How to Flee the Gestapo

I recently had a wonderful conversation with a Dutch woman and her mother. They’re trying to piece together the story of their father/grandfather. He was arrested on the Franco-Swiss border in 1942 and executed shortly thereafter.

The family has some letters that the Engelandvaarder wrote from prison. They also have some information from the man’s brother-in-law, who was also arrested on the Swiss border but was not executed because he was only 17 years old. And they have the name of a third underage Engelandvaarder who was part of the group. They believe they have a name (probably an alias) of a man who betrayed them on the border.

That’s actually quite a lot to start with, as long as you keep in mind that the memories of a 17-year-old from his time in prison are going to be restricted to what he alone experienced. But they have names, dates and locations. From there they can look up bureaucratic records and post-war reports. It’s enough to build on.
So far my new friends have come across two things that I’d like to share with you.

First, they got a name of a passeur from a French website. It’s a good and trustworthy website. Nevertheless, if you read the one page article on the father/grandfather on that website carefully, you’ll notice that the author made an assumption that doesn’t hold up. The author assumed that if French passeur X helped a few Englishmen in 1942 he must have also helped these Dutchmen in 1942. I have no doubt that the French passeur helped Englishmen and was executed at the military prison in Dijon. But I have no reason to think that he also helped the Dutchman who was also executed at the military prison in Dijon. The Wehrmacht was meticulous in their record keeping, but they had a long list of people to execute. They didn’t waste a spot on the firing range just to make sure they didn’t execute strangers at the same time. Also, passeurs weren’t running tour groups. There’s no reason to think that a Dutchman had access to the same clandestine network as an Englishman.

My point here is that you need to read anything on the internet carefully and with a certain amount of skepticism. You should take the same attitude toward books, but at least books have footnotes to back up their claims. And if it’s a book published by an academic press, it’s been reviewed by at least one other scholar in the field.

Second, my friends drove down to France to visit the village where their father/grandfather was arrested and then went to Dijon to try to see the prison. The prison was not opened to visitors. But just by chance they saw a poster for an exhibit about resistance in Dijon. It turned out to be just up the street at the local archives and it had a mock up of the sort of prison cell that their father/grandfather would have been in. Plus, the archivist was very enthusiastic and promised to look for documents for them. The moral of this story is: do not ignore the local archives and libraries. And do not hesitate to tell the archivists and librarians what you are looking for.

Footnotes. Who needs them? You do, for two reasons.

First, footnotes are like a trail of breadcrumbs that a previous researcher left for you. If you’re lucky enough to find a scholarly book about the subject you’re researching, it will have footnotes. Those footnotes will be full of extremely helpful information such as: names of archives and catalog numbers of relevant documents. So while reading this secondary source, make a note of the archives that scholar consulted. You might also want to read some of the other books in the bibliography. If you don’t know where to start, or where to go next, follow the trail of footnotes.

Second, footnotes keep everybody honest. The whole point of footnotes is so that scholars can check up on each other. Don’t think they won’t. One of my professors in grad school became a bit of a celebrity because he traveled from California to Germany to find a document that another historian had used to “prove” his argument. Turned out that other guy had Read the rest of this entry »

Now that we’ve talked about where to find documents about resisters during WWII, you have to know how to evaluate the documents you find.

Just because someone wrote something down a few generations ago does not mean it’s true. People were confused during the war. Some people even outright lied during the war, particularly if they thought it would keep them from getting into trouble themselves. So if you read something shocking about your aunt, make sure you find supporting evidence for it. Your aunt may have done whatever it is, but she might also have been the victim of false rumors and unfounded accusations.

And make sure you write down the name of the archive and the catalog number of any documents you read in your notes. Because if you accuse your aunt of that shocking thing, you had better believe that people – and not just family – are going to demand to know where you got your information. You had better be Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing on from the last two posts about archives, let’s run through a strategy to do some archival research.

Here are the two most important things to remember:

Ask the archivists for help. In my experience, archivists are friendly professionals who know a heck of a lot about where information might be hiding.

Take a lot of notes, especially any names you find while reading a document. Then use those names to expand your search. And keep careful track of the catalog number of each document.

Let’s say you have an aunt who you know was a courier for a resistance network in Lyon, France, during the war. She was arrested, but not deported. That is enough to get started. I’d start in Lyon itself in the official regional archives. They happen to have an impressive database of resisters from the region that was constructed in response to the Klaus Barbie trial. If your aunt was arrested in the Rhone region, she’s in that database. Of course, she might be in it under a pseudonym, but that’s a different problem.

So you go to Lyon, look up your aunt’s dossier and take a lot of notes. It’s important to make a list of all the other names that come up in your aunt’s file. These may be resistance colleagues of hers. Make a list of all the names you find including any alternate spellings and any pseudonyms. It’s helpful to write down birthdates and other facts about these other people as well. You want to look up their files as well because not all archival files are created equal. Some have a lot more information in them than others.

What do you do if your aunt did her illegal work in a region where no one did anything particular to gather up or organize resistance files? Start on the national level. Follow the trails of the other names you read in the files you find and keep expanding your search.

Archival research is a slow process that is unlikely to follow the path you expect. You will not find everything there is to know about your aunt in any one archive. Some archives will have more information. Some archives might have nothing at all.

Be open minded and flexible. And don’t forget to ask the archivists for help.

Next time: Footnotes!

Let’s keep talking about how to find documents about WWII in archives.
First thing you need to do is make a list of all the details you already know. It will help a lot of if you know the following:
Person’s birthdate
Person’s name
Any aliases, pseudonyms, schuilnamen, noms de guerre or odd spelling of the name
Names of anyone who helped that person or worked with him or her in the resistance
Name of any resistance group to which the person belonged
Where did he or she do his or her illegal work? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve talked about how to find an individual in the WWII archives before, but new people keep asking me questions so let’s talk about it again.
The first thing that you, as a researcher, need to understand is that every archive has its own system for filing and cataloging documents. That system depends entirely on the individual history and mission of the archive.

Official government archives are meant to store government documents. They receive documents from every department of the government on a regular basis, store them, catalog them by ministry or department and by the date, and, usually, allow researchers to look at them. So they are pretty straight forward. You look for things according to the government department involved and the years involved.

Say the person you are interested in was arrested in France in 1943. The French had a ministry for war victims that Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s review from the last couple of posts. Acts of resistance, and especially acts of violent resistance, did not happen in a vacuum in the Second World War. Occupation and resistance were a political and community struggle. Anything resisters did could have a negative impact on the community because of the occupation policy of holding the community responsible for all members, specifically any resisters.

Resisters, therefore, had to think not only of the blow they wanted to make against the German occupier but of how the occupier would retaliate against the community. In the starkest terms, they had to decide if killing a certain officer would make a big enough impact to justify the predictable execution of 50 local men in reprisal.

Of course, most resistance was non-violent and for the most part it was the resisters themselves who paid the price. Dutch-Paris, for example, did not cause Read the rest of this entry »

In my last post I wrote about how resisters in their own small community had to consider the current and future needs of that community. But there were, of course, examples of resistance actions in larger places where resisters acted without as much thought for the local residents.

In France, for example, there were times when outsiders decided to make a big statement by assassinating a German officer. They did it in a city then got away. But, predictably, the Germans inflicted reprisals on the local community for the assassination. So local men, usually men of high standing such as the mayor, the doctor, the banker, were executed as punishment for the assassination. And the occupation authorities never considered executing just one person for the life of a single German. The standard reprisal was 50 local people executed in reprisal for the death of one German.

The occupation authorities executed so many hostages, of course, as part of a policy of governing by terror. The idea was Read the rest of this entry »

When you’re thinking about resistance during the Second World War, you have to remember that most of it happened within communities where people lived and expected to continue living. In those cases, things got very “delicate” as the French say, because the people involved had to weigh the immediate German reaction to something against their community dynamics in the present and future.

For example, in November 1943, the Armée Secrète* around a market town in the Pyrenees rescued a sick colleague from a hospital. They spirited the man away in the middle of the night but left 100 Francs and a note on the night stand. The note said: “thanks for taking care of him. Don’t tell until 7:30 or 8:00 am.”

There are two interesting things here. First, the AS paid their hospital bills. Obviously, they didn’t want to discourage the hospital from helping one of their people in the future. They also understood that the hospital had Read the rest of this entry »

The reports and images of Ukrainian women fleeing with their children, leaving their menfolk behind to fight are shocking and heartbreaking. But they should not be surprising. War is an enemy to families. It breaks them apart even if no one dies.

The Second World War forced all sorts of parents to send their children away into the unknown in order to protect them from a known danger.

In London, elementary school children evacuated to rural parts of the country with their teachers but without their parents. Those parents could only hope that the local adults who took them in would treat them kindly. Some parents were so afraid of the bombing that they sent their children to Read the rest of this entry »