How to Flee the Gestapo

Civilians under Nazi occupation made a point of studying the Germans who were controlling their lives. One of the things that comes up repeatedly in reports, memoirs and diaries is that the Nazis were terrified of illness. Well, they didn’t mind at all if millions of men and women under their control in prisons and concentration camps died of disease. But they were terrified of getting sick themselves.

This was so universally well-established that resisters used the threat of illness to protect themselves on many occasions. In February 1944, for example, the SS shot every prisoner who could not stumble out on a death march before the Russians arrived at a sub-camp of the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück. Every prisoner, that is, except for the women in one particular ward of what they called an infirmary. A young woman who belonged to Dutch-Paris was lying on a bunk bed in that room. A Polish prisoner in that ward had the courage and presence of mind to tell the SS that the women in the room had typhus. Just the word “typhus” scared the SS so deeply Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an explanation for those of you who read the last post and thought: “Ha! How can she say a tire could go for 4 or 5 American dollars? They didn’t use American dollars in occupied Europe.” You’re right. No German occupation authority would recognize an American dollar as legal tender. (At least not officially, I can’t say when it comes to bribes.) You could not plunk down a couple of dollars at a ticket booth in the Gare du Nord and ask for a round-trip berth to Toulouse without having to answer some awkward questions posed by the police.

But we’ve already established that the economy was not functioning according to the usual rules of legal tender. If you happened to have some American dollars saved from a pre-war trip or perhaps from a letter sent by a relative, you could find ways to spend them on the clandestine markets. After all, after the German defeat at Stalingrad more and more people were willing to bet on the Allies winning the war. In fact, Jean Weidner had a whole pocketful of international money with him on a trip into Switzerland in 1943, including American dollars and British pounds sterling. He or his resistance colleagues had agreed to exchange the “enemy” currency for the local currency in either France or Belgian as a way of helping fugitives escape through a place where everything had to be paid for in cash. (The Swiss confiscated all his money but later returned it after considerable paperwork.)

Most people, of course, did not have American or British money sitting around. And many of them, such as the wives of French POWs who had been sitting in POW camps since 1940, were short on French francs as well.

It’s no wonder then that some French women collected their tobacco ration not because they smoked but because they needed it to buy food. A cigarette was a known quantity that everyone could agree on. If the seller accepted cigarettes in payment, he or she did not have to worry about exchange rates or currency devaluations. Cigarettes would not lose value and could be traded for another item. France never reached the state of economic disintegration in which cigarettes replaced money as Germany did in 1945. But a Dutch-Paris courier bought a carton of cigarettes to buy and bribe his was across the country in the tumultuous summer of 1944. He recorded the purchase in his expense account although he did not itemize how he spent the cigarettes.

Given all this – the fragmentation of the economy into very local markets, the loss of confidence in the government and its rationing and currency, the prevalence of an array of alternative methods of trading and payment (barter, black market, gray market) – it’s extremely difficult to convert 1943 prices into 2021 dollars. Or even 1943 dollars for that matter. But I wonder how useful that would even be. That world of rationing, shortages and barter was so very different from our own world of credit cards and online shopping. Isn’t it enough to understand the daily circumstances of finding food, heating and clothing to appreciate how difficult the occupation was for all citizens whether or not they were with the resistance?

Following the last post about the difficulties of determining wartime exchange rates for currency, some of you are probably wondering why historians don’t just compare bread basket prices. It’s a good idea except that once again you run into the huge divide between the official story and daily life in the fractured markets of occupied Europe.

Relying on official rations to determine what people ate or how much they spent on food is problematical. This is glaringly obvious in a place like Poland where anyone who ate only official rations would have starved to death within months. The situation was not quite as desperate in France or Belgium. But the rations were lean there too, and the fact that a rationing bureaucracy said that people of a certain category could have so much butter or so many grams of bread at such and such a price did not mean that either butter or bread were actually available for purchase at that or any price.

Given the problems in the official supply chain, many civilians felt they had no choice but to slip into highly individual and localized systems of barter or use the black market. Indeed, black market prices are a far more reliable measure of prices and values during the war than any official rates. There are, however, some obvious problems. In the first place, the black market was illegal and mostly off the books. In the second place, the black market does not refer to some concrete trading center along the lines of the New York Stock Exchange. There were places where black market traders congregated in certain cities, but even there deals were struck between individual buyers and sellers.

To further complicate any attempt to figure out values during the occupation, the black market had a friendlier side known as the gray market. The line is fuzzy but let’s say that the black market was purely for profit and tended to be populated by criminals on the selling side. In that case the gray market covers all the favors done among friends, relatives and acquaintances. Your cousin sells you eggs and a ham from his farm without ration coupons and at prices that are above the official prices but much less than he could get from a professional black marketer? That’s the gray market. It could also be your hairdresser’s sister’s husband trading you a new bicycle tire for a winter coat for his nephew. So did a bicycle tire cost as much as a boy’s winter coat? Only in this one particular instance. On the black market the tire might have gone for four or five American dollars, if the buyer had dollars.

So it’s difficult to determine bread basket prices for occupied Europe. It would take some lucky discoveries in the archives. And then it would be almost too much to ask that those records of prices would cover the same time period. But any such record of local prices is better than none and could be used to give a general sense of values and costs. But it’s not really necessary. There is ample other evidence that ordinary civilians got hungrier, colder, less well clothed and shod and generally poorer over the course of the war and occupation.

The most difficult information to determine when researching Dutch-Paris was not figuring out what happened in a clandestine network that reached across five countries or the names of the people involved – although that required research in over 30 archives in five languages – but how much things cost during the Second World War.

There are a lot of prices quoted in the documents. A train ticket between Lyon and Annecy cost 80 French francs. A rucksack on the black market in Toulouse cost 280 French francs. The Dutch embassy in Switzerland routed 30,000 Swiss francs to the rescuers in Brussels. Meneer X gave Monsieur Y 120 Dutch guilders. But how much are any of those figures actually worth? How many Belgian francs would Swiss francs get on the black market and how much could they buy on the black market? And how does that convert to the Euro or Dollar today?

I’ve consulted economic historians who specialize in historical currency conversion. The best they can tell me is that they can’t tell me. The war changed the world economy in many ways, including how governments everywhere suspended the free market in favor of controlling natural resources with military uses, transportation and food. The Nazis certainly did all that in addition to imposing artificial exchange rates in all the territories that they occupied. It hardly needs to be said that those exchange rates were extremely favorable to Germany. Furthermore, the occupation authorities kept a strict eye on both the currency and commodities exchanges. In fact, the Treasury department of the Third Reich had its own armed unit called the Devisenschutzkommando (DSK or currency protection command) whose members monitored the flow of money and valuables across borders. They had the power to hunt down Jews in order to steal their valuables on behalf of the Third Reich, and they did so.

his means that looking at official currency exchange rates during the Occupation is meaningless if you are interested in the daily lives of civilians. That’s why economic historians tell me that if you want to try to figure out the value or cost of an item you must forget the exchange rates and try to determine what that item could have been exchanged for. If you want to know how much a pair of shoes cost, you need to answer not in French francs but in staples such as loaves of bread. At any given time or place, what would a consumer have had to trade to get those shoes? If the answer is a certain amount of cash, then all you know about the value of that cash is that at that time and place it was worth a pair of shoes.

Prices changed with time and circumstances. An apple, for instance, would naturally cost more in March than it would at harvest time in September. That same apple would cost much more in a big city like Paris than it would in an apple growing region such as Normandy. The sudden appearance of an invading army on the beaches of Normandy and onslaught of military hostilities there would naturally drive the price of everything up, including apples. But so would a crackdown by the local Gestapo anywhere.

The point is that the war and occupation fractured the national markets into highly volatile local markets. Not only local markets, but illegal clandestine markets. Trading on the black market was always a criminal offense, even if the German authorities themselves did it in Paris. So naturally, it’s not terribly well documented. Given the German interest in controlling currency, the black market in currency was especially dangerous and therefore profitable and therefore attractive to criminals. No wonder economic historians treat Second World War currency exchange rates as a terra incognita.

Our last post started talking about a Dutch expatriate named Bernard as an exemplar of the confusion of the Occupation. Bernard was one of those Dutch expatriates who responded to a request for help from a refugee by creating an entire rescue network and helping just about anyone who asked for help. He was in contact with Dutch-Paris but preferred not to join any group.
Bernard fell victim to a rumor. He also fell victim to the collapse of trustworthy government during the Occupation and Liberation. In his case the branch of government that descended into lawlessness was the police, aided and abetted by the fact that the legitimate police had lost the people’s trust by collaborating.

On 1 May 1944, two Dutchmen in their late 20’s showed up at Bernard’s home outside Lyon asking for help to get to Spain. They showed him Dutch army papers, said they had a contact in Toulon and asked for 5,000 French francs. Both men had worked as nurserymen in the region around Lyon before the war.

While the two, let’s call them River and Field, were at Bernard’s house, another Dutchman living in Lyon who we’ll call K. arrived. K had been working with Bernard to help many Dutch refugees to hide and get to Switzerland. K bore the terrible news that Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re thinking about the Second World War and especially about the resistance, you have to keep in mind how immensely complicated life got when the Nazis occupied an area. In particular, civilians were unmoored from many of the structures of daily life that organized their pre-war world. In particular, it was always best to assume that police of all varieties could not be trusted. Also, rumor ran rampant.

We can see this in the story of a man we’ll call Bernard. Bernard was a retired Dutch executive who was living in a village outside of Lyon in 1940. Being a businessman with a lifetime of international experience and the observant sort, Bernard could tell that Dutch refugees would be drawn to Lyon because of its proximity to Switzerland. So he took himself to the Dutch consulate in Lyon and offered his services as a translator. At that time, the consul was a Frenchman who spoke no Dutch. Nevertheless the consul showed Bernard the door, which offended him to such a degree that he had nothing more to do with the consulate even though that consul died (of natural causes) early in the war.

Why did that meeting turn out so badly? Bernard doesn’t specify in his report and the consul didn’t live long enough to give one. The man who took over as Dutch consul said he didn’t know what happened. But other documents have a rumor about it. They claim that Read the rest of this entry »

In the last post our valiant Pole Wyssogota had agreed to take Dutchmen and aviators to Spain in cooperation with a Dutch escape line based in Brussels which had connections to the Comite but was not part of Dutch-Paris. Wyssogota and the Dutchman Thijs were arrested in November 1943 and deported to the concentration camps. This time, Wyssogota did not manage to escape.

The round-up in November 1943 did not capture Thijs’s two Dutch colleagues in Paris or Mme Vassias. The 66-year-old Parisienne took command of Visigoths-Lorraine and kept it going until being arrested herself in February 1944 after the arrest of one of Wyssogota’s guides near the Spanish border. She died in Ravensbrück.

The arrest of Wyssogota and Thijs left Thijs’s two Dutch friends and colleagues stranded in Paris with more than a few Engelandvaarders hiding in hotels and private apartments waiting to go to Spain. Even if the fugitives stayed in Paris until the liberation – whenever that was going to be – they didn’t have enough money to feed them on the black market indefinitely.

This is where Dutch-Paris comes into the story Read the rest of this entry »

In our last post we left the Polish captain turned resister Wyssogota on a deportation train heading to the concentration camps in the Third Reich in April 1943. Never one to accept a bad situation, our man was among 50 men who jumped from the train on the German side of the Rhine. Although he had been injured by barbed wire along the tracks when he jumped off, two other political prisoners travelled with him as fugitives.

Considering that they were part of a mass escape near the frontier and one of them was injured, they should not have been able to make it home to France. But they did with a lot of help from civilians who were priests, nuns, doctors, a village mayor and one French woman married to a member of the Nazi SD. She got them over the border, but first they spent a night in her house, sleeping under a giant portrait of Hitler. Once in France railway workers helped them get to Paris.

In May 1943 Wyssogota was back in Paris and back organizing Read the rest of this entry »

In our last post we left the intrepid Polish captain Wyssogota making the surprising choice to leave the Free Zone of Vichy France to go to Paris in occupied France. It didn’t take him long to realize how mistaken his assumptions that he could get to England via Belgium had been.

In November 1942, the same month that the Germans gave up the pretense and openly invaded southern France, Wyssogota made contact with a woman who was helping fugitives. She once guided 10 men over a border by using her own personal laissez-passer on which she had written by hand “accompanied by 10 persons.” Despite the odds, it worked on that occasion. This woman took Wyssogota to Brussels to make contact with a certain man she had heard about. They looked his number up in the phone book but it turned out that he had been arrested two years earlier but had escaped from German custody and made his way to England.

This was the final straw for Wyssogota. Disgusted by how badly escape lines were organized, he decided to stay in occupied Europe and dedicate himself to evasion.

In January 1943, Wyssogota went to St Jean Pied au Port on the Spanish border to set up a new escape line. He found a man from the Red Cross with a truck who agreed to take some people over the border and to Madrid. He also had a route through Hendaye using train, taxi and boat. He did not, however, ever go through Bayonne because of spies on the train.

Wyssogota had a bit of good luck one day when the Gestapo officer controlling identity papers turned out to be a German he had met in 1940. Before the war the Gestapo officer had played soccer for the Polish team. In 1943 he asked Wyssogota in Polish and in a very friendly fashion for his identity papers. He did not arrest Wyssogota, although he did arrest several Frenchmen.  The Gestapo officer must have liked Wyssogota or had a fondness for Poles, because he really should have arrested this man who he knew to be a defeated enemy soldier on the run.

Wyssogota’s luck turned bad on 7 March 1943 when he was arrested and imprisoned in a fortress. His escape attempt ended when he went out a back window into a courtyard full of Germans. They transferred him to the internment camp at Compiegne, from where he was deported at the end of April 1943.

In our last post we left the Polish captain Wyssogota injured in southern France as the German army was smashing into northern France. In the summer of 1940 Hitler allowed Petain and the Vichy government to administer southern France. This was not necessarily the good news that refugees with reason to fear the Germans might have thought. Vichy had its own share of xenophobia that manifested in a network of internment camps where most foreigners were held in appalling conditions. As a Pole, Wyssogota found out all about them.

Sometime during the early summer of 1940, Wyssogota talked a French prefect into giving him a small truck and enough gasoline to take himself and several other Poles to Bordeaux. They planned to sail to England, but all the ships had already departed. Stymied in Bordeaux, Wyssogota made his way to Toulouse in hopes of crossing the Pyrenees into Spain. But the walk proved too difficult for his injured leg, so he rested in a cave for a few days.

In July 1940, after the French defeat, the Polish consul gave Wyssogota a mission to evacuate Polish soldiers from Marseille. Over the next few months he organized the purchase of 27 small boats and the departure of Belgians, Dutchmen, Frenchmen and of course Poles to join the Allies. This worked well enough until November 1940 when the French police issued a warrant for his arrest. A Polish intelligence officer arranged for him to get new false French identity papers, but a Pole who had taken French citizenship identified him to the French police. They arrested him on charges of attempting to leave the country illegally (yes, it’s odd).

His lawyer got his sentence down to 8 months, but 8 months in solitary confinement was enough to land him in the infirmary. At a second trial in March 1942 the judge acquitted Wyssogota on the grounds that as a Pole he had the right to want to leave the country (le droit de vouloir partir). He was set free, but arrested again after three days. When he complained to the French prefect that he had been acquitted, the prefect asked how he could be sure that Wyssogota wouldn’t start again. He sent the Pole to a French internment camp.

Wyssogota was transferred within the French camp system to the camp aux Mines near Avignon, which detained 1,700-1,800 persons, mostly foreign Jews. The commander made Wyssogota a general interpreter because he spoke more languages than most. Unfortunately, two weeks after he arrived, the camp was turned into a staging area for departures for the extermination camps. Wyssogota did what he could to help Jews escape by falsifying the translations on documents. When the French figured it out, he was designated to go to the Third Reich on the next convoy. He was warned with just enough time to escape.

After more difficulties with Vichy prefects in southern France, Wyssogota made his way to Paris with the goal of making it to England via Belgium or Holland. The fact that he thought he could do that when everyone in Belgium and Holland was concluding that the only way to get to England was via France and Spain demonstrates how difficult it was to get reliable information under the Occupation.