How to Flee the Gestapo

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.

World War II ended in demographic chaos, with between 11 and 20 million displaced persons outside of their home countries in Europe. That’s a lot of people trying to cross frontiers, many of them suffering from malnutrition, maltreatment and trauma. Some of them had been wandering, or held against their will, since the very beginning of the war.

The people who were uprooted in 1939 and 1940 were often either refugees who fled the battles or military personnel on the losing side. In 1940, of course, it was the Poles, British, Dutch, Belgians, French and their Allies who had lost the most recent battles. An Allied soldier left behind in occupied Europe after Dunkirk had the choice of turning himself in as a POW or going underground. Some of them found their way back to the Allies via escape lines. Some hunkered down under false identities. And some joined the resistance out of either inclination or necessity.

The most well-known of such servicemen-turned-resisters may well be a Scot named Ian Garrow who started Read the rest of this entry »

If you followed the footnotes in The Escape Line or looked at the appendices, you’ll know that I went to 31 archives in seven countries to reconstruct the history of Dutch-Paris. I would have gone to a few more if I had had the time and money. If you’ve read the last three posts, you’ll have an appreciation for the range of archives that hold documents about resisters.
All of that is to say that the documents about resisters are as hidden and disbursed as their subject matter. Just like you couldn’t go up to a Resistance Recruiting center to sign up during the war, you can’t go to a single Resistance archive anywhere to find out what happened. Resisters had to be creative and flexible to lead their double lives under occupation. You have to also be creative and flexible to find what traces they left behind.

In the 1980’s it seemed self-evident that there were no documents about resistance because it would have been suicidal for resisters to write anything down. So the only histories of resistance were either oral histories or, essentially, memoirs. But that self-evident truth was wrong. There were Read the rest of this entry »

One last post about the different kinds of archives you might need to consult during a WWII research project. We’ve discussed governmental archives and the archives of institutes and museums dedicated to studying the war. There are other types of archives that may or may not have what you’re looking for.

Being bureaucracies, universities have their own archives which often have “special collections.” These concern alumni or professors rather than the school itself. They get there because someone was left with a whole bunch of papers that seemed important but they didn’t really know what to do with them. I found a cassette tape of an interview of the leader of Dutch-Paris in the special collections of the University of Michigan because a former professor interviewed him for a book she wrote in the early 1980s. Similarly, a university in Brussels has the papers of a leader of Dutch-Paris in the city that had been given to a professor by the man’s widow. The archivist told me they had been lost, which I consider to be open to interpretation. If a person in whom you’re Read the rest of this entry »

In our last post, we started talking about the importance of understanding the history and mission of an archive. Some archives, like the governmental archives, were simply gathered to store an organization’s history. In that case, you have to know what the organization did.

The Dutch Red Cross, for example, undertook the herculean task of interviewing everyone who returned from the Third Reich and cross filing all that information. They also set up a missing persons bureau, which meant they made index cards for every missing Dutch Jew. After they had figured out what happened to the Dutch population during the war, they put all the index cards, reports, lists and files in their archive, making it a treasure trove of information.

Given the cataclysmic upheaval of the war, it’s not surprising that Read the rest of this entry »