I’ve mentioned these archives before, but people keep asking me where to look for documents about an uncle or grandfather who was an Engelandvaarder. So here are the first places to look.

But first, if you find any documents, make sure to note down all the names you come across. And then use those names to see if you can find more documents. Just in general, the more versions you can get of a story, the more you will know. Practically, if you found reports about three Engelandvaarders who traveled together, one of those files will have a lot more detail than the other two. You won’t know which one until you’ve read all three.

If your Engelandvaarder made it all the way to England, he or she was interviewed by the London Dutch. Look at the Nationaal Archief (Den Haag) in the files of the Archieven van het Ministerie van Defensie/Oorlog Londen (2.13.71 2571). Most debriefing reports are quite detailed about the Engelandvaarder’s journey.

If your Engelandvaarder was arrested in France start at the Service historique de la Défense, Division des archives des victimes des conflits contemporains (Caen). They have files about almost everyone who was arrested in France for resistance during the war. That includes Dutch resisters doing illegal work in France as well as Engelandvaarders, but not Allied servicemen.

If your Engelandvaarder was arrested anywhere, deported to the Third Reich and repatriated to the Netherlands, check the Oorlogsarchief Nederlandse Rode Kruis, now at the Nationaal Archief (Den Haag). They have files on everyone who was repatriated to the Netherlands that include information about arrests and who and what the individual saw in the Third Reich. They do not include Dutch citizens who chose to be repatriated to, say, Paris.

Follow all the leads in whatever documents you can find. But don’t forget that the people giving the report were sometimes wrong. Resistance was a secretive world of extremely high stakes and limited information. What appeared to be the obvious, logical conclusion to the victim of arrest and deportation might in fact be entirely false because the arrested person did not have the most important facts of the case.

I’ll get back to that in a couple of posts. In the meantime, more on names in the wartime archives in the next post.