To continue with the last post’s descriptions of Dutch-Paris’s entanglement in the Holocaust, I noticed something unexpected in my research. If you look at the Holocaust on a macro level – millions of people murdered, industrialization of death in the extermination camps, rates of deportations, process of disenfranchisement, the Nazi machinery of death appears to be invincibly solid. But if you look on the micro level of the stories of individuals involved in Dutch-Paris, there are cracks.

There is, of course, the story of the two young Jewish men who jumped out of the deportation train in eastern Belgium and spent the rest of the war as part of Dutch-Paris. That’s a story of extraordinary courage and initiative and surely a bit of luck.

But there are also stories that show cracks in the German machinery. For example, I can think of three times when families hired lawyers to get a Jewish or partially Jewish family member out of German custody. It worked twice. The third time the lawyer could do nothing because the young woman in question was arrested with a Jew hiding in her attic, which added resistance to the charges against her. (Families also hired lawyers to get men and women charged with resistance out of prison, to mixed success.)

There are also incidents when the German officials involved appear not to have cared about race. Needless to say, these were not Nazi party officials but agents of less politically informed organizations such as military intelligence and the labor office. They had other priorities than the “Final Solution”.

By 1944, German labor officials were desperate enough for workers to ignore Nazi policy and pretty much treated every man the same. In March and June 1944, German labor agency officials arrested two different Dutch-Paris couriers off the streets of Brussels. They were herded into warehouses with other men and then shipped into the Third Reich as forced labor. No questions asked, and they weren’t that picky about how sound a man’s limbs were. One of the couriers walked with a very decided limp. Both the couriers were Jews and resisters. But the labor officials never asked any questions and neither did the overseers at the work camps. It probably would have given Hitler fits if he had known. But it was too far down into the muck of everyday life in a disintegrating Third Reich for him to find out.