Seventy-five years ago this week, on March 23, 1943, Jean Weidner went to visit the Dutch ambassador in Bern, Switzerland. By this time Weidner and a few colleagues had already been running an escape line between Lyon, France, and Geneva, Switzerland, for eight months. On this occasion, however, he wasn’t in Switzerland because of the escape line. On this trip he was traveling on behalf of a group of Dutch expatriate businessmen in Lyon.

Four months earlier, in November 1942, the Germans had occupied southern France, including the city of Lyon, while the Italians had occupied the French departments bordering the Italian and Swiss borders. This had caused a bit of a panic among refugees in southern France and those trying to help them. It had also caused the Dutch government-in-exile to stop sending money to Vichy to support Dutch citizens in southern France because they did not want it to fall into enemy hands. Some of the people who had been relying on the Dutch money were refugees but others were retirees who could not access their bank accounts in the Netherlands because of German occupation policies. Starting in November 1942 the retirees couldn’t pay their rent or their grocery bills and the refugees were in danger of being put into French internment camps or even deported to the Third Reich.

Weidner and a few other Dutchmen had tried to resolve this situation by forming a non-political committee to disburse funds to Dutch citizens in need in southern France but they had had to use their own money for it. That emptied out their bank accounts pretty quickly. So Weidner had been dispatched to ask for money from the government in exile in the person of the ambassador. He got the job because he had ways of getting into and out of Switzerland that did not require visas.

On March 23, 1943, Weidner took the morning train from Geneva to Bern to talk with the ambassador. A friend who saw him later that day at the Bern train station described him as downcast. The ambassador had been sympathetic, but he could not give Weidner any money for Dutchmen in France without permission from London. Weidner worried that by the time that authorization arrived the young Dutchmen in French internment camps would have been taken as forced labor and others would have been deported. He wasn’t at all sure what would happen to the retirees. The friend, however, had an idea that I’ll talk about in the next post.