Here’s an interesting question that someone asked at one of my talks about Dutch-Paris. If downed Allied aviators and resisters were escaping the Nazis on the trains, why didn’t the Gestapo just take over all the trains?

If there are any grad students out there looking for a dissertation topic, that would be a good one because the history of the railways during Nazi occupation is deeply complex. You could, actually, write a dissertation on very specific railway topics such as the catastrophic Dutch railway strike begun in September 1944 or the use of the railways to transfer prisoners in the spring of 1945 when it would have been far more rational for the Third Reich to use what lines and stock still functioned for military purposes.

But let’s limit ourselves to the use of the railways by Dutch-Paris and the specific question of why the Gestapo didn’t take over the trains to stop escape lines.

To a certain extent, the answer is that the Gestapo, or at least the German occupation authorities, did take over the trains. The Gestapo did not send its own agents to drive locomotives. But they did patrol passenger trains and railway stations, reserving the right to detain anyone at any time. And if it wasn’t the Gestapo checking passengers’ documents, it could have been the national police, the railway police, the German Ordnungspolizei (Green Police) or other police units. Railway stations and trains provided ideal choke points for controlling people on the move. At least one Jewish family who were later helped by Dutch-Paris were arrested by French police on a train near the Swiss border because they didn’t have the proper travel permits for that area.

But it would have been impossible for the police to check the documents of every passenger on every train. There just weren’t enough police officers. So why not shut down some or all of the trains? Because the Nazis expected to control all of Europe for a thousand years. As it was, the occupation lasted for four to five years. The Germans needed the western European economy to keep functioning. And that meant that the only form of long distance transportation available to civilians – the railways – had to keep functioning. At the very least, the German occupation authorities needed workers to get from their homes to their worksites. Businessmen also had to travel, a fact that gave cover to Dutch-Paris’s leaders, all of whom used false identification as international businessmen traveling for work.

It would be interesting to know what percentage of passengers during the Occupation were travelling on trains for resistance purposes, including as fugitives on an escape line. It might be possible to unearth figures for how many passengers travelled during the war, but it would be impossible to figure out how many of them were resisters. It’s not like resisters bought a special resistance ticket with a reduced fare for patriotism. It’s not even possible to figure out what percentage of the general population were active resisters, with or without train travel. But the figure is definitely less than 10% and probably less than 5%. That suggests that the Gestapo did not catch enough fugitives on trains to justify the economic losses of shutting them down.