How to Flee the Gestapo

Despite the common term “the Resistance” and the claims of politicians like Charles de Gaulle, the civilian resistance against Nazi occupation during the Second World War was not monolithic. It wasn’t even the work of a few large, well-known national networks. For the most part resistance was the highly fragmented and localized work of discrete groups of people who saw a need and acted on it.

This is especially true for rescue work and escape lines. In fact, there were many rescuers of Jews who worked entirely independently without ever belonging to an organized group of any sort. You could do that if you were hiding someone. But you could not act entirely alone if you wanted to move that someone to a place of greater safety. That required cooperation among a few people but not necessarily very many people.

A lot of rescue groups/escape lines operated in very specific areas, most often on a border. There were, for example, small groups that Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been discussing the essential qualities of a resistance leader, including being a good judge of character, having social skills, and being decisive, flexible and steady. Perhaps the most essential of all, however, the quality that would get a man or a woman into the predicament of leading a resistance group in the first place, is imagination.

Perhaps I should qualify that as compassionate imagination. Lots of people were able to imagine the consequences of Nazi rule, the dissolution of personal liberties, the terror. But very few people became resistance leaders. Seeing what’s happening around you and imagining how it could get worse is one thing. Imagining a way out of it is another. And imagining that risking your life in order to publish a clandestine newspaper or rescue strangers would be a way to free everyone from Nazism takes Read the rest of this entry »

Eighty years after the American Army liberated his hometown of Maastricht on September 13-14, 1944, my father still remembers the day. This is his story of his liberation.

Only six years old, he lived with his parents and older sisters in a small petit bourgeois home in the neighborhood of Wyck, east of the River Maas (aka Meuse). The old St. Servaas Bridge leads from the heart of the city to Wyck and the train station. The Germans had laid dynamite along the bridge but were also using it as an escape route from the Allies, who had liberated Brussels ten days earlier.

The people of Maastricht could anticipate their liberation with mixed feelings. Obviously they wanted to be free of the Nazi occupation, but the process was worrisome. They could end up in a battleground and had, indeed, already suffered deaths from Allied bombers who mistook their target. The German Army or the Nazis could decide to make an example of them or take reprisals for some act of resistance out on them. Horrible stories were circulating and not all of them were only rumors.

So my grandparents kept their young son inside. The entire neighborhood was inside, waiting quietly so as not to attract any attention from trigger-happy or vengeful troops. They could hear the noise of war to the south and east. Then they heard a tank clattering up a street. Tanks make a tremendous amount of noise on a cobbled street when no civilian has been able to drive an automobile for years. The brave peeked out the window.

No one recognized this tank. They were sadly familiar with the SS and the Wehrmacht and their armament. It wasn’t one of theirs, but it could belong to an as yet unknown German unit.

The tank stopped at a crossroads. Its gun turret swung around. The hatch opened.

A soldier unfolded himself out of the turret. He struck a match and lit a cigarette.

People immediately ran out of their homes to greet their liberators. Some carried bottles of alcohol they’d been saving for this very day for years. How did they know that this tank belonged to the Allies and had come to liberate them? Because no German soldier would ever smoke on duty like that.

Many others things happened in the city of Maastricht that day. Some families were bereaved, many were jubilant. But that’s what one six-year-old boy remembered of his liberation from Nazi occupation.

Here’s another essential quality in a resistance leader: courage, or holding steady through anxiety.

Resisters knew they had a lot to fear. By the end of the war the occupation authorities followed a policy of ruling the population through terror. To that end they took hostages from among the civilian community and publicly executed them when German soldiers were assassinated. They made no secret of the fact that they tortured men and women. They did not hide that they deported political prisoners to camps in the Third Reich, although they did hide what exactly happened in those camps to make them more frightening.

Resisters were afraid, if not for themselves then for their families. But they Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been discussing the necessary qualities of a resistance leader, or, really, any resister who intended to survive the war. You needed to be a good judge of character, good at making friends and able to act decisively. You also had to be flexible.

Actually, any civilian needed a certain flexibility of mind and attitude to navigate the Nazi occupation. I don’t mean the sort of moral flexibility that would allow someone to justify turning a blind eye to some glaring injustices, although that did happen. I’m referring to a much more practical flexibility in day to day life.  For example, putting enough food on the table. There were a few French civil servants who refused to accept any food from any source other than the official rations. They and their families ended up Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been talking about the essential qualities of a resistance leader. Let’s look at another one today: decisiveness.

A gentleman who worked for Dutch-Paris as a young man once told me that he sometimes missed how simple making a plan had been during the war. As a resister he was told to meet someone at a particular place and time. He showed up. The other resister, often one of the line’s leaders, showed up. He reported how many fugitives he wanted to bring over the border from the Netherlands to Belgium and when he could be ready. The leader gave him instructions from what they’d discussed at their last meeting and told him when and where they would meet again. That was it, no back and forth or changing of plans.

Of course there was a bit of nostalgia coloring that image. The reason they had to make their plans in that way is that they could not Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another essential quality for Here’s another essential quality for a resistance leader: the ability to get along with all sorts of people.

This was especially important for leaders of escape lines such as Dutch-Paris. They needed excellent social skills both to recruit help and to survive unexpected situations.

Escorting a fugitive of any sort, whether an American aviator or a Jewish grandmother, required a lot of help from a lot of people, including strangers. The guides essentially needed every person they came into contact with to like and trust them enough to not call the police to report suspicious activity. Even more than that they might need to find a café for fugitives to stay in for a few hours while waiting for a delayed train or a conductor to overlook an irregularity in Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another story of how a leader of Dutch-Paris recruited someone the line needed for their skills or resources based on his own judgment of the person’s character rather than by referral.

Even though Dutch-Paris counts as a very large resistance network with its 320+ members spread across western Europe, the line never had enough help. There were just so many tasks to be done in so many places. Inevitably many members of the line ended up doing the work of more than one person. But even the most energetic and willing person in Brussels cannot hide a fugitive in southern France.

Dutch-Paris was often short of manpower on the Franco-Swiss border because there were so many Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been talking about how Dutch-Paris recruited new members. No matter who a resister approached, the invitation to join the network was fraught with peril. There was the possibility that the person they were talking to was either working for the Germans or being watched by them. There was always the possibility that even someone you’d known for years might betray you. They might have even done so extremely reluctantly but under some pressure applied by the occupation authorities, such as holding a family member hostage.

Let’s pause for a moment and look at this from the other side, from the perspective of the person being asked to do something illegal and very obviously dangerous. Many people refused to help without betraying the person who asked them. Others were eager to have an opportunity to act against the oppressor or to help the persecuted.

It’s also possible that the person being asked was already in the resistance and was alarmed to be approached by strangers. The first thought had to be that these strangers claiming to be resisters could very easily be Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been talking about how resisters often relied on the people they already knew from work or the neighborhood or their families or school to expand their networks. That makes sense because telling someone that you were involved in the illegal work of resistance was tantamount to giving them the power to destroy you by betraying you to the occupation authorities.

But Dutch-Paris did not rely solely on referrals to recruit members. As an escape line, Dutch-Paris needed some very particular things to hide fugitives and get them over international borders. Sometimes they had to trust a stranger because that stranger had access to something they needed.

For example, when John Weidner was setting up a base in Annecy, near but not on the Swiss border, he needed to be able to Read the rest of this entry »