Escaping to Spain meant trekking over the Pyrenees for at least two days, often at night, often in the snow and always with border guards on your heels. Not surprisingly, Dutch-Paris relied on local men who ran their own escape lines over the mountains to take Dutchmen and aviators the final miles into Spain.

One of these guides, or passeurs, was an escaped French POW known as Charbonnier. He belonged to the local Secret Army and had, in fact, been given the job of regulating clandestine passages over the mountains in that region. He and his network helped very large groups of evaders including both Allied aviators and civilians. Unlike other passeurs, Charbonnier provided an armed escort for his convoys to Spain, at least in certain sections at certain times.

The Germans finally caught him a few days after the Normandy Landings. On June 13, 1944, Charbonnier did not show up at the high mountain huts where a number of fugitives, including Allied aviators and Dutch resisters travelling with Dutch-Paris, were expecting him. He and two of his colleagues were driving up to the huts when the Germans ambushed them on a stone bridge over a narrow but powerful mountain stream. Reports differ about whether they were killed by machine gun or flame thrower, but they most definitely did not survive.

Charbonnier’s network was well enough organized and firmly enough rooted in the local populace that his death caused only a slight delay in the evasion of the fugitives waiting in the huts. They set out two days later and arrived in Spain on 18 June 1944. One of them was a Dutch RAF pilot who had tunneled out of the POW camp at Sagan on 24 March 1944 as part of the “Great Escape” and was only now completing his escape from occupied territory.