Searching for the Dutch-Paris Escape Line
Knowing as you do that the Normandy Landings on June 6, 1944, turned out to be a huge success and that the Allies won the Second World War, you would think that the Germans focused all their resources and all their attention on pushing back the Allied advance. This was a lot more true for the German army, the Wehrmacht, than it was for the other German units and authorities occupying France and Belgium.
Eight days after D-Day and 15 weeks after the first round-up of the Dutch-Paris aviator escape line in Paris, German police arrested a young French courier and her mother at their home in a suburb of Paris. Three days later they arrested another Dutch-Paris courier at her apartment in the city. Five days after that they arrested a Dutch-Paris courier in Toulouse. In late June 1944 the Germans were far from admitting defeat in France. They certainly didn’t see any need to stop hunting down their enemies in the resistance.
A couple of days before that arrest in Toulouse, a Dutch-Paris courier was arrested at random on the streets of Brussels. The other three arrests were specifically a continuation of the round-up of Dutch-Paris. This arrest was part of a general sweep for slave labor. There was something slightly awry with the numbers on this courier’s false identification documents, but it was enough to land him in a warehouse full of other young men. All of them were loaded onto trains and sent into the Third Reich as manual labor, no questions asked. The arresting officers were not in the least bit interested in any of the men’s political opinions or even if they were Jewish or not (this courier was). The Third Reich needed labor because of the insatiable demand for German men in the military. So they took men off the streets of Brussels.
Although D-Day is justly celebrated as a military triumph and the beginning of the liberation of western Europe, it’s worth noting that in many ways it actually made the lives of civilians in France, Belgium and the Netherlands more dangerous until the front lines had moved past them.
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