At the beginning of this discussion about finding Engelandvaarders in the archives, I mentioned that it’s important to get more than one version of any particular event. Obviously that’s true in almost all situations. But let’s think about why it’s important when reading through the documents on resistance.

Keep in mind that most of the documents about resistance were written or recorded in the immediate postwar period. The leader of Dutch-Paris was able to write reports during the war because he went in and out of Switzerland and kept the records in Switzerland. Most resisters would have been taking a terrible risk to write anything down.

Immediately after the liberation of a country, even before the prisoners returned from the Third Reich, resisters started writing down what they had done. More importantly, bureaucracies including military and intelligence services, started investigating what they had done. Sometimes the motive was simply to understand what had happened. Sometimes the motive was to award benefits to bona fide resisters. When the political prisoners and other deportees returned, they also gave reports and/or were questioned about their experiences.

At the same time, every country had a purge of collaborators. There was an unsettled time, close to liberation, when the facts were uncertain but it was very clear that it would be beneficial to be known as a resister and detrimental to be known as a collaborator. It was a time when people could re-invent themselves.

There were individuals who had perhaps played both sides during the occupation or even worked secretly for the occupation forces who swaggered about at the liberation telling a false story of their own importance in the resistance. Many of them were exposed when the real resisters returned from the concentration camps.

But if you’re sitting in an archive and all you read are what such a person said about himself before he was caught in his falsehoods, you could be taken in by his stories as well. Unless you do the research to corroborate those stories.  Did he say that our man worked with X?  OK, if X survived the concentration camps, does X agree that our man worked with him?  If other people say that X was the real deal resister but never mention that our man had anything to do with their illegal work, you have serious grounds to doubt our man’s stories.

Sometimes the gendarmerie or their colleagues will have done the work of verifying a person’s claims to be in the resistance. You can find those files in the archives of the bureaucracy that administered resistance benefits in the country concerned. But sometimes you just have to check yourself by reading everything you can find about and by everyone in the resistance network.