As I explained in the last post, Jean Weidner asked the Dutch ambassador in Switzerland for money to support needy Dutchmen in southern France on March 23, 1943. The ambassador was sympathetic but couldn’t give him any money at that time. A friend, however, had an idea. This friend was a Jewish refugee whom Weidner had visited in a French prison and then smuggled into Switzerland. He had just started a job packing care packages to be sent to POWs in Germany by the World Council of Churches in Formation (WCC).

The WCC was a Christian ecumenical organization based in Geneva and was run by a Dutchman, Pastor Willem Visser ‘t Hooft. The friend introduced him to Weidner and his wife the next morning. Like the ambassador, the pastor was sympathetic to the plight of the Dutch refugees and retirees in southern France. Unlike the ambassador, he did not need permission to act. That very day Visser ‘t Hooft gave Weidner a letter to one of his associates in Lyon authorizing that French pastor to give Weidner a large sum of cash to distribute. Weidner and Dutch-Paris later paid the WCC back, but it was that money from the WCC that kept Dutch rescue efforts going in southern France in the spring of 1943.

Visser ‘t Hooft also formed a committee to raise money in Switzerland to help the Dutch in France. The committee was made up of illustrious Dutch expatriates in Switzerland, but it was Weidner’s refugee friend who typed up appeals in several languages on a portable typewriter in his hotel room and mailed them to everyone he could think of.

The introduction to Visser ‘t Hooft solved the immediate financial crisis, but its real long-term benefit was that that introduction led to other introductions. Pastors at the World Council of Churches had connections with other Protestants in occupied territory, some of whom were involved in rescue work. For example, they had contacts inside Vichy internment camps who were willing to work with Dutch-Paris to rescue particular individuals. They also had illegal ways of exchanging money and transferring it across borders that Weidner and Dutch-Paris used and learned from. Dutch-Paris reciprocated the favor by acting as a courier service carrying messages, documents and cash back and forth between France and Switzerland for resisters with clandestine connections to the WCC (as well as others without that connection).

On the day itself, Weidner’s first trip to the Dutch embassy in Bern appeared to be a failure, but it was anything but that. If the ambassador had handed Weidner all the cash he needed in March 1943, Weidner would not have met Visser ‘t Hooft or been introduced into the network of French resisters with ties to the WCC. He and Dutch-Paris would have missed a vital part of the network of alliances among resisters that they operated within. A few months later the ambassador received permission to fund Weidner’s and his colleagues’ rescue efforts, so they ended up with more than he had hoped for.