How to Flee the Gestapo

In a previous post I mentioned the possibility of false resisters making claims to having been in the resistance during the uncertain period of the Liberation.  It happened. Not often, […]

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 […]

Last time we talked about the arrest of a local Dutch-Paris leader under a false name in Brussels. A very similar thing happened to another Dutch-Paris leader in Paris. This […]

Here’s an example of why you cannot assume that an individual will appear in the wartime documents under only one name. To my knowledge, this same thing happened to two […]

Names can be tricky in World War II archives. I’ve found people who worked for Dutch-Paris under 10 or 12 different names in different archives, and even under different names […]

I’ve mentioned these archives before, but people keep asking me where to look for documents about an uncle or grandfather who was an Engelandvaarder. So here are the first places […]

I recently had a wonderful conversation with a Dutch woman and her mother. They’re trying to piece together the story of their father/grandfather. He was arrested on the Franco-Swiss border […]

Footnotes. Who needs them? You do, for two reasons. First, footnotes are like a trail of breadcrumbs that a previous researcher left for you. If you’re lucky enough to find […]

Now that we’ve talked about where to find documents about resisters during WWII, you have to know how to evaluate the documents you find. Just because someone wrote something down […]

Continuing on from the last two posts about archives, let’s run through a strategy to do some archival research. Here are the two most important things to remember: Ask the […]