How to Flee the Gestapo

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 […]

As we’ve discussed in the last two posts, it wasn’t all that hard to forge an identity card in France or Belgium. Pastors and university students did it. But it […]

In our last blog we were talking about who forged the false documents for resisters and other fugitives. From the admittedly small sample of Dutch-Paris, it appears that resisters did […]

Let’s continue with questions from the comments on the side of my talk about Dutch-Paris on WW2TV on youtube. Someone asked, very sensibly, how many good forgers were available to […]

Our last post started talking about a Dutch expatriate named Bernard as an exemplar of the confusion of the Occupation. Bernard was one of those Dutch expatriates who responded to […]

To continue with our armchair travels and plans for next year, here are four museums in Belgium and the Netherlands to put on the itinerary. Let’s start in the small […]

I’ve finally figured out why the map on the first version of the cover for The Escape Line was wrong. I couldn’t understand why the designer had included towns that […]

Just about 75 years ago, on October 13, 1943, Jean Weidner left Switzerland illegally but with the assistance of a Swiss officer, to create the Dutch-Paris escape line. Up until […]