How to Flee the Gestapo

It’s not hard to come up with a long list of hazards involved in rescuing fugitives from the Nazis.  The Germans themselves and their collaborators in all their many manifestations […]

The war impelled all sorts of people to extraordinary acts, not least of them mothers. Take, for instance, the wife of the Dutch consul general in the Vichy zone of […]

One of the difficulties with illegal border crossing during the war was that you had to carry two sets of ID with you, one for each side. It was incriminating, […]

According to a written note sent to the Dutch military attaché in Bern by John Henry Weidner and one of his top lieutenants, there were five good reasons for fugitives […]

Few people today appreciate the chaotic disaster of Germany in 1945 or of the millions of non-German Displaced Persons liberated there by the Allies. It would take a number of books […]

I’m taking the title of this blog and the following story from an article published by the Resistance newspaper Het Parool in 1947. It’s the story of how a young […]

Travel papers such as the authorization to cross the borders of Haute-Savoie in the last blog would be easy enough to forge if you had the forms and the stamps. […]

In amongst the documentary riches of the Weidner Archive, I’ve found a little cache of false documents. Some of them are the fakes that John Henry Weidner himself used during […]

The most poignant of the NARA helper files I’ve read concerns a young Dutch woman who was a student at the Sorbonne when the Germans invaded in 1940. We’ll use her […]

It’s 1942 in Amsterdam and the Gestapo is after you.  Perhaps you’ve done something particular to annoy them, like printing an illegal newspaper or bailing out of an American or […]