How to Flee the Gestapo

Here’s an explanation for those of you who read the last post and thought: “Ha! How can she say a tire could go for 4 or 5 American dollars? They […]

Following the last post about the difficulties of determining wartime exchange rates for currency, some of you are probably wondering why historians don’t just compare bread basket prices. It’s a […]

The most difficult information to determine when researching Dutch-Paris was not figuring out what happened in a clandestine network that reached across five countries or the names of the people […]

Seventy five years ago this month, in May 1943, a Dutch Jew who we’ll call Nestor made a clandestine journey from Brussels to Switzerland. Nestor owned a factory in Brussels […]

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 […]

Seventy-five years ago this week, on March 23, 1943, Jean Weidner went to visit the Dutch ambassador in Bern, Switzerland. By this time Weidner and a few colleagues had already […]

It didn’t take long for the businessmen in Dutch-Paris to figure out that all their careful vigilance in getting the best possible exchange rates and diligence in raising donations from […]

The question of getting money across borders during the occupation that Weidner solved with postage stamps in the last blog post bedeviled other Dutch-Paris resisters and, indeed, the whole line. […]

The restrictions and shortages of living under German occupation during the Second World War brought out an impressive creativity among otherwise ordinary and law-abiding citizens. In fact, the whole story […]

In the previous post I talked about how cigarettes were used to buy things on the black market and bribes during the war. Although it looks like some Dutch-Paris couriers […]