How to Flee the Gestapo

One of the items to show up on the expense reports of two of the Dutch-Paris couriers is “cigarettes.” For example, on 30 June 1944 a couriers spent 1,000 French […]

Money was as critical for Resistance as it is for almost everything else. But for the most part resisters did not keep careful accounts of it. Most resisters did not […]

The war left Europe in a state of poverty, financial entanglements and confusion that often blighted survivor’s lives for years while being sorted out. Take, for instance, the case of […]

You needed a certain entrepreneurial spirit to start up and run an escape line during the war. There’s no need to elaborate on the risks involved, far worse than bankruptcy. […]

Although it would most probably be a serious misfortune to get involved with a corrupt police agent or civil servant today, it could have been a saving stroke of good […]

On 23 November 1943, two plain clothes German policemen arrested a Dutch banker in the train station in Antwerp, Belgium. The banker sat in a prison in Belgium for three […]

Sitting in the archives of CEGES/SOMA in Brussels, I opened up a folder piled high with official forms all neatly filled out by hand or typewriter in bureaucratic German. They […]

At the Nationaal Archief today I asked for a file regarding the repayment of loans made to Dutch-Paris during the war. The file belonged to the records of the Dutch […]

In my off minutes from being an historian or mommy, I’ve been reading Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize winning novel Wolf Hall. I’ve been surprised to discover that St. Thomas More […]