How to Flee the Gestapo

By the time the Second World War ended in Europe in May 1945, most of the urban trees in parks and along streets had been cut down – often illegally – for firewood. The war years were cold. Every year of rationing made civilians more malnourished and more shabbily dressed. Every winter fuel rations decreased […]

A viewer of my talk about Dutch-Paris on WW2TV made an intriguing comment. I was talking about the difficulty of getting food for fugitives without ration cards. He or she quipped that it seems like crime syndicates would have been the go-to place for your shopping needs under the occupation. The answer to that is […]

We think of war as a state of emergency and a crisis. And it absolutely is for anyone in a war zone with active military operations. A bombing raid (or, today, missile raid) is most definitely an immediate crisis. Being in a village where soldiers are shooting at each other is clearly a state of […]

Civilians under Nazi occupation made a point of studying the Germans who were controlling their lives. One of the things that comes up repeatedly in reports, memoirs and diaries is that the Nazis were terrified of illness. Well, they didn’t mind at all if millions of men and women under their control in prisons and […]

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 didn’t use American dollars in occupied Europe.” You’re right. No German occupation authority would recognize an American dollar as legal tender. (At least not officially, […]

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 good idea except that once again you run into the huge divide between the official story and daily life in the fractured markets of occupied […]

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 involved – although that required research in over 30 archives in five languages – but how much things cost during the Second World War. There […]

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 a request for help from a refugee by creating an entire rescue network and helping just about anyone who asked for help. He was in […]

If you’re thinking about the Second World War and especially about the resistance, you have to keep in mind how immensely complicated life got when the Nazis occupied an area. In particular, civilians were unmoored from many of the structures of daily life that organized their pre-war world. In particular, it was always best to […]

I was honored to be invited to a zoom talk given by the daughter and niece of Dutch-Paris resisters about her mother’s adventurous escape from the Nazis during the war and her postwar work to help the children of victims of the Holocaust.  I can highly recommend her book about it, Motherland by Rita Goldberg. […]