How to Flee the Gestapo

Here’s another example of resisters disguising themselves as collaborators. The collaborationist French government, Vichy, created a paramilitary police force called the Groupe mobile de réserve or GMR (mobile reserve group). […]

As an escape line and rescue organization, Dutch-Paris ended at the Spanish frontier. The passeurs stopped at the border, handed out some pesetas that Dutch-Paris paid for, pointed the aviators […]

Another element that made every aviator’s evasion, and indeed every clandestine journey across occupied Europe, different was the fact that the enemy were not robots. Of course the German army […]

Despite the established routes and patterns of escape lines, every Allied aviator’s evasion was wildly unique. Certainly some crew members traveled the length of occupied Europe together and had similar […]

As I’ve mentioned before, there has been a fair amount of speculation about how the Germans found the convoy at the Col du Portet d’Aspet on the night of 5/6 […]

Seventy three years ago today six Allied aviators, four Engelandvaarders and a French guide walked north out of the foothills of the Pyrenees, going the opposite direction that they had […]

If you read the earlier post about trains, you know that a lot has changed about railway journeys since 1944. Another thing that has changed in some places, is the […]

If you were to trace the steps of Dutch-Paris couriers and guides, you would do most of it by train. Like all civilians during the occupation, they relied on the […]

In the last post I asked how much a map of an occupied city can really show of what it would have been like to walk from one place to […]

I’ve been thinking about maps of Dutch-Paris. The line covered so much territory that the story needs many maps: Dutch-Paris’s routes through the Netherlands, Belgium and France; maps of the […]