How to Flee the Gestapo

Dutch-Paris couriers always traveled with a particular mission in mind: deliver a microfilm to a particular café in Louvain (Belgium) on a particular date or escort so-and-so from point A […]

These don’t give you the same sense of the wartime atmosphere or aesthetic as the 1967 documentary about Dutch-Paris that I mentioned in my last post, but here are some […]

Putting yourself in the hands of an escape line certainly increased your odds of getting to Switzerland or Spain, but it didn’t guarantee it. Things went wrong for everyone, and […]

Very few resisters were professional spies or criminals, so they had to figure out how to forge papers, evade the police, and smuggle people and goods as they went along. […]

There was an evasion service (service d’évasion) that took convoys of 10 to 15 Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen and Allied aviators from Toulouse to Spain every week from November 1942 to […]

Dutch-Paris helped all sorts of people to escape from the Germans during the war. Some of them were much more obvious candidates for evasion than others. The trained military personnel […]

France fell apart under the onslaught of the Normandy Landings. Communications and transportation lines were broken throughout the country as the Resistance did its best to sabotage the German response […]

This Saturday morning, 16 July, the cyclists of the Tour de France will be pedaling past a lieu de mémoire (memory site) of Dutch-Paris: the Col de Portet d’Aspet.    This […]

After a few days of meetings at the Dutch embassy in Bern, the Swiss secret service escorted Weidner and Felix back to the French border.*  At a certain place the […]

In November 1943, John Weidner escorted the Dutch consular official who acted as the chief of the Paris section of Dutch-Paris to Switzerland.  We’ll call him Felix.  Felix was important […]