How to Flee the Gestapo

A history book about an event in living memory is never finished. Sure, the historian can spend years reading thousands of documents in over 30 archives, but there will still be details that aren’t in the documents. This is especially true in the case of Dutch-Paris because it was a clandestine network spread over half […]

Seventy-five years ago this week, on 6 September 1943, German occupation authorities in Lyon arrested the Dutch consul there. They also arrested the French bureaucrat who was his official supervisor in the matter of administering foreign nationals in southern France. The Gestapo accused the Consul of helping Dutch refugees, particularly Jewish refugees, in illegal ways, […]

Seventy-five years ago yesterday, on 11 August 1943, Jean Weidner crossed the border from France to Switzerland and announced himself to a Swiss border guard. He filled out the usual form for people who crossed the border without going through an official crossing point and surrendered the cash in his pocket. Then he went off […]

Here’s the story of Dutch-Paris’s encounter with the legendary partisan leader Colonel Romans-Petit. He and his 4,800 partisans in the French Forces of the Interior rose up to wreak havoc in the German rear when the Allies landed at Normandy. From June 6 to July 12, 1944, they controlled a 2,000 square kilometer region in […]

The only French resister to be arrested at the Porte de Pantin in December 1943 (see earlier posts) was the leader of the group from Livry-Gargan. We’ll call him the grocer. His arrest caused a lot of worry to his colleagues and everyone who was helping aviators in town because they expected the Gestapo to […]

Let’s continue the story of the Gestapo trap for Allied aviators at the Porte de Pantin, Paris, in December 1943. Sixteen aviators were arrested that afternoon, but 15 got away. How? Some were lucky enough to be on a truck driven by a quick-witted resister who pulled away in time. The men in the first […]

It goes without saying that if you were playing the dangerous double game of acting like a collaborator while working for the resistance, you needed to plan ahead to limit the damage if anyone in your group was arrested. Commander Lecatre, from earlier posts, had plans for such a contingency and issued orders on what […]

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 and police were professional enough to be predictable, but even they had off days. And their orders changed in ways that resisters could not foresee. […]

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 February 1944. Theories have ranged from betrayal to the practical fact that 28 men make a lot of tracks in new fallen snow. But maybe […]

Here’s an interesting question that came up during the proof reading for the Dutch translation of the book. Before the days of commercial air travel and cheap long distance phone calls, let alone the internet, travel took time and involved a lot more surprises than it does today. You might set out for a foreign […]