How to Flee the Gestapo

There were many ways to die in the concentration camps built in Hitler’s Third Reich to punish political prisoners of all sorts. Just as not every Jew deported to an extermination camp died from poison gas, not every political prisoner died of malnutrition and exposure, although that grim end awaited them all. Only a tiny […]

This week marks the 75th anniversary of the death of one of the young women who worked with Dutch-Paris, we’ll call her Marthe. Marthe served the line as a postbox in Paris, meaning that she accepted and forwarded messages on behalf of her colleagues. Such messages ranged for the details of an escape being planned […]

Every once in a while I pass a car with a bumper sticker urging me to practice “random acts of kindness.” It sounds like a warm, fuzzy way to make the world nicer. But if you look at the story of Dutch-Paris, you’ll see that random acts of kindness can have profound consequences. For example, […]

Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, on 20 May 1944, Jean Weidner and three other members of Dutch-Paris were arrested outside of a restaurant in Toulouse by French paramilitary collaborators in the Milice. Ironically, it was a case of mistaken identity. Weidner had a price on his head, but they thought they were arresting a French Communist […]

Luck played a role in the escape or capture of every Allied aviator, but it wasn’t possible to predict whether the luck would be good or bad. Take the story of an American gunner whose B-17 crashed in the Netherlands in November 1943. We’ll call him Ken. It was 13 days before his 22nd birthday […]

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 […]

Considering that the Second World War went on for six years and it was the duty of every British officer to attempt to escape capture, it’s not surprising that POWs spent quite a bit of time devising escapes. Officers, at least, didn’t have much else to do. But it wasn’t easy to get out of […]

Most of the Allied servicemen whom Dutch-Paris smuggled out of occupied territory via the Pyrenees and Spain were aviators who had bailed out of their airplanes or crash landed them in the Netherlands, Belgium or France. That was certainly the case with the men who were arrested – or not- at the Porte de Pantin […]

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 […]