How to Flee the Gestapo

I am pleased to announce the creation of the Association Dutch-Paris (dutch-paris.com), a non-profit registered in Thann, France. The family of Suzanne Hiltermann, who played such an important role in Dutch-Paris, has created the Association Dutch-Paris in order to spread the inspiring story of the courageous deeds of the men and women of Dutch-Paris and […]

During WWII the German security services were very good at their jobs. The Abwehr (German army intelligence) were especially professional and successful. The Gestapo (Nazi party secret police) were also quite successful, if only because almost everyone breaks under torture given enough of it. But they were not all-knowing or all-seeing and were not correct […]

Following the last few posts, I have one last comment about resisters being identified with a resistance group that did not officially acknowledge them. In most cases there are only two reasons for a resister’s resistance group of network to be misidentified.  It’s either an innocent mistake or something altogether darker. Innocent mistakes happened because […]

The last post about Josette Molland brings up the interesting question of how an individual ended up belonging to a particular resistance group in the postwar documents that now constitute the documents that historians use to write the history of the war. This is a different question than how someone joined a resistance group during […]

Here’s an example of the sort of confusion about who worked with what resistance group that I’ve been discussing in the last few posts. On 8 March 2024, The New York Times ran a front page obituary about Josette Molland, a French resister who survived the concentration camps and made a point of sharing her […]

Let’s continue our discussion of why many people assume that anyone who made it from the Netherlands to Spain or Switzerland during the war did so with the help of Dutch-Paris. The simple answer is that Dutch-Paris is the most well-known civilian escape line in western Europe. I say civilian to distinguish it from lines […]

In the last post we discussed the localized fragmentation of the resistance and how there were many different rescue groups that helped fugitives get away from the Nazis. So why is it that so many people assume that if someone got from the Netherlands to Switzerland or Spain during the war they must have been […]

Despite the common term “the Resistance” and the claims of politicians like Charles de Gaulle, the civilian resistance against Nazi occupation during the Second World War was not monolithic. It wasn’t even the work of a few large, well-known national networks. For the most part resistance was the highly fragmented and localized work of discrete […]

We’ve been discussing the essential qualities of a resistance leader, including being a good judge of character, having social skills, and being decisive, flexible and steady. Perhaps the most essential of all, however, the quality that would get a man or a woman into the predicament of leading a resistance group in the first place, […]

Here’s another essential quality in a resistance leader: courage, or holding steady through anxiety. Resisters knew they had a lot to fear. By the end of the war the occupation authorities followed a policy of ruling the population through terror. To that end they took hostages from among the civilian community and publicly executed them […]