How to Flee the Gestapo

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 […]

We’ve been discussing the necessary qualities of a resistance leader, or, really, any resister who intended to survive the war. You needed to be a good judge of character, good at making friends and able to act decisively. You also had to be flexible. Actually, any civilian needed a certain flexibility of mind and attitude […]

We’ve been talking about the essential qualities of a resistance leader. Let’s look at another one today: decisiveness. A gentleman who worked for Dutch-Paris as a young man once told me that he sometimes missed how simple making a plan had been during the war. As a resister he was told to meet someone at […]

Here’s another essential quality for Here’s another essential quality for a resistance leader: the ability to get along with all sorts of people. This was especially important for leaders of escape lines such as Dutch-Paris. They needed excellent social skills both to recruit help and to survive unexpected situations. Escorting a fugitive of any sort, […]

Here’s another story of how a leader of Dutch-Paris recruited someone the line needed for their skills or resources based on his own judgment of the person’s character rather than by referral. Even though Dutch-Paris counts as a very large resistance network with its 320+ members spread across western Europe, the line never had enough […]

We’ve been talking about how Dutch-Paris recruited new members. No matter who a resister approached, the invitation to join the network was fraught with peril. There was the possibility that the person they were talking to was either working for the Germans or being watched by them. There was always the possibility that even someone […]