How to Flee the Gestapo

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 […]

We’ve been talking about how resisters often relied on the people they already knew from work or the neighborhood or their families or school to expand their networks. That makes sense because telling someone that you were involved in the illegal work of resistance was tantamount to giving them the power to destroy you by […]

In another example of employment related connections among resisters, I’ve noticed that a number of people in Dutch-Paris worked for the same Dutch insurance company, De Utrecht. If we were talking about any other circumstance than the illegal resistance during the Nazi occupation, the number would be insignificant. But these men lived in different cities, […]

Here’s another example of  social connections among members of Dutch-Paris that were established before the war. Sometimes people recruited others for their resistance network from among the people they worked with. There was a man in eastern Belgium, for example, who worked for a government bureau that allowed him to travel from place to place […]

We’ve been discussing the practical consequences for resistance networks like Dutch-Paris of the fact that they could not openly recruit or advertise for the best candidates without being arrested and worse. One of these consequences was that everything they did went by word of mouth or gut instinct, meaning that many people came into contact […]

We’ve been talking about how resistance lines, especially escape lines, were vulnerable because they had to trust strangers and were always in need of more help and more resources. Resisters knew this. They knew that they literally put their lives in someone else’s hands when they trusted them with their identity. But in a clandestine […]

We’ve been talking about how resistance networks’ inability to vet recruits and those they helped made them vulnerable. Their constant need for more help and more resources also made them vulnerable, if only because it might force them to trust someone they were not 100% sure about. This combination made resisters vulnerable to German agents, […]

Let’s continue our discussion of the hazards of having to trust strangers for a resistance line. It was possible that the authorities might capture someone the line was helping and get information out of that person. It was also a very real possibility that a German agent might infiltrate an escape line by pretending to […]