How to Flee the Gestapo

One of the Comet escape line’s teenage couriers recently passed away at the age of 95. Like Dutch-Paris, Comet was also created by civilians. Unlike Dutch-Paris, Comet emphasized helping Allied servicemen to evade the Nazis by either taking them from Belgium to Spain or hiding them in Belgium. Both escape lines relied on the dedication […]

Our last post talked about the rescue of women political prisoners from the Ravensbrück concentration camp by the Swedish Red Cross, working in conjunction with Danish humanitarians. Several Dutch-Paris women benefited from that rescue mission. But not all the women who had been arrested as part of Dutch-Paris and deported to concentration camps were in […]

Seventy-five years ago, in the late winter and early spring of 1945, most of western Europe had been liberated from Nazi occupation. But the war was far from over. The Western Allies and the Red Army were driving towards Berlin and the USAAF and RAF were bombing Germany around the clock. The Nazis, however, were […]

Just like Dutch-Paris was not the only escape line running through western Europe during WWII, I am hardly the only historian who has been researching escape lines. One of the most dedicated and most helpful of my fellow researchers is Bruce Bollinger. If you’ve done any research on the subject at all, you’ve probably come […]

Brussels was a dangerous place for civilians 75 years ago, during the summer of 1944, especially for men of military age.  The German occupation authorities had absolutely no tolerance for anything that could interfere with their military operations and heightened their surveillance of the civilian population.   They also rounded men up off the street to […]

Knowing as you do that the Normandy Landings on June 6, 1944, turned out to be a huge success and that the Allies won the Second World War, you would think that the Germans focused all their resources and all their attention on pushing back the Allied advance. This was a lot more true for […]

There’s a new feature on the blog called “Upcoming Events.” It’s on the top of the right hand column inside a WWII-era identity card issued by the city of Brussels (Ville de Bruxelles). You can see what’s coming up at a glance and get more details by clicking on “view all events” at the bottom […]

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for a documentary about a Dutch Jew who was in southern France from 1940 to September 1942.* Like Weidner, this man, whom we’ll call Sal, was involved with the efforts of the Dutch consulate in Lyon to help Dutch Jews in 1942. The director asked me a […]

Today, May 5, is the anniversary of the Liberation of the entirety of the Netherlands in 1945.  Last night, May 4, communities across the country commemorated the terrible losses that the Dutch people suffered during the Second World War.  It’s symbolically appropriate that Oxford University Press will release my book on Dutch-Paris in the US […]

The common practice of using aliases or noms de guerre in the resistance worked very well. In at least two cases of Dutch-Paris resisters, the Germans never cracked the resisters pseudonym, even in the concentration camps. Not that there was anything good about being deported to a concentration camp. But in these cases the men […]