How to Flee the Gestapo

I am pleased to announce that Boom uitgevers Amsterdam will publish the Dutch translation of my book this November. Gewone Helden: de Dutch-Paris ontsnappingslijn 1942-1945 (ISBN 978 90 5875 5568) will be available at book sellers or as an e-book starting on 5 November 2016. Oxford University Press will publish the English edition in early […]

I am happy to announce that Uitgeverij Boom will publish a Dutch translation of my book on the history of Dutch-Paris this autumn. It  is called Ordinary Heroes or Gewone Helden. (No English language publisher yet.) While looking through what few photos there are in the archives, I was struck by how very ordinary the […]

Right around this time in 1944 Dutch-Paris started taking downed Allied airmen to Spain.  Some of the men and women in the line who worked in Brussels and Paris had been wanting to do this for some time.  The problem had not been where to find aviators on the run.  Other resistance groups in the […]

The next major city on the Dutch-Paris line to be liberated after Brussels was Maastricht. Dutch-Paris did not actually have a station in Maastricht, but they had working associations with Dutch resisters there, and a couple of Dutch-Paris guides went back and forth over the Dutch border there to escort aviators into Belgium or bring […]

Because Dutch-Paris helped more than 120 Allied aviators evade capture after their aircraft had crashed in the Netherlands, Belgium or France, I’ve read dozens of escape and evasion reports describing these men’s journeys back to England. They always begin with complete and detailed descriptions of the men’s last mission: the weather, the bombing run, the […]

If you read the story about the two friendly Miliciens in the last post, you may be wondering if Weidner also wrote a character testimonial for the older of the two paramilitary collaborators after the war. He did not. Weidner gained the friendship of the younger man by discussing the Bible with him. He cultivated […]

We tend to think of the Second World War as a simple moral equation of good vs. evil, white vs. black. It’s not too hard to make a case for that on the macro level of Hitler and the SS vs the Allied democracies and the Resistance. But the closer you get to individual stories […]

Dutch-Paris had an elaborate system for smuggling Jews, resisters and other people who needed to get out of the Nazis’ grasp from France to Switzerland. They had a chain of safe houses, many sources of false documents, donors willing to fund the effort and helpers willing to put themselves at risk to escort the fugitives. […]

As I’m writing the snow is falling down faster than we can keep the walkways shoveled, and the schools have been closed for the next three days due to dangerously cold temperatures. The last winters of the war and the first winters of the peace were also remarkably cold. But unless you stick to straightforward […]

In the previous post I shared the reflections of Frits, a Dutch university student who smuggled Jews and Engelandvaarders over the border from the Netherlands into Belgium for Dutch-Paris. As far as passeurs go, Frits was unusual. Generally speaking, you can divide up passeurs into three classes: volunteers, professionals and criminals. Frits was a volunteer […]