German counter-espionage officers stationed in occupied Holland, Belgium and France were highly professional and effective.  They did not, for example, hare right off to raid every address that they tortured out of a Dutch-Paris courier in mid-February 1944.   They knew that the courier’s colleagues would be hiding and they could wait for those colleagues to get tired of hiding and get back to work rescuing Jews and helping aviators.   So they gathered more information and bided their time.   They interviewed concierges.   They kept buildings under surveillance.   They shadowed suspects.

Then they pounced.  Early on February 26, 1944, German and French police raided several addresses in and near Paris.   They took their captives to headquarters and started torturing them right away.  Within hours they made more arrests.   By the end of the day they’d captured most of the people in Paris who were involved with the Dutch-Paris aviator escape line.   They did not bother anyone who was doing other jobs for Dutch-Paris because these particular officers were really only concerned with the evasion of Allied aviators.

They also coordinated with colleagues in other occupation zones and two days later other members of Dutch-Paris were arrested in Lyon and Brussels.  Not only did the secret military police (GFP), Gestapo and their colleagues, raid the aviator safe house in Brussels, they set up a mousetrap in it.   For days when anyone rang the doorbell at the safe house a young woman answered the door and invited the caller in.  The door closed like the bar of a mousetrap.   The caller was arrested and sent for questioning.

The Germans’ methods were effective but not necessarily precise.   They arrested everyone they found in the vicinity of a raid.  That included everyone in an insurance office when they arrived, even people who were there to pay their premiums.  It also included people on the street who stopped to gawk.  Fortunately for such gawkers it was possible to convince German interrogators that you had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and knew nothing.  Unfortunately it’s impossible to tell how many collateral arrests were made because the German records are missing.

The German officers got at least enough of the information they wanted to shut down Dutch-Paris’s aviator escape line.   They did not shut down Dutch-Paris because they did not find its leaders.   But it wasn’t for lack of trying.