As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Dutch-Paris played small roles in three iconic WWII stories: the Engelandspiel (Operation North Pole); The Great Escape and the escape from the POW prison at Colditz. In all three, Dutch-Paris escorted escapees on the last leg of their journey to neutral Spain.

In case you haven’t seen the 1963 classic movie The Great Escape, it’s the story of 76 Allied POWs who escaped from Stalag Luft III near Sagan-Breslau through a tunnel that they dug without anything near the proper equipment. The Nazis recaptured all but three of the escapees. One of the three was a Dutchman named Bram van der Stok who flew with the RAF. As a Dutchman Van der Stok obviously had a huge advantage in blending into the civilian population, especially once he reached the Netherlands.

Van der Stok escaped from the POW camp on 24 March 1944. He arrived in the Spanish village of Canejan in the Pyrenees on 18 June 1944 and he filed a report with the London Dutch authorities on 27 July 1944. In that report, he says that he paid a passeur to get him over the border into Belgium, where had had an address of a man affiliated with Dutch-Paris. But, he said in July 1944, no one could help him get further so he made his own way to Toulouse, where he found an organization to help him. I have to wonder, though, if in July 1944 – before France or Belgium were fully liberated – Van der Stok wasn’t fudging the details to protect the resisters who had helped him and were still under enemy occupation.

Because several other sources tell a different tale. According to these other, independent sources, a Dutch group that specialized in border crossings took Van der Stok from Maastricht over the border to one of their members in Hasselt. That man passed the pilot to the Dutch-Paris man in Brussels. He stayed with that man and his family for a couple of weeks. At that point, in late April or early May 1944, one of the leaders of Dutch-Paris escorted the RAF pilot with a price on his head and a Dutch secret agent (BI) from Brussels to Toulouse. The three of them stayed in a Dutch-Paris safe house (an apartment used only by the leadership) from 25 May to 9 June.

By early May 1944, Dutch-Paris’s escape route had suffered from debilitating arrests. They were no longer taking large groups of aviators and Engelandvaarders south through Brussels and Paris because they simply didn’t have enough people to do it anymore. But they were still taking individuals who they encountered along the route, such as RAF pilots who escaped from POW prison camps. They traveled in much smaller groups, usually with one of the line’s leaders and stayed away from any of the “usual” Dutch-Paris places. The Gestapo were still arresting Dutch-Paris couriers and guides as late as mid-June.

Van der Stok left Toulouse in the company of the BI agent and a Dutch priest wanted by the Nazis for his outspoken resistance. In the foothills of the Pyrenees they rendezvoused with up to 40 other fugitives including Allied aviators and Jewish families. Their passeur was ambushed and killed on a bridge on 16 June. On 18 June other maquisards from the region, heavily armed, escorted the convoy the last kilometers into Spain.

All the documents except for that report of 27 July indicate that Van der Stok had the help of organized escape lines from at least Maastricht, and was under the protection of Dutch-Paris from Brussels to Spain. And that includes the debriefing report that Van der Stok himself gave to the British as soon as he returned to England. It seems unlikely that a man who made his own way from a POW camp in what is now Poland across the Third Reich to the Netherlands would not have appreciated the assistance of an organized escape line across Belgium and France.