The last post talked about cracks in the Nazi machinery of extermination as seen on the micro level of Dutch-Paris families. In Brussels, for example, German labor officials rounded young men off the streets without once asking about racial or political affiliation. They focused entirely on getting bodies to the factories.

That sort of prioritization of other considerations above race can also be seen in the arrests of several Dutch-Paris resisters.  For example, Luftwaffe police arrested a young Jewish man who was pretty much running Dutch-Paris’s daily operations in Brussels and knew the hiding places of hundreds of Jews. Luckily, they arrested him at the apartment of a woman belonging to a different escape line and assumed that he was there to ask for help. No one set them straight. The Germans in the Luftwaffe police and court knew he was Jewish, but at the trial he was disregarded as a Jew who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and sentenced to prison as a resister not to deportation as a Jew. This is particularly interesting because the non-Jewish resisters with whom he was arrested were either executed or deported. He, however, stayed in a military prison until the last days of the occupation. Ironically, it turned out to be a rather safe place for him. Why wasn’t he deported? I suspect bribery on the part of other Dutch-Paris resisters, although there’s no evidence one way or the other.

A few months later other German military police and the Gestapo raided the Dutch-Paris safe house in Brussels, where they captured 10 Allied aviators and several resisters. Some of those resisters were Jewish, but they were all treated the same, ie as resisters caught red-handed with enemy aviators. The Gestapo may have wanted to deport those men as Jews, but the military intelligence officers had control of them because they were caught with aviators. Again, the Dutch-Paris resisters spent the rest of the occupation in prison in Belgium instead of being deported. Again, I suspect bribery.

It wasn’t always that way. In February 1944 German border troops in captured 15 Engelandvaarders and Allied aviators traveling with Dutch-Paris a few miles from the Spanish border. In the Pyrenees border region of southern France, the German officials separated the Jews from the non-Jews and sentenced them differently. The Jews were all deported to extermination camps, where they perished. The non-Jews were sent to concentration camps housing political prisoners, where some survived. The aviators were eventually sent to POW camps. So those particular Germans acted as expected by prioritizing race.