Seventy-five years ago this week, on 6 September 1943, German occupation authorities in Lyon arrested the Dutch consul there. They also arrested the French bureaucrat who was his official supervisor in the matter of administering foreign nationals in southern France. The Gestapo accused the Consul of helping Dutch refugees, particularly Jewish refugees, in illegal ways, such as providing false documentation claiming that they were Christians. The charges may or may not have been accurate in the details but they were certainly true enough. The consul was heavily involved in hiding fugitives from the Germans and had passed a number of Jews to Weidner to be taken to Switzerland.

The fact that the Gestapo had arrested a foreign Consul caused rather a stir in Lyon and the Spanish consul intervened on the two men’s behalf. The Spanish consul had a little more weight than others because he represented Franco’s regime. Spain was officially neutral, but Hitler had helped put Franco in power. Perhaps because of the public notice, the Dutch consul, who was actually a Frenchman who did not speak any Dutch, and the French bureaucrat nominally responsible for him, were not mistreated while in German custody. They were questioned but not physically interrogated.

After a few days the Germans released the bureaucrat and the Consul with a stern warning not to “meddle” in Dutch affairs anymore. They also made the Consul promise to continue to distribute aid to Dutch refugees in Lyon, presumably the “legal” ones who were not Jews. That’s as contradictory as it seems.

The net result was that the Consul’s title was officially changed to “assistant social aux neerlandaises” (social worker to the Dutch). The Consul burned a lot of his papers and started warning people to stay away from the consulate offices in his insurance office. His resistance colleagues in Dutch-Paris avoided the place from the day of his arrest. But neither the Consul nor his resistance colleagues stopped any of their illegal work of hiding Jews and other fugitives and of taking them to Switzerland. The biggest change was improved security protocols among the helpers, which included moving a couple of people from Lyon to Geneva to organize escapes from the Swiss side of the border. In this case, the Germans attempt to intimidate the Consul into obeying their laws totally failed. He had the courage to obey a higher law.