Here’s another example of why historians use footnotes. A few of the people Dutch-Paris helped get into Switzerland were family members of prominent French resisters. They were in danger under the German and Vichy policy of family responsibility, meaning that family members could be held as hostages or punished because of a resister’s actions. Two such fugitives were the 9 and 11 year-old children of the leader of a very large French intelligence network. Dutch-Paris gave them the code name “les enfants de Marie,” or “Marie’s children.”

A fellow historian recently pointed out that in her memoir about her resistance network published in 1968, Marie said that Dutch-Paris gave the children to peasants. These peasants pointed the two children in the direction of the barbed wire fence several miles away on the Swiss border and told them to walk there on their own and make their own way into Switzerland.

Knowing what I do about Dutch-Paris and having found very detailed accounts of how Dutch-Paris took the children of other French resisters into Switzerland, I just can’t believe that that’s how it happened. Sure, they may have just pointed out the border to some particularly savvy adults and sent them on their way, but never unaccompanied children. So I looked into my notes again and found an interview that Weidner gave in 1977 in which he says that he personally took Marie’s children by train to the border town of Annemasse and passed them to a guide. He wasn’t sure but he thinks it was a particular young man who took many children over the border and was entirely reliable.

This is what I suspect happened. Weidner took the kids on the train to the border and passed them to a local guide. The guide took the kids to the barbed wire fence and helped them get through it. But then the guide told the kids to walk by themselves across the expanse of fields and up the hill covered in vineyards until they got to the Swiss border posts and could turn themselves in to a Swiss soldier. It was actually safer for the children to walk through that no-man’s-land between the barbed wire and the top of the hill by themselves. The Swiss were more likely to welcome unaccompanied minors, and the border guards on the French side (Italian or German) were less likely to shoot children in the no-man’s-land than adults. So the children had a long, scary walk by themselves on the Swiss side of the border until they were completely safe. By the time they could tell their mother, who was nowhere near Switzerland when it happened, the details of the story had gotten a little garbled. Naturally, she was not pleased with the story as she understood it.

But do I know that that’s what happened? No. All my colleague and I have is the story published in the memoir in 1968, the interview from 1977, and some letters between Weidner and his friend who belonged to Marie’s network which were written in the 1980s. Nothing from the time of the events (probably 1943 but maybe 1942) or shortly thereafter; nothing from the children or the guides or the people who took care of the children in Switzerland. I expect that it would be possible to find some more solid facts in the Swiss archives, at least the date of the children’s arrival. From there it might be possible to figure out who sponsored the children in Switzerland and see if they wrote anything down.

But until someone does that research, what we have is hearsay. Anyone who reads my book will know it’s hearsay because of the footnotes. Footnotes keep us honest with our facts.