When Jean Weidner left Switzerland to link up with like-minded resisters in Brussels on October 13, 1943 (see the last post), he left Switzerland with the unofficial blessing of the Dutch embassy in Switzerland and the Swiss intelligence services.  The immediate and most important implication of this unofficial sanction was that Weidner had enough money to continue the rescue work of his colleagues in southern France and to expand it throughout France and Belgium.  Dutch-Paris was created and hundreds of people’s lives were saved.

On a far less dramatic level, the unofficial support meant that Weidner had to write reports about his bi-weekly trips through occupied France and Belgium on Dutch-Paris business.  He typed these in Switzerland using codes for names and places.  The report went to the very secure Dutch embassy, and Weidner kept a carbon copy for himself.   At the time, this undoubtedly seemed like a petty bureaucratic chore which might put a number of people in danger if it fell into enemy hands.  That is undoubtedly why Weidner never gets any more specific with addresses than the code name of a city and is pretty sparing with personal names.

Today, though, these reports are a unique treasure trove for the historian.   Resisters did not usually write down their movements.   Weidner certainly didn’t do anything of the kind before he started using government funds for their rescue work.   But having written them, he kept his carbon copies and a lot of other documents.   At the end of his long life he donated his papers to the John Henry Weidner Foundation for the Cultivation of the Altruistic Spirit, now called the Weidner Foundation for Altruism (weidnerfoundation.org).   The Weidner Foundation hired an archivist and put Weidner’s papers into archival order.  They allowed me to read them while I was researching The Escape Line, and a few years ago they donated them to the Hoover Library & Archives at Stanford University.

The Hoover Library & Archives have an amazing collection of documents relating to war and peace in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  They have documents about the Second World War and Resistance in Europe that you won’t find anywhere else.  I’m happy to announce that the Weidner Papers are now open for researchers.  You can consult the (partial) finding aid at  https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8kd2194/entire_text/ .   The Weidner Papers will not be digitized; this link is only for the catalog.  If you’re interested in a particular person, you can also consult the footnotes of The Escape Line to find the relevant catalog number.

Unfortunately, the Hoover Archives will be closed to the public from December 24, 2018 until early 2020 because of a massive construction project.   If there’s something you need to see in the Weidner Papers before 2020, you should contact them right away (hooverarchives@stanford.edu).  If you’re reading this during the construction project, look in the back of The Escape Line for a list of over two dozen other archives with documents relating to Dutch-Paris.