Last time we talked about the arrest of a local Dutch-Paris leader under a false name in Brussels. A very similar thing happened to another Dutch-Paris leader in Paris.

This man, who we’ll call Smit, had been an important leader of Dutch-Paris and other rescue groups in Brussels until the Gestapo got too close. He left Belgium for Paris and set about trying to re-build Dutch-Paris there after the big round-up in February 1944. One of Smit’s contacts in Paris was a Dutch military attaché who was up to his neck in resistance, and not just with Dutch-Paris.

Smit went to visit the military attaché at his home to discuss Dutch-Paris on the same day that the Gestapo arrived to arrest him. As usual, they arrested everyone there – just in case – including Smit. The security services in Belgium did not always communicate fully with the security services in France. Gestapo agents in Belgium were on the look out for Smit, but their colleagues in France were not. The men in Paris took Smit for what he claimed to be – a Jew looking for a way to escape.

The military attaché, who was accused of being part of Dutch-Paris, was branded “Nacht und Nebel” and deported to the concentration camps. Smit was sent off to a less awful concentration camp as slave labor without being interrogated. His colleagues in Dutch-Paris had no idea what had happened to him. They knew about the military attache because they had sources in the prison watching for Dutch prisoners. But the Germans thought Smit was so unimportant that he didn’t even register as a resister.

Also, he was processed under the false name on the false identification documents he was carrying when he was arrested. He went all the way to the Third Reich, lived as slave labor and disappeared there under that false name.

How do we know this? He sent a postcard to his brother’s neighbor in Switzerland. He used his false name but put enough personal detail (about missing his baby’s first birthday) that his brother figured it out. When Smit did not return home in the summer of 1945, the family filed many missing person reports and requests that included the false name used in the German documents. Unfortunately he never did return from the Third Reich. If he hadn’t sent that postcard his family would not even know that he had been arrested and deported.