How to Flee the Gestapo

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 Read the rest of this entry »

To continue with the last post’s descriptions of Dutch-Paris’s entanglement in the Holocaust, I noticed something unexpected in my research. If you look at the Holocaust on a macro level – millions of people murdered, industrialization of death in the extermination camps, rates of deportations, process of disenfranchisement, the Nazi machinery of death appears to be invincibly solid. But if you look on the micro level of the stories of individuals involved in Dutch-Paris, there are cracks.

There is, of course, the story of the two young Jewish men who jumped out of the deportation train in eastern Belgium and spent the rest of the war as part of Dutch-Paris. That’s a story of extraordinary courage and initiative and surely a bit of luck.

But there are also stories that show cracks in the German machinery. For example, I can think of three times when Read the rest of this entry »

I was honored to be invited to a zoom talk given by the daughter and niece of Dutch-Paris resisters about her mother’s adventurous escape from the Nazis during the war and her postwar work to help the children of victims of the Holocaust.  I can highly recommend her book about it, Motherland by Rita Goldberg.

It’s worth remembering that Dutch-Paris began as illegal opposition to the Holocaust.  The men and women of Dutch-Paris did not show their disgust with Nazi racism or their support of their Jewish neighbors by marching in the streets or signing petitions.  That would have been foolhardy in the extreme given that they were living under German occupation.  The situation had also gone far beyond the stage where political actions were helpful or even possible.  No, they took a quieter, clandestine, but no less dangerous route to resist Nazi racism by helping its victims to survive.

The component groups of Dutch-Paris in Brussels, Paris and Lyon all began in 1942 in order to Read the rest of this entry »

The resisters in escape lines didn’t put any effort into naming themselves. They weren’t planning any big advertising campaigns or even registering themselves with the authorities. They most definitely didn’t want the authorities to know they existed. They wanted to stay under the radar.

Nonetheless, they must at some point have needed to refer to their own network among themselves. In Dutch-Paris, some of the resisters called themselves the “pastor’s network”. That was either after a pastor in Brussels who was one of the leaders of the Comité there, or the pastor in Geneva who channeled funds to the rescue efforts and ran the illegal exchange of information between the Dutch resistance and the Dutch government-in-exile. Either way, the “pastor’s line” was only used by the few people who worked with either pastor. A few resisters called it the “Oranjelijn” in a patriotic nod to the Dutch royal house of Oranje, because it was a Dutch line. But most of the people in the line were not Dutch and not overtly loyal to Queen Wilhelmina. Most members of Dutch-Paris just called it “the organization,” if they called it anything at all.

So if the resisters didn’t give their own networks their names, who did? The Allied military did. The American and British governments were officially interested in any civilian who offered help to American and British soldiers and aviators in occupied territory. During the war, they put a fair amount of effort into teaching their air crews escape and evasion tactics, which included finding helpful civilians and following those resisters’ instructions. They also felt an obligation to Read the rest of this entry »

In the past few posts we’ve talked about collaborators who supported and joined the Nazis because they believed in Nazism; economic collaborators who were essentially looking out for themselves and didn’t mind what happened to the everyone else with the Nazis in control; and collabos who supported the Nazis because they focused on only a single issue.

The Nazi propaganda machine brilliantly exploited this tunnel vision to a single issue, particularly the threat of Communist takeover and the Bolshevik’s atheism. The Nazis’ used people’s fear of Communist atheism to persuade influential people to support them. They used it to recruit people into their armed forces and police units. They used it to convince the ordinary people who were just trying to survive not to kick up too much of a fuss. After all, they said, it was either the Nazis or the Communists. And with the Nazis you could keep your private property and keep going to church.

But that was a spurious argument. The choice was not Read the rest of this entry »

In the last posts we talked about single issue collaborators willing to damn everything else for the sake of one idea and  collaborators who agreed with Nazism and had the integrity to declare their allegiance.

There were also opportunist collaborators who saw that the wind was blowing on the side of the Nazis during the first years of the occupation and jumped on that ship. In the early years of occupation it was absolutely more profitable to be friendly with the Nazis, do business with the Nazis and generally support the Nazis. Maybe these people didn’t whole heartedly agree with every aspect of Nazism, but they agreed enough to put their own profit and comfort ahead of any other ideals.

This group of collabos does not include everyone who worked for the occupation forces during the war. Plenty of people really had no choice because they were Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s continue the discussion of who was the enemy of the resistance during WWII. The simple answer is the Nazis and all the Germans who obeyed the Nazi government, particularly the Wehrmacht and police agencies. But reality is never that simple. The enemy of the resistance was both Nazis (people) and Nazism (worldview).

We’ll start with the people. And we don’t need to talk about the Gestapo or any other German in uniform. But we do need to talk about the non-German Nazis, generally known as collaborators. Collaborators, or collabos to use the slang of the day, came in a wide range of conviction and action.

At the far end of the scale were non-Germans who fervently believed in Nazism and hailed Hitler as a great leader and savior. You don’t have to look hard to find these people because Read the rest of this entry »

The most insidious collabos were those who threw in their lot with the Nazis – and the futures of their entire countries – for the sake of a single issue. Rather than looking at the whole picture and considering what the consequences of the entire Nazi package would be, they focused on one issue.

The most glaring example of this would be the Catholic bishops and priests who supported the Nazis because they were afraid of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks, of course, took over the Russian empire during the Russian Revolution and created the Soviet Union as a communist state. And it has to be said that the Bolsheviks represented a clear and present danger, especially in German in the 1920s when Hitler was gaining followers. Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders made no secret of their intention to take the communist revolution west. They announced several times that they would “be in Berlin” by the following year. Ironically, they didn’t make it to Berlin until the end of Hitler’s war in 1945, but no one knew that in 1942.

Many Europeans feared Read the rest of this entry »

If you were to think of the great moral heroes of the twentieth century, the Second World War Resistance would surely make the list. They did, after all, oppose the Nazis at great risk to themselves and their families. It’s worthwhile, however, to think about exactly who resisters fought against.

At first glance the simplest case appears to be the armed resisters such as the French maquis or FFI (French Forces of the Interior), who took up arms to liberate their country from Nazi occupiers. Sometimes that happened, but just as often, the partisans were fighting their own countrymen who had chosen collaboration with the Nazis, giving these shoot-outs the aspect of civil war.

To further complicate matters, many resisters never carried weapons. The men and women of Dutch-Paris, for instance, did their best not to engage the Nazis or their collaborators. They certainly never killed anyone. And yet the Gestapo considered them Read the rest of this entry »

In my last post I mentioned the legendary Comet Escape Line. It’s legendary because the men and women of Comet achieved the remarkable feat of rescuing hundreds of Allied servicemen from the Nazis. But it is also more literarily legendary as a story. It’s a legend in itself because it is the best known of the escape lines. But much of what is told about Comet is more legend than fact.
Comet has been a legend since the liberation of western Europe in 1944. In fact, when a Dutch-Paris resister, whom we’ll call Micheline, returned from the concentration camps in 1945 she wrote down on her official paperwork that she had belonged to Comet. When the authorities asked the leaders of Comet to verify this woman’s participation they said, quite rightly, that they could not. Micheline’s request for medical aid etc was denied. It took a considerable amount of paperwork and telephone calls on the part of the leaders of Dutch-Paris to get the clerical error fixed so that Micheline could get the help to which she was entitled.

Why did she say she was part of Comet? What probably happened was that she didn’t know the name of her resistance network because they always called themselves “the organization.” So she asked someone who said: “oh, you helped Allied aviators as part of an escape line that went through Paris? You must have been in Comet.” And she wrote down “Comet.”
Why did this unknown person assume that Micheline must have been in Comet? It was undoubtedly the best known of the escape lines, possibly the only one known at the time. That was because Comet was the work of and always under the leadership and control of Belgian civilians, but it was funded by the British and most of the people they helped were Allied servicemen. In fact, Comet began as a way to get British soldiers who had been left behind at Dunkirk and taken shelter with Belgian families back to England. After the first soldiers whom they took to Spain were arrested by Franco’s police, the leaders of Comet made a point of passing their charges directly to British officials in Spain.

So Comet was known in the outside world from its beginning in 1941. It also had a certain glamour as Read the rest of this entry »