How to Flee the Gestapo

The Return of political prisoners, prisoners of war and forced laborers from Germany to France, Belgium and the Netherlands had slowed to a trickle by August 1945.   If someone had not yet come home or at least gotten a message to his or her family by then, it was unlikely that they ever would.

And yet the families and loved ones kept hoping.  Dutch-Paris had several prisoners still missing at the end of that summer.   One Dutch-Paris leader put an advertisement in the newspaper asking for any information about his sister.  He received two letters in response from women who had been prisoners at Ravensbruck with her and could tell him about her final days.

Other families made an endless round of the Red Cross and the social ministries and every other organization they could think of that might have contacts in Germany who might have information.   One Belgian family filled out endless forms searching for a missing person and made personal inquiries among returned political prisoners.  They had almost reconciled themselves to their prisoner’s death in late 1945 when the Belgian foreign office told them that the Soviets reported that they had the man and were exchanging him for a Soviet citizen.   How happy the family was as they prepared to welcome home their husband and brother.   But he didn’t arrive and he didn’t arrive.   Finally, months and months later, the Soviets said they had made a spelling error.  They knew nothing about the missing man.   The family had to accept that the story another prisoner had told them about the missing man being in a factory that was bombed into rubble in the last weeks of the war must be true.

The uncertainty about the fate of missing persons had practical as well as psychological ramifications.   If you could not prove that a person had died, you could not get a death certificate.  Without a death certificate, property could not be sold, nor could benefits be collected.   Surviving families were cast into destitution.  This was such a common and pressing problem in the Netherlands that the Dutch parliament changed the laws regarding the issuance of death certificates in cases of displaced persons.

In the case of Dutch-Paris, the lack of a father’s death certificate left his children without means or a legal guardian.   It took a great deal of official correspondence and bureaucratic dealings to straighten out the children’s legal situation on the part of both their uncle and the official leader of Dutch-Paris.  Fortunately they had adults to advocate for them.   The Netherlands still has over 500 names on its list of missing persons from WWII.

Another effect of The Return of prisoners and forced laborers to France in the summer of 1945 that we’ve been talking about for the last few posts was a resurgence of what’s sometimes called the “extra-legal purge.”

During the occupation, civilians who collaborated with the Germans had increased access to power, influence and material goods such as food. Collaborators had various reasons for working with the enemy. Some did so out of pure self-interest. Others felt that they were in a sense protecting their community from the hard reality of life. Some just agreed with Nazism and its vision of society. They all attracted the envy and contempt of their neighbors. Everyone expected that if the Germans lost the war, their collaborators would be held to account for what many considered to be treason.

The purge of collaborators took different forms with different levels of effectiveness in different countries. In France Charles de Gaulle’s postwar government very much wanted to funnel the passions swirling around collaboration into the regular court system and keep it under the control of the central government in Paris.

Many citizens had other ideas about that. Most famously, in some places, resisters rounded up the local women known to have Read the rest of this entry »

There is no doubt that every former prisoner was happy to return home from the Third Reich in 1945. But those returns often held their own traumas.

To begin with, it’s fair to assume that every displaced person who returned from Germany was in poor health. Some of them were so desperately ill that they never fully recovered and died young even if they struggled on for some years. But even those who had been arrested late in the war and spent a relatively short time in captivity were weak from malnutrition and exposure. The concept of post-traumatic stress disorder had not yet been developed, but it’s fair to assume that every returnee suffered from it to one degree or another.
Jewish survivors faced particular challenges of returning to families and neighborhoods that had been decimated. They sometimes even found themselves unwelcome in their own homes by the people who had benefited from anti-Semitic policies by moving into their homes.

Less well known, many political prisoners faces similar problems. Although in most cases political prisoners did not lose their entire families, they did sometimes lose their closest friends and colleagues. A Dutch-Paris courier whom we’ll call Read the rest of this entry »

When they liberated the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, horrified British soldiers buried the dead and tried to save the living. They also required that the German adults who lived near the camp come into the camp to see what had happened there. And they filmed what they saw. That film was made into a newsreel and distributed to cinemas in western Europe.

The documentary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen showed at a movie theater in a small town in eastern France about 75 years ago this week. By June 1945 the French were beginning to understand the depth of mistreatment that prisoners and slave laborers had endured in Nazi Germany. Huge crowds gathered at train stations whenever a train with deportees returning home was expected to arrive. The crowds could see how skeletal and weak those returnees were. Rumors spread as the family of returned prisoners talked about how sick their loved ones were. The crowds could also see that many of the people they expected to return home were not returning home.

One night that the documentary showed Read the rest of this entry »

The collapse of the Third Reich and the end of the Second World War 75 years ago was met with general rejoicing, but it also represented a threat of a global pandemic. The Nazis had forcibly displaced millions of people from their homes across Europe and brought them into central Europe as prisoners and/or laborers of varying degrees of freedom (mostly none). Most of them lived in appalling conditions without adequate nutrition, shelter or sanitation. The sick did not receive anything close to adequate medical care. Diseases like typhus ran rampant among the displaced population.

But of course none of them wanted to stay in their prisons and labor camps once the Allies arrived. They wanted to go home if they could. At the least they wanted to get out of the rubble of bombed out cities to someplace with food. Each one of those millions of displaced persons who left their prison or labor camp was a possible carrier of disease.

So why wasn’t there a pandemic in 1945? It didn’t happen in large part because the Allied authorities had not forgotten the Spanish Flu that followed the First World War and killed many more people than the war itself did. The Allies knew about the prison and labor camps, although they could not begin to imagine exactly how bad it was in them.  They came prepared.

When the Allies liberated a camp they buried the dead, gave medical care to the dangerously ill, and fed and deloused those who could walk on their own. They actually dusted former prisoners with DDT powder, which makes us cringe now, but it did kill disease-bearing insects and did help prevent a pandemic. For example, a man who worked with Dutch-Paris in Paris was liberated from a concentration camp directly into an American field hospital. Unfortunately he died there a couple of weeks later, because he was already too ill to be saved when the Americans liberated the camp.

The Allies also burned down all the buildings in places like Bergen-Belsen to kill the fleas, lice and animals that can carry typhus. They also tried to keep infected people from spreading out over the countryside by setting up refugee camps with beds, food, clothes, clean water and officials who processed applications for transportation home. In the West, many displaced persons were flown to their home countries on military planes. Others traveled by military trucks. Once they returned to their home countries, they were again screened for public health issues. The sick were given a place in a rest home or hospital to recover before continuing their journeys.

Although it’s not something you hear about, the fact that there was not a pandemic in 1945 is a triumph of public health policy, planning and action.

I had a surprising conversation with my 14 year-old son about the book he’s reading for school: Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. The most interesting part went like this:
My son : “Romeo was the bad guy.”
Me : “What?”
My son : “He murdered two people and then he killed himself, so….” (shrug).

All the times that I’ve read that play or seen it performed in its many variations, I have never thought of Romeo as the bad guy. But when you put it like my son did, I can see his point.
Dutch-Paris is open to a similarly broad range of interpretations. The prevailing opinion among Read the rest of this entry »

Weeks ago, at the beginning of the stay at home orders meant to slow the Coronavirus, an American friend forwarded a message from a Hungarian friend who was living in Switzerland. It was a poster featuring a black and white photograph of a soldier standing in the rising mist next to a small guard house. The words, in English, read “Your grandfather was asked to go to war, you’re being asked to sit on the couch.” It also had the address of a Dutch website encouraging the Dutch people to stand together against Coronavirus.

I’ve asked several historian colleagues if they recognize the photograph or the uniform worn by the soldier, but no one does. So the facts about the provenance of this poster are sketchy, but its message remains powerful.

When I first saw the image and thought that it was Swiss, I immediately thought that the analogy failed because Read the rest of this entry »

Our last post talked about the rescue of women political prisoners from the Ravensbrück concentration camp by the Swedish Red Cross, working in conjunction with Danish humanitarians. Several Dutch-Paris women benefited from that rescue mission.

But not all the women who had been arrested as part of Dutch-Paris and deported to concentration camps were in the main camp at Ravensbrück when the Red Cross arrived. They had been transferred to sub-camps. What happened to them? As we discussed in February, one of them was liberated by the Soviets in February 1945 but died a few days later from illness and the extreme weakness and malnutrition that all the concentration camp prisoners suffered from.

Another young woman had been transferred to a different sub-camp and was rounded up at gun point by the SS and told to march west. Apparently the SS thought that they were just making a strategic retreat before winning the war and that they would therefore need their slave labor to keep making their materiel.

One of the young Frenchwomen who had served Dutch-Paris as a guide and courier, let’s call her Marie, found herself on one of these notorious Death Marches. Many prisoners did not survive them. It’s actually surprising that any of them did considering how malnourished they were to begin with and that they were walking through a severe winter without even adequate boots or coats.
Marie survived by leaving the column, which was risky in itself. The SS shot anyone who strayed or fell behind. She had the good fortune to meet up with French POWs, who smuggled her into their camp. That gave her a roof to sleep under and something to eat, although the French POWs were in desperate straits themselves and didn’t have much to spare.

When the Germans evacuated the POWs’ camp, Marie decided not to join that forced march. Instead, she found some American GIs to turn herself over to. In that place at that time – Germany in late April, early May 1945 – the very most that anyone could hope for was to turn himself or herself over to Americans or Brits. As a victim of the Nazis, Marie was given medical care, food and shelter. Within a couple of weeks she was also given transportation back home to France.

Seventy-five years ago, in the late winter and early spring of 1945, most of western Europe had been liberated from Nazi occupation. But the war was far from over. The Western Allies and the Red Army were driving towards Berlin and the USAAF and RAF were bombing Germany around the clock.

The Nazis, however, were not willing to give up, nor were they willing to leave their human captives behind when they retreated. There were millions of non-Germans trapped in the Third Reich as political prisoners, racial prisoners. POWs, and forced laborers of various statuses. Rather than leave prisoners in concentration camps when they retreated, the SS either killed inmates or set them on the notorious Death Marches towards the German heartland.

In an exception to this standard operating procedure, the Swedish Red Cross was able to bargain for the release of Scandinavian prisoners if they came to transport the prisoners through the battle zone themselves. They did so in the famous white buses, so called because they were painted white in hopes that the combatants would leave them alone.

A convoy of white buses arrived at the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück the day before it was to be evacuated. The humanitarians expected Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy five years ago the Western Allies were moving into the Third Reich from the west while the Soviet Red Army steamrollered toward Berlin from the east. The armies had a very clear military objective: the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich. But they also had a vast and sprawling civilian affairs problem.

The Americans and British were not able to drive the German army out of a town, arrest the Nazi town council and reopen the schools. There were literally millions of non-German political prisoners, POWs, forced laborers and slave laborers in the Third Reich. As soon as the Allies showed up these hungry people naturally considered themselves as liberated and on the side of the victors. They did not necessarily want to remain in their prison camps or prison clothes and they certainly did not want to keep eating the slop that they’d been allowed as prisoners or slaves. Most of them wanted to go home (unless their home was being occupied by the Red Army).

From the American and British perspective, these millions of people were a potential source of chaos and disease (no fault of their own that they were captive in conditions that fostered typhus etc). On the other hand, they were also clearly victims of the Nazis and the reason for the battles.

The solution was to encourage these people to put themselves in camps where they would be well fed, given better clothing and eventually given a ride home. They could also be vetted for the sort of diseases that might cause epidemics. This suited some people fine, but there were plenty of others who had absolutely no intention to putting themselves back into any sort of camp. And so you have odd incidences at the end of the war, like reports of Cossacks stealing food and laundry in French villages.

There were people who grouped themselves together by nationality and walked home, without much caring about the property rights of German civilians. The majority of French, Belgian and Dutch, however, were happy to accept a plane ride or a truck ride home in the spring of 1945.Millions of prisoners and forced laborers came home to the West in 1945 in planes and trucks in a mass population movement remembered as the Return or le Retour. It was an emotionally fraught period that defines the end of WWII as much as any battle or military campaign.  No one who saw those convoys of displaced persons returning from the Third Reich has forgotten them.