How to Flee the Gestapo

The men and women of Dutch-Paris were resisters, meaning that they were among the tiny minority of civilians in Occupied Europe who actively opposed the Nazis. What about everyone else?
Speaking very broadly, there were two choices. If you didn’t resist, you could collaborate or you could accommodate.

Collaborators were the minority on the other end of the spectrum who actively supported the Nazis. There’s actually a range in here and some of the examples get very murky indeed. There were people who were not German but fully agreed with and supported Nazism – straight out collabos. Then there were people who thought that they could best serve their occupied country by cooperating with the Nazis. That attitude led a number of civil servants into collaboration because it Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of posts ago I wrote about the death of the woman who ran the boarding house that Dutch-Paris rented as a safe house on the escape line in Brussels. The 55 year-old political prisoner was gassed at the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück in January 1945.

Lydia’s story offers a good example of the haphazard and incomplete nature of archives and of why you should never rely on only a single source if you’re trying to figure out what happened in the past.

Because Lydia played a supporting role, she was unknown to most of the other members of the Comite in Brussels and, of course, she was unable to tell her own story after the war. But she makes brief appearances in different sources, which give different pictures of the woman.

In 1946 the Comité made reports on as many people who worked with them as they could. Lydia’s was brief because Read the rest of this entry »

There were many ways to die in the concentration camps built in Hitler’s Third Reich to punish political prisoners of all sorts. Just as not every Jew deported to an extermination camp died from poison gas, not every political prisoner died of malnutrition and exposure, although that grim end awaited them all.

Only a tiny handful of the millions of prisoners under Nazi control had anything to do with Dutch-Paris. But they died in various ways.

In November 1944 a 42 year-old man who was arrested under a false name died when the Allies bombed the factory Read the rest of this entry »

This week marks the 75th anniversary of the death of one of the young women who worked with Dutch-Paris, we’ll call her Marthe.

Marthe served the line as a postbox in Paris, meaning that she accepted and forwarded messages on behalf of her colleagues. Such messages ranged for the details of an escape being planned for Jewish refugees to microfilms in transit from a courier coming from Spain to a courier heading towards the Netherlands.

Along with most of the rest of the line in Paris, Marthe was arrested at the end of February 1944. Unusually, the Germans don’t seem to have figured out Read the rest of this entry »

January 28th marks the 75th anniversary of the death of one of the minor players in the story of Dutch-Paris. She was a 55 year-old spinster who supported herself by running a boarding house in one of the newer neighborhoods of Brussels. We’ll call her Lydia.

The archives do not have much to share about Lydia. The Comité rented her entire boarding house in December 1943 to serve as Brussels HQ for the Dutch-Paris escape line. She was arrested along with everyone else in that house early in the morning of February 28, 1944. There were 10 Allied aviators sleeping in the house that morning, damning everyone there with the capital crime of aiding the Occupiers’ enemy. It is not known if Lydia was tortured Read the rest of this entry »

Just like Dutch-Paris was not the only escape line running through western Europe during WWII, I am hardly the only historian who has been researching escape lines. One of the most dedicated and most helpful of my fellow researchers is Bruce Bollinger. If you’ve done any research on the subject at all, you’ve probably come across his extensive and extremely helpful website: https://wwii-netherlands-escape-lines.com/

Bruce’s interest in escape lines began decades ago when he visited an uncle in Belgium who told him about hiding an American aviator during the war. Unfortunately the uncle died the next year, but Bruce found the American aviator and began tracking down every detail of his evasion to Spain and everyone who Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy-five years ago, during the Christmas season of 1944, the people of western Europe had both reason for hope and reason for fear.

They had reason to hope because the Allies had landed in Normandy more than six months earlier and already liberated most of France, Belgium and southern Holland. Anyone who saw the well-fed and well-equipped Allied armies had every reason to expect that the war would finally be over before the end of 1945.

At that time, during the Liberation era, there was also cause to hope that the peace would be accompanied with new levels of social and economic justice.

But the war still raged and even those who had been freed from occupation months earlier had reasons to fear. Most of the Netherlands was still under occupation and was already well into the catastrophe of the Hunger Winter, a man-made famine imposed by the German occupation authorities on the Dutch population north of the rivers as punishment for their support of the resistance and the Allies. It would be many months before the Red Cross and the Allies were allowed to bring food to the Dutch.

On a smaller scale, there were still Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing on with our discussion of the use of the railways by escape lines, we should recognize the railway men who belonged to Dutch-Paris. There were two that I know of.

The first was a Dutch railway official who worked at the Gare du Nord, the station where all the trains to and from the north, including Belgium and the Netherlands, stopped in Paris. Our man in the station was a source of invaluable information and of less travelled ways in and out of the station. He also opened his family home to the organization for meetings and sent his teenage sons out with messages. The entire family was arrested and kept in jail by the French for two nights. After that, the French police turned our man over to the Germans but let the family go. Our man died in the concentration camps.

Our second railway man was a supervisor for the French railways in the Pyrenees. Or at least he way until he was ordered to arrange the loading of forced laborers onto a train bound for the Third Reich. His refusal to do so made him a criminal. He spent the rest of the war underground, working as a passeur or guide for downed Allied aviators and other fugitives over the Pyrenees into Spain.

There were undoubtedly other railway employees who helped Dutch-Paris out in one way or another without committing to outright resistance as part of the line. It’s likely, for example, that the men and women working for the line in Paris knew which trains to Toulouse were not patrolled by document inspectors because someone in the railways told them.

Just as Dutch-Paris could not have escorted fugitives across occupied Europe to safety in neutral Switzerland or Spain without using the train, they could not have done it without help from the railway workers.

Here’s an interesting question that someone asked at one of my talks about Dutch-Paris. If downed Allied aviators and resisters were escaping the Nazis on the trains, why didn’t the Gestapo just take over all the trains?

If there are any grad students out there looking for a dissertation topic, that would be a good one because the history of the railways during Nazi occupation is deeply complex. You could, actually, write a dissertation on very specific railway topics such as the catastrophic Dutch railway strike begun in September 1944 or the use of the railways to transfer prisoners in the spring of 1945 when it would have been far more rational for the Third Reich to use what lines and stock still functioned for military purposes.

But let’s limit ourselves to the use of the railways by Dutch-Paris and the specific question of why the Gestapo didn’t take over the trains to stop escape lines.

To a certain extent, the answer is that the Gestapo, or at least the German occupation authorities, did take over the trains. The Gestapo did not send its own agents to drive locomotives. But they did patrol passenger trains and railway stations, reserving the right to detain anyone at any time. And if it wasn’t the Gestapo checking passengers’ documents, it could have been Read the rest of this entry »

With all the dramatic stories of resistance in movies and novels, we tend to forget that resisters were civilians living under an occupation that lasted for four or five years. Like all other civilians they had to get by on short rations and worn out shoes. They lived in cold houses and drank ersatz coffee made out of roasted chickory like everyone else. Maybe they had more than their fair share of fear and anxiety, knowing that the authorities were after them as they did. And resisters who traveled as couriers or guides had much more than their fair share of the inconveniences of trying to get around as a civilian in Occupied Europe.

Travel was difficult for every civilian, of course. Because of the gasoline ration, the only option for long distance travel was the trains. Civilian passenger trains did not get top priority during the Occupation and could easily be delayed or cancelled because the Occupation authorities declared that either the train or the track was needed for military purposes. The only way to know for sure when and if a train was running, was to go to the station to inquire.

If a train was running, there was a good chance that it would be delayed. In addition to the usual, peacetime reasons that a train might be delayed, there were a few reasons specific to the occupation. In an air raid, trains stopped wherever they were so that the passengers could evacuate it to seek shelter. If they happened to be in a rural area, passengers could find themselves lying in a ditch until the all clear sounded. If the pilots damaged the train, the passengers could be there for a long time or would need to walk to the nearest town. Sabotage attempts had similar consequences although they were possibly more dangerous.

A Dutch-Paris courier reported in late 1943 that he was late getting to Paris because someone, presumably resisters, had blown up the track underneath a couple of carriages while his train went over it. The courier had helped to rescue the wounded. Other passengers helped to push the damaged carriages off the track. They had hooked up the remaining carriages and continued on.
Even without attacks, the trains of the time were cold, unlit and very crowded. They were ideal places for police to check people’s documents because very few people are willing to jump off a moving train. Train stations were also subject to heavy surveillance. International couriers and guides also had to go through several layers of document and customs inspections at every border.
There wasn’t anything very glamorous about train travel during the Occupation, even if the traveler was a courier or guide in heightened danger of arrest during the journey.