How to Flee the Gestapo

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.

Every once in a while I pass a car with a bumper sticker urging me to practice “random acts of kindness.” It sounds like a warm, fuzzy way to make the world nicer. But if you look at the story of Dutch-Paris, you’ll see that random acts of kindness can have profound consequences.

For example, in late 1943 a Dutch-Paris courier was on his way to a rendezvous at an apartment building in Brussels. He knocked on the wrong door. The lady who answered the door told him that the Gestapo was in the apartment he was looking for. It goes without saying that he left the building immediately. He was free to play an instrumental role in linking up the line and escorting hundreds of people to safety.

That neighbor lady did not have to answer her door at all. She put herself at risk by warning the stranger about the Gestapo. No one would put it past them to arrest her for doing that. In that situation, her act was not only kind but courageous.

Here’s another example that I’ve mentioned before. In December 1943 an Engelandvaarder was arrested in Paris by Wehrmacht officers. He opened the back door of their vehicle, rolled out and ran off through the blacked out streets of Paris. At one point, after the alarm had been sounded and the police were in pursuit, an old lady took the young man by the arm and told him to escort her to the Metro. The police paid him no attention because he was escorting an old woman. Her kindness, and her courage, certainly saved him.

The complete story of Dutch-Paris has to be full of such spontaneous acts of kindness. Not all of them would have been so courageous. Just giving food to a fugitive would have made a big difference to people on the run. Looking the other way, making a gesture to indicate that police were ahead, giving a foreigner directions, all those things would have made a difference to fugitives and the resisters helping them. It’s impossible to even begin to count the random acts of kindness that supported Dutch-Paris. Only the most dramatic, like the lady taking the Engelandvaarder’s arm on the streets of Paris, made it into the archives. Others may have been remembered only in the family stories of the beneficiaries. Others may not even have been noticed by anyone but the person who did them. But there is no doubt whatsoever that random acts of kindness played an important role in the resistance to the Nazis.

Although the most common image of the Liberation of Europeans from Nazi Occupation 75 years ago is one of joyous celebration, we should not forget that tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians paid for that liberation with their lives. The Dutch certainly haven’t.

Within weeks of the liberation of my father and his neighbors in Maastricht, the US Army began burying its dead in a cemetery outside the village of Margraten. Known today as the Netherlands American Cemetery, it now houses the graves of 8,291 military dead and lists the names of 1,722 of the missing. Like all Allied war cemeteries in western Europe, Margraten’s beautiful park shelters seemingly endless rows of white crosses and stars of David (link to site).

What distinguishes Margraten from other war cemeteries is the way that the Dutch people have cared for it. Right in 1944, when the first bodies were buried there, before the war was even won, local people adopted the graves of American soldiers. Volunteers were given one or more graves to tend with only the most basic information about the deceased: name, rank, home state and, if possible, day of death. They knew almost nothing about the person buried there except that he, or in some cases she, had died in the fight to save them all from the Nazis. That was enough for these Dutch men and women to continue to bring flowers to the grave for the rest of their lives. When the original volunteer died, someone else in the family took over the obligation to tend the grave.

If you look at Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s continue with the story of my father’s liberation from the Nazis 75 years ago in Maastricht. He was 6 years old, so his memories are the impression of a child.

He remembers that American Army trucks and equipment rolled past his home day and night for days. The Dutch, who had been on short rations for years, were amazed at that wealth and at the organization of the American First Army. Why, the Americans even brought their own bridge to replace the centuries old St Servaas bridge that the Germans had blown when they retreated! Nonetheless, an American officer apologized to some local dignitaries that it took his engineers more than 12 hours to lay that Bailey Bridge across the River Maas. They were usually much quicker, he said, but they hadn’t slept in days.

The local Dutch found all this wealth and efficiency reassuring enough to definitively celebrate their Liberation with Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy-five years ago the fate of the Netherlands hung in the balance as the Allies and the Wehrmacht battled for control of the Dutch bridges over the Rhine in Operation Market Garden. The Allies lost that battle, leading to the catastrophic Hunger Winter, or man-made famine, in the northern two-thirds of the country.

By that time, however, the southern portion of the country had already been liberated and was put under the control of a Dutch Military Government under Prince Bernhard (married to Princess Juliana, heir to the Dutch throne). The city of Maastricht, through which many of the aviators who were helped by Dutch-Paris had traveled on their way to Spain, had already been liberated by American troops on September 14.

In the days leading up to the 14th, there were plenty of signs to give the people of Maastricht reason to hope that their liberation was near. Brussels, which wasn’t all that far away, had been liberated on the 3rd. They could hear artillery firing, although that only meant that battle was heading their way. More tellingly, the Germans were burning their files and documents. There was no reason to do that unless they were planning to leave. Furthermore, and somewhat shockingly, there were German soldiers moving through town who looked worn and ragged. The people of Maastricht were used to seeing the occupation forces strutting around with highly polished boots and sharp creases. These soldiers looked like they might be losing.

My father, who was six years old, had his own sign. His older brother who had been underground with the resistance for some time had come back home. His mother made him leave his gun at the back door when he came in the house, but the point was that he was back home.

On the morning of the 14th the people in his neighborhood were anxious that the sound of artillery fire might be bringing the fight onto their doorsteps, but hopeful that they would soon see the last of the occupation forces. Children were told to stay inside. Most people stayed inside. Then a tank rolled down the street and stopped in the intersection.

The people of the neighborhood did not recognize the tank, but that did not mean it was an Allied tank. It could have been a new model German tank. But when a soldier popped out of the top and lit a cigarette, they knew it could not possibly be a German. They were liberated!

Brussels was a dangerous place for civilians 75 years ago, during the summer of 1944, especially for men of military age.  The German occupation authorities had absolutely no tolerance for anything that could interfere with their military operations and heightened their surveillance of the civilian population.   They also rounded men up off the street to ship off to the Third Reich as forced labor.   If Dutch-Paris needed to deliver money or ration coupons to any of the 400 people they were hiding in and around the city or to visit them for any reason during those last months of the war, it was a woman who ventured into the streets to do it.

Dutch-Paris was able to avoid further arrests during that summer, at times very narrowly, but they did already have people in prison.   There was an elderly woman and a young man who were arrested in November 1943 during a raid on another resistance network.   They had been tried and sentenced to deportation but had not been deported along with their co-defendants.  The only explanation for that is bribery, but there’s no proof of it.   The two of them, however, were included in the last trainload of political prisoners slated to leave Brussels for the Third Reich, known as the “phantom train.”   Belgian resisters managed to misplace the train long enough that it never left Belgium and the political prisoners were liberated with the rest of their compatriots.

Other members of Dutch-Paris had been arrested at the safe house on rue Franklin on February 28, 1944.  Their landlady was deported and killed at Ravensbruck, but they did not leave the prison of St Gilles until being transferred to a prison camp at Beverloo when the Allies were already on the horizon.   The guards there did execute some prisoners, but none of the Dutch-Paris resisters.   Instead, they were liberated on September 4, 1944, the day after Brussels was liberated.

Unlike their Dutch-Paris counterparts in France, the men and women of Dutch-Paris in Brussels could celebrate their liberation without the shadow of anxiety for resistance colleagues who had been deported to the concentration camps at the last minute.

Seventy-five years ago, on August 25, 1944, the German garrison of Paris surrendered after five days of street fighting. There were parties in the streets, a huge parade, a Te Deum at Notre Dame cathedral. The German occupation authorities had not followed Hitler’s order to destroy the city, but they had not been as merciful to their prisoners.

During the month of August 1944, while the Allies were battling towards Paris from their landing sites in Normandy and Provence, the Germans were deporting as many political prisoners as possible from prisons across France. This included a number of men and women who belonged to Dutch-Paris. Some of those arrested in the major raids on Dutch-Paris addresses at the end of February 1944 were deported to concentration camps within a few weeks of their arrests. Apparently the Germans did not think that these prisoners were particularly Read the rest of this entry »

August 15th marks the 75th anniversary of the Allied Landings in southern France on the beaches of Provence, known as Operation Dragoon. These are not as well remembered as the Allied Landings in Normandy a couple months earlier. But the people who lived there and the German troops and their collaborators who were still in control of southern France certainly noticed the event.

The maquis (military Resistance) sprang into action and the Pyrenees were mostly liberated in the next seven days. Dutch-Paris was still operating in the area, working to get men into Spain. A few of those fugitives chose to stay in France, joined the Secret Army and helped liberate the Pyrenees.

In Toulouse, a mob of citizens stormed the prison of St Michel on August 19 and released all the political prisoners being held there. This was good news for a Dutch-Paris courier who lived in Toulouse and had been arrested there because of her connection with Dutch-Paris on June 22. The Gestapo had interrogated her about Dutch-Paris seven times and had stripped her apartment of most valuables, but she had not yet been deported. Toulouse was liberated the next day, August 20.

Over in the French Alps, Annecy was liberated on the same day as the political prisoners in Toulouse, August 19. The entire region along the Swiss border convulsed with fighting between resisters and the Germans and their collaborators that often took the form of atrocities perpetrated on civilians in an attempt to discourage the maquis. Once the American Army showed up, however, the Germans began to retreat. Lyon was liberated on August 24.  For many civilians in the region, however, the joy of liberation was bittersweet.  It was only after the Germans retreated that they could begin to count their losses.

I’ve finally figured out why the map on the first version of the cover for The Escape Line was wrong. I couldn’t understand why the designer had included towns that were not part of Dutch-Paris’s routes. But I had made the mistake of assuming that the designer had based the cover on the photos and maps in the book or even read the book.

Then I saw the small promotional piece that a local librarian posted for a talk I gave in January. There was that same incorrect map. And this time I recognized it because the map was part of a commemorative stamp cover released in the 1980s. I’d seen it before in the Weidner archives and read quite a bit of correspondence about it. The commemorative stamps were part of a gambit of men who had not been part of Dutch-Paris to claim that they were actually the leaders of Dutch-Paris. A scandal ensued in the world of Dutch resisters, leading to the disgrace of the pretenders.

Where on earth, I wondered, Read the rest of this entry »

Today, July 14, is Bastille Day, the French national holiday celebrating freedom and democracy. It shouldn’t be any surprise that during WWII the Vichy regime banned the celebration of Bastille Day. This created a bit of a conundrum in 1944. In those parts of France that were definitively liberated by July 14, people celebrated publicly and with a lot of verve. In those places where the Germans were still in control, such as Paris, celebrations had to be a lot more circumspect. But what about those parts of the country that had never had much of a German presence or could consider themselves under Resistance control?

Two Dutch-Paris couriers found out just how confused the situation could be. Both men in their early 30s, they had left Switzerland a week earlier to try to find out what was happening with their Dutch-Paris colleagues in Paris and Brussels. They made it to Paris, although they couldn’t find most of the people they were looking for. They gave up trying to Read the rest of this entry »