How to Flee the Gestapo

Escaping to Spain meant trekking over the Pyrenees for at least two days, often at night, often in the snow and always with border guards on your heels. Not surprisingly, Dutch-Paris relied on local men who ran their own escape lines over the mountains to take Dutchmen and aviators the final miles into Spain.

One of these guides, or passeurs, was an escaped French POW known as Charbonnier. He belonged to the local Secret Army and had, in fact, been given the job of regulating clandestine passages over the mountains in that region. He and his network helped very large groups of evaders including both Allied aviators and civilians. Unlike other passeurs, Charbonnier provided an armed escort for his convoys to Spain, at least in certain sections at certain times.

The Germans finally caught him a few days after the Normandy Landings. On June 13, 1944, Charbonnier did not show up at the high mountain huts where a number of fugitives, including Allied aviators and Dutch resisters travelling with Dutch-Paris, were expecting him. He and two of his colleagues were driving up to the huts when the Germans ambushed them on a stone bridge over a narrow but powerful mountain stream. Reports differ about whether they were killed by machine gun or flame thrower, but they most definitely did not survive.

Charbonnier’s network was well enough organized and firmly enough rooted in the local populace that his death caused only a slight delay in the evasion of the fugitives waiting in the huts. They set out two days later and arrived in Spain on 18 June 1944. One of them was a Dutch RAF pilot who had tunneled out of the POW camp at Sagan on 24 March 1944 as part of the “Great Escape” and was only now completing his escape from occupied territory.

Here’s another example of why historians use footnotes. A few of the people Dutch-Paris helped get into Switzerland were family members of prominent French resisters. They were in danger under the German and Vichy policy of family responsibility, meaning that family members could be held as hostages or punished because of a resister’s actions. Two such fugitives were the 9 and 11 year-old children of the leader of a very large French intelligence network. Dutch-Paris gave them the code name “les enfants de Marie,” or “Marie’s children.”

A fellow historian recently pointed out that in her memoir about her resistance network published in 1968, Marie said that Dutch-Paris gave the children to peasants. These peasants pointed the two children in the direction of the barbed wire fence several miles away on the Swiss border and told them Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, on 20 May 1944, Jean Weidner and three other members of Dutch-Paris were arrested outside of a restaurant in Toulouse by French paramilitary collaborators in the Milice. Ironically, it was a case of mistaken identity. Weidner had a price on his head, but they thought they were arresting a French Communist who they wanted in connection to the deaths of several Miliciens.

One of the Dutch-Paris men, the one who lived in Toulouse, fumbled his documents and ran away down the street. The other three were taken to the Milice prison, which was not very far at all from the café that Dutch-Paris used as a headquarters in the city. Two nights later one of them jumped out of Read the rest of this entry »

Today, May 5, is the 74th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands. The Dutch have a big party to celebrate every five years. But every single year they commemorate the war and occupation on May 4 with solemn memorials across the country attended by huge crowds. It’s not that the Dutch weren’t happy or grateful to be liberated. In fact, Dutch families still tend the graves of Allied soldiers who died in the battles to liberate the Netherlands. It’s just that the catastrophe of five years of occupation outweighs the joy of ending that occupation.

The Dutch had a hard war, but none of the military destruction, forced removals, or deportations was as traumatic for the population as whole as the last winter of the war.  After the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944, they pushed on to liberate Paris at the end of August 1944 and Brussels in early September 1944. The Allies continued north into the Netherlands but stopped at the natural barrier of the major rivers that divide the southern third of the country from the northern two-thirds. After the debacle of the failure of Operation Market Garden Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another worry that Weidner and his lieutenants faced as they tried to figure out the extent of the German roll-up of Dutch-Paris in late February 1944. Would the Germans carry out their published threat of punishing the extended families of resisters who helped Allied aviators? After all, they arrested the 14 year-old son of one resister, and the boy later reported that interrogators repeatedly demanded to know where his mother and younger sisters were hiding. They also arrested Weidner’s sister as a hostage.

Weidner tracked down the hiding place of the mother and girls to offer to take them to Switzerland. The mother declined because she Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing our discussion of the fall-out of the wave of arrests in Dutch-Paris in late February 1944, we come to the question of what the survivors should do. The sensible thing would have been to call it a day and scatter into false identities and new hiding places far from Paris, Brussels or Lyon. But they couldn’t do that because too many people were depending on them. There were Jews in hiding places and Allied aviators in safe houses waiting to move onward to Spain. Weidner and his colleagues would not abandon these people, so they kept Dutch-Paris going.

But Jean Weidner did not have to lose another sister to the Germans. One sister, Gabrielle, was sitting in prison as a hostage meant to lure Weidner into giving himself up. But Weidner’s other sister, Annette, was at large in Paris. The Germans Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy-five years ago Jean Weidner and his lieutenants were still trying to figure out just what happened in Paris, Brussels and Lyon at the end of February 1944. With the bird’s eye view of hindsight, we know that German police coordinated raids on several Dutch-Paris addresses on the same morning in Paris and then in Brussels and Lyon two days later. But at the time the resisters had no way of knowing that. They knew that a handful of their colleagues had been arrested and that others were missing. But what had happened to them? Had they been captured? Had they gone even further underground to avoid arrest and just not re-established contact yet?

The question had wider consequences than the fate of one particular individual. If the missing person had gone deeply underground, then he or she was safe, which was a relief. If he or she had been arrested, though, Read the rest of this entry »

Luck played a role in the escape or capture of every Allied aviator, but it wasn’t possible to predict whether the luck would be good or bad. Take the story of an American gunner whose B-17 crashed in the Netherlands in November 1943. We’ll call him Ken. It was 13 days before his 22nd birthday and only his second bombing mission. Bad luck.

The entire crew was arrested at the scene of the crash, more bad luck, but they had a career military man with them who had studied the question of escape and evasion. That was good luck that combined with some impressive determination to allow our man Ken to jump out of a moving train and run away in the dark. He had the good luck to approach the farm house of a family that was not only sympathetic but who had connections to an escape line. The Dutch resisters took Ken and two of his crew mates to Belgium, where they passed them to Dutch-Paris.

Ken just happened to be in Paris when German counter-intelligence officers rolled up Dutch-Paris there. As good luck would have it, Read the rest of this entry »

German counter-espionage officers stationed in occupied Holland, Belgium and France were highly professional and effective.  They did not, for example, hare right off to raid every address that they tortured out of a Dutch-Paris courier in mid-February 1944.   They knew that the courier’s colleagues would be hiding and they could wait for those colleagues to get tired of hiding and get back to work rescuing Jews and helping aviators.   So they gathered more information and bided their time.   They interviewed concierges.   They kept buildings under surveillance.   They shadowed suspects.

Then they pounced.  Early on February 26, 1944, German and French police raided several addresses in and near Paris.   They took their captives to headquarters and started torturing them right away.  Within hours they made more arrests.   By the end of the day they’d captured most of the people in Paris who were involved with the Dutch-Paris aviator escape line.   They did not bother anyone who was doing other jobs for Dutch-Paris because these particular officers were really only Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, on 11 February 1944, several men and women who belonged to Dutch-Paris met for lunch in Paris at a Chinese restaurant that was probably on the rue Monsieur le Prince in the Latin Quarter near the Sorbonne. It wasn’t a happy meeting. Paris wasn’t a happy place in early 1944. Food was short but Germans and their spies were plentiful.
The men and women at the table were engaged in the dangerous and illegal task of spiriting downed Allied aviators through the French capital and on to Toulouse. Some of them had only met each other recently in the context of Dutch-Paris. That meant that they did not know each other’s true names, or each other’s families or even, really, anything about each other. They had no way of knowing for certain that no one at the table was in the pay of the Germans, but they did know for certain that other Dutch resisters in France had been arrested because of traitors who pretended to be resisters.

The purpose of the meeting was to organize a convoy of aviators set to leave Paris that very evening on the night train to Toulouse. They needed to settle who would bring which aviators to the train station and who would escort them south. One man there also decided that they needed to settle the group’s accounts right then and there. He collected receipts for train tickets and the like in the restaurant in full view of Read the rest of this entry »