How to Flee the Gestapo

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 »

Blog – 75 years col du portet d’aspet

Seventy-five years ago next week, on February 5, 1944, 30 men – 10 downed American aviators, three British aviators, an Australian, one Belgium civilians and 11 Dutch Engelandvaarders rendezvoused in a meadow outside of a hamlet high in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Their two French guides led them through a tiny village and into the mountains. There was already three feet of snow. Within hours a blizzard struck with heavy snow and vicious winds.

None of the men had adequate boots or winter gear and most of them had been traveling for the past several days and nights. It was dark but they couldn’t use any lights because they might attract the notice of the German patrols in the area. All the men were struggling. One of the aviators broke down but two of his colleagues carried him. The Dutchmen helped each other. They took shelter in a hut but were too cold and wet to sleep. The next morning dawned clear and beautiful. The guides decided that if the men weren’t sleeping they might as well move on. They had eight miles up and down mountainsides to go before they reached Spain.

The Germans, however, had already Read the rest of this entry »

I’m happy to report that The Escape Line has been recorded as an audiobook and is now available to borrow or purchase.   So you can listen to the story of Dutch-Paris on your commute or long drive, although you’d miss out on the photos and maps in the book.

Or you could join a walking memorial and listen to the book while hiking through the Pyrenees in the footsteps of the aviators and Engelandvaarders who Dutch-Paris took to Spain.   The British Charity The Escape Lines Memorial Society (ELMS) offers 16 different treks along the routes of WWII escape lines in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Denmark, Crete, Poland, Slovenia and Italy.   Some of them are considerably more challenging than others in terms of terrain, but all of them honor the courage and dedication of the men and women who helped aviators and others to escape from the Nazis.  The “Chemin de la Liberté” in the Pyrenees is the closest to the Dutch-Paris routes.

The walking memorials are part of ELMS’s mission to help and honor the helpers.  Now that many helpers no longer need practical assistance with medical fees and the like, ELMS is shifting its focus to education and to building friendships across international borders.  For example, they bring young students who are related to escape line families to their annual reunion in York so that the young people can practice their English, make friends and visit museums.  ELMS also runs an Escape Lines Museum at Eden Camp  WW2 Museum at Malton, North Yorkshire.   They have a very informative newsletter that goes out to members in 26 countries.   And, of course, a website with all the details at www.ww2escapeslines.co.uk.

Of course ELMS can’t completely replicate the experience of aviators and other fugitives.  They run their walking memorials during the summer months, when it’s less likely to blizzard in the Pyrenees, and they walk in the daytime rather than at night because the Gestapo has abandoned the Pyrenees (thank heavens).  But this is as close as you’ll get.  If you’re interested, now’s the time to let the people at ELMS know (www.ww2escapelines.co.uk)

Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, on December 31, 1943, Gestapo agents and other German police officials raided a somewhat seedy inn on the outskirts of Toulouse called the Panier Fleuri. They arrested two Dutchmen, one Belgian and one Irishman with connections to Dutch-Paris.  They also arrested the landlord, but released him shortly.  In fact, the Germans probably arrested everyone they found there, but the documents do not record who they were.

Dutch Engelandvaarders had been using the Panier Fleuri since the acting Dutch consul in Toulouse made an arrangement with the owners in August 1943. It was enough of an open secret that tram drivers who stopped at both the train station and the inn told Dutchmen not to worry when they got on, they’d tell them when to get off. Indeed, too many fugitives were hanging around at the Panier Fleuri. When a Dutch-Paris courier arrived in town in November 1943, she wrote to Weidner to tell him that they had to Read the rest of this entry »

Two posts ago, on November 18, I wrote about the arrest of a young Dutchman named Paul.  Although he was in charge of daily operations for the Comite and knew the names of other resisters and the hiding places of many Jews, the Germans thought he was caught by accident and of little account.

His colleagues in the Comité knew better, of course.  They decided that, at least from the standpoint of security, Paul had been doing too much.  So they split his job in two in hopes of making it harder for the Germans to roll up the Comité.   From then on, the work was divided into “sociaalwerk” (social work) of hiding fugitives and “transportwerk” (transport work) of escorting fugitives out of Brussels on their way to Spain or Switzerland.    In theory, at least, no one who helped with the sociaalwerk should have known any addresses or details about the transportwerk.    They also set about devising a new code system for keeping track of fugitives hiding in and around Brussels.

This was easier said than done because the Comité, like most resistance groups, was chronically short of personnel.  A few individuals worked in both areas, but most did not.  For the division to work, the sociaalwerk and the Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy-five years and a couple of weeks ago, in November 1943, Jean Weidner travelled to occupied Paris to find resisters who would be willing to join the new escape line that we know as Dutch-Paris. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could advertise in the newspapers, and Weidner hadn’t been in the city since the Wehrmacht marched in in June 1940. But he had heard about a minor diplomat at the Dutch embassy who had been involved in resistance pretty much since the first day the Germans had shown up. We’ll call him Felix.

Felix hasn’t survived underground as long as he had without being careful. He agreed to meet Weidner for the first time on a crowded street that had plenty of exits if Weidner’s sister made the introduction. And he didn’t trust Weidner’s claim that he had the Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy-five years ago today, on November 18, 1943, the young man in charge of daily operations for the Comité in Brussels was arrested. This was not the first time that this particular young Dutchman, we’ll call him Paul, had been arrested. He and his entire family had been captured as they fled from their home in the Netherlands towards Switzerland. Paul had jumped out of the train taking them all to Auschwitz. He’d made his way to the home of a friend of his father’s in Brussels. They introduced him to the Comité.

Paul was in charge of the Comité’s daily operations of making sure that fugitives had hiding places and got regular deliveries of money and false documents. He also had to figure out how to get some of the people they were helping to Switzerland or Spain. The Comité had already agreed to join in Jean Weidner’s new escape line at that point, but the new route wasn’t quite functioning yet. So Paul went to the apartment of an elderly widow to meet with the members of a separate escape line who had a way to get aviators out of occupied Europe.

Unfortunately, Paul wasn’t the only one who knew about this other escape line. The Germans Read the rest of this entry »

When Jean Weidner left Switzerland to link up with like-minded resisters in Brussels on October 13, 1943 (see the last post), he left Switzerland with the unofficial blessing of the Dutch embassy in Switzerland and the Swiss intelligence services.  The immediate and most important implication of this unofficial sanction was that Weidner had enough money to continue the rescue work of his colleagues in southern France and to expand it throughout France and Belgium.  Dutch-Paris was created and hundreds of people’s lives were saved.

On a far less dramatic level, the unofficial support meant that Weidner had to write reports about his bi-weekly trips through occupied France and Belgium on Dutch-Paris business.  He typed these in Switzerland using codes for names and places.  The report went to the very secure Dutch embassy, and Weidner kept a carbon copy for himself.   At the time, this undoubtedly seemed like a petty bureaucratic chore which might put a number of people in danger if it fell into enemy hands.  That is undoubtedly why Weidner never gets any more specific with addresses than the code name of a city and is pretty sparing with personal names.

Today, though, these reports are a unique treasure trove for the historian.   Resisters did not usually write down their movements.   Weidner certainly didn’t do anything of the kind before he started using government funds for their rescue work.   But having written them, he kept his carbon copies and a lot of other documents.   At the end of his long life he donated his papers to the John Henry Weidner Foundation for the Cultivation of the Altruistic Spirit, now called the Weidner Foundation for Altruism (weidnerfoundation.org).   The Weidner Foundation hired an archivist and put Weidner’s papers into archival order.  They allowed me to read them while I was researching The Escape Line, and a few years ago they donated them to the Hoover Library & Archives at Stanford University.

The Hoover Library & Archives have an amazing collection of documents relating to war and peace in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  They have documents about the Second World War and Resistance in Europe that you won’t find anywhere else.  I’m happy to announce that the Weidner Papers are now open for researchers.  You can consult the (partial) finding aid at  https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8kd2194/entire_text/ .   The Weidner Papers will not be digitized; this link is only for the catalog.  If you’re interested in a particular person, you can also consult the footnotes of The Escape Line to find the relevant catalog number.

Unfortunately, the Hoover Archives will be closed to the public from December 24, 2018 until early 2020 because of a massive construction project.   If there’s something you need to see in the Weidner Papers before 2020, you should contact them right away (hooverarchives@stanford.edu).  If you’re reading this during the construction project, look in the back of The Escape Line for a list of over two dozen other archives with documents relating to Dutch-Paris.

Just about 75 years ago, on October 13, 1943, Jean Weidner left Switzerland illegally but with the assistance of a Swiss officer, to create the Dutch-Paris escape line. Up until this point, he and his colleagues had been running an escape line between Lyon (France) and Geneva (Switzerland). Weidner himself had not been to northern France, let alone Belgium or the Netherlands, since the war started.

But in September 1943 Weidner had a meeting with the Dutch ambassador to Switzerland and the president of the World Council of Churches in Formation (another Dutchman). The ambassador and the pastor had a proposal for Weidner. The Dutch government in exile would fund Weidner’s rescue efforts in France and later in Belgium and give him and his colleagues complete autonomy to act as they thought best in occupied territory if they did two things. (1) They expanded their escape line north to the Netherlands and south to Spain in order to bring particular individuals from occupied Holland to Spain so those individuals could join the Dutch government in exile in London. (2) They established a courier route to shuttle microfilms between Amsterdam and Geneva as a way for the Dutch resistance to communicate with Queen Wilhelmina and her exiled government. Weidner accepted the proposition on behalf of his small resistance network on the Swiss border.

On October 13, 1944, Weidner was heading toward Brussels where he already had connections with a group of resisters who are known as the Committee for the Support of Dutch War Victims in Belgium. They were hiding Jews in and around Brussels and looking for ways to get Jews to Switzerland and young Dutch volunteers to Spain. They were also running out of money. It didn’t take much convincing on Weidner’s part to get the Committee to join his expanding network. After all, they’d been doing the same kind of rescue work since 1942. And Weidner offered both money and a secure route to Switzerland and Spain. It did take a few weeks of parlaying with the ambassador about the money, though, because illegal negotiations like that had to be hand delivered by couriers who were risking their lives and traveling across several borders at a time of decidedly slow travel.

It was harder to link up with like-minded resisters in Paris, but that’s a story for next month.

A little more than 75 years ago, on 8 September 1943 Italy surrendered to the Allies. The next day, on 9 September 1943, German troops occupied the Alpine departments of France bordering Switzerland and Italy that had been the Italian occupation zone since early November 1942. This counted as a catastrophe for unknown thousands of people who had fled into the Italian zone as a refuge from both German and French persecution. While they were in charge, the Italian occupation authorities simply refused to turn anyone over to anyone else. Dutch-Paris had settled a number of Jewish refugees in French villages in Haute-Savoie and Savoie because they believed that the Italians would not harm them. They weren’t so foolish as to think that Italian border guards would not shoot at resisters, but that was a different matter.

In early September 1943, however, the Italians were no longer in a position to protect anyone from anyone else. They could not even Read the rest of this entry »