How to Flee the Gestapo

A history book about an event in living memory is never finished. Sure, the historian can spend years reading thousands of documents in over 30 archives, but there will still be details that aren’t in the documents. This is especially true in the case of Dutch-Paris because it was a clandestine network spread over half a continent and some of the people involved died before they could file a report on their activities. The book itself will bring new details to light, although they may turn out to be not entirely accurate.

Here’s an example. A couple of weeks ago I received a message from an Engelandvaarder friend in Tasmania who journeyed from Paris to Spain via Dutch-Paris when he was a young man in 1944. Rudy regretted to inform me that I had made an error on a particular page of The Escape Line regarding the escape of the Dutch statesman GJ van Heuven Goedhart. Rudy wanted to know where I had gotten my information because he has a very clear memory of talking to Van Heuven Goedhart’s three Engelandvaarder companions at a hotel in Llerida, Spain, on a date that I claim the man was still in France.

I have the utmost respect for Rudy’s memory in these matters and have benefited tremendously from his unpublished memoirs and his help. But the information in the book comes from Van Heuven Goedhart’s own book, his sworn testimony before a Dutch parliamentary committee, and a whole lot of reports written about it at the time. The Dutch government in exile was very anxious about his safe escape from occupied Europe.

Rudy himself immediately understood what had happened. He Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy-five years ago this week, on 6 September 1943, German occupation authorities in Lyon arrested the Dutch consul there. They also arrested the French bureaucrat who was his official supervisor in the matter of administering foreign nationals in southern France. The Gestapo accused the Consul of helping Dutch refugees, particularly Jewish refugees, in illegal ways, such as providing false documentation claiming that they were Christians. The charges may or may not have been accurate in the details but they were certainly true enough. The consul was heavily involved in hiding fugitives from the Germans and had passed a number of Jews to Weidner to be taken to Switzerland.

The fact that the Gestapo had arrested a foreign Consul caused rather a stir in Lyon and the Spanish consul intervened on the two men’s behalf. The Spanish consul had a little more weight than others because he represented Franco’s regime. Spain was officially neutral, but Hitler had helped put Franco in power. Perhaps because of the public notice, the Dutch consul, who was actually a Frenchman who did not speak any Dutch, and the French bureaucrat nominally responsible for him, were not mistreated while in German custody. They were questioned but not Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a new feature on the blog called “Upcoming Events.” It’s on the top of the right hand column inside a WWII-era identity card issued by the city of Brussels (Ville de Bruxelles). You can see what’s coming up at a glance and get more details by clicking on “view all events” at the bottom of that box. If you’re in the neighborhood of any Dutch-Paris events, please stop by.  If there’s a place in your town that you think would like to host a talk about Dutch-Paris, please share your idea.

I’ll be giving a couple of lectures in September in the metro Detroit area. Both are free and open to the public. On September 5th I’ll give a presentation about Dutch-Paris’s aviator escape line at the Yankee Air Museum at the old Willow Run airport where so many bombers were built. It’s an interesting museum featuring the planes flown by the USAAF and the USAF and, of course, the Rosie the Riveters who built the planes flown by the aviators helped by Dutch-Paris. Here’s their website http://yankeeairmuseum.org/events/ And here’s the flyer for my talk.

A week later, on September 13, I’ll give a presentation about Dutch-Paris as a whole at the Royal Oak Public Library in Royal Oak, MI. Here’s the link  http://www.ropl.org There’s a lot of construction going on in downtown Royal Oak, so you’ll want to park in the Farmers’ Market lot just west of the library to avoid having to walk around it.

In October I’ll be in California, speaking at the Hoover Archives and Library on October 2.   The Hoover now houses Jean Weidner’s private papers, so this is a celebration of both The Escape Line and the Hoover’s surprisingly extensive and unique collection of documents on the Resistance during WWII.

On October 3 I’ll be giving a lecture at the San Francisco Jewish Community Library.  Here’s the link for that: http://www.jewishlearningworks.org   They have a parking garage around the corner.   This is also free and open to the public.

Seventy-five years ago yesterday, on 11 August 1943, Jean Weidner crossed the border from France to Switzerland and announced himself to a Swiss border guard. He filled out the usual form for people who crossed the border without going through an official crossing point and surrendered the cash in his pocket. Then he went off to the quarantine camp outside of Geneva like all the rest of the day’s refugees. None of this sounds at all out of the ordinary – except perhaps that he was carrying American dollars and British pounds sterling in occupied Europe – until you remember that Weidner went in and out of Switzerland on a regular basis on business or to visit his mother-in-law without ever alerting the Swiss authorities to his presence.

So why go through the official procedures this time? This time Weidner was there at the request of the Dutch embassy in Bern. The ambassador was keen to stay on the good side of the Swiss, who had, after all, allowed a number of Dutch refugees into their country. At this time Weidner was unofficially representing the Dutch government in exile in Vichy when it came to matters regarding the welfare and support of Dutch citizens in Vichy France. By unofficial, I mean unofficial in Switzerland and illegal and Read the rest of this entry »

Some weeks ago I joined other volunteers at the Yankee Air Museum in Belleville, Michigan, for their annual bomber buffing. That’s when we all get clean cloths and little pots of aluminum polish to shine up the museum’s B-17 bomber before it makes its annual rounds of air shows.

It was thrilling to stand on the wing of a B-17 and think about the missions that that plane and thousands like it flew during WWII to defeat the Third Reich. But it was also sobering to think about the young men of a B-17 or any bomber’s crew. By today’s standards, that plane is flimsy and small. Conditions were uncomfortable and dangerous, and a good many of the crews never returned because of malfunctions or enemy fire. A few men who bailed out of or crash landed in B-17s ended up in the hands of Dutch-Paris in early 1944. Dutch-Paris took them through safe houses in Brussels, Paris and Toulouse and then by foot over the Pyrenees to Spain. Once in Spain the British and American authorities got them back to their bases in England.

It was even more sobering to think of the men, women and children who were on the ground where those bombers dropped their bombs. No one who has sat through an air raid in an air raid shelter has ever forgotten the fear and disruption. Of course many didn’t survive to remember, including at least one Dutch-Paris resister who died when his concentration camp was bombed. It goes without saying that the prisoners were not the target, but bombing was not a precision science. That’s part of what made the Second World War such an overwhelming catastrophe.

Still, if not for the B-17 and other planes and their crews, would the Allies have won the war? Would we all be speaking German and saluting with our arms outstretched now?

I’ll be giving a talk about Dutch-Paris and its help to Allied aviators at the Yankee Air Museum on September 5, 2018. Here’s the flyer:

Going back to the earlier post about the differences between archival and oral history, there’s another danger in both sources that I didn’t mention before. Sometimes people lie.

In the case of the Second World War, there might have been honorable reasons for falsehoods. There were plenty of occasions during the war when respectable people lied in order to protect someone. In fact, resisters lied all the time. We now consider it to be part of their heroic defense of freedom, but at the time it was flat out lying to the authorities. There were even occasions when the authorities in the person of police or municipal officials falsified official documents in order to hide someone or help the resistance.

There’s another type of lying about the Second World War, however, that is harder to spot and more insidious: the creation of a personal legend about what one did during the war. It’s more likely to show up in memoirs or interviews after the events than in documents created at the time. But it depends on the liar. It was entirely possible to start such a legend during the war.

The most famous of such legends belong to notorious war criminals who managed to Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned before, I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for a documentary. It was a pleasure because I always enjoy discussing the dilemmas of civilians during the Second World War. The director asked some intriguing questions, one of which I’ll share with you today.

She asked me about the difference between archival and oral sources for writing history. Put simply, archival sources are written documents that are either in an archive or could be in one. That includes every sort of bureaucratic report and paper, diaries written during the course of events, court proceedings and newspapers, flyers etc published at the time. Oral history means interviews of participants or observers made after the fact. In theory you could collect such oral history a month after something happened, but in the case of the Second World War such interviews were not collected until decades after the events in question. So the key difference between archival and oral sources for the history of WWII has to do with the date in which they were created.

Every source has its shortcomings because no one Read the rest of this entry »

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for a documentary about a Dutch Jew who was in southern France from 1940 to September 1942.* Like Weidner, this man, whom we’ll call Sal, was involved with the efforts of the Dutch consulate in Lyon to help Dutch Jews in 1942. The director asked me a few questions that would be interesting to think about in the blog.

For example, she asked me if I thought that Sal would have been part of Dutch-Paris if he had stayed in France after September 1942. The answer is no. Resistance was a “by invitation only” club. Resisters didn’t advertise in the help wanted section. They invited people they trusted to join and risked their own lives and maybe those of their families every time they judged someone to be trustworthy enough. If that person was careless or talked too much or straight out sold them to the enemy they would all suffer.

In the case of Sal, Weidner let him know in 1942 that he had ways to get refugees into Switzerland but did not elaborate or invite him to join his escape line. Neither he nor his colleagues at the time trusted Sal because Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I’d say a little more about why it’s so appropriately symbolic that The Escape Line was officially released on May 5, the anniversary of the Liberation of the Netherlands. It would have been even more appropriate if the book had been released on May 4 because that’s the day that the Dutch commemorate their losses during the war. Dutch-Paris, of course, was part of the Dutch (and French and Belgian) resistance to the German occupation and so belongs in any victory celebration. But Dutch-Paris would not have existed if the Dutch (and Belgians and French) did not suffer the losses that are commemorated on May 4.

The list of victims of the war in the Netherlands is tragically long and varied. Dutch-Paris had a hand in trying to rescue people from almost every category. They began by helping Jews who were fleeing the deportations to Auschwitz. Then they helped young men who were trying to avoid forced labor in the Third Reich. And they helped many resisters, some of whom were being chased by the Gestapo. They did not help civilian casualties of battle or bombing in the Netherlands, but they did help downed Allied aviators and Allied soldiers who escaped from POW camps and were part of those battles.

So every inspirational story of the ordinary men and women in Dutch-Paris rescuing a Jew or a resister or an aviator comes out of a dark shadow of the terrible situation in the Netherlands. The Jews would not have needed help if they were not being hunted to death. The resisters would not have run afoul of the law if the occupation laws had not been so foul. The aviators would not be evading capture if the war had not been raging over the heads of civilians throughout Europe.

The only part of the catastrophe that the Dutch people suffered during the Second World War that Dutch-Paris does not reflect is the famine that the German occupation authorities imposed on the northern part of the country during the Hunger Winter of 1944/45.

Seventy five years ago this month, in May 1943, a Dutch Jew who we’ll call Nestor made a clandestine journey from Brussels to Switzerland. Nestor owned a factory in Brussels but spent most of his time helping other Jews escape the Nazis, particularly Jewish children who had been effectively orphaned when their parents were deported “to the east.”

Nestor worked with more than one resistance group, including the Comité of Dutch expats who were hiding Jews in Brussels and later joined Dutch-Paris. He was also the treasurer of the CDJ (Committee for the Defense of Jews), which was also hiding Jews in Brussels. Because they were running out of money in May 1943, his colleagues in the CDJ sent Nestor to Switzerland to ask for support from the international Jewish organizations there, such as the American Joint Distribution Committee.

The problem was, of course, that it wasn’t easy to get into Switzerland and, indeed, Nestor was caught and sent back over the border into France on his first attempt. He had, however, heard rumors about a Mr Meunier in Lyon who helped Dutchmen get to Switzerland. Mr Meunier happened to be John Weidner, whose second in command, who we’ll call Moen, was a Belgian Jew who had worked for the CDJ in Antwerp before fleeing to France. It’s probable that Moen and Nestor knew each other by reputation if not personally.

So Nestor went to Lyon and Weidner got him into Switzerland. This time the Swiss authorities did not realize he was there until after he had left again. Nestor was successful in getting pledges of financial support, but had no way of exchanging Swiss francs into Belgian francs or of transporting the cash to Belgium. He stopped by Lyon on his way back to talk the matter over with Weidner and Moen.

Moen volunteered to make the clandestine journey between the Swiss border and Brussels every two weeks in order to deliver cash to Belgium and bring back dangerous documents such as the lists of the true names and hiding places of Jewish children. He did it for the rest of the war.

When Weidner himself went to Brussels in October 1943 to expand his escape line into what became Dutch-Paris, the first person he talked to was Nestor. He didn’t have to look any further because the Comité of Dutch expats was eager to join forces to rescue the persecuted.