How to Flee the Gestapo

The son of an Engelandvaarder who crossed the Pyrenees with Dutch-Paris sent me a link to a documentary he participated in last year. Unfortunately the documentary, Chased and Saved, is not available online, but if it comes near you I highly recommend it. It’s part of an historical project sponsored by the provincial authority in Lleida, Spain, that remembers the refugees who crossed the mountains into Spain during WWII.

Dutch-Paris took only young men in good health, and possibly one or two women in excellent health and with a dire need, across the mountains into Spain. But Dutch-Paris was an unusually large and well organized network. They had the luxury of being able to take older people, women, and children to safety along the physically less demanding route to Switzerland and, when necessary, arranging for certain Engelandvaarders to traverse the Pyrenees in a train (albeit at staggering cost).

This documentary reminds us that tens of thousands of fugitives crossed the Pyrenees into Spain during the Second World War. Many of them were young men wanting to join the Allies or Allied soldiers and aviators wanting to get back to their bases. But many of them were civilians, mostly Jews, who were not likely candidates for climbing mountains in the dark wearing city clothes. But they did it because their choice was that or capture by the Nazis. Some of them were small children, including a woman in the documentary who took the path it films when she was five years old.

The others in the documentary are the children or nieces and nephews of other wartime refugees who trekked into Spain. They stop along the way to talk about what the experience was like for their relatives and what it means to them as Jews today. My friend, the son of the Engelandvaarder, says something important in one of those conversations that’s worth pausing to consider.
The conversation comes around to the observation that remembering the WWII border crossers is important because the same sort of thing is happening today. Someone comments that these things are cyclical. Our Engelandvaarder’s son says that this is true, but no one is obliged to accept the weight of history.

No one is obliged to accept the weight of history. It sounds banal but is actually explosive. Certainly none of the resisters in Dutch-Paris accepted the weight of history as it showed up in their day as the Third Reich or the Etat Français or internment camps or deportation trains. If they and other resisters like them had accepted it, who knows how or when the war might have ended.

As I explained in the last post, Jean Weidner asked the Dutch ambassador in Switzerland for money to support needy Dutchmen in southern France on March 23, 1943. The ambassador was sympathetic but couldn’t give him any money at that time. A friend, however, had an idea. This friend was a Jewish refugee whom Weidner had visited in a French prison and then smuggled into Switzerland. He had just started a job packing care packages to be sent to POWs in Germany by the World Council of Churches in Formation (WCC).

The WCC was a Christian ecumenical organization based in Geneva and was run by a Dutchman, Pastor Willem Visser ‘t Hooft. The friend introduced him to Weidner and his wife the next morning. Like the ambassador, the pastor was sympathetic to the plight of the Dutch refugees and retirees in southern France. Unlike the ambassador, he did not need permission to act. That very day Visser ‘t Hooft gave Weidner a letter to one of his associates in Lyon authorizing that French pastor to give Weidner Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy-five years ago this week, on March 23, 1943, Jean Weidner went to visit the Dutch ambassador in Bern, Switzerland. By this time Weidner and a few colleagues had already been running an escape line between Lyon, France, and Geneva, Switzerland, for eight months. On this occasion, however, he wasn’t in Switzerland because of the escape line. On this trip he was traveling on behalf of a group of Dutch expatriate businessmen in Lyon.

Four months earlier, in November 1942, the Germans had occupied southern France, including the city of Lyon, while the Italians had occupied the French departments bordering the Italian and Swiss borders. This had caused a bit of a panic among refugees in southern France and those trying to help them. It had also caused the Dutch government-in-exile to stop sending money to Vichy to support Dutch citizens in southern France because they did not want it to fall into enemy hands. Some of the people who had been relying on the Dutch money were refugees but others were retirees who could not access their bank accounts in the Netherlands because of German occupation policies. Starting in November 1942 the retirees couldn’t Read the rest of this entry »

As well as taking civilians to Switzerland, carrying secret documents across occupied Europe and hiding people from the Nazis and their collaborators in Belgium and France, the men and women of Dutch-Paris took over 100 Allied aviators and soldiers to Spain. A few of them escaped from POW camps in the Third Reich or Mussolini’s Italy and made their way to Switzerland. The American or British military attaches there arranged for them to travel across France and into Spain via Dutch-Paris. Most of the aviators, however, came down in the Netherlands, Belgium or France and were passed to Dutch-Paris by other resisters.

I’m looking for family members of the Allied military men helped by Dutch-Paris, mostly so I can invite them to Dutch-Paris talks. But I would certainly like to have more photos of aviators, if the families are willing to share.

Here’s the verified list of Allied military men helped by Dutch-Paris. There are more, but these are the ones who are documented. If you find a father, grandfather or uncle on the list, please let me know at megan at dutchparis.com. Thank you.

Anderson, Robert F., USAAF
Arp, Elwood, USAAF
Bachman, Carl E., USAAF
Bailey, Harold, RAF
Boyce, Harold, USAAF
Breed, Mervyn, RNZAF
Brenden, Arden, USAAF
Brigman, Campell C Jr, USAAF
Brown, Cecil,
Brown, Philip H, RAF
Buckner, John R., USAAF
Cassady, Leonard, USAAF
Cohen, Simon, USAAF
Davenport, RCAF
David, Clayton C., USAAF
Downe, Charles O., USAAF
Dutka, John A, USAAF
Elkin, Norman, USAAF
Elllis, Robert O., RAF
Ferrari, Victor, USAAF
Flores, Leopold, USAAF
Gallo, Russel, USAAF
Grubb, Ernest, USAAF
Hargest, General
Harris, RAF
Hicks, Chauncey, USAAF
Horton, Jack O, USAAF
Hussong, James, USAAF
Koenig, William, USAAF
Kolc, Eric, USAAF
Kratz, Harry, USAAF
Krengle, Robert, USAAF
Lock, William B, USAAF
Mackie, NM, RAF
Mandell, Nicholas, USAAF
Martin, Loral, USAAF
McDonald, William H. USAAF
McGlinchy, Frank, USAAF
McLaughlin, John G, RAAF
Mellen, Clyde, USAAF
Miles, Brigadier General
Miller, Karl D, USAAF
Miller, William J, USAAF
Morley, Henry, RAF
Morgan, Herman, USAAF
Morphen, Jeffrey, RAF
Mullins, Charlie, USAAF
Newton, James USAAF
O’Welch, Paul, USAAF
Page, Fred, RAAF
Roberts, Omar, USAAF
Shaffer, Edward R., USAAF
Schuman, Donald C, USAAF
Settle, James, USAAF
Shaver, Kenneth, USAAF
Sherman, Howard, USAAF
Smith, Sydney, RAF
Snyder, Walter, USAAF
Steel, Henry, USAAF
Stern, Albert, USAAF
Stock, Ernest, USAAF
Van der Stok, Bram, RAF
Tank, Frank A. Jr, USAAF
Tracy, James E, USAAF
Trinder, Wallace, USAAF
Trnobransky, Jan, RAF
Vass, John, RAF
Wallinga, Jacob, USAAF
Wardle, Hank, RAF
Watlington, RAF
Watts, George, RAF

Here’s the story of Dutch-Paris’s encounter with the legendary partisan leader Colonel Romans-Petit. He and his 4,800 partisans in the French Forces of the Interior rose up to wreak havoc in the German rear when the Allies landed at Normandy. From June 6 to July 12, 1944, they controlled a 2,000 square kilometer region in the Jura Mountains in eastern France, which they called the République de Montagne (Republic of the Mountains).

It just so happened that one of Dutch-Paris’s couriers, whom we’ll call Vermeer, was in Brussels on D-Day. The railway system fell apart almost immediately because of sabotage by resisters and requisitions by Germans, but Vermeer managed to make his way as far south as Lyon. From there, however, he had no hope of catching a train to Switzerland, so he started to walk. When maquisards (partisans) in the FFI stopped him, Vermeer asked to see their commander. They said he could, but it wouldn’t be easy and he’d have to wait in a hotel. A fire fight between the FFI and German troops delayed his departure. Finally he was taken in a car to an undisclosed location. They changed cars several times because of bomb craters in the road and other wartime inconveniences. The partisans delivered him to the gendarmes in the town of Nantua. By this time the local gendarmes had all declared their loyalty to the FFI. They put him up in a hotel for the night.

Vermeer was struck by the atmosphere in the region. He noted that there were no Germans to be seen, that the BBC Radio from London could be heard in the streets (it was a crime to listen to the BBC in occupied France); that young men in trucks were heading to the front singing patriotic French songs, and that official bulletins with news from the battle hung everywhere.
The next morning, his hosts blindfolded Vermeer and took him to talk to their commander, known then as Romans. He managed to convince them that he was not a spy but a bona fide resister on important business. While at the HQ Vermeer met an American liaison officer, to whom he gave the names and serial numbers of a group of American aviators who had been shot down near Arras and whom Dutch-Paris had just taken to Spain.

Vermeer was given safe passage and an escort out of maquis-held territory. Back in German-held territory, Vermeer got a lift from a journalist. He spent the entire time spinning a story about how pro-German he was. It worked well enough to get him to the Swiss border.

It wasn’t until after the war that Vermeer realized he’d been questioned by the famous Col. Romans-Petit himself.  In 1979 he visited Col. and Mrs Romans-Petit, who took him high up into the mountains to show him the site of the FFI HQ where he had been taken blindfolded 35 years earlier.

Considering that the Second World War went on for six years and it was the duty of every British officer to attempt to escape capture, it’s not surprising that POWs spent quite a bit of time devising escapes. Officers, at least, didn’t have much else to do.

But it wasn’t easy to get out of a POW camp. A man had to get through locked doors, barbed wire and guards who were not easily amused. Some POW camps, like Colditz, had additional challenges in the form of stone walls and moats. It was possible for a man to bluff his way out in a basket of laundry or some such, but a planned escape involved a number of men. A tunnel, for instance, had to be dug without adequate tools. And they had to hide the dirt they took out of the tunnel and shore up the tunnel as they dug. The men working on the tunnel needed sentries to warn them when guards approached.

Once a POW got to the other side of the walls, he was in enemy territory. He needed Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the Allied servicemen whom Dutch-Paris smuggled out of occupied territory via the Pyrenees and Spain were aviators who had bailed out of their airplanes or crash landed them in the Netherlands, Belgium or France. That was certainly the case with the men who were arrested – or not- at the Porte de Pantin in Paris in December 1943.

But some were aviators or soldiers who escaped from POW camps in the Third Reich or Italy and made their own way to Switzerland. Once there, they came under the protection of their respective embassies. It just so happened that the Dutch military attaché in Bern had connections to Dutch-Paris and was on good terms with the British and American military attachés in Switzerland. The Dutch military attaché arranged for a number of escaped POWs to travel from Switzerland to Spain with Dutch-Paris. His American and British counterparts paid for the men’s expenses such as train tickets, black market food, false documents for the border zone in the Pyrenees and a guide, or passeur, over the Pyrenees.

One of these men, F/Lt Hank Wardle, was a Canadian book keeper who had volunteered with the RAF before the war began. He had the dubious honor of piloting the first British bomber to be shot down over Germany at night in April 1940. He escaped from a POW camp in August 1940 but was captured the next day when he Read the rest of this entry »

The only French resister to be arrested at the Porte de Pantin in December 1943 (see earlier posts) was the leader of the group from Livry-Gargan. We’ll call him the grocer.

His arrest caused a lot of worry to his colleagues and everyone who was helping aviators in town because they expected the Gestapo to torture the grocer. Everyone was expecting a raid on the town, but it never came.

It turned out that the grocer was at least as good an actor as a resister. During the 29 days that he was in German custody he managed to convince his captors that he was insane. He also played up Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s continue the story of the Gestapo trap for Allied aviators at the Porte de Pantin, Paris, in December 1943. Sixteen aviators were arrested that afternoon, but 15 got away. How? Some were lucky enough to be on a truck driven by a quick-witted resister who pulled away in time. The men in the first truck, however, had already gotten off before anyone realized it was a trap.

After the second truck left, the Gestapo agents pulled their guns on the French resistance leader from Livry-Gargan and started looking for aviators. The four Frenchwomen who were acting as guides kept walking in the crowds. One of them was stopped but convinced the Gestapo agents that she was on her way to the market. A British aviator, the engineer on a Lancaster bomber, also managed to walk away through the crowd because, according to an American, he looked like a young boy.

A Polish Spitfire pilot in the RAF and an American mill worker from Washington State also walked away. These two, another RAF officer, and a Frenchwoman thought it was too risky to be standing around in the square with such a large group of fugitives so they went into a café. While they were there, a man came in, acting very suspiciously Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy-four years ago, on December 16, 1943, 16 Allied aviators fell into a Gestapo trap at the Porte de Pantin in Paris. The men had bailed out of their fighter planes or crash landed their bombers across northern France. The engine of one British Typhoon had simply cut out, forcing the pilot to land in a tree. Local people had gathered these men up, sheltered them, and passed them on to whatever contact they could find in the resistance. Those local resisters had passed them on to a group in Livry-Gargan (outside Paris) that had connections to the famous Pat O’Leary escape line.

Unfortunately a traitor infiltrated the Pat O’Leary line, causing arrests that cut the group in Livry-Gargan off from the route to Spain. In December 1943, they found a new connection to Spain and arranged to pass the 31 aviators hiding in their town to a new escape line at the busy Porte de Pantin in Paris.

The aviators traveled from their hiding places to Paris in two trucks. The drivers were supposed to park if they saw a particular car parked in front of the Church of Sainte Claire with a Nazi flag in its window. They saw the car but no flag. The leader of the French resistance group, the town grocer, had a bad feeling that the whole scheme for the rendezvous sounded too easy. So he got out of his car and started walking toward three men standing near the church. Something about one of them made him think that he was a Gestapo agent. The grocer asked the men for directions as a ruse and Read the rest of this entry »