How to Flee the Gestapo

Almost 70 years ago today, Dutch-Paris lost a courier through one of the common accidents of the Second World War. He was not arrested for his substantial resistance activities, or even suspected of them. But he was a young man on the streets of Brussels in the summer of 1944, which was enough to put anyone in danger.

It was June 1944, a few weeks after the Normandy Landings. Our man, whom we’ll call Pierre, and another Dutch-Paris courier were looking for a way to get to Paris. They had been told that all train traffic had been stopped at one station and were walking to another station to inquire about a train to Paris. On the big plaza outside the station two German agents in plain clothes stopped the young men and demanded to see their identification papers. The other courier still had his legitimate ID from the University of Leuven. The Germans accepted it. Pierre, however, had false documents prepared for him in Switzerland. One of the numbers Read the rest of this entry »

During the Second World War the Dutch colony in Geneva grew substantially with the influx of refugees who arrived from the Netherlands through various routes, including Dutch-Paris. After the Swiss authorities allowed them into the country, the Dutch embassy in Bern took responsibility for them. It organized refugee camps in hotels for families, for example, and made regular loans so that Dutch citizens would meet the Swiss requirements for financial independence. Although this has been a subject of controversy in recent years, during the war the embassy received a number of complaints that Dutch refugees had better accommodations and more spending money than refugees from other nations.

Dutch refugees in and around Geneva had a lot of time on their hands because the Swiss did not allow refugees to hold any job that might be taken away from a Swiss citizen. This didn’t stop a number of them from finding jobs under the table, Read the rest of this entry »

Dutch-Paris is known as an escape line, but as a matter of fact they helped many more people to hide from the Nazis than to escape from Nazi held territory. Neither task was easy, but you could make a good argument that hiding someone indefinitely was more difficult than smuggling that same person into Switzerland or Spain.

Hiding people Anne Frank style in a confined space for an indefinite period was certainly possible, but it was dangerous for everyone. And it was also almost unbearable for the people trapped in the attic or basement or false room. It was better to find a place where a fugitive could blend in and live a somewhat normal life. In the case of children, that meant hiding in a boarding school among other children. In the case of young women, Dutch-Paris resisters in Brussels tried to find jobs as domestic servants. Such a job would give the woman room and board, gainful employment and the possibility of moving about the neighborhood without attracting undue notice. Young men were harder to hide because Read the rest of this entry »

During the Second World War, as always, there were people who were looking out only for themselves. They didn’t have any particular political ideals, but they intended to be where the money and the winners were.

During most of the Occupation, that meant being where the Germans were. This didn’t require anything extreme like joining a Collaborationist political party, although it could. It could simply mean doing business with the Germans. I am not talking about the honest businessmen who kept their family factories running with German orders so they could protect their workers from being sent to work in factories in Germany. I mean the sort of business that brings in big profits and gets you invited to fancy parties with lots of food. I mean economic profiteering. It may well have meant being a middleman in the black market on behalf of the Germans. There was always the chance that the Germans would tire of you and ship you off to a concentration camp, but if you avoided that, there was lots of money to be made and good times to be had.

There was also the chance that Read the rest of this entry »

A word of caution to family historians and student researchers who are looking for resisters in the archives (see my posts of 23 December 2013, 18 February 2014 and 4 March 2014). Not all the documents in the archives are the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

In the first place, very few individuals involved in the Resistance knew the whole truth. People’s lives depended on everyone involved knowing as little as possible. You couldn’t give information under torture if you didn’t have it to begin with.

In the second place, every document was written for a purpose but that purpose was very rarely to solicit the whole unvarnished story. The reports written for the American intelligence unit MIS-X that looked for helpers after the Liberation, for example, deal only with the help given to Allied aviators. So you may find a thorough report on how a family helped one American who bailed out over France but it won’t say a thing about the dozens of Jews they also helped because the people asking the questions didn’t ask about Jews.

In the third place, not all resisters wanted to write the whole truth. Survivors Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most dangerous and most exposed jobs in the Resistance was that of courier. Because the German and collaborationist authorities were not as immediately suspicious of women as they were of men, the job of carrying incriminating documents or escorting incriminating fugitives was often given to young women. Just about anything could go wrong on a mission.

Here’s the story of one trip taken by a young Corsican woman living in Paris during the war. She gave up a good secretarial job to work for Dutch-Paris full time. On this particular day in early 1944, Marie-France as she called herself, took the light rail from the center of Paris to a farm owned by a Dutch farmer about 30km southwest of the city. She took the 1:30 train back to Paris with eight Allied aviators. The air raid claxon rang when they got to the Gare Montparnasse, so they had to wait to take the metro. As soon as the all clear sounded, she led her group through the underground tunnels of the metro to the platform they needed.

Standing on the metro platform, she counted her flock. There were only seven aviators. Perhaps she had Read the rest of this entry »

In honor of the 70th anniversary of the “Great Escape” on March 24, I’ll tell you Dutch-Paris’s part of the story. If you’ve seen the old movie, you know that the “Great Escape” happened when several dozen Allied POW’s tunneled out of a maximum security fortress in Sagan. Only three of those men made it to freedom.

One of the three was a Dutchman named Bram van der Stok who had been shot down on an RAF mission in April 1942. After he got through the tunnel, he made straight for home in the Netherlands. Not long after, he headed south towards Spain and eventually England.

Like so many evading aviators, van der Stok crossed into Belgium by Maastricht and came into the care of Dutch-Paris in Brussels. The line had been devastated by arrests in late February and early March, but was still functioning in a much reduced capacity. One of the leaders, whom we’ll call Moen, escorted van der Stok to Paris on his own personal winding route that involved various trams and climbing along the outside of a pedestrian fence between Belgium and France. In Paris, Moen passed the aviator to an unidentified woman. She took him to Toulouse on the night train and passed him back to Moen.

Van der Stok spent about a couple of weeks in Moen’s personal safe house in Toulouse while Moen arranged passage for him over the Pyrenees. He travelled with two other Dutchmen, a priest who played an important role in the Dutch social Resistance and a Dutch secret agent from the Bureau Inlichtingdienst. The priest and the secret agent had made their own way to Switzerland, where they came into the care of Dutch-Paris.

Moen paid for these three to cross into Spain with a very reliable French line that was nonetheless having difficulties of its own. The Dutchmen took a train to a small town south of Toulouse to stay in a hotel that was mostly full of Germans. The next day French partisans armed with sten guns drove them into the foothills. They settled into a rat infested farm house with a number of other evaders including several Jews, a Russian officer and more airmen. A couple days later the convoy started out on their trek across the Pyrenees, guarded by more armed partisans. Unlike so many other evaders, they enjoyed beautiful weather in the mountains and made the trip without incident in only three days.

Van der Stok arrived in Spain on June 19, 1944, almost three months after the “Great Escape” and just over two years after being shot down.  Once in Spain, the British authorities claimed van der Stok and whisked him off to England, or in what counted for whisking during the war, which meant a few days.

Sierk Plantinga, a retired archivist from the Dutch Nationaal Archief, has sent me a welcome correction to my last two posts (18 February and 4 March, 2014) about finding refugees in the archives. No one knows more about the archives about Dutch people in France during WWII than he does.

Sierk tells me, and I believe him, that as long as the family in question made contact with the Dutch authorities in southern France, Switzerland or Portugal or with the Swiss authorities, you have a good chance of finding them in the archives. There might not be much information, but the names should at least appear on a list with a relevant date.

To look for such Dutch refugees, start at the Nationaal Archief in The Hague (www.gahetna.nl). Look in five places.

(1) The archives of the Dutch consulates (later called the Offices néerlandaises, later called the Bureau d’administration des Néerlandais) in Vichy France. The inventories are all on the website (Vichy inventory 2.05.101; Toulouse inventory 2.05.100; Montauban inventory 2.02.97 and Nice, for which most documents have been destroyed). You will find the correspondence between the consulates and the Dutch refugees in southern France who asked for help. For instance, there is a list of all Dutch citizens who applied for a new Dutch passport at the Office Neerlandais in Vichy in 1942, something they needed to apply for visas to get out of Europe.

(2) The files of the Dutch Office for Refugees in Lisbon run by Baron van Harinxma (inventory 2.05.161). This will include documents about Dutch refugees in Spain and Portugal.

(3) The postwar Bureau Invordering (inventory 2.04.77). This office administered the repayment of loans that made by the government-in-exile to Dutch refugees while they were in Switzerland. These files contain the records of the refugee administration of the Dutch Legation in Bern with such interesting items as lists of how much refugees spent on what: socks, raincoats, trips to the dentist etc etc.

(4) The files of the wartime Dutch military attaché in Bern, who was Read the rest of this entry »

In the last post we talked about the probability of finding documents about a family’s legal journey out of Occupied Europe in government archives. The chances are slim to none. But in the other and far more likely scenario that the family in question travelled from The Netherlands to Portugal illegally, the chances of finding traces of that journey in the archives are even slimmer.

If the family made the journey on their own, finding and paying passeurs as they traveled southward, there is no reason to think there would ever have been any documents about their border crossings. The kind of passeur whom you found in a café in a border town did not keep written accounts. If, however, the family found the help of a Resistance group, there may be some sort of documents.

The problem for the reader who wrote to me, however, is that he knows his family’s name but not the names of anyone who helped them. If the family used a false name, which would have only been prudent, the people who helped them would never have known the family’s name and therefore never written it down. If, however, the family had shared their real name with their helpers, then there may be documents somewhere.

They would likely be in one of the archives dedicated to the war. But such archives, like all archives, have to operate within the limits of the papers that they preserve. Archives dedicated to the Holocaust organize Read the rest of this entry »

A reader wrote to me about his attempts to reconstruct his family’s flight from Occupied Europe. As I’ve mentioned before, that’s somewhat like looking for a needle that may or may not be in a haystack. Something the reader said made me think that it might be useful to return to the subject of archives, specifically what is, and is not, in archives.

The reader presumed that he should be able to find records of border crossings during the war. I, on the other hand, would be very surprised to find any such thing. I’ll tell you why in two scenarios, starting with the least likely.

Suppose that the family in question left Occupied Europe legally. That would have required a formidable number of exit and entrance visas, travel passes etc etc. At the time, in 1942, the journey would have generated a fair amount of paperwork in a fair number of bureaucratic offices across western Europe. The family would have taken this sheaf of documents and boarded a train. At every border, customs agents and border guards on both sides would have inspected the documents, possibly made telephone calls to their superiors to verify the documents, stamped them, and waved the bearers onward. None of those officials would have made a record of the family’s passing unless they arrested the family. Remember that this happened long before computers when every record had to be written or typed by hand. No one had the time to write down the particulars of entire trainloads of passengers.

If they did arrest the family, Read the rest of this entry »