How to Flee the Gestapo

For those of you who don’t like to carry your driver’s license around on the odd chance that you’ll get in a car accident, consider this. If one of the various German police surrounded the street you were walking down in Occupied Europe and caught you without your identity documents, or didn’t trust those documents, you could be, if things had turned really nasty there, shot or hung on the street. If things retained their civilized veneer, you might have been thrown in prison, which may well have led to deportation to a concentration camp. But the unexpected did happen, and you might have walked away with a small fine. It depended on when and where you were, as did so many things.

One of Dutch-Paris’s top couriers, a young man we’ll call André, went back and forth from Switzerland to France and Belgium. In Switzerland a certain Dutchman renewed his false papers on a regular basis. For France he needed the following:

1 – a French identity card, which would have his (false) name, date of birth, place of birth, photo, signature and various official stamps
2 – a work certificate [certificate de travail], essentially to explain what important war work kept a man his age out of the military or forced labor
3 – demobilization papers, to explain why he wasn’t in a POW camp
4 – an authorization to cross the borders of the department of Haute-Savoie that would allow him to approach the Swiss border

On his last trip through France, André carried:

1 – a French identity card
2 – an identity card [ausweis] from the air civil defense authority [Sécrétariat general à la défense aérienne]
3 – orders from the civil defense authority, of which he had many blank copies that he filled out himself
4 – a train pass for the French railways

The Belgians, who had had a very bad experience under German occupation in the First World War, required fewer and simpler documents. That made it easier to forge them, of course, as everyone knew. So in Belgium our man carried:

1 – a Belgian identity card, with name, address, birth date etc in an easy to forge format
2 – a pass from the Belgian Chamber of Commerce stating that he needed to travel to France for his business.

For 14 months in 1943 and 1944 all of these documents continually stood up to German, French and Belgian inspection on trains, at train stations, at borders and during random street checks.  Until one day, inevitably, they didn’t.

At the end of June 1944, André was approaching the Gare de Luxembourg in Brussels to inquire about possible trains to France, when three men in civilian clothes stopped him.  They compared André’s Belgian identity card to a list of official Belgian ID numbers written down in a notebook.  The number on André’s card was too high.  They took him to the German labor office and then to the Gestapo.  He spun a pretty story [mooi verhaal] as the Dutch say, in which he managed to hide both that he was a resister and a Jew.  But it wasn’t pretty enough to earn his release.  The Gestapo threw him in prison and then deported him to Germany, although he went as a forced laborer rather than a political or racial prisoner, which improved his odds of survival.  It wasn’t an easy year until the Americans liberated him, but he did survive.

Sometimes it seems like the whole of Europe was on the move during the Second World War. Most belonged to the obvious categories: soldiers, refugees from military actions or bombing, forced laborers, Jews. Resisters were also on the move, of course. They were a small minority, but their stories are surprisingly diverse.

Take that of a certain Dutchman whom we’ll call Ton. Apparently he got into a spot of trouble with the Gestapo in Calais in 1942 because he’d been helping German deserters. (I wish I could tell you just how he’d been helping German deserters, but he didn’t consider that part of the story important enough to write down.)

Somehow or other he got out of the Gestapo’s hands, and he and his wife fled to southern France. Like so many fugitives, they ran out of money. As he was looking for jobs, the French police Read the rest of this entry »

In August 1945, the Dutch ambassador in Paris received a letter from a man in The Hague who was looking for his son. The 21 year-old had left the Netherlands on 2 March 1942 intending to leave Occupied Europe to fight the Japanese (he had been born in the Netherlands Indies). He wrote his parents a letter on 19 March 1942 from the prison in Besançon, France, saying that he had been caught near the Swiss border and sentenced to death.

But since then his parents hadn’t received any official notice of his death or his personal effects – a compass, a watch and a silver pen. But they had heard rumors that there had been an escape attempt by the five young Dutchmen condemned to die in Besançon and only one had been killed. They couldn’t stop hoping for a miracle.

The embassy launched an investigation. The vice-consul in Lyon had heard about the executions because in March 1942 he had gotten four young Dutchmen out of the prison in Macon. They had heard about the fate of their countrymen and were very afraid that they would also be shot. He gave the names of two of the four, who would be able to tell the parents what they knew.

The consul asked the French police, who confirmed that five Dutch subjects were executed by the Germans at the citadel in Besançon on 19 March 1942. They gave the names but were ignorant of the reasons for the execution.

The Dutch consul in Dijon tracked down the Dutch woman who had acted as interpreter for the German Feldkommandatur in Besançon. She had gotten permission to visit the political prisoners who weren’t receiving food packages because they weren’t allowed to communicate with their families. The five young men had admitted that they were planning to join the Allied armies when they were arrested trying to cross the Demarcation Line in France and had therefore been categorized as political prisoners.

The interpreter took them food and did their laundry for them. She had all but arranged for the five to be reclassified as prisoners of war when an extraordinary order came from the Militärbefehlshaber in Paris ordering that they be executed immediately. They were shot that same day at 6:00 pm. Their effects were given to the French Red Cross to forward to the next of kin.

Obviously, young men who tell the Germans that they’re breaking the law in order to join the Allied armies have a lot more pride than sense. And, obviously, if they had stooped to lying they would have had a much better chance of living to fight another day. The young men who had been rescued from the prison in Macon did lie about their intentions and they did join the Allies. One of them even flew on a bomber that bombed Germany.

A less obvious lesson comes from the interpreter. On the surface she was a collaborator because she worked for the Germans. And she must have done a good enough job for them or they wouldn’t have given her permission to visit imprisoned Dutchmen. But she was lying to them, because while she was working for the Germans she was hiding many of her countrymen in her own home and helping them to cross the Demarcation Line illegally and get to Switzerland. The consul in Dijon rather thought that she deserved official recognition for her patriotic service.

Her story reminds us not to judge by appearances and that the hand of compassion will use whatever talents and opportunities are available.

It’s hard to know what balance to strike between anecdotal history (as remembered by participants) and documented history (as written at the time) when writing about something as hidden as the Resistance. On the one hand, no one ever thought to write down certain details that can only be uncovered through talking to a participant. How else will you find out that one resister knew and trusted another because their mothers had gone to grammar school together? Or that the customs agents on the trams near the Belgian/Dutch border didn’t bother young men dressed like gentlemen because they were too busy inspecting the belongings of those who looked like farmers or workers?

On the other hand, the resisters themselves had a very limited knowledge of what was going on outside their own activities for the simple reason that Read the rest of this entry »

Very few resisters were professional spies or criminals, so they had to figure out how to forge papers, evade the police, and smuggle people and goods as they went along. Sometimes they did this by diving down into the underworld and finding a criminal to mentor them. Sometimes they found a professional spy to give them some tips. But mostly they had to figure it out on their own.

Here’s an example. Until November 1943, Dutch-Paris in Brussels was mostly concerned with hiding Dutch fugitives in Belgium or getting them to Switzerland. If an Allied airman ended up in their care, they passed him on to one of the Belgian evasion services. But at the end of November 1943, one of their men announced that his contacts in the Ardennes and Maastricht had a whole lot of aviators that they wanted to move south. And so Dutch-Paris added an aviator evasion line to its activities.

They rented a boarding house and set it up to lodge and supply both aviators and Engelandvaarders. They would move the men into Brussels and equip them for the journey with workmen’s clothing, false IDs and advice on how to behave. First they had to take away all the airmen’s possessions except their dog tags because they had a dangerous habit Read the rest of this entry »

During the war, the Occupation authorities rearranged the social and political units of western Europe into individual boxes then threw up barbed wire barricades and a wall of regulations and police authorities to keep people and information from going from one box to another. It wasn’t impossible to get out of, say, the Netherlands and into, say, Belgium. But it wasn’t easy and it was even harder to get news to or from your family in another of the boxes. The situation gave rise to resistance networks like Dutch-Paris. It also presented opportunities to criminals.

Take the case of a certain young Dutchman we’ll call V who made a wartime career for himself of preying on the goodwill and/or fears of other Dutch men and women in France.  He appears to have been collecting money from his countrymen and from the Gestapo, who paid a bounty for resisters.  Here’s just one of his exploits.

At the end of 1943, V and a friend were trying their luck on the Riviera by posing as Dutch workers who needed money to go to Spain to join the Allied armies. They gathered quite a number of “loans.” But while they were talking to a Dutch consul, his colleague called the Dutch consul in the next town, who warned him that V was working with the German police. They got him out of the office as soon as they could.

But V and his friend used their Gestapo travel passes to go to the Netherlands. There they went to visit the two men’s sisters, with special greetings Read the rest of this entry »

Although we tend to think of Resistance as intense flashes of danger like we see in the movies, it’s important to remember that the Occupation ground on for years. In between the exciting parts, the heroes and heroines still needed to get their shoes fixed and take care of their families.  They all had great courage when it came to opposing the Germans, but they didn’t necessarily live blameless lives in all other regards.

Take the story of a man we’ll call Louis, who was a passeur, or mountain guide, in the Pyrenees. Louis took dozens of Dutch, Belgian, French and Allied fugitives over the mountains into Spain for several different Resistance networks. He charged Dutch-Paris 3,000 francs per man, which was around the going rate.

In mid-December 1943, the French police arrested Louis at a restaurant in Toulouse. Rumor had it that the restaurateur betrayed him because Louis was having an affair with his wife. The police couldn’t find anything to charge him with other than possession of a false identity card in the name of Paul Blanchard. A police officer who worked for the Resistance “legalized” the false card, and Louis walked out of prison as Paul Blanchard.

A month later in late January 1944, the Gestapo arrested Louis in the same restaurant. Public opinion blamed the restaurateur for denouncing him. It couldn’t be proved, but everyone thought it was highly suspicious that the restaurant owners disappeared at the liberation, presumably for fear of being tried (or lynched) for denunciation.

Louis, however, escaped from the train deporting him to Germany, made his way back to the Pyrenees and, with the help of his 20 year-old nephew, recommenced passing fugitives over the Spanish border. The Germans, however, traced him to a mountain village and demolished, stone by stone, the house that he and his nephew had just left. They didn’t capture Louis, but they did kill his 22 year-old niece. His nephew decided that things were a little too dangerous in France, took himself, two Dutchmen, a Belgian and a British aviator to Spain, and joined de Gaulle’s Free French in North Africa. Apparently he felt he’d be safer in the army in wartime than with his uncle.

Incorrigibly, Louis continued guiding fugitives until July 1944, when French Milice (paramilitary collaborators) kidnapped him by pretending to be maquisards (partisans). His body was found soon after with a bullet in the head.

Meanwhile, Louis’ wife was arrested by the Germans in early January 1944 for harboring fugitives. At the time, it was assumed that she was arrested as a hostage for her husband. But by 1947 it was thought that she was arrested for her own resistance activities because the Germans knew the passeur as Paul Blanchard rather than by the name he shared with his wife.

She returned from Ravensbruck in 1945 to take up her job as a hair dresser and care for their 6 year old daughter. It must have been somewhat bitter news to her that while she was in the hands of the Gestapo, her husband was caught, not because he was leading resisters through the forbidden zone or taking their child to safety, but because he was philandering. It’s hard to say how she or his niece’s parents would have felt about his posthumous Medal of Freedom.

There was an evasion service (service d’évasion) that took convoys of 10 to 15 Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen and Allied aviators from Toulouse to Spain every week from November 1942 to December 1943. They smuggled 400 people over the Pyrenees to Spain without mishap until it all ended because of one jumpy Belgian.

On the 19th of December, 1943, a 55 year old woman whom we’ll call Mme Arnaud escorted a group of 11 on the train from Toulouse to the small mountain town of Loures-Barousse as she had done with dozens of other groups. This one consisted of a Yugoslavian, a British aviator, four Dutch persons who had been in Switzerland, and five young Belgians. She passed the group on to the station master and a 14 year old boy.

Very unusually, an agent at the station two stops down the line asked to see the tickets of a Dutch doctor and his wife who were part of the convoy. They showed him their false papers. Two of the young Belgians, however, turned on their flashlight, which drew the attention of some Germans, who demanded their papers. Instead of Read the rest of this entry »

Dutch-Paris helped all sorts of people to escape from the Germans during the war. Some of them were much more obvious candidates for evasion than others. The trained military personnel who had bailed out of Allied aircraft had, one presumes, the field skills, discipline and health for the task. The young Dutch Engelandvaarders also had youth on their side, along with an innate understanding of the European situation. The older resisters who were called to London might not have had youth, but they had already proven their moral courage and resilience. Generally speaking, however, the Jewish families who fled with their elderly relatives and young children had nothing particular in their favor but desperation. Obviously some of them were young resisters in their own right, but as a group, the Jewish fugitives had neither chosen nor been trained for the arduous task of fleeing across Occupied Europe.

Here’s a story that illustrates how Jews and other fugitives had to rely on the kindness of many strangers. It comes from a young Dutch woman who fled with her middle-class parents during the mass deportations of Jews from the Netherlands. Unfortunately she doesn’t explain Read the rest of this entry »

In February 1943 a Dutch man of Jewish descent showed up at a farm in the Jura Mountains of France that was owned by a Dutch couple. The man had probably been on the run for months and probably had no relation with the farmer other than a shared ability to speak Dutch. The farmer gave him a place to sleep, food and clothing, as he had already given several other Jewish fugitives.

This man distinguished himself from the other refugees at the farm, however, because he had been separated from his wife in their flight from the Netherlands. We can presume that he was worried, if not downright distraught, over this. Given that he must have stumbled onto the farm, perhaps even being sent there by a sympathetic French police officer who was well-known to the farmer, how would his wife ever find him?

It probably worried the farmer too. But being a man who knew Read the rest of this entry »