How to Flee the Gestapo

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 »

I received a message from a gentleman in Collonges-sur-Salève, who was kind enough to drive me around the Franco-Swiss border last year. Apparently he’s been reading Flee the Captor, which is a biography of John Weidner’s wartime activities written in the 1960s. My correspondent brought an historical inaccuracy in the book to my attention.
Apparently the book claims that Weidner took Charles de Gaulle’s brother Xavier and his family from France to Switzerland. But it is well-known in Collonges, where all this happened, that it was the local Catholic priest who took the de Gaulles to Switzerland. Mme de Gaulle even attended the ceremony in which the priest was honored as a Righteous Among the Nations, which tells us that the de Gaulles thought it was the priest who helped them to safety.
Looking back in my notes, I find a report filed in the Dutch archives in The Hague in which John Weidner describes the priest as an active resister who harbored many resisters and fugitives. That tells us that the priest was not part of Dutch-Paris but that he and Weidner were in contact during the war.
In the French defense archives, there’s a mention of Xavier de Gaulle as Dutch-Paris’s link with the Free French in Algiers, which suggests Read the rest of this entry »

Very few people are cut out for the dangerous life of those Resistance heroes who dedicated themselves wholly to the cause – changing their appearance and identity regularly, always on the move, deliberately cut off from family in hopes of protecting them. But there were ways to continue with one’s usual life while helping out the Resistance. One could, for instance, keep one’s job at the town hall while putting legitimate stamps on false documents or warning people about impending police actions

Of course staying above ground while working for the Resistance carried its own share of dangers and anxieties. And they didn’t end with the war because to be effective such people had to appear blameless to the Germans. Which meant that they sometimes gained a reputation as a collaborator among the mass of people who were not resisters. Collaborators, or those commonly thought to be collaborators, had to answer to popular tribunals at the liberation.  It was not always easy to prove that one was not a collaborator.

Take the case of a certain Dutch entrepreneur who gained valuable contracts building airbases for the Germans in southern France. Because he was working for them and they trusted him – which implies a certain amount of schmoozing the enemy on his part – our man was able to issue travel warrants to Dutchmen that authorized them to travel from the Netherlands to southern France. Our man used those warrants to camouflage Read the rest of this entry »

It took a certain psychic fortitude and flexible attitude to survive as a rescuer.  Take just one story from a Dutch businessman who had been living outside Lyon since 1938 whom we’ll call Bernard.  He and some of his French friends in his village opened their homes to Dutch refugees, giving them shelter, buying them food on the black market, washing and mending their clothes.  They arranged for false documents through the local French resistance group and for safe passage into Switzerland through Dutch-Paris (see previous post of 10 November 2011 for more details).

In early 1944 John Weidner asked Bernard if he would shelter a young Dutch family with a 10 month old baby for a few days on their way to Switzerland.  He said he would be happy to do so and opened the door one day to find a woman with a large basket that turned out to have the baby in it.  The widow who lived in the same building and did the washing and mending for the refugees was overjoyed to have a baby in the house even though other people at the time considered babies to be a noisy security risk.

It just so happened that Bernard had already made an appointment to go to Clermont-Ferrand to fetch another young couple on their way to Switzerland at the same time that the 10 month-old was at his home.  According to the doctor, the wife was due three weeks later, but Read the rest of this entry »

Odd as it might seem, you could join the Resistance without meaning to or even realizing it. This was especially true for rescuers, who often felt that they were simply doing what needed to be done. This was the case for a Dutchman we’ll call Bernard whose resistance work developed so gradually and, in his mind, inevitably, that he didn’t think of it as Resistance until someone asked him to write a report in December 1945.

Bernard was a Dutch businessman who had been living outside of Lyon, France, since 1938. Early in the war he received a letter from a business contact in the Netherlands saying that his son, Paul, would be visiting France soon. Bernard waited but received no visitors. Then one day he got a letter from Paul written from the French prison in Macon and asking for help. Apparently Paul and three of his friends had been caught crossing the demarcation line that divided France while they were trying to get to Spain to get to England to join the Allied armies. Bernard got the four of them out of prison and brought Paul to live in his own home. Because he helped out at the Dutch consulate in Lyon, Paul met many Dutch refugees, some of whom he took home to Bernard’s place with him. Once he found a route to Spain, Paul left. He eventually made it to England where he joined RAF Bomber Command. Bernard was pleased to have played a small role in bombing Germany.

Meanwhile, word got around the Dutch community in France that Bernard was a helpful fellow. Strangers showed up Read the rest of this entry »

In 1947 one of the leaders of Dutch-Paris wrote to John Weidner because he was worried about one of their old comrades in the resistance.
The man in question was a Dutch religious (born 1901) living at his Order’s house in the heart of Paris. We’ll call him Brother Rufus. During the war he made several trips to the notorious internment camp at Drancy, outside of Paris, where the French imprisoned Jews in deplorable conditions before deporting them to their fate in Germany.
The guards undoubtedly thought that the good brother was bringing spiritual comfort to the unfortunates inside. And he may have been, but he was also using his robes to hide Read the rest of this entry »

The German security services had many ways of uncovering their opponents in the Resistance. Some of their organizations were, in fact, highly professional and adept at counter-espionage in its many manifestations. Some of them relied on brute force. But they, like resisters, also sometimes benefited from sheer luck.

We can take Dutch-Paris operations in Brussels as an example. In July 1943, the Committee rented an apartment on the rue du Trône as a sort of office or headquarters for their daily work of hiding Dutch fugitives or helping them to get to Spain or Switzerland. In late December, the Committee moved the escape-line portion of the work across town to a pension on the rue Franklin.

The German Sicherheitsdienst raided the pension on rue Franklin in late February 1944, where they captured six Dutch resisters, the Belgian landlady and ten aviators. The Germans knew the address because Read the rest of this entry »