How to Flee the Gestapo

Let’s dive deeper into the factors that shaped the practical realities of a resister’s daily life. We’ll start with what sort of illegal work an individual was doing. Broadly speaking you can break down resistance work into four large categories: armed resistance (sabotage, partisan battles); intelligence work (gathering information); welfare (hiding people, supporting the needy such as the children of deported Jews or resisters, escape lines); intellectual (political, spiritual, the clandestine press).

All resisters faced some of the same problems. For example, what they were doing was illegal and carried severe penalties if they were caught. They all needed false identification documents. They all had to be careful about who saw what they were doing and they all carried an extra burden of anxiety and fear.

But there were differences. Members of the armed resistance carried weapons, which put them in a different category in the eyes of the occupation forces. They often lived in remote places such as camps in the forest or mountains which would make getting supplies difficult and the winter’s cold and wet. They were also cut off from their families.

Individuals who worked for the clandestine press in all its forms tended to live in cities and for the most part they could live at home. The most dangerous jobs were running the presses, which were loud and therefore easily tracked, and delivering Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve all seen movies and read books with gripping tales of high derring-do by the Resistance. Some of them are based on true events because there were, indeed, moments of intense tension and danger for resisters. But for most resisters the majority of their illegal work was much less glamorous.

Let’s take a look at the practical realities of the daily lives of resisters in western Europe. It goes without saying that every resister had a unique experience. Even if we generalize (which we will) we still need to recognize that certain circumstances made a big difference to a resister’s life.

For one thing, life in the countryside was very different than life in a city. There were quantitatively more soldiers and police present on the streets of Paris than in a farming village in southern France. But it was easier to slip through anonymously in Paris than in the village. So a resister might be more noticeable and more likely to be betrayed in the small village. Unless the entire village was compromised in whatever the resister was doing, which did happen in a few places, mostly villages that sheltered the persecuted.

Also, food was easier to find in the countryside. It’s a toss-up whether it was easier to Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s continue our discussion of how private citizens have influenced the public memory of the Second World War. We began with Memorial naming the victims of the Soviet regime in the USSR. Last time we mentioned how an association in France added the name of a Dutch-Paris resister to the war monument in his home town in 2023, 78 years after his death in a concentration camp.

Dutch-Paris has also been remembered in at least two “Stolpersteine” or “stumbling stones.” These are 10cm square brass plaques placed in the cobblestone pavement outside of the last known, freely chosen residence of a victim of the Nazis before they were killed or escaped persecution through emigration or suicide. Of course many honor Jews, but the stumbling stones honor all victims of the Nazis including resisters who were killed in custody. Each one is handmade and reads: “here lived” followed by the victim’s name, date of birth and what happened to him or her.

The two Dutch-Paris stumbling stones that I know of honor a Jewish father and son who escaped from the Netherlands with help from Dutch-Paris. The father’s includes the year he was arrested in France, the date he was deported from Drancy and the date he was vermoord (murdered) in Auschwitz. The son’s says “gearresteerd 1942 Frankrijk ontsnapt gevlucht Juli 1943 Zwitserland” (“arrested 1942 France escaped fled July 1943 Switzerland).

The stumbling stones began as the private project of Read the rest of this entry »

It goes without saying that the stakes over public memory in Western Europe are nowhere near as high as they were when the private citizens of Memorial were challenging the Soviet Union by burying the dead lying in the forests around Stalingrad. But that does not mean that everyone in Western Europe is fully satisfied with the way the Second World War is remembered. Monuments are being installed and conferences convened all the time. As in the Soviet Union, much of it is being done by private citizens.

For example, there is an association in France called Le Souvenir Français with the goal of remembering soldiers and resisters who died for France, mostly by making sure that their names are listed on monuments and their graves and monuments are tended. It’s notable that even in France, where every village has a First World War monument at its heart, private citizens feel the need to guard and protect the memory of “morts pour la France”* including poilus of 1914-1918.

Like Memorial in the USSR, Le Souvenir Français is also on a mission to name those who have been forgotten. I can’t tell you exactly how they discover such names, but it must involve some detailed archival research.

Some gentlemen from a local chapter of Le Souvenir Français contacted me in November 2022 to say that they had discovered that a member of Dutch-Paris had died in the concentration camps but was not listed on any monument in Paris or in his home town. They were looking for Read the rest of this entry »

Memory slips and shifts depending on the person and the time. Ask any five people what happened at a particular place and time and they will all have a slightly – if not wildly – different memory of the event. Those are personal, individual memories.

Public memory, meaning the “official story” as remembered by a community, shifts just as much but it is often subject to the political powers and fashions of the day. Public memory finds shape in monuments, historical plaques, parades and legal holidays. The public memory of communities that are not in power takes shape in things like vigils, art installations, songs and graffiti.
Control over public memory is often a cause and site of contention. That’s true whether the question is access to archival documents that may or may not challenge the official story or bids for the design of a monument. Or even the subject of a monument.

The best example of the power of memory that I know of comes from the Soviet Union and an organization called Memorial. The rulers of the Soviet Union were masters of controlling public memory. They went so far as to erase individuals (their own former colleagues in power) from official photographs. They also lied about Read the rest of this entry »

One last comment from my talk about Dutch-Paris on WW2TV. I was discussing the arrests of most of the men and women in Dutch-Paris’ aviator escape line that led, in most cases, to torture and deportation to the concentration camps. One of the viewers wrote that “soldiers shouldn’t ask civilians for help.”

There were people in the Allied air forces that agreed with that. But, realistically, what were the airmen who were shot down over western Europe supposed to do? They landed in a country where they didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the customs or the lay of the land, and didn’t have any experience living with the enemy. But they were under orders to evade capture and try to return to base.

There was a pair of Americans who later ended up with Dutch-Paris who made their own way across most of the Netherlands without civilian help. Unless you count the food and clothing that they stole from farms as help. But even those two amazingly skillful and Read the rest of this entry »

During my talk on WW2TV someone asked the excellent question of why the archives were closed so long. And someone else asked the more philosophical but related question of why anyone would care if someone’s grandpa was a collaborator.

To protect living individual’s privacy, many archives close documents for a standard 60 or 75 years. Normally that does not include standardized reports on the potato crop as it did in France. The French simply put a blanket closure on all and any documents from the years 1939-1945. To vastly oversimplify the matter, it was a way of sweeping the war under the rug.

That attitude had a lot to do with Charles De Gaulle’s decision to pretend that everyone was in the Resistance except a few rotten Vichyites in order to demand a place with the Americans and British at the victory table and the UN Security Council. It served the interests of Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve seen the photos of Dutch-Paris fugitives crossing the Pyrenees into Spain in my book or on the WW2TV talk, you may be wondering why on earth those young men are standing in snow up to their knees way up in the mountains without so much as a warm hat let alone a decent coat or rugged footwear.

The answer is that all of them had to travel through cities on the regular trains to get to the mountains while looking like they weren’t actually going anywhere far from their home for any length of time. Young men in hiking gear heading toward the Spanish border would have been an automatic red flag for any police officer, gendarme, Milicien or German soldier in any train, train station or village. It just wasn’t safe to dress appropriately for the mountains on the way to the mountains. Nor was it possible to Read the rest of this entry »

During my talk about Dutch-Paris on WW2TV someone asked if Vichy patrolled the Franco-Spanish border as tightly at the Germans did. The answer is no, but possibly only because Vichy didn’t have the same resources as the Third Reich did.

The German occupation authorities posted a number of units in the forbidden zone of the Pyrenees including Gestapo agents and Austrian border guards who were used to patrolling on skiis. These and other German units in the area also enjoyed a near monopoly on the telephone system and on the roadways. They not only controlled most of the gasoline supply but they were able to set up check points and ambushes at key junctions.

Before the Germans arrived in full force, what did Vichy have? Their usual border patrols and the gendarmerie. Their enforcement is better described as “selective” than as “weak.” Selective because officers in the mountains had Read the rest of this entry »

A viewer of my talk about Dutch-Paris on WW2TV made an intriguing comment. I was talking about the difficulty of getting food for fugitives without ration cards. He or she quipped that it seems like crime syndicates would have been the go-to place for your shopping needs under the occupation. The answer to that is a very complicated sort-of.

The basic fact during the war was that food was in short supply. Governments tried to ameliorate that fact by imposing ration systems that were meant to make sure that everyone got his or her fair share of what was available at controlled prices. That attempt worked better in some countries than in others.

Let’s look at France only here. The ration system creaked along there but it did not provide sufficient calories for anyone to live on. A few sticklers tried but ended up literally starving. So the French people created their own supplemental “Système D”, meaning whatever you and your family came up with to get more food.

Système D was inherently illegal, but some parts Read the rest of this entry »