How to Flee the Gestapo

On 29 July 1944 the Germans executed a Frenchman we’ll call Albert for what they called terrorism and aiding and abetting the enemy.

He was certainly guilty: he’d been in charge of organizing passages to Spain for Allied airmen and resistants from November 1942 until his arrest and subsequent torture in Toulouse on 15 May 1944. He appears to have been one of Dutch-Paris’s contacts in the French Resistance for getting people over the Pyrenees.

He was not, however, a local. He’d come to the Pyrenees after escaping from a POW camp Read the rest of this entry »

While reading through all these documents in the Netherlands, Belgium and France, I’ve noticed something about the way that resisters referred to themselves during and immediately after the war. It wasn’t the same in all three countries.

In France, clandestine opposition to the German occupation was always known as la Résistance, the heroic efforts of the résistants. La Résistance translates pretty much directly into English as “The Resistance” only with a bit more élan than simple “resistance.” There’s dash, derring-do and danger wrapped up into the term, along with patriotism and heroism.

The French-speaking part of Belgium also uses the term la Résistance, but the Dutch-speaking, Flemish, part of Belgium talks about the Weerstand. Literally it means “the standing against” and has the same connotations of opposition as La Résistance.

Nowadays the Dutch usually talk about the Verzets Read the rest of this entry »

The Dutch government-in-exile in London had a problem that is today almost inconceivable: they didn’t know what was going on in the Netherlands. Nor did they have a way to communicate with the people they claimed to represent. They had to resort to clandestine means.

One such was to microfilm reports and instructions and then mail them to Switzerland, Sweden or Spain hidden in the bindings of obscure academic books. Following instructions telegrammed from London, the military attaché in, say, Bern would go to a particular Swiss bookseller and order a history of Javanese politics published in 1869 or a treatise on translating Sanskrit into Frisian. When it arrived he would slit open the cover and forward the microfilm on to London or the Netherlands.

The microfilms could also be sent by courier who carried them across the borders in fountain pens, Read the rest of this entry »

On 23 November 1943, two plain clothes German policemen arrested a Dutch banker in the train station in Antwerp, Belgium. The banker sat in a prison in Belgium for three months without being interviewed, was then transferred to an internment camp in the Netherlands where he was interviewed in an almost gentlemanly manner and then deported into the concentration camp system. The English liberated him from Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.

The Dutch banker, we’ll call him Jan, managed a branch office in Brussels. He appears to have been very busy transferring and exchanging money for the Dutch Resistance. For instance, the Hervormde Kerk sent 80,000 guilders to its pastor in Brussels for the support of Dutch refugees through our man, who converted it into Belgian francs. He was, then, under suspicion by the Deviezen Schutz Kommando (DSK) for contravening their laws about money.

But he was arrested as part of the “roll-up” of a pilot escape line run by a dangerously chatty Dutchman Read the rest of this entry »

Just because dossiers on resisters are now available, doesn’t mean that the dossiers have more information than a name and date of birth (sometimes not even that). But sometimes you can piece together a portrait out of bits from different archives.

Take the example of Dr. Dreyfus. I first came across the name in the Dutch Nationaal Archief on a list written by John Weidner. That’s all it said: Dr Dreyfus, a known colleague of Dutch-Paris.

Now that’s really not enough information. For one thing, was this Dreyfus French, Belgian or Dutch? Dreyfus is a fairly common name. To figure out which Dreyfus you need at least a first initial and preferably the full name and birth date. And then, of course, you’d like to know what it was that he did for Dutch-Paris. Read the rest of this entry »

Historical research is a little like hunting. You need to know what kinds of tracks your quarry leaves; it always helps to have a local guide, and timing makes all the difference.

For the most part historians follow paper trails, so we have to think about who would have written about our subjects and why. For instance, the men who wrote the Treaty of Versailles wrote all sorts of official memos, reports and proclamations that were diligently preserved by their governments. It’s a matter of notorious common sense, however, that resisters did not write things down and that the Gestapo burned their files.

But it turns out that common sense is wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve come to Paris to try to figure out how it came about that over one hundred members of Dutch-Paris were arrested in February and March of 1944, many of them later dying in the concentration camps. John Henry Weidner was more than a little interested in the question himself, and, as a Captain in the Dutch Security Services, in a position to investigate it just after the war.

The original arrest in a long “roll-up” of arrests, happened on 11 February 1944 in Paris when French police arrested a young courier who we’ll call Erna (b. 1921). After her return from Ravensbruck in 1945, she confessed to having told the Germans everything they wanted to know after they tortured her and threatened her father.

I spent a day at the archives of the police looking at the purge dossiers of three officers involved in Erna’s arrest. I can’t say that I learnt very much from them except that they arrested her, which I already knew. She says they arrested her because she had a large bag of food, too much given the current rations. They say they arrested her because she had a false ID, but Dutch-Paris IDs were usually quite good. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an intriguing turn of events. I’ve come across the name of a Belgian man, we’ll call him Legrand, in a few reports in a couple of archives.

The first is a long and detailed account written by an enthusiastic member of Dutch-Paris in Brussels, known as the Comité. Legrand makes a brief appearance as the colleague of the banker who was jointly running the Comité. Legrand and the banker, apparently, managed to furnish the Allies with detailed information about the V1 rockets that were storming down on Antwerp, London and the people in between.

The next appearance comes in a membership form for a postwar Resistance organization filled out by the banker. He claims to have been recruited by Legrand for a Belgian information to be their “financial delegate.” Which means he exchanged money for them under the table, something he was already doing for Dutch-Paris.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened the Resistance file of Legrand to find out that he served 6 months in prison in 1948/49 for economic collaboration. Read the rest of this entry »

Few people today appreciate the chaotic disaster of Germany in 1945 or of the millions of non-German Displaced Persons liberated there by the Allies. It would take a number of books to understand it. But I can give you one example of the confusion that also explains the richness of the archives of the Dutch Red Cross Information Bureau.

A Dutch Jewish businessman (b. 1906) whom we’ll call Nestor acted as a founding member of both the Dutch-Paris related Comité in Brussels and the treasurer of the Committee for the Defense of Jews there. In March 1944 Nestor knocked on the door of an apartment on the Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris that belonged to another Dutchman loosely affiliated with Dutch-Paris. The Gestapo answered the door.

In the fall of 1944 Nestor sent two postcards from the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen to a cousin in Switzerland. Read the rest of this entry »

1940-1945

The Netherlands celebrates Liberation Day with an official holiday on the Fifth of May every fifth year. But the Dutch remember the war every year with two minutes of silence at 8 pm on the Fourth of May, known as Dodenherdenkening (Remembrance of the Dead). People gather at monuments across the country, with the biggest and most official taking place on the Dam in Amsterdam.

But I rode my bike to the Waalsdorpervlakte Memorial in the dunes in Scheveningen, The Hague. I arrived a few minutes early to find that there were hundreds if not thousands of people already quietly lined up waiting for the ceremony to begin at 7:25. Many of them carried flowers.

During the war the Germans incarcerated resisters in the nearby Scheveningen prison, which came to be known as the Oranje Hotel*. Read the rest of this entry »