How to Flee the Gestapo

Let us pause for a moment on this 91^st anniversary of the Armistice that halted the official slaughters of the First World War (1914-1918) to remember the men and women who have died in our battles over the last century and those who’ve lived the rest of their lives under the shadow of those battles.

It would take an entire semester to work out all that that first war unleashed – some good (female suffrage), most bad (Spanish Flu pandemic). The most notorious consequence, of course, was the Second World War (1939-1945).

Now that was a war that did not limit itself to the military for either fighters or victims. That was a war that compelled soldiers and civilians alike to great acts of courage. So among today’s photos of Marines at Iwo Jima, half-frozen snipers at Stalingrad and French girls kissing their American liberators, I’d like to add another.

Dutch-Paris Convoy in the Pyrenees January 1944

Taken in January 1944, it shows a Dutch-Paris “convoy” on the final stage of its journey out of Occupied Europe: climbing the Pyrenees. To my knowledge, the photo shows the French guide (a member of Dutch-Paris); a Dutch priest; two American airmen (one from Boston and the other, a boxer, from California); a Polish RAF Spitfire pilot; a Dutch lawyer and a Dutch intelligence agent. The others are probably Read the rest of this entry »

Following my last post about joining the Resistance, I’ll be offering a series of examples of how members of Dutch-Paris ended up in the Line. We’ll start with the chef de reseau himself,John Henry Weidner (1912-1994).

Weidner’s father was a Dutch Seventh Day Adventist preacher who taught at the SDA college at Collonges sur Salève, France, when John was still in school. That gave John a strict moral upbringing, fluency in French as well as Dutch, and personal knowledge of the Franco-Swiss border where he spent as much time mountain-climbing as he could. When the Wehrmacht invaded France in 1940, Weidner was a businessman and youth group leader in Paris.  He and a French friend tried to get to England but missed the last boat.  So the two of them opened a textile shop in Lyon, which, if nothing else, gave them an officially acceptable reason to travel. Read the rest of this entry »

Say it’s 1943 and you’ve had enough of the Occupier and his brutal ways. You know there’s a Resistance because you’ve read the illegal press and you’ve heard the rumors. You want to join, but how? It’s not like you can walk down to the local recruiting office or look them up in the phone book to make an appointment.

How did you join before the Allies landed in Normandy and the Resistance came out into the open? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard enough to read someone else’s handwriting in your native language, let alone in one you learned in graduate school. But to my immense relief, most of the documents I’ve come across so far are typed. In some cases that’s because somebody’s secretary typed up copies of handwritten reports (thank you!). But in other cases people typed their own reports or letters. It surprises me how many businesses and individuals still had their own typewriters just after the war. I wonder if people hid them from the Germans the same way they hid their radios and their bicycles.

But not everyone used a typewriter, and not everyone wrote legibly. I give you Exhibit A, a letter written to John Read the rest of this entry »

The herculean task of organizing the Weidner Archives is being ably undertaken by Stan Tozeski, a retired archivist from NARA. He tells me that when he started in on a heap of moving boxes filled with manila folders and papers in various states of deterioration, in other words, the contents of John Henry Weidner’s office shipped across the country.

Weidner’s personal correspondence is now neatly alphabetized in acid-free folders and stacked in 36 (at my last count) archival-quality document boxes. Read the rest of this entry »

Travel papers such as the authorization to cross the borders of Haute-Savoie in the last blog would be easy enough to forge if you had the forms and the stamps. Identity cards posed more of a problem. Actually, they were more like identity booklets of heavy paper stock folded in thirds than the laminated cards Americans carry today in the form of driver’s licenses.  That’s probably why the police agents in black and white movies are always saying: “your papers please.”

Dutch identity cards were notoriously difficult to forge because of the misplaced zeal of a civil servant who came up with a new way to complicate the cards and presented the idea to the occupying authority. The Belgians, however, had been through a nasty occupation during the First World War and had a deliberately simple, i.e. easily forged, identity card.

Take a good look at the following five identity cards, three French and two Belgian.

Issued to: Jacques Vernet, born 20 November 1910 in Algiers [Algeria, then a French territory]

Issued by: Prefecture of Haute-Savoie, 10 April 1943 Read the rest of this entry »

In amongst the documentary riches of the Weidner Archive, I’ve found a little cache of false documents. Some of them are the fakes that John Henry Weidner himself used during the Occupation and the quite legitimate military documents issued to him at the liberation and just after the war. And some of them are the blank forms for said documents. Legally, only the issuing authority should have had those blank forms and the stamps that formalized them, but there was a brisk trade in them during the Occupation.

By the end of the war, the Dutch Resistance had a catalog of false documents. You told your contact what documents you needed, handed over some photographs, and three days later you had your papers. Read the rest of this entry »

Ladies and gentlemen, I stand corrected.  It turns out that resisters did write a lot down.  It’s just that they wrote it down after the danger had passed.  For France that happened with the Liberation in the summer of 1944.  Belgium was liberated in September 1944, as was a southern swathe of the Netherlands.  To its immense sorrow, the northern majority of the Netherlands was not liberated until May 1945.

I am working in the Weidner Center Archives at Atlantic Union College in South Lancaster, Massachusetts.  It holds Weidner’s private papers and a filing cabinet Read the rest of this entry »

The most poignant of the NARA helper files I’ve read concerns a young Dutch woman who was a student at the Sorbonne when the Germans invaded in 1940. We’ll use her nom de guerre, Anne-Marie. In the normal course of affairs, she met a man who worked at the Dutch embassy in Paris. As a member of Dutch-Paris, he was busy helping Dutch citizens get to England (via Spain) and Switzerland, so she helped him help her landgenoten (fellow countrymen).

In 1943 other friends of hers from the university were asked if they could help some allied pilots get out of France. Anne-Marie asked John Henry Weidner if the pilots could take the same route as the Dutch nationals. Weidner said they could, and so Dutch-Paris began helping pilots.

At first Anne-Marie walked to homes around Versailles where Americans or Brits were hiding, took their shoe sizes, noted down what else they needed in the way of clothing and organized false documents for them. Later, whole groups of about 10 downed airmen came from Brussels at a time. She helped hide them in Paris or escorted them to Toulouse.

In February 1944 an important courier for the Line and Dutch-Paris’s man at the Gare du Nord railway station were arrested in Paris. Anne-Marie wanted to disappear for a month, but her money had been cut off when the Germans occupied France and she couldn’t afford to take a holiday from her (unspecified) job.

When it comes to money, even altruistic heroes can loose sight of the big picture. The Gestapo arrested her within days and eventually sent her to the notorious women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück.

Only a few days after she returned to Paris in the summer of 1945, Anne-Marie took her report to the British. The British sergeant escorted her over to the American MIS-X offices so that she could share it with them. She wrote it herself in clear, if grammatically imperfect, English. The last lines read:

“The Gestapo sent me to the concentration camp Ravensbruck where I stayed exactly one year. Everything I saw in the camp made me very glad to have worked against them.”

That certainty that she was fighting the good fight undoubtedly helped her withstand a concentration camp in which only 40,000 of the 130,000 prisoners survived.

One of the best things about this project so far is the community of people who are actively interested in escape lines.  For instance, the Escape Line Memorial Society (ELMS;  http://www.escapelines.com) based in the UK raises funds to assist helpers who are now in financial need.   They also run freedom treks across western Europe in honor and memory of the escape and evasion lines. 

There is also an informal community of people who are researching escape lines.  Serendipity has brought me into contact with Bruce Bolinger of California, who is researching the evasion of a young American airman named Tom Applewhite.   [If you have information about that, I’ll happily forward it to Bruce].  His researches have recently taken him to Washington, DC, where he’s been ferreting about in the National Records and Archives Administration (NARA).  In particular, he’s been looking for the “helper files” of the people who facilitated Applewhite’s escape.  He very generously sent me a stack of photocopies of files marked Dutch-Paris.

 The helper files are the kind of document that puts a little skip in an historian’s step because they’re detailed and come from a reliable source.  And I confess that I’m pleased to read something in English.  Both the British and the Americans started compiling them as soon as they liberated an area in order to reward and assist those individuals who had helped Allied servicemen, in effect aviators, to evade and escape the enemy.  Reward might come in the form of a certificate of recognition signed by General Eisenhower, if not the Congressional Medal of Freedom.  Assistance could well mean food, money or a job.  But SHAEF wasn’t just going to take someone’s word for it before they started handing out cash or tins of corned beef hash.

 Nope, the Americans and the British investigated every claim themselves as well as searching out people to thank.  They had actually been working on this before D-Day by debriefing the aviators who made it back to England.  Their mission then was to figure out how the lines worked and who worked on them so they could tell their air crews what to do if they got shot down. 

 The American detachment, called MIS-X, had offices in Paris, Belgium, Wasenaar (near The Hague) and elsewhere.  They shared information with their British counterparts and even had a bit of a competion going as to who could do more for the helpers.

 Judging from the very few MIS-X files I’ve seen, their modus operandiwas to ask someone they knew had been an authentic helper for the names of his or her colleagues.  Then they’d invite those people to come into the office and give a statement.  Some came, some didn’t.  They put all those statements together in the “helper files” and made recommendations for awards and assistance.  They clearly respected John Weidner as a recognized Resistance chief and authority on the subject.

Although the files are obviously skewed towards assistance to Allied airmen, they are wonderfully detailed about that particular activity.  Given that Dutch-Paris rescued 112 named airmen, and perhaps 80 more whose names were lost in a Gestapo raid, this is very useful information.  I’ll discuss one of the reports in detail in my next blog.

 In the meantime, I’ll just note that all the files I’ve seen so far have been declassified in the last 10 years.  I have to wonder why the reports of people who were considered to deserve the thanks of the American people were held secret so long.  Unless it’s because the American authors also included  their speculations about who betrayed the Line to the Germans?