How to Flee the Gestapo

In my last post I described a seemingly random occurrence, apparently meant as a gesture of goodwill, that had disastrous consequences for the men and women of Dutch-Paris and those they were helping. A random passerby saw a courier drop a notebook and returned it to her in front of the policemen who had arrested her.

Random interventions by passersby, however, did not always have unfortunate consequences. They might also save a person, as happened in another Dutch-Paris story.
A young Dutchman, an Engelandvaarder, was arrested in Paris but jumped out of the Wehrmacht car taking him to Gestapo HQ and ran off into the streets of Paris. He found himself on a busy shopping street with police whistles going off all around. Where to go? What to do?

An older lady who happened to be on the street for some errand of her own saw the young man and Read the rest of this entry »

An Engelandvaarder with whom I had the great honor and pleasure to correspond, told me that luck played a crucial role in his escape from the Nazis. You may or may not believe in luck, but there are at least two instances of the history of Dutch-Paris hinging on the actions of passersby that I know of. Their effects were both negative and positive.
Here’s an example of a negative consequence.

In early February 1944, French collaborationist police arrested a young Dutch-Paris courier at a café in Paris on the grounds that she “looked Jewish” (she was not) and that she had a bag of food with her. The food was meant for aviators to eat as they crossed the Pyrenees but just as easily could have been part of a black market trade.

The police agents obliged the courier to go with them to the police station. As they walked along the sidewalk, the courier tossed a small notebook out of her pocket. A passerby politely called her attention to it and returned the notebook. Of course the police immediately Read the rest of this entry »

In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let us remember the horror and inhumanity of the “Final Solution.” But let us also remember the glimmers of humanity offered by those men and women who volunteered to help Jews escape the Nazis despite the risk to themselves.

Let us also remember the men and women of Dutch-Paris who died as political prisoners in concentration camps – or shortly after being liberated because of maltreatment in the camps – because they belonged to a resistance network that sheltered Jews from the Nazis.

Brantsen, Jacob KJ (Dutch)
De Wit, Michiel (Belgian)
Caubo, Jean-Michael (Dutch)
Charroin, Arthur (French)
Dupont, Nicolas (French)
Israel, Philip (Dutch)
Kolkman, Joseph (Dutch)
Meriot, Raymond (French)
Meunier, Marie (French)
Meyer, Paul (Swiss)
Mincowski, Leo (Romanian)
Mohr, Josephus J (Dutch)
Nijkerk, Benjamin (Dutch)
Ogy, Lydia (Belgian)
Piveteau, Gabriel (French)
Prilliez, Emile (French)
Ruys, John (Dutch)
Tester, Josephus (Dutch)
Van Haaften, Adriaan (Dutch)
Weidner, Gabrielle (Dutch)

This is a partial list of resisters connected to Dutch-Paris who are known to have died in the concentration camps. Others were killed in ambush or trying to escape or in prison in Belgian. It does not include the names of fugitives who were captured while Dutch-Paris was trying to help them, but only because the information is not known.

Civilians under Nazi occupation made a point of studying the Germans who were controlling their lives. One of the things that comes up repeatedly in reports, memoirs and diaries is that the Nazis were terrified of illness. Well, they didn’t mind at all if millions of men and women under their control in prisons and concentration camps died of disease. But they were terrified of getting sick themselves.

This was so universally well-established that resisters used the threat of illness to protect themselves on many occasions. In February 1944, for example, the SS shot every prisoner who could not stumble out on a death march before the Russians arrived at a sub-camp of the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück. Every prisoner, that is, except for the women in one particular ward of what they called an infirmary. A young woman who belonged to Dutch-Paris was lying on a bunk bed in that room. A Polish prisoner in that ward had the courage and presence of mind to tell the SS that the women in the room had typhus. Just the word “typhus” scared the SS so deeply Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an explanation for those of you who read the last post and thought: “Ha! How can she say a tire could go for 4 or 5 American dollars? They didn’t use American dollars in occupied Europe.” You’re right. No German occupation authority would recognize an American dollar as legal tender. (At least not officially, I can’t say when it comes to bribes.) You could not plunk down a couple of dollars at a ticket booth in the Gare du Nord and ask for a round-trip berth to Toulouse without having to answer some awkward questions posed by the police.

But we’ve already established that the economy was not functioning according to the usual rules of legal tender. If you happened to have some American dollars saved from a pre-war trip or perhaps from a letter sent by a relative, you could find ways to spend them on the clandestine markets. After all, after the German defeat at Stalingrad more and more people were willing to bet on the Allies winning the war. In fact, Jean Weidner had a whole pocketful of international money with him on a trip into Switzerland in 1943, including American dollars and British pounds sterling. He or his resistance colleagues had agreed to exchange the “enemy” currency for the local currency in either France or Belgian as a way of helping fugitives escape through a place where everything had to be paid for in cash. (The Swiss confiscated all his money but later returned it after considerable paperwork.)

Most people, of course, did not have American or British money sitting around. And many of them, such as the wives of French POWs who had been sitting in POW camps since 1940, were short on French francs as well.

It’s no wonder then that some French women collected their tobacco ration not because they smoked but because they needed it to buy food. A cigarette was a known quantity that everyone could agree on. If the seller accepted cigarettes in payment, he or she did not have to worry about exchange rates or currency devaluations. Cigarettes would not lose value and could be traded for another item. France never reached the state of economic disintegration in which cigarettes replaced money as Germany did in 1945. But a Dutch-Paris courier bought a carton of cigarettes to buy and bribe his was across the country in the tumultuous summer of 1944. He recorded the purchase in his expense account although he did not itemize how he spent the cigarettes.

Given all this – the fragmentation of the economy into very local markets, the loss of confidence in the government and its rationing and currency, the prevalence of an array of alternative methods of trading and payment (barter, black market, gray market) – it’s extremely difficult to convert 1943 prices into 2021 dollars. Or even 1943 dollars for that matter. But I wonder how useful that would even be. That world of rationing, shortages and barter was so very different from our own world of credit cards and online shopping. Isn’t it enough to understand the daily circumstances of finding food, heating and clothing to appreciate how difficult the occupation was for all citizens whether or not they were with the resistance?

Following the last post about the difficulties of determining wartime exchange rates for currency, some of you are probably wondering why historians don’t just compare bread basket prices. It’s a good idea except that once again you run into the huge divide between the official story and daily life in the fractured markets of occupied Europe.

Relying on official rations to determine what people ate or how much they spent on food is problematical. This is glaringly obvious in a place like Poland where anyone who ate only official rations would have starved to death within months. The situation was not quite as desperate in France or Belgium. But the rations were lean there too, and the fact that a rationing bureaucracy said that people of a certain category could have so much butter or so many grams of bread at such and such a price did not mean that either butter or bread were actually available for purchase at that or any price.

Given the problems in the official supply chain, many civilians felt they had no choice but to slip into highly individual and localized systems of barter or use the black market. Indeed, black market prices are a far more reliable measure of prices and values during the war than any official rates. There are, however, some obvious problems. In the first place, the black market was illegal and mostly off the books. In the second place, the black market does not refer to some concrete trading center along the lines of the New York Stock Exchange. There were places where black market traders congregated in certain cities, but even there deals were struck between individual buyers and sellers.

To further complicate any attempt to figure out values during the occupation, the black market had a friendlier side known as the gray market. The line is fuzzy but let’s say that the black market was purely for profit and tended to be populated by criminals on the selling side. In that case the gray market covers all the favors done among friends, relatives and acquaintances. Your cousin sells you eggs and a ham from his farm without ration coupons and at prices that are above the official prices but much less than he could get from a professional black marketer? That’s the gray market. It could also be your hairdresser’s sister’s husband trading you a new bicycle tire for a winter coat for his nephew. So did a bicycle tire cost as much as a boy’s winter coat? Only in this one particular instance. On the black market the tire might have gone for four or five American dollars, if the buyer had dollars.

So it’s difficult to determine bread basket prices for occupied Europe. It would take some lucky discoveries in the archives. And then it would be almost too much to ask that those records of prices would cover the same time period. But any such record of local prices is better than none and could be used to give a general sense of values and costs. But it’s not really necessary. There is ample other evidence that ordinary civilians got hungrier, colder, less well clothed and shod and generally poorer over the course of the war and occupation.

The most difficult information to determine when researching Dutch-Paris was not figuring out what happened in a clandestine network that reached across five countries or the names of the people involved – although that required research in over 30 archives in five languages – but how much things cost during the Second World War.

There are a lot of prices quoted in the documents. A train ticket between Lyon and Annecy cost 80 French francs. A rucksack on the black market in Toulouse cost 280 French francs. The Dutch embassy in Switzerland routed 30,000 Swiss francs to the rescuers in Brussels. Meneer X gave Monsieur Y 120 Dutch guilders. But how much are any of those figures actually worth? How many Belgian francs would Swiss francs get on the black market and how much could they buy on the black market? And how does that convert to the Euro or Dollar today?

I’ve consulted economic historians who specialize in historical currency conversion. The best they can tell me is that they can’t tell me. The war changed the world economy in many ways, including how governments everywhere suspended the free market in favor of controlling natural resources with military uses, transportation and food. The Nazis certainly did all that in addition to imposing artificial exchange rates in all the territories that they occupied. It hardly needs to be said that those exchange rates were extremely favorable to Germany. Furthermore, the occupation authorities kept a strict eye on both the currency and commodities exchanges. In fact, the Treasury department of the Third Reich had its own armed unit called the Devisenschutzkommando (DSK or currency protection command) whose members monitored the flow of money and valuables across borders. They had the power to hunt down Jews in order to steal their valuables on behalf of the Third Reich, and they did so.

his means that looking at official currency exchange rates during the Occupation is meaningless if you are interested in the daily lives of civilians. That’s why economic historians tell me that if you want to try to figure out the value or cost of an item you must forget the exchange rates and try to determine what that item could have been exchanged for. If you want to know how much a pair of shoes cost, you need to answer not in French francs but in staples such as loaves of bread. At any given time or place, what would a consumer have had to trade to get those shoes? If the answer is a certain amount of cash, then all you know about the value of that cash is that at that time and place it was worth a pair of shoes.

Prices changed with time and circumstances. An apple, for instance, would naturally cost more in March than it would at harvest time in September. That same apple would cost much more in a big city like Paris than it would in an apple growing region such as Normandy. The sudden appearance of an invading army on the beaches of Normandy and onslaught of military hostilities there would naturally drive the price of everything up, including apples. But so would a crackdown by the local Gestapo anywhere.

The point is that the war and occupation fractured the national markets into highly volatile local markets. Not only local markets, but illegal clandestine markets. Trading on the black market was always a criminal offense, even if the German authorities themselves did it in Paris. So naturally, it’s not terribly well documented. Given the German interest in controlling currency, the black market in currency was especially dangerous and therefore profitable and therefore attractive to criminals. No wonder economic historians treat Second World War currency exchange rates as a terra incognita.

Our last post started talking about a Dutch expatriate named Bernard as an exemplar of the confusion of the Occupation. Bernard was one of those Dutch expatriates who responded to a request for help from a refugee by creating an entire rescue network and helping just about anyone who asked for help. He was in contact with Dutch-Paris but preferred not to join any group.
Bernard fell victim to a rumor. He also fell victim to the collapse of trustworthy government during the Occupation and Liberation. In his case the branch of government that descended into lawlessness was the police, aided and abetted by the fact that the legitimate police had lost the people’s trust by collaborating.

On 1 May 1944, two Dutchmen in their late 20’s showed up at Bernard’s home outside Lyon asking for help to get to Spain. They showed him Dutch army papers, said they had a contact in Toulon and asked for 5,000 French francs. Both men had worked as nurserymen in the region around Lyon before the war.

While the two, let’s call them River and Field, were at Bernard’s house, another Dutchman living in Lyon who we’ll call K. arrived. K had been working with Bernard to help many Dutch refugees to hide and get to Switzerland. K bore the terrible news that Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re thinking about the Second World War and especially about the resistance, you have to keep in mind how immensely complicated life got when the Nazis occupied an area. In particular, civilians were unmoored from many of the structures of daily life that organized their pre-war world. In particular, it was always best to assume that police of all varieties could not be trusted. Also, rumor ran rampant.

We can see this in the story of a man we’ll call Bernard. Bernard was a retired Dutch executive who was living in a village outside of Lyon in 1940. Being a businessman with a lifetime of international experience and the observant sort, Bernard could tell that Dutch refugees would be drawn to Lyon because of its proximity to Switzerland. So he took himself to the Dutch consulate in Lyon and offered his services as a translator. At that time, the consul was a Frenchman who spoke no Dutch. Nevertheless the consul showed Bernard the door, which offended him to such a degree that he had nothing more to do with the consulate even though that consul died (of natural causes) early in the war.

Why did that meeting turn out so badly? Bernard doesn’t specify in his report and the consul didn’t live long enough to give one. The man who took over as Dutch consul said he didn’t know what happened. But other documents have a rumor about it. They claim that Read the rest of this entry »

In the last post our valiant Pole Wyssogota had agreed to take Dutchmen and aviators to Spain in cooperation with a Dutch escape line based in Brussels which had connections to the Comite but was not part of Dutch-Paris. Wyssogota and the Dutchman Thijs were arrested in November 1943 and deported to the concentration camps. This time, Wyssogota did not manage to escape.

The round-up in November 1943 did not capture Thijs’s two Dutch colleagues in Paris or Mme Vassias. The 66-year-old Parisienne took command of Visigoths-Lorraine and kept it going until being arrested herself in February 1944 after the arrest of one of Wyssogota’s guides near the Spanish border. She died in Ravensbrück.

The arrest of Wyssogota and Thijs left Thijs’s two Dutch friends and colleagues stranded in Paris with more than a few Engelandvaarders hiding in hotels and private apartments waiting to go to Spain. Even if the fugitives stayed in Paris until the liberation – whenever that was going to be – they didn’t have enough money to feed them on the black market indefinitely.

This is where Dutch-Paris comes into the story Read the rest of this entry »