Seventy-five years ago, on August 25, 1944, the German garrison of Paris surrendered after five days of street fighting. There were parties in the streets, a huge parade, a Te Deum at Notre Dame cathedral. The German occupation authorities had not followed Hitler’s order to destroy the city, but they had not been as merciful to their prisoners.

During the month of August 1944, while the Allies were battling towards Paris from their landing sites in Normandy and Provence, the Germans were deporting as many political prisoners as possible from prisons across France. This included a number of men and women who belonged to Dutch-Paris. Some of those arrested in the major raids on Dutch-Paris addresses at the end of February 1944 were deported to concentration camps within a few weeks of their arrests. Apparently the Germans did not think that these prisoners were particularly important or were worth further interrogation.

The prisoners who they did consider important were held incommunicado under the designation “Nacht und Nebel,” which meant that no one could find out anything about what was happening to them. The men among them were stripped naked and crammed into cattle cars on August 20. Those cattle cars were then hauled off towards Germany, making frequent stops on sidings so that military trains could use the rails. The men were not given water or any relief from the sweltering late summer heat. The journey was itself a form of torture.

The German authorities also somehow found the time and trains necessary to deport political prisoners who were not considered important enough for the “Nacht und Nebel” treatment. Among Dutch-Paris prisoners, this included women who were arrested long after the original raids, in June and July 1944. It also included Weidner’s sister Gabrielle. She had been arrested on February 26 as a hostage to try to lure her brother into surrendering. Because she was a hostage, she was incarcerated in a different part of the prison and given more privileges than the Dutch-Paris women who were arrested for being resisters. In the end, though, she ended up in the concentration camps with the rest of them.

Given the vindictive nature of these last minute deportations of political prisoners to concentration camps, it comes as a surprise that the German authorities actually released some prisoners because they were sick. After the intervention of the Swedish consul , one Dutch-Paris courier was released from the transit camp at Romainville on August 19 on the grounds that she was too ill to travel. The same thing happened to two other Dutch-Paris couriers who had been arrested in Annecy and transferred to a prison near Paris. The Germans released them due to illness shortly before the liberation of Paris.

There was great rejoicing when Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944, but the war was far from over for the French. The communications, transportation and power networks were in ruins. Crops were damaged and food distribution was crippled. And millions of French citizens – political prisoners, Jews, POWs, forced laborers – remained in German custody for the foreseeable future.