Here’s another essential quality for Here’s another essential quality for a resistance leader: the ability to get along with all sorts of people.

This was especially important for leaders of escape lines such as Dutch-Paris. They needed excellent social skills both to recruit help and to survive unexpected situations.

Escorting a fugitive of any sort, whether an American aviator or a Jewish grandmother, required a lot of help from a lot of people, including strangers. The guides essentially needed every person they came into contact with to like and trust them enough to not call the police to report suspicious activity. Even more than that they might need to find a café for fugitives to stay in for a few hours while waiting for a delayed train or a conductor to overlook an irregularity in an identity document. They might need a waiter to quietly show them the back exit. It was important for them to come across as both likeable and inoffensive or at least not dangerous.

Good social skills could also be good survival skills. On at least two occasions Dutch-Paris leaders found themselves in the dining cars of trains with a whole lot of German officers. That is a situation fraught with danger. In both cases, the leaders put on the charm and made friends with the enemy, at least until they got off the train. In one case in which the leader was traveling on his own without any fugitives to worry about, he used the opportunity to gather intelligence. Somehow the subject of the bombing of cities came up. Our man wrote an in depth report for the Allies on the effect of bombing cities in the Third Reich on enemy morale.

Dutch-Paris’s leaders had a few advantages going for them in these social situations. They were all in their early thirties, which made them old enough to be taken seriously but still young enough to have good looks work in their favor. They had also all traveled before the war, giving them experience with strangers of different sorts. And they all had at least a little experience in sales, or, put another way, persuading strangers. But even so they all demonstrated the sort of highly advanced social skills that you almost have to be born with.
a resistance leader: the ability to get along with all sorts of people.