Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, on December 31, 1943, Gestapo agents and other German police officials raided a somewhat seedy inn on the outskirts of Toulouse called the Panier Fleuri. They arrested two Dutchmen, one Belgian and one Irishman with connections to Dutch-Paris.  They also arrested the landlord, but released him shortly.  In fact, the Germans probably arrested everyone they found there, but the documents do not record who they were.

Dutch Engelandvaarders had been using the Panier Fleuri since the acting Dutch consul in Toulouse made an arrangement with the owners in August 1943. It was enough of an open secret that tram drivers who stopped at both the train station and the inn told Dutchmen not to worry when they got on, they’d tell them when to get off. Indeed, too many fugitives were hanging around at the Panier Fleuri. When a Dutch-Paris courier arrived in town in November 1943, she wrote to Weidner to tell him that they had to find someplace else because there were too many foreigners sitting around there with nothing to do but talk. Within the week, they began moving men into other hotels and hiding places in the city. It was hard to find places for such dangerous guests, though, and they did keep using the Panier Fleuri.

Why did the Germans wait until the end of December to raid such a well-known hiding place? They appear to have done so as part of a roll-up of a Belgian escape line that also sent men to the Panier Fleuri. Indeed, the Dutch-Paris courier reported with some alarm that a known Belgian agent provocateur had been seen there. The same wave of arrests associated with the Belgian line appears to have caught a French woman who guided Dutch-Paris fugitives from Toulouse to the foothills of the Pyrenees. She was caught at the train station on Christmas Eve with an Engelandvaarder. The unidentified Belgian she had also been escorting went to the rest room shortly before the Gestapo appeared and was not arrested. It might have been a coincidence.

One of Dutch-Paris’s great strengths was that they helped anyone who needed help and they worked with many other resistance groups. But that same openness put them at risk, as it did with the arrest at the train station and the raid on the Panier Fleuri. In this case, the guide survived the concentration camps. But her arrest caused the collapse of the local escape line over the Pyrenees that she had been part of.  Dutch-Paris had been working with her line and two other local lines for that last leg of the journey to Spain. It was harder to get men over the mountains after that.