Following the last few posts, I have one last comment about resisters being identified with a resistance group that did not officially acknowledge them.

In most cases there are only two reasons for a resister’s resistance group of network to be misidentified.  It’s either an innocent mistake or something altogether darker.

Innocent mistakes happened because during the war resisters generally didn’t have a name for their organization beyond the generic “organisatie” or a code name that only they and their immediate colleagues used. That’s just basic security. Dutch-Paris, for example, was a name used by British military intelligence and adopted after the war because it was most likely to get assistance for resisters who’d been impoverished and needed medical help after arrest and deportation.

For example, a woman who worked for Dutch-Paris survived the war but none of the people she knew and worked with during the war did. She returned home and was asked to fill out forms to claim her resistance benefits. She honestly did not know what the name of her network was, but she’d heard about a line that did very similar things to what she’d been doing and was called Comet. So she wrote down Comet. The leaders of Comet rejected her claim. It took quite a bit of paperwork to get that sorted out and get the woman the assistance that she needed and was entitled to. That was an innocent mistake.

There have also been claims made out of ignorant association. The reasoning goes that Dutch-Paris did X during the war, say take fugitives over the border from the Netherlands to Belgium. I did that same thing during the war so I must have belonged to Dutch-Paris. The ignorance is in thinking that anyone who smuggled fugitives over the Dutch-Belgian border was part of Dutch-Paris when in fact there were many such helpers and only a very few belonged to Dutch-Paris.

There have also been instances of people who were not bona fide resisters claiming to be part of Dutch-Paris. In 1944-46 such individuals were usually trying to hide what they had actually been doing during the war. Plenty of collaborators turned resisters at the eleventh hour or even after the liberation in hopes of whitewashing their own reputation and escaping the punishments meted out to collaborators by both vigilantes and the courts.

There have also been what you might call petty imposters. Such people were neither collaborators nor resisters during the war but created a legend for themselves after the war by telling their families false stories of their wartime heroics. It was hard to do this by claiming to be part of the local resistance because the actual resisters were right there to contradict the stories. But Dutch-Paris was a well-known resistance line that operated across western Europe. It’d be easier to claim to have belonged to such a line because no one would know for certain that you hadn’t been part of it.

Given all the possibilities, it’s a good thing that historians and researchers have archives stuffed full of eye witness accounts, personal reports and police reports to verify claims.