We’ve been talking about how resisters often relied on the people they already knew from work or the neighborhood or their families or school to expand their networks. That makes sense because telling someone that you were involved in the illegal work of resistance was tantamount to giving them the power to destroy you by betraying you to the occupation authorities.

But Dutch-Paris did not rely solely on referrals to recruit members. As an escape line, Dutch-Paris needed some very particular things to hide fugitives and get them over international borders. Sometimes they had to trust a stranger because that stranger had access to something they needed.

For example, when John Weidner was setting up a base in Annecy, near but not on the Swiss border, he needed to be able to get false documents that would allow fugitives to travel in the forbidden zone along the French side of the border. Such documents were issued by the prefecture in Annecy. False documents required true forms and true stamps. Or at least forged forms and stamps but such forgeries were beyond the capabilities of Dutch-Paris at that time.

A good false document also needed to be verifiable. That meant that if a police agent – German, French or Italian – was suspicious of a document he could find that document in the official records and conclude that it was real. Those records were kept at the prefecture in Annecy. Sometimes resisters falsified the actual records. Sometimes they just lied over the phone when a police agent called.

Weidner needed a connection at the prefecture in Annecy to provide the forms, the stamps and the verifiability for false documents for fugitives to make the last leg of the journey to the Swiss border. Weidner had lived in the region but never in Annecy itself. He didn’t know civil servants at the prefecture personally or socially. So he went to the documents office a few times to meet the people who worked there. His instincts told him that one of the women there could be trusted and would be willing to help fugitives. He was correct and she provided many false documents for Dutch-Paris.