When you’re thinking about resistance during the Second World War, you have to remember that most of it happened within communities where people lived and expected to continue living. In those cases, things got very “delicate” as the French say, because the people involved had to weigh the immediate German reaction to something against their community dynamics in the present and future.

For example, in November 1943, the Armée Secrète* around a market town in the Pyrenees rescued a sick colleague from a hospital. They spirited the man away in the middle of the night but left 100 Francs and a note on the night stand. The note said: “thanks for taking care of him. Don’t tell until 7:30 or 8:00 am.”

There are two interesting things here. First, the AS paid their hospital bills. Obviously, they didn’t want to discourage the hospital from helping one of their people in the future. They also understood that the hospital had bills to pay, including salaries and wages. Paying established the AS as a responsible, mature member of the community.

Second, the note didn’t say “don’t tell”. It just asked that the hospital delay telling the authorities until a certain time that was, actually, pretty early in the morning. They did not ask the hospital to collude to a very great extent at all. They knew that the Germans would be angry. They also knew that the hospital had to stay on the good side of the Germans to continue operating. And the entire community needed the hospital to keep functioning. Again, the AS were thinking of the community as a whole and also, to some degree, of their neighbors who worked at the hospital.

So what did the director of the hospital do? He told the Germans at 7am. But don’t jump to conclusions about how the director was a collaborator because he didn’t wait until 7:30 as requested. After all, we have to presume that somebody noticed a missing patient before 7am. The alarm could have been sounded earlier. The clever thing about telling the Germans at 7am is that it was a way to both look like you are working against the resistance by telling on them early while also, at the same time, covering up for the resistance. It’s classic playing both sides of the fence at the same time.

The fence sitting worked well enough because the hospital was still functioning a month later. In December 1943, the AS kidnapped their own chief from that hospital despite the fact that 2 German feldgendarmes and 5 French gendarmes were guarding him. They couldn’t have done that without some inside collusion (not necessarily by the director, of course). That was the same hospital that Dutch-Paris took a fugitive with frostbite the following February.

* Armée Secrète, AS, secret army, military resistance with connections to Charles de Gaulle and the Free French in London