I mentioned in an earlier blog that the Nazis accepted guilt by association as sufficient cause for extreme punishment. This went so far that they had a policy of punishing the family of resisters. This could take the form of taking the father of a family for forced labor in the Third Reich if the son did not show up for the labor draft. That was enough to convince my own father’s cousin in the Netherlands to report for forced labor as ordered instead of “going under” in hiding.

The Nazis also threatened to kill all the men in a resister’s extended family and deport all the women if a resister aided or abetted evading Allied aviators. More commonly, the Nazis would hold the people of the nearest village or town responsible for an attack on their military personnel. They went into towns and hung the first few dozen men they found by the lamp posts. They herded entire village populations into churches and set them on fire. You, yourself, did not actually have to commit a crime to be punished by the Nazis.

The men and women of Dutch-Paris did not carry weapons. They did not sabotage any rail lines or assassinate any person. They did not do anything to trigger reprisals. Nonetheless, relatives did get swept up and punished because of the illegal work of members of Dutch-Paris.

For example, during the big round up of Dutch-Paris in February and March 1944, the Gestapo arrested Jean Weidner’s sister as a hostage. As leader of Dutch-Paris Weidner was a wanted man with a price on his head. It’s not clear how they knew that his sister Gabrielle worked as a secretary at the Seventh Day Adventist temple in Paris.  They did not know that his other sister was living with Gabrielle at the time.

At the same time as they were rounding up most of the men and women working on Dutch-Paris’s aviator escape line, they arrested Gabrielle and put her in the civilian side of Fresnes prison. Unlike the people suspected of illegal work with Dutch-Paris, who were put in the other side of the prison, Gabrielle was allowed to ask for a blanket from home and to receive food packages and money. Weidner hired a lawyer for her, who had a meeting with a Gestapo officer. The officer was very clear that Gabrielle would be released if her brother turned himself in.

Obviously too many hundreds of other lives depended on Weidner staying out of the hands of the Gestapo for him to even consider turning himself in. Gabrielle stayed in prison and was then deported shortly before the Liberation of Paris to the concentration camp of Ravensbruck.  She died in a sub-camp a few days after the Russians liberated it in early 1945.

In a bittersweet irony, Gabrielle actually did work with Dutch-Paris. She was involved with helping several Jewish families escape the northern occupation zone of France before November 1942. After her brother created the full Dutch-Paris network, she served as a postbox. She was the only person who was likely to know where her brother was and she took messages and held microfilms for the Swiss Way and for agents of the Dutch government in exile.  The Gestapo might have learned a few things from her, but they never asked.