We’ve been talking about how resistance networks’ inability to vet recruits and those they helped made them vulnerable. Their constant need for more help and more resources also made them vulnerable, if only because it might force them to trust someone they were not 100% sure about. This combination made resisters vulnerable to German agents, some of whom were local people in the pay of the occupation authorities and some of whom were officers of German police authorities.

The German military police, the Abwehr, took great interest in Allied activity in occupied areas including the whereabouts and evasion of downed Allied aviators. They knew that there were civilians helping such aviators to evade capture and were determined to stop it. That’s why the life expectancy of an escape line was measured in months, and not many of them.

One of these Abwehr officers hired locals to infiltrate resistance networks but also went into the field himself under the name of Eugene. He relied on his employees to make the first contact with resisters and then introduce him as another resister with access to radio contact to London and false documents.

This is how it worked in the case of Dutch-Paris. One of the line’s couriers went home to Amsterdam to visit her parents. While she was there, she went out to the Café Americain on the Leidseplein with a friend. They ran into a young Dutchman who the courier had met in Paris and knew as a resister. This resister (who died in a concentration camp) was sitting with a man who he introduced as another resister but who was actually in the pay of the Germans. That man offered to introduce her to another resister who could get her false documents.

The man with the false documents was actually the Abwehr officer Eugene, although she fell for his cover story. He did get her false documents that worked wonderfully at the border. Of course they did. They had a code on them directing border guards to immediately contact the Abwehr. Eugene showed up again in Paris and offered to exchange money for the courier. She took him up on it.
But something spooked her and she and a friend tried to get to Spain. They were arrested near the Spanish border – possibly because of the false documents she had. The courier ended up in one of the horrendous internment camps of Vichy France. No one knows how, but she escaped from there and rejoined Dutch-Paris.

She met Eugene again many months later in Gestapo HQ in Paris. He told her he’d been looking for her. The evidence suggests that the Germans lost track of her when she escaped from the internment camp and only found her again because some over-zealous and fanatical French police arrested her and turned her over to them.

So can we say that Abwehr officer Eugene was tracking Dutch-Paris through this courier? No. But once he had her in prison he took over the investigation. The first thing he did was torture the young woman. Then he set up surveillance. Two weeks later, they rounded up almost everyone involved in Dutch-Paris’s aviator escape line in Paris, Lyon, Annecy and Brussels. Why not the entire line including the “social work” of hiding Jews? Possibly because as an Abwehr officer Eugene cared about the aviator escape line rather than some Jews being smuggled into Switzlerand.

They were good at their jobs, the Abwehr. It took a lot of effort and a lot of luck for resisters to evade them.