Here’s another worry that Weidner and his lieutenants faced as they tried to figure out the extent of the German roll-up of Dutch-Paris in late February 1944. Would the Germans carry out their published threat of punishing the extended families of resisters who helped Allied aviators? After all, they arrested the 14 year-old son of one resister, and the boy later reported that interrogators repeatedly demanded to know where his mother and younger sisters were hiding. They also arrested Weidner’s sister as a hostage.

Weidner tracked down the hiding place of the mother and girls to offer to take them to Switzerland. The mother declined because she felt she was too pregnant to make the journey, so Weidner gave her money to stay in hiding where they were. He also got money to the children of another Dutch-Paris man who had been arrested. It would have been consistent with his actions throughout the war for Weidner to have gotten aid to other families left in distress by the arrests, probably through intermediaries, although such assistance does not show up in the documents. Of course a lot of what Dutch-Paris did does not show up in the documents.

Did the Germans carry out the threat inherent in the policy of family responsibility? Yes and no. When they arrested a young French courier at her family home outside Paris, they also arrested her mother, who died in deportation. But when they arrested a young Dutch courier at her parents’ farm south of Paris they did not also arrest her parents. Nor did they arrest the elderly aunt of a Dutch-Paris woman in Annecy, or the school-age children of another Dutch-Paris woman whom they arrested at the same time. On the face of it, it seems that this round-up, which was being run by military policemen rather than Nazi Party policemen, did not routinely include family members. But it’s impossible to tell without the German records. Maybe the men in charge of this operation weren’t looking for family members, or maybe they just couldn’t find them.