In the last post we discussed the localized fragmentation of the resistance and how there were many different rescue groups that helped fugitives get away from the Nazis. So why is it that so many people assume that if someone got from the Netherlands to Switzerland or Spain during the war they must have been helped by Dutch-Paris?

Mostly, it has to do with politics and publicity or fame. Let’s look at the politics first.

At the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union had essentially occupied Eastern Europe. For their part, Western European governments were worried about Communists taking over their own countries through the ballot box or by force as well as the possible intentions of the American Army to impose occupation governments. We’ll just focus on Western Europe in this post.

The Western European governments obviously wanted to maintain or regain their national independence, be considered part of the winning alliance and be full members of the new United Nations. Only the British could claim to have fought side by side with the Americans even though other nations had contributed small national contingents of soldiers who had made it to England. It was politically very important for them to be able to claim that they had fought on the Allied side through the national Resistance.

You can make a strong argument that there was never such a thing as a national resistance, especially in France, but at the time, in 1944-45, no one really knew what had been going on. It was easy enough to claim that the Resistance (notice the capital R) existed on the national level. This was convenient for postwar governments both when dealing with the Allies and when dealing with their own populations.

Indeed, those postwar governments used the myth of national Resistance as the basis of their own legitimacy for several decades. Such claims were shored up by the fact that to a certain extent the national governments controlled the narrative of resistance and occupation by controlling the archives. It was very difficult to access documents about the war, especially in France, until around the year 2000. This was not entirely cynical and self-serving. Collaboration during the occupation created a lot of animosity in local communities and closing the archives protected citizens from vigilante purges. Or at least it was meant to do so.

So for many decades after the war a certain narrative of Resistance held sway, namely that it was a military endeavor pursued by men. This narrative began to break down in the 1980s when historians started investigating further, although the closure of the archives limited what they could do. It took the passage of time and the disappearance of the generation most closely involved in the war to open the archives and expand the narrative.

Dutch-Paris happens to have found a place, very small and to some extraneous but still a place, in the prevailing narrative. So it’s well-known, as we’ll discuss in the next post.