Although it would most probably be a serious misfortune to get involved with a corrupt police agent or civil servant today, it could have been a saving stroke of good luck during the second world war. On occasion, the corruption could be leveraged into escape.

For instance, there was a young teacher who lived in Hilvarenbeek on the Dutch/Belgian border who spent most of the war guiding desperate Jews from Amsterdam to Brussels. We’ll call him Mr Vos. In a 1994 interview, Vos said that there was only one time he was truly afraid.  He had just crossed the Dutch border when a German rose up behind him and called him back. The German didn’t accept his long story about a sick Belgian grandmother and told him to “mitkommen” (come with him) to the command post.

The soldier didn’t quite look like a “true German” (echt Duits) to Vos, so he made him an offer of “money for some schnapps”. After some negotiating and a lot of buttering-up, it worked. Vos handed over the 60 guilders he was carrying from Brussels for an illegal group in the Netherlands and walked away with a warning.

Then there’s the case of a young Dutchman who was studying at the university in Leuven in Belgium.  He also escorted people over the border to Belgium and served as the contact person between a group in Maastricht and Dutch-Paris in Brussels.  In addition, it seems, he was in charge of bribing the German judge in Maastricht to get resisters out of German custody. Apparently the price was ten kilos of coffee, the real stuff, which wasn’t easy to come by. It was a high price, but not impossible. The judge got his coffee.

Of course coffee might not be the right bribe. I have a friend whose Dutch Jewish family made their own way out of Nazi-occupied Europe in 1941 before the escape lines had been organized. My friend once asked his father how he had managed it. His father’s laconic reply: “I bribed my way across Europe with a bag of gold, a bag of diamonds and a blond baby [i.e. my friend].”

Of course there are other stories of bribes offending the official and getting the briber into more trouble. You would have had to know when to offer the diamonds and when to wield the baby. You would have had to have the good luck to run into someone who could be persuaded in the first place.

In July 1941 a young man we’ll call Frits (born 1918) left for England with a friend we’ll call Henk. They ran out of money in Valenciennes, France, and turned back to the Netherlands.

In order to support himself and his widowed mother, Frits took a job with the CCD in The Hague as a contraband food inspector. He always tried to let the individuals who were smuggling food for their own use go but cracked down on the black marketeers.

Apparently he did more than just look the other way because in May 1943 his mother (born 1900) was arrested for providing a false ID to a Jew and ration cards to about 10 Jews. The cards had actually come from Frits, but his mother took the blame and served eight months in prison, two in the notorious German prison in Scheveningen and six in the internment camp at Vught.

After her release three days before Christmas in 1943, his mother told him that she had met a woman in the prison in Scheveningen who knew an organization that helped people get to England via Spain. Frits, his mother and his friend Henk all went to visit her former prison-mate at the Volks-Universiteit in Rotterdam. On 14 February 1944 Frits, Henk and another young man had an interview with a certain Piet who took them to Brussels the next day.

They were on their way to England via Dutch-Paris.

From Brussels they traveled with a Dutch Captain and a French POW to Paris. Unfortunately in Paris Henk, the Captain and Frits’ two Dutch-Paris contacts were arrested. Frits doesn’t say what happened to the third young man or how he managed to avoid arrest. In April he travelled to Toulouse on his own, but didn’t come back into contact with Dutch-Paris until May. His new contact put him in a convoy over the Pyrenees.

He arrived in Spain on 9 May 1944 and spent the next five months in various states of arrest in Spain, Oran and Algiers before arriving in England on 21 October 1944.

The most interesting aspect of this story has to be the role of Frits’ mother. It doesn’t sound like she needed his support as much as he thought she did. After all, she was breaking the law by helping Jews and she took the punishment for his part in it as well as hers. Then she made good use of her time in prison to arrange his escape to England and got him on the road within weeks of her release. It seems unlikely that she took up her knitting after he left and quietly waited for the war to end. But the file is about him as an Engelandvaarder, not her, so we may never know.

Although Dutch-Paris was mostly in the business of rescuing people, the line did also convey information. For the most part, the information was gathered by other people skulking about the peripheries of German military installations, plying officers with wine or simply and boringly counting the number of trucks that drove by. The information, whether it be about military affairs or the state of the food supply, was written up into reports, microfilmed and then carried across the continent rolled up in hairbrushes, fountain pens and the like.

And, of course, the Dutch-Paris couriers themselves would have been good sources of information, if only about public opinion, because they relied on their powers of observation to stay alive.

But there was always the taint of rumor on any clandestine information, and sometimes it could be hard to assess. For instance, in March or April of 1944, the Dutch military attaché in Switzerland sent a letter to his British counterpart. The general was an experienced and level-headed person but he was puzzled by a report he got from a “reliable Dutchman” who had heard the same story from four different sources in four different places in southwestern France.

According to all four of these people, the Germans had put remote-controlled mines in the sea off the coast and were building large pipes down to the beaches. And according to all of them, “…the Germans intend to press glue through these pipes, by water pressure, on the beach. The landing troops running up the beach to attack, will stick in the glue……. [sic]

I do not know what to think of it,” the general continued in English, “but I do not see fit to keep it for myself. It was also told that the glue-works in Germany and the occupied countries are working with day and night shifts which could perhaps be verified.”

The story was not quite absurd enough for the general to dismiss it. After all, was it as far fetched in 1944 as the idea of self-propelled bombs making their way from the continent to England, which was actually happening in the form of V-1 and V-2 rockets? Was it harder to believe than the reports coming out of Auschwitz? If the enemy could and did do those things, why not glue up the beaches?

It is possible, of course, that the general edited the rumor before committing it to paper. It bears a striking resemblance to a persistent rumor from the First World War. In the earlier version, the Germans were said to be boiling down soldier’s corpses to make glue. In the innocence of the time, that was considered an atrocity. I would not be at all surprised if the full rumor that the reliable Dutchman heard in southern France was that in this second war the Germans were boiling down the corpses of their civilian victims in places like Auschwitz in order to make glue to stop an Allied landing. It bears the hallmark of a good rumor, the kind that travels swiftly from place to place. It fits an ancient taboo, in this case desecration of the dead, to current circumstances. It would have been one way to explain the deportations.

Of course, I don’t have a literal transcript of what the reliable Dutchman did hear from the reliable French men and women. I might be making up a rumor myself right now. All we can say for certain is that both the French and the Germans thought there might be an invasion in 1944. We can also say with confidence that not only was accurate information difficult and dangerous to relay in occupied Europe, it was hard to come by.

On 29 July 1944 the Germans executed a Frenchman we’ll call Albert for what they called terrorism and aiding and abetting the enemy.

He was certainly guilty: he’d been in charge of organizing passages to Spain for Allied airmen and resistants from November 1942 until his arrest and subsequent torture in Toulouse on 15 May 1944. He appears to have been one of Dutch-Paris’s contacts in the French Resistance for getting people over the Pyrenees.

He was not, however, a local. He’d come to the Pyrenees after escaping from a POW camp in Germany in October 1941. He and 27 other officers dug an 80 m tunnel out of Oflag IVD in Silesia and made their ways back to France from Poland. He may well have traveled along the same route as the Allied airmen he put over the mountains did. Many people who helped Allied airmen in the Netherlands and Belgium started out by helping French POWs to escape.

After all, there were millions of French POWs. Albert himself was one, an artillery officer captured at the end of May 1940.

And what was he before heading the 3eme Bureau [operations] of the French Forces of the Interior [FFI] on the frontier in the Haute-Garonne? Before being a POW? Before his second child was born less than a month before the German invasion sent him to battle?

He was a philosophy professor at a lycee [college preparatory high school] in Paris. And his superior officer in the regional FFI was a philosophy prof at the lycee in Toulouse. You never know what war will bring out of people.

While reading through all these documents in the Netherlands, Belgium and France, I’ve noticed something about the way that resisters referred to themselves during and immediately after the war. It wasn’t the same in all three countries.

In France, clandestine opposition to the German occupation was always known as la Résistance, the heroic efforts of the résistants. La Résistance translates pretty much directly into English as “The Resistance” only with a bit more élan than simple “resistance.” There’s dash, derring-do and danger wrapped up into the term, along with patriotism and heroism.

The French-speaking part of Belgium also uses the term la Résistance, but the Dutch-speaking, Flemish, part of Belgium talks about the Weerstand. Literally it means “the standing against” and has the same connotations of opposition as La Résistance.

Nowadays the Dutch usually talk about the Verzets, which gives you the same sense of standing in opposition as la Résistance or the Weerstand. There’s an added pugnaciousness in the term Verzetsstrijder, which is a “resistance fighter.” But during the war and in the years immediately following it, the Dutch talked about the Illegaliteit and the illegale werker, which is quite different. Literally they mean what they look like: the Illegality, or Unlawfulness, and the illegal, or unlawful, worker.

There’s a certain appealing matter-of-factness about this. It certainly wasn’t any less dangerous to oppose the Germans in the Netherlands than in France. You could even argue that, given the lack of natural hiding places there and the fact that the Netherlands had the least easily forged identity documents on the continent, it was more harrowing.

And yet there’s no bravado. Like the Dutch get to work digging dykes and draining polders when they need more land, they got to work to oust the foreign occupier. There was a job to be done, the “goede zaak”, literally the good business or affair, but we’d say the good fight in English, and they did it. What distinguished it from other jobs was that it was unlawful. The danger, the heroism were all just part of the work that needed to be done.

The Dutch government-in-exile in London had a problem that is today almost inconceivable: they didn’t know what was going on in the Netherlands. Nor did they have a way to communicate with the people they claimed to represent. They had to resort to clandestine means.

One such was to microfilm reports and instructions and then mail them to Switzerland, Sweden or Spain hidden in the bindings of obscure academic books. Following instructions telegrammed from London, the military attaché in, say, Bern would go to a particular Swiss bookseller and order a history of Javanese politics published in 1869 or a treatise on translating Sanskrit into Frisian. When it arrived he would slit open the cover and forward the microfilm on to London or the Netherlands.

The microfilms could also be sent by courier who carried them across the borders in fountain pens, hairbrushes, flashlights and the like. Dutch-Paris provided such a courier service for General van Tricht and Dominee Visser ‘t Hooft in Switzerland. The general trafficked in military intelligence, the pastor in civilian information.

In theory, at least, Dutch-Paris kept the information line separate from the escape line. Four couriers, including John Weidner, spent years crisscrossing France and Belgium to “loan” an acquaintance a fountain pen or flashlight in cafés in Brussels and Toulouse. In practice, the lines merged.

For instance, Dutch-Paris couriers did not regularly climb the Pyrenees to deliver microfilms to the Dutch consulate in Barcelona. They gave Engelandvaarders who were about to cross the mountains as part of their journey to England the “objects” with instructions to deliver them to the consul.

But any Spanish, Swiss, French, Belgian or Dutch customs agent or police officer with an eye for suspicious travelers, not to mention Germans, could wreck the delivery by confiscating the “object” and/or arresting the courier. The Spanish, for instance, routinely seized flashlights and razors. Engelandvaarders were instructed to try to mail them to the consul in Barcelona before turning themselves in to the Guardia Civil.

The men waiting for the microfilms in Bern, Madrid and London had some particularly anxious weeks in February and March 1944 when they were trying to establish a new code for telegrams between Bern and Madrid. Part of the code was sent via an agent who worked for Dutch intelligence in Madrid and who hurt his back in the mountains. He arrived, but only after several weeks’ delay. Madrid sent the other part via a French agent who was supposed to hand it over to John Weidner in Paris. The French courier was arrested and Weidner disappeared after the apparently unrelated arrest of his sister in Paris. It turned out that Weidner’s other sister took the codes to Bern, but gave them to the pastor rather than the general.

Then in May the French pro-Nazi Milice arrested Weidner in Toulouse because he looked like a communist on the most-wanted list. Weidner got away by jumping out the prison window, but the Milice got some of the microfilms he had been carrying.

This was too much for our man in Madrid. He proposed a new channel of communication after it became possible to send food packages from Spain to Switzerland. First he removed the top of a can of sardines and thoroughly washed it out. Then he soldered on a false bottom covering microfilms and declared it ready to mail. He sent four tins of Spanish sardines to London so they could prepare their own.

But he thought this up in July 1944, just before the liberation of southern France when more normal means of communication opened up behind the Allied lines. So the sardines never got the chance to serve in Her Majesty’s secret service.

Engelandvaarders were Dutch men and women who made a clandestine journey to England in order to join the Allied militaries or serve the Dutch government-in-exile.

On 23 November 1943, two plain clothes German policemen arrested a Dutch banker in the train station in Antwerp, Belgium. The banker sat in a prison in Belgium for three months without being interviewed, was then transferred to an internment camp in the Netherlands where he was interviewed in an almost gentlemanly manner and then deported into the concentration camp system. The English liberated him from Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.

The Dutch banker, we’ll call him Jan, managed a branch office in Brussels. He appears to have been very busy transferring and exchanging money for the Dutch Resistance. For instance, the Hervormde Kerk sent 80,000 guilders to its pastor in Brussels for the support of Dutch refugees through our man, who converted it into Belgian francs. He was, then, under suspicion by the Deviezen Schutz Kommando (DSK) for contravening their laws about money.

But he was arrested as part of the “roll-up” of a pilot escape line run by a dangerously chatty Dutchman from the Hague who had completely fallen for the false assurances of a Dutch Vertrauens-mann [loosely translated from the German as "person of trust"]. The V men and women were traitors who worked for the Germans as agents provocateur. This particular V-mann called himself van den Berg and worked for the Abwehr by infiltrating Dutch resistance networks. He was very good at it.

Interestingly, after Jan’s arrest in Antwerp, van den Berg made a tour of his friends. He told the manager of Jan’s bank in Breda that he knew the German in charge of Jan’s case and could bribe Jan out of prison with enough cash. He told the same story to a couple who smuggled downed airmen over the Dutch/Belgian border.

When the Dutch were collecting depositions about a different V-mann in 1948, the banker in Breda told them that van den Berg had showed up at his office one day with the news that Jan had been arrested. He told him so many details of Jan’s resistance work, that he trusted him. Van den Berg asked him for 50,000 Belgian francs to get Jan out of prison. He didn’t have any francs, so he gave him 6,000 Dutch guilders. He never saw either van den Berg or the money again and, “naturally”, nothing came of the attempt to free Jan.

The second V-mann said that van den Berg told the couple on the border that he was asking everyone to contribute to the bribe to free Jan so that the financial burden wouldn’t fall too heavily on any one person. The husband was willing to help, but the wife refused on the grounds that she didn’t trust van den Berg.

Van den Berg, of course, gave a different version of the story. According to him, he like Jan so much that he had protested the arrest, about which he knew nothing in advance. He made a deal with another German to get Jan out and went to raise the money amongst Jan’s friends. But, he says, the banker in Breda must have talked even though he told him not to, because van den Berg was called in by his superiors and required to turn over the 6,000 guilders.

Jan himself said that van den Berg called him in Brussels to ask for a meeting in Antwerp. Over lunch he asked him to take a particular train back so they could ride together. As he entered the station, he was arrested and was sure that he had been betrayed by van den Berg. He didn’t mention any rescue attempts.

Van den Berg’s story about wanting to buy Jan out of prison out of the kindness of his heart is hardly credible. But you have to wonder, why was he collecting this money? If he’d been ordered to do so, why not just blame it on his superiors as he does everything else? Even in 1948 he sounds bitter about losing the 6,000 guilders to his German superior.

I suspect that he was doing a little business for himself on the side with every intention of pocketing whatever money he could raise. After all, to whom are resisters going to complain that their attempts to free a resister went wrong? The German authorities?

It’s just another example of the greed that drove so much cruelty during the war, a relatively innocuous one at that.

Just because dossiers on resisters are now available, doesn’t mean that the dossiers have more information than a name and date of birth (sometimes not even that). But sometimes you can piece together a portrait out of bits from different archives.

Take the example of Dr. Dreyfus. I first came across the name in the Dutch Nationaal Archief on a list written by John Weidner. That’s all it said: Dr Dreyfus, a known colleague of Dutch-Paris.

Now that’s really not enough information. For one thing, was this Dreyfus French, Belgian or Dutch? Dreyfus is a fairly common name. To figure out which Dreyfus you need at least a first initial and preferably the full name and birth date. And then, of course, you’d like to know what it was that he did for Dutch-Paris.

I found him again in the files of the Dutch Embassy in Paris. I now knew that the doctor had received a posthumous medal from the Queen in 1950. Interesting. Did he die in a concentration camp like so many other members of Dutch-Paris? No, it turns out that he died in the Pyrenees sometime in the winter of 1942. A further document said that he was looking for a route over the Pyrenees for Dutch-Paris.

Then I found him at the Bureau Resistance at the French defense archives in Vincennes. Now I know his first name and birth date (1901). From the general dossier on Dutch-Paris that holds the official membership lists, I know that he officially began working for Dutch-Paris in June 1942 and the Spanish authorities issued a death certificate for him on 23 May 1943. So maybe he didn’t die in the mountains, but after he made it over them.

There was more than simply an information card in the doctor’s personal file because his widow needed to correspond with the Bureau Resistance regarding a pension for herself and her two young daughters. Here I discovered that he was carrying a large sum of money at his death that was never recovered and that he was crossing the Pyrenees to either find a route for Dutch-Paris or join de Gaulle.

So now we know that Dr Dreyfus was in his early 40’s; that he was married with young children; that he escorted refugees across France and that he died in Spain. There’s still no indication of how he got involved with Dutch-Paris, but the picture is beginning to fill out.

Back at the Dutch Nationaal Archief, I was looking through the dossiers on Dutch citizens who died in France during the war. There was a letter to the Dutch embassy from a Parisian surgeon regarding the effects of a young Dutchman who died in the Pyrenees around Christmas 1942 in the company of the surgeon’s friend Dr. Dreyfus. The embassy retrieved the effects from the Spanish consulate and initiated an investigation into the death of the Dutchman, which includes a police interview with another young Dutchman living in Amsterdam after the war.

From that police interview I know that four young Dutchmen had met through the Dutch consul in Perpignan. They left for the Pyrenees in the week before Christmas 1942 in the company of 4 Frenchmen and a guide. The guide left them at the Spanish border, where they parted company in a heavy snowstorm. Three of the Dutchmen later met up in Madrid. I don’t know about the Frenchmen, but one of them froze to death in that snowstorm with a young Dutchman. Their bodies and their identification cards were found in the spring and buried on 23 May 1943, the date on the death certificate.

But why was a 41 year old physician escorting refugees across France instead of seeing patients at his office?  Given his parents’ names, he was most probably Jewish, at least according to the Nazi racial laws.  The French were rounding up the Jews of Paris and deporting them to Germany in 1942.  So we can speculate that the Doctor, his wife and young children met up with John Weidner either in an internment camp or while trying to avoid one.   Weidner probably found a safe haven for the family.  And then, rather than stay in hiding, the doctor joined Dutch-Paris.  His wife and daughters survived the war.

And that is how, piece by piece, you reconstruct the story of the Resistance.

Historical research is a little like hunting. You need to know what kinds of tracks your quarry leaves; it always helps to have a local guide, and timing makes all the difference.

For the most part historians follow paper trails, so we have to think about who would have written about our subjects and why. For instance, the men who wrote the Treaty of Versailles wrote all sorts of official memos, reports and proclamations that were diligently preserved by their governments. It’s a matter of notorious common sense, however, that resisters did not write things down and that the Gestapo burned their files.

But it turns out that common sense is wrong. Resisters didn’t write down much during the war, but they did generate a good deal of documentation after the war. Broadly speaking, it falls into two categories: investigations conducted by government agencies and applications for benefits. The American and British militaries, for instance, wanted to know who had helped allied airmen in order to reward those helpers. The French army wanted to know what had gone on in France during the war for reasons of internal security. They all detailed men to find and interview resisters immediately after the war and then they filed away their reports.

In the following decades, many resisters applied for one government pension or another. One needed to prove one’s bona fides as a resister to get such benefits so the dossiers often (although, maddeningly, not always) include at least some information about Resistance activity. Now, I’m not one to wish bureaucratic hassles on anyone, least of all the survivor of a concentration camp, but as an historian I have to say that troubles with bureaucrats create a lot of documents. For instance, a French woman who served as a courier in Dutch-Paris encountered difficulties because she missed the deadline for the medical care that she desperately needed after returning from Ravensbruck. Her application led to a police investigation including interviews of witnesses and more details than most such dossiers. (It turned out well: she got the medical care and I got the information.)

But even if you know who was writing about your historical quarry, it’s not always clear where the documents would be. That’s where a local guide becomes invaluable. I’ve recently had the great good fortune to have the help of Capitaine Stéphane Longuet of the Service historique de la Défense, Bureau Résistance in Vincennes, outside of Paris. He and his very friendly staff not only allowed me to see over a hundred personal dossiers but found other files for me that I would never have found on my own simply because I did not know that certain military agencies had made these particular investigations in the late 1940s. My most sincere thanks to them for their generous assistance.

One set of files that the Capitaine called out of the labyrinths of the army’s archives particularly illustrates the importance of timing. They came from a counter-espionage agency and involved a German spy from the Abwehr. Thanks to the lapse of time and the French archival law of 2008, I’m the first researcher to see them. Even five years ago I never would have even known that they exist. I almost didn’t mind that they didn’t have what I was looking for, it was so thrilling just to see them.

I’ve come to Paris to try to figure out how it came about that over one hundred members of Dutch-Paris were arrested in February and March of 1944, many of them later dying in the concentration camps. John Henry Weidner was more than a little interested in the question himself, and, as a Captain in the Dutch Security Services, in a position to investigate it just after the war.

The original arrest in a long “roll-up” of arrests, happened on 11 February 1944 in Paris when French police arrested a young courier who we’ll call Erna (b. 1921). After her return from Ravensbruck in 1945, she confessed to having told the Germans everything they wanted to know after they tortured her and threatened her father.

I spent a day at the archives of the police looking at the purge dossiers of three officers involved in Erna’s arrest. I can’t say that I learnt very much from them except that they arrested her, which I already knew. She says they arrested her because she had a large bag of food, too much given the current rations. They say they arrested her because she had a false ID, but Dutch-Paris IDs were usually quite good. It’s possible that they arrested her because they suspected her of being Jewish, but that wouldn’t have been something they would have volunteered in a purge hearing.

One thing they all agree on is that the French police arrested Erna in the café l’Arc en Ciel (Rainbow) on the Places des Fetes in a northeastern arrondissement of Paris. After that the only clear detail is that Germans in civilian clothes removed her from the police station.

There followed various forms of “persuasion”; arrests in Paris, Lyon, Annecy and Brussels; deportations, and far too many deaths in the concentration camps.

But how did the Germans know that this young woman had been arrested, apparently by chance? How much did the Germans know about Dutch-Paris and when did they know it? Despite his friendly relations with the Dutch, Belgian, French, British and American police services, John Weidner never succeeded in seeing any German documents regarding the destruction of his network.

Of course, the Gestapo notoriously consigned their files to a bonfire before retreating from Paris and many a filing cabinet in Germany itself was bombed to smithereens. So it’s proving a little difficult to find the German side of the “roll-up”.

In the meantime, I took the métro to the Place des Fetes to find the café where Erna was arrested. I emerged into a the remains of a street market so all I could see were the obviously postwar apartment towers ringing the place. I made my way around the market without much hope until I rounded a corner to see in red neon letters shining against the gray day: “L’Arc en Ciel”

It’s still there: a small triangular café where two streets converge, across from the public baths and an art deco entrance to the metro.

Erna said she was there “to meet somebody.” The French police said they were there in a routine check of a café known to harbor “foreigners.” I was there in hope of a clue.

L'Arc en Ciel