[1] Dutch-Paris was a transnational resistance network composed of over 330 men, women and teenagers living in occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands as well as neutral Switzerland.
Between 1942 and 1944 they rescued approximately 3,000 people from the Nazis, mostly Jews, resisters, labor draft evaders and downed Allied aviators.
Dutch-Paris also acted as a clandestine courier service throughout western Europe for the Dutch government-in-exile, other resistance groups, churches and families.
Dutch-Paris began as separate grass-roots rescue operations in different cities during the spring and summer of 1942 when the Nazi occupation authorities started deporting Jews from the Netherlands, Belgium and France.
In Brussels, members of the Dutch expat community who were mostly businessmen and students created a Comité tot Steun voor Nederlandsche Oorlogsschlactoffers in België (Committee for the Support of Dutch War Victims in Belgium) that found hiding places for Jews and supported them with money, false documents and ration cards.
Another category of fugitives known as Engelandvaarder (Dutch men and women who made their way out of occupied Holland to England) asked the committee for help getting to Spain.
In Lyon, a Dutch expatriate named Jean Weidner and his wife, Elisabeth Cartier, created an escape line for Jews.
[5] Weidner and his lieutenants, Jacques Rens and Edmond "Moen" Chait, expanded the network through Belgium and into the Netherlands by linking up with the Comité in Brussels and Dutch resisters in Paris.
They agreed to join the new network because Weidner offered them money they sorely needed as well as a secure route for Engelandvaarders and Allied aviators to Spain.
The full escape line known as Dutch-Paris started taking fugitives from the Netherlands through Belgium and France to Spain and Switzerland in November 1943.
In February 1944, however, French police who belonged to a wartime collaborationist unit arrested a young Dutch woman who was working with Dutch-Paris as a courier and guide.
Two weeks later, German police units in Paris executed a coordinated raid on all Dutch-Paris addresses in the city associated with the aviator escape route to Spain.
Dutch-Paris was able to rebuild its networks and continue to support people in hiding, although they took many fewer fugitives to Spain after February 1944.
Separately and due to a case of mistaken identity, the French Milice (paramilitary collaborators) arrested Weidner, Rens and a courier named Paul Veerman in Toulouse in May 1944.
The Comité in Brussels was able to arrange for the resisters captured at the safe house on the rue Franklin in February 1944 to be detained in Belgium instead of being deported.
Jo Jacobstahl made connections with other resistance groups in Belgium to find Allied aviators in hiding, bring them to Brussels and prepare them for their onward journey.
Dutch-Paris hid Engelandvaarders and aviators in several places in Paris, including the basement of the physics laboratories of the École Normale Supérieure, hotels, and farms outside the city near Gazeran.
In February 1944 Austrian alpine troops surrounded a hut on the Col du Portet d'Aspet, where a Dutch-Pairs convoy of aviators and Engelandvaarders had taken shelter from a blizzard.
But the same person often acted as a courier for the microfilm and messenger along the escape routes because they did not have enough people to truly separate all of the network's tasks.
Without meaning to, they became a clandestine international courier service that carried personal letters, cash, and resistance documents such as plans of military installations and lists of the names and addresses of Jewish children hiding in Brussels.
It was also impossible for a full-time resister who was constantly engaged in the illegal work of rescue to hold down a job or stay in a permanent home.
In the meantime, Pastor Willem Visser ‘t Hooft, general secretary of the World Council of Churches in Formation, gave Weidner money and connections to help the fugitives.
The problem of converting currency into local cash for use in train stations, hotel, restaurants, cobbler shops etc, however, continued.
The resisters of Dutch-Paris came up with several ingenious schemes to move money around Europe, many of them involving their personal or business bank accounts in different countries.
[11] Dutch-Paris was a network of 330+ men, women and teenagers who lived in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Switzerland.
Most of the full-time members of the network – leaders, couriers, guides – had some personal connection to the Netherlands and spoke Dutch.