[1] Led by a Dutch Christian Joop Westerweel and Jewish German refugee Joachim Simon, the group was initiated in August 1942 and its first objective was to hide a Jewish youth group of "Palestine pioneers" whose members were ordered to be deported to the Nazi Westerbork transit camp.
[2] They were primarily young Jews from Germany and Austria who had fled to the Netherlands after 1933 where they followed an agricultural training to settle in Palestine.
When threatened with deportation, the resistance group helped them to find hiding places and some of them were brought to Spain via Belgium and France.
[4] The teenagers were split into groups throughout the Netherlands, including one in Amsterdam and one in Loosdrecht, a village in North Holland.
Part of this was a group of 22 underage German pioneers, who lived without family in the Netherlands in an Amsterdam boarding house.
One of them, the teacher Mirjam Waterman, decided to ask Joop Westerweel, a local Dutch Christian opposed to the Nazis, who agreed to undertake the mission of finding hiding places for the entire group.
[13] This was because their housing, which was temporary, required that they move frequently from one place to another, thus increasing the chances of being betrayed by locals or caught by the civilian police.
[16] Their second escape route, planned by Joachim Simon, was through Belgium to France and then to Spain over the Pyrenees mountain range.
Together with a few (former) employees of the Kinderwerkplaats, especially the Frisian socialist and conscientious objector Bouke Koning and handyman Jan Smit, a Rotterdam carpenter, Joop immediately started looking for hiding addresses for the Loosdrecht.
Bouke Koning found about a dozen of them with family and acquaintances in Friesland, Jan Smit ten with friends of the socialist youth movement AJC.
After a tip of that the Germans would bring the Loosdrechts group to Westerbork in mid-August 1942, the hiding operation, began.
The German pioneer Joachim Simon, one of the leaders in Loosdrecht, travelled to France to find an escape route.
He built a new route in which pioneers worked as workers of the Organisation Todt on the Atlantic Wall to flee to Spain from there.
At the end of 1943, at the beginning of 1944, the Germans managed to infiltrate the Westerweel group and the Armée Juive separately.
In France, the SD picked up members of the top of the Armée Juive and 'journeyleader' Kurt Reilinger and eight of his pioneer assistants.