CHAPTER 17
JEAN HENRI WEIDNER
Jean Weidner, an experienced skier, poses in the rugged mountainous terrain through which he led so many Jewish refugees to freedom in Switzerland.
(CREDIT: YAD VASHEM)
“I did what I think everyone should have done.”
ADOLF HITLER WAS jubilant. Wearing a German army uniform bedecked with his First World War Iron Cross medal, he sat opposite a line of defeated French generals in a railway car near Compiègne, France. It was the same car in which German commanders had been forced to surrender to the Allies in the First World War. France had preserved it as a museum and national historic site. Now, on June 21, 1940, Hitler required French officials to surrender on the same spot and in the same rail car where Germany had been disgraced twenty-two years earlier. “I observed his face,” wrote an observer of Hitler. “It was grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge. There was also in it, as in his springy step, a note of the triumphant conqueror, the defier of the world. There was something else—a sort of scornful, inner joy.”1
In the recent German blitzkrieg invasion of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, Hitler’s forces had defeated the Allied armies in a mere six weeks. The Maginot Line—the supposedly impregnable French defense fortification that stretched along the French-German border—had fallen easily to German paratroopers and flamethrowers, after having been rendered useless by the flanking German juggernaut attack through Belgium and Holland. British forces had been driven back to Great Britain, and the highly lauded French army had been thoroughly defeated. “Civilians and French troops, their faces distorted with terror, lay huddled in ditches, alongside hedges, and in every hollow beside the road,” German general Erwin Rommel reported. “The French troops were completely overcome by surprise at our sudden appearance, laid down their arms and marched off to the east beside our columns.”2
After the French commanders penned their names to the surrender document, Hitler had the railway car in which they had been humiliated hauled off to Berlin as a souvenir. Then, touristlike, he took a breakneck three-hour tour of Paris, the defeated French capital—a city he had dreamed of visiting as a disgruntled young artist. Now he came as a triumphant conqueror. He toured the Palais Garnier—the Parisian opera house—was driven down the Champs-Élysées, posed for a photograph at the Trocadero with the Eiffel Tower behind him, circled the Arc de Triomphe, and at Les Invalides stood solemnly above the ornate tomb of French emperor Napoléon Bonaparte. There, at the graveside of another dictator who had conquered much of Europe, Hitler proclaimed, “This is the finest moment of my life.”3
In contrast, Hitler’s conquest of France would produce the worst moments of life for countless French citizens—and would bring an end to life to more than seventy-five thousand French Jews. He ordered defeated France divided into two regions. Occupied France—which included the nation’s northern half and its Atlantic coastline—would be occupied by German troops; Vichy France, the remainder of the country, would be ruled by a puppet government from the city of Vichy. Eventually Hitler would order the entire country placed under Nazi rule. Hitler’s demands also required France to turn in all anti-Nazi refugees who had fled Greater Germany—mainly Jewish escapees. Soon after German forces were deployed to occupied France, the familiar Nazi pattern of persecution descended upon French Jews. It was executed slowly—France was a large country and Nazi resources were stretched by the demands of war—but it increased in severity, and eventually mass deportations to death camps began. Tens of thousands of French Jews fled to Vichy France, only to discover that there too they were targeted by the Nazis.4
Almost two weeks before the surrender, twenty-seven-year-old Jean Henri Weidner stood in the heart of Paris and watched a flood of panicky Parisians surging through the streets, desperately attempting to escape the advancing German army. “Everyone spoke with a kind of devastated astonishment,” a refugee later recalled. “They… headed out of Paris on foot, past the city gates, dragging their bags behind them in the dust, then into the suburbs, all the time thinking, ‘This can’t be happening! I must be dreaming!’” Days earlier many of these same people had been seated at sidewalk cafés, leisurely sipping coffee or wine, and expressing their confidence that the invincible French army would repel German forces while the enemy was still far from Paris. Then the French army collapsed and columns of German tanks rumbled toward the city, prompting the French government to go on the radio and order Paris’s two million residents to evacuate. Soon German troops were parading shoulder to shoulder beneath the Arc de Triomphe, and the Nazi swastika was flying atop the Eiffel Tower. Eventually, as France was sectioned into occupied France and Vichy France, most Parisian refugees returned home, and—like other Frenchmen—learned to make do with life under German occupation. But they were not Jews.5
After France succumbed to Nazi rule, Jean Weidner happened upon a roundup of French Jews by SS troops, and watched in horror as a black-uniformed SS officer heartlessly murdered a Jewish infant because the child would not stop crying. Nearby other SS officers laughed and joked at the incident. The shocking experience solidified Weidner’s determination to do something to rescue Jews from Nazi evil. Weidner was a devout Christian, a Seventh-Day Adventist, and the son and grandson of pastors. He was not a Christian in name only: As with other serious believers, his relationship with Jesus Christ was central to his daily existence. And he believed fervently that every Christian was obligated to oppose evil and help the helpless.6
His family was Dutch, but he had grown up in Collonges-sous-Salève, a small town at the foot of the French Prealps on the Swiss border, where his father was a professor of Greek and Latin at France’s Adventist University. The only boy among four children, he learned his way around the rugged, mountainous terrain and trails around the Salève, a four-thousand-foot-high French peak that towered over the nearby city of Geneva, Switzerland. From his parents he also learned the meaning of commitment to Christ and an appreciation for the Jewish people. “My mother and father taught us that Moses got the instruction from God that tells us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves,” he later explained. “And we also knew from the Bible that Jesus Christ, who was Himself a Jew, had said that the greatest commandment was ‘to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself.’”7
While the family was temporarily living in Switzerland during Weidner’s childhood, the Swiss government required students to attend public school on Saturday, which is observed as the Sabbath by Seventh-Day Adventists. Swiss authorities refused to grant the family a reprieve, and told Weidner’s father he would be sentenced to a day a week in jail if his children did not attend school on Saturdays. Instead of abandoning his convictions, Weidner’s father surrendered himself for jail every Saturday until the family moved across the border to France. “As a little boy,” Weidner later recounted, “that impressed me, the idea that if you believe in something that is right, you have to be able to accept the consequences of it.” Likewise, Weidner held a conviction that he was biblically and morally obligated to help Europe’s oppressed Jews.8
Tall, blond, and blue-eyed, Weidner had a soft-spoken, humble demeanor, but it concealed a bold, fierce determination. Before the war he had established a thriving textile manufacturing plant in Paris; after the German occupation, he forgot about making profits and turned to saving lives. He relocated the business to a new site in Vichy France and used it as a cover to ferry fleeing Jews out of the country. “It was very dangerous to help Jews and it was not easy because it was so difficult to travel from one place to another,” he later explained. “We had to find safe places along the way where people could sleep for one night or two and also ways to feed them. Then there were other problems: Where could we get false papers? Where could we find money to pay for papers and food? Where would we find people to help us? Could we trust the people we found?” Despite the challenges, Weidner’s escape network became so efficient that the Nazis posted a five-million-franc reward for his capture.9
One escape route moved Jews from France into neutral Spain; the other moved them via a chain of safe houses through the Prealps into Switzerland. Weidner not only directed operations, but also led many Jews to safety himself. “In setting up an escape route,” he later explained, “I tried to avoid the roads to find a passage from one side of the mountain to the other side, down the cliff. There, with the help of friends, we could watch during the night and then reach the border. We could avoid the guards, cut the barbed wire, and go into Switzerland.” He survived numerous narrow escapes. Once, while hiking toward a rendezvous with Jewish refugees, he was discovered by a patrol of German troops who pursued him with search dogs. With the hounds baying only yards behind him, he dodged German gunfire as he raced through the terrain he knew so well from his childhood. When the pursuing troops appeared to have cornered him, he disappeared down a deep mountain crevasse, climbing down a vertical cliff to safety.10
A strong, nationwide resistance movement arose in France after the German occupation, and soon Weidner’s network was also rescuing downed Allied aircraft crewmen. Many of the Jews moving through the network were from Holland, so Weidner’s escape route became known as “Dutch-Paris.” Twice Weidner was captured but escaped. He was arrested and beaten by the collaborationist Vichy police, but was released for lack of evidence. Once he jumped from a moving train to escape capture. On another occasion he swam across the Rhine river in the dark of night under machine-gun fire. At one point he was taken into custody by members of the infamous Milice française, a pro-Nazi French militia, who brutally tortured him. Praying desperately for strength, he held out without revealing the name of anyone in his network. Finally Milice officials gave up and ordered him turned over to the Gestapo. Weidner believed he would be executed within hours. However, a sympathetic Milice officer who had discovered a Bible in Weidner’s coat pocket felt moved to look the other way, allowing Weidner to climb out a prison window. He dropped three stories to the street below, somehow landed unhurt, and escaped.11
“If I have one hero, it is God.”
Eventually Weidner’s network involved more than three hundred operatives. Over the course of the German occupation, his Dutch-Paris network saved the lives of more than one thousand Jews and rescued more than one hundred Allied airmen. In February 1944, however, disaster struck. A network operative was arrested by Gestapo agents, who discovered a notebook in her possession that contained the names of several hundred people secretly working in Dutch-Paris. She had violated a life-and-death rule: All of Weidner’s agents had agreed never to write down another agent’s name. Her disobedient carelessness produced deadly consequences. More than 150 members of Dutch-Paris were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where more than forty died. Among them was Weidner’s sister Gabrielle, who was seized at a church service by Gestapo agents and later perished at Ravensbrück. Weidner, who was slated to be shot if caught, narrowly escaped capture.12
It was not such near-death moments that Weidner would remember in his old age: What haunted him most was the irrational hatred for God’s special people, the Jews, that he observed so often in the Nazis. “What I particularly remember was their voices,” he recounted decades later. “They sounded inhuman, hard. They didn’t speak like human beings, or act like human beings. They were a brutal force without brains, without thinking.” After the war Weidner was celebrated as a hero by the French, English, Belgian, and Dutch governments, but he never considered himself heroic. In Nazism he had seen firsthand the destructive power of unchecked sin in humanity, and it left him humbled. It was his salvation through Jesus Christ, he believed, that had spared him from such a slide into a heart of darkness. “During the war I did what I think everyone should have done,” he later stated. “I am nothing exceptional. If I have one hero, it is God.” At war’s end he determinedly pursued one last mission: He tracked down the young woman whose disobedience had cost the lives of his sister and so many others—and forgave her.13