Problems...

 

One of the lagest and most frustrating issues that many files in The Netherlands are still closed for people born after 1924.

Others require a proof of birthdate. 
Telling that my father never lied and had a very good memory, so he must have remembered his birthdate very well...  And as proof of that: the date was always on his passport! Telling that, doesn't help.

They want an official document from his birth and we have a law: De Nederlandse Archiefwet (The Dutch Archives Law) that states that official documents of birth from the civil registry will become public 100 years later. In fact, they will become public at The first workday after the year  of birth + 100.

But there are other rules and regulations and exceptions.

• In 2025 a new rule started: the 105 year rule.
  Because more people reach the age of a 100 or higher their privacy needs longer protection. So large archives, like Amsterdam have the publication date changed from after 100 years to:  after 105 years.
• When the deeds are not yet digital.
  It takes a lot of time to scan, index and putting the deeds online.
  
  In that case one can visit the archives in person.

There are options to get information when the deeds are not public yet.

• Proof that the person has died. One can use a death certificate or a personal record card of the Centre for Family history (persoonskaart van het Centrum voor Familiegeschiedenis).
  (Be aware that not all registeries know that a death certificate can overrule the 100 year law. And one can't get a personal record card without proof of death.)
• One must formulate why... It should be a legitimate interest (gerechtvaardigd belang) in the present.
  Often gynaeological research is accepted as motivation.
• Use alternative sources, like the family-weddingbooklet, birthcards and online cemetery registers

So my fathers birth certificate will be available in 2028.

So what needs to be done:

1. Request early access. The original deed is in the Regional Archives of Nijmegen.
   The reason: genealogical research (stamboomonderzoek.)
   Needed: The death certificate. (Is available).
   
   
2. Request a personal record card (persoonskaart).
   It should be available, as they had to be kept by law for everyone who died after 1939.
   It contains the exact date of birth, place of birth and names of the parents.
   Best be done at: NRO (Nationaal Register van Overledenen) of the CBG (Centrum voor Familiegeschiedenis).
   https://cbg.nl/bronnen/nationaal-register-van-overledenennro/

Note:

The National Archive got the death certificate in my first request, I motivated my request... So an exemption should have been made.
That would mean a visit to the National Archives in The Hague and see the information myself.
Or someone realizing there is only a short time to go to the first workday after the hundred years after his birth.

.

https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/onderzoeken/raadplegen-beperkt-openbaar-archief

https://regionaalarchiefnijmegen.nl/collecties/personen/persoonskaarten

https://www.wiewaswie.nl/

A double U-turn

 

Our focus had been on England.

But it didn't deliver any more information, just because we didn't have the right entrance.

Some people offered their help.
One never returned the message he wanted me to send to get him going.

I assumed others tried too.

Recently I sat down with a historian.

He said those young Dutch boys were indeed going to Canada for training.
According to him there was even a "Dutch school" (if he remembered well).

So he said me to contact the National Archives of The Netherlands again.

Even gave me the email.

I got a relatively fast reaction.

"Look on the site."

https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/onderzoeken/zoekhulpen/engelandvaarders-1940-1945

Of course I have been trying to find my father on that site.

When it was first online, and several times later.

But his name didn't pop up at all.

So I contacted Miss or Mrs. FS again.

This time she pointed out that on that same page, a few lines lower it says:

There are people, born after 1924, who are not in the searchsystem for privacy reasons.

Ofcourse I have read that before. 

But which privacy is served?

I had sent her, in the first request, a copy of the declaration of death, dated 23 september 1989.

Now I told her that his parents have died, of course.

His brothers and sister don't live anymore.

Nor does my own sister.

So what is going on?

Asked her to explain the privacy part if she still doesn't want to look things up.

Waiting for an answer.

But the U-turned seemed not to be far enough...

One can go into local archives to find out who lived at the house-address during the war.
It was noted by the Germans when a person didn't live there anymore.
So we can get an idea of when he disappeared...

I've sent the local archives a mail to look that up.

Waiting for an answer.

The email I got was false or too old.

https://regionaalarchiefnijmegen.nl/praktische-informatie/archieven-inzien

So this too has been monitized!

So someone has to go there and look up:

De woningkaart van de Elzenstraat 25 en/of de gezinskaart van de familie Geertsen uit de periode 1940-1945 en 1945-1950. (Daarna Hengstdalseweg 116).

Om te achterhalen wanneer hij destijds officieel door de gemeente is uitgeschreven (of als 'V.O.W.' is aangemerkt) en wanneer hij na de bevrijding weer op dit adres is ingeschreven. (Of op het volgende woonadres van zijn vader en moeder Hengstdalseweg 116.)

Translation: Look up who were registered at that address during that time. To see if they have removed his name from the list of inhabitants or registered as Left, destination unknown.

Lesson learned:
First research a site before asking for information. It might cost you a fortune!!

We chatted a bit about common experiences in life and which one I shared with my father.
So I said I worked at the same national organisation: The PTT. (The national post telephone and telegraph company.) But at different jobs and different places.

Turned out that when returning from England, those young men were wanted for their technical skills an knowledge.
But before they got the job they went through a very thorough examination of their past.

So there are files about that.
In most cases they had also to answer questions about how they got in England.
And of course about their schooling.

Their archives are not subject to the enormously strict privacy rules.

So......


That's a u-turn back to his parental house, and right opposite to his job after he returned.

.

.

Cardington

 

Dad didn't say much about Cardington.
But he mentioned doing a lot of sports, and that he enjoyed being part of a team and learning about sports he had never played before. I assumed he meant cricket.

I saw photos of him in a football team, which might have been in Cardington.

Between his photos there were also some taken before the main "sheds" and between the barracks.

Seen photos with W/Cdr A A Fraser-Harris, Station Officer. One with my father sitting relaxed beside him.

Often online photos are too small to identify someone. Such a pity!

He regularly told that some stations were camouflaged, so the germans wouldn't recognise them. That might have been Cardington too. He was never able to suppress a grin when he was telling about that.

As a child I played with the boys in the woods and his story inspired us to camouflage our huts so the planes couldn't see us.
Not realising they wouldn't be able to see us anyway, because of the huge trees above us. LOL!

He taught me a lot about airships like Zeppelins.  He must have learned that at Cardington.
My gram told me about seeing  'Graf Zeppelin' flying above our town in 1929.
So she enjoyed my fathers stories as much as I did.
I used his drawings and teachings for a presentation at school.

On his records:

Unit From/Unit To2 RC = No. 2 Recruits’ Centre, RAF Station Cardington, Bedfordshire.

https://bedsarchives.bedford.gov.uk/CommunityHistories/Shortstown/RAFCardington.aspx

Short story of the history of the base.

-=-=-=-

https://www.rafcardington.org.uk/

A page about the Dutch:
https://www.rafcardington.org.uk/DutchAirForce

The site offers photos, some short stories and an insight in the training the young recruits got.
Interesting is that also the staff is mentioned.

-=-=-=-

More History:

https://bedsarchives.bedford.gov.uk/CommunityHistories/Shortstown/RAFCardington.aspx

Peiter J Huijskens book about Cardington

*_*_*

To-do:

https://uk.forceswarrecords.com/unit/131552/raf-cardington

https://www.wartimememoriesproject.com/ww2/airfields/airfield.php?pid=2346

Sturtivant, Ray; Hamlin, John (2007). Royal Air Force flying training and support units since 1912. Tonbridge, UK: Air-Britain (Historians). ISBN 978-0851-3036-59.

Royal Patriotic School

The Royal Patriotic School was built as the Royal Victoria Patriotic School at Trinity Road in 1859.

It was first used as a home for girls who were orphaned in the Crimean War.
During WW1 it was used by the Royal Army Medical Corps to treat military casualties. About 1800 soldiers were treated in the building or the surrounding marquees.

After WW1 it became a girl's school, until 1939. Then they were all evacuated to Wales.

During WW2 it was the London Reception Centre, where 38.000 people who arrived from occupied Europe were questioned to gather intelligence and filter out the spies. 50 spies were identified.  300 faced longer detention for further interrogation. The centre was run by MI5 and MI6.

Intelligence personel worked there, including Colonel Oreste Pinto.
He was born in Amtserdam, studied in France. He was what the Dutch called: a lamnguage-miracle.
In 1913 he as recruited by the French and he worked as a spy.
Before WW2 he was requested to work for MI5, but he stayed independent, because he didn't want to loose Dutch citizenship. He became a counterintelligence officer.
At the centre he interrogated more than 30.000 people, and became famous for identifying 8 spies.
His most famous: the pursuit and arrest of Christiaan Lindemans, known as "King Kong," He was a Dutch resistance member who became a double agent working for German intelligence. Lindemans has been linked to the failure of the intelligence preceding Operation Market Garden at Arnhem.


Because most people arriving from occupied Europe were genuine refugees the approach of them was different from the usual way of dealing with potential spies.
Upon arrival people were never placed with those of their own country, language or group. So they couldn't construct stories or false identities.
They were first interrogted by a socalled "breaker", who would try to break through suspicious cover stories, and worked through the facts and personality. Until the decision was mde the refugee was safe or cooperative.
Then an investigator would try to gather as much local intelligence as possible. One of the methods was
Exhaustive Chronological Mapping, by which escape journeys needed to be recounted step-by-step., asking for micro-details: exact dates, names of streets, shops, cafes, colours of train tickets, the landscape, names, etc etc..

Another method was the Cross-Ruff Method. When escaped in a group, all members were immediately seperated, and interrogated. Even minor discrepancies, for instance in timelines, would be investigated. At times a person would be challenged by being told another group member had told a different story.

MI5 used highly specialised and knowledgeable personel. They knew regional dialects, the local social scene and habits, landmarks and other pecuiarities. And of course Nazi bureaucracy.

Soon after the first refugees had been seen it was clear that they could provide a lot of information about the local situations. Locations of factories, railwaystations and schedules, schools and shelters, places where Nazis were, impacts of bombing raids, and also movements of troops and defenses, even troop morale. Information also enabled to locate resistance groups, and check previous or otherwise gathered information.


The unmasked spies were immediately transferred to a high-seurity detention centre like Latchmere House/Camp 020 where they were interrogated less friendly. After conviction execution could follow. 15 enemy spies, indetified at the centre, faced that fate at Wandsworth prison.

My father told about going to a kind of school where he was interrogated.
He might not have been very awestruck by the building, as we have schools looking like these in our city.
I could feel the interrogation had made quite an impression on him, even though he never said anything specific about it.

Looking back, I think he has been able to give a lot of information about our city and the surrounding areas.

https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C137310

High Wycombe

Dad didn't tell much what he did in High Wycombe.
Probably because he had sworn secrecy and he took his oath very serious.

The only things he told me ware personal things.

LIke that he had a good stay at the place of a widow and her daughter Lillian.
Lillian went later to Rhodesia with her husband.

He always said he was very decisive in choosing for the RAF and not the Dutch squadrons.

So he must have been taking part of the pre-training program of the RAF.

High Wycombe had a very active local ATC unit.
ATC: The Air Training Corps, often called the "Air Cadets"
It gave boys aged 15 to 18 a direct pathway into the RAF.
They wore modified RAF uniforms, took classes in navigation, aircraft recognition, and radio communication, and did physical training.
They met in town halls, schools, or local bases. 
The boys were billeted with local families, placed by the British Government, paid by the Dutch Government. There they could get rest after their escape and interrogation, learn the language and habits of their new country, and prepare for the RAF.

High Wycombe was the absolute nerve center of RAF Bomber Command. 
Because of this, the town was flooded with young personnel, trainees, and administrative staff.
The RAF ran university short courses and preparatory academic schemes for young men who showed high aptitude for pilot, navigator, or technical training but were too young.
He has probably learned there aircraft recognition, morse code and aviation mathematics.

He had a booklet with silhouettes of planes, and he knew them all.
He enjoyed teaching me how to recognise planes in the sky: the spitfire was the easiest for a 4 year old.

When I was a bit older he taught me morse code.
We had fun when we were at grams to tap the wooden arms of the chairs to talk to each other, until gram told us to stop with a huge smile.

_*_*_

I have been talking with Tony Iveson and he knew my father in WW2.
They might have met in High Wycombe. 
Or maybe later.

During the war southern Rhodesia hosted the Rhodesian Air Training Group, a network of flying schools part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
Thousands of RAF personnel, including instructors, ground crews, new wives were send there because Great Britain was too dangerous and crowded for new pilots to train safely.
So Lillian's husband might have been in the RAF, or attached to the aviation industry, or maybe Lillian herself.



.

Requested:

Information at the archives by mail.




https://www.facebook.com/GBCNewsroom/posts/raf-gibraltar-says-its-extremely-proud-of-its-association-with-one-of-the-most-c/796636782463301/

Escape

 
My father left because the germans were looking for him and maybe because an uncle, a priest, was betrayed and shot by the germans in 1942 because he didn't give them any information.

When dad left he didn't say anything at home.
And he never said a word about how he reached England. 

On one of our travels we stopped in Paris for a few hours.
None had ever been there, hadn' t seen a map, and it was pre-Google.
We were walking at Place du Tertre and he knew his way to the steps, small alleys, etc. There were no signs.
How could he know?

He never anwered that question.
"Sometimes people have a feel for a city."
We never returned, he never had any interest to go there any more.

I have been told he might have taken the southern route.
The time he arrived in England fits with this route.

As he had his own resistance contacts it must have been easy to arrange an escape to Belgium. Guided by someone of the underground Dutch-Paris escape line or another group of contacts.
There he must have been put on a train, and smuggled across the Belgian border into France.

On his way he would have been prepared with precise, strict oral instructions, with brief glaces on maps.
He would have known exactly what to do, which turn to take without any hesitation.
He looked a bit French, with his hair very curly, black, longer in the front, so easy to hide his eyes and look just shy. Perfect not to draw attention of the german Gestapo or French police.

Paris was the nerve center of escape networks.
There were lots of hiding places, for instance in appartments. During the stay dad would have had instructions how to behave in the city, navigate between trainstations or metro lines blindy. He'd probably had at last one change of guides, and he had to wait for forged travel permits, so he also had time to learn some language.

When we were in France, dad would never say a word in public. He gave us instructions what to do. Even at the bakery he'd rather have us stumble over out tongue to ask for bread, than help us with the language.
Internalised during ww2?

From Paris he would have traveled south to Toulouse or Perpignan, assisted by the French-Spanish escape line network.

Then he would have made his way by foot over the Pyrenees.

Almost all Engelandvaarders who crossed the border into Spain were arrested by the Spanish Civil Guard.
Many were sent to the Miranda de Ebro concentration camp.
The Dutch government-in-exile would have negotiated their release and then they were sent to Lisbon or Gibaltar, from where they were brough to England by ship of plane.

There he would have been taken to the London Reception Centre, where he would have been interrogated about the route, about facts, people, what he saw, etc etc.
This is in a file, containing his original passport photo from the war, transcripts of the interviews, the exact routemap of his escape.

It should be in the Dutch National Archives. (Nationaal Archief)

_*_*_*_*_*_

A request has been sent (with death certificate) ... was bounced back..."Look for yourself online"  ... requested again ... bounced back referring to the Law of not giving out information of people born later than 1924 ... requested again, referring to the already sent death certificate and diving deeper into the fact that his family has died, my sister has died, and the reasons why I need this information...
Waiting for a reply...

And now?

 

So we now have some info about his time in England.

But still nothing from the archives about the time between his arrival and officially joining the RAF.

He arrived probably during the winter of 1942-1943.

He was interviewed and his choice was joining the RAF, even though he was far too young.

He might have lied about his age, as so many did during the time.

We have proof he went to Nova Scotia as part of the MOD trainigsprogram, and arrived in spring 1943.

Did he take part in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan?

He had a badge of wireless operator and I have seen photos of him in uniform using wireless equipment during WW2.
After the war he got a job without any problems, even though he had no Dutch diploma. He became a kind of wireless operator at the National Post, Telegraph and Telephone company.

Before or right after going to Nova Scotia he lived a while in High Wycombe. working at a military base, staying with a widow and her daughter, with whom he kept in contact for a long, long time.

So there is still a lot to find out.