During World War II, Germany occupied Belgium from 28 May 1940, when the Belgian army surrendered to German forces, until Belgium's liberation by the Western Allies between September 1944 and February 1945. It was the second time in less than thirty years that Germany had occupied Belgium.
After the success of the invasion, a military administration was established in Belgium, bringing the territory under the direct rule of the . Thousands of Belgian soldiers were taken as prisoners of war, and many were not released until 1945. The German administration juggled competing objectives of maintaining order while extracting material from the territory for the war effort. They were assisted by the Belgian civil service, which believed that limited co-operation with the occupiers would result in the least damage to Belgian interests. Belgian Fascist parties in both Flanders and Wallonia, established before the war, collaborated much more actively with the occupiers: they helped recruit Belgians for the German army and were given more power themselves toward the end of the occupation. Food and fuel were tightly rationed, and all official news was closely censored. Belgian civilians living near possible targets such as railway junctions were in danger of Allied aerial bombing.
From 1942, the occupation became more repressive. Jews suffered systematic persecution and deportation to concentration camps. Despite vigorous protest, the Germans deported Belgian civilians to work in factories in Germany. Meanwhile, the Belgian Resistance, formed in late 1940, expanded vastly. From 1944, the SS and Nazi Party gained much greater control in Belgium, particularly after the military government was replaced in July by a Nazi civil administration, the . In September 1944, Allied forces arrived in Belgium and quickly moved across the country. That December, the territory was incorporated de jure into the Greater German Reich although its collaborationist leaders were already in exile in Germany and German control in the region was virtually non-existent. Belgium was declared fully liberated in February 1945. In total, 40,690 Belgians, over half of them Jews, were killed during the occupation, and the country's pre-war gross domestic product (GDP) was reduced by eight percent.
Background
Belgium had pursued a policy of neutrality since its independence in 1830, successfully avoiding becoming a belligerent in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). In World War I, the German Empire invaded Belgium. During the ensuing occupation, the Allies encouraged Belgian workers to resist the occupiers through non-compliance, leading to large-scale reprisals against Belgian civilians by the German army.
As political tensions escalated in the years leading to World War II, the Belgian government again announced its intention to remain neutral in the event of war in Europe. The military was reorganised into a defensive force and the country left several international military treaties it had joined in the aftermath of World War I. Construction began of defences in the east of the country. When France and Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Belgium remained strictly neutral while mobilising its reserves.
The Belgian military was already on high alert in 1940. In fact, the Belgian Army actually obtained a copy of the German attack plans in early 1940 when a Messerschmitt Bf 108 Taifun carrying secret plans for the invasion of Western Europe (Fall Gelb) was forced to land in Vucht on January 10, 1940.
During the Battle of Belgium, the Belgian army was pushed back into a pocket in the northwest of Belgium and surrendered on 28 May. The government fled to France, and later the United Kingdom, establishing an official government in exile under pre-war Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot. They were responsible for forming a small military force made up of Belgian and colonial troops, known as the Free Belgian Forces and which fought as part of the Allied forces.
Administration and governance
Shortly after the surrender of the Belgian army, the (a "Military Administration" covering Belgium and the two French departments of Nord and Pas-de-Calais) was created by the Germans with Brussels as administrative centre. Germany annexed Eupen-Malmedy, a German-speaking region that Belgium had seized after the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. The Military Government was placed under the control of General Alexander von Falkenhausen, an aristocrat and career soldier. Under von Falkenhausen's command, the German administration had two military units at its disposal: the ("Field Gendarmerie", part of the ) and the Gestapo (the "Secret State Police", part of the SS). The section of the Military Government that dealt with civil matters, the , commanded by Eggert Reeder, was responsible for all economic, social and political matters in the territory.
Before leaving the country in 1940, the Belgian government had installed a panel of senior civil-servants, the so-called "Committee of Secretaries-General", to administer the territory in the absence of elected ministers. The Germans retained the committee during the occupation; it was responsible for implementing demands made by the . The Committee hoped to stop the Germans from becoming involved in the day-to-day administration of the territory, allowing the nation to maintain a degree of autonomy. The committee also hoped to be able to prevent the implementation of more radical German policies, such as forced labour and deportation. In practice, the Committee merely enabled the Germans to implement their policies more efficiently than the Military Government could have done by force.
In July 1944, the military administration was replaced by a civilian government (), led by Josef Grohé. The territory was divided into , considerably increasing the power of the Nazi Party and SS in the territory. By 1944 the Germans were increasingly forced to share power, and day-to-day administration was increasingly delegated to Belgian civil authorities and organisations.
Leopold III
Leopold III became King of the Belgians in 1934, following the death of his father Albert I in a mountaineering accident. Leopold was one of the key exponents of Belgian political and military neutrality before the war. Under the Belgian Constitution, Leopold played an important political role, served as commander-in-chief of the military, and personally commanded the Belgian army in May 1940.
On 28 May 1940, the King surrendered to the Germans alongside his soldiers. That violated the constitution, as it contradicted the orders of his ministers, who wanted him to follow the example of the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina and flee to France or England to rally resistance. His refusal to leave Belgium undermined his political legitimacy in the eyes of many Belgians, and was viewed as a sign of his support for the new order. He was denounced by the Belgian Prime Minister, Hubert Pierlot, and declared "incompetent to reign" by the government in exile.
Leopold was keen to find an accommodation with Germany in 1940, hoping that Belgium would remain as a unified and semi-autonomous state within a German-dominated Europe. As part of this plan, in November 1940, Leopold visited Adolf Hitler, the Führer of Germany, in Berchtesgaden to ask for Belgian prisoners of war to be freed. No agreement was reached, and Leopold returned to Belgium. This fueled the belief that Leopold, who had expressed anti-Semitic views before the war, was collaborating with the Nazis rather than defending his country's interests.
For the rest of the war, Leopold was held under house-arrest in the Palace of Laeken. In 1941, while still incarcerated, he married Mary Lilian Baels, undermining his popularity with the Belgian public, which disliked Baels and considered the marriage to discredit his claim to martyr status. Despite his position, he remained prominent in the occupied territory, and coins and stamps continued to carry his portrait or monogramme. While imprisoned, he sent a letter to Hitler in 1942 credited with saving an estimated 500,000 Belgian women and children from forced deportation to munitions factories in Germany. In January 1944, Leopold was moved to Germany where he remained for the rest of the war.
Despite his position, Leopold remained a figurehead for right-wing resistance movements and Allied propaganda portrayed him as a martyr, sharing his country's fate. Attempts by the government in exile to pursue Leopold to defect to the Allied side were unsuccessful; Leopold consistently refused to publicly support the Allies, or denounce German actions such as the deportation of Belgian workers. After the war, allegations that Leopold's surrender had been an act of collaboration provoked a political crisis over whether he could return to the throne, known as the Royal Question. While a majority voted in March 1950 for Leopold's return to Belgium as king, his return in July 1950 was greeted with widespread protests in Wallonia and a general strike which turned deadly when police opened fire on protesters, killing four on 31 July. The next day Leopold announced his intention to abdicate in favour of his son, Baudouin, who took a constitutional oath before the United Chambers of the Belgian Parliament as Prince Royal on 11 August 1950. Leopold formally abdicated on 16 July 1951 and Baudouin ascended the throne and again took a constitutional oath the following day.
Life in occupied Belgium
Living standards in occupied Belgium decreased significantly from pre-war levels. Wages stagnated, while the occupying authorities tripled the amount of money in circulation, leading to rampant inflation.
The occupying authorities tightly controlled which newspapers could be published and what news they could print. Newspapers of pro-Nazi political parties continued to be printed, along with so-called "stolen" newspapers such as Le Soir or Het Laatste Nieuws, which were published by pro-German groups without their owners' permission. Despite the tight censorship and propagandist content, the circulation of these newspapers remained high, as did the sales of party newspapers such as Le Pays Réel and Volk en Staat. Many civilians listened to regular broadcasts from Britain, so-called Radio Belgique, despite being officially prohibited from December 1940.
Most Belgians continued their pre-war professions during the occupation. The Belgian cartoonist Hergé, whose work since 1928 had contributed to the popularisation of comics in Europe, completed three volumes of The Adventures of Tintin under the occupation, serialised in the pro-German newspaper .
Rationing Before the war, the Belgian government had planned an emergency system of rationing, which was implemented on the day of the German invasion. The German occupying authority used Belgium's reliance on food imports as a bargaining tool. The amount of food permitted to Belgian citizens was roughly two-thirds of that allowed to comparable German citizens, amongst the lowest in occupied Europe. On average, scarcity of food led to a loss of five to seven kilograms of weight per Belgian in 1940 alone.
A Belgian citizen was entitled to of bread each day, and of butter, sugar, meat and of potatoes each month. Later in the war, even this was not always available and many civilians survived by fishing or growing vegetables in allotments.
Because of the tight rationing, a black market in food and other consumer goods emerged. Food on the black market was extremely expensive. Prices could be 650 percent higher than in legal shops and rose constantly during the war. Because of the profits to be made, the black market spawned large and well-organised networks. Numerous members of the German administration were involved in the black market, stealing military or official supplies and reselling them.
Allied bombing