The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (11 page)

Not all such German atrocities were provoked by re- sistance activity. On the same day, in Anhée, a small village on the left bank of the Meuse, a battalion of re- treating SS Panzer Grenadiers massacred 13 civilians, pillaged the homes of the village, and set fire to fifty- eight buildings in the town. The victims were mostly men in their sixties—one was eighty-two years old— and none of them had resistance connections of any kind. Just a few hundred yards up the road, soldiers of the 3rd Regiment, Hitlerjugend Division, crossed the Meuse between Dinant and Namur, established a

command post, and then deliberately recrossed the river again to pillage and destroy the local villages. In the small riverfront villages of Godinne, Bouillon, Hun, Warnant, and Rivière, the Germans robbed, then set ablaze, numerous homes and shot five civilians to death. Two women, Jeanne Féraille, twenty-one years old, and Elze Hubrecht, thirty-seven, both of nearby Annevoie, were repeatedly raped. Yet the Germans re- served their most vicious treatment for captured resis- tance men. On September 7, in Failon, eighteen miles east of Dinant, German soldiers arrested seven men, four of whom were civilians, three of whom were mem- bers of the local gendarmerie. The Germans considered them all likely resistance members, or “terrorists.” The prisoners were transferred to Bonsin the next morn- ing, where they were murdered. A medical examina- tion of the bodies by a local physician the following day revealed that the men had been badly beaten, tortured, and mutilated. One of the victims had his sexual organs cut off. And in December and January 1944–45, this sort of violence and atrocity started up all over again, when these same Germans returned to Belgium during their ill-fated attack in what became the Battle of the Bulge. The images so many Allied soldiers carried with them of the glory days of September have done much to cre- ate a legend about Belgium’s “easy war.” But liberation in Belgium—a prolonged, uncertain period that ran

from September 1944 until January 1945—would prove to be every bit as traumatic as in Normandy. The Bel- gians would have their war, after all.
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ITH THE DEPARTURE of the Germans in ear- ly September, Belgians and their liberators grappled with the challenge of restoring the

political order. General Eisenhower, the Supreme Al- lied Commander, appointed a Briton, Major- General George W. E. J. Erskine, to head the mission to Belgium from Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). Erskine’s appointment reflected Brit- ain’s military control of Brussels and Antwerp, while the Americans occupied southeastern Belgium, from Liège to the Ardennes. Erskine was not meant to rule with an iron fist: his job was to resurrect Belgian po- litical institutions, impose calm in the streets, and en- sure the prompt resumption of industrial production on behalf of the Allied armies. He was all too eager to delegate politics to the Belgians themselves. Yet, unlike France, where Charles de Gaulle strode forward to take up his role as the “man of destiny” at the crucial hour, Belgians lacked a national figure to whom they could turn. Belgium’s king, Leopold III, had been shamed by his wartime behavior. In May 1940, after the German

invasion and the defeat of the Belgian army, Leopold refused to leave the country (as the Dutch sovereign, Queen Wilhelmina, had done) and sued for peace with the Germans. The prime minister, Hubert Pierlot, and his cabinet decided instead to flee the country into France, and soon made their way to London, there to join other forlorn governments-in-exile that had been chased off the continent by the Nazis. King Leopold, meanwhile, remained in his sumptuous palace outside Brussels, claiming that he would share the fate of his people under German rule. He dwelt in royal comfort while the German military, along with the remarkably cooperative Belgian industrialists, bureaucrats, and administrators, ran the country. Leopold met Hitler at Berchtesgaden in November 1940, but failed to win concessions and autonomy from the German Führer; then he withdrew behind his palace walls until June 1944, when the Germans seized him and deported him to Germany, a worthless and unmissed hostage. The Al- lies therefore accorded recognition to Pierlot’s govern- ment, set its members up in a house in Eaton Square in London, and ignored them—until the swift, almost miraculously speedy, liberation of Belgium occurred, taking only a few days. On September 8, 1944, a British aircraft flew a dozen Belgian cabinet ministers, led by Pierlot, into Brussels. Upon their arrival at the Brussels airfield, no one met them at the airport. Pierlot, whom

the British ambassador said was characterized “by a certain lack of vigorous initiative,” was a man very much of the old regime: he was sixty-four years old, a twenty-year veteran of the parliament, a Catholic cen- trist, a former minister of interior and foreign affairs, and a lawyer. Upon his arrival in Brussels, he installed himself in the Ministry of the Interior, and on Septem- ber 9 he led a delegation to the World War I memorial to lay a wreath. Spectators on the streets stared mutely; there was no applause. On September 20, the brother of the king, Prince Charles, was appointed by a joint ses- sion of parliament to act as regent until the king’s fate could be determined. Pierlot resigned, only to be asked by Prince Charles to form a new government. Thus a collection of men from the prewar regime with no con- nections to the internal Belgian resistance took up the reins of power with full British support; continuity and control were the watchwords of the moment.
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Materially, Belgium in 1944 had certain advantages over France, since its infrastructure had not been se- verely damaged by the war. Though they had wrecked the telephone and telegraph exchange in Brussels, the retreating Germans had not had time to sabotage the rail and transport network. The country’s fall harvest was intact, the coal mines had not been destroyed, and even Antwerp’s port facilities had not yet been seri-

ously harmed. Even so, the large cities faced a serious bread shortage in the weeks after liberation, and con- ditions in the country worsened throughout the fall. This was chiefly due to a shortage of coal, oil, and elec- tricity to run trains, fuel trucks, and fire the bakeries. Belgium had been self-sufficient in coal before the war, but at the time of the liberation, coal production had fallen to a mere tenth of prewar production. There was a shortage of labor, since 500,000 workers had been shipped to Germany to work inside the Reich as forced labor. The train system was malfunctioning because the Germans had wrecked the telegraph network, mak- ing a shambles of the train timetables. Perhaps most important, the collapse of the German occupation had left little or no centralized Belgian bureaucracy to deal with coal transport and distribution. A good deal of the coal that was mined was sold on the black market at astronomical prices, and it was not until December that the British army agreed to place soldiers on ev- ery coal train coming out of the mines to ensure that the coal reached its assigned destination without be- ing detoured and ransacked. Belgians also had to com- pete with the Allied armies, which since November had gobbled up 900,000 tons of Belgian coal (along with tons of local vegetables, fruits, and potatoes).
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With- out reliable coal supplies for civilian consumption, the country came to a near halt. In mid- October, electricity

was shut off between 7:00 A.M. and 8:00 P.M. in an ef- fort to conserve coal; the bread lines grew. By the end of October, the temperature in the main cities among a harassed public rose to dangerous levels, and dem- onstrations began to form in front of the government offices.

To complaints about shortages, the public added criti- cism of Prime Minister Pierlot for his dilatory policy toward collaborators. The Allies estimated that some 400,000 Belgians had in some way worked for the Ger- man occupation, and the new government initially arrested as many as 60,000 people. But by the end of 1944, thousands had been released while only 495 peo- ple had been given capital sentences (mostly in absen- tia); only one senior administrator had been convicted of crimes against the state. Most received far more le- nient punishments. An astute British observer likened “the fierce and bitter hatred of collaborators” to “a reli- gious fervor,” and the press excoriated the government ministers, who had spent the war safely in London, for their failure to avenge the injustices suffered at the hands of collaborators during the war. A Belgian who had worked for the BBC in London during the war re- turned in November to find that Belgians cared more about the purges than any other issue, including food. “ Worse than anything,” he wrote of the wartime ex-

periences of his countrymen, “was the treason of the Belgians themselves,” yet these traitors now went un- punished. “Although the people will exercise great pa- tience,” he concluded, “they will never permit that the guilty should slip through the fingers of the law…. The country is beginning to ferment.”
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The food shortage and the failure of the purges pro- vided the backdrop to a major political crisis in the country in November that required the full interven- tion of the Allied military authorities. Throughout the war, Belgium had not had a large underground resis- tance, but as German labor roundups increased in in- tensity, the resistance grew. By the end of the war, there were 90,000 members of the resistance, most of them armed. The most significant groups were the Armée Se- crète, led by former officers of the Belgian army, which tended to have royalist sympathies; and the Front de l’Indépendence (FI), organized and controlled by the Belgian Communist Party. These units harassed the re- treating Germans, played a small part in the liberation of the country, and now refused to be marginalized by Pierlot’s government, which they viewed as a sad con- tinuation of the prewar gerontocracy. One British se- nior official described the resistance fighters as “a very motley array…. Members of these guerrilla forces are now to be seen in all parts of the country, bearing dis-

tinguishing armlets and carrying Sten guns, revolvers, and sometimes only knives.” They engaged in “arbitrary acts of requisition” from the civilians, and indeed were more numerous and “better armed than the Belgian police.”
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In order to protect the Belgian government and to secure public order, General Eisenhower on Oc- tober 2 ordered that the Belgian resistance groups sur- render their weapons, while he complimented them for their “devoted heroism.”
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Yet they did not readily obey. Instead, upset over the failure of the purges and spurred on by hungry, embit- tered civilians, elements of the FI arranged a serious challenge to the government. On October 21, the prime minister alerted SHAEF that he had information about a Communist uprising in the country, centered around striking miners and other disaffected laborers; SHAEF responded by swiftly arming the Belgian police with 7,500 weapons and stepping up demands for the disar- mament of the resistance. (Some of the weapons had to be parachuted into Belgium by British secret services.) General Erskine published an open letter stressing his support for Pierlot and his determination to use force to put down any political uprising. On November 25, the FI and Communist union members staged a large demonstration in Brussels and marched to government offices; when it appeared they might try to enter the

government precincts, police fired on the marchers, wounding over forty demonstrators. Three days later, tramway employees ordered a strike in Brussels and called another large demonstration that was broken up by police. But at midday, the Pierlot government was alerted to the imminent arrival in the capital of truck- loads of armed demonstrators en route from Mons. Pierlot made an official appeal to General Erskine, who called out British troops to surround the government buildings; meanwhile, Belgian police stopped the strikers before they could reach the city, and disarmed them. Pierlot later claimed to have information prov- ing that the Communists had clearly stockpiled fifteen tons of weapons and intended to seize control of the government. In the first three months of the liberation, then, food shortages had worsened, the justice system had failed to tackle the purge of collaborators, and the British army had turned the capital city into an armed camp. Belgians had precious little to show for their lib- eration.
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While politics occupied the citizens of Brussels, the realities of the war continued to weigh heavily on the residents of Antwerp and Liège. The Americans had stormed into Liège on September 7, and quickly taken over this eastern city, which sits just twenty miles from Aachen and the German border. This was a front-line

town, and the Americans demanded blackouts of all ci- vilian homes at night, reserved certain key road routes for military traffic only, and ran large convoys through the neighboring towns all day and night, endangering pedestrians. The Army naturally requisitioned proper- ty, and laid claim to any German war booty or materiel, including buildings and furniture, that had previously been used by the German occupiers. The presence of a large U.S. army in Liège made it a target for German V-1 and V-2 bombs. The Vergeltungswaffe, or “repri- sal weapon,” was a self-propelled rocket that Hitler launched against cities in Britain, France, and Belgium, starting in June 1944. These began to fall on Liège on November 19, 1944. Up to December 31, 86 V-1s and 254 V-2s fell on Liège; 231 people were killed, 365 were wounded. In January, another 49 V-1s hit Liège, kill- ing 170 persons. These attacks caused alarm and panic among civilians in the city as well as widespread dam- age to homes and public services.
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