OPINION  |  HISTORY  |  BELGIUM  |  MUSEUMS

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by Roland Binet  (De Panne, Belgium)

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A few days ago I was flabbergasted when I read a news item in the FOCUS website for West-Flanders where I live. On Saturday, August 24, 2024, in Zeebrugge there had been a commemoration ceremony for the crews of two German submarines (U-5 and UC-14) sunk during World War I and just recently identified. This official commemoration ceremony took place in the presence of the German ambassador Martin Kotthaus and the Governor for West-Flanders Carl Decaluwé: “More than one hundred years ago, the crews of these two submarines died in the middle of a horrible war. I am very grateful that today we can grieve for the dead together as friends and partners,” declared the  current German ambassador.

It is perhaps interesting to remind readers that in the past Flanders had already made a wrong choice regarding the only illustration for World War I within the ‘Flemish Canon’ (see my article, “Wrong Choice for New “Flemish Canon”). On that occasion, the choice was of a statue of a grieving couple situated in the German military cemetery of Vladslo in Flanders, a couple grieving for their slain son Peter, a German soldier who had died while his regiment attacked Ypres in October 1914, just when the danger of the whole of Belgium being overrun by the German army had been at its highest.

In a war on Belgium soil that cost millions of lives among the Belgian army and civilians and the allied troops (especially those from the Commonwealth), I find this tendency to forget and forgive, to consider in fact that the German soldiers, sailors and aviators (von Richthofen) were unfortunate victims of that war of territorial conquest utterly disagreeable and unacceptable. From my reading of German authors who wrote  about the beginning of World War I as seen from the German side, I know that there had been tremendous enthusiasm among the German conscripts and volunteers: cf. for example Sturm auf die Wallonie by Reinhardt Möllmann; Ernst Jünger who began his war as an ordinary private also felt quite enthusiastic about the rightfulness of Germany’s (and Austria’s) cause for beginning the war; Käthe Kollwitz (who sculpted the statues of the ‘Grieving parents’ to be seen in the Vladslo German military cemetery) also spoke in her memoirs of the enthusiasm of her son Peter who volunteered for the war. Ludwig Renn and  E. M. Remarque, have equally described the initial enthusiasm of the Germans conscripts or volunteers.

As for World War II, let us look at the way Flanders has honored the duty of remembering the Jews living in Belgium who had been arrested and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In an old military barracks, “Kazerne Dossin” in Mechelen, in Flanders, the first Jewish detainees arrived on July 27, 1942 in what was called a “SS Sammellager für Juden.” More than 25,000 Jews and Sintis from Belgium were detained there to be sent by death trains to Auschwitz. A mere 1,250 returned alive from these ordeals.

The Dossin Barracks

Alas, the building went to ruin and the Mechelen city envisaged having it demolished. After protests, the façade was protected and in the 1980s the barracks were rebuilt as an apartment complex. Under the initiative of associations and survivors from the deportations, in 1996, in the front part of the old Dossin Barracks the “Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance” was opened. Finally, that small museum inside the old barracks site was abandoned and a new museum was built on the other side of the square. And, in 2020, a memorial was created in the front part of the original Barracks building

(details and others in this paragraph are taken from the book (in Dutch) De Kampen by Annemie Reyntjens, Borgerhoff & Lamberigts Press, p. 94)

By contrast,

the Auffanglager “Fort Breendonk” – also situated in Flanders – where around 3,600 persons were detained, tortured, compelled to work in inhuman details (half of whom did not survive, having been shot or hanged or sent to Auschwitz or other concentration camps), got the national recognition it deserved by a law in 2003, the original SS murder and detention site having been restored and kept as a memorial site in its original state

(Annemie Reyntjens in ‘De Kampen’, pp. 52-53}.

I find it unconscionable, and utterly unacceptable, that in Flanders there are acts, deeds and currents at the highest political levels of our land that tend to consider the Germans during World War I as victims of war, and, secondly, that a site that saw 26,000 Jews and  a few hundred Sintis detained before being sent to the gas chambers during World War II could not be preserved for memory. At some deeper level, these two on-the-face-of-it distinct phenomena are intricately and intimately interrelated.