From June 1940 onwards, a military administration under the command of Alexander von Falkenhausen and the powerful head of military administration, Eggert Reeder, was set up in Belgium. This remained in existence until June 1944. Unlike in other occupied countries, the military administration maintained its supremacy over the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office), that is over the SS and the Gestapo. It was above all concerned with the economic exploitation of Belgium and with internal security. The Sipo-SD (Security Police-Security Service) as well as the Secret Field Police and the Field Police (units of the Wehrmacht, the German Armed Forces) were subordinate to the military administration. All of these played a decisive role in the persecution, imprisonment and deportation of the Jewish population of Belgium as well as in fighting the Belgian resistance.
Belgium under the German occupation
The former Appellplatz (camp’s roll call area) within the walls of Breendonk. The prisoners were subjected to the brutal despotism and arbitrary conduct of the camp guards day and night.
© Wikimedia Commons, Author: JoJan
The Belgian Chief Rabbi Dr Salomon Ullmann was appointed President of the Association des Juifs en Belgique (AJB) by the German military administration. In September 1942, he and other high-ranking AJB employees were arrested and interned in Breendonk. After his release, which was the result of an intervention made by Belgian Catholic and political authorities, he resigned. He then lived in hiding. In August 1944, the advancing Allied troops saved him and his family from deportation.
© Collection Photothèque Musée Juif de Belgique
After the Anschluss of Austria, Jean Améry fled to Belgium via Cologne. He was arrested on 23 July 1943 while distributing anti-German leaflets in Brussels and taken to Breendonk where he was tortured.
© Klett-Cotta Publishing HouseBreendonk
Located between Brussels and Antwerp, the Breendonk fortress served as a prison from the summer of 1940. Officially it was a reception and transit camp, but the conditions were just as horrible as in a concentration camp. Breendonk was under military administration. The German SS initially took over the command and guarding of the camp, but from the autumn of 1941, a Flemish SS contingent was deployed there.
The first inmates were Jews who had violated anti-Jewish regulations. From 1942, the prisoners were mainly resistance fighters. Of the approximately 3,600 prisoners during the occupation, about 500 were Jewish. About 1,700 prisoners from Breendonk were murdered here or in concentration camps.
Breendonk was notorious for the systematic use of torture, from which hundreds died.
“Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That one’s fellow man was experienced as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules.”
(Jean Amery, Torture, P. 40 in: At the Mind’s Limits, Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1980, translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld)
Vereeniging van Joden in België/Association des Juifs en Belgique (Association of Jews in Belgium, AJB)
On 25 November 1941, the military administration issued a decree compulsorily establishing an Association of Jews in Belgium (AJB). The stipulated aim was the “emigration” of the Jews as well as the establishment and maintenance of Jewish elementary schools. All Jews in Belgium became compulsory members of the AJB and had to make financial contributions.
From July 1942, the Germans made use of the AJB in their persecution measures. In July 1942, for example, the AJB had to compile a “Jews’ Register” and from July 1942 to summer 1944 it had to submit lists of names of Jews living in Belgium. The AJB had to distribute the so-called Arbeitseinsatzbescheide, orders to report for work in Mechelen. From there, the Jews were deported. The organisation was also forced to take care of Jews who had been deported to France for forced labour, and to run homes for children and the elderly.
These homes, however, did not serve to protect the people living there. Since the names of the residents in the homes were known by the Gestapo, they could be deported at any time. Under this pressure, the directors of the homes made every effort to protect those entrusted to them. ÄW