German occupation of Belgium during World War II

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.

[12] 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.

[16] 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.

[17] 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.

[22] 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.

[24] 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.

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.

The Belgian cartoonist Hergé, whose work since 1928 had contributed to the popularisation of comics in Europe,[29] completed three volumes of The Adventures of Tintin under the occupation, serialised in the pro-German newspaper Le Soir.

[36] In the early years of the occupation, Allied bombing took the form of small-scale attacks on specific targets, such as the ports of Knokke and Zeebrugge, and on Luftwaffe airfields.

In a raid on the Erla Motor Works in the town of Mortsel (near Antwerp) on 5 April 1943, just two bombs dropped by the B-17 Flying Fortresses of the U.S. 8th Air Force fell on the intended target.

[44] The value of the Belgian franc was artificially suppressed, further increasing the size of the Anti-Bolshevik charge and benefitting German companies exporting to the occupied country.

[48] Galopin was the director of the Société Générale de Belgique (SGB), a company which dominated the Belgian economy and controlled almost 40 percent of the country's industrial production.

[50] The policy hoped to prevent a repeat of World War I, when the Allies had encouraged Belgian workers to passively resist the Germans by refusing to work.

[62] This policy was, in part, because there was little resistance activity and because the demands the Germans needed to place on Belgian civilians and businesses were relatively small on account of their military success.

[64] This was partly a result of the increasing demands on the German economy created by the invasion of the Soviet Union, as well as the decision to implement Nazi racial policies.

[69] The vast majority were recent immigrants to Belgium fleeing persecution in Germany and Eastern Europe and, as a result, only a small minority actually possessed Belgian citizenship.

[82] Coinciding with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 however, the Germans rounded up a large number of Communists (identified in police dossiers compiled before the war) in an operation codenamed "Summer Solstice" (Sommersonnenwende).

[83] Many important politicians who had opposed the Nazis before the war were arrested and deported to concentration camps in Germany and German-occupied Poland, as part of the Nacht und Nebel (literally "Night and Fog") decree.

Albert Guérisse (one of the leading members of the "Pat" escape line) was imprisoned at Dachau and briefly served as president of the camp's "International Prisoners' Committee" after its liberation by the United States Army.

Though allowed more freedom than other political groups, the Germans did not fully trust these organisations and, even by the end of 1941, identified them as a potential "threat to state security".

[91][92] Shortly after the occupation, VNV decided to collaborate with the Germans and soon became the biggest group in Flanders, gaining many members after Verdinaso disbanded in 1941 and after fusing with the Flemish wing of the nationwide Fascist Rex Party.

[93] There was also an organisation, the Duits-Vlaamse Arbeidsgemeenschap ("German-Flemish Work Community", known by its acronym DeVlag), which advocated Nazi-style anti-clericalism and the inclusion of Flanders into Germany itself.

[13] In turn, the VNV was important in recruiting men for a new "Flemish Legion", an infantry unit within the Wehrmacht, formed in July 1941 after the invasion of Russia.

[97] DeVlag was closely affiliated to the paramilitary Algemeene-SS Vlaanderen ("General-SS Flanders"), which was stationed in Belgium itself and involved in the so-called Antwerp Pogrom of 1941.

[98] Though both Fascist and anti-Semitic, Rex's ideology had been more closely aligned with Benito Mussolini's Partito Nazionale Fascista than with the Nazi Party before the war.

[104] Léon Degrelle, the founder and leader of Rex, offered to form a "Walloon Legion" in the Wehrmacht, but his request was denied by the Germans who questioned its feasibility.

[102][105] As part of the Flamenpolitik, the Germans refused Degrelle's demands for a "Belgian Legion", preferring to support the creation of separate linguistic units.

[83] Passive resistance, however, could also take the form of much more minor actions, such as offering one's seat in trams to Jews, which was not explicitly illegal but which subtly subverted the German-imposed order.

After fierce fighting in the areas around the landing sites, the Allies broke through the German lines and began advances toward Paris and then toward the Belgian border.

By August, the main body of the German army in Northern France (with the exception of the garrisons of fortified towns such as Dunkirk) was openly retreating eastward.