Skeletons rattling in Belgian closets

LvB (in Dutch) comments on the factual knowledge (NOT!) of "cultured", "nuanced", Belgian journalists and others.

Elsewhere on the same blog, debate is taking place on the neutrality (or lack thereof) of the Belgian royal family, and the discussion slips from present-day political debate to WW II. Maverick conservative and occasional Wall Street Journal Europe contributor Paul Belien visits the blog, and comments (my edited translation):

Shall we open another stinking jar? There you go: in 1939, at the request of Davignon (Belgian ambassador in Berlin), [Paul-Henri] Spaak --- socialist minister before and after the war, yea later even NATO secretary-general --- put administrative gag orders on Belgian newspapers concerning reports about the persecution of Jews and dissenters. [...] Another one, this time not a Socialist but a [member of the] Catholic [People's Party]: After the Anschluss of Austria, then minister of Justice Charles du Bus de Warnaffe denied refuge in Belgium to Austrian Jewish refugees. On November 22, 1938, this knave said in [Parliament] that the Jews are "an exceedingly unreliable people" who "know no honor and never keep their word". [...]
But the greatest collaboration scandal [...] concern the Belgian State Security. [...] On May 10, 1940 [the day the Nazis invaded Belgium and The Netherlands, FB], the BSS had hundreds of "perils to the state" arrested, including Communists, Flemish nationalists, and especially refugees from Eastern Europe. The majority of [the latter] are Jews. In Antwerp alone [Belien asserts, FB] we're talking about 3000 people, nearly all German and Eastern European Jews, plus some 400 non-Jewish Germans and 50 Flemish nationalists [FB: Belien cites a Wehrmacht report presently said to reside in the US National Archives in Alexandria, VA] . These people were bundled off to France and locked up there. The non-Jews were later liberated by the Wehrmacht[...] the Jews later ended up in Nazi extermination camps where they died. [...]
Upon their return, the Flemish nationalists filed a complaint against Robert De Foy, then head of the BSS. Consequently, Wehrmacht-general Eggert Reeder [the #2 in the Military Administration, FB] had De Foy arrested. He however immediately got an angry phone call from Berlin, from [none other than Nazi security overlord] Reinhard Heydrich [y"sh], head of the RSHA [FB: Reichssicherheitshauptamt or Reich High Office of Security], ordering him to release De Foy for --- listen carefully, I am quoting Reeder: 'De Foy collaborated closely with the RSHA and with Heydrich personally, to whom he passed important information'. [Belien quotes a letter from Reeder to SS-chief Himmler (y"sh) dated Dec. 20, 1943, and which is also said to be held in these archives: German Records of Alexandria 175/120]. After the war [...] De Foy [got his job back] and is even considered a hero of the Resistance because of his short imprisonment.

Belien claims Belgium is the only Western power that arrested Jews. Sadly, this is not the case: at least in Britain and Canada, German Jewish refugees were interned as possible spies. (While some of this may have been motivated by antisemitism, the idea that the Nazis might smuggle in spies under Jewish cover identities was not totally far-fetched.)

Another commenter on the blog with the amusing alias "Constantin Canaris" (the name of a 19th-century Greek naval hero, a distant ancestor of the WW2-era German counterintelligence chief Wilhelm Canaris) notes that De Foy's relationship with Heydrich is discussed in passing in a fairly well-known French-language book on Belgium in the war: "L'an 40" ("the year 1940") by José Gotovich and J.Gérard-Liébois (CRISP, 1971). The "information" was said to concern Communist activists.

Comments

[Gawain]

To be fair to Belien (I disclose an interest I both know and like the man), the jews arrested in England and Canada were not arrested qua their Jewishness, but qua their Germaness. They were arrested and interned alongside thousands of german root British and Cnadian nationals, and many british and Canadian root nationals who were percieved as possible German sympathisers.