ABSTRACT
The arrangement between the SG and the German Military Command in the fall of 1940 whereby all anti-Jewish Decrees would be German in origin and nature and would merely be implemented by Belgian official state structures had a clear effect on the operation of the Belgian legal system under occupation. Unlike their French counterparts, Belgian legal officials were never directly confronted with a domestic system of antisemitic law.1 But a combination of the mechanisms of passive collaboration and the inevitable effects of the various anti-Jewish German Decrees meant that, in some instances, Belgian lawyers and judges had to confront the new realities of the legal category Jew in their daily practices. We have already encountered instances where the dual legal system implicated Belgian state and judicial officials and lawyers in direct encounters with Nazi legal antisemitism. In this chapter I explore those cases where the Belgian legal system and its actors were even more intimately confronted with the normative effects of anti-Jewish Decrees on the Belgian juridical order. What follows is a brief history of how the Belgian legal system coped with “Jewish cases”.
