ABSTRACT
This book deals with an understudied and often misunderstood aspect of the Shoah. The role played by local governmental and legal authorities in implementing antiJewish Decrees in Belgium has been shrouded for too long in national myth. This work seeks to explore, through archival sources and other documents, the nature and extent of local Belgian involvement in the persecution of that country’s Jewish population between 1940 and 1944. There was no directly or overtly fascist domestic, or puppet, regime in Belgium during the occupation. While the influence of collaborationist elements increased as the occupation continued, the period for implementing anti-Jewish legal measures occurred before this influence was truly significant. Local officials who assisted in implementing the anti-Jewish Decrees of the occupiers were not, for the most part, adherents of a vision of a New European Order. Most considered themselves to be Belgian patriots, serving as a buffer between the civilian population and the German occupying authority. The Jewish population of the country, however, was by and large excluded from this protection, however slight, offered by Belgian government and legal officials. The following chapters seek to explore the complex questions which surround this phenomenon characterized by officials whose self-belief was one of patriotism but whose understanding of the norms of that patriotism, of that loyalty to the Belgian nation and the Constitution, excluded any idea that anti-Jewish persecution violated any of those norms in a significant way.
