Why 27 Belgian Nazi Collaborators Faced a Firing Squad: WW2 Justice JJ
17 August 1944, German-occupied Belgium. Allied forces push north from France, German troops retreat, and the Belgian Resistance grows bolder. That evening, near the industrial city of Charleroi, resistance fighters ambush a car and kill Oswald Englebin, a Belgian collaborator aligned with Nazi Germany, together with his wife and child. By dawn, reprisals will begin. Armed militias loyal to the occupiers sweep into the nearby town of Courcelles, torching houses, dragging civilians from their homes, and lining up community leaders in a cellar.
What starts that night will escalate into mass murder. By the following day, twenty-seven civilians will be executed in cold blood. This heinous act of collaborationist violence against civilians in Belgium during the Second World War will go down in history as the Courcelles massacre. However, this crime will not remain unpunished, and the main perpetrators will pay for their crimes with their own lives. The Second World War began on 1 September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. In the months that followed, Adolf Hitler turned his sights westward. On 10 May 1940,
German forces attacked Belgium, the Netherlands, and France in a coordinated campaign. Within weeks, the Netherlands had fallen, Belgium surrendered on 28 May, and by late June France too was defeated. Western Europe now lay under Hitler’s control, and Belgium was placed under a harsh German occupation. The surrender of Belgium created a power vacuum quickly filled by the German authorities. King Leopold III remained in the country under house arrest, while the Belgian government fled to London and formed a government-in-exile. A German military
administration established itself in Brussels, ruling in tandem with the Belgian civil service. From the first days of occupation, the German authorities began reshaping Belgian society. They outlawed political freedoms, censored the press, and imposed harsh restrictions. Among those most affected were the Jews of Belgium, numbering between 65,000 and 70,000. Most were immigrants or stateless refugees from Poland who had sought safety in Belgium after the First World War. Their hopes for refuge collapsed
quickly. The Germans introduced anti-Jewish ordinances, seizing businesses and property, expelling Jews from public life, and gradually isolating them from society. By mid-1942, the deportation of Jews from Belgium to Auschwitz had begun. German authorities used the Mechelen and Breendonk camps as collection centers, from which trains carried thousands eastward under the pretext of resettlement. In reality, deportation meant near-certain death. Nearly 25,000 Jews from Belgium were sent to Auschwitz. Fewer than 2,000 survived.
Families were torn apart, and communities that had once thrived in cities like Antwerp and Brussels were almost completely destroyed. Yet thousands managed to escape deportation. With the help of sympathetic neighbors, priests, and underground networks, more than 25,000 Jews went into hiding. The Belgian civilian administration refused to cooperate with deportation orders, further frustrating German efforts. Still, the scale of loss was immense, and the memory of those who disappeared remains one of the darkest chapters of the occupation.
At the same time, the occupation empowered collaborationist movements. Chief among them was the Rexist Party also known as Rex, founded in 1935 by Léon Degrelle, a charismatic but fanatical political leader. Before the war, Rex had enjoyed some electoral success, winning over 11 percent of the national vote in 1936. But by the time of the invasion, its influence had dwindled. With German support, Rex seized a new chance at power. In January 1941, Degrelle openly pledged full loyalty to Nazi Germany and the policy of collaboration. His men became indispensable
allies of the occupiers, especially in Wallonia, the French-speaking southern half of Belgium, and in Charleroi, where Rex began to install its own mayors and paramilitary militias. On 19 November 1942, Prosper Teughels, the Rexist mayor of Greater Charleroi, was gunned down by Resistance fighters. His death marked a turning point. The occupiers responded with brutality, shooting hostages at Breendonk, a former Belgian army fort near the city of Antwerp that the Germans had turned into a notorious prison and transit camp,
and tightening repression across the country. Belgium was now a divided nation: a society under German control, scarred by antisemitic persecution, threatened by collaborators, and held together only by the growing determination of the Resistance. By 1943, as German defeats mounted on the Eastern Front, the Resistance grew stronger. Rex tightened its grip on local administration in Wallonia, expanding its paramilitary units in Charleroi, a working-class city with deep socialist and communist traditions. Rex presented
itself as a bulwark against communism, echoing Nazi propaganda of a crusade against Bolshevism. Léon Degrelle left for the Eastern Front to fight with the Walloon Legion, while Victor Matthys took charge at home. In his New Year’s address of 1944, Matthys promised that Rex would personally avenge every attack on its members. His words were soon followed by violence. On 6 June 1944, under the code name Operation Overlord, US, British, and Canadian troops crossed the English Channel and began landing on the Normandy coast in France.
As Allied forces pushed forward, Resistance attacks in Belgium grew bolder. On 8 July, Léon Degrelle’s brother, Édouard, was executed by Resistance fighters in the town of Bouillon The killing sparked bloody reprisals across southern Belgium. Only weeks later, on the night of 28 July, Jules Hiernaux, director of the Labour University in Charleroi, was murdered in his home. He was targeted for his ties to the Freemasons, a group the Nazis portrayed as working hand in hand with Jews in a supposed global conspiracy. By the summer of 1944, Belgium stood on the edge
of crisis. German retreat, Resistance attacks, and Rexist vows of revenge combined to create an atmosphere of fear and anticipation. It was in this climate that events in August would erupt into one of the most infamous massacres in Belgian history. During the night of 17 August, more than twenty civilians were dragged to a requisitioned house in Courcelles, close to the place where resistance fighters ambushed a car and killed Belgian Nazi collaborator Oswald Englebin with his family. They were locked in the cellar as their
captors prepared their execution. Among them was Father Pierre Harmignie, the dean of Charleroi, known for his outspoken criticism of the Nazi occupiers. Others included lawyers, engineers, and police officers, respected figures who had served as pillars of their community. At dawn, the Rexists started the engines of their vehicles to drown out the sound of gunfire. One by one, the hostages were led outside. Father Harmignie reportedly offered comfort to the others before his death, saying: “I die, and we all die, so that peace may reign in
the world, and so that men may love one another.” Each victim was shot in the back of the head, their bodies dumped without ceremony near the spot where Englebin had fallen. Nineteen were executed this way – the single largest group of victims in the Courcelles massacre. The killings did not stop there. Later that day, Germaine Van Hoegaerden-Dewandre, president of the Charleroi Red Cross, was taken away and shot with three bullets to the back. Elisabeth De Ridder, the housekeeper of a local architect, was also murdered. In total,
twenty-seven civilians were killed in Courcelles between 17 and 18 August 1944. Amid the slaughter, two prisoners survived. Marcel Stoquart was released before the transfer, while Germaine Gobbe was spared when a Rexist cousin recognized her. For the rest, no mercy was shown. The massacre at Courcelles did not go unnoticed by the occupiers. German authorities not only tolerated the killings but actively used them for propaganda. Newspapers across Belgium declared that Englebin and his family had been murdered by so-called “terrorists” and claimed that twenty
Resistance fighters had been shot in reprisal. In reality, the victims in Courcelles were innocent civilians, chosen precisely to spread fear and strengthen collaborationist control. Entirely separately, the Germans also carried out their own reprisal, executing twenty hostages who had already been held for earlier Resistance actions. It was a brutal reminder that under occupation, both the collaborationists and the Nazis used terror as a weapon of control. Only weeks later, Allied forces liberated Belgium in September 1944. The massacre was still a fresh
memory, and the pursuit of collaborators began almost immediately. Belgian authorities launched investigations into the events at Courcelles. Out of around 150 suspected participants, 97 were identified. Eighty were captured and put on trial. On 10 November 1947, justice was carried out in the city of Charleroi in southern Belgium. Twenty-seven Rexists were executed by firing squad, including leading figures such as Victor Matthys, who had served as interim leader of the party, and Louis Collard, his successor. Joseph Pévenasse,
the regional leader and lawyer, also faced trial for his role in organizing the killings. In the years that followed, memorials to the victims were built across the region. Saint-Christophe Church in Charleroi was rebuilt as a basilica and dedicated in December 1957, with a memorial honoring Father Harmignie and the others who had died. In Courcelles itself, a monument was erected at the site where the bodies were found, and nearby streets were renamed in memory of the victims. Each year on 18 August, ceremonies are held to commemorate the massacre.
The Courcelles massacre remains one of the most infamous examples of collaborationist violence in Belgium during the Second World War. It exposed the deadly extremes of betrayal, ideology, and revenge in a country already scarred by occupation, repression, and the Holocaust. Thanks for watching the World History Channel. Be sure to like and subscribe and click the bell notification icon so you don’t miss our next episodes. We thank you and we’ll see you next time on the channel.