The assassination of Alexandre Galopin

On the evening of 28 February 1944, at around 8.30 p.m., four armed men came to the house of Alexandre Galopin in the Brussels municipality of Etterbeek. They fired at close range; the 64-year-old governor of the Société Générale de Belgique, the country’s largest industrial and financial holding company, was gravely wounded and bled to death in hospital a few hours later. The killers were neither uniformed Germans nor members of the Belgian resistance, but Flemish collaborators: members of a hit squad that Robert Jan Verbelen had formed from men of the pro-German DeVlag organisation and the Algemeene-SS Vlaanderen. War chronologies record the event briefly as “a Belgian industrialist murdered by Flemish paramilitaries”. That is accurate, but the “industrialist” had been the most important civilian power broker in occupied Belgium since 1940, and the attack was part of a wider campaign of counter-terror conducted with the knowledge and consent of the SS.

The engineer who became governor

Alexandre Galopin was born on 26 September 1879 in Ghent into a family of lawyers connected with Liège; his father was a professor of civil law and rector of the state university there. He qualified as an engineer in 1902, continued his training in Germany, France and England, and in 1904 joined the Fabrique Nationale d’Armes de Guerre works at Herstal. By 1913 he was its managing director. During the First World War, when almost all of Belgium was under occupation, he organised the production of rifles and ammunition in France for the Belgian and French armies; after 1918 he advised the government on rebuilding industry and was one of the Belgian experts at the Versailles negotiations.

In 1923 the governor of the Société Générale, Jean Jadot, brought him into the management of the holding company, which had been FN’s principal shareholder since 1919. Galopin reorganised the group’s coal mines in Hainaut, became vice-governor in 1932 and governor of the Société Générale in March 1935. He also sat on the board of regents of the National Bank of Belgium and was vice-chairman of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. In a country where a single holding company controlled much of the mining, steel, railway and banking sectors as well as interests in the Congo, the governor of the Société Générale carried the weight of a minister – and sometimes more.

The Galopin Committee and the “policy of the lesser evil”

In mid-May 1940, a few days after the German attack and shortly before leaving Brussels, the government of Hubert Pierlot entrusted a group of bankers and industrialists with a “mission of trust”: they were to ensure that civil servants’ salaries and social benefits continued to be paid in the occupied country and to watch over the economy. Besides Galopin, the group – soon known as the Galopin Committee – included Max-Léo Gérard of the Banque de Bruxelles, Fernand Collin of the Flemish Kredietbank and the industrialist Léon Bekaert. After the capitulation of the Belgian army on 28 May, with King Leopold III remaining in the country, Belgium was ruled by the German military administration of General Alexander von Falkenhausen, while day-to-day administration was carried on by the secretaries-general of the ministries who had stayed behind in Brussels. The Galopin Committee was not part of that apparatus, but it became its backer and adviser, and historians often call it the informal “economic government” of occupied Belgium.

The committee’s guidelines, set down in memoranda of July 1940, June 1941 and June 1942, have gone down in history as the “Galopin doctrine”. It started from the premise that producing for the enemy was in principle a punishable offence (Article 115 of the Belgian criminal code forbade it), but that shutting the factories down altogether would be worse for the country. Belgium could not feed itself, the British blockade cut it off from overseas food, and the only way to import grain was through industrial deliveries to the Reich. Idle industry would also mean mass unemployment, and the Germans might – as in 1916–1917 – deport the unemployed to work in Germany. The doctrine therefore allowed limited production for the occupier but ruled out the manufacture of arms and ammunition, required deliveries to be confined to what was necessary to feed the population, and forbade any profit motive in them. A fund set up with the consent of the Société Générale and fed by voluntary contributions (some 40 million francs was raised) also quietly financed trade unions, dismissed civil servants, universities closed by the Germans and the underground Secret Army.

This “policy of the lesser evil” did not deliver everything expected of it. The government-in-exile in London, under British pressure, clearly distanced itself from it from 1942 onwards. The Reich’s growing demands, driven by the mobilisation of the economy under Albert Speer and the labour recruitment of Fritz Sauckel, led in October 1942 to the introduction of compulsory labour in Germany for Belgians as well – precisely what the doctrine had been meant to prevent. Galopin’s sympathisers, for their part, stress that factories deliberately slowed their output and delivered poor-quality goods, and that clandestine circles were already preparing post-war reconstruction; Galopin himself attended meetings of the committee from which the Belgian social pact emerged.

Verbelen and the “counter-terror”

From 1943 occupied Belgium sank into a spiral of violence. The underground was no longer confined to the clandestine press and mockery of the occupier such as the fake Le Soir of November 1943. The resistance – from communist partisans to groups linked to the Secret Army – increasingly killed collaborators: mayors appointed by the occupier, activists of Léon Degrelle’s Walloon Rexist party and of the Flemish nationalists, informers. The response was “counter-terror”: the murder of people regarded as members of the patriotic elite, often chosen with no connection to any particular attack. On 1 February 1944 Rexists shot dead François Bovesse, a former minister of justice and governor of the province of Namur, in Namur. The killing of Galopin four weeks later was the most notorious act of this campaign.

Its Flemish executor was Robert Jan Verbelen (1911–1990), a pre-war activist of the Flemish national movement who in 1940 was among the first to join the Algemeene-SS Vlaanderen and commanded its battalion for Brabant. In 1942 he became one of the leaders of DeVlag (Deutsch-Vlämische Arbeitsgemeinschaft), the most radical of the Flemish collaborationist organisations, which recognised Hitler as its leader and demanded the incorporation of Flanders into the Reich. From late 1942 he formed squads from its members and from Flemish SS men that carried out searches, beatings and killings of opponents of Nazism. They acted in concert with Heinrich Himmler’s representative in Belgium, SS-Gruppenführer Richard Jungclaus, who in 1944 gave them formal status as the “Security Corps” (Veiligheidskorps) under Verbelen’s command.

The attack of 28 February was not the only one that night. According to CegeSoma, the Belgian research centre, and Verbelen’s biographers, his men also tried to reach another member of the Galopin Committee, Max-Léo Gérard (who was not at home), the former minister Albert Devèze, the procurator general Charles Collard de Sloovere and the former head of the Sûreté de l’État, Robert de Foy; they also attacked a police station and a café thought to be a meeting place for resisters. Galopin was the only one of the prominent targets to be killed.

Sources describe the killers’ motives differently, though the versions are not mutually exclusive. Belgian historians point out that in the eyes of the extreme Flemish collaborators Galopin embodied the patriotic, French-speaking establishment and its cautious but consistent obstruction of the Reich. Biographical studies also link the attack to Himmler’s own policy: the SS was dissatisfied with the passive resistance of the Belgian economy and sought to sideline Falkenhausen’s military administration in favour of a Nazi civil administration, and striking at the symbol of the “policy of the lesser evil” undermined the whole arrangement on which that administration rested. According to these studies, the attack took place with Himmler’s approval.

Its place in the history of the war

Galopin’s death did not change the course of the war, but it shows clearly what the occupation of Belgium had become in its final year. The German military administration, which since 1940 had preferred to govern through Belgian officials and businessmen, was losing control to the SS and the most radical collaborators. While Degrelle’s volunteers were fighting their way out of the Korsun pocket and their propaganda spoke of a “new Europe”, at home their movement and the Flemish hit squads practised ever more open terror. Verbelen personally led a raid on the police station in Forest in which three policemen were killed; his men threw grenades into cafés. In July 1944 Falkenhausen was removed, and Belgium and northern France were placed under a Reich civil commissioner. In August, in reprisal for the killing of the mayor of Charleroi, Rexists murdered 27 civilians near Courcelles. A few weeks later the Allies liberated Brussels and the perpetrators fled to Germany.

After the war the Brussels military court sentenced three of Galopin’s killers and one of those who had ordered the killing to death; the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, and the convicted men were released in 1962. Verbelen, held responsible for the deaths of more than a hundred people, was sentenced to death in absentia in 1947, but he had already escaped to Austria. There he worked under an assumed name for the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, obtained Austrian citizenship in 1959, and in 1965 was acquitted by a jury court in Vienna. He died in Vienna in 1990, never having answered for his deeds.

The dispute over Galopin himself lasted longer than the trial of his killers. In a decree of 25 May 1945 the government of Achille Van Acker adopted an interpretation of the laws on economic collaboration that in practice treated the Galopin Committee’s rules as the measure of acceptable cooperation, and in 1948 the cabinet of Paul-Henri Spaak posthumously made him a Grand Officer of the Order of the Crown. The communists, and some historians after them, saw the “Galopin doctrine” instead as a screen for big business profiting from the Reich’s war economy. Belgian historiography today regards it as a compromise of the “lesser evil” typical of occupied Western Europe: it made it possible to feed the country and delay the deportations, but it also harnessed Belgian industry to the German war machine. The man who embodied that compromise was killed not by the opponents of collaboration but by its most fanatical adherents.