The closure of the Free University of Brussels

At about ten in the morning on 25 November 1941 students of the Free University of Brussels heard a brief announcement: “Owing to the difficulties that have arisen between the University and the occupying authority, the Board of Governors has decided to suspend teaching on 25 November at 10 o’clock.” The decision had been taken unanimously the day before and kept secret until the last moment, so the surprise was complete. The university, which for a year and a half had tried to carry on under occupation, preferred to stop teaching rather than accept professors appointed by the Germans.

The university is said to have been closed “on the orders of the occupying authorities” – that is how some accounts describe it – but the university’s archives and Belgian research tell a different story: teaching was suspended by the Board of Governors itself, as a protest. Over the following months the Germans tried to get lectures resumed, and they formally closed the university only in August 1942, when their efforts had failed.

A university of free thought

The university was founded in 1834 by liberals grouped around the lawyer Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen and the Brussels Masonic lodges, as a counterweight to the Catholic university in Mechelen and later in Leuven (Louvain). Its motto was the principle of libre examen, free inquiry: thought must not submit to any dogma or party. This tradition shaped the university’s fate in both wars. During the first German occupation, in 1914–1918, the university held no classes, and the vice-chairman of its board, Paul Héger, said at the time that the institution “would be betraying itself” if it accepted censorship.

For the Germans it was a hostile institution. The historian Franz Petri, who was responsible for higher education in the German military administration, called it a “citadel of Masonic forces hostile to Germany” and a place where “liberalism and Marxism unite in hostility to fascism and National Socialism”.

Under German administration

After Belgium’s capitulation in May 1940 the country was placed under the German military administration of General Alexander von Falkenhausen, in which civil affairs were run by Eggert Reeder. King Leopold III remained a prisoner at Laeken, and the government moved to London. Unlike in 1914, the rectors of Belgium’s four universities decided to open their institutions so as not to surrender the education of young people to the occupier. In German-occupied Brussels teaching resumed on 12 November 1940, the day after a patriotic demonstration on the anniversary of the end of the First World War in which students took part. The Germans immediately threatened to close the university if anything of the kind happened again.

The occupier interfered more and more in the composition of the teaching staff. A German commissioner was attached to the university: first the Munich lawyer Gustav Adolf Walz, and from May 1941 Hans Peter Ipsen from Hamburg. Under an ordinance of 18 July 1940 on the abandonment of posts, the military administration removed 17 professors, and under a further one, of 19 December 1940, another 39. For a long time the university made concessions. It protested against the anti-Jewish ordinances of 28 October 1940 but complied with them: eight academic staff of Jewish origin, among them the philosopher and logician Chaïm Perelman, were removed from teaching, and the university office three times drew up a list of Jewish students.

German plans, however, went further. The military administration wanted to assign each Belgian university a new role and to remodel them in the spirit of the Reich’s ideology. The Brussels university was to be split up, and part of it turned into a full Dutch-language university. This fitted in with the policy of Hitler, who favoured the Flemings at the expense of the Walloons, and with the ambitions of the collaborationist Flemish National Union. On the other side of the language divide, Léon Degrelle’s Rex movement was counting on German favour.

The dispute over three professors

In the autumn of 1941 the Germans demanded the appointment to chairs of three Flemish nationalists, supporters of the “New Order”: Antoon Jacob, an activist from the time of the first occupation who had fled to Germany after that war and lectured in Hamburg; the historian Robert Van Roosbroeck; and the archaeologist Robert De Maeyer. Belgian historians regard all three as men of pro-Nazi views. The university refused, and its own candidates were rejected by the German commissioner. The occupier then appointed its own men, presenting the university with a fait accompli. The university office found this unacceptable, and on 24 November the Board of Governors unanimously decided to suspend teaching. In its correspondence with the Germans it explained that the university had been opened so that students could benefit from its teaching, not to serve as a cover for teaching that was not its own.

Most students, after the initial shock, supported the decision. The general assembly of student organisations endorsed it and at first urged fellow students not to enrol at other universities.

Repression and underground teaching

The Germans tried to force the professors to resume lectures. Of some 250 lecturers, only 18 agreed. In December 1941 the occupier arrested members of the Board of Governors; eight of them were held in the citadel at Huy until the spring of 1942. The university buildings were taken over by the army.

The students managed as best they could. In the academic year 1941/1942 about 600 of them enrolled at the Catholic university in Leuven, and others at Liège. Lecturers held clandestine classes in flats and schools, and laboratory work in industrial plants; examinations could be taken before a state board, the so-called central jury, some of whose members were sympathetic to the university. From January 1942 to April 1943 the City of Brussels organised public university courses, attended by many students and lecturers of the closed university, until the Germans banned them.

Some students and professors went further. In January 1942 former students of the university, led by Jean Burgers, formed a sabotage organisation, later known as Groupe G, which worked with the British Special Operations Executive. Lecturers such as Jean Lameere and Pierre Baudoux also joined it. Its most famous operation was the blowing up of high-voltage pylons on the evening of 15 January 1944, which seriously disrupted the electricity supply to industry and the railways over much of the country. Burgers, arrested in March 1944, was hanged at Buchenwald. A former medical student of the same university, Youra Livchitz, organised on 19 April 1943 the stopping of a train carrying Jews deported from Belgium to Auschwitz; according to many historians this was the only such attack on a deportation train in occupied Western Europe.

Place in the war

The closure of the Brussels university was one of the most visible acts of institutional resistance in occupied Belgium, alongside the strike at Seraing and the actions called for by Radio Belgique, broadcasting from London. Universities in other countries followed a similar path. The Germans closed Leiden University in November 1940 after a protest against the dismissal of Jewish professors, and the University of Oslo at the end of 1943. In the east the occupiers treated universities differently from the outset. In Kraków they arrested the professors, in Prague they closed the Czech universities, and in Lwów (Lviv) they shot the scholars. In the west they wanted to take universities over, not destroy them – and that is precisely what the Brussels university refused them.

The university resumed its activities after the liberation of Brussels. The academic year was formally opened on 20 November 1944, the day of its founder’s festival, and classes began on 8 January 1945. The board took action against 33 members of staff, including the 18 who had agreed to resume lecturing after November 1941. Among those dismissed was the former chairman of the Belgian Workers’ Party, Henri de Man, who in 1940 had called for acceptance of the German victory. Students suspected of collaborating with the occupier were not readmitted.