The Courcelles massacre

At dawn on 18 August 1944, in the cellar of a terraced house in Courcelles, a working-class municipality near Charleroi, members of the collaborationist Rex party shot nineteen hostages – fifteen men and four women. It was revenge for an attack by the Belgian Resistance which the day before had killed the Rexist mayor of Greater Charleroi, Oswald Englebin, together with his wife and son. Earlier, on the afternoon of 17 August and during the night of 17–18 August, Rexists had killed another eight people in the area. The Courcelles massacre – also known as the Rognac massacre (tuerie du Rognac) – thus claimed 27 victims according to Belgian historians, and it remains the most notorious example of collaborationist terror against civilians in occupied Belgium.

The often repeated version according to which “20 civilians” died at Courcelles does not match the findings. That figure corresponds rather to a separate, “official” German reprisal: on 24 August the occupiers shot twenty hostages for Englebin’s death – prisoners held in Charleroi for possessing weapons.

Rex and occupied Belgium

Léon Degrelle’s Rex party grew out of the Catholic publishing house Christus Rex, and in 1935 it broke away from the Catholic Party as a populist anti-parliamentary movement. In the 1936 elections it won 11.5 per cent of the vote, but it then rapidly lost support and by the time of the German invasion it was a marginal group. After the surrender of the Belgian army in May 1940, the German military administration of General Alexander von Falkenhausen preferred to govern through the existing elites: officials, the secretaries-general of the ministries, industrialists and bankers. The Rexists, seeking to gain influence, tied themselves ever more closely to the occupier; in January 1941 Degrelle proclaimed that Rex and Nazism shared the same ideas, and after the attack on the USSR he left for the Eastern Front with a Walloon legion of volunteers. In his absence the party at home was increasingly run by his longest-serving associate, the journalist Victor Matthys, who in 1944 was acting leader of Rex.

From 1941 the occupiers appointed Rexists as mayors in Wallonia, especially in the industrial basin around Charleroi and La Louvière, the so-called Pays Noir. This was also a stronghold of the socialists and communists, from which a large part of the Belgian Resistance was drawn. Attacks on Rexist mayors and activists became an everyday occurrence there: on 2 July 1942 the mayor of Ransart, Jean Demaret, was killed, and on 19 November 1942 the first mayor of Greater Charleroi, Prosper Teughels. The Germans then responded for the first time with an execution of hostages announced as a reprisal: eight prisoners were shot at the fort of Breendonk.

A spiral of assassinations and “counter-terror”

After the defeat at Stalingrad, and especially after the Normandy landings, the violence escalated. The Resistance – communist partisans, socialist combat groups, units of the Secret Army – killed mayors installed by the occupier, Rexists, Flemish nationalists and informers. Rex and the Flemish collaborationist organisations responded with “counter-terror”: the killing of people regarded as leaders of the patriotic elites, often chosen without any connection to a particular attack. In February 1944 Rexists shot the former minister François Bovesse in Namur, and Flemish SS men killed the head of the Société Générale, Alexandre Galopin. Belgian historians write that by the end of the occupation Rex was embroiled in something like a local civil war.

In the summer of 1944 the Germans had fewer and fewer reasons to restrain this violence. On 18 July Falkenhausen’s military administration was replaced by a civilian Reich Commissioner, Gauleiter Josef Grohé; according to historians at CegeSoma, the new administration supported Rexist reprisals. At the same time the front in western France was collapsing: the Allies were closing the Falaise pocket, and the first columns were heading for the Seine. For the collaborators in Charleroi it was clear that the liberation of Belgium was a matter of weeks.

The ambush at the Bois du Rognac

Oswald Englebin, an industrialist born in 1893 in Seneffe, was appointed mayor of Trazegnies by the occupier in October 1941, and after Teughels’s death mayor of Greater Charleroi, the conurbation merged by the Germans; he was sworn in on 6 January 1943. In the spring of 1944 he appeared in public alongside the occupation authorities and received Degrelle, while at the same time – according to his biographers – he feared the radicals of his own party, who accused him of being “lukewarm”.

On 17 August 1944 Englebin was driving home to Trazegnies with his wife Flore and his son Philippe. On the boundary between Monceau-sur-Sambre and Courcelles, at a place called the Bois du Rognac, the car was raked with machine-gun fire. The mayor, his wife and his son were killed; only a gendarme from his escort survived. The five attackers were never identified. A secret report drawn up immediately after the attack and other circumstantial evidence point – as historians from the Belgian research centre CegeSoma cautiously put it – to partisans from the neighbouring Centre region.

The night of revenge

News of the attack quickly reached the Rex leadership in Charleroi and Brussels, which decided to avenge the mayor. According to the findings of the Belgian courts, some 150 Rexists from Charleroi and Brussels, armed members of the party’s militias, took part in the operation; the available studies do not clearly attribute the perpetrators to any one particular formation. It was directed by the party’s most senior figures: Victor Matthys, his future successor Louis Collard and the district leader, the lawyer Joseph Pévenasse.

On 17 August itself Rexists shot two men: one near the scene of the attack, the other in the headquarters of the judicial police in Charleroi, which they then set on fire. In the evening they killed three members of one family, and during the night three more people; several houses in Courcelles were set alight. That night the Rex staff decided to arrest a hundred local notables, men and women. The number was later reduced, but by morning 21 people had been detained and taken to Courcelles, to a requisitioned house in a row of workers’ cottages not far from the scene of the attack.

At dawn on 18 August, in the cellar of this house, Rexists shot nineteen of them. The victims were people known throughout the region: police officers – among them the deputy police commissioner of Charleroi, Raymond Delvaux – doctors, architects, lawyers, engineers, and also the dean of Charleroi, a Catholic parish priest. The choice was not random. As historians from CegeSoma write, the Rex leaders were in this way declaring war on the leading classes, whom they accused of complicity in the growing number of attacks on collaborators. In all, 27 people were killed on 17 and 18 August.

The Germans took no part in the Courcelles massacre, although the civilian occupation administration tolerated, and according to historians supported, reprisals of this kind. They carried out their own reprisal a few days later: on 24 August they shot twenty hostages from among prisoners held in Charleroi.

The reckoning

Two weeks later Allied troops entered Belgium; Brussels and Charleroi were liberated at the beginning of September. Some of the perpetrators fled with the retreating Germans, but the Belgian prosecuting authorities conducting the post-war reckoning with collaboration regarded the Courcelles massacre as one of the gravest crimes of the occupation. Of some 150 presumed participants, 97 were identified and 80 arrested and brought to trial. Twenty-seven of those sentenced to death were shot in Charleroi on 10 November 1947; among them were Victor Matthys and Louis Collard, held to have instigated the crime. Degrelle, who was then fighting on the Eastern Front, fled to Spain in 1945; sentenced to death in absentia, he lived there into old age and never stood trial.

The street on which the house with the execution cellar stood was renamed the rue des Martyrs (Street of the Martyrs); there is a plaque and a small chapel there, and every year on 18 August ceremonies are held in Courcelles in memory of the victims. The extension of the church of St Christopher in Charleroi was dedicated to their memory. In 1988 the Flemish journalist Maurice De Wilde ended his documentary series on the post-war reckoning, De Tijd der Vergelding (The Time of Retribution), with the massacre.

Significance

The Courcelles massacre closed four years of occupation in which Belgium had moved from passive waiting under military rule to an open, local civil war between the Resistance and the collaborators. The occupation had earlier brought the exclusion and deportation of the Jews, executions of hostages and deportations for forced labour; in 1944 the most compromised collaborators, aware of the approaching defeat, resorted to terror aimed no longer at particular assassins but at a whole class of people who were to govern the country after liberation. Meanwhile, part of that class was preparing the post-war order in secret – like the trade unionists, industrialists and officials who at the beginning of the year had agreed a secret social pact.

Soon after the massacre Rex ceased to exist as a force in the country: its activists and their families fled with the Germans, and those who stayed behind and were caught answered before the courts. The crime at Courcelles became a symbol of how Degrelle’s project ended in practice – a movement which in the 1930s had promised national renewal, and in the last days of the occupation murdered the local elites of that nation in a cellar near Charleroi.