The strike of the 100,000

On 10 May 1941, exactly one year after the German invasion of Belgium, a procession of women gathered at the gates of the Cockerill steelworks in Seraing, an industrial town on the Meuse right next to Liège. The wives and mothers of the workers were protesting because for weeks the shops had had no potatoes, the staple food of working-class families. That same day the steelworks came to a standstill. Within two days the strike had engulfed the whole industrial basin around Liège, and then mines and factories in other parts of the country. It went down in history as the “strike of the 100,000” (la grève des 100 000), although there were never that many strikers: historians estimate that at its height between 60,000 and 70,000 people downed tools, and the Germans themselves spoke of about 60,000. It was the largest social conflict in Belgium under the occupation and the first mass, open protest by its people against the conditions imposed by the occupier.

It is often said that the strike broke out “in Liège” and spread across the whole province until it involved nearly 70,000 workers. More precisely, it began in Seraing, on the outskirts of Liège, and did not stop at the provincial boundaries. The figure of 70,000, taken by most studies as the upper limit of the estimates, refers to the whole country.

Hunger under occupation

After the capitulation of the Belgian army on 28 May 1940, the country was governed by the German military administration of General Alexander von Falkenhausen, based in Brussels, occupied on 17 May. Its civil administration was headed by Eggert Reeder. King Leopold III remained a prisoner in the palace at Laeken, while Hubert Pierlot’s government carried on the war from London. The country’s day-to-day affairs were handled by the secretaries-general of the ministries, Belgian civil servants who carried out the occupier’s ordinances.

What the Germans cared about above all was that Belgian industry should work for the Reich. Belgium, with its coal mines in Wallonia and the Campine (Kempen), its steelworks on the Meuse and the Sambre, and its engineering and armaments plants, was one of the most valuable economic assets they had captured. The precondition was social peace. The occupier banned strikes, froze wages and prices at pre-war levels, and abolished the automatic indexation of wages written into many collective agreements. The pre-war trade unions ceased to function, and in November 1940 their place was taken by a single organisation, the Union of Manual and Intellectual Workers (UTMI), conceived on the model of the German Labour Front as a “labour community” without class struggle. It attracted at most a quarter of the pre-war union members.

On paper the wage freeze was supposed to protect purchasing power, since prices had been frozen too and basic foodstuffs were rationed. In practice the rationing system failed. Before the war Belgium had imported a large part of its food; now it was cut off from overseas supplies and had to hand over part of its farm produce to the occupier. Workers seldom received the rations to which they were entitled, and the food they lacked had to be bought on the black market at prices they could not afford on frozen wages. People remembered the hunger of the 1914–1918 occupation and feared its return. German propaganda blamed the British blockade, to no effect: the occupier was blamed for the shortages. Leopold III, received by Adolf Hitler at the Berghof on 19 November 1940, asked him among other things to improve the country’s food supply, but obtained nothing.

The employers, too, saw the problem. To avoid wage rises which, they reasoned, would undermine the competitiveness of Belgian industry after the war, they handed out extra food rations to workers at the factories. It was not enough. From the summer of 1940 short strikes broke out in Belgium, most often in the mines, where heavy work demanded the most calories. The workers demanded bigger food rations, soap and sometimes higher pay. The strikes usually lasted a day or two. At the beginning of April 1941 the miners of the Borinage near Mons struck for eight days. According to German reports cited by the Belgian historian José Gotovitch, the potato ration in the Liège region fell from 15 kilograms per person in March to nothing in May.

Seraing, 10 May

Seraing was a stronghold of the labour movement and one of the few municipalities in which the Communist Party of Belgium was strong. One of the aldermen (échevins) on the municipal council was Julien Lahaut, a former turner at the Cockerill works, a veteran of the First World War who had fought with the Belgian armoured car corps on the Russian front, and for many years a Communist member of parliament. Popular and known as a gifted speaker, he was the party’s best-known face in Wallonia.

The first signs had appeared the day before. According to Gotovitch, on 9 May the miners of the La Boverie pit refused to go down. On the morning of 10 May women demonstrated outside the Cockerill works, and the workers stopped work. The date was no accident – the anniversary of the invasion of 10 May 1940 gave the protest a meaning that everyone understood. The strike spread rapidly: by 12 May 22 enterprises in the Liège basin – steelworks, rolling mills, mines and engineering plants – had stopped. In places workers set up pickets. The movement then spread to the areas around Herve and Huy, the Campine mines in Flemish Limburg, and plants in the province of Hainaut, including the Centre region around La Louvière.

At first the issue was potatoes and better supplies. Soon, however, a demand was formulated for a 25 per cent pay rise. This was something new: until then strikes had been almost exclusively about food. Given the fall in purchasing power, the demand had a real basis, but it was also a political one, because it challenged the principle of frozen wages on which the occupation’s economic policy rested.

The role of the Communists

The strike was led to a large extent by Communists, although its causes were universal, and in many plants it was also supported by workers with no party sympathies. The party’s position was a peculiar one. Since the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 the Communists, obedient to the Comintern line, had regarded the war as a clash of imperialisms and proclaimed the slogan “neither London nor Berlin”. As long as the Soviet Union was on good terms with the Reich, the Germans tolerated limited Communist activity. For many members, who had joined the party as the most uncompromising opponent of fascism, this line was hard to accept. The Belgian party therefore concentrated on the struggle over social issues, in which it could speak for the workers without openly declaring war on the occupier.

The strike of May 1941 had this character too. Its demands were addressed first and foremost to the employers, not to the Germans, which reduced the risk of direct confrontation. At the same time the date, scale and reach of the protest made it a challenge to the occupier. The underground press of every persuasion wrote about it at length, and the strikers won a degree of sympathy even in middle-class circles usually hostile to industrial action. Belgian historians, among them Gotovitch and Dirk Luyten, stress that it was a social conflict with a clear patriotic undertone rather than a planned resistance operation. From the beginning of 1941, however, the Communists were already preparing a broader clandestine organisation, from which the Independence Front later grew.

Since the unions were not functioning, the strike was organised plant by plant. Meetings of the workforce elected delegations, which talked to the managements and the municipal councils. In Seraing the council recognised the strike committees as partners, and Lahaut, as a municipal officer, was able to speak for the strikers at national level. On 13 May a delegation of six workers, Cockerill’s managing director Léon Greiner and Lahaut went to Brussels to see Emiel De Winter, secretary-general of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Supply. De Winter referred them to the German authorities, giving them only a letter of recommendation. The very fact that the director of a great steelworks went to the ministry together with a strikers’ delegation was telling: the employers had ceased to act as the sole spokesmen for their workforces’ interests.

The occupier’s response

At first the Germans refused to receive the delegation. But the strike came at a bad moment for them. The Wehrmacht had only just finished the campaign in Yugoslavia and Greece, and the staffs were preparing the attack on the Soviet Union, due in six weeks’ time. Belgian steel and coal were needed by the Reich’s industry. According to Gotovitch, the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, noted that every day of the strike meant the loss of 2,000 tons of steel, and Hitler himself ordered that Liège be supplied with food immediately.

On 17 May, while the strike was still spreading, the Oberfeldkommandantur in Liège received a delegation of several hundred workers, promised better supplies and gave them to understand that wages would be raised. Food shipments were sent to the city. Work resumed gradually: 18 May is usually given as the official end of the strike, but most plants went back between 19 and 21 May, and in some places the movement petered out even later.

The final outcome was unprecedented. Falkenhausen’s military administration agreed to an 8 per cent pay rise for the whole private sector. It was the only general wage increase in Belgium during the entire occupation. The workers also received holiday allowances and extra food rations. For the miners a separate punctuality bonus was introduced, rising as absenteeism fell – the Germans wanted to stop men missing shifts to look for food in the countryside. Notice periods were lengthened, and from then on the dismissal of a worker required the approval of the labour office. Eight per cent was little compared with the fall in purchasing power, but against an occupier that had banned strikes and frozen wages it was a victory no one had expected.

Reprisals

The Germans did not strike back at once. As long as the pact with Moscow held, the military administration preferred peace and coal to open war with the Communists who had led the strike. But names were noted. On 22 June 1941, the day of the attack on the Soviet Union, the occupier carried out mass arrests of Communists in Belgium, as in other western countries. Several hundred activists and sympathisers were detained, many of them participants in the May strike. They were taken to the citadel at Huy and to the camp at Breendonk, and many were later deported to concentration camps in the Reich. Lahaut was arrested at his home that very day. After several failed attempts to escape from Huy, he was deported in 1941 to Neuengamme and in 1944 to Mauthausen, where he lived to see liberation.

The Germans never lost their fear of a repeat. In September 1942 they arrested some 400 workers suspected of preparing a similar action. This did not prevent further large strikes in November 1942 and February 1943, by which time the protests were directed above all against deportations for forced labour in Germany.

Place in the war

The strike of the 100,000 was one of several great workers’ protests in occupied Western Europe in 1941. In February the workers of Amsterdam had struck for two days in protest against the round-ups of Jews; in Belgium, two months after the Antwerp pogrom, people protested against hunger. The Belgian example crossed the border: at the end of May, encouraged by news of the concessions won in Wallonia, the miners of the French Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield, which came under the same German military administration in Brussels, went on strike. There, however, the occupier responded far more brutally.

For Belgium itself the strike brought several changes. It exposed the impotence of the UTMI, which had been unable to improve the workers’ lot, and laid bare the fiction of the “labour community”. The Communists gave up competing with the Socialists in the old unions and began to build their own clandestine workplace unions, the Trade Union Struggle Committees, while other underground organisations to the left of social democracy sprang up alongside them. The strike also helped to restore contacts between pre-war union activists that the occupation had severed. After 22 June 1941 the Communists, freed from the line imposed by the pact, joined the Belgian resistance in full, in which their Independence Front and its armed units played an important part from then on.

In post-war memory the strike occupied less space than it deserved. In the climate of the Cold War, recalling an action led by Communists was not popular, while the Communists themselves used it as proof that they had resisted before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union – which their opponents regarded as a distortion. Unlike the February strike in Amsterdam, commemorated every year, the strike of the 100,000 has never had official commemorations. Julien Lahaut, after the war chairman of the Communist Party of Belgium, was shot dead on the doorstep of his home in Seraing on 18 August 1950, a few days after the swearing-in of the heir to the throne, Prince Baudouin, during which a cry of “Vive la République!” (“Long live the Republic!”) had come from the Communist benches. The murder was long attributed to royalists; research by historians published in 2015 pointed to a secret anti-Communist network. The perpetrators were never brought to trial.