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Thursday, January 24, 2013

Divided Belgium finally admits Holocaust complicity | The Times of Israel

Flemish Minister-President Kris Peeters, second from left, visits Belgium's new Holocaust Museum in Mechelen in November. (Courtesy of Kris Peeters Vlaams via JTA)

ANTWERP, Belgium (JTA) — As the sister of Belgium’s most powerful Nazi, Madeleine Cornet knew better than to inquire about the ethnicity of the three women she hired as housemaids in October 1942.

Cornet did not want to further implicate herself by hearing what she already knew: Her new hires were Jews who managed to escape the deportations that her brother, the Belgian politician and Nazi collaborator Leon Degrelle, was busy organizing.

 The unlikely story of Cornet and her husband, Henry, was unearthed only a few months ago among a wave of articles in the Belgian media last year dealing with the country’s role in the Holocaust. The sudden focus on Belgium’s Holocaust history reflects the country’s belated reckoning with its complicity in the deaths of 28,902 Belgian Jews during World War II.

In the last year, Begium opened its first Holocaust museum and, for the first time, acknowledged its role in the persecution of its Jewish citizens. It began in August, when the mayor of Antwerp admitted the country’s Holocaust-era guilt, initiating a string of mea culpas by his Brussels counterpart and the leaders of several other municipalities and culminating with a statement from the prime minister himself............

FULL ARTICLE HERE: Divided Belgium finally admits Holocaust complicity | The Times of Israel

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