With their region being annexed to the Reich, the thorny conflicts of loyalty to which the Belgian Germanophone community had been subject to since 1920 reached new intensity. Loyalty to the Belgian nation, to which it had been attached in 1919? Or obedience to the Nazi powers which had established its iron grip over it in 1940? Christoph Brüll throws particularly welcome light on these dark years, which has left its mark on the last survivors, and even on their descendents.

‘[The Eupen-Malmedy] territory poses numerous problems. The inhabitants have changed nationality three times over the past thirty years, depending on the fortunes of war and the respective claims of the Belgian or German authorities. It remains the case that the population of Eupen and Malmedy has been constituted of sometimes good Belgians, sometimes good Germans; for the moment these people are good Belgians.’ The phrase was expressed by a British official in 1947 concerning the Belgian border zone which today goes by the name of ‘the eastern cantons’ (including that of Saint-Vith). An assessment which Christoph Brüll reminded us of during a talk on May 17, 2008, within the context of a day honouring Henri Bragard, a writer and man engaged in the turbulent history of Malmedy.

It is known that the region cited on this occasion, Prussian since the 1815 Congress of Vienna, only became Belgian following the Versailles Treaty of June 28, 1919, following the Great War. It is perhaps less known that it was attached to the Reich on May 18, 1940, thus hardly ten days after the German invasion, before once again being integrated into Belgium at the end of the Second World War. Such about turns, exacerbated in their turn by rashes of nationalist fervour typical of the first half of the twentieth century, were not without leaving their mark on a society situated at the confluence of the Latin and Germanic worlds, dragged against its wishes into the turbulences of European history. Symptomatic in this respect is the fate of the 8,700 young men recruited by the Wehrmacht from November 1941 onwards, just two months after the granting of German nationality to the population of this de facto annexed territory: 39% of them – in other words between 3,200 and 3,400 – would die in combat or in Soviet prison camps.