The historian of Aachen Peter M. Quadflieg has prospected this historical field, still little investigated to date (1). And from his research it notably appears that 20.7% of the soldiers from region previously within the Belgian state joined the Nazi organisation before May 10, 1940, whilst 79.3% were affiliated to it following the annexation. It also turns out that the majority of the contingent joined the land army (87.5%) and that a minority joined the Luftwaffe (10 %); only 1.5% joined the Waffen-SS. These figures are sufficient to show that there was no significant disparity between the young soldiers from the Reich and those from Eupen-Malmedy.

In the immediate post-war period, on the other hand, not all were to be found in the same boat. If we restrict ourselves to those whose fate has been analysed by Christoph Brüll (2), it is to be noted that up until the end of 1947 at the very least scores of them remained prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. And that a number of them who returned to the country over the course of 1945 had the unenviable destiny of finding themselves under lock and key at the Verviers prison. A concrete sign of the suspicion in which were held, once peace had returned, the soldiers who had worn – or rather had been forced to wear – the German uniform during the Second World War: 851 were in addition summoned before a War Tribunal in 1946. Furthermore, following the period when collaborators were tried and punished, 2.41% of those indigenous to the three cantons were sentenced for unpatriotic behaviour, in other words four times as many than for the rest of Belgium.

That is to say that a single ‘Belgian’ version of recent history at first prevailed in our country. The status of ‘forced conscript’ was only established in 1947, and financial compensation for the 5,000 soldiers and conscripts was only fixed in 1989, a good long time after a similar legal problem was settled concerning those Alsace and Lorraine conscripts ‘against our will’  in France. This field of study, in the process of being excavated, which concerns to the highest point the German Speaking Community of Belgium, is thus offered to researchers, in particular those who are keen to distance themselves from the ‘victimisation’ which has for too long impregnated the socio-political discourse of the eastern cantons.

(1) Peter M. Quadflieg, « Zwangssoldaten » und « Ons Jongen ». Eupen-Malmedy und Luxemburg als Rekrutierungsgebiet der deutschen Wehrmacht im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Aachen, 2008.
(2) Christoph Brüll, « Les "enrôlés de force" dans la Wehrmacht – un symbole du passé mouvementé des Belges germanophones au XXe siècle », in : Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains, 2011(1), n°241.