"Collaborators Had Their Reasons"- Belgian Deputy Premier

Maybe best left unsaid? And could someone please sort the typo?
"Belgium’s brand new Deputy Premier, Jan Jambon of the Flemish nationalist N-VA, has spoken out in defence of people who collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The politician who also doubles as Interior Minister told several Francophone dailies that collaboration was wrong, but that people did have their reasons.



The collaboration during the war, mainly, but not exclusively by Flemings, is a sensitive issue in Francophonia and the new Deputy Premier’s words are bound to spark controversy.
Mr Jambon was quizzed in connection with his presence at a meeting of Belgians who fought on the eastern front organised by the Saint Martin’s Fund by La Libre Belgique and La Dernière Heure."
http://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/belgiums-interior-minister-says-collaboration-people-reasons.html
http://deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws.english/News/141013_belgium-collaboration-Jambon

 

This coalition with the N-VA is insane!

 

Why ? Without the NVA,no government was possible .

 

The only mistake of Jambon was to give an interview to these journals,of which every one in Flanders knows the biased agenda .

 

It's a bit easy to blame the Flemish. There were great Flemish Resistants who fought the Nazis. On the other hand some Walloons collaborated and others fought the Germans . One should not blame or praise a people, but rather judge individuals .

 

...and the Belgians know from their own history that "interrregnums" with no government result in MAJOR political and economic repercussions; 1935 into 1936 comes to mind, when Belgium spent a year with no real government due to the arguments over the defence budget....

It may not seem that relevant today...but the King's idea to cut through the budget and defence spending dispute was that Belgium become Neutral, and not keep up its Locarno Pact defence obligations. Here on a WWII forum, we shouldn't lose sight of what that decision meant for Belgium a few years later in May 1940...

 

Thanks to whomever sorted the typo. One day they'll make keyboard buttons the same size as my digits...

 

This is complex stuff though, isn't it.
The events of the war and occupation seem to have been tied directly into Belgian politics since '45. They've got some separatist issues haven't they?
It's easy for these comments to sound odd to our ears, but I'd quite like to read what exactly was said, context etc.

 

You don't eat rat poison, even when you are on the verge of starving!

 

CEGESOMA came to more or less the same conclusion, all tough there was an apparently higher degree of collaboration in Flanders because of the close relationship in between flemish independance movements, german nazis and flemish nazis, a kind of a "flemish new order".

What makes a big difference though is how this historical period is seen today in Wallonia and in Flanders.

 

I do not for a moment believe that any one of the governments of the countries of Europe were in possession of a crystal ball to tell them exactly how and when the Nazi hegemony was going to last.

With this in mind, was in not prudent for people in these occupied nations to simply get on with the business of their lives? There are social climbers in every system, and they were certainly not going to get anywhere with their lives as a reed against the tide. Individuals had to weigh up their need against their moral and political beliefs. Who are we to judge them, seventy plus years into the future?

Look at the career of the Walloon Leon Degrelle. His family were persecuted and others paid with their lives for his writings, lectures, speeches and beliefs. For him, the coming of Fascism was a reprieve from the machinations of his own government and people.

It's also a matter of record that many Polish people co-operated very willingly with their German occupiers. They assisted in stripping many Polish Jews of their assets and livelyhoods, even after the Germans had gone! Did post war Poland ever acknowledge this aspect of the final solution?

Russian Jews got a raw deal from their Soviet government. Persecutions, pogroms, deportations. Was any of this ever made public by the Soviets themselves?

Austrians have more to answer for than most. WW2 might not even have been possible without unification with Germany, and this was achieved by Austrians themselves. No fifth column needed, just remove Chancellor Dollfuss and agitate, propagandize and bully, sit back and wait for your freinds to help. This may seem gross simplification, but really, was it collaboration, or a genuine coup? Postwar, Austria certainly managed to wipe clean it's role in the rise of fascism in europe, so much so that it has been said that their greatest achievement as a nation post-war was to convince the rest of the world that Adolf Hitler was a German native! If you remember, Hitler spoke German with a pronounced austrian accent his entire life, and was made to look a rustic provincial behind his back by his more aristocratic familiars.

The whole issue of collaboration is a touchy one only because we have come to see the Nazi regime as the evil of all evils. Our modern imaginations cannot conjure anything worse coming along, but the truth is that the National socialist brand of evil, like any, was relative to experience. Some feel that it was already surpassed in it's day by the crimes of the Soviet Union, a view I certainly share. But evil is, and no amount of comparison can change the basic fact that it was.

Collaborators have always existed, and they will either be hailed as heros, (as the Minutemen were), or damned as the Walloons were. It all depended on who was dictating the peace terms at the end of it. I have always believed that countries like Belgium should simply see them as products of a bygone past and move on to bigger and better things to spend taxpayers money on. Damn them, sure, but leave them alone.

 

The meaning of "Collaborators had their reasons" is : that it was not on Jambon to judge these people 70 years after the facts,because he is not a historian and did not belong to that generation .

 

Well was he a historian when he was with his buddy Le Pen and called the Waffen-SS men heroes? Shit-brown fascist scumbag, keep him, love him but do not try to sell him to me.

 

I noted Belgium was Neutral; nor was I comparing it to Czechoslovakia in any way.

What the need to cut through the political crisis created by the proposed defence budget and form a government meant was that instead of the planned level of defence spending and beefing up fixed defences along the eastern border with Germany, the new government opted for a much lower-cost sort of "compromise" defence budget for a few years, that even the Belgians had begun to realise by 1939 had left them next to defenceless in real terms, so were already planning to revamp their air force etc..

But they just didn't get the time to make up for those couple of "lost" years of increased military spending. And those were a direct result of the decisions required to cut through the debate causing political paralysis in Belgium in 1935-6.

 

You, Sir, are one of nature's finest.

 

This has come up for discussion on a number of forums over the years, but so far I haven't posted on it here...

There was indeed a strange tendency for interwar neutrals to greatly overstate their role. It seems that there was a group who, because they managed to stay neutral in WWI...thought that that status would be assured in another European war, that they'd be too useful to the "potential aggressor" as points of entry for imports etc.

The Scandanavian Neutrals seem to have succumbed to the idea of their own worth first, with their founding of the "Oslo Group"...which began life as a free trrade association to protect the members from the external pressures that in WWI forced theim into the Allies' "Quota System" that was a lynchpin of the economic blockade on Germany. Gradually the Oslo Group gained more and more members, until by the outbreak of war, Belgium was indeed a member and Leopold was the group's titular head!

The Neutrals seem to have regarded their position as some sort of "third way" between the two potential sets of aggressors; but not only did events show this to be entirely false, that their Neutrality had no inherent superiority of moral position when they were invaded...the wartime experiences of two of them Sweden and Switzerland, served as salutory lessons for other Neutrals round the world...

Both nations, with the wolf literally at their door, discovered overnight that there WAS no "third way" of neutrality - what there was was a constantly standing astride a knife edge, with the sharp edge gently resting against their gentleman's vegetables...and constantly trying to maintain a balancing act with either foot to keep themselves alive as a nation.

Switzerland - found herself surrounded on all sides in 1940, with only a technical "hole" via Vichy France out to the rest of the world for trade...a "hole" that pressure from the Germans soon forced them to close, in respect of trading with the British (as the remaining Ally, so to speak) The Swiss, in mobilising the nation for the total defence of Switzerland - and the threatened destruction of Switzerland if it was invaded - maintained THIS balancing act...trading with the Germans as the Germans demanded, but threatening that ALL that could vanish in an instant and everything that the Germans wanted from Switzerland being turned to cinders should the Nazis ever decide to simply TAKE instead of trading for...

Sweden - maintained more of a literal "balance act"; while Germany had the upper hand in the war, the Nazis found it easier to raise loans in Sweden to buy Swedish raw materials, buy assemblies etc. from Landswerk and a variety of Swedish factories, bearings from SKF, guns and licenses from Oerlikon etc...while the British found their ability to trade with and in Sweden pared down to a minimum Not stopped, no - that would be a breach of Neutrality ...but THEY found export licences blocked or quota held down to an absolute minimum, for example...until the course of the war turned in 1943 - and then the Allies found it easier to trade in Sweden for Swedish goods, services and materials...and the Germans suddenly found it getting harder and harder The two-footed Swedish balancing act literally could change in emphasis and bias depending on the war news from abroad!

But the OTHER Neutrals - the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway etc. - all thought that THEIR "support" for the Central Powers in WWI having guaranteed their survival (unlike poor little Belgium) that if they kept their heads down, didn't have the military strength to threaten anyone, and were of value "neutral" to Nazi Germany...then they'd be safe. How wrong they were. They had no inherent value; the several years of the Quota System in WWI may have hit Germany very hard...but those European neutrals that still traded their domestic production with Germany..Dutch and Danish agricultural produce, animal fodder, meat in carcass and on the hoof...seem to have missed entirely the fact that that was domestic production; apart from external imports through the Quota System like fertilisers etc. there were no restrictions on THOSE goods reaching Germany...

In other words - it didn't matter if it was a Holland or Denmark trading that vital produce with Germany, or being invaded and that produce "taken" by an Occupying Germany...that agricultural produce that had made them so important for so long to the Kaiser's Germany wasn't affected by their external relations with Germany's enemies; it was OTHER goods and business that was affected by the WWI Quota System and would again be in any renewed European war if such a system was reconstituted. I.E. what made them truly important to Germany in one war would also make them valuable in the next...but it wasn't related to their Neutrality! Holland and Denmark's fields and farms would always produce for Germany....whether free and Neutral, or invaded and Occupied.

...and once you realise that - then you realise that their Neutrality had no real value to Hitler; until the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact came to an end in fire, and Italy joined the war, and Spain's position began to change around the middle of the war - Hitler could get what he wanted from the outside world through them. He was free to invade them and use their resources and goods however he liked, there was nothing about their Neutrality that prevented him.