Camp Breendonk

As we drove from Brussels toward Antwerp we saw a sign for the Breendonk prison. The fort, which can be seen from the motor way, is located in the town of Willebroek. Begun in 1906 as part of a defensive ring used by the Belgian Army to protect Brussels and Antwerp, it was used as a concentration camp during the German occupation of Belgium during WW II.

Whereas Dachau, Germany, (where we had visited a couple of weeks earlier) had been modified and cleaned up for the tourist, Breendonk had not been cleaned up very much at all. We still saw the posts where prisoners were tied for the firing squads, the place where they were hanged, and the smelly straw cots where they had slept. At each stop of the tour through the prison, a loudspeaker would tell the horrible story.

To give the WW II prisoners something to do, they decided to have them “un-dig” the bunker and expose the concrete walls. They were forced to break up the earth with shovels and pickaxes and load the dirt into dumpsters. The prisoners removed 300,000 cubic yards of soil from the fort, then created an earthen wall around the moat, to cut off views of the fort from the outside. It’s a very grim place.

From September 20, 1940 to August 31, 1944, thousands of men were made prisoners of the Gestapo in the SS camp at Breendonk. In the beginning, life was very difficult but still tolerable, but after Germany invaded Russia, the German SS guards were reinforced by the Belgian SS, and the regime quickly became inhuman. Tortures, beltings, hangings and shootings were common. Recent research estimates that about 200 to 300 prisoners died or were killed in Breendonk.

Most people kept as prisoners in this camp were political prisoners who opposed the occupation of Belgium by the Germans. Many were betrayed by Belgian collaborators, and subsequently were tortured and executed, or died of exhaustion by extreme slave labor. Others were put on transport to other concentration camps in Germany where they underwent the same horrible ordeal, and most never returned home.

The camp was eventually closed on August 30th, 1944. When the Allied troops, en route to liberate Antwerp, arrived at Breendonk on September 3rd 1944, the camp was empty.