If we examine the big towns and the small towns, we can say that everywhere there was truly a veritable network of espionage and interference following the events or acts of which I have just informed you.
M. FAURE: It is true, then, to say that this meddling by the Germans with the administration of the communes constituted a seizure of Belgian national sovereignty?
VAN DER ESSEN: Certainly, since it made the fundamental principle of the Belgian constitution disappear, that is to say, the sovereignty that belongs to the nation and more especially to the Communal Council which appointed aldermen and burgomasters. From then on it was impossible for them to make themselves heard in the normal way, so that the sovereignty of the Belgian people was directly attacked by the fact itself.
M. FAURE: Since you are a professor of higher education, can you give us information concerning the interference in education?
VAN DER ESSEN: Yes, sir, certainly.
First, there was interference in the domain of elementary and secondary education through the General Secretary of Public Education, on whom the Germans exercised pressure. A commission was set up which was entrusted with the task of purging the text books. It was forbidden to use text books which mentioned what the Germans did in Belgium during the 1914-18 war; this chapter was absolutely forbidden. The booksellers and publishing houses could still sell these books, but only on the condition that the bookseller or library should tear out this chapter. As for new books which had to be reprinted or republished, this commission indicated exactly which ones should be cancelled or removed. That was serious and alarming interference with primary and secondary education.
As regards higher education, the interference was unleashed, so to speak, from the very beginning of the occupation; and first of all, for motives which I need not explain here but which are well known, in the free University of Brussels.
The Germans first imposed on the University of Brussels a German Commissioner, who thus had in his hands the whole organization of the university and even controlled it, as far as I know, from the point of view of accountancy. Moreover they imposed exchange professors. But serious difficulties began the day when, in Brussels as elsewhere, they required that they should be informed of all projects of new appointments and all new appointments of professors, in the same way as the assignment of lecture courses and other subjects taught in the university. The result was that in Brussels, by virtue of this right which they had arrogated, they wished to impose three professors, of whom two were obviously not acceptable to any Belgian worthy of the name. There was one, notably, who, having been a member of the Council of Flanders during the occupation of 1914-18, had been condemned to death by the justice of this country and whom they wanted to impose as a professor in the University of Brussels in 1940. Under these conditions the university refused to accept this professor, and this was considered by the occupying authorities as sabotage.
As a penalty, the President of the Board of the University, the principal members of the board, the deans of the principal faculties, and a few other professors, who were especially well known as being anti-Fascists, were arrested and imprisoned in the prison of Witte with the aggravating circumstance that they were considered as hostages and that, if any act whatsoever of sabotage or resistance occurred, they, being hostages, could be shot.
As far as the other universities were concerned, as I have just said here, they wished to impose exchange professors. There were none at Louvain because we refused categorically to receive them, the more so as it appeared that these exchange professors were not, primarily, scholars who had come to communicate the result of their researches and their scientific work, but a great many of them were observers for the occupying authorities.