Here again I shall proceed as I did in the first case. In order not to take up too much of the Tribunal’s time, I shall simply give the example of Bande, in the Arrondissement of Marche. At Bande one of these SD detachments, the officers of which said they were sent especially by Himmler to execute members of the resistance, seized all men between 17 and 32 years of age. After having questioned them thoroughly and after sorting them out in a quite arbitrary manner—they didn’t keep any people belonging to the resistance, for most of them had never taken part in it; there were only four who were members of the resistance—they led them away along the road from Marche to Basteuil with their hands raised behind their heads. When they reached a ruined house, which had been burned down in September, the officer who commanded the detachment posted himself at the entrance of the house, a Feldwebel joined him and put his hand on the shoulder of the last man of the third row who was making his way towards the entrance to the house; and there the officer, armed with a machine gun, killed a prisoner with a bullet in the neck. Then this same officer executed in this manner the 34 young men who had been kept back.
Not content with killing them, he kicked the bodies into the cellar; and then fired a volley of machine gun bullets to make sure that they were dead.
M. FAURE: M. Van der Essen, you are a historian; you have taught scholars; therefore you are accustomed to submitting the sources of history to criticism. Can you say that your inquiry leaves no doubt in your mind, that these atrocities reveal that there was an over-all plan and that instructions were certainly given by superior officers?
VAN DER ESSEN: I think that I can affirm it, I am quite convinced that there was an over-all plan.
M. FAURE: I would like to ask you a last question: I think I understood that you yourself were never arrested or particularly worried by the Germans. I would like to know if you consider that a free man, against whom the German administration or police have nothing in particular, could during the Nazi occupation lead a life in accordance with the conception a free man has of his dignity?
VAN DER ESSEN: Well, you see me here before you, I weigh 67 kilos, my height is 1 meter 67 centimeters. According to my colleagues in the Faculty of Medicine that is quite normal. Before the 10th of May 1940, before the airplanes of the Luftwaffe suddenly came without any declaration of war and spread death and desolation in Belgium, I weighed 82 kilos. This difference is incontestably the result of the occupation. But I don’t want to dwell on personal considerations or enter into details of a general nature or of a theoretical or philosophical nature. I should like simply to give you an account—it will not take more than 2 minutes—of the ordinary day of an average Belgian during the occupation.
I take a day in the winter of 1943: At 6 o’clock in the morning there is a ring at the door. One’s first thought—indeed we all had this thought—was that it was the Gestapo. It wasn’t the Gestapo. It was a city policeman who had come to tell me that there was a light in my office and that in view of the necessities of the occupation I must be careful about this in the future. But there was the nervous shock.
At 7:30 the postman arrives bringing me my letters; he tells the maid that he wishes to see me personally. I go downstairs and the man says to me, “You know, Professor, I am a member of the secret army and I know what is going on. The Germans intend to arrest today at 10 o’clock all the former soldiers of the Belgian Army who are in this region. Your son must disappear immediately.” I hurry upstairs and wake up my son. I make him prepare his kit and send him to the right place. At 10 o’clock I take the tram for Brussels. A few kilometers out of Louvain the tram stops. A military police patrol makes us get down and lines us up—irrespective of our social status or position—in front of a wall, with our arms raised and facing the wall. We are thoroughly searched, and having found neither arms nor compromising papers of any kind, we are allowed to go back into the tram. A few kilometers farther on the tram is stopped by a crowd which prevents the tram from going on. I see several women weeping, there are cries and wailings. I make inquiries and am told that their men folk living in the village had refused to do compulsory labor and were to have been arrested that night by the Security Police. Now they are taking away the old father of 82 and a young girl of 16 and holding them responsible for the disappearance of the young men.
I arrive in Brussels to attend a meeting of the academy. The first thing the president says to me is:
“Have you heard what has happened? Two of our colleagues were arrested yesterday in the street. Their families were in a terrible state. Nobody knows where they are.”