Stefan De Clerck, a Flemish Christian Democrat, has polarised Belgium, fuelling the country’s one year political crisis, by supporting a blanket amnesty for the 56,000 Belgians who were convicted of collaborating with the Nazis after the war.
“Perhaps we should be willing to forget, because it is the past. At some point one has to be adult and be willing to talk about. perhaps to forget, because this is the past,” he said at the weekend.
The Simon Wiesenthal centre has sent a letter to Yves Leterme, the Belgian Prime Minister, accusing the minister of a “betrayal of history, his obfuscation of its lessons and his contempt for the very concept of justice.”
Around 25,000 Belgian Jews were deported to Auschwitz from the Mechelen army barracks, north of Brussels, after being rounded up by authorities that often enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis despite strong resistance from Belgium’s people.
Only 1,207 survived and in 2007 the Belgian state he Belgian state apologised for “a collaboration unworthy of a democracy with a policy that was disastrous for the Jewish population”.
Shimon Samuels, the Wiesenthal centre’s director for international relations, called for Mr Clerck to be “promptly removed from his ministry, his party and shunned from the political arena”.
“To remain silent would be perceived as complicit in De Clerk’s apparent endorsement of genocide,” he said.
The Flemish minister has insisted that his comments were misinterpreted but the row has further poisoned already tense relations between Dutch and French-speaking politicians.
Many people in Flanders believe that the purge that followed the liberation of Belgium mainly targeted Flemish collaborators while prosecutions were rarer in Wallonia.
After the war 400,000 Belgians were investigated for collaboration, 56,000 were sentenced and only 242 were executed. Of over 50,000 people jailed only 2,500 were still in prison in 1950, the rest had been pardoned.
The sensitive issue has reignited after the Belgian Senate accepted draft legislation from the far-right Flemish Vlaams Belang party that would grant amnesty to all those who collaborated with the Nazis during the war.