Kazerne Dossin: a place of remembrance
Kazerne Dossin was the antechamber of death. From here, 25,835 men, women, children and senior citizens departed to Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1942 and 1944. This figure was composed by 25,484 Jews – almost half of Belgium’s Jewish population – and 351 Gypsies. The youngest deportee was 35 days old, the oldest 93 years of age.
Of these 25,835 people, 576 escaped during the journey. 24,019 of the remainder would die: they were either gassed in Birkenau or died in the slave labour camp of Auschwitz or during the subsequent death march. Just 1,240 deportees – or less than 5% – returned to Belgium in May 1945. 32 Gypsies were among the survivors.
When war broke out, the Jewish population represented approximately 1% of the Belgian population. At the end of the war in 1945, 50% of all civilian casualties were Jewish.
The transportation of over 25,000 Jews and Gypsies was a German crime, carried out by the Nazis. However, their plan could not succeed without the cooperation of:
- the Belgian civil service that, as a whole, principally accepted the persecution of the Jews and within the framework of the law, cooperated with the occupier
- Belgian collaborating paramilitary parties and organisations who would present themselves as Jew hunters
This cooperation strongly contributed to the end result: a death toll of 44% of Jews. With this, the figures of the ‘Final Solution’ in Belgium lie between those of France (25%) and the Netherlands (80%).
The text was written in collaboration with Laurence Schram.
