Historian Sofie de Schaapdrijver explains why Belgium's fifty-month occupation in WWI was erased from history.
1. Voorproevers is a Belgian public broadcaster podcast; this episode is part of a 'classics' series featuring non-fiction books from the past 25 years that have stood the test of time.
2. Historian Sofie De Schaapdrijver, now a baroness and professor at an American university, is interviewed by host Bruno Wijndalen about her 1997 book 'De Grote Oorlog: Het Koninkrijk België tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog.'
3. The episode's central thesis is that Belgium's occupation experience during WWI — 50 months of German military rule — has been systematically overlooked in favour of front-line and trench-warfare narratives.
4. De Schaapdrijver says the insight that Belgium was occupied for 50 months was something she had simply never encountered before beginning her research, despite it being historically elementary.
5. She argues the Belgian occupation of 1914-18 was comparable to WWII occupations, but began with extreme violence — German troops executed civilians in a decimation pattern (one in ten killed after forced hours of saluting) as punishment for unexpected Belgian military resistance at Liège.
6. She draws an explicit parallel with Butscha, Ukraine (2022), noting the same civilian massacre pattern occurred in Aerschot, Leuven, and Dinant in 1914.
7. Unlike WWII collaboration, WWI Belgian collaboration with German occupiers was largely ad hoc rather than ideologically motivated, though German ethnic divide-and-rule policy did create some ideological dimensions.
8. She argues Germany in 1914 entered Belgium intending to pass through to Paris; when that failed, Belgium became a war prize, and justification for annexation was retroactively constructed by denying Belgium's existence as a legitimate nation — a parallel she draws to Putin's denial of Ukrainian statehood before the 2022 invasion.
9. Belgium before WWI was, she notes, a significant global economic power — Belgian capital invested globally — a fact largely unknown today.
10. WWI shattered Belgium's 1914 national unity and left the country deeply cynical about principled resistance, since its sacrifice at the armistice table was largely ignored by the major powers.
11. She explains that Belgium suffered proportionally fewer battlefield deaths than other combatant nations because King Albert deliberately kept the small Belgian army out of the major offensives, which also meant Belgium had less symbolic leverage at the Paris Peace Conference.
12. One in seven Belgians became refugees during WWI — approximately one million people — with hundreds of thousands remaining displaced in England, France, and the Netherlands until 1918.
13. Belgian refugees in the Netherlands were confined to camps because Dutch authorities feared they would undercut local wages; in France they integrated far more easily into rural and industrial communities.
14. De Schaapdrijver argues Belgium had the most active underground press of any occupied territory in WWI, including La Libre Belgique — a resistance newspaper that began as a deliberate counter to a German-censored collaborationist paper of the same name.
15. When she visited the Royal Library in Brussels to read La Libre Belgique for 1915, the room supervisor told her there were no newspapers during 1915 because there was a war; after escalating to the press department head, she discovered the papers existed but nobody knew where they were stored.
16. The book was received far more positively than De Schaapdrijver expected, including from potential Flemish-nationalist critics who she feared would object to its pan-Belgian national framing.
17. She recalls buying a newspaper at an airport and finding a glowing first review, describing it as 'enormous relief' rather than triumph, after years of uncertain archival research.
18. De Schaapdrijver was awarded a baronetcy; she accepted it with pride, noting it is not always awarded to academic rather than business figures.
19. Working at an American university forces her to justify the relevance of Belgian WWI history from scratch, which she finds both challenging and intellectually valuable.
20. The episode concludes with De Schaapdrijver reflecting on her widowed mother — a teacher who raised four children alone from before age 30, and who explicitly refused to assign her eldest daughter domestic responsibilities, which De Schaapdrijver describes as 'applied feminism.'
