"The Belgian state adopted a docile and cooperative attitude in some very diverse but crucial domains by a collaboration unworthy of a democracy with a policy that was disastrous for the Jewish population," the report released Tuesday said.

"The step from passive to active collaboration was quickly achieved,"
Rudi Van Doorslaer, director of CEGES (« Centre d’études et de documentation guerre et société contemporaines »), a centre for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Contemporary Society, told the Belgian parliament.

The 1,100-page CEGES report was compiled by historians during two years at the request of the Belgian government.

The Senate, or upper house of parliament, has been tasked with drawing political conclusions based on the document.

In a speech on 6 October 2002 to mark the 60th anniversary of the deportation of Jews from Belgium, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt for the first time recognized that mistakes had been made by the administration during the war. He also praised all the Belgians who helped Jews escape from their Nazi persecutors, including the mayors of Brussels at the time "who refused to distribute the yellow stars." He paid tribute to those in the ministries who disobeyed the orders of the Nazis. He repeated Belgium's apologies in 2005 in Jerusalem at the occasion of the inauguration of the new Yad Vashem museum.

Three moments

The report isolates three key moments.

October 1940, when the central government started registering Jewish people living Belgium at the request of the Occupying power.

Summer 1942, when the Nazi regime massively deported Belgians of Jewish origin. At this point, collaboration started diminishing and some local representatives refused to hand out yellow stars to mark the future deportees.

And 1945, after the liberation, when Belgian military justice assessed that deliberations on the deportation of Jewish people were too "delicate" to be allowed to continue.

"The step from passive to active collaboration was quickly achieved," says Rudi Van Doorslaer, director of CEGES.

All cities except Brussels and Liège, began distributing yellow stars used to publicly identify Jews.

The study said that police in the northern city of Antwerp also arbitrarily arrested 1,243 people and handed them over for possible deportation.

It pointed out that the administration was not sanctioned after the war.

CEGES blamed the phenomenon on what it said was a "xenophobic, sometimes anti-Semititic, culture of the elite leadership" in Belgium at the time as well as the "democratic deficit in the years from 1930-1940."

Even the Belgian government in exile in London during the war, "never let it be known that policies had to be adapted and that the behavior of leading civil servants and magistrates was unconstitutional and democratically reprehensible," the report said.

Of the estimated 56,000 Jews living in Belgium at the beginning of the war, around 25,000 were deported to Auschwitz from the Mechelen army barracks, north of Brussels. 

Just 1,207 survived. Half of Belgian Jews died during World War II. 

Between 2001 and the end of last year, Belgian authorities received around 6,000 demands for compensation, of which 4,140 were accepted, according to government figures.

Around 30,000 Jews live today in Belgium.

Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, who apologised to the Jewish community in 2002 for Belgium's role in the Holocaust, said through a spokesman that the report's findings should be incorporated into history text books.

Philippe Markiewicz, president of CCOJB, the umbrella group of Belgian Jewish organisations, said: "This report is fundamental and it is a victory for enlightened democracy."

He said that despite the negative impact of the report, there were many Belgians who risked their lives to save Jews. "You also have to see that there were some administrations which had a remarkable attitude and rescued Jews," he declared.

In a sign of how the country's linguistic divisions affect perceptions of history, French-language newspapers and audiovisual media gave large coverage to the report while Flemish media reported it discreetly on inside pages or not at all.