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Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt:"It is only by recognising the responsibility of the authorities of that time that we can build a future in which this will never happen again."
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BRUSSELS (AFP-EJP)---Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt apologised Tuesday for his country’s role in the Nazi deportation of Jews during World War II and said he hoped all compensation claims would be paid this year.
"It was a dark period in the history of our country," he said at a ceremony marking the 62nd anniversary of the end of World War II hostilities in Europe.
"It is only by recognising the responsibility of the authorities of that time that we can build a future in which this will never happen again," Verhofstadt told a gathering of Jewish and government officials before unveiling a plaque in Brussels to commemorate "Belgian Righteous" who helped saved Jews during the Holocaust.
It is his third public apology for the deportations.
Of the estimated 56,000 Jews living in Belgium at the beginning of the war, around 25,000 were deported to Auschwitz. Only around 1,200 survived. Some six million European Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis during World War II.
A government commissioned report released in February found that the actions of the Belgian authorities of the time were "unworthy of a democracy"
It said Belgian authorities agreed in late 1940 to a Nazi demand to register the names of the Jewish population. Then, in 1942, all cities except Brussels and Liege, began distributing yellow stars used to publicly identify Jews.
The study said that police in the 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.
The phenomenon was blamed on a "xenophobic, sometimes anti-Semitic, culture of the elite leadership" in Belgium as well as the "democratic deficit in the years from 1930-1940."
Compensation demands
Verhofstadt also said that he hoped that the 5,640 demands for compensation sought by victims and their families would be paid by the end of the year.
"The sums not individually paid out will be sent to the Belgian Judaism Foundation," he said.
In a speech on 6 October 2002 to mark the 60th anniversary of the deportation of Jews from Belgium, the Belgian Prime Minister 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 Holocaust Museum.
