From the start of the war in 1940, the German occupiers had their eye on a brand new modernist block of flats on the Louisalaan in Brussels. It became the headquarters of the German security police and its notorious Gestapo division. But also the target of an heroic RAF pilot. The apartment building on the Louisalaan is one of the 100 locations that define Belgium and is contained in the new book “Het verhaal van België” (The Story of Belgium).
This article is an excerpt from the book “Het verhaal van België” (Pelckmans Publishers) in which VRT News journalist Jos Vandervelden tells the story of 100 places that were decisive in Belgium's political history. Photographer Alexander Dumarey captured the locations as they look today.
On 20 January 1943, pilot Jean de Selys Longchamps flew his fighter plane towards Belgium. The Belgian Army officer had fled to England at the start of World War II and had perfected his skills as a pilot in the Royal Air Force. First, he followed orders to strafe trains and railway tracks between Kortrijk and Ghent.
Then he decided to carry out a plan he had long been brooding on: a revenge expedition in retaliation for the torture of his father that was said to have happened at the German Gestapo headquarters in Brussels. Without permission from his army superiors, he flew towards Brussels, low over the city, exactly following the Emile De Motlaan. This allowed him to aim the on-board gun on his Hawker Typhoon very precisely at his target, the Gestapo building on the wide Louisalaan. 5 workers were killed in the attack, including the commandant Alfred Thomas. At the same time, some of the sinister archives in the building were also destroyed.
A war headquarters was not the use the modernist architect and visual artist Stanislas Jasinski had envisaged for his building in 1937. The Belgian of Polish extraction, who had worked with celebrated Belgian architects Victor Horta and Henry Van de Velde, wanted standardised blocks of flats to give shape to a new city.
At No 453 on the Louisalaan, he built the 12 storey Résidence Belvédère, with one flat per floor, generously containing four-bedrooms each. The building rose high above the traditional mansions that would all be replaced by high-rise buildings in the following years. Adorned with a huge swastika flag, in 1943 the modern residence was a very easily recognisable target for the revenge-seeking pilot, Jean de Selys.
The Gestapo move in
From the very start of the Nazi occupation of Belgium in 1940, the Germans had their eye on the comfortable newly-built building at No 453 and had the Sipo-SD requisition it. While in the Wetstraat, Belgium’s political nerve centre in Brussels, General Alexander von Falkenhausen took control of Belgium's military administration, the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) were responsible for maintaining order.
The Sipo-SD began in Brussels with about 20 employees and by the end of the war employed more than 500 personnel, both Germans and Belgian collaborators. Gradually, the organisation freed itself from the military administration and gained far-reaching powers of its own in Belgium, from fighting smuggling, black-marketeering, mandatory work avoiders and counter-espionage to persecuting Jews and suppressing the resistance.
The Louisalaan became the headquarters of the Sipo-SD that was divided into several departments. The most notorious was Division IV, that of the secret police, the Gestapo. Sint-Gillis prison in Brussels, Mechelen's Dossin Barracks and the forts of Breendonk, Dinant and Huy were all controlled from the Louisalaan.
Jean de Selys's one-man raid made the building at No 453 virtually unusable. There was a rush to move to No 347, a few hundred metres further along on the Louisalaan. This too was a new apartment building with a ground-breaking design. Immediately, as at No 453, here too, the cellars were converted into cells. While administrative work was being done above ground, the dirty work took place underground. In the small dark cellars, people were locked up, interrogated, beaten and tortured. The horror would only stop in September 1944 when Brussels was liberated.
The buildings on the Louisalaan were briefly managed by Allied forces and were then returned to their owners. The living quarters were refurbished and the cellars became storage space once again. New generations of residents did not know what horrors had taken place in their cellars, or did not want to know. Nevertheless, the traces left behind left nothing to the imagination.
A memorial to bear witness
It wasn't until 1994 that André Dartevelle, a documentary maker working for Francophone broadcaster RTBF, gained access to the macabre cellars of No 347 and saw traces of the ordeals and the madness meted out here. Layers of chalk revealed countless inscriptions with texts, names and drawings, partly legible, partly erased, in different languages, carved by fingernails or metal objects. Each inscription betrayed bitter despair.
The disclosure of the Lousalaan’s grim legacy led to a public demand for the apartment buildings to bear witness to their past and for the cellars to serve as a memorial. It was a call that for years met with resistance from the private owners.
Until in 2016 the Brussels Region decided permanently to protect the underground spaces in both buildings. Since then, nobody has been able to touch the cellars. But they are still not open to the public. Today, Nos 453 and 347 merge anonymously into the wall of apartment buildings along the always bustling Louisalaan.
As difficult as it is to turn the gloomy cellars into a memorial, it was far easier to rekindle the memory of war hero Jean de Selys. He was not only given a plaque on the façade of No 453, but also a gilded bronze bust on the central reservation of the Louisalaan. However, on account of his wayward exploits, he was sanctioned and even demoted by his military superiors. The very same year of the attack on the Brussels Gestapo headquarters, a further combat mission in his Hawker Typhoon ended with fatal consequences for the young aristocrat. He was killed at the age of 31.