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During World War I several Flemish soldiers were punished for their active or passive involvement in the Flemish Movement. Ten of these soldiers were sent to a penal military unit in 1918 called the Special Forestry Platoon in Orne, Normandy, France. They were forced to work as woodchoppers in hard living conditions until several months after ...
Depiction of the Yser Front by the Belgian artist Georges-Émile Lebacq (1917). The Yser Front (French: Front de l'Yser, Dutch: Front aan de IJzer or IJzerfront), sometimes termed the West Flemish Front in British writing, was a section of the Western Front during World War I held by Belgian troops from October 1914 until 1918.
The German occupying authorities, under Von Bissing and influenced by pre-war Pan-Germanism, viewed the Flemish as an oppressed people and launched a policy to appeal to the demands of the Flemish Movement which had emerged in the late 19th century. These measures were collectively known as the Flamenpolitik ("Flemish Policy").
Civilians were summarily executed and several towns deliberately destroyed in a series of punitive actions collectively known as the Rape of Belgium. As many as 6,500 people were killed by the German army between August and November 1914. In Leuven, the historic library of the town's university was deliberately burned. News of the atrocities ...
The origins of the Franco-Flemish War (1297–1305) can be traced back to the accession of Philip IV "the Fair" to the French throne in 1285. Philip hoped to reassert control over the County of Flanders, a semi-independent polity notionally part of the Kingdom of France, and possibly even to annex it into the crown lands of France. [8]
Flamenpolitik (German: "Flemish policy") is a policy practiced by German authorities occupying Belgium during World War I and World War II. The ultimate goals of these policies was the dissolution of Belgium into separate Walloon and Flemish components and Germanisation .
The First Battle of Ypres (French: Première Bataille des Flandres, German: Erste Flandernschlacht, 19 October – 22 November 1914) was a battle of the First World War, fought on the Western Front around Ypres, in West Flanders, Belgium.
Burning and shooting by German troops took place for five days, during which 248 residents were killed; the surviving population of 10,000 people were expelled and over 2,000 buildings were burnt down. At the Catholic University of Leuven, the historic library of 300,000 medieval books and manuscripts was destroyed.