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Leopold III (1901–1983) reigned as King of the Belgians from 1934 until 1951, when he abdicated in favour of the heir apparent, his son Baudouin.As a prince, Leopold, Duke of Brabant, fought as a private during World War I with the 12th Belgian Regiment while still a teenager, but was sent by his father to Eton College in the United Kingdom, in 1915.
The refugees had originally been dealt with by the British government and in September 1940, pretty much like in December 1914, a Central Service of Refugees was established to provide them with material assistance and to organise employment for Belgians in Britain. [18]
The first negotiations on the return of 900,000 Belgian refugees began on October 12, 1914. In May 1915 there were still 105,000 civilian refugees in the Netherlands, a number which remained more or less unchanged for the rest of the war. As with the military refugees, the return of the last civilian refugees to Belgium began at the end of 1918.
The high visibility of the refugees underscored the role of Belgium in the minds of the French and British. [ 9 ] [ 10 ] In the spring of 1915, German authorities started construction on the Wire of Death , a lethal electric fence along the Belgian-Dutch border which would claim the lives of between 2,000 and 3,000 Belgian refugees trying to ...
Belgian refugees in Roosendaal and Bergen op Zoom, bioscoopjournaal August 1914. The First World War generated population displacements of an unprecedented scale, of more than 12,000,000 civilians, (later exceeded by those of the Second World War which reached 60,000,000). [1]
The German army advanced rapidly into Belgium, besieging and capturing the fortified cities of Liège, Namur and Antwerp and pushing the 200,000-strong Belgian army, supported by their French and British allies, to the far west. [3] Large numbers of refugees also fled to neighbouring countries.
The German invasion of Belgium was a military campaign which began on 4 August 1914. On 24 July, the Belgian government had announced that if war came it would uphold its neutrality. The Belgian government mobilised its armed forces on 31 July and a state of heightened alert (Kriegsgefahr) was proclaimed in Germany.
About one million civilian refugees left in 1914 for Great Britain, the Netherlands and France; most returned after the siege but a sizeable number of the refugees in the Netherlands remained after 1918. [44] Several Belgian military refugees are nowadays buried or commemorated at the Belgian Military Field of Honour 1914–1918 in Harderwijk. [46]