POW welcome signAbout ZEDELGEMPOWCAMP.BE
Our sincere gratitude to Pol Denys, who launched his efforts some 21 years ago to preserve the physical remnants of the Zedelgem POW camp and its history. Zedelgem's POW camp—functionally several camps housed side-by-side—had been completely unknown to him and his fellow townsfolk until he discovered a map, in Russian, which brought attention to this role of Zedelgem in the aftermath of WWII. Since then, Pol successfully campaigned for local and national governmental recognition of the site's historical significance and obtained EU funds to establish a museum on the camp's grounds for visitors and researchers to familiarize themselves with the camp and, in particular, with the history of the Latvian Legion, Waffen-SS.[1] Thanks to Pol's continued efforts, including joint projects with Latvia, the Zedelgem POW camp site will opened to the public in 2020.
Pol launched ZEDELGEM-POW-CAMP.BE in Flemish as part of his awareness campaign. Unfortunately, the original web site and domain name were lost and site contents only partially preserved online: www.zedelgem-pow-camp.be at archive.org
We renewed the web site when the domain became available to continue the Zedelgem POW camp awareness campaign. Please contact us if you are interested in contributing materials to this heritage site or assisting with translations. We would be particularly interested in photographs or scans of artifacts which we could share here.
Owing to miscommunications with DNS Belgium, the domain name was lost in January 2022 and registered by a third party for ransom, whose final offer was €999. We elected to continue the website under zedelgempowcamp.be.
You can reach us at contact@zedelgempowcamp.be.
For more on the Latvian Legion: history, the first deportation trial against an alleged "Latvian Nazi", and coverage in the press, we recommend you visit latvianlegion.org.
| [1] | The Waffen-SS were non-German military units, which while administered by the German SS, were operationally subordinated to the Wehrmacht, and were — as Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff attests — not involved in the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the "elite" Nazi German SS. The vast majority of Legionnaires were conscripted—by the end of the war, the Germans had illegally drafted every Latvian male born after 1905 into service on the Eastern Front. |
Updated: January, 2022