Index cards on Jews from Belgium interned in or deported from France. Collection

The Belgian Commissariat for Repatriation was created in June 1944 by the Belgian government in London to coordinate the repatriation of thousands of Displaced Persons to Belgium. The Commissariat was initially a military organisation. It sent over 400 liaison officers on missions all over Europe to look for missing persons. These missions were usually carried out upon requests from family members, but the officers would also systematically search hospitals, prisons, camps, municipal administrations, businesses and other potential places where persons from Belgium may be found. The mission’s approach depended largely on the information available. For persons whose circumstances and place of death were known, the officer would collect evidence at the scene. When lacking this information, the officer would try to retrace the persons path from where he was last seen by collecting testimonies and documents. In the Summer of 1945, most Displaced Persons had been repatriated and the Commissariat shifted its focus to the 20.000 persons from Belgium who were still missing. The military liaison officers were replaced with multi-lingual civilians who searched the former occupied territories for both information on missing persons and general documentation. Marie-Céline de Dorlodot had worked for the Belgian Repatriation Service since June 1940 and became the head of the Belgian Mission for Searches in France and member of the Belgian Military Mission for Repatriation from France. She and her team thus collected information on over 10.400 persons from Belgium, including thousands of Jewish war victims. All searches of the Commissariat were suspended in 1955, when the organisation was transferred to the Service for War Victims, today the Archives Service for War Victims – State Archives of Belgium.

As of 1945, the Belgian Mission for Searches in France, a subsection of the Belgian Commissariat for Repatriation, started looking for missing persons from Belgium who had been in France during the war. Among those missing were thousands of German and Austrian Jews from Belgium who had been arrested as suspects by the Belgian authorities in May 1940 as well as Jewish refugees who fled south at the time of the German invasion or later on during the war. For some of these persons relatives had filled out search requests, for others the Belgian Mission used the index cards compiled by the Sicherheitspolizei-Sicherheitsdienst (Sipo-SD) in Brussels from 1941 onwards. The Sipo-SD had created these 56,000 file cards as an overview of the situation of the Jewish community in Belgium and to keep track of the deportation. The cards were abandoned at the Werbestelle Hasselt in September 1944 and were subsequently given to the Commissariat. The Belgian Mission for Searches in France filtered out the Sipo-SD file cards of Jews deported from France. Since the Sipo-SD only started registering in 1941, these were mostly refugees who fled Belgium later in the war, after 1940. The family search requests and the selected Sipo-SD index cards were then completed with information obtained via the archives of French internment camps, the French deportation lists, hospital records and other archives. Thus the so called ‘fichier Drancy’ was created, which is in fact only one of three subseries of the original index card series of the Sipo-SD, officially called the filing cabinet on the persecution and deportation of Jews, Roma and Sinti in Belgium. A second subseries consists of the index cards of the Jewish men, women and children deported from the SS-Sammellager Mecheln (Dossin barracks), a third subseries contains the index cards of Jews persecuted in Belgium. In 1997 the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance, predecessor of Kazerne Dossin, obtained permission to catalogue, digitise and index the fichier Drancy, after which the subseries was rendered to the Directorate-General War Victims, today Archives Service for War Victims – State Archives of Belgium. In 2016 the Archives Service for War Victims started a new digitisation and cataloguing project for the fichier.

Service for War Victims, today Archives Service for War Victims – State Archives of Belgium, 1997