Information bulletin regarding non-Belgian residents of the Zonhoven municipality. Collection

On 18 December 1940 the Feldkommandantur in Antwerp started distributing over 8,000 expulsion orders among non-Belgian residents in the city. Several nationalities such as Czech, German, Dutch French and Polish nationals, but also stateless persons, former members of the Foreign Legion and Roma and Sinti were targeted. In practice, most people who received such an expulsion order were Jewish. The reason for the measure remains unclear. Of the 8,000 persons addressed, in January and February 1941 over 3,000 were sent from Antwerp to the province of Limburg in the east of Belgium. There, they were scattered throughout the municipalities in small groups. The municipality of Zonhoven took in 19 people of whom 18 were Jewish. As stipulated by Belgian law and the immigration authorities, all of them registered in the Zonhoven information bulletin for non-Belgian residents. When the Antwerp expulsion measure ended – for women and children in March 1941, for men in the summer of 1941 – most of them returned to Antwerp or moved to Brussels, upon which they were stricken from the information bulletin at the municipalities in Limburg. The forms, however, remained part of the municipal archives.

Digitisation permitted by municipality of Zonhoven, 2003