Belgians retake Ghent

On 10 November 1918 the last German units withdrew from Ghent, and Belgian soldiers entered the city. The British chronology of the war records the recapture of Ghent by Belgian troops under this date, and the Ghent city museum likewise states that the Germans finally left the city on 10 November. So ended the occupation that had begun on 12 October 1914, when the Germans marched into the city after the Allies had abandoned it following the fighting at Melle. Ghent, one of the largest cities in Belgium and the capital of East Flanders, regained its freedom the day before the armistice.

The last weeks of fighting

After the battle of Kortrijk King Albert I’s Flanders Army Group, made up of the Belgian army, the French Sixth Army and the British Second Army, set off further east on 20 October, towards the Lys and the Scheldt. In the north the Germans dug in behind the Deinze–Bruges canal and until the end of October stubbornly repelled the Belgian attacks. On 2 November, however, they had to fall back behind the Ghent–Terneuzen canal. On 9 November, as German resistance clearly weakened, the Belgians stood on this canal along their whole sector, from the station in Ghent to the Dutch frontier. The Allies planned a new attack across the Scheldt towards Brussels for 10 November, but it was called off when it became clear that the armistice was a matter of hours.

The Germans were withdrawing anyway. During the night of 4 to 5 November the German supreme command ordered a general retreat to the Antwerp–Meuse position, which ran from the Antwerp fortifications through Dendermonde along the river Dender. Ghent lay in front of it, in a forward zone that no one any longer intended to defend. The liberation offensive cost the Belgians dearly: according to Belgian figures, between the end of September and 11 November the Belgian army suffered nearly a third of all its losses of the whole war.

The city in the days of liberation

Ghent’s German mayor, Franz Künzer, left on 8 November. The next day the socialist Edward Anseele took over the mayor’s duties, as the lawful mayor, Emile Braun, was in deportation in Germany. The departing Germans blew up the railway bridges and destroyed the port installations. The area around Dampoort station and the former Abbey of St Bavo, which had been hit by Allied aerial bombs, also suffered badly.

The joy at the occupier’s departure also had a dark side. Inhabitants attacked houses and looted the homes of the so-called activists, Flemish campaigners who had collaborated with the Germans. Ghent was the centre of this collaboration: in 1916 the occupiers had turned the local university into an institution teaching only in Dutch, and had deported the best-known opponents of the change to Germany.

A few days later the city celebrated. On 13 November King Albert I, together with Queen Elisabeth and the heir to the throne, Leopold, made a ceremonial entry into Ghent and took the salute of the Belgian troops on the Kouter square. From 15 November the deportees began to return: Mayor Braun, alderman De Weert and the professors Henri Pirenne and Paul Fredericq, whom the Germans had arrested and deported as early as March 1916.