The strike of the '100,000' in Belgium

Belgium had been occupied since May 1940 and its vital heavy industry was working for the German war effort. Workers there were subject to frozen wages, severe rationing and the threat of forced labour in the Reich. The clandestine Communist Party — the USSR still being tied to Germany by the Nazi-Soviet pact — nevertheless drove the social agitation, alongside other trade union networks.

In the spring of 1941, discontent was rising in the steel mills, where the production rates imposed by German orders contrasted with falling rations and wages frozen since the defeat. At the Cockerill steelworks at Seraing, near Liège, the workers were at the end of their tether. The date of 10 May, the first anniversary of the invasion, gave the moment patriotic significance: a wage protest could become an act of resistance to the occupier.

Our militants had to decide on the form of action, in a country under German control where any strike was forbidden and harshly repressed: launch an open strike combining wage demands with defiance of the occupier, at the risk of arrests; stick to discreet protests to preserve the networks; or give up, judging repression too dangerous.