2023-08-24 13:12:00
At number 2 rue de la Brasserie, a plaque on the facade invites passers-by to remember. The plaque pays tribute to Walthère Dewé, this great resistant of the two wars. It was here, in Ixelles, that the Germans from whom he was trying to escape killed the man who ran the Clarence network. Go see the inventory, you will be surprised.
The writer and historian Joël Goffin was stunned. “Damn, have we already forgotten? Is this how we pay tribute to our great men, and keep the memory alive of the man who ran La Dame Blanche during the First World War and the Clarence network during the second ?”
The White Lady
Walthère Dewé was an engineer. The Liègeois was 34 years old, in August 1914, when the Germans invaded. And from whom to hold. As soon as the invasion took place, a cousin, Dieudonné Lambrecht, set up a spy network in the Allied intelligence service. Thanks to him, the allies will know almost everything regarding the rail movements of German troops in the occupied country. But Lambrecht was taken by the Germans and shot at Fort de la Chartreuse on April 18, 1916. It was his cousin, Walthère Dewé. It was then Walthère Dewé who took over. The network, renamed La Dame Blanche and which will have up to 1,300 agents, will provide London with 75% of the information collected in occupied Belgium.
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The Clarence Network
When the second war arrived in September 1938, Walthère Dewé was chief engineer at the Régie des Télégraphes et Telephones. Upon the declaration of war, contacted by the British SIS, the ancestor of the current MI6, he created the Belgian Observation Corps. Under cover of commercial activities with Germany, this network made up of businessmen carried out industrial espionage missions in Germany.
In June 1940 when France and Belgium capitulated, Walthère Dewé reactivated La Dame Blanche with the help of his friend Hector Demarque. Under the nom de guerre of “Cleveland”, Dewé organized the new network, which he called “Clarence”, modeled on that of the White Lady of the first war. The Clarence network will send 872 radio messages, 163 reports including maps, sketches and photos, and 92 couriers which will be forwarded to England via France and Spain. Claude Dansey, the deputy director of the SIS who managed the contacts from London, will say of the Clarence network that it occupied “the first place among the military intelligence services of all occupied Europe”.
Brewery Street
Walthère Dewé will not see the Liberation. In early 1944, radio transmissions with London became increasingly risky, with the Germans using radio direction finding to locate places of transmission. Nothing will stop Dewé alias Cleveland, neither the arrest of his two daughters, nor the loss of his wife struck down by a heart attack.
At the beginning of January 1944, Walthère Dewé learned that the Gestapo had just identified Thérèse de Radiguès, another great figure in the Clarence network, whose house in Ixelles was used as headquarters and as an arms depot. Walthère Dewé decides to go and tell her to get to safety. Today is January 14. When he arrives at her home, at 41 avenue de la Couronne, the Gestapo is already there. Faced with the Gestapists who appear in the living room, Dewé, who is no longer very young – 63 years old – manages to jostle them and flee. He runs one hundred and thirty meters. At the crossroads of avenue de la Couronne and rue de la Brasserie, he jumps into a tram on line 81 which unfortunately stops almost immediately, because of a red light. Walthère Dewé jumped out of the tram and ran towards Place Flagey but, in a second twist of fate, a German officer arriving on foot from Place Flagey fired on him.
Find the difference
Walthère Dewé is killed in front of number 2 rue de la Brasserie.
This place which today no longer resembles anything.
The facade is tagged. On the commemorative plaque of the “hero of the two wars fallen under the German bullets”, someone went to tag: “The real hair”.
Look for the difference. In France, the ashes of Jean Moulin are in the Pantheon. In Belgium, who knows Walthère Dewé? In France, high schools, boulevards bear the name of Jean Moulin. In Ixelles, 2 rue de la Brasserie is a disgrace.
The community reacted
This had been the situation for many, many months, and no one found fault or reacted. To prepare this report, we contacted the mayor of Ixelles last Thursday, at his vacation spot. Christos Doulkeridis was unaware of the situation.
But he reacted immediately, from there. The next day, an intervention by the municipality took place to clean the plate. The graffiti team did the necessary.
As for the facade, officers sought to contact the owner of the building; this one was not present. A warning has been left in the mailbox.
The procedure will follow its course, explained yesterday the mayor Doulkeridis. “If the owner does not respond to us within 30 days, we can intervene, in accordance with municipal regulations, to clean the facade”.
Christos Doulkeridis said he was very attentive to the preservation of places of memory. There are others.
Not far from there, at the corner of avenue de la Couronne and rue Wéry, is the one that recalls the memory and the martyrdom of little Loubna Benaïssa who was assassinated on August 5, 1992 by Patrick Derochette, at the age of nine. years. From now on, the memorial site in homage to ‘Cleveland’ will be similarly maintained.
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