Two weeks before the minute of silence at Auschwitz, 80 years after the liberation of the camp, the Flemish Parliament observes a minute of silence for a person who put the Holocaust into perspective. Roeland Raes, member of Vlaams Belang, died at the end of November at the age of 90. It was the family who asked the Flemish Parliament for this minute of silence, and the institution agreed, despite the controversial nature of Raes, to say the least.
In the early 2000s, the man, who had already built a solid reputation, began to minimize the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust in several interviews.
On Dutch television, he disputed the figure of 6.5 million deaths and claimed that extermination in the gas chambers was not organized on such a large scale. Raes, at the time vice-president of the Vlaams Blok, deliberately sowed doubt. He broadcast fake news even before the term appeared. Likewise, he publicly questioned the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary.
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And if Raes sowed doubt, it was not simply out of ignorance. Obsessed by the question, he regularly appeared in the company of notorious collaborators such as Florentine Rost van Tonningen, known as the “black widow”, whose husband, figurehead of national socialism in the Netherlands, was a precursor of the Nazi party .
For years, Raes was also the contact person in Belgium for Flemish collaborators exiled in Argentina. He ended up being convicted of Holocaust denial after a long legal procedure.
Vlaams Belang candidate in the last municipal elections, he was hastily removed from the lists after a scandal broke out over his former statements, which he himself said he no longer endorsed.
And this is not impossible, because Raes is capable of changing his mind: while he had voted, at the time, against the right to euthanasia, he resorted to this liberal law at the end of his term. life.
-Raes was already very ill and very old when he was placed on the local list of Vlaams Belang in Aalter, East Flanders. This gesture seems less like a second chance and more like a sign of gratitude.
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The man’s old friends believe Raes was “deeply convinced” when he relativized the Holocaust. “I’m sure he still believed it. It was not a slip of the tongue,” one of them testified.
The Flemish Parliament did not owe this minute of silence to anyone. Raes only served three years on the Flemish Councilthe ancestor of the Flemish Parliament. Obviously, not everyone appreciated the idea of paying tribute to the deceased Holocaust denier: Groen decided to leave the benches of the hemicycle during the minute of silence, followed by the PVDA and Vooruit.
Flanders has the heroes it chooses. First of all by electing Raes at the time. Then by authorizing Parliament for a minute of silence in his memory. In a publication published a few years ago, the Flemish Parliament paid tribute to August Borms and Staf De Clercq, two men towards whom Raes was well disposed. So that’s perhaps the idea: if the Flemish Parliament honors collaborators, why not deniers after all?
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