Chimay is a Belgian town whose wartime history exposes the crimes of Jean-Jules Lecomte, a Nazi collaborator later found living in Madrid. The town’s monasteries had protected Jewish children by hiding them in plain sight; Lecomte forced his way into those convents, identified the children, and helped send them toward extermination. His subsequent evasion of a death sentence makes Chimay a place where the rescue of the vulnerable and the impunity of their persecutor meet.

Setting and reputation

Chimay is introduced through an ordinary marker of local identity: its famous beer, brewed by Cistercian monks at the town’s abbey. That familiar detail gives way to a darker account of the town’s religious houses. Several convents there were devoted to teaching, and their nuns had taken in Jewish children, registering them under false names as supposed siblings or cousins of Catholic pupils. The contrast is stark: institutions associated with learning and religious life became places of concealment and protection amid persecution.

Lecomte’s crimes in Chimay

Lecomte was a member of both the Rex Party and the SS. During the Nazi occupation he became burgomaster of his native town, a position from which he persecuted Chimay’s Jewish families and deported them. He then entered the convents by force, shot nuns, arrested their superiors, and exposed the children whose identities had been concealed.

The following day, the Jewish children were put on a train bound for an extermination camp. Few arrived alive, and none returned. The sequence makes the convents’ refuge precarious: false names and a network of religious protection could delay discovery, but Lecomte’s violence overturned that shelter and turned the town’s places of refuge into sites of capture.

A sentence in absentia

A few months after the war, Lecomte was tried in Charleroi for crimes against humanity and sentenced to death in absentia. He was never captured. The legal judgment thus named the scale of his crimes without bringing him into custody or ending his freedom.

Years later, an investigation in Madrid revealed where he had been: while sought for wartime atrocities in Belgium, Lecomte had been drinking coffee at number 14, Calle Galileo. That discovery turned Chimay from the setting of a historical account into a key to identifying a fugitive in Spain. The gap between conviction and capture carries the location’s wider significance: the crimes committed there were known and judged, yet judgment alone did not prevent their perpetrator from finding refuge elsewhere.