Charleroi is the Belgian city where Jean-Jules Lecomte was tried in absentia for crimes against humanity and sentenced to death after the war. The judgment established his criminal responsibility, but he was never captured; the city’s place in the narrative therefore marks both the possibility of legal accountability and its limits when fugitives remain beyond reach.

The trial of Jean-Jules Lecomte

Lecomte, a member of both the Rexist Party and the SS, had served as burgomaster of his hometown, Chimay, during the Nazi occupation. He persecuted the town’s Jewish families and deported them. When convents sheltered Jewish children by enrolling them under false names as relatives of Catholic pupils, Lecomte forced his way into the convents, shot nuns, detained their superiors, and identified the children. The following day, the children were put on a train bound for an extermination camp; few arrived alive, and none returned.

A few months after the war, Lecomte was tried in Charleroi for crimes against humanity and sentenced to death in absentia. The verdict did not lead to his arrest: he was never captured. The distinction between a court’s formal judgment and the fugitive’s continued freedom gives Charleroi’s episode its stark consequence.

A location in the postwar pursuit

The trial is recounted as Manuel Arroyo learns what Lecomte had done and realizes that a man connected to the Madrid escape network is a war criminal. The revelation turns the account of a fugitive’s presence into a question of responsibility: Lecomte’s record was not rumor or vague wartime association, but conduct followed by a postwar conviction, even as custody remained out of reach.

Charleroi also belongs to the book’s wider contrast between prosecution and protection. The narrative places Lecomte’s unsuccessful pursuit beside the Franco regime’s later refusal to surrender people named in the Allies’ List of 104, including Clarita Stauffer, whose role in arranging false papers and employment for Germans was specified in the Allied claim. In that context, Charleroi stands for a legal response that could name and condemn a perpetrator, while the broader escape networks and political protections described in the book obstructed the delivery of fugitives to justice.