Liège

Liège is presented through Fabrique Nationale, the arms factory where M. Goossens built his professional reputation and secretly worked against the German war effort. The city’s industrial setting links exacting weapons manufacture to a hidden history of Resistance work and sabotage.

Fabrique Nationale and Goossens’s Work

For thirty years, M. Goossens was a trusted employee of Fabrique Nationale in Liège. His precision in engineering was considered indispensable, and he became the company’s foremost expert on its wide range of weapons, from small automatic pistols to heavy machine guns. By the early 1950s, he had risen to departmental chief, a position that made later suspicion of his honesty seem implausible to his superiors.

The Factory During the Occupation

After the Occupation, M. Goossens continued working at the arms factory that the Germans ran for their war effort, but his employment concealed resistance. In private, he took part in a network of safe houses for downed Allied airmen; at work, he led a sabotage ring. Weapons produced at Liège were made unreliable: some failed to fire accurately, while others exploded at the fiftieth shell, killing their German crews.

Public Reputation and Hidden History

The sabotage and aid network remained undisclosed until M. Goossens’s lawyers brought them to light in court after he was suspected in an arms-deal embezzlement case in the early 1950s. His record at the factory thus carried two sharply opposed meanings: years of trusted technical service and covert damage to the German war effort. His reluctance to publicize his Resistance activities, including because post-liberation honours would have embarrassed him, reinforced the contrast between the quiet employee known in Liège and the wartime work revealed later.