ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 15, 1996 TAG: 9602150082
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-12 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
SOURCE: Associated Press
A farmer's wife put to death for betraying the Belgian resistance in World War II should have been given a life sentence instead, a court ruled Wednesday.
Irma Laplasse was accused of telling German occupiers about a resistance hideout after resistance fighters captured two dozen Germans and informants, including her son.
A German unit attacked the hideout hours later, killing one resistance fighter and later executing six others. Laplasse's son survived.
Laplasse was executed by firing squad May 30, 1945, at age 41.
The current trial has highlighted lingering hatreds from the occupation, which ended in early 1945, and the subsequent wave of trials of alleged collaborators.
``We still have not digested this Irma Laplasse case,'' said political commentator Johan Anthierens, who wrote a book on the case.
Belgium executed 242 people for collaboration and convicted a further 57,254.
Justice Minister Melchior Wathelet requested that Laplasse's case be heard again after allegations that her two 1945 trials were unfair.
The court found that Laplasse committed treason but that it could not be proven that she alone informed the Germans of the hideout.
During the retrial, resistance groups and others in French-speaking southern Belgium spoke out against Laplasse's backers.
In the Dutch-speaking north, where Laplasse lived, reactions have been more ambivalent.
To some, she embodied the evil of Nazi collaboration. To others, she simply was protecting her son.
LENGTH: Short : 42 linesby CNB