Article from the Journal of Belgian History receives award

On Heritage Day (Erfgoeddag, 26 April 2026), the quinquennial Oscar Delghust Prize was awarded in Ronse. The winning entry was Nico Wouter’s article on the Leo Vindevogel affair, which was published in the Journal of Belgian History.

Leo Vindevogel was the wartime mayor of Ronse and the only Belgian member of parliament to be executed after the Second World War for collaboration. After the war, he became one of the main symbols in Flanders of so-called the anti-Flemish repression. In this narrative, his death sentence was regarded as a political settling of scores and a miscarriage of justice. There was strong pressure to have the original trial reviewed, but, ultimately, this never took happened. In the article, Nico Wouters analyses this narrative and compares it with the original court documents. Can we really speak of a miscarriage of justice? How did the courts come to hand down a death sentence?

This award of this prize highlights the importance of the Journal of Belgian History as a leading platform for new and innovative historical research. All the articles, debate papers, reviews and summaries of doctoral theses published in this periodical are open access, that is, they are available free of charge via the journal’s website. Some print issues are also available free of charge and can be obtained at events organised by CegeSoma.

The article “The Vindevogel Case” (in Dutch) can be found here.