The Locksmith Who Butchered 31 SS Guards and Freed 400 Prisoners Before the Alarm Rang

#Antwerp #WaffenSS #WW2History In the summer of 1942 the SS hired a Belgian locksmith to fit new hardware on every door of the Begijnenstraat transit prison in Antwerp. He did the job properly, the way his father and grandfather had done every job since 1873. Then he went home, closed the shutters, and spent four months cutting duplicates of every key by hand file at his own bench, hiding them in a lead-lined tobacco tin behind the workshop stove. This documentary tells the story of Willem De Smet, third generation of a family trade on Wolstraat, fifty-five years old, who walked through the outer service door on Kloosterstraat at twenty-two forty-seven on the night of the fourteenth of April 1943 with a shortened crowbar sewn into his coat lining and a leather ring of forty-seven cut keys in his inside pocket. Inside were four hundred prisoners. One hundred and thirty Resistance detainees in Block A. Two hundred and ten Jewish deportees in Block B awaiting transfer to Mechelen. Sixty mixed detainees in Block C. Thirty-one SS-Totenkopf guards were on the night shift, their commander drinking coffee on the ground floor of the guardhouse. Relief was due at four in the morning. Willem had a window of seventy-three minutes and he intended to use twenty-two of them. Discover how a man who spent his working life making sure things stayed closed opened three cell blocks in the dark, why a relief guard arriving fifty-one minutes early nearly ended everything, and what the sewer outfall onto the Scheldt embankment had to do with four hundred people disappearing into eleven Antwerp side streets before the alarm bell rang at nine minutes past three. 🔥 In this video: The Contract: The SS hired the wrong locksmith, and paid him properly for it. Forty-Seven Keys: Four months of night work by hand file behind closed shutters. Twenty-Two Minutes: The window, the route, and the order the blocks were opened in. The White Brigade: Five cell-block guides, coded pick-up groups and eleven side streets. The Alarm at 03:09: The relief guard whose wife went into labour that night. Sources of Where I get my facts: Saerens, L. (2000) Vreemdelingen in een wereldstad: Een geschiedenis van Antwerpen en zijn joodse bevolking (1880-1944). Tielt: Lannoo. Steinberg, M. (2004) La persécution des Juifs en Belgique (1940-1945). Brussels: Éditions Complexe. Michman, D. (ed.) (1998) Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians, Germans. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem. Van Doorslaer, R. et al. (2007) La Belgique docile: Les autorités belges et la persécution des Juifs en Belgique. Brussels: Luc Pire. Warmbrunn, W. (1993) The German Occupation of Belgium, 1940-1944. New York: Peter Lang. Disclaimer: This video is a dramatised historical narrative set against documented events of the Second World War, intended for educational purposes. Characters, dialogue and specific incidents are reconstructed for storytelling. #Antwerp #WaffenSS #WW2History #Belgium #Resistance #History #WhiteBrigade #Occupation