Painful Death of Oswald Englebin *Warning Real Footage JJ

Noon, August 17th, 1944. A wood gas car groans up a hill outside Charleroi, Belgium. Behind the wheel, a 20-something son driving his own father home. Beside his father sits the woman he married two decades earlier, the woman who gave him that son. In less than a minute, gunfire will tear through that car, and what follows will spiral into the single bloodiest night of collaborator vengeance in occupied Belgium.

27 civilians executed, most of them people who had never even heard the family’s name. This is a true story, pieced together from Belgian court records, wartime archives, and the accounts of survivors who lived to testify. If stories like this, the ones history tries to bury, matter to you, hit subscribe right now and ring that bell because Nazi history digs up the darkest, best-documented chapters of World War II every week, and you don’t want to miss what’s coming next.

Now, let’s go back to where it all began. With a boy who missed one war, and a man who chose the wrong side of the next one. Oswald Engelbin was born December 27th, 1893, in Seneffe, a quiet farming town in French-speaking Wallonia. When Europe exploded into the First World War in the summer of 1914, Engelbin was called up like every young man of his generation.

But a training injury pulled him out of uniform before he ever reached the front lines. While an entire generation of Belgian men were slaughtered in the mud between 1914 and 1918, Engelbin went home. There, in the years that followed, he fell for a woman named Floor Philippe. Records don’t preserve their courtship in detail.

No love letters survive, no diary entries. But what we do know is this: They married, and the marriage produced a son, Philippe, named in the family tradition of the era. For a while, it looked like an ordinary, unremarkable Belgian life, a husband, a wife, a boy growing up in a country still recovering from one catastrophe with no idea a second one was coming.

That second catastrophe arrived disguised as an economic collapse. The Great Depression slammed into Belgium in the early 1930s, gutting industries and throwing hundreds of thousands out of work. Fear of communism spread through the working towns of Wallonia like a fever, and into that fear walked a young charismatic publisher named Léon Degrelle who transformed a small Catholic printing house called Christus Rex, Christ the King, into a full-blown political movement simply known as Rex.

Rex preached order, tradition, and a rejection of the chaotic parliamentary politics that Degrelle blamed for the crisis. In the 1936 elections, Rex stunned the country, pulling in more than 11% of the national vote almost overnight, a genuine political earthquake. But Degrelle’s admiration for Mussolini and Hitler soon curdled the movement into open fascism, and the moderate Catholics who’d carried Rex to that surprise victory abandoned it in disgust.

The ones who stayed were the true believers. Oswald Englebin was one of them. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939, Belgium hoped, as it had in 1914, that neutrality might spare it. It didn’t. German forces crossed the border on May 10th, 1940, and after 18 days of fighting, Belgium surrendered on May 28th.

For committed Rexists, occupation wasn’t a national tragedy, it was a career opportunity. Englebin threw himself fully into collaborationist politics. In October 1941, the German administration installed him as Rexist mayor of Trasignies, a small town near Charleroi. Then, in July 1942, the occupiers consolidated the region into a sprawling administrative zone called Greater Charleroi, and Englebin was put in charge of the supply office, deciding how food and coal reached a population that was growing hungrier and angrier by

the month. His predecessor as mayor of Greater Charleroi, Prosper Teughels, had been assassinated by the resistance, a warning shot Englebin apparently chose to ignore. In December 1942, he stepped into the vacant mayor’s office anyway. From there, he made himself impossible to miss. In March 1944, he personally hosted Leon Degrelle at Charleroi’s City Hall, praising Belgian volunteers who had shipped off to fight and die for the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.

A month later, he stood before SS troops freshly returned from the collapsing Soviet Front, delivering a speech of gratitude in front of Degrelle and a hall full of Rexis officials. Journalistically speaking, this is the detail that matters most. By mid-1944, Oswald Englebin wasn’t just administering Charleroi.

He was one of its most visible faces of collaboration. And after the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy that June, visibility like that had become a death sentence waiting to be carried out. By August, resistance cells across Hainaut province were emboldened, striking harder and more often at Rexis targets.

On the afternoon of August 17th, 1944, just after noon, Englebin left City Hall for what would be the final time. His son Philippe drove. Beside Philippe sat the mayor’s bodyguard, gendarme Marcel Ducan, a submachine gun resting across his knees. In the backseat, Oswald Englebin sat beside his wife, Flore. The car struggled up the steep grade between Monceau-sur-Sambre and Courcelles, in a wooded stretch known locally as the Bois du Rognac, a name that would soon become inseparable from tragedy.

Ducanes noticed a car pulled over up ahead. A man crouched beside it as if changing a tire. It was a setup. Four more men rose from the tree line and opened fire with automatic weapons. Ducanes reached for his gun, but Philippe had already been hit at the wheel. The car lurched, spun, and dropped backward into a roadside ditch as the gunfire continued.

Two attackers moved in close, ordering everyone out with their hands raised. Only Ducanes could still move. Oswald Englebin, 50 years old, his wife, and his son were already dying. More shots followed at close range to finish the job. Investigators later counted six bullet wounds in Englebin’s body, 18 in his wife’s, and four in his son’s.

Ducanes escaped on foot to raise the alarm, but by the time help arrived, it was already too late to save any of them. Word of the assassination reached Rex command in both Charleroi and Brussels within the hour, and the response was immediate and merciless. Before the day was even out, two men were killed in the first wave of retaliation.

One gunned down near the ambush site, another inside Charleroi’s judicial police headquarters, a building the killers then set on fire. That evening, three members of a single unrelated family were executed. Three more people were killed overnight. None of them had any documented connection to the ambush. Then came the coordinated part.

Rex leadership in Brussels and Charleroi decided the reprisal needed to be bigger, a message no one in the region could misread. Overnight militia squads rounded up local dignitaries, police officers, doctors, architects, lawyers, civil officials, people chosen simply because they were prominent, respected, and reachable. Roughly 21 hostages were dragged to a requisitioned house in Courcelles and locked in the cellar to wait.

Among them was Father Pierre Harmignie, the dean of Charleroi since 1938, a priest openly critical of the occupation from the pulpit. Survivors and later accounts say that in the darkness of that cellar, Harmignie tried to comfort the others, reportedly telling them that his death, that all their deaths, might still serve peace and human love.

Whether every word of that account is exact, historians can’t say for certain. >> [clears throat] >> But the moment itself, a priest offering comfort to strangers hours before execution, is corroborated across multiple post-war sources. At dawn on August 18th, the killers started their car engines to drown out the gunfire.

One by one, the hostages were led outside and shot in the back of the head. Their bodies left near the same wooded road where the Engelbin family had died the day before. 19 people were murdered in that single morning session, the largest single act of killing in what would become known as the Courcelles massacre, sometimes called the Rognac massacre after the woods where it began.

It still wasn’t over. Later that day, Germaine Van Hogarden de Wandre, president of the Charleroi Red Cross, was seized and shot three times in the back. Elizabeth De Ridder, a housekeeper working for a local architect, was murdered as well. By the time the killing finally stopped, 27 civilians were dead across Courcelles, a total confirmed by post-war Belgian court records and cross-referenced by multiple historians since.

Only two hostages survived that night. Marcel Stockart was released before the final executions began for reasons that were never fully documented. Germaine Gobez survived purely by chance. One of the militiamen guarding the hostages happened to be her cousin, and he pulled her out before the shooting Everyone else in that cellar was killed.

Afterward, according to post-war accounts, the men responsible didn’t slip away in shame. They drove back to Brussels, where their superiors greeted them with drinks and praise, calling what they’d done an act of revolutionary vengeance. Englebienne had reportedly asked, before his death, for a quiet, private funeral.

Rexism’s leadership wanted a massive public spectacle to rally support instead. In the end, his family got their way. He was buried on August 21st, 1944, in a modest ceremony still crowded with senior Rexism’s officials paying their respects. German-controlled newspapers, meanwhile, ran with a very different story.

Headlines across occupied Belgium accused unnamed terrorists of butchering an innocent public servant and his family, conveniently erasing the 27 murdered civilians from the narrative entirely. It was propaganda dressed up as journalism, and for a brief window, it worked. Around the same time, German forces separately executed 20 additional hostages of their own, unrelated to the Englebienne ambush, as payback for earlier resistance operations.

Two different occupying powers, two separate death lists, one shared strategy, terror as governance. Belgium was liberated just weeks later, in September 1944, and the hunt for those responsible began almost immediately. Out of roughly 150 suspected participants, investigators eventually identified 97. 80 were arrested and stood trial.

On November 10th, 1947, in Charleroi itself, 27 Rexists faced a firing squad for their role in the massacre, a grim symmetry with the 27 civilians they’d killed. Among the executed were Victor Matthys, the party’s interim leader, and his successor, Louis Collard. Joseph Pevenasse, the regional Rex leader and lawyer accused of orchestrating the roundup, also stood trial for his part in the killings.

By the war’s end, roughly 88,000 Belgian citizens had died, including 25,000 Belgian Jews murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Against that backdrop, the story of one collaborator mayor and his family might seem small. But it isn’t. It’s a case study in how quickly a system built on fear can turn its own believers into victims and how easily the innocent get pulled into the reckoning when institutions choose vengeance over justice.

Oswald Engelen chose to serve a regime responsible for unimaginable death. His wife and son were killed alongside him for that choice and 27 people who never made any choice at all were killed because of it. If this story stayed with you, don’t scroll away without subscribing to Nazi history.

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