News from the Wikibase Resistance project. Half a million data about Agents of the Intelligence and Action Services involved in the resistance in Belgium.

Thanks to a collective effort, the data feeding from 46,340 files about the attribution of the status of Intelligence and Action Agent preserved at CegeSoma is now finished!

There are over half a million data that now enable us to have an overview of the persons about which the State Security (Sûreté de l’État/Staatsveiligheid) has opened files. This information can henceforth be searched by gender, age, place of residence, or resistance network to which the person belonged. In anticipation of a transversal study to be published in the future, this data feeding work already allows us to make some observations.

From the information contained in the files preserved at CegeSoma it appears that about half of the requests addressed to the Belgian state were rejected (of a total of 40,869 requests accounted for, 49.1% were refused, 45.3% led to the status of national recognition and 5.2% led to an equivalent status from the French state; no data for 0.4% of the files). More than 4 requests out of 5 that led to the granting of the status of Intelligence and Action Agent were filed by men (more precisely 82.6% according to a sample of 11.094 recognised agents from September 2022). The top of the list of resistance networks and missions is held by the trio “Luc-Marc” (14.4%), “Bayard” (14.4%) and “Zéro” (12.3%).

We will keep you updated about the publication of these data in the coming months. Until then, you can already contact CegeSoma if you would like to obtain further information about one of these files.

The Wikibase Resistance project team continues its long-term work with a new challenge at hand: feeding the data from over 25.000 files on persons who have requested the status of resistance fighter through the underground press.