Memorial Pillar Mayor Tielemans

The facts
On August 19, 1914, after strong resistance from the Belgian army, Aarschot was occupied by the German troops. The population was terrorized. Homes were destroyed and looted. In the morning, 39 civilians were murdered. The afternoon was quieter, but around 7 p.m. German soldiers panicked and fired everywhere in the city. Commander Stenger was killed. In the following hours, houses were set on fire and civilians, men, women and children were herded together on the Grote Markt. Around 7 p.m., a large group of men were led out of the city and shot.
At around 11 pm, a second group of hostages was taken away. The men were forced to lie face down in a potato field behind the then Stockmans farm. The next morning, at 5 am, a cart rattled by with the body of Major General Stenger on it. The body was buried in the railway embankment with military honor. After nearly two hours of deliberation, the staff officers decided on the fate of the hostages: every third man would be shot. Mayor Tielemans, his son and his brother were the first to act. The prisoners were arranged in rows of three. An officer identified an unfortunate person from each row: 29 men were executed.

The memorial pillar
Because in 1921 the liberals and socialists in the city council refused to erect a memorial for the murdered mayor Tielemans, widow Tielemans bought the land near the now disappeared Stockmanshoeve where her husband, son and brother-in-law were shot. In 1923 she financed a memorial column: a hard stone obelisk crowned with a cross and surrounded by the greenery of weeping willows, palm trees and rose bushes.

Hunted by an order from the Germans to evacuate the city, widow Tielemans fled to the Netherlands with her daughter on August 20, 1914. She would never return to Aarschot. She paid for the maintenance of the monument and even after her death in 1936 her daughter Florence continued to do so. Because she did not want her children to pay any more for the costs, she donated land to the city in 1939.

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Source

• Text: Jan Rymenams
• Photos: