Word: laeken
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...Brussels, streetcar motormen who defied strike orders were blocked by throngs on the tracks who threw bricks through the car windows. Taxis that ventured out were overturned. A procession of several thousand anti-Leopoldists marched towards Leopold's palace at Laeken yelling "Abdication!" and "A has la calotte [down with the cassocks]." Ex-Premier Spaak was at the head of the line. A woman ran up to him, stroked his plump face and said, "Aren't you tired? What are you going to do now? Camp...
Inside the Laeken palace grounds, soldiers rushed to the entrance gates. They shook the hands of demonstrators, who cried: "The army is with us!" The crowd came face to face with lines of black-helmeted gendarmes, who thrust them back. When a caravan of buses and automobiles bringing pro-Leopoldists from Ghent approached the palace, it was met by a volley of paving stones and bricks thrown by the demonstrators...
Leopold tried to get Socialist Party President Max Buset to confer with him at the Laeken palace, but Buset scorned the royal summons. Said he: "People a good deal more eloquent and persuasive than I am have talked frankly to Leopold . . . with complete lack of success . . . Why should I waste my time?" But at week's end after the King ordered the army, including two battalions brought from occupation duty in Germany, to quell rioting, Buset went to the palace...
Private Affair. The Germans interned Leopold in the royal chateau at Laeken. He regarded himself as a prisoner of war, refused to exercise royal functions. He visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden; his purpose, he later said, was to get better treatment for the Belgians. It was at Laeken, in September 1941, that he married Mary Liliane Baels...
King Leopold III of the Belgians, since 1940 a Nazi prisoner, was reported reunited with his children in Bavaria. From neutral sources came a picture of the royal offspring, taken while they were still happily grouped on the grounds of the Palace of Laeken in Brussels (Josephine Charlotte, 16; Albert, 10; Alexandre Emmanuel, 2-Leopold's only child by his second wife, Marie; Crown Prince Baudouin...