Raindorf, Maurice

(1909-1943)

   The son of political refugees from Russian Poland who arrived in Brussels in 1906, Maurice Raindorf was born on 16 February 1909. He completed primary studies in Ixelles and attended the Athenée de Saint-Gilles from 1921 to 1926. He worked in private business and became an ardent socialist and an equally active antifascist. In the summer of 1941 Raindorf began to assist in publication of underground newspapers, including Le Peuple and La Libre Belgigue. He became a key operative whose identity was revealed under torture by a prisoner of the Gestapo. Caught and condemned to death by the German War Council, he was imprisoned at Saint-Gilles and deported on 28 July 1942 to Bochum, Germany. In 1943, he was taken to Cologne where he was decapitated on 18 March. On the 80th anniversary of his birth, the commune of Uccle renamed the square adjoining avenue Wolvendael and Dieweg in his honor.