The green-garbed German officer was abruptly firm: the Fuhrer would not tolerate delay. For the last time handsome, sad-eyed Leopold III looked down from his Laeken palace-prison on swans nodding whitely in a blue lake, on the withering bloom of purple rhododendrons beneath stately beeches. Stiffly he turned, walked out to a waiting car, climbed in beside his commoner second wife (to whom he had given the title Princess de RĂ©thy). As helpless as any of the 600,000 Belgians who had preceded him, the King of the Belgians was deported to Germany.
Just four years had passed since German might and...