Reichskommissariat of Belgium and Northern France
The Reichskommissariat was established on 13 July 1944 by Hitler's "Erlaß des Führers über die Errichtung einer Zivilverwaltung in den besetzten Gebieten von Belgien und Nordfrankreich vom 13.[4] On 15 June it was joined with the two French départements of Nord and Pas-de-Calais (included on the grounds that part of this territory belonged to Germanic Flanders, as well as the fact that the entire region formed an integral economic unit[5]) as the Military Administration in Belgium and North France (Militärverwaltung in Belgien und Nordfrankreich).[13] When the German military launched the Ardennes Offensive on 16 December 1944, the Nazi collaborators had renewed hopes of carrying out their ideals.[14] In a 20 December 1944 interview with a pro-Nazi newspaper, Degrelle said no decision had yet been taken about the future of Belgium: 'The issue of the transformation of the States of the West is not current.[15] Meanwhile, van de Wiele's Vlaamsche Landsleiding, a self-proclaimed Flemish collaborator government-in-exile which had fled to Ústí nad Labem (German: Aussig) in November 1944[16] and had been designing statutes for a future Reichsland Flandern,[17] in late December 1944 moved to Wahn near Cologne to prepare for the 'liberation' of Flanders as it was building a combat group of Flemish collaborators to join the Ardennes Offensive.