Belgium Belgium Belgium officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Western Europe bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to the southwest, and the North Sea to the northwest. It covers an area of and has a population of more than 11.4 million. The capital and largest city is Brussels; other major cities are Antwerp, Ghent, Charleroi and Liège. The sovereign state of Belgium is a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system of governance. Its institutional organisation is complex and is structured on both regional and linguistic grounds. It
Catholic Church and Nazi Germany the Vatican that the Germans planned to invade France through the Netherlands and Belgium on May 10. On May 7, Alfred Jodl noted in his diary that the Germans knew the Belgian envoy to the Vatican had been tipped off, and the Fuehrer was greatly agitated by the danger of treachery. Following the Fall of France, peace overtures continued to emanate from the Vatican as well as Sweden and the United States, to which Churchill responded resolutely that Germany would first have to free its conquered territories. In Rome in 1942, US envoy Myron C. Taylor, thanked the Holy See