up before conscription began in 1941, most were conscripted after that date and worked as forced labour against their will. 200,000 Belgian military prisoners of war, who had been captured in 1940, were also transported to Germany. Most were used as forced labour and paid only a nominal sum. About 80,000 (mainly Flemish) prisoners were returned to Belgium between late 1940 and 1941, but many remained in captivity until the end of the war. They were often kept in very poor conditions and around 2,000 died. Collaboration During the period of Nazi occupation, some Belgians collaborated with their occupiers. There were pro-Nazi political organizations in both Flemish and Walloon communities before and during the war. The most significant were DeVlag, Verdinaso and Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV) in Flanders as well as the Catholic Rex movement in Wallonia. Each of these movements had subtly different ideologies, their own paramilitary forces and printed their own newspapers. These organisations were also instrumental in encouraging Belgians to enlist into the German Army. Unlike the German-style National Socialist agenda of DeVlag, VNV appealed directly to a Flemish separatist agenda, though this message was never the main source of their popularity. Infighting between the groups, particularly VNV and DeVlag, was considerable. On the whole, the Belgian administrative system was very pliant and became an instrument of collaboration. In a 2007 report by a Belgian research institute, Cegesoma, a panel of historians concluded that Belgium had offered "maximum administrative collaboration" with the German occupation forces. The same report also commented on the apparently higher levels of collaboration in Flanders as part of an attempted integration into a "German-Flemish New Order". The towns of Brussels and Liège, the report added, "remained [generally] patriotic-Belgian and decisively hostile to Germany". The report also found that many Belgian authorities had been compliant, even active, in the deportation of Jews. Two separate units of the Waffen-SS, the Flemish Legion and the Walloon Legion, were recruited from Belgium during the occupation. Léon Degrelle, founder of the Rexist Party, served as commander of the Walloon Legion, which fought against the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. A total of 15,000 Belgians in the "divisions" (neither ever greater than brigade strength) fought on the Eastern Front where the Walloon Legion was nearly annihilated in the Korsun–Cherkassy Pocket in 1944. After the war, a total of 400,000 Belgians were investigated for collaboration. Of these, around 56,000 were