Qualla: Wire of Death https://qualla.com/wire-of-death en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:33 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_res/siteimages/rsslogo.png Qualla: Wire of Death https://qualla.com/wire-of-death Wire of Death: Introduction https://qualla.com/wire-of-death/ Two warning words ran the length of the wire: Hoogspanning - Levensgevaar. High voltage. Lethal danger. On the Dutch side of the border, where the signs were posted, the meaning was unambiguous. On the Belgian side, behind two thousand volts of taut copper wire and a hundred-metre kill zone patrolled by German guards, the meaning was the same but the consequences were not. Crossing the wire meant freedom from occupation. Touching it meant dying instantly. Between 1915 and 1918, somewhere between two and three thousand people made the calculation, and lost.

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/5/g/wire-of-death-wp/u15g-wire-of-death-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Wire of Death: What the Germans Built https://qualla.com/wire-of-death/ When German forces swept into neutral Belgium in 1914, the refugees came with them. By the end of that first year alone, a million Belgians had crossed into the Netherlands. Many were fleeing the occupation; others were trying to reach unoccupied Belgian territory in the west, or...

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/5/g/wire-of-death-wp/u15g-wire-of-death-what-the-germans-built.mp3 0:06 2 full Wire of Death: The People Who Tried https://qualla.com/wire-of-death/ The dead were not soldiers. They were farmers, smugglers, mothers carrying children to relatives on the other side, young men who wanted to enlist, priests, brothers and sisters trying to reach each other. The methods of crossing read like a folk catalogue of desperation: pole va...

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/5/g/wire-of-death-wp/u15g-wire-of-death-the-people-who-tried.mp3 0:06 3 full Wire of Death: The Funeral at the Fence https://qualla.com/wire-of-death/ The Belgian-Dutch border had never really been one. Flemish-speaking villages on both sides intermarried, traded, celebrated weddings together, buried each other's dead. The wire cut all of that in half overnight. The most quietly devastating image from those four years is not of...

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/5/g/wire-of-death-wp/u15g-wire-of-death-the-funeral-at-the-fence.mp3 0:06 4 full Wire of Death: Smugglers and the Iron Curtain Before the Iron Curtain https://qualla.com/wire-of-death/ The wire was hated, and not just by Belgians. The Netherlands had entered the war hostile to Britain, a hangover from the Second Boer War, but the daily news of villagers killed at the border swung public opinion sharply against Germany. Smuggling, already a Flemish border tradit...

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/5/g/wire-of-death-wp/u15g-wire-of-death-smugglers-and-the-iron-curtain-before-the-iron-cur.mp3 0:06 5 full Wire of Death: After the Power Was Cut https://qualla.com/wire-of-death/ In October 1918, with the German lines collapsing in the west, the occupiers opened the wire and let French and Belgian refugees pour back through rather than clog their own supply roads. A few weeks later the armistice was signed and the power stations that fed the fence went da...

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/5/g/wire-of-death-wp/u15g-wire-of-death-after-the-power-was-cut.mp3 0:06 6 full