Hitler's Foreign Executioners (42 page)

Himmler, however, did not give up – the Nordic lands were too precious a prize – and in January 1941 he made the first of a series of visits to Oslo to review new SS recruits. In Norway, the SS formed a bewildering number of SS police and combat units: it is estimated that some 15,000 Norwegians had volunteered by the end of the war. To educate these men, Himmler appointed SS veterans who had served on the Eastern Front, murdering Jews in Lithuania, Latvia and Belorussia. In Himmler’s plan, the Norwegians, like other western volunteers, would form a Staatsschutzkorps (Corps for State Protection) – politicised soldier-policemen inculcated with SS values. In Norway, Himmler set up a training centre
in Kongsvinger on the Swedish border. Its task was to manufacture a new, elite police force, the Ordnenspolitiet, based on the German Order Police, which had, as we have seen, been transformed into a militarised corps of soldier-policemen. They would be deployed to fight partisans on the Eastern Front – and a number of Norwegian recruits were assigned to the SS Kampfgruppe Jeckeln. Later in 1942, the Frikorps Danmark, as well as Flemish and Dutch volunteers, joined their Norwegian comrades serving in 1st SS Brigade, to fight ‘partisans’ near Minsk. A Norwegian SS officer oversaw the evacuation of the Minsk ghetto.
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We know too that Norwegians served with the German Polizei-Gebirgsjäger-Regiment 18, which took part in the deportation of Jews from Athens.

These are the Nordic warriors that Mr Østring hopes to commemorate.

At the beginning of 1944, the German Propaganda Ministry in Berlin battled a relentless blizzard of bad news. On the Eastern Front, Stalin's resurgent armies battered the once mighty forces of the Reich, and the German Empire shrank by the day. But Propaganda Minister Goebbels knew that even if the war was lost, the battle for German hearts and minds might still be won. And on the Eastern Front, an unlikely hero emerged from the blood-drenched ice and snow in the unlikely shape of a Walloonian Belgian called Léon Degrelle. He and a few hundred survivors of the battered SS ‘Sturmbrigade Wallonien' had become trapped by the relentless advance of the Soviet army. Degrelle had fought his way through Russian lines to rejoin the retreating German army. Most of his men had been killed, left behind in the snow and ice. But turning desperate flight into an uplifting epic story was meat and drink to Dr Goebbels. The little Walloonian SS man with the cheeky smile who was, some believe, the model for Hergé's Tin Tin would join the pantheon of Germanic war heroes. Degrelle would be sent to meet Hitler in person.
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Degrelle devoted many pages to this semi-mythical encounter in his memoir
Campaign in Russia
. The story begins with Degrelle resting with the ‘Wallonien' men who had survived his reckless adventure, all of them shaggy and caked with thick, black mud. A German corporal races up with a summons. ‘The Führer has telephoned three times. He is waiting for you. We've been looking for you
everywhere for two days!' A Fieseler Storch putters out of the clouds to fly Degrelle to Hitler's Wolf's Lair headquarters. These little aircraft had been designed for aerial surveillance and from the air Degrelle has a panoramic view of the seemingly endless black ribbons of German troops trudging west towards Kiev, starkly outlined against the all-encompassing white snow – tiny as flies. In the far distance, giant oil wells loom against a blue and silver sky.

When the Fieseler lands at an airfield near Pinsk, Degrelle is transferred to one of Hitler's Fokker Condors. As the big tri-motor throbs into a thick layer of cloud, the endless Russian steppe slowly recedes. Degrelle would never return to the front. After an hour or so, the Fokker crosses the vast Pripet Marshes and soon afterwards begins descending towards the gloomy Masurian woods near Rastenburg that hide Hitler's military headquarters. Degrelle is in no fit state to meet the Führer. For the purposes of basic hygiene, he is taken first to Himmler's headquarters, Hochwald, which lay hidden in thick pine forest some 20 miles to the east. In the SS chief's personal shower Degrelle washes away layers of grime and legions of lice. Himmler presents him with a clean shirt. SS orderlies remove his mud-encrusted SS uniform. Finally Degrelle is presentable and Himmler drives him to Hitler's headquarters.

By early 1944, Allied air forces dominate German air space. Massive raids have become routine; terror and destruction fall nightly on German cities. As Degrelle is driven into Hitler's headquarters, workers from the Todt Organisation are busy reinforcing the massive concrete bunkers. Security is tight. Rumour has it that a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer plans to assassinate the Führer. Himmler drives on through a succession of gates and barriers, deeper into his master's lair. Hitler spends most of his time in a modest wooden barracks situated at the northern end of the inner compound. The windows face north so that its solitary occupant, who prefers to work through the night, will never be tormented by direct sunlight. Life at the Wolf's Lair was described by General Jodl as ‘between a monastery and a concentration camp'.
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A small party of journalists has been invited to watch as Hitler awards the Iron Cross to heroes of the Reich. As they wait for the Führer, Himmler tries out his execrable French on Degrelle.

A pair of double doors swings open. There is a flickering barrage of magnesium flashlights. Film cameras whir. As Hitler enters, Degrelle is conscious of nothing but his eyes, and then the warmth of his handshake. The voice is hoarse: ‘I've been worried about you,' says Hitler. As he moves away to confer with his SS chief, Degrelle has a chance to study the man whose cause he has followed to the ends of the Earth. He is stunned. ‘The Führer of before the war had disappeared,' Degrelle confessed later. Gone was ‘the fiery Führer with the chestnut hair, the trim body, the back as straight as an Alpine pine'. Now Hitler is stooped from ‘bearing the weight
of the world'. His hair is white. He is an old man. Grasping a pair of tortoise-shell glasses, Hitler remains silent for some time, his jaw grinding. Suddenly aware of the cameras, Hitler rediscovers some inner reserve of energy and begins to quiz Degrelle about the great breakthrough at Cherkassy. Enthralled, he takes Degrelle by the elbow and leads him into the adjoining map room so that he can demonstrate precisely how he had fled the Russian ‘kettle'. The Führer nods sagely: ‘If I had a son I would wish him to be like you.'

Hitler was, as Degrelle feared, gravely ill. He suffered severe intestinal problems. His left leg trembled uncontrollably. His physician, the loathsome Dr Morell, had treated him with amphetamine pills and cocaine eye drops. Hitler was, in short, a wreck. But when Degrelle wrote about his triumphal visit to the Wolf's Lair in his memoirs, he chose to recall ‘a life of simplicity and order'. Hitler, he imagined, ‘worked through the night in profound contemplation', pacing slowly, bent and grey, ‘ripening his worries and his dreams'. On that ‘night of great emotion', Hitler presented Degrelle with the Ritterkreuz (Knight's Cross). Hitler, in Degrelle's besotted eyes, remained ‘a genius at the height of his power'. He was the architect of a New Order that would bring glory to the heirs of Charlemagne and the medieval Dukes of Burgundy. As the meeting ended, Degrelle said his ‘soul was singing'.

Collaboration was the faith of men who had briefly tasted power but had had it snatched away. In many countries where fascism had failed to take root, native would-be führers snatched at Hitler's boots as he strutted by, as if some of his tawdry magic would rub off on them. Most saw too late that they had boarded a ship of fools. But few acknowledged guilt or expressed shame. One such was Léon Joseph Marie Degrelle. In the mid-1930s, Degrelle had risen to spectacular heights as leader of the Belgian far-right Rex Party but then fallen back to earth like a spent firework. The self-proclaimed ‘Chef de Rex' was a chronic narcissist – and to be sure, his vulpine good looks photographed well even on the front line. He was a brilliant orator, master of spicy turn of phrase and pithy metaphor. Like British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, Degrelle was a champagne fascist – and a seducer of other men's wives.
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He was erratic, short tempered, a maladroit spinner of plots and schemes, and yet by 1944, this fallen Walloonian demagogue had become a hero of the German Reich.

Degrelle was a consummate survivor. As the Reich disintegrated, he fled to Spain. Here the former Chef de Rex amassed a small fortune throwing up stuccoed villas to blight the Costa del Sol. From a sumptuous, ochre-coloured villa in the
mountains north of Malaga, he devoted his old age to spewing out books about the greatness of Hitler and the ‘myth of the Holocaust'. He became an icon of a resurgent European fascism and a hero for radical Muslims. He was eulogised thus by Radio Islam:

Inside his Spanish fortress, Degrelle's servants kept the shutters locked tight. Even in daytime, the light was sepulchral. The former Chef de Rex, who in old age had run to fat, received admirers sitting stiffly behind a massive desk modelled on the one Hitler installed in the Reich Chancellery. On the wall behind, Degrelle had hung a Burgundian banner and a Waffen-SS pennant. On a polished table, in solitary splendour, stood a small bust of Hitler. He delivered to order sour denunciations of Jews – and, a Catholic to his last breath, published a morally obscene ‘Letter to Pope John Paul II', denouncing the papal visit to Auschwitz in 1979. ‘The Holocaust is a myth,' he insisted. History, he told all comers, had proved Hitler right. It was the Bolsheviks all along who had been the real criminals. Léon Degrelle died in 1994, a grand old man of the far right. His life had been a long, morally fetid journey through the putrid landscapes of European fascism. And yet as a Francophone Walloonian Belgian, Degrelle, when he first offered his services to the German occupation authorities, had been dismissed as not much better than an
untermensch
. His Flemish rival Staf de Clercq was Himmler and Berger's choice of collaborator. How did this mercurial Catholic dissident became a hero of the elite SS?

To answer that question, we must begin with Degrelle's troubled and divisive homeland. Starting in 2007, gloomy reports appeared in the European press concerning the dire state of Belgium. Following disputed election results in June that year, Belgians lived without an elected government for six months. A Flemish flower seller was quoted in the London
Guardian
: “‘Belgium!” he splutters. “That's something that doesn't exist. The national anthem? Nobody knows it … The King? A parvenu! A dysfunctional family. We are not going to take it anymore.”'
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Three years after, in 2010, the same bitter wrangling between Dutch-speaking Flanders to the north and French-speaking Wallonia to the south brought down the Belgian government for the third time. Belgium has always been a battlefield.
According to one journalist, ‘a whiff of the Balkans' can be detected in the capital of the European Union. ‘Long live Flanders, may Belgium die!' According to Filip Dewinter, leader of far-right Flemish nationalists: ‘There's no Belgian language. There's no Belgian nation. There's no Belgian anything.' The German
Der Spiegel
speculated: ‘Is Belgium Falling Apart?' A Belgian school teacher called Gerrit Six put Belgium up for sale on eBay: ‘Belgium: a Kingdom in Three Parts', with free delivery. Bids eventually reached 10 million euro before eBay closed the auction. Today, it is language that separates the Belgian citizens of Flanders and Wallonia. But for the new German masters of Europe in 1940, the differences between Walloons and the Flemish ran deep.
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German race scientists viewed the nation of Belgium as a deviant fusion of two distinct European peoples: the French-speaking Walloons and the Germanic Flemish. They naturally favoured the latter and many Flemish Belgians urged union with Hitler's Reich. In the aftermath of Hitler's blitzkrieg, Nazi planners hatched up a now forgotten scheme to remove Walloonian Belgians and hand most of northern Europe to its rightful racial owners, the Flemish and the Dutch under the protection of the Reich. Léon Degrelle passionately admired Hitler. But he had a problem – he was a Walloon. From the German point of view, Degrelle was the wrong kind of Belgian. To serve Hitler's Reich, as he so ardently wished, Degrelle had to somehow overturn the preconceptions of Himmler's race experts.