Hitler's Foreign Executioners (44 page)

The rather decrepit, hard-drinking Falkenhausen, like many Prussian aristocrats and career officers, detested Hitler and his movement. As Hitler and the OKW planned their attack on Western Europe, Falkenhausen had secretly warned the Belgian government. But by 1940, he had entered his twilight years and lacked the will to resist the Nazi juggernaut or, for that matter, to take much interest in Belgium.
¹³
He delegated most of his responsibilities to his deputy Eggert Reeder, formerly the council leader (Regierungspräsident) of Aachen. Like his boss, Reeder was no bleeding heart German liberal, but he was a punctilious and hard-working bureaucrat. Before Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, he had been a member of the moderate German People's Party (DVP), and like many other opportunist ‘March Violets' had joined the NSDAP in 1933 to keep his job. According to Elmar Gasten's history of Aachen, Reeder ‘remained true to his policy, protecting the administration from encroachments by the [NSDAP]'.
¹⁴
Himmler later persuaded the highly competent Reeder to join the SS, but he was never a convinced National Socialist.

Once installed in Brussels, Reeder would successfully keep Himmler at bay for some time. He had a crucial advantage. In compliant Belgium, security remained a low priority until 1943 and gave Himmler few excuses to impose SS control. Reeder's occupation resembled the Danish case, where SS-Brigadeführer Werner Best developed a cheap and efficient method of ‘indirect rule'. So long as the subject peoples of ‘protectorate' Denmark and Belgium kept supplying Germany with cheap labour, minerals, butter, meat and fish, purged their administrations of Jews and communists, and generally kept their heads down, they would be rewarded with light touch ‘supervisory' administrations.
¹⁵
Hitler favoured the Best doctrine. According to the ‘Table Talk', recorded by his factotum Martin Bormann, Hitler often praised the British Raj, which, he believed, employed a handful of sahibs to rule over millions of Indians.

As soon as Reeder took up his post in Brussels, he had to deal with the importunate Chef de Rex Léon Degrelle. In his
Tätigkeitsberichte
(activities reports), Reeder gives us a vivid portrait of the troublesome Walloon, and shows how he and the Rexist leadership refashioned their faded party as a pro-German faction. In a book published in the 1970s,
Die Verlorene Legion
, Degrelle explained how he hatched up a plan for a ‘Fascist Greater Belgium' that could take its rightful place in Hitler's New Order, under his leadership. This new nation would be shaped by what he called the ‘hard, pure and revolutionary' doctrines of National Socialism and would ‘eradicate pitilessly' ‘old democratic, plutocratic, Masonic and even Jewish cliques'.
¹⁶
Reeder was no ‘righteous gentile'. He did not hesitate to authorise the deportation of ‘foreign' Jews. But he may have spared occupied Belgium an even worse fate by shutting the door on Degrelle.

It took Degrelle, a chronic fantasist, some time to understand that neither Hitler nor Reeder and the Militärverwaltung would do many favours for tiresome upstarts like himself who might destabilise the delicate checks and balances of occupation. They had nothing to gain by sponsoring the careers of loud-mouthed petty dictators. They could not, of course, share the Francophone Degrelle's passion for a ‘greater Belgium', even as a vassal state. Successful collaboration was a difficult trick to master, as any number of aspiring ‘quislings' (including Vidkun Quisling) found to their cost. And in Belgium, Degrelle faced another thorny obstruction. He was, in the German view, the wrong sort of Belgian.

Like any colonial regime, the Germans deepened the fractured Belgian society by turning to a single favoured ethnic group – in this case the Flemish. They viewed the Flemish as a ‘Germanic' people, as blood kin. Hitler insisted that the administrative donkey work be carried out by Belgian civil servants, under a small German staff, and ordered Reeder to deal exclusively with the Flemish. Staf de Clercq, the
head of the Flemish far-right Vlaams National Verbond (VNV), was soon being courted by the Germans and by June, the plum jobs in the Belgian administration had been grabbed by VNV men. The Germans quickly released Flemish POWs, but Walloons they left to rot behind barbed wire. Himmler's loathing of the inferior Walloons was especially intense.

Hitler had frustrated Himmler's ambitions in both the Netherlands and Belgium. In the late summer of 1940 he tried another tactic. He authorised Berger to recruit Flemish and Dutch volunteers for service in the SS ‘Standarte Westland', which recruited volunteers from both the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Then in September, Hitler proposed the formation of a purely Flemish SS legion which, he informed Reeder, ‘should serve as a rallying point for all Flemings who are willing to serve in the army'.
¹⁷
In his activities report, Reeder noted with alarm that this decision signalled a new plan ‘to build a supra-party organisation which could take on all the Völkisch forces in Flanders'. In other words, he feared that Himmler would use the Flemish SS as a Belgian Trojan horse. The news of this Flemish initiative also dismayed Degrelle and his Rexist comrades. Himmler's racial doctrines barred their way to power.

The study of eastern peoples (
Ostforschung
) dominated German race science and especially fascinated Himmler. But it would be wrong to conclude that the race experts had no interest in ethnic diversity in Western Europe. Himmler also energetically promoted
Westforschung
, the study of European peoples. Race science in the Third Reich would never be a merely scholarly pursuit. It had an instrumental political purpose: to facilitate ‘Germanisation'. The task of Hitler's experts in both Eastern and Western Europe was to measure the quantity of Nordic blood possessed by different ethnic groups. On that basis, some would be selected for future assimilation as ‘Germanics', the rest would be discarded. After 1939, the lion's share of
Westforshung
fell into the hands of Himmler's think tank the SS-Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage), and for the Ahnenerbe's race experts, the people of the Netherlands, like the Nordic Scandinavians, had a special status.

In October 1940, the Ahnenerbe took over Der Vadaren Erfdeel (DVE), a right-wing Dutch institute linked to the National Socialist Party (NSB). The DVE had been set up in 1937 to study the Germanic ancestry of the Dutch. In the occupied Netherlands, SS race experts and their obliging Dutch counterparts collaborated on what became known as the ‘Holland Plan' – the western version of the Generalplan Ost. The core idea had first been proposed by Bonn university professor
Dr Otto Plaßmann, who headed the Forschungsstätte für Germanenkunde, germanische Kulturwissenschaft und Landschaftskunde (Research Facility on Germanic Ancestry, Cultural and Geographical studies). In a letter to the Director of the Ahnenerbe, Plaßmann outlined a wildly ambitious scheme to create a ‘Greater Holland' carved out from the Netherlands and parts of Belgium. As in the case of the Ostplan, implementing the Holland Plan meant that any non-Germanic ethnic groups must be removed or even liquidated; and ‘non-Germanic', of course, meant the Francophone Belgians, the Walloons. German race scientists already knew a great deal about the Walloons.

The doyenne of Walloonian studies was Franz Petri.
¹⁸
In the mid-1920s, Petri and like-minded scholars had become fascinated by different ethnic cultures that lay scattered along German borderlands. These included Petri's own special study, the Flemish population of the Netherlands. In common with many German anthropologists, Petri welcomed the coming of Hitler's Reich since leading Nazis like Himmler and Rosenberg favoured the systematic study of race. In 1936, Petri joined the SA and the NSDAP and began cultivating connections inside the SS. He also formed close ties with Flemish nationalists based in Cologne and was a founder of the Deutsch-Vlämische Arbeitsgemeinschaft (DeVlag), which before too long would fall into the hands of Gottlob Berger. Petri too was a passionate advocate of a ‘Greater Holland'.

In October 1939 a Belgian journalist called Maurice Wilmotte read Petri's somewhat obscure papers concerning the ‘Flanders-Germanic borderland' and raised the alarm: Petri's ideas, he revealed to the readers of
Le Soir
, were nothing less than an invasion plan. Wilmotte was right to be concerned. After the German invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium, Hitler approved Petri's appointment as Kulturpapst (literally, culture pope) – a key position within the Belgian military administration. His task would be to manage the ‘Germanisisation' of Belgium ‘in harmony with the methods used by German kulturpolitik in the Danube and Balkan countries'. In these regions, the Germans had used local ethnic Germans as the vanguard of a Germanisation campaign.

Petri shared Himmler's fascination with the Middle Ages and the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire (the First Reich), like Heinrich the Fowler and Barbarossa. He believed that the ancestral Nordic heartlands – the so-called Mittelreich or Niederrhein – remained biologically extant in a region marked out by the Emperor Charlemagne's strongholds in Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne and Nijmegen. Reminding his SS masters that these Germanic emperors had led crusades against ‘Asiatic' and Slavic peoples in the east, Petri argued that
Westforschung
must therefore be the foundation of
Ostforschung
: you had to study the west in order to master the
east. This too was Himmler's conviction. It followed that the Germans, of course, but also the Dutch and the Flemish, directly descended from the crusading peoples of the First Reich. They provided the ethnic ‘key' to the Germanisation of Western Europe and by the same token must become the vanguard troops for the conquest of the east.

As Kulturpapst in occupied Belgium, Petri had considerable influence. His small but energetic staff took an active interest in everything from education to film and theatre, religion, art and, of course, the vexed question of language. Petri purged the Belgian universities of all Jewish staff and began to restock the library at Louvain, which had been vandalised by German troops, with ‘Germanic' volumes. For Walloons like Degrelle, Petri's reign of cultural terror was a catastrophe. In German eyes, only the sturdy, blonde Flemish farmers had ‘the right stuff'. Walloons, Petri sneered, tended to shun the countryside, favoured socialistic ideas and spoke an odd French dialect. But he remained undecided about their precise racial origin. Were the Walloons
Untermenschen
like the Slavs? At best they might be
Mischlinge
, ethnic hybrids. In any case, the Walloonian provinces simply didn't fit. The Holland plan that Petri and other SS academics developed in 1940–42 proposed an ethnic restructuring of the entire region that reunited all Germanic peoples. The unfortunate Walloons would first be deported to the Dutch province of Limburg. After that ‘a few million people' would be moved east into the General Government.
¹⁹

Léon Degrelle had only the vaguest idea that the Germans regarded him as not much different from a Slav, and that Himmler was mulling over a plan to deport Francophone Belgians like himself. He simply wanted to retrieve the power that had slipped through his fingers in 1936. He had met Hitler only fleetingly at the height of Rexist fever, but was convinced that his fame as Chef de Rex would win him influence with the new masters of Europe. After his escape from captivity in the south of France, Degrelle immediately sought out the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz. They had met in Berlin in 1936, and Degrelle had closely followed the career of this silky young star of the German Foreign Service. It was no hindrance to Degrelle's cause that Frau Abetz,
née
Suzanne de Bruyker, had been a childhood friend of Mme Degrelle. Abetz, an ardent Hitlerjugend veteran, owed his present ambassadorial position to his former status as the French expert in the Dienstelle Ribbentrop – the ‘shadow foreign office' that Hitler created to counter the more conservative Foreign Office in the Wilhelmstrasse. Before 1940, Abetz enjoyed taking semi-official tours of France where he liked to visit art galleries and cultivate the nastier political factions. When Hitler engineered Ribbentrop's appointment as Foreign Minister, he dispatched the ambitious Abetz to Paris where this oleaginous plunderer set about ransacking the art collections owned by French Jews.
²⁰

When he sat down to dinner with SS-Brigadeführer and Ambassador Abetz at the German Embassy in the rue de l'Isle, Degrelle, riding on a wave of inflated self-confidence, regaled his astonished host with his plans for a new Burgundian empire – a Greater Belgium that would take its place as part of the German New Order. This phantasmagorical plan obsessed Degrelle, and in 1940, he may have believed it fitted with German plans. It is true that Hitler had discussed breaking France into provinces based on the old medieval kingdoms like Burgundy. Degrelle may well have got wind of this plan and concluded that his own Burgundian vision could be harmonised with Hitler's. He was wrong. A note in Goebbels' diary tells us why: Hitler's new Burgundy would have no place for a Degrelle or any other Francophone Belgian. He planned to settle the province with ethnic Germans from South Tyrol – a region that Germany and her Axis ally Italy frequently squabbled over.
²¹
On 10 July 1940 Himmler, who, it will be recalled, had been appointed ‘Reichkommissar for the Strengthening of Germandom' (Reichkommissar für die Festigung des deutschens Volkstums, RKVD), toured the old Burgundian lands to assess their suitability for ‘Germanisation'. He concluded that it would be necessary to import not less than 1 million Tyrolean Germans.