Hitler's Foreign Executioners (45 page)

At their meetings in Paris, the suave Abetz listened politely to Degrelle's schemes – and passed on his ‘suggestions' to his Foreign Office colleagues in Berlin. It is unclear whether at this stage the ambassador meant to help or harm Degrelle. Abetz was certainly more sympathetic to the collaborators' cause than Hitler. Goebbels noted ‘Only Herr Abetz collaborates. I do not. The only collaboration I am willing to consider on the part of our French friends is the following: if they deliver the goods and do it voluntarily … that I will call collaboration.' In any event, when Reeder and Falkenhausen read Abetz's report, all hell broke loose. They had yet to meet Degrelle but they knew his demagogic reputation. Quite apart from his racial disadvantages, Degrelle had made it all too evident that he was a fantasist with a ravenous appetite for power. Eggert and Falkenhausen refused to even consider a deal with Degrelle. He should have sunk without trace, a
collaborateur manqué
. But it was not in the nature of the Chef de Rex to give up without a fight.

It is natural for a certain kind of unrequited suitor to redouble their efforts rather than try to imagine why they might have been rejected. Now the spurned Chef would transform himself into the most ardent of National Socialists. He began by using the Rexist press to attack and ridicule the British and to denounce Jews in language borrowed from Goebbels' newspapers. Anti-Semitism had never been as potent a vote winner in Belgium as it had been in the Netherlands.
²²
To be sure, Degrelle's infamous attacks on ‘Banksters' may have implied anti-Jewish sentiment but his speeches contained very few direct pejorative references to Belgian Jews. From
the winter of 1940, Degrelle re-engineered Rex as a Jew-baiting party. The party rag
Le Pays Réel
ran regular stories highlighting alleged Jewish deceit and corruption, and Rexist thugs began to attack Jews in the street or in their homes. Degrelle organised a new Rexist militia, the black-clad, SS-inspired Formations de Combat, which rampaged through Belgian cities and towns setting alight Jewish stores. Rexist propaganda portrayed Degrelle as the spurned leader who, alone, knew what was best for Belgium as it faced up to occupation. Fired up by a captive audience of Rexist acolytes, he became, in his own mind, the visionary statesman who would singlehandedly lead a renewed Belgium to its proper place in Hitler's New Order.

On 6 January 1941, at a huge Rally in Liège, the Chef de Rex addressed 5,000 Rexists, ringed by his Formations de Combat. For two hours, Degrelle harangued his exultant audience, banging the same drum: only the German Reich could guarantee the future glory of Belgium. He finished with a passionate ‘Heil Hitler!' In the days and weeks after the rally, Degrelle noted that this provocative ‘Heil Hitler!' had final broken through the barrier of German indifference. His efforts to act out the role of a German backed national Belgian leader forced Reeder to reassure the Belgian government that he continued to back them, and not the Rexists. Degrelle enjoyed Eggert's discomfort, strutting around Brussels in his black uniform: the very model of a strong leader in waiting. General von Falkenhausen shut his door on the persistent Walloon – but Reeder found him increasingly difficult to avoid.

For the bumptious Degrelle, this wooing of the Reich took its toll. At the end of April, Reeder reported to Berlin that the Rexists seemed to be in disarray. He attributed this apparent breakdown to the volatile antics of the Chef: ‘a perpetual, not always happy, improvisation'. He reported increased levels of negative opinion concerning Degrelle and his party, even in the Walloonian heartlands. As his fortunes sagged once again, Degrelle (as most frustrated wartime collaborators eventually did) wrote a begging letter to Hitler: ‘After six years of violent struggle … I am immobile and sterile.' He did not receive a reply; after all, the German leader was not an agony aunt.
²³
For Degrelle, collaboration had come to look a lot like the mythical labours of Sisyphus; he would roll the boulder of sycophancy up one hill only to have it rolled down another.

Degrelle was not stupid. He began to get an idea of how the ponderous and confusing German occupation ticked. He understood at last that his ultrapatriotic talk of ‘Burgundian empires' did him no favours. He realised that in German minds only true ‘Germanic' peoples could seek favoured status. Degrelle would have to take on the might of German race science. He was a mediocre theoretician but it took only a little digging to find out that even experts like the esteemed Petri had yet to completely make up their mind about the racial status of Walloons.
This uncertainty could be exploited. Perhaps Walloons too might be reclassified as ‘Germanics'? This would mean abandoning ‘Belgian' nationalism and accepting complete integration with the Reich. But to the power-obsessed Degrelle, the dream of a united Belgium was a political dead end. In the summer of 1941, Degrelle and his closest allies in Rex began to promulgate the idea that Walloons were not at all a French left over, as the Dutch and Flemish experts argued. On the contrary, he and the Walloonian people had long ago descended from a Germanic frontier people.
²⁴
At first, Degrelle's campaign to join the Aryan club, conducted through the party paper and a few obscure journals, made little headway. His new plan would take time to work. But then, in the course of a single night, his political fortunes changed utterly.

In his memoir, Degrelle tells us that 22 June 1941 began like ‘all the beautiful Sundays of summer'. He was idly turning the dials on a radio when he picked up the astonishing news that German armies had crossed the Soviet border. He was exultant: ‘The real war … had just begun. This was a war of religions.'

For Degrelle and the Rexists, Hitler's crusade against Bolshevism would sanctify their shabby and discredited cause. At the end of June, Degrelle returned to Paris seeking another meeting with Abetz. He found his old friend busy discussing the new Légion des Volontaires Français with Jacques Doriot and Marcel Déat. Abetz urged Degrelle to propose forming a Walloonian legion. This time, Degrelle's timing was a lot better. On 29 May 1941 Werner von Bargen, a German official in Brussels, who later helped organise the deportation of foreign Jews, wrote to the Foreign Office in Berlin: ‘It is important for us above all to win Belgium over to the new order of Europe.'
²⁵
He urged that the German administration back all Nazi style organisations, not just Flemish ones. Rex, thanks to Degrelle's talent for mimicry, had just the right Nazi style trappings. On 27 July, Hitler approved the raising of national legions from each country of occupied Europe to join the struggle against Bolshevism. In Belgium, two legions, the Flemish SS Vlaam Legioen and the Légion Wallonie, would be split between the Waffen-SS and the German army respectively. Degrelle had yet to win over Himmler and the SS but the stage was fast being set for the second coming of Léon Degrelle.

So it was that on the morning of the 8 August 1941, Léon Degrelle smartly attired in the grey uniform of a German army private joined a motley crew of 860 men of all ages who had volunteered to join Hitler's ‘war of annihilation'. The lowly rank of the Chef de Rex was a consequence of his utter lack of military experience. He
had at first insisted on being immediately promoted to lieutenant but the Germans turned him down. He would serve as a humble private (Schütze) in the 1st Group of the 1st Platoon. The fact that Degrelle ended up enlisting at all reflected his chronic insecurity about political rivals like his former deputy Fernand Rouleau, who had first proposed the idea of a Walloonian legion to the Germans. Degrelle could not afford to put his feet up on the domestic front while competitors won glory on the battlefield.
²⁶
In front of the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, callow young thugs waited for orders alongside elderly veterans in badly fitting new boots. The new 373rd (‘Wallonia') Infantry Battalion (Légion Wallonie) would be commanded by veteran Captain Georges Jacobs and was firmly attached to the Wehrmacht – so far, only Staf de Clercq's Flemish volunteers had been permitted to join the SS.

Regardless of his humble rank, Degrelle had no intention of abandoning his status as Chef. As Captain Jacobs ordered the Walloonian volunteers to fall in, Private Degrelle appeared standing on the Palais balcony to harangue the recruits about ‘the struggle against Bolshevism'. He addressed a motley crew of Rexist diehards and veterans of the Formations de Combat, and members of a radical ‘League' of Belgian anti-Semites. The latter at least had a clear idea about what a ‘crusade against Bolshevism' would mean on the front line. As the Chef de Rex returned to the ranks, it began to rain. Private Degrelle fell in and the Légion Wallonie marched off towards the Gare du Nord to begin their journey to the east. An uncertain and distinctly hazardous future awaited every one of them. Only a handful of ordinary Belgians took much interest in the passing show. No one cheered or waved a flag. Most recognised Degrelle and many had come to despise Rex and its preening Chef. Now he had turned traitor. As Degrelle marched into the huge, noisy station and joined the Walloon volunteers struggling with their bulky and unfamiliar kit, he realised that ‘there was no going back, there was only ahead'. Only by shaking the dust of political failure could he ever hope to win German backing and the power he craved. In his memoir, written after the war, Degrelle tried to rationalise his decision: if the Reich triumphed:

A German victory, which he did not question, would allow him to return in triumph to his ungrateful homeland as a Walloonian conquistador. Many of the men
who marched as volunteers in Hitler's war machine would never see their homes again. They would end their lives in the blood, mud and ice of the steppe, their deaths the blood price of collaboration.

Campaign in Russia
(
Front de l'Est
), Degrelle's memoir about his experience on the eastern front in both a Wehrmacht battalion and later the Waffen-SS, must be classified under ‘memoirs, unreliable'. On the first page he boasts that: ‘By 1936, I'd already shaken my country to its very core … I could have been a minister in the government: I had only to say one word to enter into the game of politics.' Published by the right-wing Institute for Historical Review and introduced by a Third Reich apologist, who describes Degrelle as ‘one of the great men of the twentieth or any other century',
Campaign in Russia
must be treated with caution. It is laced with barefaced lies and misrepresentations; its author is blindly infatuated with Hitler; the writing is grossly solipsistic. Its faults, in short, are legion. But hidden behind the flimflam, the preposterous boasting, the ridiculous self regard is a brutally explicit memoir of Hitler's war.

Degrelle had promised the men who had enlisted alongside him that they would be home by Christmas. He insisted that they were defending 2,000 years of the highest civilisation – and would be fighting alongside innumerable other dedicated young men who had made the same decision to fight for a New Europe: blonde giants from Scandinavia, Hungarian dreamers, whimsical Italians, bantering Frenchmen, swarthy Romanians. On 12 August, the legion arrived in Meseritz, where recruits swore an oath of allegiance to the commander-in-chief of German armed forces, Adolf Hitler. A few days later, the legion men boarded trains for Brest, where they transferred to wider gauge lines and crossed the old Soviet border and began steaming into vast expanse of Ukraine under glorious blue skies.

Few of the men who now gazed on the endless, flat landscape had ever travelled outside Belgium. For hours, days, then weeks they gazed, bewildered, at an astonishing alien new world that had been torn and twisted by the German war machine. Wrecked tanks and armoured cars stretched to the horizon. Every few hours, the long line of wagons and carriages would grind to halt for long, nerve-sapping hours next to ruined, smoking villages. Degrelle and his men watched in amazement as a seemingly endless chain of cattle trucks rumbled in the opposite direction bearing a miserable cargo of tens of thousands of Russian prisoners. More than a million and half Soviet soldiers perished in German camps. The Russian captives stood 80 to 100 in each wagon; ‘hairy giants', Degrelle called them, many saffron coloured with tiny ‘Asiatic' eyes. At night, he claims, the Russian captives fought over human flesh uttering brutish terrifying cries. They used tin cans to slice up the body of a ‘dead Mongol'. The German guards halted these packed trains
crammed with starving POWs for weeks at a time. The Belgians watched as prisoners leapt on to the tracks where they plucked long red worms from the glutinous Ukrainian mud which they swallowed immediately, their gullets rising and falling. Degrelle shows no compassion for these ‘Asiatic' victims of Hitler's war. They were observing the beginning of a shameful forgotten holocaust that troubled Hitler's foreign volunteers not a jot.