By the mid-1930s, Degrelle had become one of the most notorious rightist leaders in Europe. He had studied law at the Catholic university in Louvain but failed to graduate. He tried his hand at journalism and was offered a job by a radical conservative journal called Christus Rex, which was founded to honour the 1925 Quas Primas Encyclical on the Feast of Christ the King, issued by Pope Pius XI. The Pope weighed in against ‘the plague which now infects society. We refer to the plague of anti-clericalism, its errors and impious activities. This evil spirit, as you are well aware, Venerable Brethren, has not come into being in one day; it has long lurked beneath the surface.’7 That evil spirit was, of course, Bolshevism. This new brand of evangelical anti-communist Catholicism shaped Degrelle’s thinking as much as the rise of European fascism. In 1927, the editors of Christus Rex sent him to report on the bloody Christero War that had erupted in Mexico, sparked by anti-clerical laws passed by President Plutarco Elias Calles. The Christeros were Catholic terrorist gangs who roamed the Jalisco province led by priests and armed with ancient muskets. They attacked and terrorised villages. The Mexican army responded in kind and began murdering Catholics. Degrelle was inspired by the Christero revolt with their battle cry of ‘Long live Christ the King!’ and on his return to Belgium began to use Christus Rex to build his own radical Catholic political movement: ‘Rex’. Degrelle’s movement was rabidly anti-communist, but also preached a hazy kind of social equality. Degrelle was a natural orator and noisily attacked corrupt Belgian politicians and denounced ‘Banksters’. That term was a coded reference to Jewish financiers and, as Rex grew and expanded, Degrelle added to his ideological arsenal the ideas of other far-right radicals like the Spanish Falangist José Primo de Rivera and the Romanian Corneliu Codreanu. He admired Hitler and the dynamism of the new Germany. But the Nazi ideologues had little time for this Walloonian demagogue. They favoured Degrelle’s Flemish rival Staf de Clercq who led the fascist Vlaamsch Nationall Verbond, which, backed by Germany, campaigned for a pan-Dutch state, the ‘Dietsland’, that would unite Flanders and Holland and eject the Wallonian provinces. Both Degrelle and de Clercq adopted the usual sartorial trappings of European fascist parties with dark or black uniforms and macabre insignia.
By 1936, Rex appeared to be on the brink of electoral success. Degrelle staged huge rallies modelled on the German ‘Party Days’ in Nuremberg. The youthful, photogenic and relatively glamorous Degrelle appealed to many disenchanted young Francophone Belgians and he was featured in the American newsreel ‘The March of Time’ along with other rising stars of the far-right European firmament. In the 1936 elections, Rex garnered a decent share of votes and began to look like a serious player. But Degrelle had unwisely attacked and alienated the conservative wing of the Catholic establishment and, added to the fact that he preached a negative message about corruption and the excessive influence of Belgian Jews, support for Rex began to drain away. But by the time Hitler attacked Poland in September 1939 Rex was a spent force. The solipsistic Degrelle became increasingly belligerent. He had glimpsed power and abruptly lost his way. His public attacks on ‘Banksters’ now modulated into overt anti-Semitism and he made a succession of hopeful pilgrimages to Berlin. Hitler’s Germany promised the brightest future for divided Belgium –and for the Chef de Rex, Léon Degrelle.
In the spring of 1940, Hitler’s armies gobbled up nations as if they were so many breakfast Brötchen. On 10 May, fast-moving Wehrmacht ground forces, paratroops and glider troops swept across the Belgian border backed by screaming Luftwaffe dive bombers. For the second time in a century, German troops incinerated the famous library in the university town of Louvain.8 The Belgian army fought back – but the national government led by the Catholic Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot was in disarray. Further west, Allied forces had been overwhelmed by the Wehrmacht’s surprise advance through the allegedly impenetrable Ardennes. On 24 May, King Léopold III, who despised Pierlot and his ministers, assumed command of the Belgian army and prepared to make symbolic last stand on the River Lys. Pierlot fled to London but the king refused to escape, claiming that he would be regarded as a deserter. Encircled at Dunkirk, the British Expeditionary Force fled across the Channel. And on 27 May, Léopold surrendered his forces to the Germans. He retreated to his castle at Laeken and refused further entreaties to follow the example of King Hakon VII of Norway and the Dutch royal family to escape and form a government in exile. In London, Churchill denounced Léopold for betraying the Allied armies and the French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud accused him of treason. This was unfair. The French fought on but when Reynaud appointed the ageing Philippe Pétain as Minister of State, the die was cast. Pétain urged the French to throw in the towel. On 22 June, he signed an armistice and ordered Renaud’s arrest. Hitler’s blitzkrieg was over and the reactionaries soon came to terms with the new status quo. Léopold was, like the English Edward VIII, a rabid opponent of democratic government and, as Pierlot feared, he hoped to make terms with Hitler. His hopes were frustrated, however. He had one brief and unproductive meeting with Hitler at the Berghof in November then sulked inside Laeken castle until the end of the occupation.
When news of the rapid German advance had reached Brussels, the Pierlot government, fearing attack by a ‘Fifth Column’, arrested thousands of suspected German sympathisers, including Léon Degrelle. Most were quickly released, but the Rexists and a few Flemish nationalists remained in custody. To keep Degrelle and the other remaining potential Quislings out of German hands, the Belgian police transported twenty Belgians and fifty-eight foreigners on so-called ‘Phantom Trains’ across the French border to Abbéville. Here the police hauled Degrelle and a few other Rexists from the train and locked them in a vault underneath a bandstand. They were lucky: French soldiers shot twenty-one prisoners, including the Flemish national leader Joris van Severen, but the rest, including a now heavily bearded Degrelle, ended up an internment camp at Le Vernet in the south of France, close to the Spanish border. In a short pamphlet, ‘La Guerre en Prison’, written a year later 1941, Degrelle made much of his ‘martyrdom’.9
In Belgium, it was widely believed that the Chef de Rex had been killed and news of his apparent demise even reached Hitler, who made a reference to the rumour in a letter to Mussolini.10 In Brussels, the Rexist leaders who had survived the purge leadership now took stock. As news arrived of the German victories over the French and British forces, many of their supporters were euphoric. Surely the Chef had been right and corrupt ‘Banksters’ and feeble politicians had led Belgium down the road to humiliation and defeat: ‘Degrelle avait raison!’ insisted the Rexist newspaper Le Pays Réel. In July, Vichy officials released a handful of Rexists, who reached Brussels with the glad tidings that the Chef was alive and well. In July, a small expedition of Degrelle’s closest allies travelled to Le Vernet and managed to get him released. By 22 July, Degrelle and his party had reached Paris, now the German administrative centre of occupied France. Degrelle was eager to offer his services to the victorious, clearly unbeatable Reich. Soon, he assumed, he would be making a triumphant return to Brussels as a German-appointed national leader. But as he would soon find out, even the most fervently expressed craving to serve the German occupiers rarely led to a role in Hitler’s New Order. This may seem surprising. After all, an occupying enemy power has few friends and would surely welcome the craven overtures of aspiring collaborators. But in 1940, Léon Degrelle had only the faintest idea how Hitler’s Reich worked and what stood in his way.
In most of the occupied nations, like Norway and Denmark, civilian commissars closely bound to the NSDAP and the SS soon replaced military administrations. But events in Belgium took a different course. Here a German military administration (Militärverwaltung) held on to power, kept the SS at bay and ruled through the Belgian civil service until July 1944. This unusual state of affairs reflected Hitler’s chronic indecisiveness as well as the usual squabbling between his fractious subordinates. In the winter of 1939/40, Hitler was eager to maintain ha
rmonious relations with his generals and reward them for the astonishing success of military operations in Poland and Western Europe. So he played along with the OKW’s complacent assumption that when military operations had been wrapped up, new army administrations would assume executive functions in occupied territories, like Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France, and began selecting future administrators who played ‘management games’ to prepare them for their tasks.
When the Dutch army commander-in-chief General Henri Gerard Winkelman surrendered on 15 May, the OKW appointed the elderly General Alexander Baron von Falkenhausen, recently recalled to active service, as the military commander of the Netherlands. But two days later, the High Command received disquieting news: Hitler had overruled their decision and decided to install a civil administration in the Netherlands under Reich Minister Artur Seyß-Inquart, who was then serving as Hans Frank’s deputy in the General Government. The German commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, Walther von Brauchitsch, now had the embarrassing task of telling Falkenhausen that his services were no longer required – at least for the time being. As it turned out, Seyß-Inquart and the SS dominated the German occupation of the Netherlands until the end of the war – with calamitous consequences for Dutch Jews.
The humiliation of the OKW and Falkenhausen led to grumbling about the ‘utter dishonesty of our top leaders’.11 But shortly after King Léopold, as commander-in-chief of the Belgian army, had surrendered, Hitler shrewdly dispatched Falkenshausen to Brussels to head up a military administration. Himmler lobbied Hitler to appoint a civilian commissar – but this time Hitler fobbed him off. In the Netherlands, the brutal Seyß-Inquart resisted Himmler’s efforts to have his fiefdom immediately incorporated into the ‘Greater German Reich’.
Hitler, however, never considered the Belgian military solution to be final. In the summer of 1940, he floated the idea of appointing a civilian commissar to manage Flanders and reducing the army’s sphere of command to the Francophone Walloon provinces and northern France. The hand of Himmler is clear. His preference would always be for a ‘Greater Netherlands’. His Waffen-SS recruitment chief Gottlob Berger, who had long had his finger deep inside the Flemish pie, proposed transferring another notorious bully, Josef Terboven, who had just been appointed Commissar of Norway, to apply his ruthless style to the new Reich Gaue ‘Flanders’ and ‘Wallonia’.12 And so it went on … But by the autumn of 1940, Hitler’s attention had turned decisively to the Soviet Union and he simply lost interest in Belgium. In Belgium, Falkenhausen and his staff still clung precariously to power – and their anxieties about Hitler’s intentions would have a profound impact on their treatment of impetuous collaborators like Léon Degrelle.
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.
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