By the summer of 1944, just over half the men serving in the Waffen SS were not ‘Aryan Germans’. The bloating of the Waffen-SS had begun in the summer of 1942 and had depended on non-German recruitment. The ‘Nordland’ division alone consisted of Dutchmen, Danes, Norwegians, Flemings, Swedes, Swiss and ethnic Germans. By the summer of 1943, Bosnians, Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians fought in Waffen-SS uniforms. In the summer of 1944, Himmler acquired yet more SS warriors by gobbling up the Wehrmacht Osttruppen divisions recruited in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, as well as the Indian Legion and a shabby bunch of British fascists known as the Britisches Freikorps.
Even as the German armies fell back towards the old borders of the Reich, the lure of Himmler’s elite, black-uniformed Übermenschen continued to entice many young men. One late convert was a French idealist who, in June 1944, made his way to the recruiting office of the SS ‘Charlemagne’ division in Paris. His name was Christian de la Mazière.4
In August 1944, Paris was paralysed in torpid ennui. The city baked in a brutal heat wave. Metro stations stood silent and empty; electricity came on only between half past ten and midnight. In theatres and music halls, actors and entertainers performed by candlelight. Noxious odours bubbled up from the slow, murky waters of the Seine. In the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Elysées, dazed Parisians and a few German officers sipped weak coffee under limp cafe awnings or trotted aimlessly between appointments, waiting for something to happen. From the roof of the old Napoleonic Naval Ministry, now the German Admiralty, a red and black swastika flag still hung. According to one reporter, ‘the city was decomposing’.
In Normandy, the Allied armies had at last ‘forced the lock of the door’ and their supreme commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower had some hard decisions to make. For once, American and British strategists unanimously agreed that the main push should be towards the ‘Siegfried Line’ that defended the old German border. A single American army (the 12th) would be diverted to encircle but not attack Paris. Eisenhower had no desire to get bogged down in a protracted and bloody battle in the ‘City of Light’. But General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the French Free Forces, bitterly opposed this Allied plan to downgrade the French capital. He had always imagined marching in triumph down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées to the Place de l’Étoile to reclaim France and salvage her reputation. De Gaulle’s relationship with the other Allied powers had never been harmonious. Now his spies had discovered that the French Communist Party planned to strike against the Germans and liberate Paris. This would mean that this proud and reactionary figurehead would be shoved to one side. Whoever liberated Paris would rule France. De Gaulle had to stop the communists at all costs.
In the meantime, Hitler had summoned Major General Dietrich von Choltitz to his Rastenburg headquarters. In the aftermath of the July bomb plot, Hitler was a wreck. After delivering a hysterical attack on the perfidious Prussian officer corps, he appointed the astonished von Choltitz ‘Fortress Commander’ for Paris with orders to punish any civil disobedience. Behind Hitler’s decision to appoint Choltitz was an even more draconian plan. The German general had distinguished himself on the Eastern Front as a practitioner of ‘scorched earth’ tactics. As he retreated, his forces left in their wake a swathe of burned villages, mangled factories and ruined crops. ‘Why should we care if Paris is destroyed?’ asked Hitler – and that, in short, would be Choltitz’s future task.
Paris had once been the most coveted posting for German officers and diplomats. German ambassador Otto Abetz was a noted bon vivant, who had spent many blissful hours at Maxim’s and the Hôtel Bristol consorting with celebrity hangers-on like the actress Arletty and the opium-addicted poet Jean Cocteau. Now in August, with unseemly haste, their German friends had begun to prepare for the end. The 813th Pionierkompanie began setting explosives at key locations: at electrical and water facilities, and beneath the beautiful old bridges that spanned the Seine. German engineering units mined the Palais du Luxembourg, the French Chamber of Deputies, the Foreign Office, telephone exchanges, railway stations and factories. U-boat torpedoes were brought to Paris and positioned in tunnels beneath the city. On 16 August, Hitler ordered Gestapo and civilian administrators to leave Paris and three days later de Gaulle ordered free French forces to begin attacking German positions. The Paris uprising had begun.
Both the British and the Americans blamed Stalin for the tragedy of Warsaw. They had no desire to be held accountable in the eyes of the world if Paris now suffered the same grisly fate. Eisenhower was also aware that the French revolt was fast turning into a civil war waged between the Communist Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), led by Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy (‘General Rol’), and the Free French Gaullists. The Bolshevik spectre stalked the grand boulevards. Allied anxieties worked in de Gaulle’s favour. In any case, General Leclerc (the nom de guerre of Comte Philippe de Hautecloque), the commander of the Allied 2nd Armoured French Division, had ignored American orders and begun advancing towards Paris. Inside the city, Gaullist Yvon Morandat outflanked General Rol and formed a Cabinet. Faced with a Gaullist coup, Eisenhower had few options left – and at last approved an attack on Paris, unaware that a French one was already underway. German SS men began executing their prisoners; in one Gestapo prison at Mont Valerien they shot 4,500 men. At Rastenburg, Hitler was heard to ask ‘Is Paris burning?’ At his headquarters in the ‘City of Light’, von Choltitz vacillated.
Robert Brasillach, a pro-German fellow traveller, wrote later: ‘You could feel that everything was at an end.’ After five years of docile occupation, astute Parisians began polishing their credentials as résistants. A few well-known ‘collabos’ were summarily shot and some pitiful women who had enjoyed horizontal liaisons with German officers were publicly shaved and shamed. But even as the German occupiers prepared to abandon the city, the French far right was not a spent force. On 21 April, an Allied air raid had badly damaged Sacré Coeur, the church built to atone for the sins of the 1871 Paris Commune, and the Parti Populaire Française (PPF), led by a veteran of the Eastern Front Jacques Doriot, staged a noisy, well-attended rally to protest against Allied barbarism. A star speaker was Léon Degrelle, recently promoted SS-Sturmbannführer and resplendent in black Waffen-SS uniform, displaying an Iron Cross. On 3 May, French fascists gathered en masse in Pére Lachaise cemetery to commemorate the centenary of their prophet, the Catholic anti-Semite Éduard Drumont.
As the flame of revolt sputtered into life all over France, the Germans responded by applying the techniques of Bandenbekämpfung to the Western Front. In western central France, the multinational SS ‘Das Reich’ (Alsatian French nationals served in its ranks) descended on the village of Oradour-sur-Glane and executed male villagers and burned women and children to death in the village church. Even as Himmler’s elite troops turned their weapons on unarmed French civilians, Himmler launched a new recruiting campaign. In Paris, posters declared ‘La SS t’appelle!’ and, in the last summer of Hitler’s war, thousands of young Europeans responded to the final SS call to arms.
Despite its grand sounding name, the Waffen-Grenadier-Brigade der SS ‘Charlemagne’ (französische Nr. 1) had been stitched together from an older French SS unit, the 7th Storm Brigade, which had suffered very high losses on the Eastern Front, and the notorious French police, the Milice Française. Commanded by Joseph Darnand, this paramilitary force, set up in 1943 by Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval, had worked closely with the German authorities to root out and deport tens of thousands of French Jews. In July, Himmler had summoned Darnand to Berlin, promoted him to Obersturmführer and put him in charge of forming a new SS division. It was one of the paradoxes of wartime collaboration that Darnand was instinctually anti-German; but he hated and feared ‘Jewish-Bolsheviks’ a great deal more than the despised ‘Fritzes’. Many of the Frenchmen who answered Darnand’s summons would end their lives defending the Chancellery in Berlin, just a few hundred metres from Hitler’s smouldering corpse.
Christian de la Mazière was a young Gallic volunteer who answered Himmler’s call. Many of his comrades died on battlefields in Pomerania and Berlin – but de la Mazière survived and lived long enough to write a uniquely cogent account of why he volunteered to join the SS ‘Charlemagne’ in the dying days of the Reich. Like so many lives on the far right, Mazière’s opened with an authoritarian and bigoted father. Claude-Nicolas de la Mazière descended from decayed aristocratic stock and, when Christian was born, managed an elite cavalry school in Saumer. Like many born into this embittered and faded class, Claude-Nicolas was Catholic, a patriot and, following French tradition, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite. In the century since the Enlightenment, French Jews had been legally emancipated by Napoleon; some had prospered. This had hardened ancient hatreds especially among relics of the Ancien Régime in rural areas, where Catholic priests still promulgated their ancient libel that Christ had been murdered by the Jews. French anti-Semitism was energised in an even more menacing guise after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the humiliation of the Second French Empire. Many well-known Jewish families had roots, if not relatives, in Germany or Eastern Europe and some used Yiddish at home. To men like Claude-Nicolas de la Mazière, French Jews would never be French enough.5 According to the founder of L’Action Française, Charles Maurras, the public expression of anti-Semitism was a public duty, a matter of ‘patriotic will’. For opportunist politicians, Jews provided useful scapegoats. They could be vilified as conspiratorial agents of international capital or on the other hand as Marxists, red in tooth and claw. In 1894, French anti-Semites found their cause in the trumped up Dreyfus Affair, and a leader in the shape of Charles Maurras. When Dreyfus was finally exonerated, the Jew-hating French far right dreamt of revenge.
Christian de la Mazière would grow up to reject his father but not his poisonous hatreds. Like Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, the writer who called himself Céline, he saw France as ‘rotten to the core with Jews’: its citizens had been enslaved by Jewish bankers. In the mid-1930s, de la Mazière joined L’Action Française and fell under the spell of its silver-tongued propagandist Léon Daudet, a literary jack of all trades who drummed into his disciples that ‘One must be anti-Semitic … there, in effect, is the psychological root of all the ideas and the feelings that have brought nationalists together’.6 In 1937, de la Mazière and a party of French enthusiasts travelled to the annual Nazi ‘Party Day’ in Nuremberg. He wrote later that this first experience of Hitler’s Germany ‘through the banners and floodlights of Nuremberg’ was a ‘revelation’. This political equivalent of a High Mass, conducted by Adolf Hitler standing before more than a million Germans and international fellow travellers, the massed black and red banners, the severe black uniforms of the SS and the superbly drilled crowds of euphoric Germans, thrilled de la Mazière and his fellow supplicants. Nuremberg seemed to be a celebration of faith not merely power. ‘I began to dream,’ de la Mazière confessed, ‘of a new world in which Europe would become a beacon of National Socialism … I felt the sincerest need to sacrifice myself for an ideal.’ This new world would be ‘Jew-free’ at last; in de la Mazière’s words, Jews stood for ‘a general force of evil’.
Nearly a decade later, de la Mazière had lost none of his crusading zeal. On the contrary, the German conquest and occupation had convinced him that this was a superior power and culture. He welcomed the deportation of Jews, organised by the SS and their French collaborators. Now, from the windows of his apartment in the Rue Chevert, de la Mazière watched half-naked German gunners dismantling anti-aircraft guns in front of Les Invalides. For two years he made a living writing for a German sponsored anti-Semitic journal. He liked to boast that his work had inspired a friend to enlist in the French volunteer SS division and sacrifice his life for the Reich. Now de la Mazière heard the news that SS Chief Himmler had called for fresh blood to join the SS ‘Charlemagne’ Division to ‘save Europe from Bolshevism’. Was this, he reflected, his last chance for glory? Should he abandon his pen for a rifle?
One sweltering day, at two o’clock in the afternoon, de la Mazière made up his mind. He took lunch then strolled across the Pont d’Alma to the Hotel Majestic – the SS headquarters in Paris. Behind the Majestic’s opulent facade on the rue Dumont d’Urville, de la Mazière discovered a spectacle of chaos and undisguised panic. SS men scurried from office to office, gathering up files and hurling them on to a bonfire that blazed in the hotel courtyard. But somehow a young SS man found time to procure the right documents. An SS-Hauptsturmführer appeared and ordered de la Mazière to find his way to the camp at Wildflecken, near Sennheim in Alsace, where the French volunteers would be being trained. Then the SS men bowed, made the Hitlergruss, clicked their heels and vanished. In his memoir, de la Mazière recalled: ‘This raised arm. I felt I had crossed a threshold … these SS men fascinated me and I wanted to be assimilated into their ranks. I saw them as a race apart … strong courageous and ruthless beings without weakness, who would never become corrupt.’
By the time de la Mazière made that symbolic Hitlergruss in the summer of 1944, many millions of Jews and other ‘enemies of the Reich’ had been murdered by men in SS uniforms. Himmler’s empire resembled a sprawling multinational corporation whose business was pillage and mass murder. The SS empire was corrupt on an unimaginable scale. And yet as de la Mazière’s account demonstrates, the SS was still able, even as the Thousand-Year Reich collapsed, to conjure up the alluring promise of ideological partnership in an ideal future world. Himmler possessed a refined gift for exploiting dreams, including his own. He was, after all, a fantasist himself: a former chicken farmer who fervently believed that he was the reincarnation of a medieval emperor. As de la Mazière would soon discover, the SS Junkerschulen like the one at Wildflecken were not just pitiless machines designed to turn out ruthless killers. They resembled monasteries, ‘downright religious establishments’, that reshaped minds and bodies.
It was there on the Wildflecken parade ground on 12 November 1944 that Christian de la Mazière, trembling with anticipation, stood alongside other French volunteers and took the Waffen-SS oath in German and French: ‘I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, Germanic Führer and Re-maker of Europe, to be true and brave. I swear to obey you and the leaders you have placed over me until my death. May God come to my aid!’ De la Mazière was marched off to the infirmary where a medical officer took a blood sample. An assistant heated up a tattooing instrument and branded the SS Sig runes, with blood group, just below his left armpit with a sharp hiss of singed skin. Many SS recruits would, very soon, have reason to regret taking this particular rite of passage. Christian de la Mazière had joined Himmler’s elect.
The apparent triumph of the SS ‘State within a State’ nourished many delusions. After serving with the Wehrmacht Légion Wallonie, the Belgian demagogue Léon Degrelle had finally persuaded German race experts that the Belgian Walloons had as much right as Flemish Belgians to claim Germanic descent. In April 1943, he had been summoned to Himmler’s headquarters a few kilometres from Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair near Rastenburg. This was the first time Degrelle had met the SS chief. He provides very few details of his impressions; he was much too fixated with Hitler. The purpose of the meeting was to agree details about the transfer of the légion to the Waffen-SS as the SS ‘Sturmbrigade Wallonien’. Their conversation then turned to the political destiny of the Belgian Walloons. Degrelle assured Himmler that his political movement ‘Rex’ and the Walloonian people he claimed to represent would happily join the ‘Greater Germanic Reich’. He reassured Himmler that any resistance would be dealt with by the new SS Sturmbrigade. Degrelle broadcast the same surreal message to his new recruits: ‘Soldiers of the Führer, you will also be, after the war, political soldiers who will raise [in Wallonia] the banner of victorious revolution.’7 Degrelle at last, it would seem, was within striking distance of the top levels of the Reich. But his progress had, as ever, been propelled by the over-heated fuel of whimsy. In any case, Himmler
had the last laugh. For despite all Degrelle’s posturing as a ‘Germanic’ hero, the légion had been accepted into the Waffen-SS as ‘würdige Nicht-Germanen’ (worthy non-Germans).8
And so Léon Degrelle marched off to war again. On 2 November 1943, SS-Obersturmbannführer Degrelle, officially listed as an aide-de-camp, along with just over 1,000 Walloonian SS volunteers boarded military transport trains at the Wildflecken/Gersfeld station and began the long journey to the east.9 SS-Sturmbannführer Lucien Lippert commanded. The German front line might have seemed the safer option: on the home front in occupied Belgium, the Belgian resistance, the Armée Secrète, had begun picking off Degrelle’s supporters and collaborators in a well-organised campaign of assassination.10
Hitler's Foreign Executioners Page 49
