Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme
The Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism (LVF, French Volunteer Legion against Bolshevism , also known as the Legion volontaires française or Légion anti-bolchevique ) was on 8. July 1941 in the German Wehrmacht occupied France founded, 15 days after the beginning of the company Barbarossa (German attack on the Soviet Union ) at the suggestion of Jacques Doriot by Marcel Déat and Marcel Bucard . Eugène Deloncle took over the chairmanship of the LVF Executive Committee. It failed to recruit more than 3,000 volunteers. The main focus of the French Legion was Belarus . Here it formed part of the German military occupation apparatus behind the front of Army Group Center , which also included Latvians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Slovaks and Spaniards. The Legion was not the largest group of foreign collaborators in Belarus, but it was almost the last unit to retreat.
The French Legion was officially disbanded on July 23, 1944 and was merged with the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the SS “Charlemagne” (French No. 1) .
Lineup
Volunteers were recruited through the Paris recruiting office. The first were sent to Alsace for training as the French SS Volunteer Assault Brigade . The officers were trained in the SS Junker Schools , the NCOs at Unterführer schools. Half of the recruits was the Infantry - Regiment 638 of the Armed Forces, which in Polish Deba was stationed. The first deployment took place in the winter of 1941/42 on the Eastern Front under the designation 638th Infantry Regiment. The unit was part of the 7th Infantry Division involved in the advance on Moscow . In these battles, the unit suffered heavy losses under its commander, Colonel Roger Labonne, and was withdrawn in the course of the defensive battles and no longer used as a front line unit.
Operations in the fight against partisans in Belarus 1942/43
At the turn of the year 1941/42 the Infantry Regiment 638 was placed under the command of the rear Army Area Central , which was commanded by Max von Schenckendorff . Since October 15, 1942, the unit was led by the Wehrmacht as a reinforced French Grenadier Regiment 638. Six months later it was replaced by the Légion tricolore until it was absorbed into the LVF. The battalions and companies of the French unit, between 2,400 and 3,500 men, were divided into different bases and integrated into the counter- partisan measures in Belarus. The first demonstrable use of the French to actively fight partisans was the Wehrmacht company "Erika" at the end of July 1942. It came to a fight with a group of 300 partisans. The French arrested 500 civilians. In the operation "Greif" in August 1942, in which 11 battalions took part and which lasted two weeks, the French, in association with two police regiments, "killed" 498 people out of a total of 14 of their own dead. A tank, a gun, three flak, mines and explosives were found, but not a single rifle. According to Soviet data, the number of victims is around 900 innocent old people, women and children, several villages were burned and a further 910 people were deported to the German Reich for forced labor. Other anti-partisan companies, in which the French units were involved and which almost always ended with massacres of the civilian population, followed: company "Eule" in September 1942, "Hasenjagd" and "Duckjagd" in October 1942. Even during the regular security service, the French used to "pacification actions". At the Karlsbad operation, which was carried out by the SS and the police in October 1942, 1,051 people were shot, several villages were burned and the cattle were requisitioned.
Operations against Soviet troops in Belarus, 1943
The French Legion was assigned to various German divisions until it was again under the command of Colonel Edgar Puaud in June 1943 . On June 25th, units of the LVF under the command of Major Bridoux fought a Soviet attack on the Bobr River for 48 hours without interruption. Supported by fighter planes, 5 Tiger tanks and a Waffen SS unit, they fended off the attack. This action is considered to be the most successful operation of the LVF, in which 40 destroyed Soviet tanks lay in front of the French positions. A Soviet communiqué said that " the sacrifice of two French divisions " had stopped their troops. Between April 1942 and January 1943 a total of thirteen French defected with guns. In November 1943 a base occupied by the French, Garrison Wolosowitschi , overran collectively, probably because of a drop in morale.
Position of the Vichy regime to the French Legion
The initiative received support only on the fringes of the base of the Vichy regime until it found support from the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz . Instead of the hoped-for 100,000 fighters, only 12,000 registered. The Vichy regime did not euphorically support the unit fighting in the uniform of the Wehrmacht, but rather forbade the active officers of the armistice army to get involved here. On the other hand, Vichy saw it as a useful outlet for militant, extreme collaborators who should let off their disappointment and anger on the Eastern Front instead of discrediting the Pétain government through propaganda . There were 110 Bretons among them (which was effectively 1%, although the Breton population made up almost 10% of the population of all of France). A recently published study by Kristian Hamon showed that the Breton nationalists Yves Le Négaret , Taldir Jaffrennou and Alan Heusaff belonged to the association "Friends of the LVF". French prisoners of war in the German Reich, who preferred to take part in the war against the Soviet Union than to do forced labor in the German Reich , also belonged to the LVF.
Dissolution of the French Legion
The LVF also fought against the Red Army in Ukraine until their return to France in June 1944 . On July 23, 1944, the LVF was dissolved by order of Heinrich Himmler . 1,200 LVF survivors formed the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the SS “Charlemagne” (French No. 1) in September 1944, together with other French volunteer units of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS and members of the Groupe franc de la garde of the Milice française .
literature
- Owen Anthony Davey: The Origins of the Legion des Volontaires Francais contre le Bolchevisme. In: Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 6, No. 4 (1971), pp. 29-45.
- Kuzma Ivanovic Kozak: French in the associations of the Wehrmacht in: Wolf Kaiser (Hrsg.): Perpetrators in the war of extermination. The attack on the Soviet Union and the genocide of the Jews , Berlin, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-549-07161-2 .
- Barbara Unteutsch: From the Sohlbergkreis to the Collaboration group: a contribution to the history of German-French relations based on the Cahiers franco-allemands / German-French monthly books; 1931–1944 , Münster: Kleinheinrich, 1990 ISBN 3-926608-56-0 , pp. 193–198.
- Pascal Ory : Les collaborateurs , Paris: Éditions du Seuil , 1977 ISBN 2-02-004585-0 , pp. 240-242.
- Oleg Beyda, 'La Grande Armeé in Field Gray': The Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism, 1941, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 29, no. 3 (2016) : 500-518.
