Léon Degrelle

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Léon Degrelle (center) with Sepp Dietrich (left) and Jean Vermeire in Charleroi, 1944

Léon Joseph Marie Ignace Degrelle alias José León Ramírez Reina (born June 15, 1906 in Bouillon , Belgium , †  March 31, 1994 in Málaga , Spain ) was the leader of the Belgian Rexists and an officer of the Waffen-SS , most recently officially ranked one SS standard leader .

Life

youth

Leon Degrelle was born as the eldest of eight children of a Catholic local politician in French-speaking Wallonia and studied law at the University of Leuven . He also worked as a journalist for the youth magazine Cahiers de la Jeunesse Catholique and, at the age of twenty, became the director of Editions Rex in Leuven . The publishing house published predominantly Catholic writings for the youth. After he had published a positive article about the anti-clerical , fascist writer Charles Maurras , the Catholic college circles turned against him; from then on he acted more and more critically and ruthlessly, also against the church.

Out of dissatisfaction with the policy of the then leading Catholic party in Belgium, which was also prepared to compromise with the Belgian socialists , which did not find a solution to the ongoing conflict between the French-speaking Walloons and the often socially disadvantaged, Dutch- speaking Flemings and, in Degrelle's opinion, an “ulcer “Was, he began to get involved in politics. In 1935 he formed the rexist movement Mouvement National Rexiste within a few months .

Role during World War II

When the Wehrmacht marched into Belgium in 1940, Degrelle was deported via Dunkirk to Lille in France , interrogated at the headquarters of the Deuxième Bureau and, according to his own statements, tortured. As a result of the advance of the Germans, it was brought via Rouen , Nantes and Tours to La Rochelle . He was there, as was later in the prison camp of the Spanish fighters in Le Vernet , in custody with members of the Parti communiste français who had been arrested as part of the party ban. The government rest of France led at the insistence of the Belgian government in exile, which is also located in Vichy was the dismissal Degrelle, who returned to Belgium.

In 1941 the German Wehrmacht set up a battalion-strong troop formation that was deployed on the Eastern Front under the command of Georges Jacobs . The approximately 1,000 men of the " Walloon Legion " initially wore army uniforms with the Belgian coat of arms on their left sleeve. They committed themselves in the Wehrmacht for two years, with the option of continuing to commit themselves or to travel home.

With the idea of ​​a "Common Europe" - based on the Walloons' right to have a say in this Europe after the " Final Victory " - Degrelle suggested first Himmler , then Hitler himself, that Walloons should participate in the Wehrmacht, on condition that this participation had to take place only in the "East", i.e. against communism . Flemings were active in the Wehrmacht since 1941.

With the order to transfer all non-German volunteers to the Waffen-SS, the remnants of the Walloon Legion, which had been smashed on the Eastern Front, were reorganized and - materially and personally strengthened - converted into an SS Assault Brigade. Degrelle was appointed SS-Sturmbannführer and took over the political leadership of the brigade ; the military leadership lay with SS-Obersturmbannführer Lucien Lippert and later in the hands of SS-Oberführer Karl Burk . After heavy fighting, the brigade was renamed the 28th SS Volunteer Panzer Grenadier Division "Wallonia" (Walloon No. 1) towards the end of the war , but remained a brigade in terms of manpower and equipment.

Léon Degrelle in Charleroi , 1944

At the end of August 1944, Adolf Hitler personally awarded Degrelle the Oak Leaves to the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross , making him one of the "most highly decorated" foreigners in the Wehrmacht. In September 1944 Degrelle became the commander of the 28th SS Volunteer Panzer Grenadier Division "Wallonia".

post war period

At the end of the war on May 7, 1945, Degrelle escaped arrest by fleeing by plane from Oslo to Spain. In December 1945 he was sentenced to death in absentia by a Belgian special court and was expatriated . In addition, a law was passed making selling, buying, owning or reading a book by Degrelle a criminal offense in Belgium ("Lex Degrelle"). All efforts of the Belgian government to extradite Degrelle failed because of the indifference of the Francoist regime; an expulsion in the summer of 1946 under pressure from the western states (presumably to North Africa) was thwarted by the undisturbed re-entry shortly afterwards. Degrelle built a new business life under the protection of the Franquist Eduardo Ezquer under the name of León José de Ramirez Reina.

After 1945 Degrelle regularly attended meetings of SS veterans, clubs and neo-Nazi events, for example a solstice celebration on the occasion of a military sports camp of the French National Front . He kept in close contact with SS veterans such as Otto Skorzeny and the Swiss National Socialist François Genoud . On the Costa del Sol he ran real estate businesses, a laundry chain and an import-export trade. After the Transición he lived “undisturbed and prosperous” in Madrid and Málaga until his death in 1994 , which led to permanent diplomatic tensions between Spain and Belgium.

He has often worked as a contact person for the actions within the framework of the rat line .

reception

The American-French writer Jonathan Littell used Degrelle's autobiographical work La Campagne de Russie as the basis for his novel Die Wohlgesinnnten (2006), in which he deals with a Nazi perpetrator in a fictional autobiography. Littell's close reading of the Degrelle text was based on Klaus Theweleit's study, published in 1977, on men's fantasies about the sexual fantasies and acts of violence of German volunteer corps members after the First World War, and found "almost exactly the same behavior and word complexes, arranged around the panic about the" mixed states of the body edges " . ”Littell published the literary result of the text analysis in 2008 under the title The dry and the wet.

Fonts (selection)

  • My adventures in Mexico. Haas, Augsburg 1937.
  • I was a prisoner. Dungeon diary from Belgium and France. Hesperos, Nuremberg 1944.
  • The lost legion. Schütz , Preußisch Oldendorf 1952.
  • Front de l'est. La Table Ronde, Paris 1969.
  • Lettre à Jean-Paul II à propos d'Auschwitz. Les Éditions de l'Europe réelle, Brussels 1979 ( Holocaust denial ).
  • "Because hatred dies ..." memories of a European. Translated from the Spanish by Wilfred von Oven . Universitas Verlag, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-800-41261-6 (autobiography).
  • Hitler - born in Versailles (= publications of the Institute for German Post-War History. Volume 18). Translated from the French by Claude Michel in collaboration with Rolf Kosiek . Grabert , Tübingen 1993, ISBN 3-87847-122-X (Original: "Les tricheurs de Versailles").
  • Warmongers' conspiracy 1914. The assassination attempt in Sarajevo - backers and background. Druffel & Vowinckel , Stegen / Ammersee 2009, ISBN 978-3-8061-1203-0 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Léon Degrelle  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. a b c Birgit Aschmann: "Faithful friends"? West Germany and Spain, 1945–1963. Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 1999 (dissertation, University of Kiel, 1998), p. 145 f.
  2. ^ To the entire complex of Carlos Collado Seidel : Fear of the "Fourth Reich". The Allies and the elimination of German influence in Spain 1944–1958. Schöningh, Paderborn 2001, pp. 50-58 (digitized version ).
  3. a b Spain / Degrelle: Blurred traces. In: Der Spiegel No. 43, October 21, 1959.
  4. Volker Mauersberger : The "Hitler of Belgium": Spanish fascists give protection. In: Die Zeit , February 18, 1983.
  5. ^ Uki Goñi : Odessa. The true story. Escape aid for Nazi war criminals. Association A , Berlin, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-935936-40-0 .
  6. Klaus Theweleit: The Belgian Hitler son and the German survival. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , April 25, 2008.
  7. Jan Süselbeck : Shimmering self-staging: Jonathan Littell's analysis of fascism “The dry and the damp” raises more questions than it can answer. In: Literaturkritik.de No. 5, May 2009. On the similarities between the linguistic and psychological analysis of Littell and Theweleits Laurent Wolf: Essai. Nazis de corps et de mots. In: Le temps , April 12, 2008 (French).