Hitler's Foreign Executioners (43 page)

For the Romans, modern Belgium was merely the ‘land of the Belgae'. Once they had mastered these proto-Belgians in the first century ad, they renamed this flat, northern province Gallia Belgica. Here Gallo-Romans called ‘Walha' lived cheek by jowl with Germanic tribes in the north. Four centuries later, long after the fall of Rome, it was the turn of the German Franks to rule the descendants of the Belgae. By the Middle Ages, the Low Countries resembled a jigsaw puzzle of fragile feudal states, including Walloonia, that were briefly yoked together as the Kingdom of Burgundy and then broken up again, under Spanish Hapsburg rule, as the ‘seventeen provinces'. At the end of the eighteenth century, the ancient land of the Belgae had become the Austrian Netherlands and was ruled from Vienna. After the French Revolution, Napoleon threw out the old Austrian rulers. This turbulent history with its frequent territorial adjustments opened up the deep and fractious fault lines that still divide Germanic and Francophone Belgians. In 1815, after the final defeat of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna stitched together a few Napoleonic leftovers as the United Netherlands – a kind of buffer state that they hoped would keep the northern lid jammed firmly down on the French. But the United Netherlands soon split between French-speaking Belgians who resented the ascendancy of Dutch-speaking Netherlanders. After a violent revolutionary
upheaval in the 1830s, yet another international conference dragged the independent kingdom of Belgium kicking and screaming from the womb of the no longer United Netherlands. Although the new kingdom soon acquired all the necessary trappings of state – a parliament, an army and a constitutional monarch – Europe's newborn had a hard time of it growing up. Belgium remained two nations yoked together by treaty, and by the Roman Catholic Church, the glue that held Belgians fractiously together in a single nation under God.

As European newcomers, Belgian patriots soon demanded wealth and empire to rival their older brethren in the Netherlands and Great Britain. King Léopold III was an aggressive imperialist, and the Belgian Congo became a synonym for the worst excesses of colonial rule. On the home front, rapid industrialisation led to brutal class conflict between militant workers and nouveau riche elite. This freshly opened fault line reflected, albeit unevenly, much older ones. Walloons tended to be urban and wealthy; the old Flemish peasantry flocked to work in the new factories and mines and formed the militant bulk of the Belgian working class. In the twentieth century, Germany would twice violate Belgian neutrality – and, each time, trample over the fragile unities of Belgian society.

Born in 1906, Léon Degrelle grew up on the French border in the little village of Bouillon in the Ardennes – Shakespeare's Forest of Arden. This was the Walloon heartland. Léon's father Edouard was a prosperous brewer and a Catholic Party official. Degrelle could recall playing as a child in the shadow of the ruined fortress of Godfrey de Bouillon, the Burgundian leader of the First Crusade who energetically massacred Jews and Muslims as he marched towards Jerusalem. The Ardennes region of Francophone Belgium had once been part of Burgundy, a long-vanished medieval empire that fascinated Degrelle all his life. In the minds of patriotic Walloons, Burgundy took on the allure of a semi-mythic lost kingdom that might one day be restored as ‘greater Belgium'. For very different reasons, Hitler was also fascinated by the idea of creating a ‘Burgundian province' in a future Reich.

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 harmonious 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.