Hitler's Foreign Executioners (67 page)

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’.
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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.’
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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).
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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.
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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.
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By the time the Walloons reached the front, the Soviet army had penetrated to a position a hundred miles west of Kiev, biting deep into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. As the Russians prepared to cross the Dnieper, German forces clung to a chain of strong points on the opposite bank. One was located in the industrial region of Cherkassy and defended by the SS ‘Wiking’ division, reinforced by the Estonian SS ‘Narva’ and the Flemish SS Sturmbrigade Langemarck. The ‘Wallonien’ reached the Cherkassy salient at the end of November. The supremely pompous Degrelle was immediately at loggerheads with his commanding officer Lippert, but the front line offered few opportunities for political skulduggery. Through December and into early January 1944 the ‘Wallonien’, fighting against overwhelming forces in sub-zero temperatures, suffered ‘fearful losses’. Lippert’s natural caution was frequently undermined by the reckless Degrelle, who was desperate to bolster his standing with Himmler.
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By the beginning of February, some 250 SS ‘Wallonien’ men who had survived this relentless attrition had become trapped inside the ‘Korsun-Cherkassy pocket’ by the relentless Soviet advance. On 13 February, Lippert was killed by an explosive shell, a moment Degrelle recalled in grisly detail. Lippert, he wrote, uttered ‘the superhuman scream of a man whose life is suddenly torn from him’, but he still possessed ‘the extraordinary lucidity to pick up his kepi from the ground and put it back on his head so as to die fittingly’.
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By then, armadas of Soviet T-34 tanks, backed by roaring batteries of ‘Stalin Organs’ relentlessly tightened the trap around the German forces. The new ‘Wallonien’ commander Jules Mathieu ordered Degrelle and the surviving Belgians to ‘break out’ towards the south-east, where they could rendezvous with German reinforcements. At dawn on the morning of 17 February, Degrelle joined a ‘fantastic
jumble’ of tanks, mechanised and horse-drawn vehicles, Ukrainian refugees and even Soviet POWs all trying to reach a narrow corridor of escape before the Russians slammed it shut. ‘It was no lark,’ Degrelle recalled. Ahead, German panzers, driven by their ‘marvellous warriors’ forced open a breach just a few hundred metres wide. As the Belgians, hauling their dead commander on a sled, raced after the tanks, thick snow began to fall making it almost impossible to see further than a few metres, but shielding the retreating troops from Soviet aircraft. Degrelle led his battalion deep into a ravine, where he halted, uncertain what to do next. At any moment, he feared, the Soviet ‘Mongols’ would discover them and start hurling down grenades. But somehow Degrelle extricated his men and they trudged painfully west, past twisted tank wrecks and the ‘hot intestines of horses spilled on the bloodied snow’.

A day later, the fleeing German forces reached the east bank of the Gniloi-Tikitsch River. Huge blocks of ice crusted the rushing torrent, swollen by the spring melt. Every bridge had been destroyed. Close behind, Degrelle recalled, Soviet tanks had begun spilling over the ridge he had just descended – and he and the retreating Belgians had no choice but to take their chances in the icy river. Many vanished forever in the swirling torrent. Soldiers who made it to the other bank, some ‘naked and as red as lobsters’, huddled together by the frozen bank, but there was no time to spare. As the Russian tanks began firing from the opposite bank, Degrelle and his comrades made a dash for the forest. Looking back, he could see unceasing ‘human streams’ of German soldiers gushing from the woods, desperately dodging Soviet fire and throwing themselves into the freezing water.

For Degrelle, the ‘Cherkassy breakout’ was the zenith of his career as a collaborator. At the beginning of 1944, the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin battled with a relentless inundation of catastrophic news from the east. Goebbels seized on the
Tcherkassykämpfer
and turned a shambolic retreat into a spectacular triumph. Its most prominent hero was, of course, Léon Degrelle, who was summoned to the ailing Hitler’s military headquarters and, in front of Germany’s delighted press corps, awarded a Knight’s Cross. Buoyed up on a wave of fatuous euphoria, Degrelle was flown back to Belgium in triumph on 22 February. In Brussels, Degrelle’s most devoted supporters staged a rally at the Palais des Sports. Diehard Rexists filled the hall and applauded as the Chef reaffirmed his faith in Hitler and the Reich.

Degrelle squeezed every last drop of acclaim from his triumphal progress. On 5 March, he arrived in Paris and harangued a pro-German gathering at the Palais de Chaillot in SS uniform. On the platform with Degrelle stood the crème de la crème of the French collaborationist movement, among them Marcel Déat, Jacques Doriot and Joseph Darnand, the commander of the French SS ‘Charlemagne’ division. After the Rally, German ambassador Otto Abetz, who had long promoted
Degrelle’s cause, threw a party at the German Embassy. At the beginning of April, Degrelle returned to Brussels and, riding in an armoured half-track with his children, and led the ‘Wallonien’ men to yet another rally. The Bourse had been decorated with SS Sig runes and swastika flags which proclaimed ‘
Honneur a la Légion!
’ As the round of celebrations and parties continued, and expensive champagnes and cognac flowed at Degrelle’s lavish home in the Drève de Lorraine, the Chef de Rex waited impatiently for the call from Hitler promoting him from war hero to Belgian Staatsführer.

The German military governor, Eggert Reeder, observed the triumphant spectacle with alarm. Reeder had long had the measure of Degrelle and despised him as a vainglorious fantasist. ‘It is the case,’ he reported: