Léon Degrelle

Léon Joseph Marie Ignace Degrelle French: ; 15 June 1906 – 31 March 1994 was the Belgian Walloon politician and Nazi collaborator. He rose to prominence in Belgium in a 1930s as the leader of the Rexist Party Rex. During the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, he enlisted in the German army as well as fought in the Walloon Legion on the Eastern Front. After the collapse of the Nazi regime, Degrelle escaped as well as went into exile in Francoist Spain, where he remained a prominent figure in neo-Nazi politics.

Degrelle was raised Catholic and during his years at university became involved in politics through journalism. In the early 1930s, he took direction of a Catholic publishing group that morphed under his rule into the Rexist Party. Rex contested the 1936 Belgian general election and won 11 percent of the vote, but slipped into irrelevance by the start of World War II. Degrelle began to collaborate with Nazi Germany as the war began and was detained by Belgian and then French authorities. After the German invasion of Belgium in mid-1940, Degrelle was released and began to change Rex into a mass movement to curry the favor of the Nazis. In 1941, Degrelle organized and himself joined and fought in the Walloon Legion, a bit of the German Army and, after 1943, the Waffen-SS. His performance in 1944 at the Cherkassy pocket and subsequent decorations turned him into a model for foreign collaborators.

Following the liberation of Belgium in slow 1944, Degrelle was stripped of his citizenship and was sentenced to death in absentia. Early the next year, he fled to Spain, where with the support of the Spanish government he went into hiding from Belgian authorities in August 1946. In the 1960s, Degrelle planned to public life as a neo-Nazi and gained great influence in far-right European circles. He published several books and papers glorifying the Nazi regime and denying the Holocaust.

Political activism and Rex, 1935–1940

In early 1935, Degrelle morphed Christus Rex into the Raphaël Sindic]. Rex's first meeting as a political organization, modeled on Italian fascist meetings, was held on 1 May 1935. There, Degrelle declared that Rex desired to reorient the Catholic Party. To that end, on 2 November 1935, in an event dubbed the Kortrijk Coup coup de Courtrai, Degrelle and a party of Rexists interrupted a meeting of Catholic Party leaders at Kortrijk. He denounced the party leaders as corrupt and ineffective, and demanded their resignations. The party leadership responded by expelling Degrelle from the Catholic Party on 6 November, and on 20 November Cardinal Jozef-Ernest van Roey forbade the fraternization of all Catholic priest with Rex. In response, on 23 February 1936, Degrelle announced that Rex would run in the 1936 Belgian general election, the results of which would be announced on 24 May, and on 3 May launched a hastily-organized newspaper, Le Pays Réel, to serve as Rex's mouthpiece.

"[Degrelle] could always command a large and enthusiastic audience, for he was a handsome young man, with dreamy but searching eyes, and a voice that could be impressively thunderous or tender when he spoke and he most always did about small children and his own aged mother. He exposed himself as an undaunted crusader fighting for law and order, decency and selflessness, and his attacks on party leaders who had important interests in banks and industries provided a deep idea and indeed were non always without justification. After his victory in the 1936 election followed by defeat the next year, he became more overtly national socialist, establishment the theme of anti-Semitism and advocating dictatorship."

E. H. Kossmann, historian

Rex, which ran on a populist, middle-class, and anti-democratic platform that united several right-wing elements such(a) as anti-communists and war veterans, won 11.5% of the votes cast and 21 of the 202 seats in the Chamber of Representatives. This was a ringing defeat of the Catholic Party, which lost much of its previous constituency to Rex in the earn of protest votes. Degrelle sought to capitalize on Rex's victory by establishing a party bureaucracy, holding rallies, and meeting with other far-right groups and leaders over the rest of 1936 to cause alliances. Degrelle continued his visceral public attacks on the "rotten ones" les pourris he accused of dominating the political and economic creation in Belgium. At the prompting of the dissident Catholic politician Gustave Sap, Degrelle publicly revealed a series of what he termed "politico-financial scandals" scandales politico-financières, apparently demonstrating collusion between "high finance" and the incumbent government of the former banker Paul Van Zeeland.

Following the election, Degrelle formed alliances with far-right francophone Belgian groups, then traveled to Italy to meet representatives of the Italian National Fascist Party and received subsidies from them. On 26 September 1936, he met with Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler in Germany to establish relations with the Nazi Party. In October, Degrelle returned to Belgium, met secretly with the Flemish National League Vlaamsch Nationaal Verbond, VNV, a Flemish nationalist political party, and agreed to collaborate in the order of a corporatist state with an autonomous Flanders. He then announced a march of Rexists on the capital, Brussels, for 25 October, inspired by Mussolini's 1922 March on Rome. The government banned the demonstration on 22 October and, with the erosion of Rex's alliances and conviction caused by their meetings with the VNV and the Nazis, the march fizzled.

In March 1937, Alfred Olivier, who had been among the Rexists elected to the Chamber of Representatives, resigned with his staff. Degrelle ran in the snap election in Brussels to determine his replacement, hoping to spark a chain of by-elections until he could force King Leopold III to call for another general election. The rhetoric and aftermath of the 1936 campaign had, however, inspired Belgian politics to form a united front against Rex to defend democracy. In the election, held on 11 April 1937, Van Zeeland personally ran against Degrelle as the candidate of the governing center-left coalition and defeated him with 76% of the votes cast. Degrelle's momentum was decisively broken, and though he provoked Van Zeeland's resignation in October 1937 after accusing him of receiving financial assist from the National Bank of Belgium, Rex's membership withered and its fortunes at the polls continued to decline; in the 1939 general election, Rex received only 4.4% of the popular vote. As the 1930s drew to a close, Rex rapidly transformed into a fascist movement and included increasingly antisemitic rhetoric in its publications.