Degrelle declares for Nazism

On 5 January 1941, in the Coronmeuse sports hall in occupied Liège, Léon Degrelle, leader of the Belgian Rex party, addressed a rally of his movement. He spoke of the ideological kinship between Rexism and National Socialism, called Adolf Hitler the most extraordinary man of his age and ended his speech with the cry “Heil Hitler!”. A few days earlier, on 1 January, he had closed a New Year article in the party daily Le Pays Réel with the same salute. Until then Rex had tried to pass itself off as a Belgian, royalist and Catholic movement that collaborated with the occupier out of expediency. From January 1941 it became an openly collaborationist movement, tied to Nazi Germany, and its leader, cut off from the King, the Church and most of his compatriots, staked everything on a single card.

Degrelle is often described as the leader of a “Walloon fascist party”. That is a simplification. Rex was a Belgian party, active above all in the French-speaking part of the country and in Brussels, but until May 1941 it also had a Flemish branch. Degrelle began speaking of the “Germanic” character of the Walloons and of Wallonia as a separate homeland only in 1942–1943. Some sources date the speech to 6 January. Belgian studies, including the chronology of the Institut Destrée and the Belgium WWII portal of the Brussels research centre CegeSoma, consistently place the rally in Liège on 5 January 1941.

Rex in the 1930s

Degrelle, born in 1906 at Bouillon in the Belgian Ardennes, grew up in the Catholic youth movement. From 1930 he ran the Christus Rex publishing house, named after Christ the King, and within a few years turned it into a political movement aimed at the leadership of the Catholic Party. In 1935 he was expelled from it, and in the election of 24 May 1936 his Rex won 11.5 per cent of the vote, 21 of the 202 seats in the Chamber of Representatives and 12 seats in the Senate. It was the greatest shock to Belgian politics in the interwar period. Rex attacked “rotten” politicians and “banksters”, demanded a corporatist state with a strong government answerable to the King, and soon began to propagate antisemitic slogans.

The success proved short-lived. In the autumn of 1936 Degrelle met Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in Germany, took money from Mussolini and concluded a secret agreement with the Flemish nationalists of the Flemish National Union (VNV). The “march on Brussels” of 25 October 1936, announced on Mussolini’s model, ended in humiliation. In April 1937 Degrelle forced an early by-election in Brussels, but all the democratic parties put up the Prime Minister, Paul van Zeeland, against him, and the Primate of Belgium, Cardinal Joseph-Ernest van Roey, forbade Catholics to vote for Rex. On 11 April 1937 Degrelle received 19 per cent of the vote, Van Zeeland 76 per cent. In the election of April 1939 Rex fell to 4.4 per cent and 4 seats in the Chamber. Belgium, which at the time was banking on neutrality, secured among other things by the German guarantee of 1937, regarded Rexism as a passing phenomenon.

From prison to Brussels

On 10 May 1940, the day of the German attack on Belgium, the Belgian authorities arrested several thousand people suspected of sympathising with the enemy, among them Degrelle, despite his parliamentary immunity. The prisoners were taken to France. On 20 May at Abbeville French soldiers shot 21 of them, including Joris Van Severen, leader of the Flemish Verdinaso movement. Degrelle, who in Belgium was also believed to have been killed, had been separated from this group earlier. Beaten and moved from prison to prison, he ended up in the Le Vernet internment camp in the south of France. There in July he was found by the Rexist journalist Pierre Daye, and thanks to the German diplomat Otto Abetz Degrelle was released and returned to Brussels on 30 July.

He found the country after the capitulation of the army, under the German military administration of General Alexander von Falkenhausen, with King Leopold III a prisoner at Laeken and the legal government in exile. In the summer of 1940 he expected to become prime minister of a new, authoritarian Belgium within a victorious German Europe. He came to an arrangement with the socialist Henri de Man, who was then seeking a similar path, and courted the support of the court and the Church. Leopold III, however, refused to receive him, the Church kept its distance, and the Germans, on Goebbels’s instructions, ignored him. The military occupation administration preferred to work with the Belgian civil service and with the VNV, which as a Flemish movement fitted Nazi ideology better.

So on 25 August Degrelle relaunched Le Pays Réel and tried to turn Rex into a mass movement. The party’s strong-arm squads, the Formations de Combat, grew; in the autumn of 1940 they attacked Jewish shops and started street brawls. The Germans, who wanted calm, ordered them reined in. At the end of 1940 Rex was a small movement, hated by most Belgians and disregarded by the occupier.

The rally in Liège

The turn of January 1941 grew out of this weakness. Degrelle, like other Belgian politicians, understood that the war would last a long time and that the Germans would not hand power back to the Belgians before it ended. He decided to court their favour not as a Belgian patriot but as a supporter of the New Order. On 1 January 1941 he ended an article in Le Pays Réel with the salute “Heil Hitler”, and on 5 January he repeated it at the rally in Liège, before a hall full of his supporters. According to accounts cited in the literature, he stressed the “ideological community of Rexism and National Socialism” and called Hitler a genius and “the most extraordinary man of our time”.

Liège, a working-class city with strong socialist and liberal traditions, received the rally with hostility. According to the Institut Destrée chronology, residents of every political persuasion gathered spontaneously outside the hall to demonstrate against the Rex leader. The counter-demonstration was so large that neither the Rexists nor the German authorities dared to intervene, and the local police plainly sympathised with the demonstrators. Some accounts say that Degrelle and his men intended to march on the town hall after the rally, but this cannot be confirmed.

Consequences of the turn

The occupier received the declaration coolly. General von Falkenhausen never met Degrelle, and Eggert Reeder, head of the civil administration within the military government, regarded his politics as constant and not very successful improvisation. The Germans nevertheless began to subsidise Rex, allowed it to operate freely and in time placed Rexists in some local offices. In February 1941 Degrelle began recruiting drivers for the German National Socialist Motor Corps (NSKK). He promised a thousand men and found about three hundred.

Within the movement the turn caused a new wave of departures. Former sympathisers who in 1940 had backed a cautious “policy of presence” left the party, and their places were taken by radicals ready for full collaboration. For most Belgians, who listened every evening to Radio Belgique from London, the Rexists simply became traitors. The government of Hubert Pierlot, which a few weeks earlier had declared war on Italy and was waging war alongside Britain, treated people openly serving the occupier as enemies of the state. After the liberation, membership of Rex during the occupation became the basis for thousands of charges in the Belgian collaboration trials.

Rexism was not alone in this. At the same time the VNV in Flanders, the Dutch National Socialist Movement in a Netherlands occupied under Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Vidkun Quisling in Norway were following a similar path. All of them hoped that by demonstrative loyalty to Hitler they would win power in their own countries. The Germans made use of all of them, and gave none of them what they sought.

Place in the war

The rally in Liège brought Degrelle neither power nor German recognition. In April 1941 the occupation authorities passed over the Rexists in filling new posts, and in May the Flemish branch of Rex was absorbed into the VNV. Rex was close to falling apart when, on 22 June 1941, Germany, carrying out the plan for Operation Barbarossa, attacked the Soviet Union. Degrelle saw the war against Bolshevism as his chance. He secured permission to form a French-speaking volunteer unit, the Walloon Legion, and enlisted in it himself as a private. On 8 August 1941 some 850 volunteers, most of them Rexists, left Brussels for training in the Reich, and from there for the Eastern Front.

From then on Degrelle conducted politics with a rifle. In 1943 he proclaimed the Walloons a Germanic people, and the Legion passed into the Waffen-SS. After the battle of the Cherkassy pocket in February 1944 Hitler awarded him the Knight’s Cross and made him a model for collaborators across occupied Europe. Rex, led in his absence by Victor Matthys, slid into terror against opponents and the resistance. In December 1944 a Belgian court martial sentenced Degrelle to death in absentia, but in May 1945 he escaped to Franco’s Spain, where he lived until 1994 as an unrepentant Nazi and Holocaust denier. The cry in Liège marked the start of that road: the moment when a movement that had begun as a Catholic revolt against a corrupt political class openly became the Belgian branch of Nazism.