This post examines the post-World War 2 life of Walloon leader and super-soldier Leon Degrelle, seen by many as the likely successor to Hitler. It seeks to answer this question: how did Degrelle maintain his relentless optimism and idealism for decades when ongoing developments regularly proved disappointing to him personally and to his cause? Was his perspective appropriate? This is a long, detailed post and there may not be one next week.
“What weighs upon one in exile is neither loneliness (this is often, to the contrary, a wonderful blessing) nor the bitterness of defeat, but rather it is that feeling of impotence, being unable to project all the forces that roar inside of one and to convince others born to transmit these forces as I was born to carry them. This is the torture of every day, every hour; that nothing happens.” – Leon Degrelle to a young comrade, November 11, 1961
This is a post about Hitler’s top guy.
That got your attention, right?
“Hitler’s top guy” is a reference to Sam Hyde’s comedy sketch. For those who don’t know Sam Hyde, he’s a comedian whose approach is to make fun of his in-person audience as a meta-joke for people who later watch the shows online; it’s reminiscent of Andy Kaufman, I think. Hyde walks the line of offensiveness right up to the point of being physically attacked, but because he’s 6’4” and a trained fighter people avoid assaulting him. He had a Comedy Central show which was cancelled after one season due to his association with the alt-right. Some of his classic comedy pieces include his 2070 paradigm shift making fun of Ted Talks, an open mic at some NYC art event where he starts preaching the evils of homosexuality to a horrified crowd, the sketches “Thanks white people”, “You might be Michael Brown if,” and MDE sketch “Moms”. My favorite sketch of his, though, is “Hitler’s top guy” where he disparages Hitler to a Jewish woman on a date while at the same time fantasizing about how great it would have been to be Hitler’s top guy:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/gH6kzLTUUMk?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
To take the question of “Hitler’s top guy” seriously, there’s multiple ways to ask who the “top guy” could be. His #2 was officially Rudolf Hess as Deputy Führer, Hermann Göring was his appointed successor in 1939, he spent a lot of time with his architect Albert Speer, Martin Bormann was Hitler’s private secretary and had immense power. However, militarily, Hitler’s top guy – his favorite soldier – was a non-German Belgian named Leon Degrelle.
Degrelle (1906-1994) was a Belgium politician that formed the Rexist party, a far-right, Catholic, populist, middle-class, anti-communist socialist party in 1935. The party had success until the non-populist parties banded together to defeat Rex’s ascension, after which it lost it’s momentum. Here’s Degrelle in a brief 1936 clip:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/66XG4YQtwD4?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
After Hitler’s invasion of Belgium Degrelle became a collaborationist and, after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, he organized the Walloon legion of Belgian volunteers to assist in the war effort. He strongly believed in the dangers of the communist threat and thought a pan-European Christian socialism was the only alternative to stop it, which he continued to believe for the rest of his life.1
Degrelle led the legion personally and was wounded five times, displaying fierce bravery and tenacity. Here he is in an anti-communist speech in 1944:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/oIQUa8OOF18?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
The Walloon’s were originally considered an inferior French people compared to the Germans, but due to Degrelle’s efforts the Germans “upgraded” them to a Germanic people. The Walloons were eventually integrated into the combat Waffen-SS (not to be confused with the paramilitary SS; you can see video of Degrelle’s discussing the Waffen-SS here). The Waffen-SS casualties on the Eastern front were staggering; out of a million members, 352,000 died and 50,000 were missing in action. Instead of leading from the back like in almost every other army in the world, their officers led from the front. As a result, half of all division commanders were killed in combat. Degrelle was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross (Germany’s highest military medal) as well as became the first recipient of the Golden Badge for Close Combat (requiring fifty hand-to-hand battles) by Hitler personally. Hitler once reportedly said: “If I had a son, I would want him to be like Degrelle.” (This reminds me of Obama’s “If I had a son, he’d look like Treyvon [Martin.]”)
Hence: Hitler’s top guy.
Indeed, the liberal European historian Jacques de Launay wrote: “It is necessary to speak with those from Hitler’s entourage who are still alive to understand that Degrelle had great possibilities of becoming, perhaps, the Fuhrer’s successor.” This was due to Degrelle’s unique personality profile, which we will discuss. He was even arguably the inspiration for the comic book character Tintin (which remain among the best books for a young boy to read today); also see here if you know French.
A journalist, politician and warrior before the war, Degrelle became a prolific author (writing around twenty books), poet and motivational speaker after the war, as well as serving as a center to which anti-communist elements gathered while in exile. I read his famous The Eastern Front memoir a number of years ago. It was easy to read and if you want a beat-by-beat retelling of Barbarossa from his perspective as a front-line soldier – where he rose from private to general – it’s a good one.2 By all accounts his behavior at the front was exemplary, displaying honor and courage, and he did not participate in any war crimes; the Allied War Crimes Commission did not include him on their lists, neither did the Israelis, and even the Soviets who he fought against never charged him with such crimes. Per Degrelle,
An identical purpose united us all: to represent our people brilliantly among the twenty nations that had joined the struggle; to fulfill, without servility, our duty as Europeans, by fighting against the mortal enemy of Europe; to obtain for our mother country a strong voice in the continental community that would be born out of the war; and finally, to gird the shock troops whose might would guarantee social justice upon our permanent return to our country after the hostilities.
For this ideal we offered our lives.
This offering was not mere rhetoric. Of the six thousand Belgian volunteers who joined the Wallonian Legion between autumn of 1941 and spring of 1945, 2,500 died as heroes. 83% of our soldiers received one or more wounds in the course of this mighty epic. Of the first eight hundred volunteers, three alone of those who had taken part in all the battles reached the end of the war alive: a simple soldier, a junior officer who became a captain, wounded three times, and the author of these lines, himself wounded on five occasions.
But all of this is preamble; it’s not why I wanted to write this point. Here, my interest is in the intersection of idealism and ideology succumbing to hard, painful realities, when the ideal is destroyed; how one keeps and maintains or loses hope against overwhelming odds, how people sustain themselves spiritually. Degrelle fought against overwhelming military odds on the Eastern Front but it was really after the war during his time in Spain, where he lived until he died in 1994, that his real struggle occurred: a long-term failed struggle against the continuous advent of a global political, financial, anti-western civilization push that was and is leading directly to the suicide and end of the West entirely. Would he succumb to despair? Would he fight against the dying of the light? How would he react? After all, the Nazis had attempted a transvaluation of society’s core values for the first time since the success of Christianity 2,000 years before; it’s failure unleashed a sustained, violent, and increasingly intense egalitarian ratchet effect which we are still experiencing to this day.
To be clear, my interest in these questions is broader than Degrelle: how can one maintain hope in light of loss, or otherwise how should one respond to philosophical pessimism which was discussed previously in Schopenhauer vs. Nietzsche’s starkly different approaches. In the future I will be discussing others who struggled with faith against overwhelming odds in different contexts.
For this post I picked up Léon Degrelle in Exile (1945-1994) by José Luís Jerez Riesco, a close friend of his. It was a well written book and he had access to a huge amount of Degrelle’s writings and correspondences, both public and private. I came away from it with a solid understanding of his thought process and worldview – that of a staunch anti-communist, a pan-European promoter and a deeply held Catholic faith, along with a love of beauty – and if you are interested in Degrelle I highly recommend it.
Okay, let’s begin.
Degrelle’s escape to Spain
Degrelle participated in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944/January 1945, which failed. In April, with the Allies rapidly closing in he headed north and into Norway. On May 8 Norway officially surrendered as did Germany, marking the end of the war. Unwilling to accept “victor’s justice” of death by partisans, Degrelle boarded a small plane with a couple of others with the goal of reaching Spain, which was non-aligned during the war and Franco’s government had at least nominal pro-Axis sympathies. There were two major problems: (1) the plane they boarded had clear Nazi markings and they had to fly over Allied territory, where they had a major risk of being shot down; and (2) the range of the plane was on the borderline of being able to reach Spain (~2,200 km, maximum range was 2,300 km). If they didn’t reach it they would crash and die or be captured and imprisoned, likely shot. Their hope was that the Allies would not shoot down the plane on the day of surrender, that they would be confused by the plane’s passage if they weren’t partying, drunk and asleep. The plane was indeed shot at by anti-aircraft fire as it passed over Allied territory, but it was not hit. The plane made it to the border with Spain where it crash-landed, hard, out of gas, on the beach on the Spanish side of the border. One of the pilots was killed in the crash and the occupants suffered varying degrees of injury; Degrelle was badly injured.
Attempts to repatriate Degrelle
The injury turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Degrelle. Belgium put extreme pressure on Spain to expel him, but Spain pushed off a decision because Degrelle was bedridden for more than a year and unable to be moved due to strict doctor orders. Degrelle had been tried and convicted in absentia in 1944 after the Allies had re-taken Belgium and sentenced to death without right of appeal for fighting on behalf of the Axis on the Eastern Front (he was smeared at various points at having committed war crimes, but no evidence of war crimes was ever substantiated – he was a front-line soldier), so sending him back would be akin to a death sentence. Vae victis! At the same time France demanded Pierre Laval’s return from Spain, and Spain sent him back under France’s promise for a fair trial and no execution, which France immediately backtracked on. Degrelle was supposed to be sent back on the same flight as Laval but avoided it because of his injuries. Railroaded in a show trial, Laval thought his career was on the line but not his life. He was convicted and executed. This shocked Spain’s leaders and soured their willingness to send Degrelle back.
Thus began Belgium’s multi-decades attempts to force Spain to hand back over Degrelle. Belgium used every method at its disposal to accomplish this – they held back normalizing relations with Spain, they issued complaints to the U.N., they sent multiple kidnapping teams to kidnap Degrelle which were only averted by the narrowest of margins (Israel, De Gaulle and other allied countries also tried to kidnap him; Israel thought he would be able to reveal the location of Martin Bormann who had disappeared, but it was really because of Degrelle’s growing spiritual reputation as the potential successor to Hitler). Degrelle explained how he avoided these attempts:
Firstly, because I am very lucky, always protected by a special “baraka” [blessing]. Secondly, to kidnap me, they have to resolutely risk their necks. I was not an easy man to catch. I got my training during my seventy-five close combat engagements on the Eastern Front. The kidnappers, even knowing that, always acted within the shelter of protective operations that were too complicated. It was evident that they did not want to die in their attempt. In the end, those “gangsters” in the service of certain low-level politicians, and even the naive Loinfosse wanted nothing more than my blood. Lacking a great ideal, they did not know how or want to risk anything of themselves, and so they failed outright. I could always face them because I have what they do not have: faith in a cause. I sympathize with those whose lives were only shadows without light. I prefer to be on the top and not on swampy ground.
Spain had to deal with these kidnapping attempts gingerly; even after being caught most of the attempted kidnappers were quickly released. Spain was in a very weak position vis-a-vis the allies; Franco did not want to be overthrown. Belgium imprisoned Degrelle’s parents, both of whom died in prison in extremely poor conditions, imprisoned his wife for a decade (released after six years), his brother-in-law was murdered in prison, and Belgian authorities separated his five children, changed their names and brainwashed them. Degrelle would not hear anything from his children for more than a decade, their only crime that they were related to him. Even his birthplace and his home were razed. Previously, his pharmacist, non-combatant brother had been assassinated in 1944 by partisans to hurt Degrelle as he fought on the front. Later, all his children would join him in Spain, although tragically his son, who he had last seen when the son was four years old, joined his father finally at the age of eighteen and died only a couple of months later in an automobile accident.
To put the persecution against Degrelle in perspective, Belgium ordered the arrest of 28,000 entrepreneurs – almost all of Belgium’s employers – for “economic cooperation” with Germany. Some 15,000 people were killed and another 231,000 were banned from work, of which 70,000 were imprisoned. Similar acts of injustice occurred in all the so-called “liberated” countries.
Degrelle was willing throughout all these years and decades to return to Belgium and face trial, but he was not willing to turn himself over to be quietly executed. His conditions for turning himself over were a publicly televised and fair trial where he would be able to defend himself to the Belgian public. Belgium, terrified at what Degrelle would reveal – he knew many of their dirty secrets, including that the Allied Belgium politician Paul-Henri Spaak who had desperately wanted to work with Hitler but Hitler had been repulsed by him and turned him down – would not and would never agree to these conditions. They also banned all his books (as did France), possession of which carried a heavy criminal sentence and prohibited his words from being published in the newspapers.
Degrelle, once recovered, escaped from the heavily guarded hospital with the tacit approval of Francisco Franco and Degrelle’s fascist and conservative allies. Franco then told Belgium that Degrelle had left the country, hoping to divert much of the pressure being placed upon Spain to return him. Degrelle moved from safehouse to safehouse for long stretches of time without the ability to move about and with almost no one knowing his whereabouts; he spent his time writing books about his life and the eastern front. This was an extremely depressing time for him; between losing the war, his injuries, his sadness at his parent’s death in prison (for no crime other than being his parents) and his wife’s imprisonment and not knowing where his children were, along with his inability to leave the small, dark hiding places, it severely tested his usual resolutely optimistic character. In addition, one of his injuries returned and he lost weight. Nearly at death’s door, he was operated on and survived the operation from where he began his recovery. He wrote to his doctor in his despair:
It is the soul that is sick. The soul loaded down with so many painful events, by all my great greats that have died. I was made, so I used to feel, to change the world, to convey it a great ideal. Instead, I will die of having turned this immense and devouring fire against me. This is what consumes me, excessively, made by the universe and resting upon the poor heart of a defeated giant. Even this word “giant” will make you smile, but it is true. I believed I was born for an epoch and felt I had the right to look, with the eyes of a teacher upon a people made to receive my faith and be transfigured by it. We can take care of it, with attention, with tenderness, but my great dreams of yesterday, who will resurrect them? This not being able to act breaks me down…
He also wrote a letter to his cousin Louis, a priest, regarding his family being imprisoned just for being related to him:
In your letters, my dear Louis, you have made clear that some conditions need to be included [for his family to be released]. You speak of “expressing sincere repentance,” of “wise resolutions for the future.” What do you mean? Do you think I risked my life for four years on the Eastern Front, where I suffered so much, without having carried inside me a great ideal? Should I disavow all this right at the moment when, everywhere, the fight against communism is the first rule of the day? One thing that we have understood for years and have shown, is that we offered our own youth to protect the world and Christianity from the communist tidal wave that millions of crazy people, attacking us from behind, have managed to use to take over half of Europe.
In this struggle, cooperation with Germany was the only reasonable course because it represented the only serious force on the continent….So, my dear Louis, do you understand the monstrosity of asking me to piously put on the slippers of repentance and sterility? In short, as a priest, you well know what it means to have a vocation. I also have one that embraces my whole being. It is God who has given it to me. For me, to reject it would be to betray the gift of God and betray my own life….As for my children, I want them to always hold their heads high when they think of my work, instead of looking at a father who would have morally ended himself by preferring conformity and the cowardice of easy renunciations rather than a hard life…
Degrelle’s decades in Spain
After many years the risks to Degrelle began to recede a bit – even as the calls for his expulsion back to Belgium to face certain death and the kidnapping attempts remained an ongoing threat – and he began to move about more freely. As a devout Catholic he undertook the 640 mile Camino de Santiago pilgrimage on foot. He built his house and collected much art. He continued to read and write letters and meet up with many Axis leaders and Eastern Front soldiers and volunteers, including those from Spain’s famed Blue division. He also became very successful as a developer of houses for the United States’ military bases in Spain, and he created a series of successful dry cleaners in 1968. His wife divorced him after her long imprisonment where the death of their son in Spain under his responsibility was the final straw; he eventually remarried. Regarding his approach, he wrote:
Often in life, only beauty frees the soul from human misery. There are so many mediocre, low, or ugly things on earth, that one day you end up being drowned in them if you do not carry in yourself the fire of that which is beautiful, burning away the ugly, consuming it, and purifying yourself. There are thirty-six ways to bring art to life. It is necessary to cultivate them with passion and love. It is our inner health, our secret garden that, without ceasing, refreshes us and fortifies us. Poetry, painting, sculpture, music…no matter what it is, it is necessary to avoid the banal, to rise above the dust, to create the great rather than conform to the small, to make this extraordinary flame, which each of us possesses in ourselves, come to life and turn it into a great fire!
Elsewhere, he stated, “There are no great men who are not, first and foremost, great artists. Any work, whether political or note, that does not enhance the splendor of beauty, is nothing more than a tree without roots, ready to be knocked down by the next gale.”
Degrelle spent much of his time writing, giving speeches and interviews in order to combat the relentless Allied propaganda about Germany and Hitler’s base evils. Degrelle explained that he had a vision for a united Europe and he fought on that basis against the twin evils of communism and hyper-capitalism; it was only through a European socialism that equality and justice could be promoted. The Walloon brigade volunteering on the Eastern front was meant to demonstrate to the Germans that, if the Germans had won, that Belgians should be treated equally to the rest of European countries, that they had done their part with blood and sacrifice as well. Degrelle also combated the notion of the Holocaust – he acknowledged that Jews in Poland had been nearly wiped out at one point (in one interview he stated, “The problem with the Jews is that they always want to be the victims, eternally prosecuted, so much so that, if they have no enemies, they invent them. Their persecution was not only in Germany, but also in Poland, where they were almost exterminated. As always, they wanted to form a state within another state.”), but he said there was never gasing of the Jews in concentration camps, that the allegations were physically impossible and that it was a false narrative designed to benefit Jews generally and Israel. Rather, those who died within the concentration camps were because of disease and lack of food, especially at the end of the war when logistics broke down. He countered by pointing out that the Allies had killed 200,000 defenseless women and children in the Dresden firebombing (which had been heavily suppressed in the West until David Irving’s 1963 book on the topic), that the Soviets had enacted the Katyn massacre (after attempting to blame the Germans) and had killed and were killing many millions of their own citizens in gulags and elsewhere, and that America had killed hundreds of thousands in their nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He also noted that the West had criminalized open discussion of the Holocaust, where he was sued in Spain as an early form of lawfare3, an argument I agree with (which our elites has also done to an extent over HBD, global warming and especially recently with COVID). If an argument is true it should be able to be debated openly and honestly; there doesn’t come a point where discussion is simply over and done, period, no more discussing it or you get punished. I am intrinsically quite wary of any argument that becomes verboten like this.
Degrelle remained a fighter until his death. He remained optimistic, writing in the 1950s: “In two, three, or five years, great hours will come. You will see…how we will do formidable tasks. All that has been done so far has been nothing more than patrol, reconnaissance, stealthy inspection. Real life has yet to begin. I firmly begin it.” In an interview in 1954, he stated that the world is headed toward it’s redemption. Yet in 1961, he wrote:
Everything has died around me, great ideas and great dreams. The years pass, and with them the golden years of strength and faith; everything is frayed and is breaking down. I am like the dead man who has been left with his eyes open in the coffin. From time to time, a hopeful breeze blows in, refreshes the atmosphere and puts me into action, but our time now is no more than jumping from miscarriage to miscarriage, like a woman who can give no more of herself. The great masses are brutalized by the enormous forces of the beasts and the corruption that dominates everything. How do you blow all this up? I would certainly jump for joy if there were but still a possibility of rebuilding a great Europe, but my hamstrings would go numb before the chance to jump ever came, if this possibility can still be given to a world that does not deserve it. In short, Michelangelo used mud, not to honor clay, but to create beauty and the eternal! Man is made of mud that can serve the worst (today) or the best (if the time of destiny comes again)…
He wrote later that year, “Everything can change abruptly! Our generation, too, had to climb out of the abyss. Living, this means fighting, believing, struggling up until our very last breath! We have what is essential: willingness and faith!”
In a letter to his daughter in 1974 he wrote,
Ordinary life is often drunkenness, monotony, brutish, but it can also be beautiful, and happiness is at your door if you recreate it without ceasing, if you put your mind to it. It is like fireworks; they can be nothing more than stupid firecrackers in a box, or they can also flood the sky with dazzling-colored lights. Even by closing your eyes, bright colors are discovered. Beauty and happiness, in everything, are within our reach, in the contemplation of a blade of grass, or in the mysterious impulse of a gaze. Everything is inside us. We can do everything, but look, it is not necessary to be just a small ant walking to and fro stupidly and uselessly. There are ants, millions of ants, there are also lions, some are lions, and eagles, some are eagles. You need to be a lion or an eagle…
Above all, it is essential to get out of mediocrity, avoid it at all costs, and escape that which will otherwise invade us everywhere and oppress us just like the metastasis of a cancer. In the background, the noblest evasion, that which, in any case, comforts everything, is God. You know, truly, that this was my true great ideal. I wanted to be nothing more than this. This interested me much more than politics…The Church, like everything else, is all mixed up, but the heart of men is always the same, it will always be the same, and conflicts, temptations, endless aberrations will never choke the great inner calling of every being, their thirst for truth, justice, their need for surrender, and above all their hope for eternity. If not, what is living? If it is nothing more than walking in circles for fifty to eighty years inside a pot – or inside a mink coat – what does it serve, if we accumulate a lot of grudges, disappointments, sadness, which, sooner or later, eat away our chest, as if an infestation of rats were gnawing at us under our clothes?
Happiness is the peace of the soul, it is nothing else, it is to have a soul that believes and gives, that is nourished by great inner light that illuminates and comforts by the joy that it brings to those who strive not only in material complications, but in the long, interior shadow of spiritual sterility. In fact, the vast majority of men are very unfortunate, even if they do not appear that way, even if they say they are not, even though they bustle and cover themselves with an outer cover of a joy that almost always is nothing more than a show, an escape…
If you have crossed the artificial barrier of false, creative joy of a world that is nothing more than pretty dust, you will understand that sooner or later it will decompose; you have to be attentive to the essentials. The only thing that does not lie, that never disappoints, is the great inner peace, that secret vocation that transcends everything. To have discovered this vocation, to have allowed it to gush forth (there are so many wonderful springs that never gushed forth), to have made of life, poor in itself (even when the brightest tinsels camouflage it), a wealth always renewed…
This is the story of both the happiness and misfortune of humanity, which otherwise adapts, and winds up diluted in mediocrity, this is the fate of accommodation of the vast majority of people. So, how many mediocre people surround one! They end up being satisfied with, or unconscious of, their semi-mediocrity, becoming accustomed to it, thinking nothing more beyond this vague comfort that pleases everyone equally, like a car (like everyone else!), a television (like everyone else!), a vacation (like everyone else!), and a certain cavalier agreement that makes one become too engulfed in family or in the midst of being crushed by the weight of life….
Degrelle lived to the age of eighty-seven, had a youthful outlook and attitude until the end, and died of heart disease in Spain. His only regret was that the Axis lost the war:
And when we see what there is on the other side, what 30 years of the others’ victory has given, this anarchy in the world, this rout of the white world, this desertion throughout the universe; when we see in our own countries the decay of morals, the fall of the fatherland, the fall of the family, the fall of social order; when we see this appetite for material goods which has replaced the great flame of the ideal which animated us, well then, truly, between the two we chose the right side. The small, miserable Europe of today, of this impoverished Common Market, cannot give happiness to men. Consumer society poisons humanity rather than elevating it.
So, for our part, we dreamed of something great, and we have only one desire, that this spirit be reborn. And with all my might, up to the last moment of my existence, I will fight for this. So that what was our struggle and our martyrdom, will one day be the resurrection.
See here for to watch the video of his speech on this (unable to embed here unfortunately); it is worth watching. And here he is recommending one have faith in life:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Rr6bwQdfr4o?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
Degrelle’s character
Degrelle maintained a firm belief in God, an optimism that things were right about to change in favor of the national socialist vision. “We all carry our cross. It must be carried with a proud smile, so we know we are stronger than suffering and also so that those who wounded us know their arrows reached us in vain…Next to the long voluptuousness of solitary domination, which is human melancholy it flowers without vigor, with muted colors on which the weak breezes float! Melancholy is the disease of the defeated. Joy is the fire of untamed colors, and no mishap can quench or suffocate these fiery colors!” Despite various earthly defeats, he always optimistically retorted, “Yes, but only temporarily defeated.” He maintained this hope through the end, even though things got worse and worse for that vision as the years and decades passed. He kept his door open to everyone, even the anonymous, and he displayed great bravery and courage in standing up for his ideals. Indeed, the national socialist ideal was his core belief and he remained faithful both to it and to Hitler, who he viewed as a genius who had been demonized intentionally by the West during and after the war, until the end.
It was a combination of Degrelle’s eloquence, his intelligence, his courage, his unshaken belief in his ideals, his incredible youthfulness and energy (which he maintained until the end of his life; he slept maybe only three hours a day), his ability to build friendships and alliances, that led both Degrelle himself and many others to think that he had been destined to much greater things, handicapped by being forced into exile and the shattering of his ideal on the world stage. He shared the following on one occasion:
God dwells in me. If, by some miracle, fate was to warn me again, yes, I would still go to the appointment, but to the appointment of the forgers of peoples, of the masters of life, the only ones that interest me….I wanted to fill my soul with greatness, and it is a food that costs dearly. I pay the bill, but the bliss I had following my vocation, and forging a lofty destiny, makes up for the most bitter of bitterness….I see, with a clear vision, that this life has given me a maximum of sorrows and joys. In short, it was worth it. I am happy….We are only defeated when our soul is defeated. Misfortune is nothing more than an accident.
The true sacrifice of exile is not there. What is harder and crueler to me is the feeling that the decades in which I could have done something great have gone away in silence and uselessness. I was carrying tumultuous forces within me, which I can only imperfectly distinguish. They lie inert in the background of my solitude. What I could have achieved for myself, and especially for others, was forbidden to me. Exile buried me alive. Since 1945 I have only survived in hibernation.
This is the drama of my exile: holding against my heart glowing possibilities, suffocated by a layer of lead. I was made to create. My arms have hung limp for decades. Will I be only the end of the epic, whose tools are destroyed for eternity?
In my service of my faith, my life has been a sword. I remained steadfast both in luck and in misfortune.
Degrelle was right when he said “The heroic thing was not dying on the Eastern Front, but fighting, from 1946 onwards, without dying.”
Was Degrelle’s optimism misplaced?
I was drawn to Degrelle’s story because he and I are very different, primarily in how pessimistic I am about both human nature and the future of the world and how optimistic he was. Degrelle lived for an ideal: he stated in an interview in 1954: “Our mission was precisely to guide those people toward us with faith, even if it was bad, to purify it in our struggle. Even today, I believe that the world can be saved when people who are always wholesome are given an ideal.” My perspective is much closer to Ernst Junger’s, who thought as shown in the allegorical On the Marble Cliffs (1939) that Germany was going to be disastrously destroyed in World War 2 and it’s ideals shattered regardless of what one thought of the merits of the movement. In his novel the main character and his brother are invited by two conservative elites to invade the nearby forests of the Head Forrester – the sinister enemy lurking in the woods, who was engaging in charnel house murders akin to a concentration camp or gulag – and kill him, and they decline. They saw the two conservative elites as fighting foolishly in vain against something that could not be stopped, while the two conservative elites saw the main character and his brother as weak-willed cowards. The two conservative elites went forward with their plan anyway and die for it. Who was right? On what basis is one to know? Would there have been a different outcome if the protagonist and his brother had participated, or would they have been killed uselessly as well?
This is why Guido Preparata’s narrative in his amazing Conjuring Hitler, covered previously here (and whose brief, inconsequential references to Degrelle’s writings contributed to his unwarranted academic lynching at the University of Washington, as he recounts in this afterward to his book), is so important: it answers so many strange questions about the war that are otherwise unsolvable, questions that must be answered to understand the war and the world’s setup:
If it is true that the British stewards intrigued at Versailles to conjure a reactionary movement that would feed on radicalism and be prone to seek war in the East; if it is true that the Anglo-Americans traded heavily with and offered financial support to the Nazis, continuously and deliberately from the Dawes loans of 1924 to the conspicuous credits via the Bank of International Settlements in Basle of late 1944; if it is true that the encounter in Cologne in von Schröder’s mansion was the decisive factor behind Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor; if it true that such financial support was accorded to make Nazism an enemy target so strong as to elicit in war a devastating response – retribution that would make the Allied victory clear-cut and definitive; if it is true that appeasement was a travesty since 1931; if it is true that Churchill refused deceitfully to open a western front for three years, during which the expectation was that the Germans would find themselves so hopelessly mired in the Russian bog as to make the British closing onslaught from the West as painless as possible; and if it is true that Hess brought with him to Britain plans for evacuating the Jews to the island of Madagascar, for such was the last policy pursued by the Germans before adopting the Final Solution – a plan that clearly was given no sequitor; if all the foregoing is true, then it is just to lay direct responsibility for incubating Nazism and planning World War II, and indirect responsibility for the Holocaust of the Jews, at the door of the Anglo-American establishment.
This is not to argue that Hitler was an intentional puppet; rather, the British and Jewish international financial interests set up the conditions for a revanchist German war machine that would make war in the East in order to then be obliterated and destroyed; the massacre of Germans within the Polish corridor was the spring on the trap, per Good Citizen, much like Russia was trapped by the U.S.’s control over Ukraine (which was butchering Russian-leaning civilians in the Donbass for a decade, killing 10,000). Indeed, Hjalmar Schacht, the head of Germany’s central bank, fed highly confidential German industrial figures to Montagu Norman, his boss and the head of the British central bank, which gave Norman the confidence necessary to push forward with the war. What became the Allies out-produced the Axis in every industrial category and availability of personnel by a 4:1 to 10:1 ratio, Norman knew this, and in industrial wars production is the deciding factor, not organizational quality, quality of soldiers or their morale levels, of which the Germans were far superior.4 Germany, set up unknowingly to be destroyed ahead of time, was sacrificed on the alter for worldwide global control and power…
Additionally, a key insight into understanding this reality is that a society’s core beliefs will intensify over time as a ratchet effect, as previously discussed here. In World War 2 Hitler attempted a transvaluation of values away from the West’s core values of egalitarianism to one of inegalitarianism. When his attempt failed, the egalitarianism at the heart of Christianity doubled down and intensified in a very intense way. This is why the Allies were so ruthless in murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians during the war, executing thousands of Nazis after the war, throwing their families into prison including children, then forcing a radical de-Nazification agenda after the war (Morgenthau had wanted to genocide Germany entirely, a plan that was only stopped at the last second) – the West’s core values had been challenged, unlike, say, fighting a Vietnam or Korea war or Afghanistan war or whatever. Any war fought over a society’s core values is going to be a fight to the death. The central bank owners could not have pursued war in this brutal fashion without the core values of society being so radically challenged.
After the war Degrelle thought that a revolution could take place at any moment and had baited breath for decades after the war. But there would be no round two, at least not in his lifetime; he held his breath in vain. Instead, we have seen ever-increasing ratcheting egalitarianism until the nightmare of today. Before he died in 1994 Degrelle had put his faith in a strong-man arising in Russia to save Europe, but even there he was wrong; post-Soviet Russia was and is just as controlled by our elites as Soviet Russia was; Putin remains a pathetic puppet controlled by the international financial elite! Poor guy, he did not understand the level and degree of behind the scenes manipulations…
To compound this issue further, I wrote previously how the Muslim sufi philosopher Rene Guenon saw the world as increasingly solidifying into materialism: that we were in the Kali Yuga, the last phase of the world which would continuously get worse – more materialistic, less spiritual, less just – before it ends and the cycle begins anew. This is why Nazi Savitri Devi, who believed that we were in the Kali Yuga, called Hitler the “man against time” in her book The Lightning and the Sun (which I didn’t think was well written) – in other words, he was striving against the intensification of the cycle which made him a great man to her even if he was doomed to failure (she originally thought he would be the reincarnation of Vishnu, meant to end the cycle and start a new one, but she had to reconsider after Germany failed).
I would also note that Degrelle, as a passionate and dedicated Catholic who spent much time with Hitler, believed that Hitler was at least nominally pro-Christian, even if some other top Nazis like Himmler were anti-Christian and pro-pagan. However, I think this perspective may be wrong: Hitler’s Table Talks, to the extent they were real (and the scholarly consensus is that they were probably real even if some of the quotes may have been taken out of context) showed that Hitler eventually wanted to mothball Christianity as an outcrop of Jewish decadence and replace it with nature worship and pantheism. As such, Degrelle was possibly fighting for the very forces that, if they had won, would have undermined his Catholic faith.
So let’s put this critique together. If one combines Preparata’s thesis with Guenon/Devi’s beliefs about the Kali Yuga, and one sees how the world has indeed developed since World War 2 – where Western civilization has basically ended, dead by international financial predation and endless swarms of migrants – then it seems clear that Degrelle’s boundless optimism – which did falter a bit in old age as he came to see Europe as increasingly irredemable5 and the arrival of neoliberal feudalism6 – was false. Not intrinsically false, necessarily, but false in terms of the way power works and the setup of the world; the end of World War 2 was preordained before it began, the Germans never had a significant chance for victory (Russia had moved it’s factories beyond the Urals before the war began, Germany was never close to developing nuclear weapons, etc.). Hitler, despite his complaints arguing about Jewish international control and the Bolsheviks did not seem to really understand what he was up against; he remained pro-British through much of the war, he was surprised at how deeply the international financiers were willing to double down, and even in April 1945, as relayed by David Irving in Hitler’s War, he expressed feverish hope after FDR died on April 12 that the Americans and British would turn around and ally with him at the last second, to save him much like Hitler’s hero Frederick the Great was saved, in order to stop the Soviet menace – but the Soviets were totally controlled by the same international financiers that controlled Britain and America! Degrelle had always thought that the communists were the real threat, but the communism was a front, a fake; it was just an ideology that allowed the international financiers to genocide and remake the Russian population.If Hitler had really understood this, I think his approach on the Eastern Front would have been very different; initially the Germans were extremely harsh with the Eastern European populations, seeing them as sub-humans to be exploited and exterminated to make room for lebensraum instead of to be liberated as allies. Degrelle did not see them this way, and he noted that the German position did change over time (but too little too late):
Personally, I have always vigorously defended the Russians and, finally, succeeded in convincing Hitler that the Germans should live with the Russians as partners and not as conquerers, but before achieving any such collaboration, the issue of eliminating communism was a priority.
But does that mean that Degrelle’s perspective was wrong? Perhaps he’s right that it was proper to fight for his ideal even if he was destined to failure; he was being true to himself, and the courage and dedication he showed to his ideals was admirable. I think it would be hard not to admire his positive attributes in real life. As Chesterton once wrote, it is the irrational optimists that ultimately succeed:
No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.
Degrelle’s optimism was also reflected in his astrological chart. His natal sun sign degree is described (quite accurately) as follows:
23-24 deg Gemini (Carelli interpretation)
Symbol: A merry fellowship.
A demonstrative and jovial fellow whom all will like. The native would seem unable to live alone, as the frankness with which he declares his friendship, the selfless pleasure he feels in the company of his comrades, and the proof of true friendship he can give when needed, will win him the largest possible number of hearts. Few people will enjoy so many and so sincere affections.
The native’s mind might turn to deep scientific research. He is in love with fine arts and music but his inborn innermost gift is the art of persuasion.
Degrelle’s astrological chart emphasizes his courage, ups-and-downs in life, fame, adventurous spirit, ambition: “One believes that one is entrusted with a special mission and must follow the path which has been drawn by a mysterious hand” (Saturn), “Matters of intellectual and spiritual nature are of major importance in one’s solitary works” (Uranus). So much of a person’s personality is written in the stars…
Regardless of whether irrational optimism may sometimes succeed, Degrelle did not succeed in his lifetime. His understanding of the issues was too narrow and limited; the truth is that our elites have grown in power over time: first with the privately owned Bank of England (1694), destroying Napoleon, and overthrowing the Tsar and instituting the privately owned Federal Reserve in 1913. Perhaps it goes back much further than that, capturing the Catholic Church, pushing Protestantism, or to the beginning of Christianity itself (as a Jewish plot to conquer Rome after the destruction of the Second Temple, as Nietzsche argued), or long before. I have argued that this world is likely controlled by a malevolent Demiurgic spirit that seeks to destroy the God-souls within each of us.
With my belief, Junger’s concept of the anarch is more appealing to me – to be an observer of human nature, to study it and the various ideologies that come and go ephemerally without being attached to any of them. What is important is one’s individuation process and connection to the Divine, to further our own spiritual development and to help others that we know with theirs.
Another problem was that the Nazis were as group-centered and required conformity as much as the Soviets and the brainwashed Americans/British. Governmental and media messaging that so easily sways people into believing propaganda is one of the fundamental problems of this reality, and that problem exists regardless of ideology. Degrelle noted this aspect in his criticism of hyper-capitalism:
By dint of cunning, intelligence, and passion for the new, television has become a real wonder. The result: the masses are stuck in front of their television screen for three and a half hours a day. They end up being completely confused, at the mercy of whatever viper’s tongue or whatever garbage happens to spew forth…These passive viewers do not think any more, guided not by ideas but by repeated images, often amazing, and almost always destructive to the personality.
Three minutes of television have a thousand times more impact than a hundred objective studies by scholars or specialists…
Television is the great poison of the century. It is enough that some of its broadcasters are installed in key positions by well-placed political personalities or by money manipulators, juggling the millions that regulate the life of television channels. These donors of illusions make opinion, dominate opinion, confuse opinion, and by what right? What remains of “democracy” at the end of such gawking by the caged multitudes?
But the Nazis utilized the same tactics for their control! Hitler bragged about how the white male masses ate up official propaganda even when it contradicting itself the moment before in his Table Talk:
We have frequently found ourselves compelled to reverse the engine and to change, in the course of a couple of days, the whole trend of imparted news, sometimes with a complete volte-face. Such agility would have been quite impossible, if we had not had firmly in our grasp that extraordinary instrument of power which we call the press—and known how to make use of it.
A year before, when the Russo-German Pact was signed, we had the task of converting to a completely reverse opinion those whom we had originally made into fanatical opponents of Russia—a maneuver that must have appeared to be a rare old muddle to the older National Socialists. Fortunately, the spirit of Party solidarity held firm, and our sudden about-turn was accepted by all without misgiving. Then, on 22nd June 1941, again: “About turn!” Out shot the order one fine morning without the slightest warning! Success in an operation of this nature can only be achieved if you possess the press and know how to make tactical use of it.
When you regard the role of the press from this angle, you will realize at once that the profession of the journalist now is very different from that of the journalist of yore. There was, indeed, a time when the profession of journalism was one without real importance, for rarely had the individual journalist any opportunity to give proof of personal character. Today, the journalist knows that he is no mere scribbler, but a man with the sacred mission of defending the highest interests of the State. This evolution has been in progress throughout the years following our taking power, and today the journalist is conscious of his responsibilities, and his profession appears to him in a new light.
In other words, this blind trust of authority figures is a universal problem. It remains one of the, if not the primary, problems plaguing society today. It stems from millions of years of hunter-gatherer evolution where failure to listen to the tribe’s leader meant expulsion or death, but in this modern environment where the leaders are not tied to the outcome of the tribe the masses will have to wisen up or be destroyed.
Conclusion
I hope you’ve enjoyed this discussion about Leon Degrelle’s life. His life is the stuff made of historical epics and poems, a spirit unconquered – victi invitis victuri – but more importantly, it demonstrates one of the multiple ways one can respond when one’s ideal and worldview is destroyed, which is endlessly fascinating. The death of an ideal isn’t limited to World War 2 and the West, of course – we can see it with the death of ancient civilizations like the Mayans or the Chinese or the Native Americans or the Japanese. I will continue to explore this topic of the challenges to belief, how it is updated or destroyed and how people react to it, in different contexts and with different responses in future posts.
Thanks for reading.
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1 He wrote in 1991:
The modern world is threatened with death by two monsters: on the one hand, communism, invalidated from the very first moment by the economic aberration of Marxism; on the other hand, hyper-capitalism, moving man into social selfishness, unlimited speculation, immorality of money, and becoming the sole guide of human destiny. Sweeping out one serves no purpose if the other is not swept out as well, instead of turning one of them into the only global arbiter, as it is at the moment. It would be necessary to replace these two heresies against nature with a liberating system that would bring social justice to humanity, based mainly on a balanced collaboration of the classes, the dignity of work, and respect for the human being, owner of the material.
2 The highlights that stood out to me was his meeting with Hitler, his movie-worthy escape at the end of the war to Spain, his brief references to how badly the Germans treated the invaded Soviet Union populations initially which was later partially reversed, and how the Soviet troop surrenders – which were numerous in the early stages of the war – completely stopped when the Americans landed in Morocco and Algeria. His account of the eastern front soldiers fighting until the end, knowing they would lose, against overwhelming enemy military strength was interesting.
3 Interestingly Alberto Benasuly of the ADL stated in 1990: “The European Community and, of course, Spain, which occupies the complicated southern border, is inevitably going to assist with in the coming decades, the peaceful or impetuous invasion of Africans, asians, South Americans, and Eastern Europeans.” In 1994 Benasuly created a Commission of Jewish Organizations of Spain composed of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain, the B’nai B’rith of Spain, and the ADL in order to affect the proposals of Spanish parliamentary groups.
4 Trevor N. Dupuy, a noted American military analyst, US Army Colonel, and author of numerous books and articles, studied the comparative performance of the soldiers of World War II. On average, he concluded, 100 German soldiers were the equivalent of 120 American, British or French soldiers, or 200 Soviet soldiers. “On a man for man basis,” Dupuy wrote, “German ground soldiers consistently inflicted casualties at about a 50 percent higher rate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troops under all circumstances [emphasis in original]. This was true when they were attacking and when they were defending, when they had a local numerical superiority and when, as was usually the case, they were outnumbered, when they had air superiority and when they did not, when they won and when they lost.” Many other noted historians agreed with this assessment.
5 In a 1985 interview he stated: “Now more than ever, strong men, that is, men who have Europe’s best interests at heart, will be needed, given that the people of Europe are going to be invaded by immigrant peoples who are foreign to her civilization and genius. In this regard, Jean Raspail’s book, The Camp of Saints, seems to me prophetic. It is urgent for people who are tragically sleeping to wake up. History has shown, countless times, that rejection of combat in a just cause leads to disappearance.”
Then in a 1992 interview, he stated:
I always believe that salvation can come if the Russians bring it. I believe that Europe no longer has sufficient strength to do it. It is a broken continent. In fifty years of democracy, since 1945, its results have been catastrophic. Nothing has changed for the better and everything has changed for the worse. These are countries that are all ruined. These are countries with tremendous racial corruption, countries that have lost all the old virtues that made up Europe. Europe is a hyper-capitalist territory without hyper-capitalism. They have no money, but they have the vices that American hyper-capitalism has given to Europe. The Russian people have been left as a fairly healthy people who can recover and, as I have said from the beginning, it is always to be hoped that out of their three hundred million people someone will come who can raise up the Russian people and give decisive support to Europeans who still seek the resurrection of a great ideal….
The enemy right now is the enemy of all time: hyper-capitalism. For us, there were two great enemies in the world: Marxism, which throws classes against each other, inevitably ruining the entire economy and leading people to ruin; and hyper-capitalism, which turns every man into a machine and makes him a pawn placed on the American board, instruments of the Americans….American capitalism is the great enemy, but an enemy as weak as communism. Just as communism fell once because it was a false doctrine, hyper-capitalism can sink. It is completely ruined. It has the highest deficit in the world. It has many races mixed together who hate each other and has a materialism that eliminates all spiritual life. This is how they will bring themselves down. This is necessary because, otherwise, the Pacific world will become the masters of the next century.
6 As he wrote in 1992,
Humanity believes itself free, but where is it? Hyper-capitalism dominates society. This is the new form of slavery, a slavery in which the gold barely camouflages the cruelty. The poor man, however poor he may have been in the past, could still get a morsel; when having next to nothing was still sufficient. Today, the relentless rigor of modern life, with its overconsumption and its unceasingly increased expenses, dominates or strangles the penniless; the man who started out honest ends up being considered a fool. It is the evilest, the most calculating, the least scrupulous that counts. If someone lacks money, he feely consents, beyond his means, with their sword at his throat, to being tyrannized by creditors. Living on credit has become, for the nine out of the lured by it, a false passport to the trap of wealth, believing that once they get it, they can keep taking on limitless debt.
A young man does not understand that, before, one could live in another way.
Modern life, of course, is theoretically easier than yesterday, but only for some. It throws entire undeveloped countries into torment. The truth is that most men and women, even if they work hard, are only rich in terms of money that is eclipsed, that slips between their fingers and disappears like water in the sand….
