The Fascist Boobs
Die Verlorene Legion.
by Leon Degrelle.
Stuttgart, Veritas Verlag. 509 pp.

The appearance of the memoirs (translated into German from a still unpublished French original) of Leon Degrelle, leader of the pre-war fascist Rexist movement in Belgium and commander of the Walloon Legion that fought by the side of the Nazis on the Eastern front, focuses attention on the international nature of Hitlerism. How was it that Nazi fascism, an ideology based on exaggerated nationalism—nay, on Pan-Germanism—could be exported to so many other countries? Why, in spite of their professed super-patriotism, were Quislings so ready to betray their own countries at Hitler’s behest?

The answer given by Degrelle to explain his own case has to be pieced together by the reader. Endless sanguinary details of infantry fighting, repetitious descriptions of heroic Walloons killing and being killed by Red soldiers, take up most of the 509 pages. Even as military history, these battle scenes contribute very little to our knowledge of what happened in Russia between 1941 and 1944. The author is not interested in over-all strategic considerations—or professes not to be—and deals almost exclusively with what happened before his eyes in his own small sector. Undoubtedly a brave soldier, he fought for a cause which ten out of eleven of his countrymen considered high treason; but he retracts nothing and excuses himself only indirectly. In a few poorly written paragraphs, he merely reiterates his conviction that he fought for “European civilization” against “Asiatic hordes.” To him, apparently, Hitler represented Europe. And for this “Europe” three thousand of the six thousand Belgians Degrelle recruited into his legion gave their lives.

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What Degrelle leaves unsaid is infinitely more significant than what he says. A misfit in civilian society, he found his vocation in slaughter. The Nazi glorification of militarism and complete rejection of the values of ordinary civilized society promised fulfillment of secret yearnings. Nazism was essentially a puerile faith, and Degrelle had never fully outgrown his adolescence.

For Degrelle, Hitlerism was no mere matter of party affiliation or political program, but gave meaning to an otherwise barren life and justification for a constitutional inability to make value judgments. It did not matter to Degrelle that Hitler’s agents had long backed the Flemings—who, speaking a Germanic tongue, were considered “racial brothers”—against the Walloons in a thinly disguised effort to destroy the Belgian state. His disregard of this is of a piece with his incapacity to resent Hitler’s irresponsible military decisions, which the Walloon Legion paid for in blood. If Degrelle were to put it to himself this way he would have to recognize that the blood of the men he recruited and led into hopeless battles rested on his head too.

Though Degrelle first won notice as a political leader, he found out—like every “natural-born” fascist—that he was not interested fundamentally in political problems or political solutions. This is why fascism’s disastrous inability to solve anything, even for fascists themselves, does not compromise it in his own eyes. True, having burned his bridges behind him, having led several thousand fellow Belgians to wanton deaths in a cause not their own, he cannot admit to himself or the world that he was misled. But also, he does not really feel that Hitler misled him, or that the Nazi leadership is to be blamed for the incompetence and irresponsibility, political, military, and otherwise, by which it brought on its own—and Degrelle’s—defeat.

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This is important to grasp in trying to understand the mentality of the people who form the “cadres” of fascism. At bottom they are often unpolitical beings—in politics, but not of it, lacking any sense of what politics can and can’t do, in any case asking of it not practical achievements, but personal satisfaction: the chance to shine in public, self-importance, conspicuous activity. But these are to be got in truly serious politics only as by-products, not as ends in themselves. And those who seek them as ends in themselves will, if they persist and if circumstances are propitious, win them perhaps for a moment—but only for a moment; the larger the victory the greater the likelihood of the final catastrophe.

This little captain, Degrelle, this nonentity of perverted political ambition now decaying in Spanish exile (to which he escaped the day the war ended), makes the point as well as any of the larger luminaries of fascism. They paid for their misuse of politics and their irresponsibility with death; but before they died they succeeded in making it clear that, like Degrelle, they were boobs—vicious, murderous, and more important boobs, but boobs nonetheless. And, because they were boobs, more fatal in the end to their followers than to their enemies.

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