Léon Joseph Marie Ignace Degrelle (; 15 June 1906 – 31 March 1994) was a Belgian Walloon politician and Nazi collaborator. He rose to prominence in Belgium in the 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 and fought in the Walloon Legion on the Eastern Front. After the collapse of the Nazi regime, Degrelle escaped and went into exile in Francoist Spain, where he remained a prominent figure in neo-Nazi politics.
Degrelle was raised Roman Catholic and during his years at university became involved in politics through journalism. In the early 1930s, he took control of a Catholic publishing house that morphed under his leadership 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 unit of the German Army and, after 1943, the Waffen-SS. His role in the combat at the Cherkassy pocket in 1944 and subsequent military decorations turned him into a model for foreign collaborators.
Following the liberation of Belgium in late 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 help of the Spanish government he went into hiding from Belgian authorities in August 1946. In the 1960s, Degrelle returned 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.
Early life Léon Degrelle was born on 15 June 1906 in Bouillon, in the Belgian province of Luxembourg, and baptized five days later as Léon Joseph Marie Ignace Degrelle. He was the fifth child of Marie Boever and .
Édouard, who came from the French Ardennes, later claimed that he had emigrated to Belgium as a result of the introduction of secularism in France. He made a career as a brewer and became a naturalized citizen before World War I. He was elected to the provincial council of Luxembourg for the first time in 1904 and became a respected conservative politician as a member of the Catholic Party. Marie came from a local bourgeois family whose father had been involved in the founding of the newspaper L'Avenir du Luxembourg.
The Degrelle family was highly religious; as a child, Léon attended Mass every day and attended a preschool run by the Sisters of Christian Doctrine of Nancy. He completed secondary schooling at the Institut Saint-Pierre de Bouillon. From there, he enrolled at the Collège Notre-Dame de la Paix, in Namur, where he read and subscribed to the ideas of Léon Bloy, Charles Péguy, Léon Daudet, and especially Charles Maurras. Degrelle next enrolled at the Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix in Namur to study law. There, however, he became active in clericalist political activism to the detriment of his studies, which he abandoned in 1925 after failing his exams that year.
Journalistic career, 1927–1935 Shortly after his failure at Namur, Degrelle was admitted into the prestigious Catholic University of Leuven, which awarded him a diploma of candidacy in philosophy and literature on 27 July 1927. That year, Degrelle joined (Action catholique de la jeunesse belge, ACJB), a militant clerical youth organization founded by the priest Louis Picard, whom Degrelle had met while studying in Namur. Again preoccupied with activism and reading, Degrelle was a poor student but encountered some professional success as the director of the student newspaper L'Avant-Garde. At this time, Degrelle also began a successful career as a writer and published several books from 1927 to 1930.
Impressed by Degrelle, Picard encouraged him to become involved in journalism within the ACJB from 1927. The next year, Degrelle began writing pro-monarchy, clericalist pamphlets whose wide circulation brought Degrelle to the attention of Abbé Norbert Wallez, another Catholic priest and an admirer of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, who worked as a newspaper director. Degrelle accepted an offer from Wallez to become an editor at his newspaper Le XXe Siècle. In 1929, with Wallez's support, Degrelle traveled to Mexico to report on the Cristero War, a rebellion of Mexican Catholics against the incumbent anti-clerical government. On returning to Belgium, Degrelle dropped out of Leuven after failing to attend the exams for his doctorat de troisième cycle.
In October 1930, Degrelle was asked by the ACJB to take over the management of Christus Rex, a small Catholic publishing house named after the popular youth cult of Christ the King. He accepted, staffed it with young radical Catholic students, started publishing mass-circulation magazines, and, having achieved success with these magazines, expanded its catalog with new periodicals over the next three years. In the same period, he popularized a pair of Marian apparitions at Banneux and Beauraing. He produced leaflets and posters for the Catholic Party ahead of the 1932 election, earning Christus Rex and Degrelle many conservative allies. From January 1931, with Picard's support as chair of the board of directors, Degrelle and his father purchased controlling stakes in the business. Léon assumed total control of Christus Rex by 1933 and used the platform to attack the leadership of the Catholic Party.
After the 1932 election, Degrelle began to refer to Christus Rex as a nationalistic, pro-clerical political movement, which alienated the officially apolitical ACJB. In 1933, the Catholic Party cut its ties with Degrelle, as did the ACJB the following year. To avoid insolvency, Degrelle downsized Christus Rexs staff and obeyed a command from the Bishop of Tournai to cancel a rally in Charleroi to avoid further clashes with the Catholic establishment. Over the interwar years, however, Belgian Catholic politics had split between that Catholic establishment and an authoritarian and radically clerical faction of urban, middle class students who viewed the Catholic Party as being weak and complacent. By 1936, Degrelle, who proved to be a charismatic speaker, had become highly influential amongst the latter group.
Political activism and Rex, 1935–1940
In early 1935, Degrelle morphed Christus Rex into the Rexist Party (Rex), an authoritarian, populist, and strongly clerical faction of francophone Catholic student radicals such as José Streel, Jean Denis, and . 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 reform 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 any 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.
Rex, which ran on a populist, middle-class, and anti-democratic platform that united several right-wing elements such 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 form of protest votes. Degrelle sought to capitalize on Rex's victory by establishing a party bureaucracy and holding rallies. He also continued to attack the "rotten ones" (pourris) whom he alleged dominated Belgium's political and economic establishment. 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 formation 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 image 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 support 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.
War and German occupation, 1940–1945
At the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Belgium declared its neutrality, which Rex vociferously supported. Degrelle additionally blamed the war on Britain, France, and "the occult forces of Freemasonry and the Jewish finance", precipitating a further decay of Rex's membership and reputation. In January 1940, Degrelle secretly and unsuccessfully requested German funding for a new, pro-neutrality newspaper. Amid the German invasion of Belgium on 10 May 1940, Degrelle was detained by the Belgian government, as were other Rexist leaders not enlisted in the Belgian Army such as Victor Matthys and Serge Doring.