Léon Degrelle and the Nazis who landed on La Concha Beach the day after the surrender of the Reich
"Ambitious, vain, and audacious," is how Léon Degrelle is described in the pages of the dramatis personae of The Last Flight by Fernando Castillo (Renacimiento). Later, in person, Castillo expands on his definition: "He was tall, handsome, and friendly, and he was cultured, or at least well-read. He was also a storyteller, and his memoirs are so full of lies that there are moments when he makes you laugh," the author tells EL MUNDO. "He was a caricruz , one of those characters who risked everything every time and always got an extra life." "He was a swindler; he went bankrupt a hundred times and always found someone to save him, someone to saddle his debts on." "I don't think he was born to be a Nazi; for many years he was a Christian conservative, more or less a Walloon nationalist... But he became an outright fascist and never regretted it. He wasn't like Jean-Marie Le Pen , who tried to modernize the meaning of the word fascist. Degrelle talked about Hitler and the SS, he denied the Holocaust... He had no complexes." "He was a womanizer. When he wrote in his memoirs about his desperate flight through Denmark and Norway, he devoted paragraphs and paragraphs to talking about how much he liked Scandinavian women." "He was a sinister man. And by sinister I don't mean fascist, I mean something more."
Léon Degrelle is one of the central characters in The Last Flight , a book that is, in reality, a section of Castillo's obsessive and fascinating oeuvre. From Night and Fog in Occupied Paris and The Strange Rearguard to Modiano's Paris and The Years of Madridgrad , the author has written half a dozen collage books, made up of shadowy characters who move and connect in Madrid during the Civil War and in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Fascist poets, Stalinist playwrights, antiques dealers, Belgian actresses, Jewish lovers, thugs serving the Gestapo, war pilots who had fought for White Russia, champions at Roland Garros, passionaries and Pétaines ... Fanatics and opportunists, suicides and survivors . In The Last Flight , this cast reappears at their worst: fleeing from the wars they had lost. Thus, Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, Palmiro Togliatti and dozens of Spanish republicans are portrayed in Castillo's book boarding the Douglas DC2 and Dragon Rapide that would take them from the runways of Albacete, Murcia and Alicante to Oran and Toulouse, just as Louis-Férdinand Céline , Corinne Luchaire, Pierre Laval and the elites of the French Collabo appear flying in Junkers and Heinkel planes from France to Germany and from Germany to Spain when the Thousand-Year Reich was collapsing around them.
None of these flights was as unusual as that of Léon Degrelle, who landed in the waters of La Concha Bay at six in the morning on May 7, 1945, one week after Adolf Hitler's suicide and one day after Germany's surrender. 80 years ago now. The plane was a Heinkel 111 H-23, a variation of a bomber dedicated to transporting paratroopers, and it had the Balkenkreuz, the cross of the German armies, painted on its fuselage. Its roar upon landing woke the entire city. A rumor spread in San Sebastián that Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer were flying it, but the identity of the crew soon became known: Albert Duhringer , pilot; Benno Epner , his adjutant; Gerhard Stride , mechanic; Georg Kubel , telegraph operator; Robert du Welz , SS captain; and Léon Degrelle, the general of the Walloon Division, the favorite son of the Second Reich, the man Hitler said embodied the son he never had. Well, that's what Degrelle said Hitler said, but Fernando Castillo suspects it was just one of his fantasies.
How did Degrelle end up in San Sebastián? His escape began in June 1944, the last time he was in Brussels, his hometown, where he buried his brother Edouard, a pharmacist killed in a Resistance attack . In the following months, Degrelle was on the Eastern Front with the Walloon Division and in the retreating Axis territories: Baden Baden and Sigmaringen (the refuges of French collaborationists after the liberation of Paris), Milan, Berlin... On April 20, in the territory that is now northern Poland, he gathered his troops, an already depleted group of French-speaking Belgian volunteers who, since June 1943, had been considered Waffen-SS. He told them that the war was lost for the Axis, gave the soldiers false civilian papers, and recommended that they pose as Nazi forced laborers. Good luck.
Degrelle and his assistant, Robert du Welz, passed through Lübeck and Kiel, German Baltic ports. On the night of Hitler's suicide, May 2, they jumped to Copenhagen. "When many of his comrades in arms committed suicide, Degrelle had the survival instinct to attempt one more impossible jump," Castillo recounts. Denmark had been, during the war, a rare case of occupation, relatively friendly. The Jews of Copenhagen had not been sent to extermination camps, the cities had not been bombed, and Degrelle thought that Christian X 's kingdom could become a northern Switzerland. However, the British entered Denmark on May 5, and the Belgian Nazi had to escape at the last minute, aboard a minesweeper, to Oslo.
In Norway, there remained 300,000 German troops who would not receive the order to surrender until the 7th and who maintained a certain control over Oslo. They were led by a particularly hated Gauleiter , Josef Terboven , and supported by a hardline collaborationist Prime Minister, Vidkun Quisling , who was even more ferocious than Degrelle. Together, they sheltered the Belgian SS general for two days and revealed to him that a Heinkel 111 H-23 and its crew were ready for their final escape at Gardermoen airfield , today's Oslo Airport.
"Degrelle later wrote that this was the plane Albert Speer had at his disposal, but that's another one of his lies," Castillo says. "Speer traveled in a Focke Wulf, much more modern and comfortable than the Heinkel. The incredible thing, however, is that Degrelle achieved the impossible and escaped, something that neither Quisling nor Terboven managed... Do you know which countries most harshly repressed the collaborators after the war? Belgium and Norway."
The Heinkel 111 H-23 is credited with a range of 2,300 kilometers, and the closest point in Spain to Oslo is 2,200 kilometers away. However, pilot Duhringer couldn't fly in a straight line. The Heinkel had to navigate by touch, spotting lights, guessing that some had to be those of Hamburg and others those of Bordeaux. Degrelle wrote in his memoirs that he flew over Paris and saw the lights of his enemies' cars and celebrations, but Castillo believes that was another fantasy. Before the night was out, the plane ran out of fuel while flying over Biarritz, so Duhringer glided until he had flown across the border and made an unprecedented ditching in the Bay of San Sebastián. Had that operation taken place in the waters off Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Degrelle would have been handed over by France to the Belgian resistance fighters, who would undoubtedly have executed him.
What did Léon Degrelle find in San Sebastián? First, a few broken bones that took him to the General Mola Military Hospital, in the Egia neighborhood. He was in uniform. "The rest of the crew came out unscathed," Castillo says. During his convalescence, Degrelle's Spanish friends, led by José María Finat y Escrivá de Romaní , Count of Mayalde and future mayor of Madrid, took him away in a car and hid him. "No one did anything like that in Spain in those years without the regime's permission," Castillo explains. But the dictatorship played dumb. When Belgium demanded the extradition of its most hated son, Spain said it didn't know where he was. "And then, unofficially, it offered him as a pledge: we'll give you Degrelle, but you help us normalize our situation in Europe and forget our past friendship with the Reich," Castillo says. Belgium took this badly and recalled its ambassador.
It didn't matter. Degrelle survived the years 1946 and 1947 as best he could, those in which Franco's regime was at its most fragile, and afterward, he did what he knew best: seduce, entangle, and deceive, enrich himself, ruin himself, and enrich himself again, showing off and recounting his adventures to win over a renewed public starting in the 1970s , when the new fascism entered the European political landscape. He had a white SS general's uniform made, as if he were living in a play. And his companions on the flight from Oslo to San Sebastián? The Germans returned home. They were young and had no crimes to answer for. Robert du Welz passed through Miranda de Ebro and Zurbano Street in Madrid and ended up in Lora del Río , in Seville, where he led a discreet life. Degrelle also went to live in the same region, in the town of Constantina, where he built a palace called La Carlina and filled it with looted archaeological treasures. Du Welz eventually broke off relations with his boss, probably over a financial issue. Degrelle died in Málaga in 1994. So he lived 18 years in democracy and never fared badly.
elmundo
