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Charlemagne's Crusaders: French Collaboration in Arms, 1941-1945 J. G. Shields French Cultural Studies 2007; 18; 83 DOI: 10.1177/0957155807073317

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French Cultural Studies

Charlemagne’s Crusaders French Collaboration in Arms, 1941–1945

J. G. SHIELDS University of Warwick

Military collaboration is one of the least acknowledged aspects of France under the Occupation. Yet from summer 1941 France raised a number of fighting units for Hitler’s armies, each with its distinctive mission and each drawing the Vichy regime deeper into collaboration with Nazi Germany. This article discusses that process and its diverse implications. It shows how the Paris collaborationists used military engagement to pressure the Vichy government into more activist collaboration and explores the divergent perspectives in which this was viewed from Berlin, Paris and Vichy; it considers the mobilising myths, motivations and misapprehensions behind military collaboration; and it identifies some of the anomalies of that collaboration, with its reconceptualising of France and Other, friend and foe, belonging and alienation. Those French ‘patriots’ who fought in German uniform would become effective exiles from a homeland they departed to ‘defend’ only to see it ‘liberated’ by their ‘enemies’. Exposing the divisions and the delusions underlying military collaboration, the article sheds light on conflicting political calculations and shifting allegiances in occupied France.

Keywords: Bolshevism, collaboration/collaborationism, France, Germany, military, Occupation, Vichy government, Waffen-SS, Wehrmacht

At 3.15 a.m. on Sunday 22 June 1941, the first artillery barrages announced the invasion by German armed forces of the Soviet Union. The ‘European crusade against Bolshevism’ code-named Operation Barbarossa was underway. A week later, having cleared its intentions with Berlin, the French government at Vichy severed diplomatic relations with Moscow.

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At the same time, approval was sought from the German authorities by leading collaborationists in occupied Paris to form a French volunteer legion to participate in the military effort on the new Eastern Front. With approval secured, the creation in July 1941 of the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchevisme (LVF) marked the start of a Franco- German military collaboration that would evolve over the next four years and culminate by stages – Légion Tricolore, Phalange Africaine, Sturmbrigade Frankreich – in the formation and deployment of the French Waffen-SS Charlemagne Division. Though they enlisted relatively few recruits, the LVF and subsequent formations drew France deeper into the spiral of collaboration initiated in October 1940 by the agreement between Hitler and Marshal Philippe Pétain as French head of state. In their propaganda, their statutes and the personal testimony of some who fought in them, these units yielded telling insights into the motivations of those in France most committed to collaboration with Nazi Germany. They also brought into focus the tensions between the ‘collaboration’ born of political expedience at Vichy and the ‘collaborationism’ promoted from ideological conviction by more radical elements mainly in Paris. Taking France well beyond the terms of the armistice agreement of June 1940, military collaboration exacerbated the fundamental problem with which the Vichy government grappled throughout the Occupation: that of retaining sovereign authority over a France which it controlled only insofar as the Germans permitted. Though it warrants barely a mention in most studies of the Vichy regime, the French provision of fighting units for Germany tells us much about the intensification of collaboration, the dynamics of power in occupied France, and the gulf of perception underlying relations between Berlin, Paris and Vichy. At another, more global level, military collaboration offers an intrigu- ing subject of analysis. It rested on particular conceptions of national, racial and cultural identity, mediated through the historically resonant notion of an East/West clash of ‘civilisation’; it radicalised the reshaping under Vichy of transnational alliances and enmities; and it raised press- ing questions about the place of a defeated, yet potentially rehabilitated, France within the context of a totalising war. Those Frenchmen departing in Wehrmacht uniform for the Russian front, however, were déracinés in time and in space. Likened to the knights of the First Crusade, they were embarked on a historic anomaly, fighting for an occupying enemy of France against an objective ally. They had the geographically incongruous conviction of mounting a last-ditch defence of a homeland over 2000 kilometres away; yet, in so doing, they were to become effective exiles from that homeland, both physically and ideologically displaced as Occupation gave way to Liberation in France and as the ‘New Europe’ in

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which they had sublimated their national identity fell to ruins. This article draws in part on the memoirs by which a number of these ‘exiles’ would later seek to justify their collaborationist engagement or simply to defy a post-war Republican consensus from which they continued to be alienated.

Military collaboration: from LVF to Charlemagne Division A ‘Foreign Legion in German uniform’ Launched a year to the day after the signing of the Franco-German armistice, the invasion of the Soviet Union redefined not only the military but also the political contours of the war. In rupturing the Nazi–Soviet pact, it provided a powerful new rationale at Vichy for collaboration with Hitler’s Reich and galvanised the Paris collaborationists for a war on communism. It pushed the French Communist Party (PCF) into resistance and designated its members ‘agents of Moscow’ against whom ‘a fight to the death’ now had to be waged. Collaborationist publications like Je suis partout deemed the threat of communism a sufficient argument for embracing National Socialism. They colluded in the Nazi propagandist claim that the war in the East was not a war of aggression but a defensive measure to prevent ‘a savage horde from sweeping towards Lisbon and perhaps all the way to London’ (Mermet and Danan, 1966: 41, 53–5, 58).1 A motley group of political activists, journalists and intellectuals, the Paris collaborationists saw themselves – and were seen from Berlin – as a lever with which pressure could be brought to bear on the government at Vichy. They led or were associated with a range of radical movements which attracted a combined membership of perhaps a quarter of a million over the period of the Occupation. Critical of Pétain’s cautious traditionalism, they called for France to assume its place in a new European order, conceiving of Hitler as a modern Charlemagne mobilising Europe against Bolshevism and its ‘allies’, international Jewry and Anglo-Saxon capitalist imperialism. Thus on 23 June, the day after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, was prevailed upon to seek permission from the German Foreign Ministry for the creation of a French legion. Two weeks later, a number of collaborationist leaders – among them Jacques Doriot of the Parti Populaire Français (PPF) and Marcel Déat of the Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP) – signed a proclamation committing France, with ‘the consent of Marshal Pétain and the acquiescence of the Führer’, to ‘the crusade against Bolshevism’ and ‘the struggle to defend European civilization’. Published in the PPF’s organ Le Cri du Peuple on 8 July 1941, this

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was accompanied by an editorial from Doriot which identified in the ‘crusade against communism’ ‘the real meaning of the present war’: In helping to crush Bolshevism, the Legion of French Volunteers gives France the opportunity to resume her place as a major European power. The soldiers who are about to depart are on the threshold of a struggle for the rebirth of our country. (Davey, 1971: 32–3, 35) The disparity is striking between this rousing call to arms and the lack of enthusiasm evinced both by Berlin, which took almost two weeks to grant its grudging permission, and by Vichy, which could scarcely have been less enthusiastic in having ‘no objection’ to the initiative (Paxton, 1966: 275). Doriot’s editorial betrayed a misconception characteristic of French collaborationists at large. As the whole course of the Occupation would show, the ‘rebirth’ of France as ‘a major European power’ was never part of Hitler’s project. Quite the contrary. The defeat of 1940 had seen almost two million French soldiers captured, most of whom were still held in German camps. The armistice agreement had obliged France to demobilise what remained of its armed forces, except for an armistice army of up to 100,000 men retained for internal security (until the occupation of the southern zone in November 1942, when that too was disbanded). While Pétain hoped for an eventual ‘peace of collaboration’, Hitler envisaged only a ‘peace of oppression’ (Pétain, 1989: 89). The treaty intended to seal this pax germanica would have provided for a small French army of 25,000 men; but France was above all to be kept in a state of ‘permanent weakness’ and never again allowed the means to embark on war (Paxton, 1966: 393; Jackson, 2001: 171). Though promoted in Francocentric terms by Doriot and others, moreover, there was nothing uniquely French about the proposed military collaboration. The fact that it was sanctioned at all arose from Hitler’s decision to recruit an anti-Bolshevik legion in each of the occupied countries of western Europe (Stein, 1966: 152). The Paris collaborationists nonetheless saw here an opportunity to court favour with Germany and position themselves as the future leaders of a post-war France within Hitler’s Europe. The pro-Nazi weekly Au Pilori announced proudly that ‘the German troops’ would now be reported as ‘our troops’ (Cotta, 1964: 271). This perception took no account of the cynicism underlying ‘Kollaboration’ from the perspective of Berlin, or of the contempt in which the French were held as warriors by the German high command. In Hitler’s judgement, French soldiers were now ‘considerably worse’ than they had been in the First World War; for the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, they were fit at best for ‘unloading sacks of potatoes behind the lines’ (Bourget, 1970: 296; Saint-Paulien, 1964: 242–3). The request that French prisoners of war be allowed to enlist was refused by the Germans, who also refused permission for French workers in

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Germany to join the LVF. Nor did Berlin honour Hitler’s reported agreement that each LVF recruit would secure the release of an imprisoned relative. Though some from both groups would take up arms, especially in the later stages of the war, French prisoners remained valuable bargaining counters between Berlin and Vichy, while French workers were seen as more useful in the factories than in the field. France was already contributing massively to the German war effort through the provision of foodstuffs, raw materials, manufactured goods and armaments, with French aircraft eventually sup- plying front-line German troops from North Africa to Stalingrad. Given Hitler’s reservations, a limit was imposed on the LVF of 15,000 men, though actual membership would never approach even half that figure. Despite extravagant promises by the collaborationist parties, the initial recruitment drive of summer 1941 yielded fewer than 3000 volunteers only, with a high proportion of volunteers rejected as unfit to serve in the Wehrmacht. Of a recorded 1679 would-be legionnaires examined by German doctors on 28 August 1941, almost half were rejected on medical grounds – some 70 per cent of them for dental problems (Saint-Loup, 1963: 19–20). This rigorous selection procedure served to enforce Hitler’s instruction that the LVF be kept small and to remind the French of their station as a defeated, inferior people. By spring 1942, the LVF nonetheless boasted around 170 recruitment offices throughout France (Lefèvre and Mabire, 1995: 256). Though estimates of recruitment vary, a German report from July 1942 recorded 3641 recruits to the LVF during the first six months of its active deployment; over the longer span of its first two years, the Legion reportedly attracted some 10,700 volunteers of whom 6429 were enlisted (Davey, 1971: 37). As a private rather than a French state initiative, the early LVF was financed from donations, fund-raising campaigns and the German treasury. Recruits were to be aged between 18 and 40 (50 for officers), and pay and benefits were set in line with those of the regular French army. Volunteers vacating employment were assured of returning to their jobs, while unem- ployed recruits were to be prioritised for employment on completion of their service. The prevailing mood among the first volunteers seems to have been one of impatience to join up in time for the victory parade in Moscow. They would be part of an army of some four million German and pro-Axis troops, ‘the largest invasion force ever seen’ (Beevor, 1999: 12–13). After the easy campaigns in Poland, France and the Balkans, it was predicted by some that the war in Russia would be over in a matter of weeks. Others with a more long-term geo-strategic vision reasoned that France should claim a stake in the future ‘colony’ that the Soviet Union was destined to become for western Europe (Gordon, 1980: 245, 248–9; Mermet and Danan, 1966: 42–3, 49). The LVF attracted a mix of young men with no military experience, war veterans and some former soldiers of the French Foreign Legion. It struggled to attract able officers notably. Attempts to recruit from the

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armistice army brought scant results as regular soldiers balked at serving in the Wehrmacht, especially with ‘officers’ such as Lieutenant Doriot. Above all, the widespread antipathy in France towards the LVF explains its poor recruitment, with legionnaires often attracting verbal abuse and LVF premises being vandalised. Those who signed up did so for a variety of reasons: ideological conviction; adventurism or opportunism (to escape justice, unemployment or – after February 1943 – forced labour in Germany); the desire among some demobilised soldiers to return to military life; and puerile vanity (to be able to ‘walk down a street in Berlin and be saluted by uniformed Germans’) (Gordon, 1980: 253–60).2 The Legion was entrusted to the command first of Colonel Roger-Henri Labonne, a former military attaché with no meaningful combat experience, then of Colonel Edgar Puaud, a hard-boiled Foreign Legion officer returned from Indo-China who, ‘like a true legionnaire’, ‘loved war’ (Paxton, 1966: 95). The first contingent of some 800 rank-and-file and 25 officers, including Doriot, was dispatched in September 1941 to a training camp south of Warsaw. They would be joined by a further 1400 recruits over the next month before being incorporated into the Wehrmacht as the 638th Infantry Regiment within the 7th Bavarian Infantry Division (Lambert and Le Marec, 2002: 16–20; Corvisier et al., 1994: 70). The regiment would see action briefly at the front near Moscow in December 1941 (sustaining the loss of some 250 dead, wounded or evacuated with frostbite) before being reas- signed to anti-partisan operations behind the German lines (Ory, 1976: 244). The first legionnaires had been led to believe that they would fight in French uniform; but since France was not officially at war with the Soviet Union, this would have breached the Hague Convention and led to those captured being treated as partisans rather than regular soldiers. The LVF was therefore deployed as ‘a sort of Foreign Legion in German uniform’ (Ory, 1976: 236). The only concessions to the legionnaires’ nationality were the French flag which they were allowed to carry and the small tricolour badge and lettering ‘FRANCE’ often worn on the sleeve of their feldgrau uniform. Otherwise, they were to be considered as members of the German army and subject to German military jurisdiction. This did not prevent the anomaly of Croix de Guerre being conferred on certain legionnaires for distinguished service in German uniform against a power that was not a declared enemy of France (Delarue, 1968: 204, 213). In its organisation, the LVF was run by a Comité central of prominent collaborationists who recruited on its behalf (Déat, Bucard, Costantini) or joined its ranks (Doriot, Clémenti). Its first president was Eugène Deloncle, head of the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR), co-founder with Déat of the RNP and former leader of the extreme-right terrorist Cagoule movement. In Doriot, Bucard, Costantini and others, the LVF was led by men who, little more than a year before, had fought against the same German army for which they were now recruiting agents. In a bizarre quirk

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Figure 1. Jacques Doriot with other LVF officers on the Eastern Front. The tricolour badge can be seen on the sleeve of his uniform.3

of fate, the German embassy official appointed as liaison officer to the LVF was the former pilot Julius von Westrick, whose aircraft had been shot down by Costantini in the First World War, with the two subsequently becoming friends (Gordon, 1980: 136). Nor did irony end there. Doriot had been decorated in both wars and would go on, in 1943, to add an Iron Cross to his Croix de Guerre. The PPF leader had been one of the brightest young firebrands in the PCF until the rift that prompted his expulsion in 1934 and his espousal thereafter of visceral anti-communism – a transformation which he held in common with a number of other notable collaborationists. In addition to these political agitators, the LVF boasted a Comité d’honneur with influential religious, intellectual and political patrons. Among these were the scientist Georges Claude, the cinematographer Auguste Lumière, the novelist Alphonse de Chateaubriant, the rector of the Catholic Institute of Paris, Cardinal Alfred Baudrillart, the head of the Press Corporation, Jean Luchaire, and the Academician and future Education Minister, Abel Bonnard. Though the Comité d’honneur was presided over by Vichy’s Delegate-General to the Occupied Zone, Fernand de Brinon, the

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Figure 2. Jacques Doriot wearing his Iron Cross (2nd class) and two other German medals alongside French decorations from both wars.

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attitude of the government was one of ambivalence and suspicion. In both its organisation and recruitment, the LVF was much less present in the unoccupied south than in the occupied northern zone. German control officers in the southern zone reported only a trickle of recruits and the German Armistice Commission noted in May 1942 that the French authorities were hindering the LVF campaign (Paxton, 1966: 275).

From Wehrmacht to Waffen-SS This was soon to change. Fearing that the Legion might serve as a militia for the political ambitions of the Paris collaborationists, Pierre Laval transformed it in June 1942 from a private organisation into an official French force. Laval’s return to power as chef du gouvernement at Vichy in April 1942, and the promotion of Bonnard and de Brinon notably, marked an intensification of the regime’s readiness to collaborate. On the first anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the LVF was converted into the Légion Tricolore, with the Secretary of State for Franco-German Relations, Jacques Benoist-Méchin, appointed president of its Comité central. The future head of the Milice and Secretary-General for the Maintenance of Order at Vichy, Joseph Darnand, was brought in as a counterweight to Doriot and recruitment was expanded in the unoccupied zone. The Comité d’honneur now included four Vichy ministers (de Brinon, Benoist-Méchin, Bonnard and Marion), with Laval himself as président d’honneur. It was hoped by Benoist-Méchin and others that the state-sponsored Légion Tricolore would serve as the embryo of the single party which Vichy had refused to set up in 1940. It failed, however, to win approval from the German authorities, who were opposed politically to any such development and militarily to a force presuming to represent France (as Article 3 of the new Legion’s statutes declared) ‘on all fronts where national interest is at stake’ (Lefèvre and Mabire, 1995: 260). By January 1943, the Légion Tricolore had been obliged to revert to the LVF and would remain restricted to anti-partisan duties behind the Russian front. The important point was that Vichy now retained its much closer association, decreeing the LVF to be an official organisation of the French state and appointing de Brinon president of its Comité central. The costs of deployment would continue to be met from the German treasury while the Vichy government would cover expenses in France, including disability pensions and support for the families of legionnaires. While Vichy’s attempt to relaunch the LVF as the Légion Tricolore was faltering, another significant development took place in the form of the Phalange Africaine. This was conceived as an ‘Imperial Legion’ to help the Germans repel the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942 and to uphold French sovereignty in a crumbling empire. Unlike the LVF, the

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Phalange Africaine was essentially a Vichy initiative. Despite predictions by Laval of fully 18,000 recruits and with enrolment underway, however, the Germans failed to provide the aircraft required to transport volunteers from the mainland, thereby restricting the recruitment pool to the French community in Tunisia (Lambert and Le Marec, 2002: 60–5; Gordon, 1980: 159–60). Attracting no more than a few hundred volunteers who would be incorporated into Rommel’s 334th Infantry Division, the Phalange Africaine was militarily meaningless; by spring 1943 it had been almost entirely wiped out. This minuscule force nonetheless marked a further stage in military collaboration and in Vichy’s gradual accommodation to it. Just as Doriot and Deloncle had been prime movers in launching the LVF, so Darnand would promote a Phalange Africaine for which recruitment, while it lasted, was managed from Vichy itself. Clearly, it was not concern over the principle of fighting with the Wehrmacht that had given rise to Vichy’s reservations about the LVF in July 1941, but rather concern over what a military force under the control of the Paris collaborationists might mean for the power balance in occupied France. Already in August 1940, within weeks of France’s capitulation, Laval had offered Germany a volunteer force of some 200 French pilots ready to fight with the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain – an offer loftily spurned by Germany. Undeterred, Laval had continued to request that France be allowed to ‘make her modest contribution to the final overthrow of Britain’, while the position articulated by Vichy was that, in return for favourable peace terms, France was ‘ready to enter the continental front’ (Paxton, 2001: 66–73). The resistance by French forces to British-Gaullist incursions at Dakar, in French Equatorial Africa and in Syria could already be interpreted as de facto military collaboration even before the opening of the Russian front. The abortive ‘Paris Protocols’ of May–June 1941, which would have ceded the use of French colonial airfields and ports to Germany, also indicated Vichy’s readiness to engage in a degree of military collaboration for political ends. The same was evident in August 1942 when, following the Allied raid on Dieppe, Pétain appealed to Hitler that France be allowed to ‘make a contribution to the safeguard of Europe’ (Paxton, 2001: 304–5). Though this overture appears to have gone unanswered, the formal neutrality of Pétain’s regime was proving, in the words of one historian, ‘increasingly asymmetrical’ (Jackson, 2001: 180). Some months after the failure of the Légion Tricolore and the fiasco of the Phalange Africaine, Vichy would implicate itself further in the Nazi war effort. With the German offensive critically stalled in Russia, the French government took the step in July 1943 of authorising the formation of a French unit in the Waffen-SS, the Sturmbrigade-SS no. 7 or ‘Sturmbrigade Frankreich’. Until then, French volunteers had signed up for the German armed forces as individuals or through the LVF. Close to

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10,000 Frenchmen, including conscripts from the annexed departments of Alsace-Lorraine, are estimated to have joined the German navy (Kriegsmarine), motorised corps (NSKK), anti-aircraft defence units (Flak), and most notably the Todt Organisation (OT), the construction and engineering group responsible for building the Atlantic Wall (Corvisier et al., 1994: 71).4 Now Frenchmen in their numbers would be invited to see the Waffen-SS as a legitimate calling in the name of France, and a decree signed by Laval made the amendment to French statute required to formalise this. An Association of the Friends of the Waffen-SS was created under the propaganda ministry of Paul Marion, and posters projected SS soldiers fighting ‘to keep the West in existence and preserve the spiritual culture of France and Europe’ (Mabire, 1973: 30–1). Wary – again – of the use to which a French SS brigade might be put, and ever clinging to its mock national sovereignty, Vichy insisted only that the force should not be deployed against dissidents in France. That was now the prerogative of Darnand’s Milice. The launch of the Sturmbrigade Frankreich confirmed the failure of an LVF which had seen barely two weeks of undistinguished front-line service in two years. The first recruitment drive reported some 800 volunteers enlisted by September 1943 and 2480 by January 1944, though

Figure 3. A French recruitment poster for the Waffen-SS.

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again many were found unfit and rejected (Ory, 1976: 244–5, 266). Just as for the LVF, recruits were drawn largely from the collaborationist parties, with a significant number coming also from Darnand’s Milice. Again like the LVF, they carried their squabbling into the service of the Reich. Some came from youth movements such as the Jeunes du Maréchal and Jeunes de l’Europe Nouvelle; others were volunteers with no political past, many aged under 20.5 Engaging the Red Army in its westward push of August 1944 through Galicia, the brigade sustained heavy losses and was pulled back with the rest of the German forces. Pascal Ory (1976: 267) describes a first battalion decimated in a fortnight from 1000 to 140 fighting men. Following the Normandy landings of June 1944, some (including Ambassador Abetz) proposed the use of the LVF against Allied forces in France, and Doriot declared his readiness to lead it into battle there. Laval and the German military authorities vetoed this, ensuring thereby that the Legion would see through to its grim conclusion its mission on the Eastern Front. With France liberated and the Vichy ‘government’ evacuated to Sigmaringen in Germany, the final episode of military collaboration would be played out in autumn 1944 and spring 1945. Survivors of the LVF, Milice, Sturmbrigade Frankreich, Kriegsmarine, OT, NSKK and others (some 7500 Frenchmen in all) were formed into an under-strength SS Waffen-Grenadier-Division no. 33, or Charlemagne Division. These were not all the ‘dreamers in helmets’ later romanticised by one of their number (de la Mazière, 1972); they were self-made exiles who had nowhere else to go, trapped between the Red Army and the Liberation purges in France. As the last word in collaboration, they swore the SS oath to Hitler before being deployed in February 1945 against the Soviet offensive in Pomerania. To the end, the gulf of perception between the collaborationists and the German high command remained, with Hitler dismissing these French soldiers as ‘good for nothing’ (Azéma, 1993: 209). The few who were not killed, wounded, captured or lost to desertion in that brief campaign made their last stand, as irony would have it, defending the Führer’s bunker amid the ruins of Berlin (Stein, 1966: 164; Gordon, 1980: 276–8).6

Cultural collaboration: a ‘true France in a united Europe’ The rare achievement of the LVF was to ‘unite’ the disparate and often bitterly opposed factions of collaborationism behind the single cause of anti-communism. There were a cluster of other causes, too, underlying this alliance of convenience: xenophobic nationalism, European supremacism, anti-Semitism, an Anglophobia for which the British attack on the French fleet at Mers El-Kébir was but the latest reference. Drawing its ideological animus from the collaborationist parties, the LVF was conceived not only as a fighting unit but as a political movement, a ‘formation de combat politique’ in the words of one prominent recruit

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(Saint-Loup, 1963: 15). The ‘true France in a united Europe’ for which Radio-Paris called from its studios on the Champs-Élysées was shorthand for a commitment to Hitler’s European project either as a desired end in itself or, more commonly, as the least of the evils open to France in the mid-twentieth century (Lévy, 1966: 13–14). Few were those, even among the most committed collaborationists, who proclaimed unequivocal adherence to Nazism within its own terms rather than through their shared opposition to the enemies of Nazism. The stark choice was between a Europe dominated by National Socialism and a Europe under the Soviet yoke. ‘I wish the victory of Germany because her war is my war, our war’, stressed the pro-Nazi intellectual Lucien Rebatet. Laval placed himself beyond the mercy of the post-war tribunals by proclaiming his desire that Hitler should triumph to ‘prevent our civilisation collapsing into communism’. The journalist Marc Augier (alias Saint-Loup) would rationalise his engagement in the LVF in similarly Manichaean terms: if National Socialism were the means to bring about a properly socialist Europe, he declared, ‘then I am ready to conclude an alliance with the devil himself’ (Verdès-Leroux, 1996: 170; Jackson, 2001: 227; Ory, 1976: 238). First-hand accounts of service in the LVF suggested that few recruits were keen to be instructed in National Socialism, and there was even evidence of anti-German sentiment. The Legion was also thought to harbour communist and Gaullist infiltrators. In its own propaganda, however, the LVF left no room for nuance, with its mission to protect the ‘threatened peoples’ and ‘ancient civilization’ of Europe against the ‘savage hordes of the base Caucasian’ (Gordon, 1980: 255, 260–1). Those Frenchmen who enlisted were praised by Pétain for participating in a ‘crusade’ against the ‘Bolshevik peril’ and fighting for the cause of ‘European reconciliation’ (Randa, 1997: 359). It was in this spirit, too, that the LVF attracted support from elements in the French Catholic Church only too ready to invoke France’s crusading tradition against a godless Red Army. Thus the rector of the Catholic Institute of Paris, Cardinal Alfred Baudrillart, who extolled the LVF as ‘a new chivalric order. These legionnaires are the crusaders of the twentieth century. May their arms be blessed! The Tomb of Christ shall be delivered.’ Thus, too, Monsignor Jean Mayol de Lupé, chaplain to the LVF and later Charlemagne Division, who would terminate Sunday mass with the cry ‘Heil Hitler!’ and who, at the age of almost 70, added an Iron Cross to his chaplain’s crucifix and Légion d’honneur (Randa, 1997: 368–77; Halls, 1995: 350). For those collaborationist intellectuals like Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rebatet who savoured the ‘virile charm’ of the LVF from the comfort of their Paris apartments, this fine flower of France was joining not a German but a European army that would destroy ‘Marxist illusions’ and ‘refashion the world of tomorrow without democracies and without

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trusts’ (Cotta, 1964: 274; Randa, 1997: 342–3). Brasillach and Rebatet belonged to a coterie of young radical right-wing intellectuals who, in the late 1930s, had used their pens to incite violence against their political adversaries, most notably the leaders of the left-wing Popular Front of 1936–38. Through the columns of Je suis partout and other extreme-right publications, they had called for the Socialist (and Jewish) premier Léon Blum to be shot, for communist leaders to be assassinated, and for a purge of Jews in France (Verdès-Leroux, 1996: 97–9, 155–60). For them, the prospect of armed engagement posed, if not a dilemma, at least a development with which their conscience had to be squared. Rebatet, who had dreamed of pointing his ‘oft caressed machine gun’ and of ‘firing like a god’ into the ranks of his political enemies, felt less inclined to violence when the opportunity to enact his fantasy presented itself. If he went to Russia, he determined, it would be not with a ‘rifle’ but with a ‘pen- holder’. Brasillach had ‘too much respect for human blood and especially the blood of the young’ to take part in military action – which did not prevent him from commending such action in others or from visiting the front to fawn over the uniformed Doriot. In other cases, age would render the question otiose. ‘If I had not been too old to leave my books’, declared the 50-year-old Pierre Drieu La Rochelle in summer 1943, ‘I should have joined the SS’ (Ory, 1976: 239; Grover, 1962: 55). For these stormtroopers by proxy, the ‘European battalions of the Waffen-SS’ embodied the ‘elite of that Aryan international’ to which France no less than Germany had rightful claim (Randa, 1997: 343). As Article 6 of the LVF’s statutes made clear, the Legion was open to ‘[a]ll Frenchmen of Aryan stock having completed their national service’ and able to furnish evidence of their ‘Aryan quality’, good health and clean police record; it was also open – as an ‘exceptional provision’ – to ‘foreigners having served in the Foreign Legion or having fought in units of the French army’ (Article 12). Foreigners, then, could join the LVF, but not French Jews. When Vichy launched the Légion Tricolore, a ministerial circular of 7 July 1942 stipulated: ‘Those persons declared Jewish by the law of 2 June 1941, together with those who, although not considered Jewish, have two Jewish grandparents cannot be members of the Légion Tricolore’ (Randa, 1997: 353, 688–9). If the cult of Aryanism in the French context was largely rhetorical, the exclusion of Jews was real and enforceable. The Jewish Statutes of October 1940 and June 1941 effectively barred Jews from participation in public life, placing severe restrictions on their employment and education. Alongside French communists, freemasons and liberal teachers, Jews were designated by Vichy as a group which had conspired in France’s downfall and with which the regime had its score to settle. At the first rally held in the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris on 18 July 1941 to drum up recruits for the LVF, the leader of the Ligue Française, Pierre

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Costantini, roused applause among the 8000-strong audience by attacking the Jews and calling for executions (Bourget, 1970: 301–2). Echoing Nazi propaganda, the collaborationists represented the Jew as the controlling force behind both Moscow and London, and as a dangerous, stateless enemy within the Etat´ Français. ‘There is only one column’, declared Costantini on radio the day after the Vel d’Hiv rally, ‘the Jewish column, the real fifth column. It is the Jews who created the Soviets’ (Mermet and Danan, 1966: 62). The LVF thus quickly became an expression of anti- Semitic as well as anti-communist sentiment, a response to the ‘Judaeo- Bolshevik’ threat that was central to Nazi demonology. The names of Marx and Trotsky sufficed to confirm the Jewish origins of Bolshevism, and the Jewish power behind Anglo-Saxon capitalism was no less axiomatic. While the LVF’s Paris headquarters were installed in the former offices of the Soviet travel agency Intourist, commercial premises belonging to Jews were requisitioned for use as recruiting stations. The national community from which Jews and communists were excluded found idealised expression in the propaganda that accompanied military collaboration. The theme of the crusade against ‘the Infidel’ in defence of ‘the West’ was much invoked by the LVF, with Moscow figured as a new Jerusalem and Charles Martel’s victory over the Muslim army at Poitiers in 732 as ‘the only battle in two thousand years comparable to that now being waged’ (Mermet and Danan, 1966: 48). Swords, shields, helmets and lances were part of the medievalised iconography of the Legion. Napoleonic mythology, too, was amply exploited. Commem- orative stamps featured medieval knights, imperial grenadiers and LVF soldiers in battle, while Joan of Arc was inevitably pressed into the service of a heroic military imagery conveyed through posters, press and films (Rossignol, 1991: 195–201). Vichy propaganda played on a primarily French register with a strong religious tenor, denouncing the Soviet Union as ‘the very antithesis of the spiritual values and political principles on which the Marshal is seeking to rebuild the country’ (Mermet and Danan, 1966: 54). Pétain’s message of November 1941 to the first LVF contingents was couched in a language of national and spiritual redemption: the Legion was restoring not only ‘part of our military honour’ but also ‘faith in our own virtue’ (Randa, 1997: 359). Emblems of past regimes (Rude’s Départ des volontaires, imperial eagles, Marianne) combined with Vichy’s Francisque to convey an unin- terrupted history of French grandeur. The Paris collaborationists worked on a broader canvas, incorporating images redolent of Nazism (German uniform, swastika, the Wehrmacht soldier as the new Teutonic Knight) and foregrounding the European dimension of a conflict waged by an Aryan brotherhood in arms. For them, the Waffen-SS represented a new chivalric elite to match ‘King Arthur, Lancelot of the Lake, Perceval and Galahad’, and recruits to the Sturmbrigade Frankreich were, like the

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Figure 4. A poster for the Légion Tricolore evoking Napoleon and the Grande Armée.

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Figure 5. An LVF recruitment poster blending the imagery of the crusader knight with that of the Wehrmacht soldier.

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knights of ‘the First Crusade’, assured their place ‘in legend and in history’ (Randa, 1997: 345; Cotta, 1964: 274). Such was the collaborationists’ dream; the reality was quite different. Those French volunteers who thought of themselves as Germanic warriors were profoundly misguided. Foreign recruits to the Waffen-SS were expected, in Himmler’s words, to ‘subordinate [their] national ideal to a greater racial and historical ideal, to the Germanic Reich’ (Stein, 1966: 148); but the rank reserved for the French in that Germanic order was clear from the place accorded them in its armed forces. At the outset, the LVF was not permitted to join the Waffen-SS: it was absorbed along with its Croatian, Spanish and Wallonian counterparts into the Wehrmacht, while legions from Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands attained Waffen-SS status. Only when the exigencies of war prevailed over the racial imperatives of SS ideology did anti-Bolshevism become the deter- mining factor in admission, allowing the Waffen-SS in summer 1943 to sanction a recruitment drive in France and, in late 1944, finally to inte- grate the LVF. By that time, the Waffen-SS had also opened its ranks to Eastern Slavic recruits from Ukraine and Muslims from Bosnia- Herzegovina (Stein, 1966: 152–3, 179–86).

Failed collaboration: a union of irreconcilables By late autumn 1944, all remaining vestiges of active French collaborationism were concentrated in the Charlemagne Division. By then, the Vichy apparatus had been consigned to exile. By then, too, some of the most ardent ideologues like Brasillach and Drieu had relinquished their faith in National Socialism, while collaborationism had lost all meaning as a way of securing the future of France in a post-war Europe. France had still not made peace with Germany, nor declared war on the Soviet Union, as the last surviving Frenchmen in Nazi uniform were pushed back to Berlin by the advancing Red Army in spring 1945. In the four years since the formation of the LVF, France had been drawn into an increasingly state-sponsored contribution to German military operations. The failed attempt by Vichy to convert the LVF into the Légion Tricolore showed the limits to the regime’s putative sovereignty, while the subsequent endorsement of the LVF as an official state organisation demonstrated the prevalence at Vichy of political pragmatism over principle. As a note from Pétain to Admiral Darlan shortly after the Legion’s formation revealed, its deployment in German uniform was a cause of embarrassment at Vichy (Bourget, 1970: 298–9). Not so for the Paris collaborationists. At the LVF’s inaugural meeting in the Vélodrome d’Hiver in July 1941 – as reported (significantly) by a police informer – Déat intoned that if the government did not show sufficient mettle, he and his supporters were ready to depose it, while prospective legionnaires

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were ‘assured of being the future leaders’ of the new France (Bourget, 1970: 302, 304). Relations between Paris and Vichy would remain as fraught throughout, with the Waffen-SS serving as the ultimate theatre in which the ‘Marshal’s man’ Darnand would seek to outdo the would-be ‘Führer’s man’ Doriot in courting German favour. Acceding to the rank of Sturmbannführer and taking with him many of his Miliciens into the Waffen-SS, Darnand provided the measure of Vichy’s ultimate implication in the doomed adventure of military collaboration. If the Paris collaborationists were defined by their opposition to Vichy, they were further defined by their opposition amongst themselves. Saint-Loup (1965: 18) recounts how, as the first volunteers were inducted at the Borgnis-Desbordes barracks at Versailles on 27 August 1941, fighting broke out in the line between Doriot’s PPF supporters and Deloncle’s MSR supporters. Then, at the formal induction ceremony on the same day, Laval and Déat were wounded by pistol shots from a recruit. The would- be assassin, Paul Collette, who would later claim to be a Gaullist, had enlisted through the MSR and was thought to be in league with Deloncle (Delarue, 1968: 166–75). The first blood had been spilt under the banner of the LVF – and it was French. Even when dispatched to the front, the LVF would remain as politically riven, notably between supporters of Doriot and those of Deloncle. It was largely in order to upstage his political rivals that the PPF leader himself enlisted. The remark to Doriot’s mother by his wife, on learning that he had been awarded the Iron Cross, spoke volumes: ‘He must be pleased. That will give him clout against the little politickers around here who thought they could do him down in his absence’ (Bourget, 1970: 313). Meanwhile Deloncle made known his fear that, if he joined the LVF, he would be assassinated by Doriot’s henchmen (Delarue, 1968: 185). Volunteers were recruited mainly through the collaborationist parties and retained their party affiliation over and above their common calling to the Legion. It was even envisaged for a time that companies might be formed exclusively on the basis of party membership. The intensity of political infighting was noted by Monsignor Mayol de Lupé as a factor harmful to the Legion’s cohesion; it was noted also by the Germans, who issued a stern instruction in April 1942 that LVF recruits should either sink their political differences or return home. Some MSR members took the latter course and returned to serve their party in Paris rather than their ‘country’ in Russia (Lambert and Le Marec, 2002: 21). The arrival in late 1944 of some 1800 Miliciens to swell the ranks of the Charlemagne Division merely added more crabs to the basket, as Doriotist veterans clashed with Darnand’s newly arrived contingent. Other splits too ran through the collaborationists’ ranks as French Waffen-SS lorded it over career soldiers who had come through the LVF but remained tarred with the defeat of 1940 (Gordon, 1980: 244, 277; Ory, 1976: 267).

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Besides the personal and party rivalries which the LVF and Charlemagne Division served to exacerbate, there persisted to the end a profound ideological incoherence – between Christian ‘crusaders’ and neo-pagan ‘Nazis’, narrow nationalists and Europeanists, reactionaries and revolutionaries, between those owing their paramount allegiance to the Pope and those happy to swear it to the Führer. Ideological incoherence was embedded, too, in the discourse which supported military collaboration. In honouring the few survivors of the Phalange Africaine in May 1943, the president of the LVF’s Comité central, de Brinon, declared: ‘To fight against Anglo-American plutocracy is to fight against Bolshevism’ (Ory, 1976: 246–7). Such an incongruous remark was possible only in the service of a ‘crusade’ that had lost its defining rationale and clarity of purpose. Nor were the political perspectives more easily reconciled than the ideological. The failure of military collaboration was foreshadowed from the outset by the lack of agreement between Berlin, Paris and Vichy over its value. For the Paris collaborationists, it was ‘the reconciliation of two great European peoples’ and the means of sharing in a German victory; for Vichy, it was an unwelcome initiative which threatened to undermine the government and shift the balance of power within France; for Berlin, it was a military irrelevance but a further means of dividing and ruling France, of encouraging (in the words of a German embassy directive) ‘those forces likely to create discord’ and ‘internal disunity and weakness’ (Saint-Paulien, 1964: 147, 242, 248). By spring 1944, there was not even agreement about the rank of the LVF’s commanding officer – ‘General Puaud’ for Vichy and Paris, ‘Colonel Puaud’ for Berlin (Delarue, 1968: 219). While Hitler sanctioned the LVF primarily as a useful political device, the German military authorities and the Vichy government did more to hinder than to promote it. That its most ardent proponent, Doriot, was bitterly opposed within collaborationist circles and kept under surveillance by Berlin and Vichy alike summed up the disunity and mistrust on which military collaboration was founded. More telling still was the appointment of the Nazi sympathiser Jean Fontenoy at the head of a propaganda section within the LVF. Fontenoy’s real purpose was to spy on the Legion and compile reports for the German authorities; but he in turn was to be kept under close surveillance by a German liaison officer attached to the propaganda section (Davey, 1971: 43–4). To the end, French military collaboration was played out in the service of three quite distinct political projects. To the end, too, the Vichy government sought to contain and gain some hold over an armed force which it viewed as a threat in the hands of the Paris collaborationists. Nothing of this had been anticipated in the armistice agreement, and it completed the renversement des alliances effected by Vichy in relation to the Allied and Axis powers. No public pronouncement would return to

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haunt Pétain more than his declaration of support for the ‘noble duty’ undertaken by the first transports of legionnaires embarked for the front in November 1941. In the charges laid against him at his trial on 23 July 1945, and in the summing-up prior to his sentence on 14 August, the High Court of Justice would invoke this support for an undertaking described now – out of all proportion – as a ‘Franco-German campaign against the Russians’. Through this and other means (military cooperation in Syria and North Africa, ‘Paris Protocols’, civilian labour programmes), Pétain was guilty of ‘intelligence with Germany, a power at war with France, with a view to advancing the undertakings of the enemy’ (Le Procès du Maréchal Pétain, 1945: I, 29; II, 1119–23). With the 89-year-old Pétain’s death sentence commuted to life imprisonment, the ultimate judgement on military collaboration would be served some weeks later on his former chef du gouvernement, Laval. As the real architect of collaboration, concluded the High Court, Laval had, inter alia, repeatedly expressed his wish for a German victory and ‘notably encouraged and supported the formation of a French troop to fight in German uniform alongside Germany against Russia’ (Le Procès Laval, 1946: 307). The man from whom blood had first been drawn at the LVF induction in August 1941 had remarked with prescience then that those were but the first of the bullets destined for him, ‘since the French will not understand what I will attempt to do when I return to power’ (Bourget, 1970: 312). Laval would be executed by firing squad at Fresnes prison on 15 October 1945.

Notes 1. Since this article draws on a range of French, English and German sources, some of which are already in translation, all quotations are, for consistency, given in English. 2. In July 1942, the weekly L’Illustration reported 90 per cent of a 200-strong sample of legionnaires to be manual working-class, and only 10 per cent middle-class (Cotta, 1964: 273). 3. The author is grateful to Grancher publishers for permission to reproduce Figures 1 and 2 from Lambert and Le Marec (2002). 4. French membership of the German armed forces is impossible to establish with precision. Kedward (1985: 44) estimates at under 6000 the Frenchmen enlisting in the LVF or Waffen-SS; Gordon (1980: 244) puts the figure at around 10,000 and Saint- Paulien (Randa, 1997: 337) at 15,000. British intelligence files opened in 2000 recorded an estimated 14,000 French Waffen-SS (Norton-Taylor, 2000), while Stein (1966: 139) proposes the yet higher estimate of 20,000. 5. A report on recruitment for November 1943 showed 54 per cent aged 17–20 and 25 per cent listed as students; 38 per cent were artisans and 20 per cent low-grade employees, while the 7 per cent for agricultural workers reflected the urban character of the collaborationist parties and the 4 per cent for career soldiers confirmed the brigade’s lack of appeal in French military circles (Gordon, 1980: 270–1). 6. The debacle is recounted at length in Jean Mabire’s La Division Charlemagne (1974) and Christian de la Mazière’s personal memoir, Le Rêveur casqué (1972).

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References Azéma, J.-P. (1993) ‘Vichy’, in M. Winock (ed.), Histoire de l’extrême droite en France, pp. 191–214. Paris: Seuil. Beevor, A. (1999) Stalingrad. London: Penguin. Bourget, P. (1970) Histoires secrètes de l’occupation de Paris (1940–1944), vol. I: Le Joug. Paris: Hachette. Corvisier, A. et al. (1994) Histoire militaire de la France, vol. IV: De 1940 à nos jours. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Cotta, M. (1964) La Collaboration 1940–1944. Paris: Armand Colin. Davey, O. A. (1971) ‘The Origins of the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchevisme’, Journal of Contemporary History 6(4): 29–45. Delarue, J. (1968) Trafics et crimes sous l’occupation. Paris: Fayard. Gordon, B. M. (1980) Collaborationism in France during the Second World War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Grover, F. (1962) Drieu La Rochelle. Paris: Gallimard. Halls, W. D. (1995) Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France. Oxford: Berg. Jackson, J. (2001) France: The Dark Years 1940–1944. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kedward, H. R. (1985) Occupied France: Collaboration and Resistance 1940–1944. Oxford: Blackwell. Lambert, P.-P. and Le Marec, G. (2002) Les Français sous le casque allemand: Europe 1941–1945. Paris: Grancher. Lefèvre, E. and Mabire, J. (1985) La LVF 1941. Par moins 40 degrés devant Moscou. Paris: Fayard. Lefèvre, E. and Mabire, J. (1995) La Légion perdue. Face aux partisans, 1942. Paris: Grancher. Lévy, C. (1966) ‘L’Organisation de la propagande’, Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 64: 7–28. Mabire, J. (with P. Demaret) (1973) La Brigade Frankreich. La tragique aventure des SS français. Paris: Fayard. Mabire, J. (1974) La Division Charlemagne. Les combats des SS français en Poméranie. Paris: Fayard. de la Mazière, C. (1972) Le Rêveur casqué. Paris: Robert Laffont. Mermet, P. and Danan, Y.-M. (1966) ‘Les Thèmes de propagande après le 22 juin 1941’, Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 64: 39–62. Norton-Taylor, R. (2000) ‘Lord Haw Haw’s Flight to Germany’, The Guardian, 20 April, p. 9. Ory, P. (1976) Les Collaborateurs. Paris: Seuil. Paxton, R. O. (1966) Parades and Politics at Vichy: The French Officer Corps Under Marshal Pétain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Paxton, R. O. (2001) Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940–1944. New York: Columbia University Press. Pétain, P. (1989) Discours aux Français: 17 juin 1940 – 20 août 1944, ed J.-C. Barbas. Paris: Albin Michel. Le Procès du Maréchal Pétain. Compte rendu sténographique (1945). Paris: Albin Michel, 2 vols. Le Procès Laval. Compte rendu sténographique (1946). Paris: Albin Michel. Randa, P. (1997) Dictionnaire commenté de la collaboration française. Paris: Jean Picollec.

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Rossignol, D. (1991) Histoire de la propagande en France de 1940 à 1944. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Saint-Loup (1963) Les Volontaires. Paris: Presses de la Cité. Saint-Loup (1965) Les Hérétiques. Paris: Presses de la Cité. Saint-Paulien (1964) Histoire de la collaboration. Paris: Éditions de l’Esprit Nouveau. Stein, G. H. (1966) The Waffen SS: Hitler’s Elite Guard at War 1939–1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Verdès-Leroux, J. (1996) Refus et violences. Politique et littérature à l’extrême droite des années trente aux retombées de la Libération. Paris: Gallimard.

James Shields is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Warwick. Address for correspondence: Department of French Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK [email: [email protected]]