Léon Degrelle

Rexist Party Fascists and Nazis 1906–1994 ○ Died in exile

Belgian Rexist leader and Nazi collaborator who fought on the Eastern Front with the Walloon Legion

Born in Bouillon, Belgium, he entered politics through Catholic Action and journalism while a student at Leuven. In the early 1930s he took over a Catholic publishing house and turned it into the Rexist Party, which won 11 percent in the 1936 election before declining. After Germany occupied Belgium in 1940 he made Rex a collaborationist mass movement, and in 1941 he organised and joined the Walloon Legion of the German army on the Eastern Front. The Legion passed to the Waffen-SS in 1943, and his decorations after the Cherkassy pocket in 1944 made him a model for foreign collaborators. Sentenced to death in absentia, he fled to Francoist Spain, published neo-Nazi and Holocaust-denying writings and died in Málaga in 1994.

Also known as: Léon Joseph Marie Ignace Degrelle