Hitler's Flemish Lions E-Book

Jonathan Trigg

• Herausgeber: Spellmount
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 425

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Motivated by anti-communist zeal and a burning desire for Flemish self-rule, the men of the SS Langemarck answered Himmler's call to arms and earned a reputation for steadfastness in battle from friend and foe alike, right through to their eventual destruction by the Soviets in 1945. The exploits of key figures such as the famous Flemish Knight's Cross winner Remy Schrijnen are covered in detail. Written by a former captain in the British Army, this is the second in Spellmount's new series on Hitler's foreign Legions, following the best-selling Hitler's Gauls.

Leseprobe

Jacket: SS-Legion Flandern volunteers in the frontline outside Leningrad in the winter of 1941/1942. (Courtesy of Rene Chavez)

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my thanks to a number of people, without whose help and support this book would never have been written. First to the Flemish veterans themselves, both from the SS-Legion Flandern and the Langemarck. As time marches on their numbers are dwindling – in recent years both Remy Schrijnen and Georg D’Haese have passed away – but, as ever, without the help and patience of the veterans in answering endless mind-numbing questions on obscure details of events that happened more than sixty years ago, this book would have been impossible to write. Thanks again to Frau Notzke at the Bundesarchiv; I think she is resigned to my constant correspondence from now until the series is finished or she gets another job!

Thanks to my publishers at Spellmount: to Jamie for starting me on this journey and to Shaun for his constant encouragement and chivvying. My thanks go yet again to my oldest and best friend Tim: you helping me has become a bit of a habit.

As any author writing military history will attest, one of the major challenges is to find photographs that are both interesting and illustrative of the text, and maybe even to find the ‘Holy Grail’ – photos that have never been previously published. This task was made so much easier for me with the help of some real stars from across the world, so thank you to Kris Simoens, Rene Chavez, Michel Breiz, Sébastian J. Bianchi and James Mcleod, and in particular thank you to Luc De Bast for allowing me access to his amazing private collection.

Thank you as well to everyone who has bought and read Hitler’s Gauls. If no-one had then this book would never have seen the light of day.

Last but definitely not least I want to again thank my beautiful wife for putting up with me during the writing of this book and to my children, Maddy and Jack, who at least tried to stop yawning when Daddy was telling them what he was doing all this time.

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

List of maps

Notes on the Text

Introduction

I

A Tale of Two Peoples: The Flemish and the Walloons

II

Flanders: The Rise of Nationalism and the Extreme Right

III

1940: Blitzkrieg and Belgian Collapse

IV

The Waffen-SS and the Legionary Movement

V

Round One: Leningrad and the SS-Legion Flandern

VI

Round Two: Vlasov, the Volkhov Pocket and Krasny-Bor

VII

Rebirth: The SS-Sturmbrigade Langemarck

VIII

Dogged defence in the Ukraine

IX

The Legend of Narva: The Battle of the European SS

X

Last Throw of the Dice: The Formation of the SS-Langemarck Division

XI

The Ending: Pomerania

XII

Retribution

Appendix A

Waffen-SS Organisation

Appendix B

Waffen-SS Ranks

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

List of Maps

1Flanders and Walloonia, 1940, (here)

2The Battle of the Volkhov Pocket, January–July 1942 (here)

3SS-Sturmbrigade Langemarck Ukrainian Campaign, January–April 1944 (here)

4SS-Kampfgruppe D’Haese, 25–29 July 1944, Battle of the European SS at Narva, Estonia (here)

5The End – the 27th SS-Langemarck Division in northern Germany, 1945 (here)

Notes on the Text

Military ranks: Waffen-SS ranks are used for Waffen-SS personnel. A conversion chart has been provided as Appendix B. German Army (Heer) ranks and those of the Red Army are used for their respective soldiers.

Military terminology: As far as possible the military terminology used is that of the time and the army involved. On occasion an attempt has been made to ‘translate’ that terminology into modern British Army parlance in order to aid understanding.

Unit designation: All orders of battle use the German unit designation of the time and this is continued throughout except in certain circumstances where it is simplified to improve the flow of the text. Russian formations are numbered while German formations are written or use the original Roman numerals.

Foreign words: Where non-English words are used they are italicised unless in common usage and English translations are given immediately afterwards. If then used often in the text they are no longer italicised.

Measurements: Distances are given in miles but weapon calibres are given in their usual metric form.

Place names: Particularly as regards places in the Soviet Union I have stuck with one spelling if there are several but have also tried to include other derivations in brackets, the same goes for those cities/towns/villages in German Pomerania as was, that are now Polish.

Introduction

It was so damned hot! The young Flemish volunteer from Bruges wiped the sweat from his brow, but his eyes still stung from the salt in the perspiration that was pouring down his brick-red face. He risked a glance at the man on his right in the line and was pleased to see that he was also sweating freely and he looked damned nervous too – maybe it was alright to be scared. His comrade returned his look and suddenly they both grinned at each other, it was all they could manage not to burst into laughter. They had stood in the line since early that morning but hadn’t had an opportunity to fight as yet. So far it had been a battle of missiles from both sides with death and injury claiming men seemingly by chance. As the morning had worn on the hot July sun had got fiercer and fiercer, and the men had had no chance to drink or seek shade. Behind them the young volunteers could hear the screaming of their wounded comrades and the laboured curses of the stretcher bearers nominated to carry the dead and injured from their ranks. But they didn’t think about that; all their attention was suddenly focused out to their front again where they could see the massed lines of the enemy finally beginning to form up ready to attack. All along the line from left to right the enemy was beginning to move and get ready for what everyone knew would be the decisive charge. The Flemings settled their helmets more comfortably on their heads and gripped their weapons tighter. This was it. God, there were a lot of them out there in front! But the Flemings knew they had to hold. To hold was to live; to break was to be torn to bloody shreds in a panic-stricken mob, to be cut to pieces in the dust. The same thought went through many a Fleming’s head: ‘But there are so many of them, and they are so lavishly equipped with the very best, how can we stand?’ There were no answers yet.

Then it began. The enemy line began to move forward, halting and jerky at first while they sorted themselves out. Then the pace picked up and the raucous cries and shouts of encouragement started. In contrast, the Flemings were silent. Only discipline held them now, that and the proximity of their fellows. After all, running is easy when you’re faceless but when you’re surrounded by your neighbours from the street back home running is the hardest thing to do. If someone ran everyone would know it and the shame would be tremendous. So, held by fear of failure as much as iron discipline the young men of tiny Flanders stood their ground and waited with dry throats and bladders suddenly full.

The enemy was close now, the charge in full flow and the noise they made as they screamed their battle cries and pounded across the ground hit the Flemish line like a single living thing. The line seemed to shudder and the charging soldiers saw it and shouted for joy – they would break and be slaughtered! But the line didn’t break: it steadied, and the charging Frenchmen saw that too. The French cavalry realised too late that the Flemish militia would hold, and those that tried to turn their horses away only succeeding in robbing their charge of momentum. But the vast majority of the first line hit the Flemish wall of pikes and spears head-on at full tilt. As the French cavalry stalled the Flemish foot soldiers swung their goedendags, bulky five-foot-long wooden staffs topped with vicious steel pikeheads (the name means ‘hello’ or ‘good day’), into the melee of men and horses, cutting down the cream of French chivalry.

The result was military disaster for the French. Armoured cavalry, the acknowledged elite of the military world, had ruled the battlefields of Europe for the best part of 800 years but here in Flanders at Kortrijk (Courtrai in French) on the afternoon of 11 July 1302 that era was going to come to a bloody and inglorious end.

Kortrijk was a pivotal battle in the history of the Middle Ages in Europe and presaged the later victories of the Scots at Bannockburn in 1314 and the Swiss against the Austrians at Morgarten in 1315. It is more than coincidence that all three battles were not only won by previously subject peoples against their erstwhile imperial masters, but also that in all three battles it was steadfast infantry that humbled armies of mounted knights and men-at-arms.

This book, the second in the Hitler’s Legions series, is about the men of Flanders who fought in their thousands alongside the Germans, firstly in the SS-Legion Flandern, then in the SS-Sturmbrigade Langemarck and finally, in their last incarnation, in the 27th SS-Freiwilligen Grenadier Division Langemarck (Flämische Nr.1). Although not a sovereign nation in themselves, and with their population totalling less than that of Birmingham in the UK, the Flemish were to supply the Third Reich with more volunteers than Great Britain, France, Sweden, Norway and Denmark combined. Indeed, along with their next-door neighbours and racial cousins the Dutch, the Flemish contributed more volunteers as a proportion of their population than any other Western European people. Not only would they supply large numbers of fighting men, but those same men would also earn glory for themselves in the bloody battles of the Eastern Front almost from the start of the war in the Soviet Union.

Of the thirty-eight nominal Waffen-SS divisions created by the end of the war over half were composed of either foreigners or the so-called Volksdeutsche (racial Germans born outside the borders of Germany at the outbreak of the war). But many of these formations contributed little if anything militarily to the Nazi war effort. This could not be said of the Flemings. From the bitter Siege of Leningrad in 1941 to the slaughter at the Battle of the Volkhov Pocket in 1942, the desperate defensive fighting in the Ukraine in 1943–44, to the famous ‘Battle of the European SS’ at Narva in Estonia in 1944, and finally to the snow-bound hell of Pomerania and the Oder in 1945, the Flemings made their mark in combat.

But who exactly are the Flemish? Flanders constitutes the northern half of Belgium, due northwest of Dover and a few hours’ sailing time across the English Channel, so the Flemish are officially at least Belgians, but then why didn’t they fight with that idol of the foreign legionary movement in World War II, Léon Degrelle and his Rexists? After all, he was Belgian. Were there differences between Degrelle and his men and the Flemings that made it impossible for them to serve together? Degrelle and his volunteers started out as as Heer volunteers, a German Army unit, and not Waffen-SS men, whereas the Flemings were a Waffen-SS Legion from the start.

What was the difference? The answer is complex, and as with so much else within the history of foreign volunteers in the Second World War, that complexity grows out of centuries of history and tradition. Any attempt to characterise the multiplicity of motives of Hitler’s volunteers must begin with the climate of virulent anti-Bolshevik sentiment. Many at the time felt that Western European civilisation was under threat from the faceless hordes from the barbaric East. (Needless to say, volunteers from the Soviet Union shared the anti-communist part of this motivation, but without the same prejudice against people from the East!) But part of what makes the Flemish volunteers so interesting is that, unlike so many of their comrades in other volunteer formations, anti-communism was not the main motive for their participation in the war. Rather, it was the nationalism of the Flemish people, a long-standing determination that has yet to force a material result. The story of the Flemish Waffen-SS must be seen as a defining chapter in the history of a struggle that began centuries ago and continues even today, with the political machinations of the nationalist far-Right Flemish Vlaams Blok party and its successor, the Vlaams Belang.

In order to understand the Flemish SS volunteers in the Langemarck, one has to understand who the Flemings are. That identity includes the tumultuous events of the field of the ‘Golden Spurs’ at the climatic moments of the Battle of Kortrijk back in the hot summer of 1302.

I

A Tale of Two Peoples: The Flemish and the Walloons

Belgium is a small country of around ten million inhabitants, and alongside its next-door neighbour, the Netherlands, it lies sandwiched between the twin giants of Germany to the east and France to the west. The southern half of Belgium is Walloonia, based on the medieval cities of Charleroi and Namur and containing about forty per cent of the population. The Walloons are Gallic in language, culture and outlook. French-speaking, they have always followed their southerly neighbours, the French. The northern half of Belgium, the provinces of West-Vlaanderen, East-Vlaanderen, Antwerpen, Brabant and Limburg, constitute the ancient territory of Flanders (Vlaanderen in Flemish and Flandern in German) and its inhabitants are called the Flemish. The Flemish make up the majority of the Belgian population, about sixty per cent, and speak their own language, which is closely related to Dutch and German. The country, like so much of the Low Countries, is still quite rural, with fertile, flat farmland stretching away in all directions. The countryside is dotted with prosperous and well-kept towns and villages and a few historic cities such as Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp which dominate the landscape, geographically, politically and culturally. The racial divide between these two peoples is the dominating issue in the history of Belgium and the most important factor in understanding the men who fought in the Langemarck and its predecessor units.

Rome and the Belgae

Present-day Belgium is named after its original Celtic inhabitants, the tribe of the Belgae. As with the rest of Celtic Europe (bar far-flung Scotland and Ireland), the Belgae were conquered by the Roman legions. Over nearly four centuries of the Pax Romana the local Celts in the fertile lands of the Belgae became thoroughly Romanised and integrated into the Empire. But finally, right at the beginning of the fifth century AD, the era of imperial Rome was coming to a bloody close (at least in the West) as a vast tide of barbarian Germanic tribes moved relentlessly over what was the imperial frontier – the mighty River Rhine.

The Germans are coming

Although at the time it was thought that the Empire was suffering from a series of invasions, we now know that it was actually the frontal edge of a huge migration that had started thousands of miles east on the borders of China. As nomadic peoples such as the Huns and Scythians moved west in search of fresh grazing and hunting grounds they displaced the tribes they met, who in turn pushed other tribes to move farther to the west, and so on. The net result was an irresistible wave that came crashing into the Western Roman Empire when it was at its weakest point in more than two centuries. For Roman Gaul (modern-day Belgium and parts of France, the Netherlands and Germany east of the Rhine) that meant a host of ferocious Teutons arriving in successive migrations over more than a century. Some of the barbarians moved through Gaul and onwards to other provinces: the Visigoths and Ostrogoths to Spain, the Asding and Gepid Vandals to North Africa and the Lombards to northern Italy. Some settled specific areas and gave them their names, for example the Burgundians and Suevi settled Burgundy and Swabia in southern Germany respectively. Others conquered territories and became the overlords of the people who already lived there.

One such tribe were the Franks, who, like all of the Teutonic peoples, were tall, blond haired and blue-eyed warriors. They moved into Gaul, seized land, built houses and began to farm and trade. In a few places they settled in large numbers, but in most they were fairly thinly spread, and overall they were greatly outnumbered by the existing Romano-Gallic inhabitants. Over time they intermarried and absorbed the language and customs of their new neighbours. In this manner, modern-day France began to establish its own identity, not Teutonic but Gallic. This meant that the true racial frontier between the invading mass of Germanic tribes and the settled Romano-Gauls lies not in France but in modern-day Belgium, or more accurately in its northern half, Flanders.

The Germanic Flemish

Flanders was the high water mark of mass migration westwards by the Teutons in Continental Europe. As it is with tectonic plates in the earth’s crust – the pressures and cataclysms as the opposing masses strain against each other – so it is with human beings, and it is the eternal fate of the Flemish to lie at the northern end of the great curving ‘racial’ plates that separate the Germanic peoples of north and central Europe from their Latin and Celtic neighbours to the south and west. In the far south this line is anchored in Italy’s Alto Adige region (the old Austrian South Tyrol), Italian in name and Germanic in blood, the curve then stretches north and west through the mixed peoples of Switzerland, up through the oft-disputed French provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, into Luxembourg and on into the Netherlands and finally Flanders.

The Dutch won their independence from Imperial Spain in 1581, and have hung onto it ever since, but the history of the Flemish is not of independence but of periodic conflict with their mighty French-speaking neighbours, and occasional disaster as they have suffered from either an expansionist German or French policy.

Medieval Flanders

The heyday of Flanders was in Medieval times. The entire Flemish population that now sits across modern Flanders, northern France and southern Holland came under the control of the ancient County of Flanders and its next-door neighbour the Duchy of Brabant. These two small but influential territories sat at the heart of western civilisation and were courted and fought over by successive monarchs from across Europe for their power, wealth and geographical position. The Flemish and their Dutch cousins were at the forefront of western European trade and burgeoning industries, particularly weaving, cloth making and metal working. For the English kings the Flemish were a gateway to mainland Europe, a maritime power in their own right and the destination for so much of England’s ‘white gold’: sheep wool.

The huge flocks of sheep that covered England and much of Wales were harvested to supply massive amounts of wool to the workshops of Flanders, which turned the high-quality fleeces into clothes for much of Europe and even beyond. Such was the wealth that this trade generated for both sides, England in particular, that in the House of Lords the Lord High Chancellor of the United Kingdom still sits on a battered old scrap of woolsack.

Kortrijk – The Flemish Bannockburn

The trading strength of England was protected by its king, but the Flemish had no equivalent overlord to safeguard their interests. Instead, they formed themselves into powerful trade guilds with complex structures and strict codes to regulate their businesses and promote their growing wealth and influence. In time, the guilds came to dominate the cities of Flanders such as Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, as well as the surrounding countryside. This type of organisation stood outside the feudal order of European society, as it did not rely on the countryside for its wealth and was controlled by a class of artisans and merchants rather than landed magnates.

This was, of course, anathema to Flanders’ feudal neighbour France, who cast covetous eyes upon Flanders. In 1300 King Philip IV of France, Philip the Fair, attempted to annex the County by imprisoning the native Count of Flanders, Gwidje van Dampierre, and imposing his own governor, Jacques de Chatillon. Civil unrest broke out throughout the County, leading in 1302 to the infamous Good Friday massacre of every French citizen within the city walls of Bruges. The French response was to send a powerful army under Count Robert II of Artois to crush the uprising. After assembling at Arras in northern France the French host moved on to the city and castle of Kortrijk, the gateway to Flanders.

Robert of Artois’ army was extremely impressive. It may have only totalled about 8,000 men, including 1,000 crossbowmen, 1,000 pikemen and 3,500 light infantrymen, but at its core lay over 2,500 heavy armoured cavalry. It was this force that made the French army truly dangerous. European warfare was still dominated by the aristocratic heavy horseman covered in full armour and wielding sword, lance and shield. Standard military methodology at the time equated one such cavalryman to ten foot soldiers in terms of effectiveness on the battlefield. By this calculation the French force stood at just over 30,000 strong in terms of combat power. In contrast to this feudal army of French chivalry, the Flemish force of just 9,000 men was composed wholly of infantrymen. The Flemish troops were composed overwhelmingly of urban guild militias. Willem Van Gullik (the deposed Count Gwidje’s grandson) and Pieter De Coninck commanded 3,000 men from Bruges, Gwidje Van Namen (also called Guy of Namur - the son of Count Gwidje) led 2,500 men from coastal Flanders, and 2,500 men came from east Flanders including John Borluut’s 700 men from Ghent and a further 500 from Ypres. In reserve for the Flemish sat John of Rennesse’s 500 men. All of the militia were well equipped with pikes, infantry armour and shields, but they were considered no match for the might of the Capetian host.

The Flemish force also made for Kortrijk to seize the castle themselves and by a twist of fate the two armies arrived pretty much simultaneously. They spent 9 and 10 July manoeuvring for any advantage they could gain, but finally on the 11th the two hosts confronted each other in a large, fairly flat field east of the town to decide the issue. The French formed into their ten divisions called ‘battles’, and sent forward their crossbowmen, covered by infantry, to fire into the Flemish ranks, cause attrition and try to break up the enemy formation, itself organised in blocks eight men deep. The Flemings had no choice but to stand and take the punishment and wait for the inevitable French charge. The timing of that charge was critical to the outcome of the battle: the key was to launch it at just the right moment to either capitalise on a disintegrating Flemish line or to cause that break-up itself. Abiding strictly by the laws of warfare, the French had all the advantages and all they needed to do was be patient and maintain their discipline and cohesion. They failed to do either. With aristocratic arrogance they charged at the Flemish before their crossbowmen had inflicted enough casualties or broken up the ranks of pikemen. They fully expected them to turn and run; this the Flemings obstinately refused to do. The result was catastrophe for the French.

In a foretaste of what was to happen over the next century at Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt the French nobility were dragged from their warhorses by their social inferiors and butchered in the mud. The greater part of the French army was annihilated, among them over a thousand of their heavy cavalry, including over sixty barons and lords. Among the dead lay the French commander, Robert II of Artois, plus the Constable of France, two Marshals of France, the Counts of Aumale, Dammartin, Eu and Ostrevant, the Duke of Brabant, the French-imposed Governor of Flanders Jacques de Chatillon and even King Philip IV’s chief advisor, Pierre de Flotte. The Flemish dead amounted to just over 100. In commemoration of their famous victory the Flemings cut the golden spurs from the French knightly corpses and hung over 500 pairs of them in the Church of Our Lady in Kortrijk. It was this act that gave the battle its now famous name.

The effects of the battle were far reaching. At the time the result shocked all Europe – the Pope was even woken up in the middle of the night to be told the news – and an enraged Philip was stirred to send an even greater army to crush the uprising. In the longer term the Battle of the Golden Spurs set a precedent that would lead to the ending of the supremacy of the armoured knight and the death knell of the feudal system that sustained him. For the Flemish, it gave them a national identity based on an iconic victory against all the odds. Those who don’t think such an event can really make much difference to a people should just ask any Scot about Bannockburn! Ever since the battle 11 July has been the Flemish national day and an official holiday in Flanders, and Pieter De Coninck’s shield symbol of a black lion on a yellow background (the Vlaanderen die Leu) has become the national symbol of Flanders.

‘Kissing Cousins’: Flanders and Holland

The entire population of Flanders numbers just over six million, with maybe one hundred thousand or so Flemings in southern Holland, and another million of Flemish descent in the northern French départments of Nord and Pas de Calais (the so-called Frans-Vlaanderen). The Dutch population to the north are linguistically and culturally allied to the Flemish. However, and crucially, the Dutch are wedded to their Protestant faith. The Flemish are equally fiercely tied to the Church of Rome. Indeed, when the Congress of Vienna in 1815 created the Kingdom of the Netherlands, conjoining the provinces of Flanders and Walloonia with Holland, there was nothing but friction. The Catholics were treated as second-class citizens until the Flemings and Walloons overcame their traditional enmity, coming together in revolt against their Dutch overlords in 1830 and winning their independence.

The result was not as the Flemings intended. Under the influence of the British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, the European Powers convened a conference and recognised the new state of Belgium in December 1830. This decision set the fledgling country on a road that would be forever marked by internecine strife between its component ‘tribes’. It would foment the rise of Flemish nationalism and was therefore a hugely important factor in the birth of the Langemarck and its predecessor Waffen-SS units. Coincidentally, it would also play a significant part in the story of Degrelle and his Walloon volunteers.

In the new state the minority Walloons soon came to dominate all aspects of government, commerce and culture. It was often said as a jibe against the Flemish that while the Walloons had culture, the Flemish had agriculture, and this Walloon sense of superiority translated into open contempt on their part for their Flemish fellow-countrymen and their way of life. French was made the official language of state and education, with Flemish marginalised. Entry and progress in the civil service, the armed forces and all the professions was dependant on speaking French, putting the Flemish at a huge disadvantage. Higher education was predominantly French-speaking. Indeed, it was not until 1930 that the University of Ghent – a city within Flanders – became the first Belgian university to accept Flemish as its first language.

The result was that Walloonia raced ahead economically to become the first continental European area to industrialise, and the Flemings fell even further behind in their own country. Even the new monarchy, the German Saxe-Coburgs, quickly became Gallicised and ignored their Flemish subjects. It was this tension at the very heart of Belgian life that would lead to the inevitable rise of Flemish nationalism.

II

Flanders: The Rise of Nationalism and the Extreme Right

Like so much else in the history of World War II, some of the reasons for the continuing rise of Flemish nationalism can be found in the mud and misery endured in the trenches of ‘the war to end all wars’. When the Imperial German Army rolled over the borders of Belgium on its way to Paris in its doomed attempt to fulfil the strategy of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914, the mood in the country was the same as across all of Europe and volunteers flocked to the colours to defend their homeland from Prussian aggression. For the thousands of Flemings who joined up, what they found in the royal Belgian Army disillusioned them so completely that when the war was eventually over the survivors would become the driving force behind a strident new movement that pushed Flemish nationalism to the forefront and set the groundwork for the eventual birth of the Langemarck.

Much of Flanders, and indeed most of Belgium, was occupied and administered during the war as a conquered territory by the Germans, only a small strip of Flanders in the west, near the coast and centred on the town of Ypres, remained free. The rest of Belgium was governed by the German General von Bissing, and then following his death in 1917 by his successor General von Falkenhausen. (Interestingly, during the Second World War, when Belgium was once again overrun, she would be ruled by another von Falkenhausen, the son of the World War I general.) The portions of Flanders that weren’t overrun by the Germans in 1914 then became the frontline of the titanic struggle fought in the west between the Great Powers.

References to ‘Flanders fields’ are well known to any reader of English literature of the First World War as the British faced the German Army across Flemish territory, and names such as Ypres, Menin and Passchendaele will forever link the area in the popular imagination to the muck and blood of the trenches.

The young Flemish farmhands and townsmen who either volunteered or were conscripted into the army found themselves in an alien environment where they were little more than cannon fodder. The mainstay of large parts of the army were Flemish infantrymen but the hierarchy was dominated by French-speaking Walloons who comprised the vast majority of the officer and NCO classes and who made little effort to hide their contempt for their Flemish soldiers. All orders were given in French and the Walloon officer corps showed little interest in learning the language of the men they commanded. The result was entirely predictable. Hordes of bewildered Fleming soldiers were led into battle by superiors that hadn’t even bothered to explain what they were meant to be doing. Consequently they were swiftly mown down, achieving very little. At each failed attack and costly defence the resentment of the Flemish soldiery grew deeper.

The ‘Council of Flanders’

Under von Bissing’s governorship, occupied Flanders was encouraged to go its own way politically, and in February 1917 some two hundred nationalist activists came together and set up the rather grandly titled ‘Council of Flanders’. Their initial intent was to provide Flanders with a new autonomous leadership, and over time to become a provisional government for a wholly independent country. The crowning act of this policy was a declaration of Flemish independence by the Council in December 1917.

This move was seen by their occupiers as a very large step too far – a reacton that should have been studied by every nationalist movement that allied itself with the Nazis in the Second World War. Von Bissing’s successor von Falkenhausen reined in the Council and then suspended it all together. The German ideology in the two World Wars may have been very different in many respects, but what remained the same was their unwillingness even to contemplate a situation where they were not total masters of Europe. In the First World War this badly affected the ability of the Central Powers to combat the Allies; in the Second it was a deciding factor of the outcome of the conflict. Combined Allied efforts triumphed over Nazi Germany’s refusal to do anything but attempt to crudely exploit its satellites and potential allies. This belief in the need for domination was Germany’s Achilles heel in both World Wars.

The Frontpartij – the birth of modern Flemish nationalism

As with many other men engaged in the brutal slaughter of the Western Front, there began to develop a political consciousness among some of the Flemish soldiery that was hitherto unknown. So many young men who prior to the War had no political views came to think deeply about the politicians and political systems that had led them to a world that accepted the deaths of thousands of the best and bravest for the gain of a few yards of mud and little else. Given the circumstances, it was inevitable that the Flemish political awakening would be nationalistic in character, prompting a desire for self-rule or outright independence. The soldiers initially called their movement the Frontbeweging (the Front Movement), and they met together and produced crude leaflets and news sheets to discuss politics and how they wanted their country to change after the War was over. The Frontbeweging soon metamorphosed into the Vlaamsche Front, but that name also fell by the wayside very quickly, and it came to be called simply the Frontpartij (the Front Party). It was the tenets as well as the members of this party that were to set the tone for Flemish nationalism for the rest of the century.

The First World War ends

The ending of the War brought revolution and near civil war to much of Europe, including Belgium’s eastern neighbour Germany. France was engulfed by severe political instability and sporadic street violence, but in the Low Countries of Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands there was comparative calm. The Dutch had remained neutral in the War and possibly the biggest issue they faced was the fallout from having the former Imperial German Kaiser Wilhelm II take refuge in their country following his abdication. But the Belgians had to come to terms with huge changes from the pre-War status quo.

Firstly, large swathes of her territory had been fought over and were physically devastated. Although they had not suffered the truly monumental casualties that characterised the war efforts of Germany, France, Britain and Russia, the Belgians had lost over 58,000 men killed and wounded with several thousand more missing believed dead. Secondly, the genie of Flemish nationalism was now well and truly out of the bottle. The members of the collaborationist Council of Flanders were arrested, tried and convicted to loud acclaim by the Walloon population, with 112 receiving lengthy prison terms and forty-five ringleaders being sentenced to death. In Flanders the process only served to stir up unrest and resentment, so much so that the government moved to defuse tensions by commuting the death sentences.

However, even the shadow of collaboration hanging over Flemish nationalism didn’t stop the Frontpartij from polling 57,422 votes in the 1919 elections and returning three members to the 202-seat Belgian parliament. By 1929 the party had gained significant strength and went on to triple its number of deputies on a popular vote of 132,962 in the election of that year. Although this was hardly a dominating political force, it must be remembered that the Socialists, the largest political party, only had some seventy seats in total. This steady growth in electoral support prompted an already jittery government to offer concessions and pass an amnesty law that released all the ex-Council members still being held in prison.

This time of growing success at the polls for Flemish nationalists saw the campaign to elect the former head of the Council, Dr August Borms, in a by-election for the Lower House in Antwerp in December 1928. Despite the fact that Dr Borms was still serving out his prison sentence at the time he was duly elected with a stunning majority of over 40,000!

Nationalism and the Extreme Right

Nationalism has a tendency to veer towards the Right of the political spectrum, and the more radical the nationalism the further right it seems to go. This is not true in every case – the IRA in both its Official and Provisional forms had long tied its nationalist goals to a socialist ethos – but more often than not the arena of nationalist activity embraces a love of order, traditional family values and quasi-military structure and ceremony. No nationalist gathering anywhere in the world would be complete without a sea of flags and devotees of the cause in bits and pieces of badly fitting, old cast-off uniforms, marching out of step. This outward devotion to order and discipline doesn’t seem to hold, however, when it comes to their own unity, and again if there is another dominant characteristic for every extreme rightist nationalist movement in existence is its seeming predilection for internal wrangling, splits, political feuds and dissipation of strength through a multitude of often minuscule parties and organisations.

Such was the fate of Flemish nationalism. As support for the moderate Frontpartij began to wither in the early 1930s so the movement shifted to the far Right and splintered. Several dozen parties appeared to take up the mantle of nationalism in Flanders but in the years prior to the break-out of the Second World War the political landscape was increasingly dominated by three wildly differing organisations, each of whom would play a key role in the Langemarck and its predecessors.

No Flemish Quisling

The history of collaboration in the Second World War threw up an array of characters that came to symbolise their own peoples’ alliance with the Germans. Vidkun Quisling in Norway, Joseph Darnand in France, Anton Mussert in the Netherlands and of course Léon Degrelle in Walloonia, were all leaders that embodied the collaboration of their respective countrymen. These men dominated their national agendas during the war, and the volunteers that their countries contributed to the Nazi war effort were heavily influenced by them.

Flemish collaboration could not be laid at the feet of one overarching figurehead; unlike all the other countries who collaborated with the Nazis, there were a plethora of leaders who more often than not competed amongst each other in the splintered politics of the nationalist Right. There was Joris Van Severen of Dinaso, Staf De Clercq of the VNV, Jef Van De Wiele of DeVlag and Reimond Tollenaere of the VNV’s paramilitary Black Brigade, all of whom were prominent figures. In another departure from the norm, of all these leaders only Van De Wiele survived the war to be prosecuted. Elsewhere, the key figures were brought to justice at the end of hostilities and died before a firing squad or at the end of the hangman’s rope. In the Flemish case Van Severen didn’t even have a chance to collaborate as he was shot by French gendarmes during Hitler’s 1940 invasion of France and the Low Countries, De Clercq died of a heart attack in 1942 and Tollenaere was killed in action on the Russian Front. There would be no single, reviled Quisling figure in the Flemish story.

The VNV, Dinaso and DeVlag

Without doubt the largest and most influential Flemish nationalist organisation was the Vlaamsch Nationaal Verbond (Flemish National Union), the VNV. Indeed, it would be from its party members and supporters that the lion’s share of the Flemish wartime volunteers would come. This party, formed in October 1933 from the amalgamation of a host of smaller parties, became the standard bearer for Flemish hopes of self-rule. It set up female and youth wings alongside its mainstream adult male membership and was openly paramilitary in its appearance and style. Led by a burly school teacher and ex-founding member of the Frontpartij, Gustave ‘Staf’ De Clercq, the VNV became the mainstay of Flemish nationalism. Staf De Clercq himself was forty-nine when he founded the party. Jeroom Gustave Theophile De Clercq was born on 16 September 1884 into a solid middle-class family from Everbeek in Brabant. As ‘De Leider’ (the VNV’s version of Nazi Germany’s Führer), the VNV expounded a doctrine of a ‘Greater Netherlands’ where the combined peoples of Flanders, Holland and the Frans-Vlaanderen would unite into a new country. This land would be strongly pro-Catholic (it must be remembered that the Dutch are firmly attached to their Protestant faith) as well as authoritarian, the intent being to found a fascist state based on the VNV’s motto of ‘Alles voor Vlaanderen, Vlaanderen voor Kristus’ (All for Flanders, Flanders for Christ). The VNV was highly complimentary about Nazi Germany, indeed the party adopted the Nazi raised arm salute, and very antagonistic towards the Walloons and the French.

The VNV had its own uniformed militia, of course, the grey-shirted Grijze Werfbrigade (Grey Defence Brigade) and a party newspaper, the Volk en Staat (People and State) edited by the ex-Council of Flanders member Antoon Meremans. Both the militia and the paper, like the party in general, were fervently pro-Nazi but interestingly only mildly anti-Semitic. This religious tolerance was something that was shared across the Low Countries with anti-Semitism being a relatively minor issue for both Léon Degrelle’s Walloon Rexists and Anton Mussert’s Dutch Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging, as well as for De Clercq’s Flemish nationalists.

The middle-aged Staf De Clercq was the most powerful of the nationalist Flemish leaders but he was not the most charismatic. That mantle went to the lawyer and ex-army officer Joris Van Severen. Born George Van Severen on 19 July 1894 in the village of Wakken in west Flanders, he was a bright student and won a place at Ghent University where he changed his Christian name to Joris, as he felt it was more ‘Flemish’, and became involved in nationalist student politics prior to the First World War. Having volunteered at the outbreak of hostilities, he served with distinction and was granted a commission as one of the very few Flemish officers in the army. He was an ardent supporter of the Frontpartij and when news of this reached his military superiors, it cost him his commission once the War was over . Undeterred, he went on to qualify as a lawyer and then stood for parliament, where he served as a deputy between 1921 and 1929. During that time Van Severen found that parliamentary democracy was not to his taste and he felt the Frontpartij’s moderate stance had no chance of delivering any radical change for Flanders.

Impressed by the rise of the Nazis in neighbouring Germany, Van Severen left the Front in October 1931 and set up his own organisation, the cumbersomely named Verbond van Dietsche Nationaal-Solidaristen (the Union of ‘Netherlandish’ National Solidarity – Dietsche has a wider meaning than purely Dutch). Unsurprisingly the full title was seldom used and the organisation was commonly referred to as the abbreviated Verdinaso, and then the even shorter Dinaso. Dinaso was not a registered political party as Van Severen had no interest in elected politics. His platform was an overtly fascist one of independence from Belgium – a much used Dinaso slogan was ‘Flemings, always remember that Belgium is not your fatherland’ – and a union of all Dutch-speaking peoples across the globe including South African and Dutch East Indies communities. Unlike the VNV it was also strongly anti-clerical. Hitler’s Nazis were openly cited as a model for Dinaso and, like the VNV, the raised-arm salute was adopted by the membership and huge emphasis was put on the organisation’s paramilitary wing, the 3,000 or so members of the green-shirted Dietsche Militanten Orden, the DMO (initially called the Dinaso Militie before its reincarnation in 1934 as the DMO – the Netherlandish Military Order). The DMO had its own motto, ‘Recht en Trouw’ – Right and Loyalty, which was also the name of its newspaper and they were led by Jozef ‘Jef’ François. He would later volunteer for the SS-Legion Flandern.

Dinaso was not a mass movement, but it was renowned for the discipline and devotion of its members. So much so that even after Van Severen announced a hugely significant political volte face in 1935, stating that Walloons and Flemings were of common Frankish descent and therefore Belgium was now indivisible as one nation, the movement didn’t disintegrate. Perhaps a third of members resigned in disgust and confusion but the rest stayed with Van Severen until the outbreak of war dramatically intervened.

The last, and most extreme, of the three major Flemish nationalist organisations that influenced the Langemarck and its predecessors was the Duitschen-Vlaamsche Arbeidsgemeenschap – the German-Flemish Working Community, abbreviated to DeVlag (The Flag). Ostensibly a harmless ‘cultural’ body set up in 1935 and designed to promote cross-border artistic and linguistic fraternity and contacts between Flemish and German artists and luminaries, it was in reality an extremist pro-Nazi political pressure group. Its leader was the fanatical Jef Van De Wiele, who envisaged himself as nothing less than the Führer of an enlarged province of Flanders that sat within the borders of the German Reich. Very much like its rival Dinaso, DeVlag was not a political party but rather an ‘order’ of those nationalists dedicated to the overthrow of the Belgian state and its incorporation into a National Socialist Europe.

These three bodies dominated the landscape of Flemish nationalism before the Second World War. There were other fringe parties, most of them rabidly anti-Semitic as well as openly pro-Nazi or pro-fascist, but their numbers were tiny and their influence negligible. However, the major point is that Flemish nationalism was a genuine mass movement and not just the political home of a small number of malcontents. The VNV share of the Flemish vote in the last election before the war was approaching 10 per cent, to give some idea of relative popular strengths at the same time in neighbouring France the 250,000-strong far-right PPF was polling less than 5 per cent. Not only was the nationalist movement one of mass appeal in ‘Germanic’ Flanders but it was also veering steadily right. It was pro-German, paramilitary and authoritarian in nature, and in essence it was tailor-made to be used by the Waffen-SS for the recruitment of volunteers. In these fertile conditions the Langemarck had laid in gestation for a long time; only one defining event was required and it would be born. That event was the onset of war.

Two names to remember

The story of Langemarck is more than the story of hosts of competing Flemish nationalist parties and organisations and their struggle for power and recognition in a state that ignored them. It is also more than the phenomenon of the Waffen-SS legionary movement. It is at heart a story of many thousands of individual Flemings who made a conscious decision to join their erstwhile conquerors in wearing the uniform of a body that was to be later condemned at the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal as a ‘criminal organisation’, whose members of whatever nationality were to be denied the civil rights afforded to their defeated compatriots in the rest of the Wehrmacht.

But how did they make the momentous decision to join? The Langemarck came into being late in the War when the tide had already turned decisively against Nazi Germany, but the men at its heart had been in German uniform for years by that stage. The Flemish saw their country overrun by a military whirlwind that was epitomised by the dashing élan of the premier Waffen-SS formations, and when given the opportunity to join that same elite, they took it. The horrors of the concentration camps and the utter brutality of the Eastern Front were some way in the future when the seeds of the Langemarck were sown. Who were they then, these Flemings who flocked to a foreign flag, and what was their story?

When Remy Shrijnen made it onto Waffen-SS recruiting posters for his exceptional bravery at the front late on in the war, the figure that stared out at potential recruits was not the archetypal model of Teutonic manhood – a blue-eyed, blond haired giant he certainly was not! Indeed, Schrijnen stood only 5’ 4’’ tall (approximately 164cm) in his stockinged feet, when the minimum required for the Waffen-SS at the beginning of the war was 5’ 9’’ (Himmler’s height). He was of fairly slight build and had an intense, serious air that never left him. Born into a working class family with strong nationalist roots in the town of Kemptich on Christmas Eve 1921, the young Remy was one of eight children. The Shrijnen’s were a happy, close-knit family, intensely proud of their ‘Flemishness’ and their feeling of kinship with the Germans over the border. From the start young Remy was imbued with the politics of Flemish nationalism, indeed his railway worker father was an early member of the Frontpartij and then its successor the VNV. After completing his secondary education Remy’s future before the war held out the prospect of nothing more dramatic than a lifetime of manual work and street-level political activism, but that was all to change in the summer of 1940.

Another young man destined to play a pivotal role in the Langemarck and the story of the Flemish volunteers was Georg D’Haese. Born in Lede in Flanders on 4 August 1922 the young D’Haese was also the offspring of Flemish nationalist parents. The well-educated D’Haese pursued German Studies in his higher education, but the defining influence of his youth was his belief in the cause of Flemish nationalism and membership of the VNV, a membership which he continued throughout the War. His firm belief in the cause of Flemish nationalism was to remain with him throughout and was to have unexpected consequences years later in his service career. As an individual, D’Haese was artistic, intelligent and popular. A smiling figure, he was always ready with a joke, and though mature for his age he lacked the overtly serious air of Schrijnen.

III

1940: Blitzkrieg and Belgian Collapse