Léon Degrelle, Belgian SS officer (d. 1994)
Léon Joseph Marie Ignace Degrelle (French: [dəgʁɛl]; 15 June 1906 – 31 March 1994) was a Belgian Walloon politician and Nazi collaborator. He rose to prominence in Belgium in the 1930s as the leader of the Rexist Party (Rex). During the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, he enlisted in the German army and fought in the Walloon Legion on the Eastern Front. After the collapse of the Nazi regime, Degrelle escaped and went into exile in Francoist Spain, where he remained a prominent figure in neo-Nazi politics.
Degrelle was raised Catholic and during his years at university became involved in politics through journalism. In the early 1930s, he took control of a Catholic publishing house that morphed under his leadership into the Rexist Party. Rex contested the 1936 Belgian general election and won 11 percent of the vote, but slipped into irrelevance by the start of World War II. Degrelle began to collaborate with Nazi Germany as the war began and was detained by Belgian and then French authorities. After the German invasion of Belgium in mid-1940, Degrelle was released and began to change Rex into a mass movement to curry the favor of the Nazis. In 1941, Degrelle organized and himself joined and fought in the Walloon Legion, a unit of the German Army and, after 1943, the Waffen-SS. His performance in 1944 at the Cherkassy pocket and subsequent decorations turned him into a model for foreign collaborators.
Following the liberation of Belgium in late 1944, Degrelle was stripped of his citizenship and was sentenced to death in absentia. Early the next year, he fled to Spain, where with the help of the Spanish government he went into hiding from Belgian authorities in August 1946. In the 1960s, Degrelle returned to public life as a neo-Nazi and gained great influence in far-right European circles. He published several books and papers glorifying the Nazi regime and denying the Holocaust.