His father, Edouardĭegrelle, was a prosperous brewer who had immigrated to Belgium from France five years earlier, provoked by a French "anti-clerical" governments's expulsion of the Jesuit order. Leon Degrelle was born on IS June 1906 at Bouillon, on the French border, in the Belgian province of Luxembourg.
Furthermore, both American and English readers of the present-day have little feel for, or knowledge of, the essentials of Continental history so important for understanding Degrelle and his movement, notwithstanding a vast influx of refugee scholars to American and British universities in consequence of national revolutionary developments throughout the Europe of the 1930's and 1940's. It was not for nothing that his fellow Walloon volunteers jokingly referred to him as "Modest the First, Duke of _Burgundy, ',' on the front. Degrelle's life story is little known in England and America, and the General is often not disposed to enlighten us on many salient details.
Yet a few preliminary remarks are necessary to set the stage for the great drama of the Wallonian:~eroes ,n the East. A master stylist in French, the author of more than twenty books, with an incomparable breadth of life experience and culture~' Degrelle as actor and chronicler of the anti-Soviet epic needs little assistance or elucidation from any chair-bound academic or editor. In Campaign in Russia Degrelle deals almost exclusively with his service on the German Eastern Front in the great European crusade against Communism in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the other territories which then languished, and still languish, under the despotic rule of the masters of the Soviet Empire. Publicist, political leader, soldier, Catholic, man of the West, Leon Degrelle compels our attention: long slandered by distortion or omission by the powers which seek to control our thought, now he speaks to us in our own language. For the fIrst time the majority of English speakers in America, Great Britain, and other English-speaking countries will have the chance to make up their own minds about a public fIgure who for over fIfty years has been in his native country, Belgium, and abroad, one of the most admired as well as one of the most reviled and traduced fIgures of the century.
9~e of the great: men of this or any century begins to tell his story in English. INTRODUCTION With this translation of Leon Degrelle's Front de /'est. CAMPAIGN IN RUSSIA THE WAFFEN SS ON mE EASTERN FRONTĬAMPAIGN IN RUSSIA THE WAFFEN SS ON THE EASTERN FRONT