Peter David Orr - Léon Degrelle's Escape to Spain

Léon Degrelle's Escape to Spain

By Peter David Orr

Degrelle’s flight from Norway to Spain sheds light on one of the last "outs" available to Hitler to get to Spain in the closing days of WW2. Degrelle's escape route on night of May 7/8 largely mirrored one arranged by Albert Speer and Werner Baumbach and intended for Hitler's use, which would have taken him from the Isle of Sylt (Northernmost Germany on the Danish border) to Spain. We can learn from Degrelle's flight what might have been for Hitler, if he hadn't chosen an alternative route.

The infamous Belgian collaborator and Waffen-SS commander was involved in intense defensive actions designed to blunt the Soviet drive to Berlin from the northeast. In the midst of what Degrelle later described as a hopeless and rapidly disintegrating situation, he was driven two hours south and met with Hitler in Berlin. Was he ordered to come? If so, by whom? Perhaps he came on his own initiative. We just don't know. In the decades following the war, Degrelle never spoke or wrote about that aspect of this visit.

In fact, we only know about his last face to face with Hitler because he admitted it shortly after he his plane crash landed in Spain. Based on Degrelle's account, the meeting took place over lunch on April 23, 1945. The assumption is that this meeting took place in the Führerbunker, but Degrelle didn't mention the specific location, so his account does not preclude a meeting in the command post bunker of the Zoo Flak Tower complex - where this author is convinced that Hitler went when Goebbels moved in to the Führerbunker late on the night of April 22. In any case, Hitler told Degrelle to head north to Denmark and that he would be doing likewise in the near future.

The Flight

On May 7, 1945, at 6:00 PM, Degrelle met with Dr. Terboven and General Rediess at the Prince Olaf Palace in Oslo, Norway. Terboven explained that although he had failed to get the Swedish government to grant Degrelle and his assistant Robert du Welz asylum, “At the airport at the foot of the mountain there is still a private plane. It belongs to Minister Speer”. Then Terboven added, “Do you want to take your chances and try to reach Spain tonight?”

The oft-repeated story that Degrelle’s flight to Spain was piloted by Albert Speer's personal pilot, Erich Adam, is wrong. This error is partially due to Degrelle's above-mentioned report of what Terboven said to him on May 7. Terboven was unaware that Speer oversaw "outs" for the Nazi hierarchy, so he didn't know that Speer could assign any one among a more than two dozen planes and their crews to anyone he pleased. Terboven assumed that the plane was Speer's personal plane; it wasn't. Degrelle simply repeated Terboven's erroneous assumption.

"Well", the reader might ask, "How do you know it wasn't Speer's personal plane and pilot?"

That's a great question, considering Albert Speer did have an Heinkel 111 at his disposal - apart from the planes he and Baumbach assigned for potential "outs". Speer's planes (he reportedly used an He-111, a FW-200, an ME-108 Taifun, and a Si-204D-1) all bore civilian plane fuselage codes (Stammkennzeichen). Civilian planes bore codes that were four capital letters; whereas military planes were 4-digit number and letter combinations. On the left, below, is the best photograph available of the He-111 which carried Degrelle to Spain. Look at the code. On the right, below, is Speer's He-111 (CN+??). Later in the war, this plane's code was changed to TQ+MU.

Degrelle's plane - Playa La Concha at San Sebastian, Gipuzkoa, Spain

Speer (far right) watching his He-111 being loaded in 1944 for a flight to the Russian front.

Furthermore, we know who Speer's pilots were: Kurt Glaubitz, Alfred Eich, and Erich Adam. None of these men piloted the plane that took Degrelle to Spain.

In his memoirs, Leon Degrelle omits important background information concerning his escape flight to Spain, but thanks to British Intelligence, we know the key missing detail. They intercepted and decrypted a radio message by "Reichskommissar of Norway, Josef Terboven, in Oslo, to Admiral Dönitz at Flensburg". Terboven sent this message two days prior to Degrelle's flight to Spain:

"Walloon Führer SS Degrelle has just arrived in Oslo. He states that with your consent he is to be taken to Spain or Japan in a submarine. Please confirm whether a submarine is to be placed at his disposal. Heil Hitler."

Two days prior would have been May 5, 1945. Notice Terboven isn't asking for a plane for Degrelle. Why?

Degrelle had missed his flight.

This brings us back to what Hitler told Degrelle in Berlin on April 23. He encouraged Degrelle to "fly north to Denmark" to catch a plane and he told Degrelle that he would be doing the same in the near future. Of course, Degrelle never revealed where, specifically, in Denmark, Hitler told him to go. Nevetheless, a picture can be pieced together.

Speer and Baumbach were using Tønder, Denmark, to facilitate "outs" for Himmler, Hitler, and others. This all grass emergency airfield was established in March of '45 at a former WWI Zeppelin base. Tønder was a logistics hub where fleeing Nazis could obtain fake ID and papers and then hop a flight, train or car to the their "out".

Degrelle was supposed to go to Tønder and catch a flight to Spain from an airfield (Fliegerhorst Westerland) on the Isle of Sylt. However, this flight departed on April 30. Hitler was supposed to be on that plane but selected a different "out" due to hostile air traffic. The flight that Degrelle could have taken from the Isle of Sylt flew to Spain without Hitler on board. Speer had called and cancelled the flight but the pilots and SS-officers who had been waiting, decided to go to Spain anyway. The pilot and crew had no idea that Hitler (or Degrelle) had been scheduled to be on that flight. This plane departed on April 30 was Luftwaffe General Friedrich Christiansen's personal plane - a DC-3 captured during the invasion of the Netherlands. Christiansen's plane had been fitted with extra fuel tanks in its fuselage, and capable of making it to any airfield in Spain. The plane was painted to resemble an American Air Medical Transport. It's departure forced Speer to improvise for Degrelle. He arranged for a different plane; one in Oslo, Norway.

It was around 11:00 PM on May 7 that they boarded. Degrelle later described his pilot as a “magnificent frizzy-haired” fellow “with hands as big as flippers, decorated with the German Cross in Gold.”

The crew and passengers of the He-111 were:

Pilot—Albert Duhinger

Navigator/Mechanic—Gerhard Stride

Crew—Georg Kubel, Benno Epner

Passengers—Leon Degrelle and Robert du Welz

The pilot and navigator calculated that the He-111 had just enough range to make it to San Sebastian, Spain, provided they flew very high to conserve fuel. There was no time to obscure the Nazi German markings on the plane.

They took off from Oslo around midnight, using only a map of southern Norway and a “minuscule map of France that came from a pocket atlas".

In his memoirs, Degrelle asks a rhetorical question:

“Who would imagine that one of the Reich’s planes would come out of the North Sea from along the coast of Scotland? We had taken care, in truth, to use this stratagem, first straight toward England, then approaching the European continent as if we were coming from British shores”.

This first portion of the flight went well, but a storm forced them to fly at a lower altitude than they had planned. This caused them to be “harassed by searchlights” around 1:30 AM as they flew over Antwerp and Lille. It was around that time when Allied observers contacted them by radio, asking, “Who are you? What are you doing?” Their only response was to go faster. Degrelle vividly recalls approaching Paris, “a very low altitude”. He was even able to see particular streets and squares. Next, they flew over Beauce, the Loire, the Vendee, and on to the Atlantic coast, along which at 5:00 AM they reached the Gironde estuary, and then flew over Arcachon, Landes, Lake Biscarosse - sighting the Pyrenees in the distance at daybreak. On what must have been fumes, they flew over Biarritz, Saint-Jean-de Luz, and the mouth of the Bidassoa, before gliding in “at roof level”, in fact, “grazing several”, before crash landing on the beach at San Sebastian.

Degrelle in Spain

He sustained serious injuries to his shoulder. A Spanish reporter interviewed him from his hospital bed, and the story (see newspaper clipping, below) made quite a splash internationally. There was emmense pressure to expell Degrelle from Spain and send him to Belgium to face charges of treason, but Spain’s Falangist dictator Francisco Franco craftily helped him elude extradition, saw to it that he had gainful employment, and granted him Spanish citizenship under the pseudonym Jose Leon Ramirez Reina. Duchess Louise de Valencia opened her country estate in Merida to him. Thereafter, Degrelle somehow managed to own an elaborate castle-like estate in Constantina, Spain, called "La Carlina", and a villa on the Costa del Sol in Torremolinos, where he entertained Albert Speer several times following Speer's release from Spandau Prison. The post-war relationship between Degrelle and Speer has largely been ignored, but in 1973 Speer even bought a beautiful house near Degrelle's property with the killing he made off of the first edition of his memoirs, Inside the Third Reich.

Whereas Speer tricked useful idiots into believing he was a repentant former Nazi, some even calling him "the good German", Degrelle was an unrepentant supporter of Hitler and the Nazi regime to the end of his life in 1994. Of course, after meeting with Speer, Degrelle never again mentioned his last meeting in Berlin with Hitler, instead parroting Speer's version with a twist: "Hitler died a hero in Berlin", as a "the greatest defender of Western Civilization", despite being "betrayed by almost everyone".

Degrelle in Spain, 1949.

Degrelle relaxing at his impressive "Finca" in Constantina, Spain.

The name of his estate, "La Carlina", was a tribute to his wife, Jeanne-Marie - whose nickname was "Carlina".