The Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism (Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchevisme, or LVF) was one of the Wehrmacht’s many foreign supplements recruited to fight on the Eastern Front.
They were French (kind of like me) but were supposed to swear an oath to Adolf Schicklgruber, pledging to serve the Third Reich until the Axis won the war. (They purportedly even had their own theme song, though I’ve found awfully little evidence to substantiate that.) They are most notable for being the only Wehrmacht foreign formation that took part in the Axis’s advance on Moscow.
What was the basis for this legion?
In July 1941 four ultraright parties took part in the founding of the future legion: Parti Populaire Français (PPF) of Jacques Doriot, Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR) of Eugène Deloncle, Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP) of Marcel Déat, and Marcel Bucard’s Mouvement Franciste. On 27 August already the first volunteers arrived in Versailles, at the Borgnis-Desbordes barracks.
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Very often, legionnaires who were not qualified to do so took on command duties in the subunits. This even reached the point where officers were forced to pay great attention to tasks that the junior commanders in the platoons should have been dealing with.
There were not enough experienced commanders; the attempts to recruit in the Army of the Armistice had failed, and in addition, the military cadres were unwilling to serve under the command of such people as Doriot — political leaders, but not military ones. Most of the officer corps had no other motivation apart from money.
(It is a bit unusual to compensate ‘volunteers’ with money, but whatever.)
Naturally, their superiors gave them a good dose of standard antisocialist tosh:
At 10:30 a.m. on 5 October the first two battalions took their oath to Adolf Hitler. The ceremony began with speeches that flowed smoothly into a dual Protestant and Catholic service. Conducting the latter was the chaplain of the LVF, Monsignor Jean de Mayol de Lupé, who stated: ‘God will preserve the defenders of Christian civilization’.
After the church service regimental commander Labonne spoke, stressing that Germany was fighting for civilization and a ‘new Europe’ against the ‘eastern threat’. He concluded his address with the words, ‘Legionnaires, long live Germany and long live France!’
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Labonne spoke of the legionnaires in passionate terms, describing them as heirs of Godefroi de Bouillon. He stressed in particular the ‘Asiatic’ and ‘bestial’ nature of the Red Army and described Stalin as ‘Attila, the scourge of God’.
(The comparison to Attila the Hun is worth noting. Likening Joseph Stalin to Adolf Schicklgruber wouldn’t have worked—for obvious reasons—so instead, what the Fascists did was liken Stalin to Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan: Asian commanders infamous for their brutality and widely perceived as serious threats to the very concept of Western civilization.)
Most of the time, these antisocialists were poorly trained for warfare:
The inadequately trained legionnaires retraced the same road toward Moscow that the Grande Armée had followed almost 130 years earlier.
Sacrificing the training of the soldiers, the French politicians rushed the legion into battle; it seemed to them that the final thrust against Moscow was not far off and that if the legion spent more time under instruction it might arrive too late, causing the whole project of collaboration to fail. Paris parties were anxious to see results as quickly as possible; come what may, the legion was to fight the Red Army.
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Due to the shortage of young cadres, the LVF was staffed with older officers who had served out their terms. When the officers were recruited to the legion there was no commission to check their capabilities, and they had received confirmation of their rank almost immediately.
The officers were incapable of providing effective leadership and were inadequately trained; such education as they had received dated from the period around 1914 and was outmoded. Command of the regiment was in the hands of officers who regarded battle as a sort of military parade.
Pictured: a fifteen‐year‐old boy in the LVF. Although youths were no doubt the minority of members, it is still quite disturbing that they were permitted at all.
Aside from the want for training, this legion had other problems. For example, larceny:
Theft flourished in the legion, with the officers frequently taking part. In Deba they ‘behaved like common criminals’, running an officers’ casino that clearly brought in shady income. They secretly sold wine to the soldiers that had been provided by the Germans, something that was known to all but about which everyone kept silent. […] Thievery continued to flourish in the legion, and soldiers and officers lost their belongings.
Infighting:
Doriot and the members of the PPF wove constant intrigues, with the result that the most burdensome tasks fell on the members of the competing party, the MSR. A considerable number of MSR members served in the I Battalion, while the II Battalion consisted mainly of members of the PPF, and the 13th and 14th companies were almost entirely under Doriot’s control. Worse still, Doriot gained ascendancy over Labonne and saw to it the decisions that were put into effect were those that suited his, Doriot’s, ends.
Underequipment:
The […] weapons they were given were of low quality. […] The Germans did not provide trucks, and the troops proceeded on foot. The heavy weapons, equipment, and ammunition were transported using horse‐drawn carts, and the remaining equipment had to be carried by the soldiers themselves.
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In one of the houses a fire broke out, and a whole platoon lost all its arms and equipment in the blaze. […] Heading the column, Hugla took a wrong turn and together with his soldiers wandered throughout the night, losing a number of his horses during the march. […] Some soldiers did not even have overcoats, some did not have soles on their boots and fewer than half had gloves.
Insufficient nourishment:
Food supplies were inadequate and of unsatisfactory quality. […] Another five legionnaires vanished without trace and died of exhaustion and hunger. […] They had no provisions and were eating their horses; First Lieutenant Laurin of the 13th Company told Fontenoy that of 130 horses, no more than 30 remained.
Unhealthiness:
Because of an almost complete lack of facilities, hygiene was poor, and lice began to appear while the troops were still in the camp. […] Individual legionnaires could not endure the situation, and a number of men committed suicide. […] Almost immediately, dysentery broke out in the columns of Frenchmen, and the disease affected as many as a third of the personnel. The legionnaires were also suffering from lice.
Temperature:
During the nights, the thermometer dropped as low as minus 40°. The number of soldiers suffering from severe frostbite mounted. Often, the frost made weapons unserviceable; machine guns and rifles jammed constantly, and as one of the soldiers wrote, ‘men felt betrayed by their own weapons’. […] ‘The dressing stations were full of wounded, and especially, of severely frostbitten men who displayed hands as white as wax, and rigid legs with feet blackened by irreversible putrefaction that ate through the flesh to the bones’.
Well, it’s called ‘the cold war’ for a reason.
The conditions that these miserable fucks had to endure were so severe that it’s almost easy to feel sorry for them. With all that being said, it would be an exaggeration to summarise these ~1,200 antisocialists as harmless:
[W]hatever the case, the LVF had reached the front and now had to prove itself in battle. […] Lieutenant‐General von Gablenz tried immediately to help the Frenchmen. The division gave them horses and carts to replace those that had been lost or that had lagged behind, and additional training exercises, conducted by German officers fluent in French, were organized for the artillerymen and antitank crews.
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On 25 November three Soviet soldiers surrendered to the Frenchmen; the prisoners stated that in the next few days the units in which they had served were to go on the attack.
On 27 November the first battle took place. The Russians carried out a reconnaissance in force in the sector defended by the 1st Company of the legionnaires. The attack was beaten off without losses to the French side, while two Russians were killed.
However, the encounter did not pass off without incident; the 1st Company expended 12,000 cartridges, and its commander, Captain Leclerq, who had recently been promoted to Major, urged that the positions be abandoned, as a result of which he was removed from his post. Major Planard de Villeneuve was appointed to head the I Battalion.
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Moving across a field, the 1st Company headed toward a forest that was not far off. Suddenly, the enemy opened a withering fire on the French ranks, and the Frenchmen fell on the snow, several of them mortally wounded.
The legionnaires opened a return fire, and the machine gun and mortar subunits that were supporting the attack managed to suppress a number of weapons emplacements. A German artillery observer who witnessed the battle wrote of ‘a courageous, but absolutely idiotic attack by the French volunteers, as in the times of Frederick the Great!’
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According to the count made by the 7th Division, the 1st and 2nd Companies had lost 12 men killed and 55 wounded. A small number of Red Army soldiers had been captured, and 12 dugouts had been seized along with three machine guns. It was noted that the Russians had lost numerous men and that the French officers and soldiers had ‘fought well’.
In addition to this, the Third Reich reformed this legion in 1942 (principally through Fascist eugenics):
The [Third Reich] sought to reduce the number of political activists from French parties and also remove German nationals who had earlier served in the French Foreign Legion.
To avoid offending and alienating their allies of the day before, everything was carried out as far as possible beneath the guise of rejecting men on the basis of medical evidence. A very significant date in the history of the LVF was 3 March 1942, when most of the dismissals took place. By mid‐March the regimental commander Labonne had also lost his post.
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The [Third Reich] forced everyone, including participants in the battles near Diutkovo, to undergo the course of military training a second time. In April 1942 the Recruitment and Training Detachment of the 638th French Infantry Regiment was formed.
In the spring and summer of 1942 the French battalions were divided up and sent to fight against partisans in Belarus, where they were placed under the command of the 221st and 286th Security Divisions.
So, to keep it simple:
Militarily, the legion can be numbered among the Wehrmacht’s least successful foreign formations.
In 1941, more legionnaires were lost to frostbite alone than to enemy fire, in fact. I’m sure that they all must have been overjoyed by the fact that they didn’t have to live under communism, as they froze to death and the life went out in their eyes.
For a more comprehensive analysis, see Joining Hitler’s Crusade, chapter 11.