Letter To the Pope on His Visit to Auschwitz

Leon Degrelle, who pre-war was a charismatic political leader from the French part of Belgium, in 1941 joined 400,000 other foreign volunteers in the Wehrmacht and then the elite Waffen-SS to fight Stalin's Red Army on the terrifying Eastern Front. He was the most highly decorated soldier in the million-man Waffen-SS. Degrelle and his Belgian volunteers led a critical Waffen-SS breakout from Soviet encirclement at Cherkassy in 1944 that helped save the whole German central front. Hitler personally pinned on him the Knight's Cross [Ritterkreuz] of the Iron Cross, to which later Oak Leaves were added.