THE TAPE

In 1985 Albert Folens was interviewed by a journalist from the Sunday Tribune who had been alerted to the fact that Albert's wartime experience was a lot more than he pretended. It was possibly known at the time that Albert had been involved in the Flemish Legion, a supposedly independent regiment sponsored by the Waffen SS (the Nazi party's paramilitary wing).

What was certainly not widely known was that Albert had worked for the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi intelligence service, albeit in a purely desk job translating newspaper reports and keeping an eye on potentially subversive anti-German Flemish authors.

To give the journalist his due, he did manage to get an admission of this from Albert but it fell well short of the scoop about the brutal Nazi war criminal he had expected.

His editor refused to print his story on the basis of lack of evidence and disproportionate grief to Albert's family and damage to his business. The interview was, at least in part, taped and the tape surfaced some twenty years later in an RTÉ television programme which did paint Albert as a brutal Nazi war criminal, without a shred of evidence to back this up.

Shortly after the interview, the journalist did attempt to access official Belgian records but was refused as these were private.

Following the interview, Albert asked for a copy of the tape to which he was entitled but he never got it. His fear was that it would be doctored. No doubt he also felt that it could be used selectively against him. This was why he insisted on an agreement with the Tribune & the journalist that, were it or any part of it to be used, he would have an immediate right of reply commensurate with the use made of the interview.

In the event very little of the tape was used in the tv programme. This was very surprising and suggests that there was not much else in it or that using it would reflect as much on the journalist concerned as on Albert.

The tape extracts which were used are reproduced here with commentary:

AF tape [Albert Folens]: So how come you are going to have any comprehension for what I have done during the war? So how can you understand that we cooperate whole-heartedly with the Germans. We can only get rescue from the Germans.

This is a straightforward explanation by Albert of why a significant number of Flemings were hoping for a German victory in the war. They had been persecuted by their own Belgian state which had attempted to suppress their culture and language and the Germans had promised them some degree of independence should Germany win the war.

AF tape: So the Flemish Legion was formed on the understanding that we would have our own Flemish Legion, our own insignia and everything would be independent.

After Germany declared war on Russia (June 1941) it realised it was going to run short of troops to fight on two fronts at once. So it set up semi-independent volunteer army units in the occupied territories to get recruits. In the case of the Flemish Legion, the Germans promised that volunteers would fight only on the eastern front (against the Russians and atheistic communism), that they would not wear Waffen SS insignia, that they would be commanded by Flemish speaking officers, and that their Catholic religion would be respected. This is what Albert is referring to here. As it happened, the Germans systematically broke these promises one after the other as the war progressed. But by then Albert had already been repatriated to Brussels due to ill health. It should also be remembered that, though Albert trained for combat with the Legion, he never made the eastern front and so did not actually bear arms against the King's ally (Russia).

AF tape: And gradually they started to incorporate us into the Waffen SS.

This is a reference to what is explained above.

AF tape: I still think that the Americans are stupid and criminal to have asked for a complete surrender. But no, to please Stalin they wanted a complete surrender and a complete vacuum in Middle Europe, so that the Hungarians and the Czechs and so on are now under Russian domination. And that's the stupidity of the Roosevelt. A sick man with a sick mind and ignorant.

Albert's remark here is grossly misrepresented in the tv programme where the impression is given that Albert thought any resistance to Hitler was misplaced, thus making him a Nazi. Albert here is criticising the manner in which the war was ended. His argument is that seeking a negotiated settlement rather than demanding an unconditional surrender could have meant less of central and eastern Europe ending up under Soviet control. Whether this was an option or not is open to dispute but it was certainly not an isolated view at the time. The WWI treaty of Versailles, with its insistence on unconditional German surrender and severe German reparations, is credited with contributing to the rise of Hitler in the first place. And in modern times, the US dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is questioned as it is claimed that the same result could have been obtained with the stroke of a pen by the US dropping their insistence on Japan shedding the Emperor.

AF tape: So that in the SD I was in Abteilung, or in department, 3C B that was “lectoral”. Now the whole Abteilung III consisted of no police work whatsoever. It was only keeping an eye on the future development of Flanders and of Belgium. Gathering information on people who might be useful for this, and for that, and for everything.

Albert is here explaining what his role was in the Sicherheitsdienst and recently accessed official documents show that this is precisely what he was doing. No more and no less.

So, to sum up, Albert's admission of his role in the Flemish Legion and in the SD was certainly a scoop. Unfortunately, the journalist was not content to leave it at that. He expected to reveal a brutal Nazi war criminal and that's what he was going to get, by hook or by crook. It took him twenty years but by God did he get what he wanted and with a vengeance.

Albert's admissions do not make him a brutal Nazi war criminal.

It is also questionable whether the interview itself could be justified by the trauma caused to a man already severely traumatised by his wartime experiences and who had attempted to put them behind him and start a new life in Ireland.

In 2016 the journalist in question was described by RTÉ as "an informed journalist and author of the highest integrity" and who am I to question the judgement of such an august national institution.

I would, however, remind you that it was RTÉ that broadcast this scandalous and obscene programme in the first place.

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