Undercover Colonialism? Southeast and East-Central European Mercenaries in the French Foreign Legion and Their Repatriation and Reception in the Socialist Bloc, 1945–53

This paper looks at a diverse group of people, including Jewish refugees, Nazis fleeing persecution, and ‘ordinary men’ from Southeast and East-Central Europe who ended up in the French Foreign Legion in the 1940s and became active participants in the re-colonization of Indochina after the Second World War. With a transnational focus on the GDR, Romania, Hungary, and Vietnam, this presentation is based on the analysis of archives in four states with sources including memoirs, consular reports, the papers of the French colonial administration, and most importantly, the trial proceedings of captured legionaries in Stalinist Hungary, recently made researchable at the State Security Archive. I look at three interrelated issues more closely. First, how the Foreign Legion experience of many East Europeans, including their participation in genocide in Southeast Asia, became forcibly silenced in public life, as it complicated the self-understanding of these regimes as supporters of colonial liberation movements and victims of prior colonialism and imperialism. Second, through a case study of mercenaries who returned to Stalinist Hungary, I explore how these former legionaries participated in the 1956 revolution, formed support networks, and from the 1960s onward, ostentatiously showed off the fruits of their legionary service and French pensions. Finally, I look at how the participation of East European foreign legionaries in French recolonization efforts compared to state-sponsored peacekeeping interventions at the end of the Vietnam War (1973-1975) and efforts to emphasize socialist solidarity between Vietnam and the socialist states of Eastern Europe. The presentation also touches on broader problems posed by the French Foreign Legion for the historiography of the Cold War, socialist Eastern Europe, and decolonization; these include the role of ideology (or lack thereof) in this modern form of mercenary service or the issue of state sovereignty during the Cold War.