FRANCE | Waffen SS volunteer and Front National (FN) pioneer Castrillo dies, 89

From Jean-Yves Camus in Paris Tuesday, 14 February 2012, 16:45

Born in 1922, the son of a Spanish entrepreneur who supported the fascist Phalange, Castrillo joined Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français at its inception in 1936. During the war, he belonged to the pro-Pétain youth movement, Chantiers de la Jeunesse, then at the end of 1942, joined the Nazi Schutzkommando der Organisation Todt, serving in Norway and then in Memel until the end of 1943. After a brief return to France, he joined the Waffen SS Division Charlemagne in 1944 and fought until 1945 on the Baltic coast. In 1946, he was sentenced to 4 years in jail. Castrillo was one of the former Nazi collaborators (most of them former Waffen SS men) who, in 1967, founded the monthly newspaper Militant. His last article was published in the autumn 2011 issue. Militant was the internal bulletin of the Front National in the 1970s, representing the fascist, Holocaust-denying and racialist wing of the party led by François Duprat. In 1981, however, the Militant crew fell-out with the “modernist” wing of FN and left the party. Castrillo launched the Parti Nationaliste Français, which is still active. He was also a regular speaker at the annual commemoration of Robert Brasillach, the fascist novelist executed in 1945. Castrillo was one of the very few survivors of the pre-War extreme-right who were later members of the FN. He is survived by François Brigneau, 92, a former Milice member who became a vice-president of the FN and by Jean Madiran, aged 91, a former Action française intellectual who, in the 1980s, founded the Catholic traditionalist daily paper Présent, supporting the FN until 1998.