Bezen Perrot

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Flag of the Bezen Perrot (Perrot Unit)

The Bezen Perrot (formerly Bezen Kadoudal) was a Breton collaborationist force during the Nazi occupation of France that grew from the earlier Lu Brezhon militia. Led by Célestin Lainé and Alan Heusaff, as many as 70 to 80 people joined the ranks of the Bezen Perrot, or "Perrot Units", at one point or another. They fought under German uniform and command, as the Bretonische Waffenverband der SS.

Before the war Lainé had created the organization Gwenn ha du as a Breton nationalist direct action unit modelled on the IRA. The activists behind this were defined as members of a group called Service Spécial. This unit had formed the basis of an elite militant group affiliated to to the nationalist militia Bagadou Stourm.

At the end of World War II Lainé decided to separate from Bagadou Stourm and integrate with the SS in the face of the assassination of several leading figures of the Breton cultural movement. One of those assassinated was priest and Breton language defender Abbé Perrot, killed by the French Resistance. The militia had originally been named Bezen Kadoudal, after the anti-Jacobin Breton rebel Georges Cadoudal. The 1944 assassination of the priest prompted Lainé to change the organization's name in honor of Perrot during March of 1944.

It had already been envisaged by German strategists that in the event of Allied invasion the Breton nationalists would form a rearguard, and that further nationalist troops could be parachuted into Brittany.^[1] Following the war many of the organization's members fled to Ireland.