Blum, Léon (1872–1950) ideologues rather than Nazi-style race-haters, and not a few DEV men were unwilling working class conscripts who had no loyalty to the fascist cause whatsoever Several hundred DEV prisoners were returned to Spain by the Soviet Union in 1954 and 1959 See also Blue Squadron BLUE LEGION “Legion Españolo de Voluntarios (LEV).” See Blue Division BLUE PLAN See Force Franỗaise de lIntộrieur (FFI) BLUESHIRTS Fascist street organizations that engaged in political thuggery and even murder of political opponents In China in the 1930s, Whampoa Military Academy cadets and graduates were organized as leaders of death squads and political intimidation units by the Academy’s erstwhile first commandant, Jiang Jieshi He dressed them in blue shirts in admiring emulation of Benito Mussolini’s blackshirts in Italy Many blueshirts later served Jiang’s regime as secret police Before, during, and after the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Falange Party radicals organized in blueshirt clubs and street gangs across Spain to intimidate political enemies Some later fought as volunteers in the Blue Division on the Eastern Front BLUE SQUADRON “Escuadrilla Azul.” Five squadrons of Spanish volunteer fighter pilots, many of them former blueshirts, who joined the Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front See also Blue Division BLUM, LÉON (1872–1950) French socialist He came to prominence on the French left during the Dreyfus Affair before World War I Blum rejected Vladimir Lenin’s hard ideological line in 1921, splitting democratic French socialists from far left fanatics who started to call themselves Communists Blum opposed French occupation of the Ruhr in the 1920s In 1936 he headed a Popular Front government, becoming the first socialist premier of France He was unable to garner support for strong opposition to Adolf Hitler: the Spanish Civil War badly divided French public opinion and made it impossible to form an antifascist front with other democracies The democratic right in France also failed to understand that the real danger to national liberty was not internal but external: not French socialists but German and Italian fascists and their building armies, made more threatening by fifth columnists and future eager collaborators among domestic fascists Blum became premier again in 1938, but he still could marshal almost no support for a policy of active resistance to Nazi Germany’s growing aggression in Central Europe Blum condemned the appeasement policy of the Munich Conference Despising his socialist politics and his Jewish faith, the extreme right in France 173