H-Diplo ARTICLE REVIEW 925 6 February 2020

Special Section. “Dancing with Belligerency.” Contemporary History 54:4 (2019): 825-926

https://hdiplo.org/to/AR925 Review Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

Review by David A. Messenger, University of South Alabama

n September 1939, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini introduced a new concept into the international arena, that of ‘non-belligerency,’ which meant staying out of the war but not being neutral in that one side was definitely favoured- in Italy’s case, the side of Nazi Germany. Italy’s non-belligerency ended up being just a temporary phase before Mussolini Ijoined the Nazis in the Axis war machine in June 1940. The end result of prior ideas about neutrality and Mussolini’s actions meant that traditional neutrality, “was largely inadequate in providing for the basic needs of these states in an era of ideological and total war.”1 Traditional neutrality, at least in a legal sense, came with “duties of abstention.”2 Spain, as with Italy, became caught up in the circumstances of war and its own history, to become a state that may have been neutral in name, but never in its actions or obligations. A state with ties to local as well as German and Italian fascism, but one still recovering from three years of Civil War, Spain by the end of 1940 was in the middle of an internal debate about whether or not to remain neutral or join the Axis.3 In fact, the leader of the Spanish dictatorship, General Francisco Franco, declared Spain to be a ‘non-belligerent’ in June 1940, just after Italy entered the war, reminding many of Italy’s similar declaration in advance of joining the war on the Axis side.

Many ideological components of Nazi Europe were embraced by the officially ‘non-belligerent’ dictatorship of Francisco Franco during the Second World War. Most significant was Spanish participation in what Franco perceived as the most important part of Nazi Germany’s campaign, its war against Communism in Europe. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, Spain immediately offered to participate; the Germans accepted this offer June 24. On that same day, the President of the Spanish fascist movement Falange and Foreign Minister Ramón Serrano Suñer gave a speech entitled “Russia is to blame” in front of the Falange headquarters in Madrid, announcing Spain’s link to Nazi Germany in the form of volunteer soldiers to be sent to the Soviet Front.4 The Spanish Blue Division, officially the Spanish Division of Volunteers, was sent to the Soviet Union to fight. It consisted of Falange members and students, and was led by Spanish army officers and technicians; this Division, by the end of the war, numbered some 45,500.5 Many Falangists considered deployment in Russia to be a continuation of the Spanish Civil War in its fight of the forces of order

1 Neville Wylie, “Introduction: Victims or actors? European Neutrals and Non-Belligerents, 1939-1945,”in Wylie, ed., European neutrals and Non-Belligerents during the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 5.

2 Antonio Marquina, “The Spanish Neutrality during the Second World War,” American University International Law Review 14:1 (1998): 71-184, here 183.

3 Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (London: Fontana Press, 1995), 404.

4 Xavier Moreno Julià, Blue Division: Spanish Blood in Russia, 1941-1945, trans. Iain Stewart (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2015), 76.

5 Moreno Julià, Blue Division, 11.

against Communism.6 Others saw it as best representing the true Germanophile nature of the regime, a payback to Germany for its contributions to Franco’s victory in the Civil War, and a “mitigation” of Spain’s delay in not yet entering the world war.7 On July 13, 1941, the troops left Spain for the Soviet Union, with training in Germany first. In Germany, there were tensions with the local population, as well as tensions between those within the Division from the Falange fascist political Page | 2 movement and those from the Spanish Army.8 The soldiers in training were paced under the command of the Germany Army and swore allegiance to German Führer Adolf Hitler. The Blue Division began marching to Russia on August 17, 1941.

Meanwhile, in Spain, extensive economic trade between Spain and Germany gave important assistance to the Nazi war effort. Over 25,000 Spaniards worked in Germany during the war.9 An additional 40,000 Spaniards worked in occupied France during the war, having been recruited by Spanish consulates, which also was part of the Nazi war effort.10 By 1944, 39.2 per cent of all Spanish exports went to Nazi Germany and another 30 per cent to German-occupied Europe.11 The export of wolfram – a metal significant in weapons construction- was the backbone of Spain’s economic trade with Nazi Germany. The number of wolfram mines in northwest Spain rose from 6 in 1941 to 124 by 1943.12 By 1944, it represented 25 per cent of all Spanish exports.13 Although, as will be seen, the Allied powers also purchased wolfram, German interest drove and developed this important market. Spain’s government income from wolfram sales went from $700,000 U.S. dollars in 1941 to $60 million in 1943.14 Economic ties were enhanced by extensive cooperation between Spain and Nazi Germany in the area of intelligence. By 1938-39, the Abwehr (German intelligence organization) detachment in Spain, KO- Spanien, became one of its largest foreign operations, with 200 personnel and over 1,000 sub-agents as well as a close relationship with Franco’s intelligence services, first in Burgos and then, after the Civil War ended, in Madrid through the Spanish General Staff.15 In 1941, some 7,500 Germans were resident in Spain; by 1944-1945 it is estimated that number had grown to 12,000, most of whom were involved in some sort of official government or economic capacity.16

6 Wayne Bowen, Spain during World War II (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 41.

7 Stanley G. Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany and World War II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 147.

8 Moreno Julià, Blue Division, 130.

9 Bowen, Spain during World War II, 120.

10 Payne, Franco and Hitler, 140.

11 Pierpaolo Barbieri, Hitler’s Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 241.

12 Leonard Caruana and Hugh Rockoff, “A Wolfram in Sheep’s Clothing: Economic Warfare in Spain, 1940-1944,” Journal of Economic History 63:1 (2003), 100-126, here 112.

13 Caruana and Rockoff, 120.

14 Bowen, Spain during World War II, 108.

15 Manuel Ros Agudo, La Guerra Secreta de Franco (1939-1945) (Barcelona: Crítica, 2002), 210.

16 Carlos Collado Seidel, “España y los agents alemanes, 1944-1947: intransigencia y pragmatism politico,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma: Serie V. Historia Contemporánea 5 (1992): 431-482, here 436.

Yet Spain never officially joined the Axis war effort. So what was the nature of Spain’s relationship with Nazi Germany? What can we learn if we go beneath the surface of the facts presented above? That intention motivated a conference sponsored by the Centre for War Studies at the University College of Dublin in 2016, in which I was fortunate enough to participate. Some of the papers presented there have now been published in a special section of the Journal of Contemporary History. Organized by the conference planner, Mercedes Peñalba-Sotorrío, “Dancing around Belligerency” sets out to Page | 3 introduce us to new research in the field of Hispano-German wartime relations and to recast Spain as an “overt ally” of Nazi Germany in the war.17 Yet beyond this, the new research presented here not only documents in great detail the relationship of these two regimes, but also better examines the fascination Spaniards had with transnational fascism and the Nazi New Order. Transnational fascism, Peñalba-Sotorrío argues, is a better concept than older ones like Robert Paxton’s “Five Stages of Fascism” because it emphasizes “contacts, influences and the transference of illiberal political ideas between different political movements” in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s.18 These insights allow us to move beyond a focus on the key players of each regime, or particular ideological necessities to count a movement as fascist, and instead to emphasize a broader sphere of society that was attracted, for multiple reasons, to the allure of a New Order in wartime Europe.

David Brydan examines the Medical Corps of the Blue Division in Russia as a way to take us into this aspect of new research. For Spanish doctors and nurses in Russia, the German Army and its medical staff provided a unique opportunity for “scientific, intellectual and professional exchange.”19 Ideology and a shared desire to remake Europe were factors, but were not the only motivation, nor even the most important one, for the Spaniards to draw close to the Germans. Concepts of European brotherhood and fascist enterprise were driven by the sense that the Wehrmacht represented the height of professional medical expertise on the battlefield that the Spanish could learn from.

With a greater emphasis on ideology, but a similar link to the development of professional networks, Tori Morant i Ariño focuses on the ties built by women members of the Spanish Falange with German and Italian fascist women from 1937- 1943. She argues that the 34 visits made by delegations to Germany and Italy, which she calls “ideology tourism,”20 were meant to give insight to Pilar Primo de Rivera and other leaders of the Women’s Section of the Falange for how to develop a permanent organization. Although initiated by German Ambassador to Spain Wilhelm Faupel in 1937, these visits, which were strongest in two periods, 1937-9 and 1941-2, went beyond ideological support for the invasion of Russia and the war against Communism. Indeed, women leaders spent a great deal of time studying Nazi youth and other organizations with an eye to building similar structures in Spain.21 Structure meant as much or more as ideology, if ideology was the initial factor that got women to go to Germany.

Xosé Núñez Seixas examines the overall influence of Nazi ideology on the Spanish Falange in his article subtitled “A Fascist Hybridization?” He argues that what most appealed about Nazism to many Spanish fascists was not so much ideological components as the boldness of Hitler in seizing power in 1933; Spanish fascists, by contrast, rarely engaged with the racial or

17 Mercedes Peñalba-Sotorrío, “Introduction: Spanish-German Relations during the Second World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 54:4 (2019) [hereafter JCH 54:4]: 825-833, here 827.

18 Peñalba-Sotorrío, “Introduction,” 828.

19 David Brydan, “Transnational Exchange in the Nazi New Order: The Spanish Blue Division and its Medical Services,” JCH 54:4: 880-901, here 882.

20 Toni Morant i Ariño, “Spanish Fascist Women’s Transnational Relations during the Second World War: Between Ideology and Realpolitik,” JCH 54:4 (2019): 834-857, here 835.

21 Morant i Ariño, “Spanish Fascist Women’s Transnational Relations during the Second World War,” 841-842.

paganistic elements of Nazism.22 Even as Nazism replaced Italian fascism as the model for Falangists due to their many visits to Germany, what we might call non-ideological or less ideological elements of Nazism held the most appeal. As with the women’s section, the structures and organizations of Nazism, particularly its welfare organizations, fascinated Spaniards. Spanish delegations visiting injured Blue Division soldiers in German hospitals after 1941 were struck by the modernity and quality of German care for veterans, something they felt was missing in Spain.23 Núñez Seixas goes on to argue that the Page | 4 activism of Blue Division veterans within the Franco regime through the 1970s maintained such inspiration from Nazism. However, there is no question that Nazism replaced a kind of national fascism in Spain, one grounded, ultimately, in close relations with the Catholic Church.

On the whole, these contributions encourage us to think about fascism and Nazism in different ways. The appeal of Nazism for many Spanish fascists was not so much ideological as professional and organizational. The remaking of German society and the outreach the Nazi party developed across many levels of society, in many ways, including in the development of youth groups, welfare organizations, and professional organizations, captivated Spaniards who hoped to mobilize and engage their society in a similar way. There was much to learn from Nazism if one wanted to mobilize and modernize Spain. Spaniards were therefore able not necessarily neglect Hitler’s racial ideology, but to overlook it. For Núñez Seixas, this means a lack of engagement with it. For Brydan, Spanish soldiers and doctors were aware of Nazi racial policies and worked with forced Jewish labor in German wartime hospitals, but distanced themselves from the violence of the occupation in Russia.24 For even those ideological tourists of the women’s section, it was not racial thinking that led to admiration for Nazi Germany, but the “totalitarian aspirations” of someone like Pilar Primo de Rivera who sought to engage Spaniards as the Nazis engaged Germans.25

Mercedes Peñalba-Sotorrío takes a slightly different approach to the question of Hispano-German relations, focusing on the propaganda machinery of Hans Lazar, an Austrian who served as the press attaché at the German Embassy in Madrid from 1938 through the end of the war. Peñalba-Sotorrío emphasizes that despite the fact that Germany knew by 1940 that Spain would not join the war, a significant propaganda campaign was still developed. Indeed, by 1942, Lazar had 432 people working for him- an incredible number.26 To what end?

Peñalba-Sotorrío argues that the efforts to “sell” Nazi Germany in Spain was to allow Franco to stabilize his regime around cooperation with Germany, in terms of the economy, policing, intelligence gathering, etc. In short, Spain had to be made to act like an ally even while sitting out of the battle. Lazar’s monthly budget of some 200,000 pesetas included 175,000 pesetas for the bribery of Spanish journalists.27 This was meant to ensure that the Spanish journalists would cast Germany’s actions almost entirely as a response to the unfairness of the Versailles treaty, or simply develop and drum up anti-British sentiment. In addition to using local journalists, the Embassy’s own newsletter had a circulation in Spain of 45-60,000.28 After 1942, Lazar’s efforts shifted to spreading Nazi propaganda under the guise of it being developed by Spanish writers, instead of begin given to them by the Embassy. Support from the Spanish Falange and the Foreign Minister (until September 1942)

22 Xosé Núñez Seixas, “Spanish Views of Nazi Germany, 1933-45: A Fascist Hybridization?” JCH 54:4: 858-879, here 863.

23 Núñez Seixas, Spanish Views of Nazi Germany, 1933-45,” 873-874.

24 Brydan, 891.

25 Morant i Ariño, “Spanish Fascist Women’s Transnational Relations during the Second World War,” 841.

26 Mercedes Peñalba-Sotorrío, “Beyond the War: Nazi Propaganda Aims in Spain during the Second World War,” JCH 54:4: 902-926, here 904.

27 Peñalba-Sotorrío, “Beyond the War,” 907.

28 Ibid.

Ramon Serrano Suñer was essential in this effort. The Falange and Spain’s Directorate of Security helped deliver some 2 million pieces of German propaganda per month in these years.29 The partnership between Germany and the Falange was essential to this effort. These findings on Nazi propaganda thus cohere with the other three articles that explore Spain’s attraction to Nazism and Nazi Germany in this era.

It is important overall, and especially in the case of Spain’s effective alliance with Nazi Germany, to see transnational fascism Page | 5 through a variety of lenses, for that was how Spaniards found themselves drawn to it. While some in the Falange no doubt shared Hitler’s racial views, this was only one way into the network that was growing and developing between Spain and Germany from the Civil War through the end of World War II. Admiration for Germany’s modernity, and a desire to bring Spain into such a state using the authoritarian methods of Nazism attracted doctors, scientists and other professionals to fascism. The desire to copy Nazi Germany’s ability to mobilize the population for state purposes was the hook for leaders like Pilar Primo de Rivera of the Falange. The efficiency of the Nazi takeover of the German state and the growth of its welfare and other organizations drew widespread praise, which leads Núñez Seixas to conclude that the ideology of Spanish fascists was more of a “hybridization” of fascism than a more pure ideological copy.30 Even in efforts the Nazis made themselves, such as through Lazar’s extensive propaganda, the cooperation and support of Spanish fellow travelers was necessary. So for multiple reasons, and in multiple ways, Spain’s engagement with Nazism inside Spain, in terms of foreign policy, and on the battlefields of the Soviet Union drew in different people for different reasons, many of which cannot be included in the category of ideological attraction. Yet the results point to the consensus view most historians now hold, that Spain was, in effect, an ally of Nazi Germany’s in the war. Understanding the multiple paths Spaniards took to get to this state reveals much about Spain, about transnational fascism, and further complicates any simplification of fascism and Nazism in important ways.

David A. Messenger is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of South Alabama, in Mobile, AL. He is the author of three books and numerous journal articles focused on the role of Spain in the Second World War and after. His most recent book on that topic is Hunting for Nazis in Franco’s Spain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014). He also has an interest in the memory of war and is author of War and Public Memory: Case Studies in Twentieth Century Europe (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020).

29 Peñalba-Sotorrío, “Beyond the War,” 911.

30 Núñez Seixas, 860.