Hitler And Spain

The Nazi Role in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

Robert H. Whealey

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813182759
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The Spanish Civil War, begun in July 1936, was a preliminary round of World War II. Hitler's and Mussolini's cooperation with General Franco resulted in the Axis agreement of October 1936 and the subsequent Pact of Steel of May 1939, immediately following the end of the Civil War.

This study presents comprehensive documentation of Hitler's use of the upheaval in Spain to strengthen the Third Reich diplomatically, ideologically, economically, and militarily. While the last great cause drew all eyes to Western Europe and divided the British and especially the French internally, Hitler could pursue territorial gains in Eastern Europe.

This book, based on little-known German records and recently opened Spanish archives, fills a major gap in our understanding of one of the 20th century's most significant conflicts. Its comprehensive treatment of German-Spanish relations from 1936 through 1939, bringing together diplomatic, economic, military, and naval aspects, will be of great value to specialists in European diplomacy and the political economy of Nazi imperialism, as well as to all students of the Spanish Civil War.

1

Hitler’s Diplomatic Policy toward Spain: July 1936

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War marked a major turning point in the European balance of power. Adolf Hitler, the Führer of Germany, and Benito Mussolini, the Duce of Italy, aided the Spanish military rebellion in a cooperation that paved the way for their political understanding in October 1936—the Axis. On the other side of the barricades, the Soviet Union supported the Spanish Republicans, and substantial unofficial aid flowed from France to the Loyalists, though the French and British governments officially avoided confronting the Fascist and Nazi dictatorships.

The principal purpose of this volume is to document how Hitler used the Spanish crisis to strengthen the Third Reich. The civil war in Spain provided Hitler with a great opportunity. This “last great cause” drew all eyes to western Europe, divided the British and especially the French internally, and shifted the overall European balance of power. Thus Hitler could pursue territorial gains in eastern Europe.

The civil war that broke out in July 1936 had long roots in the troubled politics of Spain. Municipal elections in April 1931 repudiated King Alfonso XIII and the military dictatorship he had encouraged since 1923. Economic depression had further encouraged disillusionment with the old regime. Lawyers, journalists, and educators sympathetic to republicanism had for over a century complained of Spain’s backwardness relative to France and Britain. They demanded a new democratic-republican constitution. Alfonso abdicated, and the royal family left Spain; thus was born the Second Spanish Republic.

The new government was a coalition of liberal-progressives and democratic socialists who immediately prepared a new constitution. They were supported in the streets and the countryside by labor unions and the heretofore illegal anarchist movement, the largest in Europe. Small groups of Stalinists and Trotskyites added their few, but loud, voices. The new constitution provided for proportional representation and a multiparty system modeled in spirit after the French Third Republic.

Among the goals of the first Republican leaders were to disestablish the Roman Catholic Church, cut down the overstaffed army officer corps, and recognize collective bargaining. Land reform was discussed, but little was actually accomplished. Regional autonomy was granted to the Basques and the Catalans, angering proponents of strong central government. Army officers attempted a coup in August 1932, but it was unsuccessful. The November 1933 elections brought a right-wing government to power.

The fundamental problem with Spanish politics from 1931 to 1936 was intolerance on all sides. This set the stage for partisan conflict, leading eventually to civil war. The Anarchists, Trotskyites, and some of the Socialists and Communists pressed for further peasant and working-class revolution. The church leaders, professional army officers, and landlords were bitter about their loss of privilege. Small property holders were frightened by the “red” rhetoric of the Left. Youth from the property-holding classes were drawn to fascist movements, the most important being the Falange Española, founded in 1933. Others supported the reactionary traditionalists known as Carlists, who called for the return of a monarchy, but not of Alfonso’s house. Many business leaders backed the Alfonsoist monarchists, the army, and the church. Together with capitalists from Britain, America, and France, well-to-do Spaniards feared a revolution in Spain similar to the 1917 upheaval in Russia.

From November 1933 to the end of 1935, rightist coalitions of churchmen and monarchist sympathizers dominated the right-wing governments, after the first group of leftist reformers (1931-1933) was out of office. In the fall of 1934, a violent strike took place in Asturias. The conservative government finally collapsed in December 1935 over a question of taxes and gambling scandals.

On February 16, 1936, a close election brought to power a coalition of liberals, Socialists, Communists, Trotskyites, and Anarchists formed into a left-wing alliance of parties known as the Popular Front. The major issue uniting the group was amnesty for the strikers of 1934. Although antifascist in ideology, the Popular Front had little interest in foreign affairs because Spain for over a century had assumed a neutral stance toward the affairs of Europe.

The great failure of the newly elected leftist government was not coming together after the election and uniting behind a minimum program. The progressive liberals were divided into at least three parties on the basis of personality. The Socialists were divided between reformist and revolutionary wings. The Anarchists only voted for the Popular Front to avoid rule by the Right, but Anarchists were dedicated to further revolution. The Communists were too few to do much in parliament, but they influenced important socialist and liberal journalists. The Basques and Catalans were anxious to maintain their independence from Madrid.

From a foreign point of view, Britain, France, and the United States (in that order) had the most interest in Spain because of invested capital and markets. The Spanish parliamentary Left looked to those nations as models. Karl Marx had higher prestige with the revolutionary Left than Joseph Stalin had. Strategically, Spain was important to both the French and the Germans in their historic rivalry. Italy and Britain also had an interest in the gateway to the Mediterranean.

In the months following the February elections, confusion and sporadic violence escalated in Spain. The Spanish Civil War began on July 17, 1936, with an insurrection of army officers at Melilla in Spanish Morocco. Within hours, most of the right-wing officer corps throughout Spain had risen against the leftist Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic. Liberals, Socialists, Communists, leftists, Basques, and Catalans—a majority of the people in the major cities and more than half the countryside—rallied around the government, putting up stiffer resistance than the rebels had expected. Although the planned coup d’etat failed, it did succeed to the extent that the government found it impossible to suppress the insurgents, and Spain was engulfed in civil war. Each camp—Republican and Nationalist—consisted of a variety of classes, parties, and factions.

The rebel officers on the mainland needed the disciplined Moroccan forces commanded by General Francisco Franco to cross the Straits of Gibraltar and to give immediate help in conquering areas held by the Popular Front. This provided the opportunity for German and Italian leaders to intervene in Spain, thus helping turn the Spanish Civil War into a preliminary round of the great conflict known as World War II.¹

Germany Expands Its Spanish Interests before July

When Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, Britain, France, and the United States were more important as traders and investors in Spain than was Germany.² To the relatively weak Spanish economy, however, considerable German economic and military pressure was applied in the early thirties.³ Germany by 1935 was recovering from the depression faster than France was, and the Third Reich was beginning to assert itself economically. Spain purchased 120.3 million⁴ gold pesetas (14.8 million gold dollars) worth of goods in Germany in 1935, particularly chemicals and electric appliances,⁵ while Germans chiefly bought from Spain iron ore, pyrites, skins, fruits, and vegetables.

In addition to foreign trade and capital, numbers of foreign technical personnel help determine economic influence from abroad upon a relatively underdeveloped country.⁶ In one sense the most important foreigners living in Spain were the Germans, because they formed the largest group of employed aliens. It is true that fewer Germans than Portuguese lived in Spain, and that total salaries and positions of Germans were lower than the French, the British, and the Americans; yet a much larger proportion of the resident Germans were employed.⁷ Eight thousand of the total twelve to fifteen thousand⁸ Germans living in Spain before the civil war resided in Barcelona, and about 260 German-owned or German-operated firms located their headquarters in the Catalan capital.⁹

Politically, many of the Germans in Spain were organized in the Nazi party’s foreign branch, the Auslandsorganisation, or AO. During the course of the civil war, Nazi Germany would greatly increase its economic influence in Nationalist Spain and would participate generally in revolutionizing the Spanish picture.

As for military ambitions, since 1922 the Germans had been interested in building war vessels prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1925 King Alfonso XIII had offered the services of Spanish industry.¹⁰ The Spaniards were interested in cash and in asserting some independence from French and British sea power; therefore, they agreed to tap German technical knowledge about submarines for the development of the Spanish arms industry and navy. In response, the German navy sent Captain Wilhelm Canaris, a career officer and a specialist on Spain, to arrange for submarine construction. As a young naval lieutenant during World War I, Canaris had served in Spain as an espionage agent against Britain and France.¹¹ Between 1915 and 1930 Canaris had traveled about a dozen times to Spain,¹² most of these trips arising out of the 1925 contract with private shipbuilder and arms manufacturer Horacio Echevarietta of Cádiz. The contract called for the building of twelve U-boats and one thousand torpedoes for Germany.¹³ A key Canaris contact was Admiral Antonio Magaz, Alfonso’s minister of navy in the 1920s who, during the civil war, was to become Nationalist ambassador in Berlin. The project ended after the fall of the Spanish monarchy in 1931,¹⁴ although as late as 1933 the German navy still extended credits to the shipbuilder because Manuel Azaña, the Spanish prime minister, hesitated to repudiate the contract.¹⁵

The major objective of the German navy from 1919 to the outbreak of the civil war in Spain was preparation for a naval war with France and Poland.¹⁶ The Germans assumed that, in any such war, the United States and Great Britain would remain neutral but potentially hostile. Spain’s neutrality might be benevolent, so Canaris joined other planners in naval war games in which Spanish sea bases were scheduled to play a role against France.¹⁷

Between 1933 and June 1936, Canaris visited Spain at least twice. Whom he saw and what he discussed remain matters of dispute, though in all likelihood he was working on setting up a secret organization to supply food and fuel to German vessels in the event of war with France. By the time Canaris became vice admiral and head of the German military intelligence (Abwehr) in January 1935, he knew more about Spanish affairs than any other high-ranking German official in Berlin.

In political terms, Spain had little place in Germany’s plans before 1936. At least, Hitler’s program for Europe as set forth in 1925 in Mein Kampf did not deal with it at all. But in “the secret book,” written in 1928 and discovered after World War II, Hitler not only stated that Britain and Italy could serve Germany as allies but added that Spain and Hungary had the same aversion to France that Germany had.¹⁸ Hitler, therefore, saw Spain as potentially weakening France, although he did not elaborate upon any possible Spanish-German alignment.

José Antonio Primo de Rivera, head of the fascist-inspired Spanish Falange, did visit Berlin in 1934,¹⁹ where he discussed Nazi-Catholic relations with Nazi party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg. Subsequently Rosenberg forbade the translation of the Führer’s anti-Catholic tracts into Spanish because avoidance of unnecessary offense to the dominant Spanish religion served Nazi political interests in Spain.²⁰ José Antonio spent only five minutes with the Führer,²¹ and no fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures, and Maps
• Preface
• 1. Hitler’s Diplomatic Policy toward Spain: July 1936
• 2. The Ideology of Anticommunism: July 1936–March 1939
• 3. The Diplomacy of the Anti-Comintern Bloc
• 4. The Development of German Economic Interests
• 5. The Place of Spain in German War Plans
• 6. Conclusions
• Appendix A. Note on Monetary Values
• Appendix B. German Intelligence Agents in Spain before July 1936
• Appendix C. Chronology
• Notes
• Bibliographical Note
• Bibliography
• Index