Fighters across frontiers

Transnational resistance in Europe, 1936–48

Robert Gildea, Ismee Tames

• Verlag: Manchester University Press
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526151230
• Thema: Geschichte
• Thema: Europäische Geschichte

This landmark book, the product of years of research by a team of two dozen historians, reveals that resistance to occupation by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the Second World War was not narrowly delineated by country but startlingly international. Tens of thousands of fighters across Europe resisted 'transnationally', travelling to join networks far from their homes. These 'foreigners' were often communists and Jews who were already being persecuted and on the move. Others were expatriate business people, escaped POWs, forced labourers or deserters. Their experiences would prove personally transformative and greatly affected the course of the conflict. From the International Brigades in Spain to the onset of the Cold War and the foundation of the state of Israel, they played a significant part in a period of upheaval and change during the long Second World War.

1

‘For your freedom and ours!’:
transnational experiences in the Spanish
Civil War, 1936–39

Samuël Kruizinga with Cristina Diac, Enrico Acciai,
Franziska Zaugg, Ginta Ieva Bikše, Olga Manojlović Pintar
and Yaacov Falkov

In July 1936, over six thousand athletes from twenty-two different countries gathered in Barcelona to participate in the International Workers’ Olympiad. Less a sporting event than a mass political rally, it was intended by its organisers to attract both more participants and more spectators than the official 1936 Olympic Games that were to be held in Nazi Germany from 1 August. These alternative Olympics were sponsored by the Popular Front government of Spain, made up of a coalition of liberal and leftist parties elected on an anti-fascist platform. The Barcelona Olympiad promised to be the vanguard of a powerful Europe-wide countermovement and drew the eyes of the European left-wing press.¹

On 19 July, however, the very same day the opening ceremony of the ‘People’s Olympia’ was to take place, Barcelona was rocked by a military revolt. Rebel generals ordered its garrison to take control of the city as part of a coordinated strike against the Popular Front government.² In response, many international athletes helped the civilian population to resist, and together they fought off the Barcelona coup. In other Spanish cities, too, military revolts were quickly quelled. Only Seville fell to the rebels on 26 July, but this proved to be a turning point in the history of Spain. Its capture allowed rebel officers to airlift the Army of Africa, which they controlled, from Spanish Morocco to mainland Europe. There they were joined by about half the Spanish territorial army and the vast majority of its officers. The revolt now turned into a full-blown civil war in which the rebels enjoyed the support not only of most of the army and various rightist, monarchist and fascist political organisations but also of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The forces of the Republic nevertheless resisted. Left-wing journalists who had come to cover a sports event became war reporters. News of Spain’s resistance against a fascist takeover quickly spread, and socialists, communists and other leftists all over Europe soon pledged their support.³

The threat of foreign intervention on both sides of the Spanish Civil War led the governments of Britain and France to propose a non-intervention agreement to localise the conflict and thereby, hopefully, prevent the outbreak of a second World War. While openly agreeing to the principle of non-intervention, however, Germany and Italy secretly continued to supply men, materiel and money to the rebel forces, while the Soviet Union supported the Republic. Joseph Stalin hoped to deter German aggression against the Soviet Union while highlighting the importance of communism in the fight against fascism. In order to entice Western democracies to join an anti-fascist defensive pact he decided against flagrant infractions of the non-intervention agreement, but on 18 September 1936 the Executive Committee of the Communist International (Comintern) instructed its non-Soviet member parties to start recruiting a volunteer force to fight in Spain.⁴ Comintern officials travelled to Spain to help create new International Brigades of the loyalist Spanish army, officially formed at Albacete, some 150 miles from Madrid, on 14 October 1936. The base was to be commanded by leading communists, and the Parisian offices of the French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français, PCF) were designated by the Comintern as the transit point for recruits from all over Europe on their way to Spain. Its importance to international volunteers only increased from February 1937 when, as part of continuing international efforts to localise the Spanish conflict, the Franco-Spanish border was closed and the Spanish coast blockaded by an international fleet. From that moment, volunteers all but required the help of the international Communist Party apparatus to reach Spain.⁵

The International Brigades quickly became the default destination for international volunteers for Spain. Their recruitment drive stressed the fight against fascism as transcending narrow party-political boundaries, and they welcomed anti-fascists of many different creeds among their ranks. However, their creation by the Comintern polarised scholarly opinion on both its organisation, and its membership from the moment the Spanish Civil War ended. Were the Brigades composed of communists fighting to establish a ‘Red’ Spain? Were they innocent idealists duped by the Comintern into fighting for Moscow? Or were they simply committed, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, to ‘the only political cause which, even in retrospect, appears as pure and compelling as it did in 1936’, to halt the rise of fascism and Nazism before it was too late? Since the 1990s the opening of archives related to the Civil War has refocused research on the creation of collective biographies of national contingents of International Brigades, particularly those from the United States, France and the United Kingdom, in order to answer these questions.⁶

This chapter, however, seeks to explore another angle, and focuses on the International Brigades as a focal point for the diverse transnational experiences of those who volunteered. In choosing to fight for Spain, anti-fascists from all over the globe came together, each guided by a wide range of expectations and beliefs. On the Spanish battlefields, people came to different understandings of themselves and others, of their role in world affairs and of the meaning of anti-fascism, fascism and communism. Fighting a war far from their home and surrounded by ‘otherness’, they added new layers to individuals’ already complex identities, and were propelled on new paths by the way they navigated the conflict and its confusing aftermath. Moreover, crossing paths in Spain was not always simple. It might also result in failures to communicate, misunderstandings, disappointments and even conflict, the aftereffects of which lingered long after the end of the war.

In order to explore these developments, we will follow eight very different and relatively unknown people who all travelled to Spain from farflung parts of Europe in order to fight fascism, as they understood it. These were Aureliano Santini from Italy, Clara Thalmann from Switzerland, Galia Sincari from Romania, Žanis Folmanis from Latvia, Ljubo Ilić from Yugoslavia, Jona Brodkin from the British Mandate of Palestine, and Jef Last from the Netherlands. They have been chosen not because they were crucial to the Spanish war effort, were uniquely present at key junctures of its history or are archetypical of different varieties of transnational experience. It is rather because, firstly, these eight have left testimonies which allow us to trace transnational ‘lines’ and ‘nodes’: that is, their routes into and through the Spanish conflict, and the hubs of transnational activity where these routes crossed with those of others. These allow us, secondly, to (re)consider key questions of agency and identity within the mass ideological conflicts of the twentieth century. Thirdly, these cases give us insights into the very different geographical and institutional contexts that shaped their anti-fascism, ranging from the Arab–Jewish conflict in Palestine and anti-Semitism in Romania to the experience of exile in Paris and an intellectual’s disappointment in Stalin’s leadership. Fourthly, their histories provide an implicit commentary on and even a correction to our understanding of the global anti-fascist solidarity movement for Spain which, until now, has been shaped primarily through British, French and American frames of reference.

Pathways to Spain

Anti-fascists broadly understood the Spanish Civil War as a local flashpoint in a global war between fascism and its opponents. Victory or defeat would therefore have consequences that far superseded the local Spanish context. Victory might mean that fascists everywhere would be on the defensive, even in Germany and Italy; defeat meant that the fascists would be emboldened, perhaps enough to launch a new world war. The International Brigades’ motto, Por vuestra libertad y la nuestra (‘For your freedom and ours’), reflected this connection between the Spanish struggle, the global ideological battle between fascism and anti-fascism (in whatever guise), and individual brigades’ own concerns about their present and future.⁷

Those who joined the International Brigades from an enforced exile, such as the young Italian communist Aureliano Santini, born in 1912, were perhaps most alive to this connection between the local and the global. As a ten-year-old, he saw Benito Mussoloni’s Blackshirts burn the socialist party branch headquarters in his native Empoli, in Tuscany. Deeply shaken by this act of violence, Santini yearned for a chance to retaliate against the Blackshirts and at the age of eighteen joined an underground communist cell. After he was twice arrested and imprisoned, Santini decided to join other Italian communists in exile in France. In Paris, which had become the prime European hub for exiles fleeing persecution in the 1930s, the PCF played a key role in helping communists who were fleeing political persecution in countries with right-wing, fascist or Nazi dictatorships to re-establish a working political apparatus. Evidently impressing the leadership of the exiled Italian communists in Paris, Santini was chosen to study at the International Lenin School in Moscow, where the future cadres of the Party were trained. This gave him opportunities for both a Marxist-Leninist education and the practical acquisition of a working knowledge of German and Russian. Letters from the late 1930s to his friends and loved ones back in Italy testify that his separation from them heightened his feelings of urgency and that the struggle against fascism was at once Italian and global. When news of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War reached him, Santini was among the first to join the Giuseppe Garibaldi Battalion of the International Brigades, composed of Italian exiles.⁸ His letters to his girlfriend, who had begged him not to go, detail his belief that going to Spain was his duty as an Italian and a communist. ‘Could I be absent from a great fight like the one fought in Spain? No! I am happy to find myself here in the midst of the struggle’.⁹

Santini’s words will have sounded familiar to many Germans, Austrians, Yugoslavs and others who had been forced underground or into exile for their political beliefs, and who relished the fight against fascism. In Spain they could both engage their enemies in a fair fight and give their own dictators a bloody nose in the process. This realisation was sometimes not immediate. Ljubomir (‘Ljubo’) Ilić had voluntarily chosen exile, leaving his native, impoverished Split (in current-day Croatia), where he was born in 1905, to pursue architecture studies in Paris. There he combined a cosmopolitan lifestyle with an interest in left-wing politics. He engaged with communism intellectually rather than emotionally, as Santini did, and in the early 1930s decided to join both the French and the Yugoslav Communist Parties, the latter having its headquarters in Paris because of political repression at home. Following the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in Marseilles in October 1934, during a state visit to France, Ilić was held for four months by French police and repeatedly beaten. This clearly had a radicalising effect on him, and after his release Ilić was one of the first Yugoslavs to go to Spain. According to his Yugoslav Communist Party file he did not volunteer as such but was ordered to go by the party-in-exile to prepare the ground for other Yugoslavs to follow.¹⁰

Žanis Folmanis, like Ilić, was an intellectual. An aspiring Latvian poet and writer, born in 1910, he joined a Riga communist cell when in May 1934 a coup installed a right-wing dictatorship led by Kārlis Ulmanis. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War Folmanis immediately set his sights on joining the International Brigades in order to defeat fascism both in Spain and internationally. This, however, was far from easy. Latvia’s borders were heavily patrolled, and its accession to the international non-intervention agreement heightened government surveillance of potential Spanish volunteers. Folmanis nevertheless obtained a passport and bought a train ticket to Paris with money collected by Latvian chapter of the Comintern-affiliated International Red Aid, under the pretence of visiting the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris. Once there he used the underground ‘railway’ established by the PCF to shuttle volunteers across the Franco-Spanish border in secret, although for him the ‘railway’ meant crossing the Pyrenees on foot.¹¹

Galia Sincari, by contrast, was far from a devoted anti-fascist, let alone a communist. In her case, it was not personal or ideological convictions, nor any external pressure exerted on her by a political party or organisation that inspired her volunteering for Spain. Born in 1912 into the Jewish minority that lived in Bessarabia, she moved to the interior of Romania and worked as a nurse in a Jewish hospital in the Romanian town of Iași. She associated with communists socially, but a former colleague asserted in 1950 that communist colleagues had a hard time trusting her.¹² What is clear, however, is that early in 1937 she faced disciplinary actions at the hospital for allegedly socialising with communists, and that Iași was threatened by the anti-Semitic violence of the far-right Iron Guard movement. Vulnerable professionally and fearing for her safety, Sincari sought a way out. When she was approached by a communist handler who solicited her aid to fight for Spain, she accepted, although on condition that she could say goodbye to her mother in Bessarabia.¹³ She undertook the trip to Paris at roughly the same time as Folmanis and using the same cover story. Sincari later testified that the shared experience of crossing the Pyrenean border brought together her rag-tag group of Europeans, who could not speak each other’s language, and resulted in joint celebrations when they finally caught sight of Spain.¹⁴

Galia Sincari was not the only woman to travel to Spain. About thirty women from Romania alone volunteered for the International Red Aid missions, the medical services of the Republican Army or the International Brigades. But not everybody accepted the contemporary gender norms that a women’s place in war was at home or in the hospitals. Clara Thalmann, born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1908, was one of them, although she conceded in later interviews that at the time she scarcely considered herself a trailblazer or even a feminist. Rather, she felt like a political outsider who had fallen out with the Communist Party in 1925 for sympathising with the...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates
• List of maps
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Chronology of events
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘For your freedom and ours!’: transnational experiences in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39
• 2 The ‘Spanish matrix’: transnational catalyst of Europe’s anti-Nazi resistance
• 3 Camps as crucibles of transnational resistance
• 4 From regular armies to irregular resistance (and back)
• 5 Inherently transnational: escape lines
• 6 Transnational perspectives on Jews in the resistance
• 7 SOE and transnational resistance
• 8 Transnational guerrillas in the ‘shatter zones’ of the Balkans and Eastern Front
• 9 Transnational uprisings: Warsaw, Paris, Slovakia
• 10 Afterlives and memories
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index