Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II (review)

The defeat of Hitler in May 1945 was greeted by Spain’s tightly controlled press with extravagant eulogies of Franco, the genius that bestowed the gift of peace upon Spain. According to the Falangist Arriba, the end of the war was ‘Franco’s Victory’. The monarchist ABC carried a front page picture of the Caudillo ‘chosen by the benevolence of God. When everything was obscure, he saw clearly... and sustained and defended Spain’s neutrality.’ For the next thirty years, Franco’s admirers hailed wartime neutrality as something achieved by dint of skilful and courageous deceit of Hitler.

There was no more fervent admirer of Franco than the Caudillo himself. Either directly in his speeches and his books and articles and in published interviews with journalists or through private audiences granted to his hagiographers, he worked tirelessly to create a lifestory that justified comparison with the great figures of Spanish history and legend. Among his most cherished myths were three – that he had won the Spanish Civil War by dint of military genius, that he had masterminded Spain’s economic boom of the 1960s and, above all, that neutrality in the Second World War was his brilliant achievement. In fact, there was no truth in any of them. Victory in 1939 was gained thanks to the unstinting aid of Hitler and Mussolini and the non-interventionist policies of Britain and France which deprived the democratic Republic of the weapons that it needed to defend itself. Economic boom came after Franco had relinquished day-to-day decision-making. Before 1957, his economic policies had been disastrous. During the Second World War, the self-styled ‘Caudillo of Peace’ had been desperate to enter the war on Hitler’s side and was thwarted only by Spain’s parlous economic situation and the Führer’s reluctance to take on another ally even more impecunious than Mussolini.

Historical writing in Spain, and also in Britain, since Franco’s death in 1975 has shattered these myths although all three still have their proponents, largely, it must be said, amongst diehard Francoists. German submarines were given refuelling facilities in north-western Spain and the Canary Islands. Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes were allowed to fly from Spanish bases. Crash-landed Allied aircraft were handed over to German technicians for inspection. Logistical support was given to German and Italian sabotage operations in Gibraltar. The area surrounding the Rock became a centre for German espionage. The Spanish media was virtually entirely in the behest of the press attaché in the German Embassy. In 1942, nine million pro-Axis leaflets were distributed in Spain while Allied propaganda was obstructed and people were arrested merely for for trying to enter the British and American embassies. On several occasions in the course of the war, Franco offered to fight at Hitler’s side. In Seville in February 1942, he declared: ‘if the road to Berlin were open, then it would not merely be one Division of Spanish volunteers but one million Spaniards who would be offered to help’. He was referring to the ‘volunteer’ Blue Division sent, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, to fight on the Eastern front. This is all well-documented. However, the idea of a hard-won neutrality lingers on and with it the notion that Franco was responsible for saving many Jews from extermination at the hands of the Nazis.

For readers with neither the time nor the linguistic skills necessary to read the substantial body of work produced in the last fifteen years, Stanley Payne’s synthesis is a useful exposition of Franco’s Axis flirtation. The book leans heavily on the work of Spanish historians, especially that of the recently deceased Javier Tusell. There is little here that is entirely original, which somewhat belies the wildly extravagant eulogies to Payne’s achievement printed on the back cover. Non-specialists will not be...