Blue Division

• 1. Introduction

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  The Blue Division was a unit of Spanish volunteers who fought for Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front during World War II, yet Spain itself was never officially at war. Between 1941 and 1943, tens of thousands of Spaniards put on German army field grey and marched toward Leningrad, wearing a single sleeve badge that read "España" to mark them as something apart from the Wehrmacht they had formally joined. How did a country that declared itself non-belligerent end up fielding a division inside Hitler's army? What kind of men signed up, and why? And what happened to those who refused to come home when their own government ordered them back?

• 2. Franco's Tightrope

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  Francisco Franco had taken power at the head of a coalition of fascist, monarchist, and conservative factions after the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. More than 300,000 people died in that conflict, and the country's economy suffered lasting damage. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had backed Franco's Nationalists; the Soviet Union had backed the Republicans. Franco sympathised with many aspects of fascist ideology, especially its anti-communism, and he did not conceal that sympathy once World War II began.

  In the autumn of 1940, Franco came close to stepping off the fence entirely. He met Adolf Hitler on the 23rd and the 24th of October 1940 at Hendaye to discuss Spanish belligerency. The meeting came to nothing. Franco wanted promises that Spain would receive colonial territories from France in North Africa; Hitler was not prepared to delegitimise the new Vichy regime by carving up French holdings. Spain remained officially non-belligerent, pulled between debts to the Axis, wariness of Britain's naval power, and a country still bleeding from civil war.

• 3. Birth of a Division

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  Within hours of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941, Foreign Minister Ramón Serrano Suñer brought a proposal to Franco: let Spaniards volunteer to fight in what he publicly framed as an "anti-communist crusade." Senior Spanish Army officers supported the idea, and Franco agreed. Germany accepted the Spanish offer on the 24th of June 1941.

  Recruitment opened on the 27th of June 1941. By the 2nd of July 1941, just five days later, 18,373 men had volunteered. Half of the officers and non-commissioned officers were professional soldiers given leave from the Spanish Army, many of them veterans of the Civil War. Nearly a fifth of the early volunteers were students. The division also absorbed a small number of White Russian émigrés already living in Spain. General Agustín Muñoz Grandes was assigned to lead them.

  Because the volunteers could not officially wear Spanish Army uniforms, they assembled a symbolic composite: the red berets of the Carlists, the khaki trousers of the Spanish Legion, and the blue shirts of the Falangists. That blue shirt gave the unit its name. On the Eastern Front they wore standard German field grey, but with a sleeve shield marked "España" and the Spanish national colours. The blue uniform was reserved for leave time back in Spain.

• 4. The Long March to Leningrad

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  On the 13th of July 1941 the first train left Madrid for Grafenwöhr in Bavaria, where the volunteers spent five weeks in German Army training. There they were formally organised as the 250th Infantry Division, their regiments renamed after the Spanish cities their men largely came from: Madrid, Valencia, and Seville. Each regiment contained three battalions, and an artillery regiment of four battalions supported the whole division. Aviator volunteers formed a Blue Squadron, flying Messerschmitt Bf 109s and Focke-Wulf Fw 190s; they claimed 156 Soviet aircraft shot down.

  On the 31st of July, after swearing the Hitler Oath, the division was formally incorporated into the Wehrmacht. It was assigned to Army Group Center, the thrust toward Moscow, and transported by train to Suwałki in Poland. From there the men had to walk. The planned route covered roughly 900 kilometres through Grodno, Lida, Vilnius, Minsk, and Orsha toward Smolensk. On the 26th of September, while still marching, they were rerouted from Vitebsk and reassigned to Army Group North, the force closing on Leningrad. Their first posting placed them along the Volkhov River and Lake Ilmen, with headquarters in Grigorovo on the outskirts of Novgorod, responsible for a 50-kilometre stretch of front.

  In Novgorod the division left a destructive mark on the city's medieval heritage. Soldiers burned the iconostasis of the Church of Saint Theodore Stratelates for firewood. They converted the high cupola of the Church of the Transfiguration on Ilyina Street into a machine-gun nest, badly damaging the building and many of the medieval icons painted by Theophanes the Greek. Three more iconostases were removed and taken to Germany before the end of 1943. Vladimir Kovalevskii, a White Russian interpreter who served with the division, left a memoir describing low discipline and crimes committed by the Spanish volunteers.

• 5. Krasny Bor

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  In August 1942, the Blue Division was transferred north to the southeastern flank of the Leningrad siege, near Pushkin, Kolpino, and Krasny Bor in the Izhora River area. Command had by then passed to General Emilio Esteban Infantes. After the German defeat at Stalingrad, German forces were pulled southward, thinning the Leningrad perimeter.

  In February 1943 the Soviet 55th Army, strengthened by the momentum of Stalingrad, attacked the Spanish positions at the Battle of Krasny Bor near the main Moscow-Leningrad road. The attacking Soviet force outnumbered the Spaniards by seven to one and was supported by tanks. Despite very heavy casualties, the Spanish volunteers held their ground. The siege of Leningrad was maintained for another year as a result.

  Hitler took note. He commissioned a medal specifically for the Blue Division in January 1944, the only component of the German Army to receive a medal of its own. During his table talks he said of the Spaniards: "They have never yielded an inch of ground. One can't imagine more fearless fellows. They scarcely take cover. They flout death." He called the division equal to the best German units. Throughout the Leningrad front the division continued suffering casualties from enemy action and from the weather.

• 6. Withdrawal and the Holdouts

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  Allied pressure on Franco grew as the war's balance shifted. Negotiations began in the spring of 1943, and on the 10th of October 1943 Franco issued the withdrawal order. On the 3rd of November 1943 the Spanish government ordered all remaining troops home. Not everyone obeyed. Close to 3,000 men, mostly Falangists, refused to return. They were the "non-returners."

  Spaniards who stayed on were folded into a variety of German units. Some joined the 3rd Mountain Division and the 357th Infantry Division. One unit was sent to Latvia. Two companies joined the Brandenburger Regiment and the 121st Division in security operations in Yugoslavia. A company of 140 men, designated the 101st Spanish Volunteer Company of the SS, was attached to the 28th SS Volunteer Grenadier Division Wallonien, organised into four rifle platoons and one staff platoon. Fresh volunteers continued to slip across the Spanish border near Lourdes in occupied France even after the official withdrawal.

  Those who stayed first formed a unit called the Blue Legion within the 121st Infantry Division, but even that smaller formation was ordered home in March 1944, transported back to Spain on the 21st of March. The holdouts who remained were absorbed into whatever German units would take them.

• 7. Prisoners and the Long Wait

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  Through rotation over the entire campaign, as many as 45,000 Spanish soldiers served on the Eastern Front. The Blue Division and its successor units suffered 4,954 men killed and 8,700 wounded. Another 372 members of the division, the Blue Legion, and the SS company were captured by the Red Army.

  Most prisoners of other nationalities were repatriated after 1945, but Francoist Spain and the Soviet Union had no diplomatic relations. The prisoners were not sent home. Soviet camps held them alongside other captives in a complicated mix: hardline anti-Communists, men who had collaborated with Soviet authorities, and even Republican Spanish sailors whose ships had been requisitioned after the fall of the Republic.

  After Stalin died, the situation shifted. In 1954, the French Red Cross arranged for the ship Semiramis to carry those who wished to be repatriated to Barcelona. On the 2nd of April 1954, 286 men who had been held since the war's end finally returned to Spain, more than a decade after the last Blue Division soldier had left the front. Today, 1,900 soldiers of the Blue Division are buried in the war cemetery in Veliky Novgorod, Russia.