Spain during World War II

• 1. Introduction

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  Spain during World War II occupied one of the strangest positions of any nation in the conflict. Francisco Franco, the dictator who had won power with German and Italian guns, sat at the edge of a war he had nearly joined, watching empires rise and fall while holding his own fractured country just outside the fight.

  On the 19th of June 1940, with France collapsing beneath German boots, Franco pressed a message to Adolf Hitler. He wanted in. He was ready, under certain conditions, to enter the war on the side of Germany and Italy. The conditions, as it turned out, were the problem. They would define the next four years of Spanish foreign policy, and they would keep Spain out of a war that might have destroyed it.

  What made Franco hold back, even after pledging to join? What did Spain quietly provide to Germany while officially claiming neutrality? And who were the tens of thousands of Spaniards who went to fight anyway, on both sides of the front lines? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. The Meeting at Hendaye

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  Hitler and Franco met face to face only once, at Hendaye, France on the 23rd of October 1940. The meeting lasted nine hours. No agreement was reached.

  Franco arrived with demands that struck Hitler as excessive. In exchange for entering the war, Franco wanted the territorial annexation of Morocco, other territories in French Africa, heavy fortification of the Canary Islands, and large quantities of grain, fuel, armoured vehicles, military aircraft, and other armaments. Hitler, in turn, had his own plans for Morocco and wanted bases in the Canary Islands for what he envisioned as a future naval war against the United States. The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote that the German willingness to forgo Spain's participation rather than abandon plans for naval bases off northwest Africa "surely demonstrates the centrality of this latter issue to Hitler as he looked forward to naval war with the United States".

  The impasse also had a practical dimension. Spain relied on food and oil from the United States, and the U.S. had agreed to take British recommendations on restricting those supplies. Lacking a strong navy, any Spanish military action would depend on German oil, which was itself partly drawn from captured French reserves. Neither side would make sufficient compromises, and talks collapsed.

  Afterward, Hitler famously told Mussolini he would prefer to have three or four of his own teeth pulled out than to speak to Franco again. But Hitler tried once more. In December 1940 he sent a blunt letter requesting passage for German troops through Spain to attack Gibraltar. Franco refused, saying he wanted to wait until Britain "was on the point of collapse". By then, Italian forces were being routed in Cyrenaica and the Royal Navy was operating freely in Italian waters. Britain was clearly not finished. A follow-up letter from Hitler offered grain and military supplies. Franco replied that circumstances had changed so far beyond October that "the Protocol then agreed must now be considered outmoded".

• 3. What Spain Actually Gave Germany

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  While diplomats exchanged letters and demands, Spain was already providing Germany with concrete and sometimes covert assistance.

  The most valuable resource was wolfram, the ore form of tungsten, extracted from German-owned mines in Galicia in northwestern Spain. Tungsten was essential for precision engineering and armament production. Despite Allied efforts to buy up available supplies and drive prices up, shipments to Germany continued until August 1944.

  Spanish ports also served German submarines. Between January 1940 and February 1944, between 25 and 26 German U-boats were replenished in Spanish harbors. The ports of Vigo, Las Palmas, Cádiz, and Ferrol were all used. Overall, 1,508 tons of gas-oil and 37.1 tons of heavy oil were supplied, along with lubricants, water, food, and in some cases navigation charts, first-aid kits, and torpedoes. Three of the operations were emergencies; most were scheduled in advance.

  Beyond material support, Franco allowed a pro-Axis propaganda campaign in the Spanish press, permitted the Gestapo to operate inside Spain, and created a Jewish Archive in case the Germans wanted information about Spanish Jews. Franco's chief of security, José María Finat y Escrivá de Romaní, issued an official order on the 13th of May 1941 requesting lists of all Jews from every provincial governor. Six thousand names were compiled, and Romaní was then appointed Spain's ambassador to Germany, where he delivered the list personally to Himmler. After Germany's defeat, the Spanish government tried to destroy all evidence of this cooperation. The order survived.

  Spain also acted as a trade conduit for goods from South America, including industrial diamonds and platinum. After the war, evidence was found of significant gold transactions between Germany and Spain that ceased only in May 1945, believed to derive from Nazi looting of occupied lands.

• 4. The Blue Division

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  When Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Franco found a way to repay his wartime debt without formally entering the conflict. He permitted volunteers to join the German Army on the explicit guarantee they would fight only against the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, and not against the western Allies.

  Hitler approved the use of Spanish volunteers on the 24th of June 1941. Volunteers arrived at recruiting offices across Spain in numbers far beyond expectations. Cadets from the officer training school in Zaragoza volunteered in particularly large numbers. The Spanish government had initially planned to send around 4,000 men; they ended up with enough for a full division. The result was the Blue Division, or División Azul, commanded by Agustín Muñoz Grandes, comprising 18,104 men in all, including 2,612 officers and 15,492 soldiers, along with an air squadron called the Blue Squadron.

  Trained in Germany, the division was deployed to the Siege of Leningrad. In August 1942 it moved to the southeastern flank of the siege, near Pushkin, Kolpino, and Krasny Bor in the Izhora River area. Its defining engagement came in February 1943, when the Soviet 55th Army, strengthened after the victory at Stalingrad, attacked Spanish positions at the Battle of Krasny Bor. General Emilio Esteban Infantes commanded roughly 6,000 Spanish soldiers who threw back some 30,000 Soviet troops. The siege of Leningrad held for another year.

  By October 1943, diplomatic pressure had grown severe enough that Franco ordered the division home, though a token force remained until March 1944. In total, about 45,000 Spaniards served on the Eastern Front, and around 4,500 died. Of the 372 men from the division and related units taken prisoner by the Red Army, 286 were held until the 2nd of April 1954, when they returned to Spain aboard the ship Semiramis, provided by the International Red Cross.

• 5. Spaniards Fighting for the Allies

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  Tens of thousands of Spaniards fought against the Axis as well, mostly veterans of the Republican side in the Civil War who had gone into exile after their defeat.

  When France fell, the French Republic had interned many of these refugees in camps such as Camp Gurs in southern France. To improve their conditions, many joined the French Foreign Legion at the outbreak of the war, making up a sizeable portion of it. Around sixty thousand joined the French Resistance, mostly as guerrillas. Several thousand more joined the Free French Forces. Some sources have claimed as many as 2,000 served in General Leclerc's Second French Division, many from the former Durruti Column.

  The 9th Armoured Company, comprising almost entirely battle-hardened Spanish veterans, became the first Allied military unit to enter Paris during its liberation in August 1944, where its soldiers met Spanish Maquis fighters alongside French resistance members. An additional 1,000 Spanish Republicans served in the 13th Demi-Brigade of the Foreign Legion.

  In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union had received former Communist Spanish leaders and children evacuated from Republican families. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, many joined the Red Army. According to the historian Antony Beevor, 700 Spanish Republicans served in the Red Army and another 700 operated as partisans behind German lines.

  Spaniards also worked in intelligence. The double agent Juan Pujol García, code name GARBO, worked for the Allied cause. At the postwar Potsdam Conference in July 1945, Joseph Stalin wanted to impose heavy sanctions on Spain and support democratic forces to destroy Franco's regime from the inside, but Harry S. Truman and Winston Churchill persuaded him to settle for a full trade embargo instead.

• 6. Jews, Refugees, and a Complicated Record

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  Spain's treatment of Jewish refugees during the war is among the most debated aspects of its wartime conduct, and it resists simple characterization.

  Spanish diplomats in occupied Europe, particularly in Hungary, extended protection to Jews claiming Spanish ancestry, providing documentation without requiring proof of descent. In Budapest, the Spanish head of mission Ángel Sanz Briz saved thousands of Ashkenazim by granting them Spanish citizenship, placing them in safe houses, and teaching them minimal Spanish so they could claim to be Sephardic Jews if questioned by authorities who didn't know the language. When Sanz Briz was forced to flee Budapest, an Italian diplomat, Giorgio Perlasca, who was himself living under Spanish protection, used forged documents to convince Hungarian authorities he was the new Spanish Ambassador. He continued the protection of Hungarian Jews until the Red Army arrived.

  Between 25,000 and 35,000 refugees, mainly Jews, were allowed to transit through Spain to Portugal and beyond. Control of the Spanish-French border relaxed somewhat after the Anglophile Francisco Gómez-Jordana Sousa replaced Franco's brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Suñer as foreign minister, and thousands managed to cross, many through smugglers' routes. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee operated openly in Barcelona.

  The picture has a darker side. The Franco regime had created its Jewish Archive at German request, compiled a list of six thousand Jewish names for Himmler, and after the war harbored figures who had been responsible for Jewish deportations under Vichy France, including Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who served as Commissioner for Jewish Affairs from May 1942 to February 1944, as well as former Nazis such as Otto Skorzeny and Léon Degrelle. Historian Trudi Alexy described the situation as an "absurdity" and a "paradox" of refugees fleeing Nazi persecution to seek asylum in a country where no Jews had been permitted to live openly as Jews for over four centuries.

• 7. The Cost of Survival

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  Spain emerged from the war without having formally fought in it, but the price of that survival arrived with the peace.

  American pressure in 1944 had already forced Franco's hand on tungsten exports. When the U.S. imposed an oil embargo, Franco yielded, cutting off supplies and withdrawing the Blue Division. The shift came too late to spare Spain's international reputation. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt had privately assured Franco that Spain would not suffer consequences from the Allies, but Roosevelt died in April 1945. His successor, Harry S. Truman, showed no such accommodation. A number of nations withdrew their ambassadors. Spain was not admitted to the United Nations until 1955.

  The postwar isolation extended to trade with most countries as well. The wartime years had also left Spanish armed forces in a weakened position. The Army's weapons were described as very obsolete by 1945, owing to the rapid technological evolution of the Allied and Axis armies during the war, while Spain stood still. At the end of the Civil War in April 1939, the Spanish Army had counted 1,020,500 men in 60 divisions. Franco had cut that to 250,000 by early 1940. By November 1942, with Allied landings in North Africa and the German occupation of Vichy France pressing close to the border, he ordered a partial mobilization that brought the army back to over 750,000. By 1945, it stood at 300,000 enlisted men, 25,000 non-commissioned officers, and 25,000 chiefs and officers, armed with equipment already outpaced by the rest of the world.

  One quiet footnote to Spain's wartime balancing act came in 1945, when Franco's government awarded a lifetime pension to the widow of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the German intelligence chief who had been executed by the Nazis. The pension was granted in recognition of the advice Canaris had given Franco to keep Spain out of the war, advice that Franco, as the pension acknowledged, took and was forever grateful for.