ABSTRACT
There is little dispute about the influence of Nazi intervention in Spain upon the course and result of the Civil War there from 1936 until 1939. It was the Italo-German transportation of Franco’s army of Africa over the Straits of Gibraltar from Spanish Morocco to metropolitan Spain, during the period late July to September 1936, that rescued the geo-graphically dispersed military insurgents against the Republic from isolation and piecemeal defeat. 1 Hitler was in no doubt about the significance of this airlift, as his later comment demonstrates: ‘Franco ought to erect a monument to the glory of the Junker 52. It is this aircraft that the Spanish revolution has to thank for its victory.’ 2 Moreover, although the Nazi regime did not, like Fascist Italy, commit large numbers of ground troops to the Spanish struggle, the quantity and quality of the German matériel and military personnel dispatched to sustain the Francoist Civil War effort were sufficient to make a major contribution to its eventual victory over the Republican camp. 3 In conversation with Italian Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, in September 1940, Hitler was prepared to share the victor’s laurels in Spain: ‘Italy and Germany had done very much for Spain in the year 1936…. Without the help of both countries there would be today no Franco.’ 4 However, among his own aides, on 7 July 1942, the German leader was inclined to appropriate the entire credit for the triumph of the rebel cause in Spain. For, although Hitler noted that the Spanish Nationalists could ‘consider themselves very lucky to have received the help of Fascist Italy and National-Socialist Germany in their…civil war’, he also made this observation:
People speak of an intervention from Heaven which decided the civil war in favour of Franco…but it was not an intervention on the part of the madam styled the Mother of God…but the intervention of the German General von Richthofen [who commanded, in the later stages of the Spanish conflict, the German air corps that supported the Nationalist army, the Condor Legion] and the bombs his squadrons rained from the heavens that decided the issue. 5
If historians are ready to recognize the impact of German intervention upon the outcome of the Spanish Civil War, there is much less of an historiographical consensus over the reasons for which the Nazi state became, and remained for the duration, involved in that combat. 6 Some commentators have attributed this absence of agreement about the primary purpose of Nazi engagement in Spain to the deficient state of the extant documentary sources pertinent to this problem. 7 It has also been asserted that the diversity of views concerning the origins and aims of German intervention in Spain’s civil strife derives from an excessively static conception of German policy towards that conflict. According to this view, Nazi goals in Spain changed over time as the Civil War there developed into a protracted struggle which, in its turn, evolved as part of a general international situation to which German foreign-policy makers had to formulate a global response. Thus, it has been doubted whether Germany’s help to the Nationalist camp over the course of the three-year Civil War can be explained by reference to the factors which induced Hitler, on the night of 25–6 July 1936, to lend immediate small-scale military assistance to Franco. 8 Indeed, one historian, Wolfgang Schieder, has characterized Germany’s engagement in Spain’s internal struggles as a cumulative one, which Hitler failed to control. 9