![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
General Franco's dictatorship maintained a relationship with the genocidal process promoted by Nazi Germany during the Second World War (1939-1945) that has been the object of political and historiographical discussion. While Franco's detractors denounced his open complicity with the Holocaust pursuant his anti-Semitic impulses, his supporters praised the assistance he provided on humanitarian grounds to the Jewish population persecuted during the Holocaust. Accurate and diachronic analysis of Franco's own ideas and of his regime's conduct during the six-year conflict presents a more complex image that precludes unequivocal subscription to one or other of these positions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 According to Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the term ‘Jewish Question’ was coined in Western Europe in the eighteenth Century to referred to the ‘problem’ that ‘the anomalous persistence of the Jews as a people posed to the new nation-states and the rising political nationalisms’, using its apparent verbal neutrality to conceal ‘the user’s impatience with the singularity of this people that did not appear to conform to the new political demands of the state’. The War against the Jews, 1933–1945, 17. It was widely used in Spain in the translated form of ‘cuestión judía’. See Rozenberg, La España contemporánea y la cuestión judía, 11–12.
2 Preston, Franco. A Biography, 360. This historiographical assessment is endorsed by the testimony of the Director General of Foreign Policy in the Francoist Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the world war: ‘It is the Head of State who is personally responsible for these issues of foreign policy’. Doussinague, España tenía razón, 1939–1945, 22.
3 See Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews, 1933–1945. Raul Hilberg’s initial 1961 study on this process continues to be a canonical work, courtesy of its descriptive thoroughness: The Destruction of the European Jews. It can be complemented by Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews.
4 The largest figure is suggested by the official pamphlet, Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, España y los judíos. The smallest one is advanced by the journalist Ysart, España y los judíos en la Segunda Guerra Mundial; Lipschitz, Franco, Spain, the Jews and the Holocaust; Salinas, España, los sefarditas y el Tercer Reich.
5 Martín de Pozuelo, Franco, cómplice del Holocausto.
6 Avni, España, Franco y los judíos; Marquina and Ospina, España y los judíos en el siglo XX; Rother, Franco y el Holocausto; Rohr, The Spanish Right and the Jews, 1898–1945; Baer, Visados para la Libertad; Lisbona, Más allá del deber.
7 Ladero Quesada, “El número de judíos en la España de 1492,” and Contreras, “Judíos, judaizantes y judeoconversos en la Península Ibérica en tiempos de la expulsión,” 170–80 and 457–77.
8 Bachoud, Franco, 19–20; and “Franco y los judíos,” 379–90 (quotation on p. 379).
9 Apart from the classic aforementioned work of Isaac, Las raíces cristianas del antisemitismo, mention should be made of three more recent studies on this question: Wistrich, Antisemitism; Perednik, La Judeofobia; and Judaken, “Anti-Judaism,” 13–24. The crucial religious dimension that generated this initial hostility toward the Jewish religion is studied from different perspectives in Bottéro, Ouaknin and Moingt, La más bella historia de Dios.
10 Article, “Judíos y Masones,” in La Lectura Dominical, organ of the Apostolate of the Press, 27 February 1898. Reproduced in Ferrer Benimeli, El contubernio judeo-masónico-comunista, 138. Cfr. Domínguez Arribas, El enemigo judeo-masónico en la propaganda franquista.
11 A comprehensive review of the Philo-Sephardic movement in Aliberti, Sefarad. Una comunidad imaginada, 1924–2015, 33–94; and Rozenberg, La España contemporánea y la cuestión judía, especially Chaps. 2 and 3. A recent evaluation of the subject by Josep Calvet (‘Spain, Refuge for Jews Fleeing Nazism during the Second World War’) and Tabea Alexa Linhard (‘routes of the Renowned and the Nameless: Clandestine Border-Crossing at the Pyrenees, 1939–1945’) in Brenneis and Herrmann, eds., Spain, the Second World War and the Holocust, 115–24 and 125–37. A general assesment in Santiago López Rodríguez.
12 Lisbona, Retorno a Sefarad. La política de España hacia sus judíos en el siglo XX, 37–38.
13 Franco Bahamonde, “Xauén, la triste,” 145–47. D. Rozenberg comments in this respect: ‘The glorification of colonial action and a certain exaggeration of the Jewish welcome are evident in these lines, but they also transmit a clear respect towards a minority linked to their biblical and Hispanic traditions’ (La España contemporánea y la cuestión judía, 65). A. Bachoud writes in the same vein: ‘The fact that he refers to Hebrews, Jews, and Israelites or alludes to the Mosaic Festival evidences a clear desire to return to them their age-old, biblical identity’ and ‘extracts them from the negative stereotypes associated with the word Jew’ (“Franco y los judíos,” 382).
14 Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction; Mosse, Toward the Final Solution; Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World.
15 Cohn, Warrant for Genocide; Bronner, A Rumor about the Jews.
16 Words of Moro, La Iglesia y el exterminio de los judíos. Catolicismo, antisemitismo, nazismo, 52–53.
17 The label ‘imported anti-Semitism’ and its secondary function was coined by Manfred Böcker in his study on the Jews in the Second Republic. Quoted in Álvarez Chillida, El Antisemitismo en España. La imagen del judío, 1812–2000, 347. Cfr. González García, Los judíos y la II República.
18 Declarations of 18 August 1938. Franco, Palabras del Caudillo, 19 abril 1937–31 diciembre 1938, 259–63.
19 Letter conserved in the Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores (Foreign Ministry Archives) in Madrid (AMAE), serie ‘Archivo Renovado’ (Renew Archives serie), código R (code R), box 1371, file 3. Henceforth: AMAE R1371/3. Letter delivered by the ambassador ‘into the Holy Father’s own hand’ and in ‘the strictest and most absolute secrecy’, the latter responded on 2 May expressing thanks for ‘a very interesting document’ and praising Franco’s support for the proposals for ‘lasting and just peace, which is not a truce’ promoted by the Vatican. The document contained a letter from Roosevelt to the leaders of the National Council of Young Israel in which he referred to the complicated relations between the USA and the USSR and laid out his proposals for cooperation with Stalin after the war, addressing his concerns over the security of his future borders.
20 de Andrade, Raza. Anecdotario para el guión de una película, 71. Reprint in Barcelona, Planeta, 1997, 77 (historical introduction by Ricardo de la Cierva). The curious aspect of the question is that this was not the first time that Franco had revealed his veiled Philo-Sephardic sympathies, more explicit in times prior to the Civil War. Blin, “Franco et les juifs du Maroc: una approche historique,” 37–57.
21 Published in Extremadura. Diario Católico, 1 January 1940; and in the Madrid newspaper Abc, 2 January 1940.
22 Although the bibliography on Spain and the Second World War is enormous, mention must be made of the works by Tusell, Franco, España y la Segunda Guerra Mundial; Bowen, Spain during World War II; Sáenz-Francés, Entre la Antorcha y la Esvástica; Thomàs, ed., Estados Unidos, Alemania, Gran Bretaña, Japón y sus relaciones con España entre la guerra y la postguerra, 1939–1953; and Brenneis and Herrmann, eds., Spain, the Second World War and the Holocaust. As regards the internal situation, see two important studies: del Arco Blanco, ed., Los “años del hambre”; and Cazorla, Las políticas de la victoria. La consolidación del Nuevo Estado franquista.
23 The previous quotation in Lisbona, Más allá del deber, 50.
24 Encrypted telegram from Serrano Suñer to J. F. de Lequerica (Ambassador to France), 9 November 1940. Archivo General de la Administración (General Administration Archives) en Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), box 82 (‘Expediente general sefarditas, 1939–1945’), file 20552. AGA 82/20552. The document is reproduced in the doctoral thesis by López Rodríguez, El Servicio Exterior de España durante el Holocausto en la Francia ocupada, 1940–1944, 319; and in a photographic format in Alejandro Baer’s catalogue, Visados para la Libertad, 23.
25 Unequivocal proof that these instructions were of a general nature is their almost literal reproduction in other official documents of the period, such as, for example, the previous despatch sent to the Spanish representative in Bulgaria on 7 August 1941: ‘although it is true that in Spain there is no racial law, the Spanish Government cannot create difficulties, even for its subjects of Jewish origin, to prevent them from being subjected to general measures’. Reproduced in Lisbona, Más allá del deber, 235.
26 de Lario, “La lista de Rojas,” 213–59.
27 The previous quote by Rother and the ambassador’s testimony (dated 10 November 1942) in Rother, Franco y el Holocausto, 72 and 405. The judgment by López Rodríguez, El Servicio Exterior de España durante el Holocausto, 187. The conflicting views of Catholics and Falangists on the ‘Jewish Question’ and the consequent policies toward Nazism are well studied by Lazo, La Iglesia, la Falange y el Fascismo, particulary in chapter 5.
28 Aliberti, Sefarad. Una comunidad imaginada, 118.
29 Despatch from Julio Palencia Álvarez-Tubau to the Foreign Minister, Sofia, 14 September 1942. Text reproduced in Alejandro Baer’s aforementioned catalogue, Visados para la Libertad, 48–49; and also in José Antonio Lisbona’s work, Más allá del deber, 238.
30 Note from the Director General of Foreign Policy, José María de Doussinague, January 1943. AMAE R1716/3.
31 The quotations come from different notes from Gómez-Jordana and other high-ranking Spanish diplomats 1943 compiled by Rother, Franco y el Holocausto, 274, 279 and 282. The textual phrase by Gómez-Jordana, although used in several places, is part of his letter of 16 June 1944. AGA 82/2547. The possibility of its origin in Franco himself is suggested by López Rodríguez, El Servicio Exterior de España durante el Holocausto en la Francia ocupada, 298.
32 Recent evaluations on the subject by Josep Calvet (‘Spain, Refuge for Jews Fleeing Nazism during the Second World War’) and Tabea Alexa Linhard (‘Routes of the Renowned and the Nameless. Clandestine Border-Crossing at the Pyrenees, 1939–1945’) in Brenneis and Herrmann, eds., Spain, the Second World War and the Holocaust, 115–24 and 125–37. A general assessment in Lisbona, Más allá del deber, 40–41; and López Rodríguez, El Servicio Exterior de España durante el Holocausto, 39 and 307.
33 See the record of 18 individual cases compiled by J. A. Lisbona (Más allá del deber) and A. Baer (Visados para la Libertad). By way of updated review and summary of this theme, see López Rodríguez, “La diplomacia española durante el Holocausto,” 145–98.
34 The previous quotations in Preston, Franco. A biography, XIX and 487. Franco was proud of his cautious behavior at that time and afterward, as he declared at a close friend at the end of his life: ‘I am here because I neither understand nor do politics. That is the secret’. Quoted in Moradiellos, Franco. Anatomy of a dictator, 39.
35 Lisbona, Más allá del deber, 48.
36 Ibid., 50.
37 Rozenberg, La España contemporánea y la cuestión judía, 248.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Enrique Moradiellos
Enrique Moradiellos (Oviedo, Spain, 1961) is at present a professor of Late Modern Spanish and European History at the University of Extremadura (Spain). Previous to this appointment, he has been lecturing in Spanish History at Queen Mary College (University of London) and the Complutense University of Madrid. As a full member of the Royal Academy of History of Spain, in 2017 he was awarded the National Prize for History on account of his book entitled Historia minima de la Guerra Civil Española. His main field of research is basically XXth Century Spanish History, with particular attention to the period of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and Franco’s Dictatorship (1939–1975). He is the author of the book entitled Franco. Anatomy of a Dictator (London, I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2018).