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This below is Chapter 3 Section 4:
4. Germany and the Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War
Rumors about the arrival of Soviet ships bringing weapons for the planned seizure of power by the Bolshevik forces were, according to those involved, major motive for triggering the uprising of the Spanish army against the Popular Front government on 17-18 July 1936; allegations of Hitler’s involvement in the preparations are still making the rounds today. One is untrue, the other highly improbable. The Spanish Civil War grew out of Spanish roots. But early on, and not without reason, the events in Spain between 1931 and 1936 were compared with those in Russia between February and October 1917, and in November 1936 Soviet and German planes and tanks, manned or at least directed by German and Soviet soldiers, engaged in a bitter fight for Madrid. The decision was made by Fascist Italy’s heavy deployment of regular army and militia units, and joint intervention brought Germany and Italy together to form the “Axis.” Secretly, and at first scarcely noticed by the world public, a struggle of a very different kind was being waged on the side of the Republicans or the Reds, a struggle between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks with an inverted front, which can be seen as the result of the contrast between the early and late phases of the Russian revolution.
The Spanish state, like the Russian, had been formed in a struggle against a non-Christian power, and where the rule of the Moors preceded that of the Tartars, the memory was still strong, and one of the after-effects was, as in Russia, the great importance of a state religion. In Spain, too, industry had developed very unevenly up to the First World War, the largest part of the country was still entirely agrarian, and in many regions the majority of the population was made up of landless or land-poor farmers. Among the intellectuals in Spain, too, Europeanizers took a harsh stance against traditionalists, and this alone proves that Spain, like Russia, had a difficult relationship with Europe. In Spain, too, social unrest was combined in a variety of ways with regional aspirations for independence, which in the case of the Basques and Catalans almost took on the character of national liberation struggles against Castilian domination.
Admittedly, the differences were also considerable. Spain had been part of the liberal monarchies since the end of the first Carlist War in 1839; it had repeatedly experienced revolutionary upheavals, most of them triggered or ended by the army’s pronunciamento; since 1889 parliamentary elections had been held by universal suffrage; the Socialist Workers’ Party had a legal existence, and the anarchists spread their doctrine not only among the peasants of Andalusia but also among the factory workers of Catalonia. Thus, in 1931, as a result of elections, the monarchy was replaced by the Second Republic, which not only adopted a constitution modeled on the Weimar Republic, but its party system seemed to differ little from that of the other European states, except for the unusual strength of the anarchists.
It was not surprising that the new state found harsh opponents on both the monarchist right and the anarchist left, for it was initially governed by left-bourgeois forces who wanted to continue the work of repressing the Church, reducing the army and reducing large-scale land ownership. What was even more serious was that the Socialists, under the leadership of Largo Caballero, who had worked closely with the dictator Primo de Rivera until 1930, developed more and more into a revolutionary party, and that Gil Robles’ Christian Democratic Party did not give up its fundamental reservations. For the one and for the other event, however, international conditions were already decisive: for the socialists, Hitler’s seizure of power and the violent defeat of the Austrian Social Democrats in February 1934, for the Christian party, the CEDA, the atmosphere of the cult of the leader and the uniformed associations, which hardly remained anywhere without effects. The Asturian uprising of 1934, which was crushed in bloody battles by the Foreign Legionnaires under General Franco, contributed immensely to sharpening the antagonism: Largo Caballero was now not averse to being called the “Spanish Lenin,” and considerable sections of the CEDA now sympathized with the newly founded “Falange” and its leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera.
The elections of February 16, 1936 showed that two roughly equal blocs of right and left constituency were facing each other and that the center was almost destroyed, but as a result of the electoral system a great victory for the Popular Front was produced, which now also included the anarchists. The result was severe social unrest in large parts of the country, since the agricultural workers in particular demanded the immediate fulfillment of the election promises and in many places occupied the land of the large landowners without any fuss. Dozens of churches were set on fire across town and country, and the death toll ran into the hundreds. There was much talk in the socialist press of the impending proletarian revolution, and with some justification observers perceived the hand of the Comintern behind the unification of the socialist and communist youth leagues. On the other hand, the Falange did their best to provoke by assassinations, and the Carlists in Navarre prepared almost openly for civil war. But more and more generals in the army, both republicans and monarchists, became convinced that the country was threatened with disintegration by social and separatist agitation and that President Manuel Azaña, the model of the leftist educated citizen, was the Kerensky of a Spanish revolution.
Thus, preparations were made for the uprising, which the leaders were convinced would not be a revolt, but rather a seizure of power and the restoration of order along the lines of the nineteenth-century pronunciamentos or the coup d'état of Primo de Rivera in 1923. The assassination of the monarchist politician Calvo Sotelo by members of a kind of regime police was probably more cause than reason, and on the evening of July 17, 1936, the most powerful units of the Spanish army, stationed in North Africa, where they had experienced heavy defeats and great victories, took control of the colony, while the next day many army units rose up in the motherland. But only in the north and in the extreme south of the country did the soldiers prevail with the consent and participation of the population or by surprise attack; in the big cities, on the other hand, excited crowds quickly assembled and demanded arms from the government. Although considerable parts of the army and police forces, and almost all the air force and navy, remained loyal, the government gave way under a new prime minister, and within a few days the army insurrection was crushed in Madrid and in Barcelona, in Valencia and in Badajoz, in Catalonia and in Estremadura. At the same time, however, the revolution spread like wildfire in loyalist Spain and reduced the power of the left-bourgeois government to nothing. Armed masses filled the streets, burned down churches, drove out or killed the businessmen and especially priests and monks, set up cooperatives and organized defenses. The mood was festive almost everywhere: here, too, the slaves had chased the masters away and were now setting up a life of equality, often with touching recourses to older times, as in Catalonia in particular, where many village communities behaved like independent states and abolished all the symptoms of luxury and vice, such as coffee and alcohol, but also now and then experimented with a large-scale planned economy. The Left around the world saw the liberation and the serenity, the new beginning and the mass enthusiasm; everywhere the Right looked with horror at the murders, the disorder and the dispossession, and they immediately spoke of Bolshevism in Spain. The Left denounced the mass shootings carried out by the Whites in many places, and the Right spread reports of the crucifixion of priests and the horrific drownings of innocent people by the Reds. Public opinion became even more polarized than during the Russian Civil War. More clearly than then, Liberal voices were in favor of the Republicans and Loyalists, but even the New York Times expressed fears in early August that if the government won, Communism would soon take over, and in England it was not just conservatives who were outraged about the fact that the sailors on some ships of the Spanish Navy had thrown their officers overboard, just as Sergej Eisenstein had depicted in his “Battleship Potemkin.”
Events like these could not leave any state indifferent. As early as the evening of July 23, reports in the French right-wing press made it known that the French government had received a request from the Spanish Prime Minister Giral for arms deliveries and that it intended to fulfill this request. In France, however, Léon Blum was now at the helm as head of the Popular Front cabinet. One could guess that there was an ideological affinity here, even if one did not know that Giral had ended his telegram “with brotherly greetings.” That this affinity would soon have consequences in France similar to those in Spain was the thesis of the French Right, which therefore opposed such an intervention with the utmost vigor and dire threats. Thus, the newspaper reports probably would not have been needed to persuade Hitler to accept Franco’s request for the delivery of 20 transport planes, which were conveyed to him by two German businessmen in Bayreuth on the evening of July 25. This request bore all the signs of improvisation, and it would certainly have been rejected by the Foreign Office because the risks were considered too great and, moreover, they did not want to endanger the lives of the Germans in Republican Spain. But Hitler was immediately convinced that Bolshevism was reaching for Spain and that its path had to be blocked. None of his advisers dared to disagree, and from the beginning of August Junker planes played a key role in transporting Moroccan troops and Franco’s Foreign Legionnaires across the Strait of Gibraltar to Andalusia. Only this made it possible to continue the civil war, which now presented itself as an armed conflict between regions and, to a certain extent, between classes. Catalonia, ruled by the anarchist trade union CNT, was in a front with the predominantly socialist-ruled Madrid and the Catholic, non-revolutionary Basque Country, against Navarre, with its Carlist militias, and Old Castile, where the Falange was strong, as well as those parts of Andalusia, where the urban and rural workers had been surprised by a coup d'état by General Queipo de Llano, who was a staunch and proven Republican.
Just as early as Hitler and Mussolini, who also sent some planes, but with more determination, the Communist International intervened in the struggle, and it would have been powerless without the organization and funds placed at its disposal by the Red Army Intelligence and the GPU. In truth, then, it was a matter of Soviet intervention, but this intervention would not have been possible in such a form unless a large number of men, and by no means only communists, had not been ready to risk their lives to prevent the “attack of fascism.” Thus, in France and England, for example, numerous volunteers flocked to the assembly points, German and Italian emigrants joined them, men came secretly from Yugoslavia and Greece, and so many even came from America that they were finally able to form their own battalions. The opposing side also not without volunteers from foreign nations: French, English, Irish; but it was characteristic of the anti-fascist climate of the time that not a single American was among them. After the completion of the extensive preparatory work and transports, the “International Brigades” were set up in October; all accounts agreed that the troops, so diverse in nationalities and convictions, were filled with great enthusiasm, and that they did really understand the “Internationale,” which they sang in many languages, as the anthem of a new and better humanity. The upper ranks of the officers, of course, were almost exclusively occupied by communists, and the “Fifth Regiment” was considered the most useful instrument of the party, which, with its demand for “discipline, hierarchy, organization” differed from the anarchists and their undisciplined militias.
While France supported the “Loyalists” in many ways, it had officially closed its borders when England made a strong suggestion that it work towards a general policy of non-intervention. For England, it was certainly not only the view of the policy of small resistance that was decisive, which could now perhaps be brought to a new beginning after the end of Mussolini’s Ethiopian campaign, but also the thought of the enormous English investments in Spain, which would presumably be endangered if the Madrid government, i.e. the revolutionary forces, were victorious, undoubtedly played a role. In fact, almost all the countries of Europe subscribed to this policy, which one might well call a policy of limiting intervention, for no one doubted that German, Soviet, and Italian arms were entering Spain and would continue to do so.
Meanwhile the national troops had managed to establish a link between their northern and southern territories at Badajoz, and at the end of September they relieved the officers and cadets who had been defending themselves against overwhelming odds for two months in the Alcázar of Toledo. The fall of Madrid seemed imminent.
In the Soviet Union, very soon after the outbreak of the civil war, large solidarity and protest events and fundraising events were held, and many sharp speeches were made against the peace-threatening actions of fascism, but at first Stalin seems to have thought that the organization of the international brigades would suffice as immediate help. Nothing should have been more unpleasant for him in the given world political situation than the proof that he was in the process of setting in motion a Bolshevik revolution in Spain on the model of the Russian one. Even the well-founded suspicion would have destroyed all chances of a policy of great resistance and created the danger of an agreement between England and Germany, which he had just wanted to counter by announcing the popular front policy at the 7th Congress of the Comintern in July/August 1935. But he could not remain idle when Germany sent arms to Spain.
Thu, as early as September, reports were received from foreign missions in Berlin that Russian troops with weapons on board had sailed from Odessa or had arrived in Spanish ports and that a lot of gold was being transported from Spain, which was apparently intended to pay for war material deliveries. Almost simultaneously in October, German and Italian and Soviet tanks appeared on the two sides. When the fighting around Madrid began in early November, a number of German and Soviet aircraft took part in the fighting. The Russian advisers did not take part directly in the fighting, but the Russian Ratas proved superior to the German He 51s unexpectedly, and the same was true of the tanks. The air supremacy of the Nationals soon came to an end, and when the XI. and the XII. International Brigade marched through the city to the cheers of the population and intervened in the fighting on November 10, the Moroccans advancing on the outskirts of the city were stopped and the city remained in the hands of the government, headed by Largo Caballero at the beginning of December.
But around the same time, German aid assumed a large-scale and systematic character for the first time, both as a result of Soviet support and, in turn, as a cause of its further reinforcement. As of mid-November there was a large air force unit in Spain called the “Condor Legion,” consisting of about 5,000 men who were nominally volunteers, reinforced by a some armored detachments and ground troops who were mostly engaged in giving combat training to Spaniards. Deliveries of a few Messerschmitt fighters largely restored the earlier superiority; but that military successes were only partial moments in a great struggle, the Legion and the German leadership had to learn when at the end of April 1937, in connection with Franco’s offensive on the northern front, the city of Guernica was destroyed by German planes and a wave of indignation swept the western countries. The Italians had an even harder experience, having brought to Spain since December whole divisions totaling some 50,000 men. Although the “Blackshirts” conquered Malaga on February 8, not least because of the failure of the militias stationed there, they suffered a noticeable setback at the end of March when they encountered the international brigades near Guadalajara, which included the Italian “Garibaldi” battalion. The fact that they had to give up most of the land they had conquered was less important than the fact that their opponents’ fighting morale proved to be stronger. None other than General Mario Roatta admitted that the International Brigades fought “skillfully and above all with fanaticism and hatred” while the Blackshirts apparently lacked motivation. The worst thing was that the Italian anti-fascists were able to reach the ears of the militiamen with their propaganda and that whole units of troops surrendered without necessity or even defected. On the other hand, the appeal to proletarian solidarity and the propaganda against the senselessness and injustice of this war made no impression on the officers and soldiers of the Condor Legion—apart from the exceptional traps of a few prisoners. In so far as they did not see themselves as pure war technicians, for whom Spain was a maneuvering field, they more or less shared the belief that they were defending culture against malicious attack, and throughout they were imbued with a secure sense of belonging to a higher order, so that they often looked down with contempt on the Spaniards of both sides. Doubts were occasionally raised, and it is by no means unbelievable when a post-war witness claims that the National Socialists among the legionnaires in particular often wondered whether they weren’t fighting on the wrong side. However, such questions did not result from genuine sympathy for the opponent, but from aversion to the reactionary and overly cautious generals and to the major role of the Catholic Church on the national Spanish side.
If the Russians had asked themselves without prejudice what conclusions should be drawn during this first combat operation against Germans since the end of the First World War, they would probably have stated that the troops of National Socialist Germany were even less affected by a propaganda storm along the lines of of the victory over Kornilov than the German army of 1918, that perhaps victory had been the exception dependent on very specific circumstances, since while then all “Kornilovs” from Horthy to Franco had won or at least had good chances of winning, not to mention such unexpected figures as Mussolini and Hitler. For the Germans, on the other hand, much food for thought might have been given by the simple fact that the Spanish masses who created the Bolshevik chaos could not have been incited by Jewish agitators, as might have been the case in Russia, for a Jewish minority was almost non-existent in Spain. So it was not surprising that at the “Party Congress of Honour” in September 1936 there was a great deal of talk about Spain and that Rudolf Hess described it as the aim of the congress to “develop the great thesis and antithesis of the century, Bolshevism and National Socialism,” but it must have been very disturbing for the wiser ones among the National Socialists that Alfred Rosenberg took up again the old talk about “Soviet Judea” and that Goebbels again called Bolshevism the “dictatorship of the inferior.” If the impressions of 1917/18 were perpetuated in such an unchanged way, there was a very great danger of misjudging an opponent whose industry supplied such excellent weapons and whose followers in the International Brigades, to no small extent Jews, accomplished achievements that inferiors and subhumans could not even have dreamed of. For the traditional views of both sides, however, it should have been a shock that Joseph Goebbels in Nuremberg singled out a man as a particularly bad representative of Bolshevism, who disappeared without a trace a few months later after being violently attacked by the communist press: Andrés Nin, the main leader of the left-wing communist party POUM.
What the outside world perceived in Red Spain, insofar as it did not sympathize, was above all the Bolshevik chaos and Bolshevik terror: the poorly dressed masses armed with rifle in the streets, the walks where opponents were shot, the undisciplined mobs of the anarchists, the mummies of nuns torn from the graves and placed in the streets, the violent seizures of property, the forced collectivizations. But in the midst of this chaos there was a force that stood for order from the start, that spoke out against socialization and that held and killed in its own prisons not only big capitalists or officers but also Bolsheviks in particular: the Spanish Communist Party. Certainly it was not the only one who held the view that the war had to be won and therefore waged efficiently. Largo Caballero as prime minister also worked to ensure that the anarchist militias were placed under a unified leadership, he too advocated for the creation of a regular army with ranks and strict discipline, he also advocated the abolition of the soldiers’ councils and, in general, the “rule of the committees.” But the Communists not only set an excellent example of their own, but from the outset they championed theses which aroused great uneasiness among their socialist allies, and even more so among the anarchists: the Spanish people were not fighting for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but for the defense of the republican order, which included respect for small and medium-sized property; compulsory collectivization in the manner of the anarchists was to be rejected; churches should be reopened and freedom of worship publicly guaranteed; not only must fascism was be eradicated, but so must Trotskyists and the “uncontrollables” (i.e., radical anarchists). A letter signed by Stalin, Voroshilov and Molotov, which Ambassador Marcel Rosenberg handed to Prime Minister Caballero in December, was written along these lines: it was important to win over the lower and middle bourgeoisie, they must be protected from confiscation and freedom of trade must be ensured if possible. A good relationship with the left-bourgeois forces around President Azaña was of crucial importance; for the worst danger to the victory of the common cause was the creation of the impression that Spain was to be regarded as a communist republic.
The close connection between the internal policy of the Spanish Communist Party and Stalin’s foreign policy is striking, and it cannot be denied that Lenin’s party had opposed the anarchists and lack of discipline during the Russian Civil War with no less determination. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the Communist Party in Spain defended the theses which the Mensheviks had championed in Russia: the theses that the conditions were not ripe for socialism, that it was necessary to cooperate with the bourgeoisie, that it was only possible to carry out a bourgeois revolution. It was therefore not surprising that the Communist Party in Spain became the protector of independent farmers and tradesmen and that the enormous increase in its membership was due not least to the influx from these circles. Nor is it surprising that Camillo Berneri, an emigrant from Italy and intellectual spokesman for the Catalan anarchists, accused the Communist Party of being the “Foreign Legion of Spanish democracy and Spanish liberalism.” In this Bolshevism, then, there were at least two parties filled with deadly hatred for one another. The Communists were the aggressors, and the accusations they made especially against the POUM, the left-communist or right-anarchist party of Andrés Nin, were in themselves a death threat: the party was Trotskyist and infiltrated by people from the Falange, they took a negative stances on Russian aid and counteracted the war effort through their strong position in Catalonia. Then, in early May 1937, civil war in civil war did indeed break out in Barcelona: supporters of the CNT and the POUM violently resisted orders to evacuate the telephone exchange they controlled, and they returned the city to their absolute power for a few days, but eventually they succumbed quickly to the rapidly approaching and mostly Communist government troops. At least 500 dead were counted. Andrés Nin was arrested and, after being severely tortured, murdered like Berneri.
This shattered the power of Catalan anarchism, but it also shattered the power of revolutionary impetus and spontaneity. From then on, two regular armies fought each other in Spain, and after Caballero’s replacement, Juan Negrin was at the head of the government, a man who was considered a liberal and cultivated intellectual. But the Communists and the Soviet advisers had a much stronger influence on him than the German and Italian officers were able to win over General Franco. The latter thus evaded adequate payment for the huge deliveries he had received, while the Red Spaniards paid for the Soviet aid on with the gold reserves of the state bank to the last penny. Germans and Italians remained foreign auxiliaries and very few of their officers had experience dating back to 1918-1920. The Russian officers, on the other hand, and the leaders of the International Brigades were largely veterans of the Revolution and the Civil War, e.g. the Soviet Consul General in Barcelona Antonow-Owsejenko, the generals “Kleber” and “Lukacz,” the commanders Ludwig Renn and Hans Kahle. That they were still firmly rooted in their old faith cannot be doubted, and neither the struggle against the anarchists nor the support of the Spanish comrades for the bourgeois republic changed that. They certainly did not lose the conviction that they were on the right side, when facts such as that Franco and his German and Italian auxiliary troops had greater military successes to show, that Germany and Italy as “Axis Powers” were moving ever closer together in great politics, and that Mussolini, on his triumphant visit to Germany towards the end of September 1937, called Bolshevism “the modern form of the darkest Byzantine tyranny” and dared to prophesy that Europe of tomorrow would be Fascist. But the news from the Soviet Union must have worried them.
Ilja Ehrenburg visited the XII. International Brigade on the Aragon front, while also speaking to a “short, stocky, and exceedingly scowling man,” apparently a high-ranking officer from the ranks of the Soviet advisers, who had a copy of Pravda in front of him. The man drank cold tea and suddenly he asked: “Do you know the latest? Tukhachevsky, Yakir and Uborevich have been sentenced to death by firing squad. They are enemies of the people.“
While not a few of his best soldiers and the flower of the Communist International were fighting in Spain, Stalin had launched the great “purge” in Moscow. Many of the Spanish fighters fell victim to it, among them Antonov-Owseyenko, who was famous in the Soviet Union as the conqueror of the Winter Palace. Hitler was either a collaborator or a dupe. Nevertheless, the great reconstruction pathos that had dominated the country from the beginning and especially since 1928 did not die out in the Soviet Union.