Introduction

Abstract

In December 1945 the Spanish dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde was in dire trouble. Seven months after Nazi Germany’s surrender, the victorious Allies were gearing up to drum the Franco regime out of the postwar international community over Spain’s wartime relations with the Axis powers, a process that had started the previous August with the dictatorship being branded in the Potsdam Declaration as the one neutral state that should be excluded from the new United Nations Organization (UN).1 Francisco Franco had no one to blame but himself for his current desperate situation. Whether out of gratitude for military aid rendered during the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War, ideological affinity with fascism or a pragmatic desire to stay on positive political and economic terms with the European continent’s most powerful state—at least until Germany was pulverized by the Soviet Union, the US and UK—or, most likely, a combination of all these factors, for the first several years of World War II Francisco Franco maintained a pro-Axis “non-belligerency” until the Soviet victory at the Battle of Stalingrad prompted him to shift to a more equitable neutrality. Indeed, Franco had met with Hitler at the French Basque border town of Hendaye and been photographed and filmed with der Führer—the film and pictures would come back to haunt him in peacetime—and he had allowed both the transfer of thousands of Spanish workers to German factories and the formation of the Division Azul to fight alongside the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front when Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.2