Franco’s war on Spanish Jews

‘For some people, life was split in two on 22 June 1941, for some on 3 September 1939 and for others on 18 July 1936.’

So wrote Ilya Ehrenburg after the horrors of the Second World War, referring to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and to the declaration of war by Britain and France in 1939. He then went further than many by including the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. For Ehrenburg, the war against Nazism was a continuum that began with the rebellion of Francisco Franco against the Spanish Republic in July 1936.

In a few weeks, on the 90th anniversary of its outbreak, the Spanish Civil War will be remembered for its brutality and self-sacrifice, its folklore and poetry – and the members of the International Brigades who came from the four corners of the earth to fight the ally of Hitler and Mussolini. It was a civil war in which half a million people lost their lives including many foreign volunteers who were often using outdated and inadequate weapons.

The first British volunteers for Spain were Jewish tailors from London’s East End. Nat Cohen, Sam Masters and Alec Sheller were on a bicycling holiday – and stayed to fight Franco. The bicycle of a fourth friend, Ubby Cowen, was stolen in London so he was unable to join them. Sam Masters was killed, whereupon the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers raised funds to send an ambulance to Spain in his memory.

While Franco was regarded as ‘neither as wicked as Hitler nor as foolish as Mussolini’, Jews were disproportionately represented in the International Brigades. Many had joined their local Communist party as the only group willing to take a militant stand against home-grown antisemitism. They understood the struggle in Spain as an opportunity to strike a personal blow against fascism.

Even so, they were held in disdain by both the Comintern (Communist International), which frowned on Jewish nationalism, and also by Jewish community leaders, who felt that they would endanger the good standing of Jews in British society and allow them to be branded as subversive revolutionaries.

While several thousand books have been written about the Spanish Civil War in a plethora of languages, the doyen of historians on this subject, Paul Preston, has drawn attention to an under-publicised aspect – Franco’s deeply ingrained belief in a ‘judeo-masónico-bolchevique’ conspiracy by Jews and masons to overthrow Christian civilisation. Franco saw the civil war as a holy war of the believer against the infidel, in which a fascist victory would permit the construction of a new Spain, upholding traditional Catholic values.

In his book, Architects of Terror  (2023), Preston notes that there were less than 6,000 Jews in the Spain of the 1930s – a third of them were refugees from Nazism. The Catholic Church greatly feared the influence of the October Revolution in 1917 and the preponderance of assimilated Jews, such as Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev in the upper echelons of the Bolsheviks.

Some Catholic figures in Europe continued to regard the Jews as Christ-killers even before the advent of Communism. The Catholic press in France had been complicit in promoting the framing of Alfred Dreyfus in the notorious Dreyfus Affair in 1894.

By 1919, the Papal Nuncio in Munich, Eugenio Pacelli, spoke of a ‘Jewish-Bolshevik global conspiracy’. This had stemmed from an amateurish attempt by Kurt Eisner and others to establish a Bavarian socialist republic. The Catholic and far-right press described the German-born Eisner as ‘a dirty little Jewish Polish schnorrer (beggar)’. In March 1939, Pacelli was elected as Pope Pius XII, ‘the silent Pope’ of the Holocaust.

With the rise of the Spanish Republic in 1931, antisemitism became a political weapon in the hands of the nationalist right, concentrated around CEDA (the Confederation of the Autonomous Right). The leaders of the republic, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, Miguel Maura and Fernando de los Ríos, were declared to be of Jewish origin. At an election meeting in Madrid in October 1933, posters proclaimed the need to save Spain from ‘Marxists, Masons, Separatists and Jews’.

The Spanish Carlist, Lianas de Niubo, wrote that many countries had been subjugated by the Jews because of the campaign of ‘the four horsemen of the Apocalypse – Judaism, Communism, freemasonry and death’. In Pamplona, books written by Jews were burned. By 1935, Hitler’s Mein Kampf  and the Russian forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, had been translated into Spanish.

On the outbreak of the civil war, 48 out of 51 Spanish bishops signed an appeal to churchmen in other countries espousing the cause of Franco and the nationalists. Cardinal Goma, the primate of Spain, said that the nationalists were fighting ‘the Jews and Masons who had poisoned the ingenuous pueblo with Tartar and Mongol ideas and who were erecting a system manipulated by the semitic international’.

In 1940, on the fourth anniversary of the outbreak of the civil war, Franco linked the conflict to the Reconquista of Spain from Islam by the forces of Christendom. Franco’s New Spain was compared to the Spain of 1492 – to that of Ferdinand and Isabella, rulers who had expelled its Jewish population. The Nazis were depicted as simply a modern version of this episode in that they, too, were expelling their Jews.

Franco’s Comision de Cultura was designed to purge academia of Jews and masons. In June 1941, Franco’s Spain informed its consuls in Greece and the Balkans that its Jews – descendants of the expelled of 1492 – were not to be regarded as Spanish subjects and thus not to be protected from Nazi vengeance.

From 1939 until the end of 1942, Franco refused to allow Jewish refugees to settle in Spain and some were turned back at the Spanish border. The philosopher, Walter Benjamin, committed suicide in September 1940 after being refused entry, while the writer Arthur Koestler carried a vial of morphine in case he needed to do the same. Franco’s government knew full well about the Nazi mass murder of Jews in Europe. Despite this, there were Spanish diplomats in Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest, Athens and Paris who disobeyed their official instructions and saved Jews.

The tide began to turn with Allied victories in the Middle East and the fall of Mussolini. In April 1943 Churchill had lunch with the Spanish Ambassador in London and asked why Jewish refugees and escaped prisoners had been turned away at the Spanish border. Churchill told Franco’s emissary that such actions would not be forgotten.

As history records, the West needed Franco’s Spain during the Cold War against Stalin. American military bases were constructed in Spain during the 1950s and the country subsequently became a playground for the sun-seeking British holidaymaker. At the same time, the personal histories of Nazis taken to the United States, such as the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, were sanitised to assuage American sensibilities – and his role in the deaths of thousands of slave labourers carefully omitted from the official record.

Yet Franco’s views on the Jews did not alte after the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, when the official press reported that ‘Hitler had fallen in battle’. In his book, Preston comments that Franco subsequently wrote antisemitic articles in Arriba under the pseudonym of Jakim Boor and blamed the Jews for the hostility towards his regime at the UN. In his view, the extermination of the Jews during the war was limited to ‘a handful’ and he regarded The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a factual document. Despite this, Franco’s Spain was welcomed into the family of nations.

During the war, Angelo Roncalli was appointed the Papal Nuncio in the Balkans. He provided protective passports to many Jews in Hungary and persuaded the Bulgarian king to stop the deportation of Jews from occupied Greece. In 1958, Roncalli was elected as Pope John XXIII and proceeded to reform the Catholic Church – and especially its attitude towards Jews.

Franco, however, did not change. He continued to believe in his conspiracy theories about Jews and masons until his dying day in November 1975. For Spain’s caudillo, the fascist zeitgeist never faded.