Basque History of the World (30 page)

Basque soldiers saying Mass before a battle, photo by David Seymour, 1937. The Ikurriña is in the foreground and pinned on some of the uniforms. (Magnum Photos, Inc.)

11: Speaking Christian

And like the Basque poet who saw the immaculate snowflake disappear the instant he held it in his hand, I found myself with all my dreams turned to foam at the moment I possessed them.

—José Luis Alvarez Enparantza, a.k.a. Txillardegi
,
HAIZEAZ BESTALDETIK
(Beyond the Wind), 1979

F
RANCO, FOR THE
most part, was a successful liar. Though few people completely believed his explanations of Guernica, subsequent generations of Basques, having grown up going to Franco’s schools, often believe the Guernica death toll to be far less than the staggering numbers asserted by witnesses and accepted by historians in the rest of Europe. One of Franco’s most successful lies was that through his cleverness, he had outmaneuvered Hitler and kept Spain out of World War II. Then, according to him, he seduced the Americans. Even today, Spaniards of Republican families who grew up hating Franco but attending his school system believe these myths.

In reality, Franco had desperately wanted to get into the war. The war machine the Germans and Italians had shown him stretched his military imagination to its limits. At the outset of World War II, it did not even occur to him that other nations might possess the military power not only to stop but to defeat the Germans. Certain of German victory, he hoped for a share of the war booty. He was especially interested in gaining more of Morocco at France’s expense. But the Germans thought that he was an ineffective general and that his army was poorly equipped and backward. After the Civil War, the Spanish economy having collapsed, hunger and unemployment were widespread, and the Germans reasoned that if Spain were an ally, Germany would have to feed its people, arm them, train them, even, as the Germans had done in the Civil War, fight for them. Hitler repeatedly spurned Franco’s offers.

The two met on October 23, 1940, at the train station in Hendaye, which is about 100 yards from the border, the St. Jacques Bridge over the Bidasoa. The meeting resembled a comic encounter from Charlie Chaplin’s film
The Great Dictator
, which was made the same year. Hitler and the German command were kept waiting, stiffly pacing in the train station. Franco’s slow chugging train arrived, depending on whose version is believed, either eight minutes or one hour late. There were rumors of an attempt on Franco’s life by grenade-throwing Spanish anarchists. No such attack took place, though a plot may have existed. Franco, mortified at being late, fumed and ranted, threatening to fire the officer responsible for his travel arrangements, but recovered in time to step down on the Hendaye platform, tears of joy glistening in his eyes. The Caudillo, as Hitler addressed Franco, was evidently overcome at the moment of meeting the man he addressed as the Führer.

Franco made his case for entering the war. Hitler talked of his war problems. Franco talked of his supply needs to ready for war. The two conversations rarely intersected. Hitler began to grow irritated. Franco, to show a knowledge of war strategy, suggested, as an aide had told him, that once England was defeated, the British would still fight on from Canada. The Führer did not find this an interesting point and, hopping to his feet, announced with notable agitation that it would be pointless to continue the conversation.

From this meeting, Franco let it be widely known in Spain that he, their Caudillo, had held off the Nazis at Hendaye, that they had come threatening to take over Spain, and he had masterfully negotiated Spanish neutrality. According to Franco, Hitler had said, “I am the master of Europe and, as I have 200 divisions at my orders, there is no alternative but to obey.”

There is no record of this remark, and German records show that Hitler and his divisions wished to stay far away from Spain. Hitler’s only known comment on leaving the Hendaye meeting was “
Mit diesem Kerl ist nichts zu machen
,” You can’t do anything with this character. Later, he said to Mussolini of his meeting with Franco, “I would rather have three or four teeth pulled, than go through that again.” Curiously, another time, on the subject of the Hendaye meeting, the Führer muttered something to an adjutant about “Jesuit swine.”

It was one of many times that Franco was saved by luck. Had he succeeded in persuading Hitler to let him join the Nazi war effort, Spain would have been overrun by the Allies in 1945 as the Basques had hoped. But as it was, Spain was a neutral country, albeit one that supplied raw material and armaments to the German war effort. The Wehrmacht fought with Spanish-made cartridges, rifle barrels, engines, uniforms, and parachutes. And they also fought with a Spanish volunteer division, the Blue Division, whose veterans continued, even years after Franco’s death, to proudly display the iron crosses they had won from Germany.

Franco had personally assisted in the escape to Spain of Léon Degrelle, the wanted Belgian SS officer about whom Hitler had reportedly once said, “If I had a son, I would want him to be like Degrelle.” In 1949, Franco did the same for wanted SS colonel Otto Skorzeny. The United Nations reported after the war that between 2,000 and 3,000 German Nazis as well as many more war criminals from the Vichy regime lived in Spain. The U.S. government estimated that Nazi holdings in Spain were worth $95 million in late 1940s dollars. The war criminals whose records la ligne had smuggled over the Pyrenees to the British were now safe and comfortable and continued to live openly in Spain, giving interviews to Western press expressing Nazi ideology, even after Franco’s death. Many prominent war criminals died in luxury in Spain in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1994, when the German government sought to prosecute Otto Ernst Remer, Hitler’s security chief, for preaching racial hatred, he fled to Spain. The Spanish court ruled that since there was no such crime under Spanish law, he could not be extradited. He died in a Costa del Sol resort in 1997.

T
HE
B
ASQUE NATIONALISTS
claim that after the Civil War, during Franco’s World War II neutrality, 21,780 Basques were executed. The figure has never been verified. In San Sebastián, by the graceful curve of the world’s most beautiful urban beach, was a prison where Franco’s men shot Basque nationalists almost every day until 1947.

Immediately after the Basque provinces had been taken, Franco outlawed the Euskera language. The Basques were told to “speak Christian.” Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, the “traitor provinces,” were singled out for special punishment and lost all rights of self-rule. Navarra, a very loyal province, still had some fiscal autonomy.

In the summer of 1944, when large numbers of armed Republicans, especially Basques and Catalans, neared the Spanish border, many in Madrid believed that the invasion was about to begin, that Franco would soon be overthrown. But units such as the Guernica Battalion decided to finish the war for France first, thus gaining both the sympathy and availability of the Allies to help them in Spain. In October 1944, a group of Communist Republicans did invade and were defeated.

In March 1945, Don Juan de Borbón, the pretender to the Spanish throne, denounced the dictatorship as an ally of the Axis and called on Franco to step down and make way for a constitutional monarchy.

Ever since the conference at Yalta in February 1945, when the Allies had promised democracy to the countries controlled by the Axis powers, Franco had started a frantic and largely successful project, revising history. He would never again admit that he had wanted to enter the war or that he was a German sympathizer. He claimed he had only 26,000 political prisoners. That did not include those in his forced labor camps. Still, two years earlier the government had confessed to 75,000 political prisoners, none of whom had been released.

The Basque government-in-exile meeting in midtown Manhattan in 1944. Aguirre is in the center at the end of the table and Telesforo de Monzón is on his left. (Sabino Arana Foundation, Bilbao)

To the French, British, and Americans, Franco’s Spain was a pariah nation. Despite constant overtures by Franco, it was to be excluded from the United Nations, NATO, the Marshall Plan, and later, the European Economic Community. In effect, it was shut out of the postwar Western world. But it was not invaded. Spain was not to be liberated. The policy of President Franklin Roosevelt, stated in 1945, was that the United States would not interfere in Spain as long as it was not a threat to world peace. On the other hand, he said, “I can see no place in the community of nations for governments founded on fascist principles.” Ostracism but not intervention. In 1946, a Polish diplomat tried to make the case that Franco was “a threat to world peace” because German Nazis in Spain were building an atom bomb. This might have led to an invasion, except that the diplomat had no evidence to support his charge.

But the Basques, most Republican exiles, even many in the Franco government, were convinced that the end was near. In July 1945 the Basque Nationalist Party had created an intelligence service to keep the United States informed on events in Spain, in preparation for the invasion. Convening his government in New York in late 1945, Aguirre told his cabinet, “We will return to our country, this year.”

The government-in-exile returned to Basqueland, to Bayonne, and even reorganized the cabinet in preparation for its new responsibilities after the anticipated liberation of Spain. In Spanish Basque country, ikurriñas were turning up unexpectedly on public monuments. Someone was painting
EUZKADI
, the forbidden word from the forbidden language, on walls in very large letters. Statues of the regime’s heroes, such as General Mola, were dynamited.

Then the Basque government made a decision that would change the landscape of Basque politics for the next two generations.

The government-in-exile contemplated three options: Should it continue an armed underground resistance? Should it organize mass protests and other types of political resistance? Or should it disarm and concentrate on international diplomacy? Putting its faith chiefly in the United States and going against millennia of Basque history, the government-in-exile chose the third option.

The United States and the Basque nationalists, according to Aguirre, were allies. All the way back to President Woodrow Wilson, who had mentioned Basques and Catalans as examples of nations struggling for the right to self-determination, the United States had been friendly to the Basque cause. The Basque Nationalist Party and the OSS had worked hand in hand. The Guernica Battalion had received American training and weapons.

Now, in 1947, the Basque government had no more money to maintain an armed force. The United States, Aguirre believed, would be its defender. The veterans dispersed, some settling in France, some in Latin America, some in the United States. A few refused to accept Aguirre’s decision and slipped into Spain to fight and, in most cases, were killed. Many would never return to their native provinces. Kepa Ordoki died at the age of eighty in 1993, in Hendaye.

While Telesforo de Monzón was living with his wife in St.-Jean-de-Luz growing raspberry bushes, Franco was summering in San Sebastián, eating, according to legend, with the silverware his troops had stolen from the Monzón estate in Vergara. But the Basque government was confident that Franco, the leftover dictator of a destroyed alliance, could not hold out much longer, with his country impoverished and isolated. Basque shipbuilding was barely functioning, Altos Hornos de Vizcaya had laid off half its work force, and trade unions were calling general strikes. The Franco government responded by sending thousands of Guardia Civil and police to Bilbao.

Then salvation came to Franco from unexpected places such as Prague, taken over by a Communist coup in 1948. The world was being divided into Communists and anti-Communists, and Franco was a long-standing anti-Communist—one of his few consistencies. The two Germanies declared separate capitals in 1949. In June 1950, the United States went to war in Korea. Two months after the Korean War began, the U.S. Congress authorized $62 million in credit for Franco’s anti-Communist Spain. The following year France removed the diplomatic status of the Basque government office in Paris, expelling Basques from the city they had helped liberate and turning the building, near the Eiffel Tower, back into the Spanish Embassy.