By Stanley G. Payne
ISBN-10: 0300122829
ISBN-13: 9780300122824
Was Franco sympathetic to Nazi Germany? Why did not Spain input global struggle II? In what methods did Spain collaborate with the 3rd Reich? How a lot did Spain support Jewish refugees?
This is the 1st booklet in any language to reply to those fascinating questions. Stanley Payne, a number one historian of recent Spain, explores the total diversity of Franco’s courting with Hitler, from 1936 to the autumn of the Reich in 1945. yet as Payne brilliantly exhibits, kinfolk among those dictators weren't just a topic of realpolitik. those immense egos engaged in a rare tragicomic drama usually verging at the darkish absurdity of a Beckett or Ionesco play.
Whereas Payne investigates the evolving courting of the 2 regimes as much as the belief of global conflict II, his important quandary is the enigma of Spain’s exact place throughout the struggle, as a semi-fascist nation suffering to keep up a tortured neutrality. Why Spain didn't input the struggle as a German best friend, becoming a member of with Hitler to grab Gibraltar and shut the Mediterranean to the British army, is on the middle of Payne’s narrative. Franco’s in simple terms own assembly with Hitler, in 1940 to debate accurately this, is stated the following in groundbreaking aspect that still sheds major new mild at the Spanish government’s vacillating coverage towards Jewish refugees, at the Holocaust, and on Spain’s German connection in the course of the length of the war.
