Those who have gone through the process of editing a long book with several collaborators know how painful and frustrating the process can be. This volume brings together thirty-six specialists, including the editors. The task must have been a daunting one. This is why this review starts by congratulating the editors on the outcome of their work. They have done an impeccable job of classifying and connecting all the different chapters which has resulted in a highly integrated, coherent, and unusually engaging text.

As invariably happens with almost anything related to the Holocaust, this is a sad story, or rather an array of stories, big and small, dark or with tiny points of light, that end up telling us the many sides of the horror—in this case, both as it occurred and how we remember it. Also, what might initially appear a simple linear story of mass murder, of victims and perpetrators, in reality contains variables and contradictions that surprise, and at times might confuse and even unsettle the reader. For Spain, a lot of the deceptively simple story is the product of the Francoist dictatorship's post-World War II propaganda and its claims that the regime did everything possible to protect the persecuted Jews of Europe from the Nazis and other antisemitic criminal dictatorships and fascist movements. As we shall soon see, this is a crude but lasting myth (Sara J. Brenneis and Gina Herrmann, 8). In a rebuke to the Franco regime's narrative, this volume offers a less morally comforting but more complex and truer story.

Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco's regimes were deeply intertwined. The former supported the latter's rebellion in July 1936 and, jointly with Benito Mussolini, sent the military forces and material support that enabled Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War in March 1939 (Haim Avni, 29). In the meantime, Hitler trained his men and tested his killing machines in Spain, and the Gestapo instructed the Spanish police on how to terrorize its enemies. Hitler robbed and sent political enemies and Jews to their death in camps as soon as he took power in 1933. Franco did the same starting in July 1936, when Spanish Jews were harassed, robbed, and in some cases killed in Spanish Morocco (Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida, 76; Isabelle Rohr, 104–105). This was part of a larger process in which hundreds of thousands of liberals and left-wing Spaniards suffered a similar fate in the rebel-controlled areas.

As the editors show in the introduction, after June 1940, Franco helped Hitler as much as he could to win World War II. He also provided the German dictator with the first train cramped with deportees—exiled Spanish Republicans, interned first by the French and abandoned later to their fate by the Caudillo's government—that left France for the camps, where they were gassed or worked to death (Brenneis and Herrmann, 6). When Hitler's extermination plans were extended to the Soviet Union in June 1941, his Spanish ally sent close to 45,000 men to fight alongside the German troops. Soon after, in spite of having full knowledge of what the Nazis where doing to the Jews, the regime instructed its diplomats not to intervene or speak up, thus participating in the cover-up of the Holocaust (Brenneis and Herrmann, 10–11). After many more events in this collaboration between the Caudillo and the Führer, after 1945 Franco's Spain helped thousands of Nazi (and other) war criminals to escape, find shelter in Spain, and avoid facing justice for their misdeeds.

Antisemitism in Spain, like in the rest of Europe, has a long historical trajectory. But antisemitism there has a particular twist: since their expulsion in 1492, there have been practically no Jews in Spain (Martina L. Weisz and Raanan Rein, 49–64). This obvious fact and other factors have led many authors to describe Spanish antisemitism as colored with harmless ideas and actions based on culture and religion rather than race, thus making it supposedly less inhumane in both concept and practice. In theory, this way of thinking argues, a Jew could cease to be discriminated against or hated by simply converting to Catholicism. This was the type of prejudice espoused by the last openly antisemitic Pope, Pius XII—the same pontiff who first remained silent during the Holocaust and then asked the authorities of liberated Italy to preserve the 1938 antisemitic laws (Álvarez Chillida, 74). Furthermore, this peculiar, supposedly more benign form of antisemitism, allowed for a philosemitism to flourish in Spain in the nineteenth century. However, these good feelings were limited to the Sephardim or descendants of the expelled Jews (Álvarez Chillida, 65–79) who, in the distant past, were supposed to have been nurtured by the sacred land of Spain.

Franco and his fellow generals shared such ideas, and this is why they could be antisemites and philosemites at the same time, differentiating between the “bad” Eastern Jews and the “good” ones from the Mediterranean. This would become a most convenient narrative once things went wrong for the regime in 1945, when the Allied powers won World War II and the Francoists needed to distance themselves from the Holocaust. In essence, both from a moral point of view and, more importantly, based on the experience of the victims of the Holocaust, this differentiation in the types of antisemitism was nothing but smoke and mirrors meant to excuse Spanish antisemitism and its dreadful outcomes. Once we degrade a human being on account of race, religion, or on other grounds, regardless of the proclaimed intentions (from conversion, to the mission to civilize or to purify the race), we set up an alibi for oppression, dispossession, and eventually murder.

In his contribution to this book, Jacobo Israel Garzón gives this excellent summary of Franco's treatment of Jewish people during World War II:

• • “Pressure on Jews living in the Iberian Peninsula, not recognizing their religious rights or those of association”.

• • “Neutrality towards Jews of the Moroccan Protectorate”.

• • “Limited generosity in the provision of transit visas to refugees in the country, as long as the Jews passed through the country and did not remain there”.

• • “Non-recognition of the citizenship rights of Spanish Sephardim abroad” (84).

Furthermore, as he and other authors point out, Spanish authorities not only mistreated Jewish refugees or did not help them—they also banned and chased from the country the relief organizations that tried to assist them, forcing these organizations to operate remotely from Portugal (Israel Garzón, 91).

This is what actually happened. What could have happened was even worse. Compromising documentation was destroyed, but there remains sufficient information to prove that the Spanish police compiled a Jewish Archive, a secret census of all Jews living in the country (Israel Garzón, 87). Drawing on this data, the regime provided the Nazis the tally of all Jews living in Spain, which the Nazis used for their calculations of how many they had to kill during the notorious January 1942 Wannsee Conference.

While Franco's cooperation, real or potential, with the Nazis stood out, his animosity toward the Jews was commonplace, insofar as during the 1930s and 1940s the world failed the Jews. More examples exist of different countries’ callousness and collaboration with the Nazis in this matter. While this is to be expected from dictatorships, sadly the track record of democracies is not one to be proud of either. The international community had a chance to help the persecuted Jews of Europe during the 1938 Évian Conference, before the Final Solution began, and again to save many people still alive during the 1943 Bermuda Conference. Yet racism, disguised with different arguments, resulted in the abysmal failure of both meetings. With no commitments to fulfill, Western countries acted in a shameful way, taking no responsibility for the unfolding genocide. For example, Canada allowed only 5,000 Jews to settle there between 1939 and 1945, while the number of Jews who entered the United States between 1933 and 1945 was a paltry 130,000.Footnote ¹

In this miserable international context, the Francoist regime's record can be placed somewhere on the continuum between the actions of the Nazis and their allies at one end and the passivity of the democracies on the other. According to the most recent research, Franco's Spain admitted some 15,000 Jews, but almost all of them were given only 5 days to transit and leave the country (Josep Calvet, 117). Spain was not a shelter, but a land of transit and this process was far from easy. Up to mid-1940, those legally admitted had to show all of the following documents: a valid passport, an exit visa from France, entrance and transit visas for Spain, and tickets to embark on ships from Spanish or Portuguese ports. This changed for the worse with the defeat of France and the collapse of the Third Republic in June 1940. To start with, the Vichy regime refused to allow the refugees across its border with Spain. For its part, the Spanish police became harsher in attitude, pushing away more people than before, who also now had more trouble obtaining all the necessary documents to satisfy the legal requirements for entry into Spain. If rejected by the Spanish authorities, the refugees would end up in the hands of the Vichy police and/or the Nazis. Not surprisingly, from that moment on, the number of illegal crossings went up.

People tried to cross the Pyrenees on foot and in groups. These very high mountains constituted a daunting obstacle, especially in winter, for civilians who were not always in good health and often were unfit for the journey. Many perished or, sick or exhausted, had to turn back to their internment or death. Sometimes they fell prey to bandits and fraudsters, but simultaneously secret organizations started networks to help them. The first underground organizations were established by the Allied secret services to rescue soldiers, politicians, and men of military age from occupied Europe. The same structures helped civilians. Other groups, such as the Jewish Army, were created exclusively to assist Jewish refugees. There were even organizations that specialized in saving children. Exiled Spaniards in France contributed to creating and running those networks. Also, residents on both sides of the border assisted refugees, sometimes spontaneously.

In spite of all this help, most of the people who crossed illegally were captured before they could reach Portugal. When this happened, they started a journey of suffering through different detention centers (Calvet, 118–119): first to the small local jails near the place where they had been arrested, then to provincial prisons or, in the case of men of military age, to concentration camps such as the notorious one in Miranda de Ebro, which had been in use since the Spanish Civil War. (Surviving members of the International Brigades were interned there.) Women were sent to women's prisons and normally allowed to keep their children with them. Some were diverted to Barcelona or Madrid. But this policy was not uniform. For example, the city of Lleida had no women's prison, so women refugees were simply released. If this happened, they had to fend for themselves or seek assistance from underground organizations to survive until their male relatives were set free and they could continue their odyssey together.

While the dictatorship's hostility toward foreign Jews transiting through Spain resulted in an impossible-to-quantify number of deaths and much suffering, its attitude to Spanish Jews abroad was equally criminal. Thessaloniki was home to thousands of Sephardic Jews. A minority were Spanish citizens. The rest were entitled to citizenship and, in theory, to the protection of the Spanish state (Maria Fragkou, 138–152). The Germans occupied the city on April 1941 and immediately started to plunder the local Jews’ properties and to mistreat them. Madrid said nothing. In February 1943, the SS began to carry out the Final Solution in Thessaloniki. In spite of the pleas of both prominent members of the community and some Spanish diplomats and consular agents, the Francoist authorities chose not to interfere with the genocide. Jews under the potential protection of Spain were left to their dreadful fate. Most of the Thessaloniki Jews were sent to Auschwitz. At the same time, the request by the Spanish consul in Athens to repatriate that city's Spanish Jews was rejected. They and their fellow Spaniards from Thessaloniki ended up in Bergen-Belsen. When the British liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, they found 155 Spanish Jews from Athens. In the meantime, Franco had agreed to the repatriation from Bergen-Belsen of only those Thessaloniki Jews who had Spanish nationality. In February 1944, 365 surviving Spanish Jews from that city arrived in Spain. Their right to residence was denied, and all of them were sent to camps in Morocco, from where they were expected to emigrate elsewhere. All the expenses incurred in the operation were charged to Jewish or American relief organizations.

In this dark story, there were a few good men and women who, in spite of representing the fascist Spanish state, managed to help—and almost certainly save from extermination—nearly 8,000 Jews (Fragkou, 152). They did so by going against orders from Madrid and using their limited authority to manipulate the perpetrators. First, though, they attempted to register their concern by conveying to their bosses the dimensions of the unfolding human catastrophe and the need to intervene. Miguel Ángel de Mugurio, Spanish ambassador in Budapest, personally sent more than twenty communiqués to his superiors denouncing the decrees against the Hungarian Jews (José Antonio Lisbona, 155). In June 1944, his replacement, Ángel Sanz Briz, forwarded to the Spanish foreign minister a thirty-page report about Auschwitz, which included details about the use of gas chambers. Discouraged by Madrid's silence, he decided to go rogue. He rented houses to shelter persecuted Jews, whom he placed under his embassy's protection. He also issued letters of protection to individuals. Furthermore, after receiving permission from the Hungarian authorities to issue three hundred letters of safe conduct to Sephardic Jews, he ingeniously extended those to three hundred families (Lisbona, 155–156). Last but not least, in November 1944, he confronted Nazi officials to save some of his Jewish protégés from being deported to the camps. In total, Briz saved some 5,000 people. When Briz left Budapest, an employee at the embassy, the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, continued and extended his humanitarian work while pretending to be a Spanish diplomat.Footnote ² Yad Vashem has recognized both men as Righteous Among the Nations.

Other Spanish diplomats saved Jews in Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, France, Germany, and Italy (Lisbona, 157–181). Those men, and sometimes their wives, were the exception, not the norm, in the Spanish diplomatic corps. At the risk of their careers, they used the chaos of the final months of the war and the difficulty in communicating with their superiors to act against Madrid's wishes. This is why they remained silent for decades afterwards about their actions. Ironically, as we shall see, their good deeds were later cynically appropriated by the Francoist dictatorship to bolster its spurious claims of having been a benefactor of the persecuted Jews.

One of Madrid's issues with the Jews—in addition to the regime's antisemitism and its barely hidden wartime alliance with Germany—was that it associated Jewishness with its other political demons. In the never-very systematic Francoist ideology, Jews, Marxists, Freemasons, and liberals belonged to the same category of undesirable people who were rabid enemies of the true Spain, represented by Franco's New State. The regime despised the nearly 350,000 Spaniards exiled after the Civil War and feared that they might return victorious to Spain in association with the Allies. According to the antisemitic views of the Francoists, the British and the Americans were just puppets of the Jews, who at the same time controlled, or at least were closely associated with, the Soviets. These were paranoid ideas but, in a sense, they became true for Franco's victims, when exiled Spaniards and Jews wound up in the same Nazi camps and died together there.

In the terrible winter of 1938–1939, close to half a million defeated soldiers and pro-Republican civilians crossed the French border. The French authorities’ response was to intern them in hastily built and totally unprepared camps. The French wanted the Spaniards to go back home and therefore made their lives hard. Those who thought they had nothing or little to fear returned to Spain, where the victorious Francoists and their repressive system soon proved their hopes to be naive. Those who remained in France were often very badly treated. Able-bodied men were put to work in dreadful conditions (the worst probably was the construction of the Trans-Sahara railway in Algeria, where they perished in droves), or given the chance to join the French Army's auxiliary corps or the Foreign Legion. When France fell in June 1940, the Germans captured tens of thousands of Spaniards. Many escaped and joined the resistance or the French Free Forces—Spaniards of the Leclerc Division were among the first troops to liberate Paris in 1944 (Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, 185–198; Robert S. Coale, 199–213). But many more were trapped, and close to 15,000 were deported to some of the most notorious Nazi camps. Mauthausen-Gusen alone saw 7,200 Spaniards enter its gates, where nearly 5,000 of them were murdered.

Spaniards perished in the camps for some of the same reasons that Jewish people did: no government wanted to protect them, while some governments, starting with the Nazi and Francoist states, wanted to kill them. The same regime that would later claim it had protected the Jews gave the green light to the Germans to arrest, deport, and murder as many of its citizens—Spanish Republicans and Jews—as the Nazis could capture. The same deafening silence from Madrid regarding the fate of the Jews applied to the Republicans, and the same lack of remembrance, if not insults, for the victims of the Holocaust was extended to the Spanish victims, Jews and Republicans alike. The Francoist official line regarding the Jews was that Spain had had nothing to do with the Holocaust, performing only good deeds. The argument regarding the Republicans was that those enemies of the fatherland had gone abroad to escape their crimes. What happened to them after that was not Franco's fault or his responsibility.

Anti-Francoists and other victims of the regime constructed a different memory of these events, one that linked their sufferings to fascism's other victims. For exiled Republicans, resisters, and camp survivors living in France, it was only logical that their alternative view of things thrived alongside their French comrades’ memories. The memory of the camps, the testimonies, the ceremonies, and even the monuments, survived in exile, in joint Spanish-French associations such as the Amical de Mauthausen (Friends of Mauthausen). These memories would not be transplanted to Spain until after the restoration of democracy following Franco's passing (Juan M. Calvo Gascón, Gina Herrmann, Andrea Hepworth, Sara J. Brenneis, Marta Marín-Dòmine, Soledad Fox Maura, and Rosa Toran, 214–326).

In the meantime, in liberated Europe, the Francoist regime should have had a lot to atone for.Footnote ³ It didn't. The dictatorship was internationally isolated between 1945 and 1949, when the Cold War and the United States’ strategic interests turned Franco—until then perceived as a bloody fascist dictator allied to the Nazis—into a moderate, Christian, anti-communist ruler who kept his unruly country at peace. Furthermore, at no point, even during the worst years of the international boycott, did the Spanish dictator have to respond personally for his actions. Impoverished Spaniards who were, not coincidentally, the main losers of the Civil War, paid the price for the dictatorship's many crimes. They were the ones who suffered hunger, abysmal labor and social conditions, and political repression not just during World War II, but also for many decades afterwards.Footnote ⁴

The Caudillo's impunity was all the more repugnant because the regime's crimes were so many. Collaboration with the Nazis was one, repression against Spaniards another, abandonment of Republicans and Spanish Jews made three, and callousness regarding the fate of European Jews—four. The dictatorship could try to deny all of them, but what its propaganda machine said during the war was printed and broadcast for all to see, then and today. From the first days of the Civil War in 1936, until 1945, Franco's regime produced feature films, books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles that used the crudest antisemitic stereotypes and language. However, today Franco's admirers include East European right-wing politicians who have no problem with his brand of antisemitism and see him primarily as a Catholic, anti-communist champion.Footnote ⁵ This cult is particularly strong in Poland and Hungary, where the local “good” interwar dictators are also often praised.

A typical Francoist “documentary” was the 1942 film La División Azul (The Blue Division). It tells merry tales about the men the Caudillo sent to fight against the Soviet Union in 1941 (more on them later). In the film, the soldiers are young, idealistic, very brave, are having a great time, are admired by the Germans, win medals and battles, and nobody dies. The film's opening justifies Germany's entry into the war as a natural reaction to both world Jewry's machinations and Polish provocation. The movie's “explanation” of the Jews' plutocratic and communist plotting would have been familiar to the wartime public, whereas the logic behind the attack and defeat of the Poles was more original: they dared to show pride in the form of military exercises on the border with Germany and obviously they had to be punished (Javier Domínguez Arribas, 334–336). This kind of outrageous propaganda continued even when caution should have been absolute. As late as 1949–1950, writing under the pseudonym Jakim Boor, the Caudillo, then busy presenting himself as a friend of the Jews, penned a number of newspaper articles full of vicious antisemitic attacks (Weisz and Rein, 57; Domínguez Arribas, 344).

The deep Catholic roots of Spanish antisemitism have been used both then and today to argue that antisemitism in Spain was more humane and could never be considered equal to murderous race-based antisemitism. Such reasoning is artificial at best. Religious antisemitism provides the moral bridge between human decency and mass murder as it helps to pave the road to the latter in the eyes of conservatives and/or god-fearing sections of society. In Franco's Spain, Catholic publications were not as crude in their antisemitism as those produced by the Falange, whose Nazi-financed press as late as the end of 1944 still defended the existence of ghettos as a means to properly control Jews (Mercedes Peñalba-Sotorrío, 393). But Catholic publications decidedly contributed to the demonization of the persecuted. Even the most elitist of the religious orders, the Jesuits, speaking through their highly intellectual journal Razón y Fé (Reason and Faith), wasted some ink rejecting racial antisemitism yet continuously denounced Jewish influence in public matters. The Spanish Jesuits’ position was in full accord with that of their order's Rome headquarters. In both cases, the Jews’ alleged manoeuvres and perfidy were highlighted during World War II, while the reality of the ongoing genocide was ignored (Graciela Ben Dror, 356–359). This position was similar to the one adopted by the popular organization Spanish Catholic Action, which in mid-1942 was still vividly defending the measures taken by some states to protect themselves against the disturbing influences of the Israelites (Ben Dror, 360–366).

These examples were not isolated cases. Between 1939 and 1945, not a single article appeared in the Spanish press—whether Catholic, Falangist, or monarchist—criticizing the genocide then taking place in Europe (Ben Dror, 366). In those years, the view from Madrid was that the world was divided between good and evil, and good was the exclusive realm of Catholicism, Francoism, and their international friends. There was no room in this narrative for little people's real lives, especially if they were Israelites, and this cruel logic produced poignant results. When news arrived in February 1945 of the conversion to Catholicism of the Chief Rabbi of Rome and his wife, the Spanish press rejoiced and attributed this move to the Jews paying their endless debt to god for having killed his son. The connection between the rabbi's decision and the Holocaust could not be and was not mentioned (Ben Dror, 368). In the meantime, it never occurred to the Vatican to include Mein Kampf on the Index of Forbidden Books.

In May 1945, with Hitler dead and a complicated past to bury, the Francoist regime's propaganda faced what seemed an impossible task. But help from an unexpected quarter had arrived already. Already in May 1943, in an attempt to mollify Franco, Rabbi Maurice Perlzweig, head of the British chapter of the World Jewish Congress, had praised the dictator for allowing some “twenty thousand refugees [to find a] temporary heaven and security in Spain” (Pedro Correa Martín-Arroyo, 374). As we have seen, reality was very different, but this fanciful information was the beginning of a myth: Franco, the good dictator, had willingly and generously rescued thousands of Jews. The authorities took the cue. In February 1944, as the war was going very badly for the Germans, the Spanish foreign minister explained to his listeners in a speech broadcast from the United States how Spain had rescued the above-mentioned 365 Sephardic Jews interned in Bergen-Belsen—more proof, he said, that all accusations of racism against the regime were false. He forgot to mention that those Jews were Spaniards, that they were immediately deported from Spain to North Africa (Martín-Arroyo, 375–376), and that because of his government's decisions, many others did not make it to Spain alive.

Other postwar accomplices in Franco's whitewashing also had a lot to account for. None other than the Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long (see footnote 1), declared in 1946 that Spain had been “one of the countries that contributed the most to alleviate the Jewish exodus during the war” (Martín-Arroyo, 377). Those words were uttered at the onset of the Cold War, the political circumstances of which were to work wonders for Franco. In 1948, The Washington Post claimed on its front page that Franco would invite hundreds of thousands of Sephardim back to Spain, reversing their 1492 expulsion (Martín-Arroyo, 379). To further bolster such fanciful, spurious claims by Franco's newfound friends, in 1949 the regime published a pamphlet titled “Spain and the Jews,” which falsely claimed that Franco had allowed 50,000 Jews to enter the country during the war. Fascist maths is in a league of its own.

Such lies resonated even among some right-wing Israeli parliamentarians, particularly the heirs to the Revisionists pro-fascist parties and terrorist groups of the pre-independence period. Benjamin Arditti published several articles in 1951 claiming that Jews were indebted to Franco (not to his diplomats gone rogue) for the rescue of the Jews with Spanish citizenship in Bulgaria during the war (Martín-Arroyo, 380). The Caudillo, never one to lose an opportunity to change the past, had already been taking steps to appear in a good light in front of the Western powers. In 1946, the Barcelona synagogue, closed by him in 1939, was reopened, and in 1949, Madrid's Jews were allowed to build their own temple. However, both were considered private homes and were not permitted to show any external symbols marking their existence (Martín-Arroyo, 381). Spanish Jews were not able to display their faith in public until 1967. In any case, this cosmetic change was a success among some Jews. When the dictator died in November 1975, the editors of The American Sephardi made an offering for the “repose of the soul of Generalissimo Franco” and stated in his obituary that he had been “a great benefactor of the Jewish people” (Martín-Arroyo, 384).

In the postwar period, other inconvenient leftovers of the murky past endured and needed to be dealt with. One of them was the undeniable presence of the Blue Division on the Eastern Front. The solution was to present its members as good soldiers, who were not antisemites at all, just anti-communists who fought bravely and “cleanly” because, unlike some of their German counterparts, they did not commit crimes against civilians, whether Jewish or not. This interpretation was based on both truths and convenient blind spots. Antisemitism was rampant in the Blue Division. The treatment of civilians depicted in propaganda was more or less accurate (even if many aspects of the Spanish soldiers’ behavior, such as their propensity to steal from civilians, was ignored). In any case, there is no proof that the divisionarios directly participated in the Holocaust—in fact many sources corroborate stories that point at their relaxed attitudes toward civilians in the territories where they operated. But in this historical sanitation project, the relatively good behavior of the soldiers served to deflect attention from the fact of their ultimate function in the Soviet Union: in fighting alongside the Nazis, Spaniards were enabling both the oppression of people who had done them no harm and the perpetration of the Holocaust (Boris Kovalev, 423–443; Macarena Tejada López, 444–465).

The second inconvenient fact was the presence in postwar Spain of thousands of German and other war criminals. The solution the Franco regime found to overcome this obstacle was simple: it blocked the Allies’ efforts to subject those criminals to international justice. At the same time, the Francoist authorities allowed them enough freedom to live comfortably in Spain and even to undertake conspiratorial activities both in Spain and abroad, as long as they did so discreetly (David A. Messenger, 483–499).

Finally, there was the fact that Franco won the Spanish Civil War thanks to Nazi and Italian Fascist assistance (and to American oil and trucks, and other Western democracies’ cynical or cowardly policy of non-intervention). This historical rupture was mended in the best possible way by the dictator and his minions. Poor Franco—always both victim and hero—personally revealed to the world in 1947 not only that he owed nothing to Hitler but that he had been another Nazi target—the Nazis, he claimed, tried to slow down his victorious march at the end of the Civil War.Footnote ⁶ Moreover, he said, his deals with Nazis and Fascists had been no passionate alliance but rather a minimal interaction necessary to overcome what he falsely claimed had been a prior and much bigger Soviet intervention in Spain. He presented himself as a Catholic ruler and a gentleman who skillfully navigated the rough waters of wartime Europe and in this way saved his nation from disaster. According to the Franco of the post-1945 era (depending on his needs, there would be many versions of the same despot), the whole Caudillo-Führer relationship had been a misunderstanding caused by the great powers’ blindness. Had he not foiled Hitler's plans to drag Spain into the war in their meeting at Hendaye in October 1940? If only the Nazis, the British, and the Americans had understood who the real enemy was (the Soviets) and had acted together! How different would the world be today if they had had the Caudillo's historical insight in identifying communism as the real, ultimate enemy of Western Christian civilisation! His American friends were more than ready to corroborate this story. Some even went so far as to claim they had proof that during World War II, Spain had been an ally, silent but loyal, of the Western powers.Footnote ⁷

We know better now. We have countless memoirs and testimonies about both Franco's dictatorship and the Holocaust, and excellent books analyzing these and other aspects of World War II. But the protagonists of these memoirs and testimonies are disappearing fast. The duty of those who know and those who have the means to learn is to continue teaching the history as it happened, to save the voices of the victims from oblivion, and to integrate this past into a democratic and humanitarian memory that illuminates our times.

In the case of Spain, the trajectory of the memory of violence has been difficult. In power for nearly 40 years and thus monopolizing official truth, Francoism managed to convince most Spaniards within the country, including many who opposed the regime, that the Holocaust was alien to Spanish history or marginal at best. This version of events did not work for the exiled population that had directly suffered the consequences of opposing both Francoism and Nazism (Marilén Loyola, Isabel Estrada, Stacy N. Beckwith, Paul Cahill, and Shmuel Refael, 503–584). Sadly, even today, more than 40 years after the restoration of democracy in Spain, school curricula do not address the issue of Spain and the Holocaust. Only small public history projects have told that story. As a result, in the words of the philosopher Reyes Mate, there is no “culture of the Holocaust” in the country (Marta Simó, 586). A study based on a 2015 survey of people in Germany, the United States, Canada, and Spain, showed that knowledge about the Holocaust was highest in Germany (84 percent), followed by Canada (78.4 percent), the United States (72.8 percent), and Spain placing a distant last (57.4 percent) (Simó, 591). To this it would be opportune to add—I have no data to offer, only very personal perceptions as a historian of Europe working in North America for three decades—that there is a general lack of knowledge abroad about Spain's role in the Holocaust.

The gap in historical knowledge and consciousness is the product of Franco's success in disassociating his regime from Nazi Germany and its crimes in the popular imagination. This has had many consequences in Spain, which persist today. For example, too many conservative Spaniards and foreigners alike still believe that Franco was or became (after the few, harsh first years of rule) a good dictator, certainly not as bad as Hitler or, another favorite comparison, Joseph Stalin—as if the crimes of Hitler and Stalin can dispense those of Franco. Another consequence is that other Spaniards, mainly of the left but also on the right, take a morally distant and even cynical view of the Holocaust as something foreign and irrelevant to them. It is as if they are uncontaminated by history and feel above current debates, which allows them to point too quickly—in what the sociologist Alejandro Baer has called a manifestation of “the Spanish tic”—to the ongoing Palestinian sufferings at the hands of Israel as an equivalent to the Holocaust. For them, with a succinct reference to Palestine any debate about the Holocaust can be immediately closed, and further inquiry becomes unnecessary.Footnote ⁸ This “Spanish tic” explains actions like the one (only one example among many) that took place in Catalonia in 2009, when the regional government suspended the public celebration of the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust in protest over Israel's violent invasion of Gaza.Footnote ⁹ With this gesture, the victims of the Holocaust were made accomplices of the actions carried out by a state that did not even exist when they were murdered, and in a symbolic way they were victimized again. This event, like the very fine volume edited by Sara Brenneis and Gina Herrmann, shows that in Spain, as in the rest of the world, the Holocaust continues to be a historical problem interwoven as much with the past as with current politics. It also shows that it is for us to decide whether in the future debates around the Holocaust will arise from ignorance or from knowledgeable reflection. This is both our historical and our moral responsibility—to avoid it could have fatal consequences.