For the rest of the Spanish war Hitler continued to secretly support Franco, sending troops to the Condor Legion for one-year tours of duty. They would return to Germany tanned and wealthy.
Rudolph von Moreau, who dropped the first bombs on Guernica, returned in the spring of 1937 and became a test pilot in the Luftwaffe. On March 26, 1939, he was killed on a test flight.
After the Spanish Civil War ended on March 29, 1939, among the tributes to Franco received were messages of congratulation from Adolf Hitler and Pope Pius XII.
When the Condor Legion returned to Germany on May 31, 1939, the troops were greeted in person by Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring, who promised that each “volunteer” would receive a special medal in bronze, silver, or gold.
On June 6, the entire force of some fifteen thousand men, with Sperrle and Von Richthofen at its head, paraded through Berlin. Hitler told his heroes that their success in Spain “was a lesson to our enemies.”
Despite Franco’s debt to the Condor Legion, when Hitler, in 1940, invited Spain to ally itself with Germany and Italy, Franco skillfully declined.
Some of those who had been in the Condor Legion in Spain at the time of Guernica went on to satisfying military careers.
Hugo Sperrle, in 1940, was commander in chief of Air Fleet III, an armada of some fifteen hundred bombers and fighters that Germany used in the Battle of Britain. On the eve of battle, Sperrle was promoted to field marshal. Toward the end of the war, he went into hiding. An American patrol unearthed him in southern Germany in 1945. Sperrle protested he was now “a retired private citizen.” He was put on trial at Nuremberg in 1948 for war crimes.
Two years earlier, the court had refused an appeal by the former Basque minister of justice, Jesús Leizaola, that the destruction of Guernica be included in the charges, ruling that the tribunal was concerned exclusively with World War II crimes. Sperrle was acquitted of all charges. He retired to his birthplace, Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, where he died in 1953.
Wolfram, Freiherr von Richthofen, given command of Air Fleet VIII, a new close-combat unit composed principally of Stuka dive bombers, led the assault on Poland with spectacular results. Ultimately, Hitler made him the youngest field marshal in the Luftwaffe. He was forty-seven years old.
In May 1945, on his way to Hitler’s redoubt in Bavaria, Von Richthofen was captured by an American patrol, but had to be transferred to a military field hospital, where he died just two months after the war ended in Europe.
The leader of No. 2 Squadron during the attack on Guernica, Hans Henning, Freiherr von Beust, became, at twenty-five, the youngest captain in the Wehrmacht. During World War II he survived 480 bombing missions, including some thirty over London.
Von Knauer, who led the raid on Guernica, used his experiences in Spain to prepare a manual for Luftwaffe bomber pilots, with particular emphasis on low-level attacks. He, too, survived the war, and like Von Beust and the leader of No. 3 Squadron, Von Krafft, was by 1975 retired from the German armed forces.
Captain Franz von Lutzow received two Iron Crosses before he was killed over the English Channel by a Spitfire.
Lieutenant Hans Asmus, shot down over London, survived, though wounded. He eventually returned to flying as a NATO pilot and rose swiftly in that organization to become commander in chief, NATO Air Force, Baltic. His wife is a Basque.
General Sperrle’s adjutant at the time of Guernica’s bombing, Heinz Trettner, had a meteoric rise in the Luftwaffe, and straight into controversy. He was accused of attacking Rotterdam after it had capitulated. He denied the charge, claiming that he had attempted to stop the blitzkrieg. At the end of the war in Italy, he was held responsible for atrocities committed by the troops under his command, a charge he also rejected.
In 1964 the KGB, the intelligence arm of the Soviet Union, fed through Bonn’s diplomatic pipelines “hard evidence” that Trettner, by then inspector general of the Federal Armed Forces of West Germany, was a “war criminal” who had led the attack on Guernica. It wasn’t true—and Heinz Trettner, now comfortably retired, doesn’t care what the Russians say about him.
The rebirth of Guernica probably dates from Saturday, May 1, 1937, when the Nationalists established a field kitchen in what had been the town’s marketplace. People came out of the hills to eat their first warm food in almost a week.
Father Iturran lived to see the Church of Santa María completely repaired. He died in 1946, and is buried in Guernica. Father Eusebio made his way to France, where he would spend the rest of his life.
On Monday, May 3, 1937, the Unceta plant was back in production—making weapons for the Nationalists.
In 1939, Teresa Ortuz became a postulant nun. In 1974, she celebrated thirty-five years in the Carmelite Order.
The Sisters of Penance, in the Convent of Santa Clara, no longer make wedding gowns for the town’s favored brides.
The ruins of the Church of San Juan were fenced in to stop children from playing among them.
The Bank of Vizcaya, of course, reopened. The ledgers that Julio Bareno had carried to the bank’s head office in Bilbao enabled business to be transacted smoothly.
Today, Guernica is a thriving town of 15,500 people. It shows few signs of the bombing.
The Unceta factory now employs over five hundred, exports over 200 million pesetas’ worth of guns to over seventy countries each year. Rufino Unceta is fond of presenting heads of state with hand-tooled weapons. The late President Dwight D. Eisenhower received a set of exquisite silver-tooled pistols; his letter of gratitude has a special place in the company’s archives in Guernica.