Because the fate of Gibraltar hung on the actions of Spain, it mattered greatly to the Rock when, in September 1940, General Franco sent Ramón Serrano Suñer at the head of a top-level mission to Berlin. Ten senior Falangists, including Miguel Primo de Rivera, the orator Dionisio Ridruejo and Demetrio Carceller (once a Catalan associate of Juan March), were among the flock of bureaucrats who accompanied the envoy on his important diplomatic task, shepherded by the German ambassador himself, Baron Eberhard von Stohrer.
Ramón Serrano Suñer was then head of the Falangist political junta and el Ministro de Gobernación (Interior Minister), which is to say the man who controlled Spain’s prisons, police and press. He was, according to Admiral Canaris, ‘the most hated man in Spain’, but his star was rising because he was also the brother-in-law, el cuñado, of General Franco’s wife, Carmen Polo. If Franco was el Generalísimo, the joke went, Serrano was el Cuñadísimo. To Sir Samuel Hoare, however, the Falangist hard-liner Serrano was no laughing matter but one of the chief villains, ‘a pinchbeck Robespierre’, a fanatic ‘in the grip of the Axis’. Serrano had very limited experience of foreign affairs, but he had been to Italy and met Mussolini and his Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano in June 1939. The Italian foreign minister described him as ‘a slender and sickly man – one of those characters given to study and reflection … But it is always feeling that dominates him: he hates and loves impetuously. His bête noire is France. He … considers France the eternal enemy of Greater Spain.’
On 13 September, the day after his thirty-ninth birthday, Ramón Serrano Suñer led the Spanish diplomatic party across the bridge at Irún into German-occupied France. Quiet, shuttered Hendaye was now hung with giant swastikas; the beret-wearing locals seemed cowed. The Germans laid on a luxurious train that bore the Spaniards to occupied Paris where the new German ambassador, Otto Abetz, greeted them at the Gare d’Austerlitz. They spent a day in the French capital, enjoying the lack of traffic around the famous sights; buses, taxis and private cars were now prohibited, so Parisians rode thousands of bicycles. German army signposts – black on white – pointed at key junctions and crossings, and more swastikas hung over the arcaded rue de Rivoli, where the W. H. Smith bookshop at No. 248 was now Frontbuchhandlung. Uniformed but unarmed Wehrmacht personnel shopped with Reichsmarks that bought twice as much as before.
The Spaniards travelled on to Germany by rail. At the Anhalt Bahnhof in Berlin, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Reich Foreign Minister, met them with an entourage including the immensely tall chief of protocol, Minister Dr Freiherr von Dörnberg. The Nazis laid on a smart guard to inspect, and a crowd with children waving little Spanish flags. A convoy of Mercedes-Benz motor cars drove them to the Adlon Hotel. Serrano Suñer did not like Ribbentrop, finding him vain, affected and stupidly robotic. Their three hours of talks were tedious. Ribbentrop pressed the question of when Spain was going to join the war; Serrano talked the usual high emotions and low economics, and Ribbentrop found his plea of poverty annoying. When they discussed Spanish ambitions for North Africa, Serrano soon realised that the fall of France would yield no easy pickings, no ripe colonial fruit. The Germans were not going to give away the French Empire, as some Spanish Falangists hoped and believed. Nazi Germany still wanted to keep Vichy France sweet in North Africa. Spain would have to insist on its claims to Morocco.
At what Serrano in his memoirs called a ‘brilliantly boring’ reception where the Spaniards mingled with leading Nazis like Frick and Ley and Himmler, Ribbentrop declared that Spain’s equivocal foreign policy ‘looked like ingratitude’ and had upset Hitler. And why was one Spanish minister working for England? Serrano says he bridled at this clear reference to Beigbeder. ‘Spanish ministers might be right or wrong in their thoughts and actions,’ he replied stiffly, ‘but we only serve the national interest.’ Ribbentrop blundered on, saying that Hitler might have to occupy Spain for security reasons, given the country’s strategic location. And what about Portugal? Hitler’s troops might have to come and invade there, like Wellington’s in the Napoleonic Wars. There were good business reasons to stick with Germany, the crass Reichsaussenminister suggested.
Serrano Suñer left the party early to prepare for his meeting with Adolf Hitler the next day. He felt daunted: a poor provincial was about to encounter the sovereign of Europe. On 17 September 1940, in his black-shirted Falangist uniform and flattish peaked cap that made him look like a senior railway-ticket inspector, Serrano entered the huge Reich Chancellery, designed by Albert Speer to overawe visitors and impress them with the Third Reich’s grandeur. An eagle with a twenty-five-foot wingspan on a laurel-wreathed swastika hovered over the neo-classical portico. Inside were huge carved doors, kitsch statues of naked athletes, and long rooms that he had to proceed through in turn. The Marmorgalerie or Marble Gallery – at 146 metres exactly twice the length of the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles – led to the imposing entrance of Hitler’s vast study. Speer wanted to lay a carpet along it, but Hitler insisted that the red marble floor stayed highly polished so that visitors were made uneasy by its slippery surface before they reached the dictator’s sanctum. After being made to wait for hours, President Emil Hácha of Czechoslovakia walked this walk in the early hours of 15 March 1939. When he got there, Hitler’s harangue was so ferocious that he fainted. Dr Theo Morell, Hitler’s tubby drug-dispenser, revived him with a stimulant injection, and Hácha promptly signed his country away.
Serrano had only seen Hitler once, from afar, an idol in a car with his arm outstretched, among the torches and banners and searchlights of the 1937 Nuremberg rally, which he had attended with Nicolás Franco, the general’s brother. Hitler close up in person was both impressive and vulgar, he thought. The Führer had a powerful gaze, and was self-controlled. He ranged like a cat from the armchair to the table covered with maps and charts, but when he hooked on his clerical spectacles and fussed with compasses to measure Stuka bombing ranges he looked a German petty bourgeois again. Hitler seemed to take a childish pleasure in tracing lines and jabbing at points on the map with his big fleshy hands. He was assertive in his opinions and boastful about Germany’s military prowess.
There were six people present at the hour-long meeting. Joachim von Ribbentrop and the veteran civil servant Otto Meissner supported Hitler, while Serrano’s back-up was the committed Falangist and philologist Antonio Tovar. The interpreter was Hitler’s usual multilinguist from the Foreign Ministry, Minister Dr Paul Otto Schmidt, a decent-seeming man who nevertheless badly irritated Serrano. When the Germanophile Tovar translated back what Schmidt was saying in German to Hitler, Serrano realised that the mellifluous subtleties of his eloquence were not getting through to the Führer at all – Dr Schmidt spoke Spanish like a gringo travelling salesman in South America. But Schmidt claimed to have photographic recall, and his notes summarising the conversation have survived.*
According to Schmidt’s account, Serrano opened the meeting with a glozing message from Generalísimo Franco, which ‘expressed to the Führer his gratitude, sympathy and high esteem, and emphasised to him his loyalty of yesterday, of today and for always’. Serrano said that the Spanish attitude to Germany had not changed in the least; it was only a question of clarifying the conditions under which Spain would be ready to fight alongside Germany. And once again he played the economic squeezebox: ‘Whenever Spain’s supply of foodstuffs and war material was secure she could immediately enter the war.’ He mentioned the shopping list given to Admiral Canaris and stated that ten 38 cm (fifteen-inch) guns would be ‘necessary for Gibraltar’.
Hitler said the German people had never forgotten Spain’s help for German prisoners of war in 1914–18. It was that appreciation which had led to German involvement in the Spanish Civil War. But now Germany was in the decisive fight against England. The continent of Europe, from Norway to Iberia, was secure; the British could not mount any kind of cross-Channel landing, but they might try to alienate the Vichy French colonies in North Africa and wage war from there. Serrano said that Spain was concerned that the British might land on the Cantabrian coast, where the communists of Asturias might support them. Hitler told him not to worry: the whole population of Norway had been on Britain’s side and that had not helped the British landing there to succeed.
‘Air supremacy is the main thing. That is the principle of this war,’ Hitler announced. Were a group of Stukas and other dive-bombers made available for the conquest of Gibraltar, within a week there would be no British ships for 350 kilometres because heavy bombs would cripple them. ‘In Norway, we forced the English to retreat using Stukas alone.’ (Serrano noted that Hitler never called the Junkers Ju 87 dive-bombers ‘Stukas’ like everyone else but always used their full name: Sturzkampfflugzeuge, literally ‘fall-fight-aircraft’.)
Hitler, who was a military ‘nerd’, stuffed with specs and stats, launched one of his pedantic disquisitions on the effectiveness of aerial bombing versus artillery in tackling a stronghold like Gibraltar. The huge bombs dropped on the Maginot Line had destroyed structures built to withstand artillery in ten minutes. ‘Even when there is no direct hit, the concussive effect of a thousand-kilo bomb was in itself tremendous. Therefore, the decisive factor for the conquest and later defence of Gibraltar is the guarantee of absolute air supremacy.’ Hitler continued to argue against supplying big guns to Spain. It was true, the Führer went on, that 38 cm heavy artillery had been set up on the French side of the English Channel, shooting across at England, but that had taken several months and was only for use in bad weather when air attacks were out of the question. Hitler compared the limited amount of explosive a long-barrelled gun could deliver in two hundred shots to the amount a Stuka squadron of thirty-six planes flying thrice daily could drop. He thought 38 cm guns would not be possible for Gibraltar: the transport would be too difficult and installation would take three or four months. (Ian Colvin interpreted this stress on aircraft versus artillery as a matter of power and control: Hitler could loan the German air force, but he would have to give away the guns.) Germany would do everything in her power to help Spain, Hitler said, because once she entered the war, Germany would have every interest in her success – any Spanish victory would also be a German victory. ‘In the Gibraltar undertaking, it would be primarily a matter of taking the fortress itself with extraordinary speed and protecting the Strait.’
Serrano Suñer thanked the Führer. In the previous discussions that General von Richthofen and Admiral Canaris had had with General Franco, German intentions had not been quite clear. His request to the Führer to put this all down in writing for the benefit of General Franco was granted.
Hitler then referred to the reconnaissance mission that Admiral Canaris and the paratroop heroes of Fort Eben Emael had made to Algeciras and La Línea, and said they had concluded that Gibraltar could be taken by a modern but relatively modest attack that would silence the big guns. Germany was offering Spain aircraft to clear enemy ships from the strait and selected assault engineers with special armour-destroying weapons called Scharten or ‘pillboxcrackers’.
Now Serrano talked about Morocco. Surely it was Spain’s Lebensraum? Hitler replied that Germany had economic and strategic interests in Africa too. England and Free France had their eyes on Madeira and the Canary Islands and they were trying to entice the USA to the Azores. The meeting concluded with Hitler saying he wanted to meet Franco on the Spanish frontier. He also invited Serrano to visit the battlefields of his great victory in the west and to see the big guns now being set up along the English Channel, before returning to Berlin.
Serrano had another meeting with Ribbentrop in his office, overlooking the old park behind the Wilhelmstrasse. There are two contradictory accounts of this. Both involve a large wall-map. Paul Schmidt the interpreter recalled Serrano and Ribbentrop standing before a map of the French colonial empire in Africa and the German Foreign Minister in effect saying ‘Help yourself’. Serrano then started with the port of Oran in Algeria and traced an arc south past the Strait of Gibraltar to include all Morocco and a big chunk of Mauritania in French West Africa to ‘round off’ the Spanish colony of Río de Oro, the southern half of Spanish Sahara. ‘Ribbentrop eagerly sold the goods which did not belong to him,’ wrote Schmidt; ‘apparently no price was too high for Spanish collaboration.’ In return, Ribbentrop asked for the concession of one U-boat base at Villa Cisneros in Río de Oro and another at Santa Isabel in the island of Fernando Póo, part of Spanish Guinea in the Bight of Biafra (nowadays Malabo on the island of Bioko, part of Equatorial Guinea). Serrano was, according to Schmidt, ‘niggardly’: Río de Oro might be possible, but Fernando Póo was out ‘for historical reasons’ and ‘on account of Spanish public opinion’.
Serrano, on the other hand, recalls Ribbentrop doing all the talking, standing before the map of Afrika, indicating a huge band across the middle of the continent, south of Lake Chad, north of Angola and Mozambique, an area taking in the Cameroons, both French and Belgian Congos, and British East Africa – Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. In Serrano’s account, Ribbentrop said this was the German zone of interest, an economic empire in the very heart of Africa, which the German people needed and deserved. Looking at the Atlantic coast of French Morocco, Ribbentrop said Germany needed air and military bases at Mogador (now Essaouira) and at Agadir, the port where the Kaiser had caused the ‘crisis’ in 1911. Then something more worrying: Ribbentrop asked for one of the seven main Canary Islands as a German military base. Serrano Suñer had been quite happy for Nazi Germany to take over other people’s territory all across Africa, but he was not prepared for this, and he bridled.
‘Bear in mind, Minister,’ Serrano said stiffly, ‘that the islands you are talking about are part of our national territory, a province of our country.’
‘The common needs of Euroafrican defence against American imperialism demand it. I trust the Generalísimo will understand.’
‘I cannot even transmit this request. Don’t you understand that while the youth of Spain, who have shed their blood for the greatness of their Patria, are crying out for Gibraltar, it would be monstrous, even criminal, for us to entertain any thoughts of amputating, ceding or limiting our territory or our sovereignty? The Canary Islands are as much a part of Spain as Madrid or Burgos. You can establish your bases in Senegal at Saint Louis or at Dakar, without encroaching on Morocco, let alone our national territory.’
Memoirs tend to be self-serving. Ramón Serrano Suñer wrote Entre Hendaya y Gibraltar in 1947 partly to defend himself from the charges in Sir Samuel Hoare’s 1946 book Ambassador on Special Mission, in which he was painted as the villain. The modern Spanish historian Ángel Viñas has described Serrano’s memoirs as ‘untrustworthy’ (‘no fiables’) and says that ‘at key points, he lied like a trooper’ (‘mintió como un bellaco’). By the time he wrote them, Joachim von Ribbentrop was dead, the first Nazi to be hanged after the war crimes trial at Nuremberg, so could not contradict Serrano’s account. Whether their Berlin encounter was like that or not, the Spaniard was keen to present himself as a man defending the integrity and independence of Spain, rather than, in his own words, ‘a Nazi serf’.
Serrano sent a courier back to Spain by air with Hitler’s letter and an urgent note to Franco warning him of the German threat to the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession for nearly five hundred years. They did not know, though might have surmised, that in June 1940 Winston Churchill had also asked the British Admiralty to draw up plans to seize the Canary Islands (code-name ‘Bugle’), as well as the Portuguese Cape Verdes (‘Shrapnel’) and the Azores (‘Alloy’), as fall-back positions should Gibraltar ever be lost.
Then Serrano went on a week-long Nazi battlefield car trip, nursing a streaming cold which he picked up in a damp Berlin air-raid shelter. (The RAF had started bombing the German capital with scores of aircraft on 25 August 1940.) He found totalitarianism ‘a mixture of puerility and grandiosity’, like the ostentatious palaces of its leaders. Food rationing gripped even the elite: they ate a lot of roast duck because game was the only meat not on points. Once they had a stew made of deer so well hung it was barely edible. The Nazi ‘new order’ was both impressive and boring. Serrano recalled a ghastly day being driven around in big cars, inspecting Heinrich Himmler’s SS empire. They saw barracks, sports halls and a criminology museum, then wasted an hour inspecting an automatic card index. By the time they came to the fourth explanation of its functioning he felt like screaming.†
In Belgium, Serrano took the obligatory tour of Fort Eben Emael, already becoming a legendary German victory. He saw desolate Dunkirk’s beaches with overturned ambulances and carts in the sands, the wreckage of downed aeroplanes and the funnels of sunken ships sticking up from the sea. The gung-ho German admiral cheerfully showed them how the Organisation Todt (OT), the construction enterprise headed by engineer Fritz Todt, were building the Atlantic Wall of Festung Europa (Fortress Europe), ramparts and ditches of reinforced concrete, immense casemates for artillery draped in camouflage netting, long-barrelled guns that could reach the English coast clearly visible over the Dover Strait from Cap Gris Nez. In Calais and Boulogne he saw shoals of motor torpedo boats and barges ready for an invasion which he suspected was not going to happen.
Ribbentrop, meanwhile, had flown to Rome on 19 September, and was childishly pleased with the ‘applauding squad’ that greeted him. In the car, he told Count Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister, that he had a surprise in his briefcase: a military alliance with Japan, to be signed soon in Berlin. Ribbentrop saw this personal diplomatic triumph as a double winner, because both the USSR and the USA would feel threatened. Ribbentrop wanted to meet lots of people and got busy socialising. ‘Everyone disliked him,’ Count Ciano wrote in his diary, also recording the German Foreign Minister’s bullish account of his talk with Serrano:
Spain is ready to enter the war and has informed the German Government of her requirements … grain and war materials … certain specialised weapons as well as a guarantee that at the end of the war the coastal strip of Morocco from Oran to Cap Blanc will be transferred to Spanish sovereignty. The Führer is in principle in favour of making these concessions for the sake of ensuring Spain’s entry into the war, which would have as its immediate object the occupation of Gibraltar … If the Duce agrees, Ribbentrop hopes to draw up a protocol with Serrano Suñer on his return to Berlin in order to lay down the conditions for Spain’s entry into the war.
Meanwhile, Franco had read Hitler’s letter and replied on 22 September in his usual opaque prose. ‘My dear Führer!’ it began. After the familiar flurry of ‘cordial thanks’ and ‘complete agreement’ with ‘your esteemed ideas’, Franco’s anxieties about Morocco emerged. He was bothered in particular by ‘the establishment of an enclave for German military bases by occupying both harbours of the southern zone’. Franco said that these (unspecified) enclaves would be ‘unnecessary in peacetime and superfluous in wartime’ because Hitler could count on the use of every single one of Spain’s harbours ‘since our friendship is to be sealed firmly for the future as well’.
Franco agreed that ‘the first act in our attack must consist in the occupation of Gibraltar … within a few days by the use of modern equipment and trained troops’. Franco said there had been a misunderstanding about his request for big guns. He did not want large-calibre static artillery, but movable ones of about twenty centimetres or eight inches. It would be hard to build new airfields because the terrain was so rugged and the weather so bad, but air power would be indispensable.
Franco went on with his fears about a British surprise attack on the Canary Islands. Spain was moving men and food, arms and ammunition, artillery and shells, planes and pilots from less threatened regions to the islands. The letter ended in more verbiage:
I would like to thank you, dear Führer, once again for the offer of solidarity. I reply with the unchangeable and sincere adherence to you personally, to the German people, and to the cause for which you fight. I hope, in defence of this cause, to be able to renew the old bonds of comradeship between our armies. In the expectation of being able to express this to you personally, I assure you of my most sincere feelings of friendship and I greet you.
Your
F. FRANCO
On 26 September 1940, Adolf Hitler and Grand Admiral Erich Raeder had one of their regular conferences on naval affairs. Hitler disliked the sea, because he got seasick easily, and he feared the ocean. ‘On land I am a hero,’ he once told Raeder, ‘but at sea I am a coward.’ Unlike Churchill, the Führer had never read Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power. Instead he had consumed Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer and so believed in Lebensraum on land, expanding territories to the east across Eurasia. The seaman Admiral Raeder, like the airman Marshal Göring, was not at all keen on invading Russia. He had read enough history to know how Napoleon began to lose his empire.
Now the Führer listened to Raeder expounding a maritime strategy. The admiral argued cogently that the Mediterranean should be tackled in the winter of 1940–1. Raeder said the British considered the Mediterranean the pivot of their world empire. British armies in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean were being reinforced from Australia and India. Italy and its African empire was going to be the main point of attack because the British always picked off the weakest enemy first. However, added the admiral, were Germany to seize Gibraltar, then this would completely alter the balance of power in the Atlantic. German U-boats could throttle British supply lines and force die Engländer to surrender without the Germans having to undertake a difficult amphibious invasion of the British Isles.
Hitler was already getting bored with the Sealion plan for invasion, so this argument appealed to him. Following his southern strategy, Raeder said Germany should then strike at the Suez Canal, which the Italians would never be able to take without German help. Then the German armies could advance through Palestine towards the oilfields of Iraq and Persia, which would threaten the USSR from the south. Some actions at Dakar and Casablanca to keep the British and French out of Africa would secure the whole of the west and south. Then Germany could turn all its military might eastwards against the Soviet Union.
The Führer enjoyed this conversation and the new possibilities it opened up. The OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) headquarters planners had done more work on the Canaris–Mikosch assessment of how Gibraltar might be taken, and had assigned mountain troops and artillery for training and rehearsals. Things could soon get moving.
*
On Friday 27 September 1940, in a big media event with photographers and newsreel cameramen and Serrano Suñer watching, Chancellor Adolf Hitler, Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano and Japanese ambassador Saburo Kurusu signed the Tripartite Pact in Berlin. The old ‘Pact of Steel’ now embraced its third member, the Axis became a Triangle, and Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan were joined in a mutually defensive military alliance for the next ten years, with the right to establish ‘New Orders’ in their respective continents.
The following day, Saturday 28 September 1940, Hitler had a long talk with Count Ciano about Spain. Hitler wanted the war finished, decisively, and he was sarcastic about Spain’s contribution to that end. The Spanish wanted Germany to supply seven hundred thousand tons of wheat per year, all the oil and petrol they required, all the equipment the Spanish army lacked, all the artillery, aeroplanes, special weapons and troops needed for the conquest of Gibraltar, plus all of Morocco and Oran in Algeria. And what was Spain offering in return? Her friendship …
Hitler wondered what would happen if Vichy France ever got wind of Spanish ambitions for French Morocco. Pétain might well do a deal with the English in order to save French North Africa. It might be better for Germany if Vichy France held on to Morocco and defended themselves against the English – after all, Vichy had managed to beat off the Anglo-French attack at Dakar – whereas if Franco’s Spanish troops occupied French North African territory they would probably yell for German and Italian help as soon as the English came at them. The Führer needed to talk it all over coolly with Mussolini. Helping Spain would mean heavy sacrifices and tiresome military obligations for both Germany and Italy. And even then, the Spanish might still scuttle back into neutrality. Spain was all take and no give. Germany had assisted Franco in the Spanish Civil War and although Hitler did not want to calculate the blood sacrifice in economic terms, the fact was that Spain owed Germany four hundred million Reichsmarks in war debts;‡ but whenever reparation was brought up, the Spanish talked about their noble ideals, making the Germans seem like Jews, screwing cash out of something sacred.
Hitler told Ciano that Franco had invited him to a meeting at the border between France and Spain and he was not sure whether or not to accept. He would talk to Mussolini first.
Ciano said that Italy had not forgotten burning its fingers in the Spanish Civil War either, when Franco had claimed that if only he could get a dozen transport planes or bombers from Italy he would win the war in a few days. ‘A few days’ became three years, and those twelve planes turned into more than a thousand aircraft, six thousand Italian dead and costs of fourteen billion lire. Would the same thing happen again? Caution was needed, and a good long talk. Ciano said that il Duce was eager to meet der Führer, too. Would Herr Hitler like to meet Mussolini at the Brenner Pass on Friday 4 October, when Serrano would be in Rome?
Back in Rome on Monday 30 September, Ciano went to see Mussolini, who was very happy that his Italian troops in Libya were slowly rolling eastward against British Egypt, whose patrols were falling back. Il Duce yearned for the military glory that Italy ‘has sought in vain for three centuries’.
The next day, the Spanish Foreign Minister Ramón Serrano Suñer arrived in Rome on the train from Munich. Among the Spanish Embassy welcoming party at the railway station was General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, but he refused to greet Serrano or shake his hand or to attend the lunch that was laid on. Murderous Queipo de Llano – the man Arthur Koestler described as a sexual psychopath – had been exiled to Rome since August 1939 and was living at the Hotel Excelsior with his attractive thirty-two-year-old daughter Mercedes, known as Maruja, whom Queipo’s own wife Genoveva suspected he had incestuously molested. Ostensibly the head of the Spanish Military Mission to Fascist Italy, Queipo de Llano was being spied on by his aide-de-camp and was in disgrace because he had insulted Franco in his Tourette’s-like outbursts. Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law, told Ciano that he thought Queipo de Llano was ‘a bandit and a beast’.
Mussolini had Serrano installed in the Italian Foreign Service’s charming Renaissance palace, Villa Madama, set in terraced gardens on Monte Maria, and they met that afternoon, Tuesday 1 October. Serrano began by saying that Spain had always given the Axis moral support, but it was now preparing to take up arms ‘to settle its centuries-old account with Great Britain’. Spain had a host of internal problems, but he thought that war would be a unifying factor: people would rally to the cause of regaining Gibraltar and Morocco, especially young people.
Serrano was much more at home in Fascist Italy than he had been in Nazi Germany. Because Mussolini seemed friendly, intelligent and loyal – muy simpático – the Spaniard poured out his heart to him and Ciano. He could not hide the worry and anguish that had been caused him by Ribbentrop’s unfriendly, sometimes threatening and always difficult attitude, which undermined the good impression he got from his talks with Hitler. He railed against the tactlessness of the Germans and their complete ignorance of the Spanish moral universe. He strongly disliked their attitude to the Catholic Church and said they were not the right people to create the new order of European civilisation.§ Mussolini, who understood far better than the Germans what Spain had suffered in the civil war, calmed his fellow Latin down. Ciano recorded him saying to Serrano that although Spain should accelerate her military preparations, they should only come into the war on the basis of a collective decision and when the time was right.
When Ciano sent a copy of the conversation to the Germans, he naturally left out Serrano’s ‘colourful invectives against the Germans’, only adding in his personal diary: ‘The Germans are not models of courtesy, and Ribbentrop less so than the others, even though this time there is something to be said for him. For years the Spaniards have been asking for lots and giving nothing in return.’
*
On Friday 4 October, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met in the Alps. Each Axis dictator arrived in his own special armoured train at the Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy. They had met here two and a half years earlier to celebrate the so-called ‘Pact of Steel’ that was now being corroded by their own bad faith; both men lied about the present and concealed their plans for the future.
Hitler said the attack on England was going well, although he had postponed the actual invasion; Mussolini boasted about his advance into Egypt, next stop Mersa Matruh and then forward to Alexandria and the Suez Canal, although this was not going to happen. Hitler did not say he was going to take over Romania, and Mussolini did not say he was going to attack Greece. They talked about Spain’s intervention in the war. Hitler summarised his conversations with Serrano – ‘the crafty Jesuit’ – and spoke of the Spanish demand for large supplies of wheat, at a time when there was not enough grain in Germany and potato flour was already being added to bread. The Spanish wanted the whole Moroccan coast, but Germany herself needed a base at either Casablanca or Agadir. The Führer was prepared to cede Gibraltar to the Spanish but he was not minded to give them everything they wanted in Morocco: if Spain got a strip of French Morocco as requested, the English might invade the Canaries and Vichy North Africa could swing to de Gaulle. Finally, Hitler stated that he considered the war as good as won.¶
On the same day, far away in Tokyo, Prince Konoye, the Japanese premier, declared that if the USA recognised the leadership of Japan, Germany and Italy in eastern Asia and Europe, then those three Powers would logically recognise the leadership of the USA in the western hemisphere. If, however, ‘the USA … challenges the three Powers, we are ready for a fight to the finish’.
In the USA, the America First Committee, recently founded by Yale University students, was getting organised in Chicago as the foremost non-interventionist pressure group to keep the USA out of foreign entanglements.
In the British parliament, at the end of his wide-ranging ‘War Situation’ speech of 8 October, Winston Churchill was placatory towards Spain, which he described as a country ‘much nearer home which has for some months past seemed to hang in the balance between peace and war’.
We have always wished well to the Spanish people … There is no country in Europe that has more need of peace and food and the opportunities of prosperous trade than Spain … Far be it from us to lap Spain and her own economic needs in the wide compass of our blockade. All we seek is that Spain will not become a channel of supply to our mortal foes … British interests and policy are based on the independence and unity of Spain, and we look forward to seeing her take her rightful place both as a great Mediterranean Power and as a leading and famous member of the family of Europe and of Christendom …
On the Spanish side, things looked rather different. Serrano Suñer had flown back to Madrid from Italy, and conferred with his brother-in-law Franco. On 10 October, he wrote to Ribbentrop in Berlin asking for Spain’s proposal to join the Axis alliance for the next ten years to be treated with the utmost secrecy. Serrano could not afford to jeopardise the shipments of Canadian and Argentine wheat that Beigbeder and his Spanish diplomats were then struggling to get through the British economic blockade’s navicert system. It was vital that the food be seen as Red Cross humanitarian aid for hungry people in Spain, not as extra rations for a nation about to join the Axis. Serrano ended his missive with his ‘respects to the Führer, with best wishes for the collaboration of our two peoples for the common good’.
*
German military planning for the taking of Gibraltar continued. On 12 October, General Franz Halder, chief of the OKH, the Army General Staff, picked Mountain Troop General Ludwig Kübler to lead the attack. Kübler, who was later hanged for war crimes in Yugoslavia, only liked to be photographed from the right because the left side of his mouth and cheek was hideously scarred by a wound from the First World War. He was sent to train with his soldiers at Valdahon camp in eastern France, in the foothills of the Jura Mountains. General Halder reckoned that the 98th Mountain Infantry Regiment, mainly Bavarians and Austrians, together with a regular infantry regiment like the Grossdeutschland, could do the job, backed up by twenty-six medium and heavy artillery batteries with 165 guns, plus engineer battalions, three observation battalions, two smoke battalions and appropriate logistics. The preparations would take six to eight weeks, and the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf plus extra artillery would be needed for flank protection when they were on the move through Spain.
The German planners talked to the Luftwaffe about their requirements for Gibraltar: reconnaissance and observation planes as well as attack aircraft like dive-bombers and fighters, and sufficient anti-aircraft batteries. The logisticians were also working out the 1200-kilometre route for a land march through Spain – Irún–Burgos–Valladolid–Salamanca–Caceres–Mérida–Seville–Algeciras – and the right places for supply bases that would meet the requirements of 65,383 men and 1094 horses for 136 tons of food a day, as well as shifting 13,179 tons of ammunition and 9000 tons of oil and petrol without damage or loss over inadequate roads and railways. Halder talked with Lieutenant Colonel Mikosch and Major Staubwasser, both just back from their reconnaissance trips to Spain. Staubwasser estimated that there were ten thousand British troops on the Rock; Halder thought Mikosch ‘over-optimistic’ about how long it would take to beat them.
*
The ‘New Order’ in Nazified Europe ground on mercilessly. On 15 October, Lluís Companys, the extradited former president of autonomous Catalunya, was executed by firing squad in Barcelona. The next day, 16 October, General Franco changed his cabinet. He made himself Minister of the Interior and promoted Demetrio Carceller, the Falangist leader in Catalonia, to Minister of Industry and Commerce. There was an additional bombshell for the British. Their friend in the regime, Colonel Juan Beigbeder, was sacked as Foreign Minister, without notice. When they heard that his replacement was Ramón Serrano Suñer, there was consternation at the British Embassy: the arch-enemy was now inside the gates. Hoare’s staff were convinced that Spain would soon join the Axis, declare war, and attack Gibraltar.
*
The signs from Spain were as ominous as the gloomy autumn skies. Early on Saturday 19 October 1940, the German SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler set off for Spain via Bordeaux with his chief of staff SS-Gruppenführer Karl Wolff and a large entourage of Gestapo and SS officers in their long greatcoats and high-peaked, eagle-badged caps. Further south at Hendaye, they crossed the bridge-border into Irún, where they were greeted on Spanish soil by the German ambassador, Eberhard von Stohrer, accompanying José Maria de la Blanca Finat y Escrivá de Romaní, the Count of Mayalde, who was Spain’s dreaded Director General of Security.
José Finat, the man who had had Lluís Companys extradited from France and shot at Montjuic Castle in Barcelona, was keen to achieve even closer links with the Gestapo. The German and Spanish police had already signed a collaborative agreement on 31 July 1938 which meant they could swap communist, anarchist or other ‘usual suspect’ prisoners without any diplomatic niceties. Germans who had fought for the International Brigades could be handed over to the German police, and Spanish Republicans sent back to Spain. Or either country could punish them as they saw fit. Some 4800 Spaniards died in Mauthausen concentration camp.
In 1941, just before he left to become the Spanish ambassador in Berlin, Finat asked the governors of every province in Spain to compile registers of all Jews and people of Sephardi Jewish ancestry, including those conversos or converts who were now ‘passing’ as Spanish Christians. Finat’s idea was that this racial information would be ready for the SS Hollerith punch-cards, to ease ‘ethnic cleansing’ when Spain joined the war on Germany’s side and to enforce what Churchill had called ‘the odious apparatus of Nazi rule’.
That Saturday, Himmler’s party drove to San Sebastián in a holiday mood. It was not all police business. They had brought their shotguns, hoping for a spot of game in the Basque hills, but it was too rainy. In the wet streets of the city that the Basques call Donostia they were met by Falangists in blue shirts and red berets who demonstrated marching and flag-waving and elevating of right arms. Then they drove on to Burgos, the former headquarters of the Francoist uprising. General López Pinto, who was said to have been dismissed as head of the VI Military Region after his ‘¡Viva Hitler!’ gaffe in June, was prominent among those who escorted the uniformed Germans. Shops were shut so that the Burgaleses could turn out with their umbrellas in the rain to cheer the Reichsführer. The city’s dignitaries greeted him on the steps of the Cathedral, where Himmler was eager to see the red marble tomb of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid Campeador, a Visigoth whom his racial theories conceived as an ancestral Germanic warrior hero. (Perhaps he was also shown there the battered old iron-bound chest that El Cid had employed to hoodwink some Jewish money-lenders, filling it with sand rather than gold as security for a cash loan.) At dinner that night, Himmler sat next to SS-Sturmbannführer Paul Winzer, his Gestapo attaché at the German Embassy in Madrid since 1936, who filled him in on everything he needed to know. At 11 p.m., cars took them to the railway station for the night sleeper train across the meseta to Madrid.
Serrano Suñer, the new Foreign Minister, was among the military and civil chiefs waiting on the platform at Madrid’s Atocha station to greet the distinguished Nazi visitor at 9 a.m. sharp on Sunday. Hundreds of swastika banners hung along their route up the Paseo del Prado, past the Botanical Gardens and the Prado art gallery to the Ritz Hotel. At midday, Himmler went to meet Franco at the Pardo Palace. They had lunch at the German Embassy, then went to the Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas to see ‘six magnificent bulls’ meet their ends in a muddy rain-lashed arena. Bespectacled Heinrich Himmler was not averse to organising the extermination of millions, but he was personally squeamish and did not enjoy the spectacle of ritual slaughter: the gouging picador, the stumbling blood-slicked beast, la estocada, the glittering toreador strutting with a severed black ear held triumphantly aloft. There was a small disturbance afterwards in the cheap seats when two young men from the British Embassy refused to stand when they played the ‘Deutschlandlied’, the German national anthem, and plain-clothes Gestapo men roughly jostled them out.
Among other tourist highlights, Heinrich Himmler visited the National Archaeological Museum. The SS-Reichsführer was delighted to have as his guide a German-speaking Spanish archaeologist whose Visigothic excavations in Segovia seemed to confirm the crackpot racial theories of das Ahnenerbe, the Ancestral Heritage department of the SS Race and Settlement Office, which carried out pseudoscientific research into Aryan, Germanic and Nordic origins as well as deftly looting antiquities. Near Barcelona in Catalonia, the occult-minded Himmler also visited the Benedictine monastery of Santa María de Montserrat, in the belief that it was the Montsalvat of Wagner’s Parsifal, the sacred place that was guarding the Holy Grail. Solaced by wishful thinking, Himmler flew home to Germany.
* Interpreter Schmidt had opinions too. He said that Ribbentrop (‘a dangerous fool’) reminded him of the terrier in the famous gramophone advertisement: yapping at the sound of His Master’s Voice. Galeazzo Ciano also records Hermann Göring calling Ribbentrop ‘Germany’s no. 1 parrot’. US interrogators later dubbed the minister ‘von Rippenshit’.
† These were Hollerith punch-card machines, purchased from the USA, useful for identifying and targeting Jews and computerising the concentration camp system. See Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (Dialog Press, 2012).
‡ According to the modern economist E. Martínez Ruiz, Francoist Spain’s total civil war debt to Nazi Germany was 732.6 million Reichsmarks, equivalent to US$295.4 million then.
§ Serrano Suñer from Catholic Spain made a major blunder on this trip to Rome by failing to pay his respects to the Pope at the Vatican.
¶ When Ribbentrop parroted ‘The war is already won’ on 2 November 1940, a German army major turned to Count Ciano and said in his laboured French: ‘This phrase was given to us in 1914, in 1915, in 1916, and in 1917. I believed it. In 1918 I wished I were dead.’