The image that accompanies this article, taken in 1941, in the midst of World War II, is eloquent. The Spanish and Nazi flags preside over the departure from Barcelona’s France station of a contingent of “producers” to Germany. The governments of Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler had signed an agreement on August 21 of that year. Spain thus alleviated the problem of unemployment and, incidentally, gave a helping hand to a conquering Germany that seemed invincible. Berlin urgently needed labor for its factories, especially armaments.
The presence of Spanish and Portuguese workers during the Third Reich is one of the least known chapters of the war, a very complex phenomenon, because it includes several categories, from those who made the decision almost entirely voluntarily – although conditioned by the misery in which they lived – and they traveled from the Iberian Peninsula, to the exiles of the Civil War who were already living in France in very harsh conditions and the prisoners who were able to earn a semi-freedom through work. We are talking about 60,000 people. The two thousand were Portuguese.
The Universitat París 8, in the suburb of, is hosting until the end of October an exhibition about the often dramatic and with names and surnames of these Portuguese and Spanish workers. The initiative is part of a wider international research and memory recovery project, with the support of the European Commission. The Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the Universitat Nova de Lisboa have collaborated, among other institutions.
Unlike the resistance fighters or those deported to concentration camps, who were at least considered heroes by the opposition to Franco, the experience of many of the Iberian workers during the Third Reich was overshadowed for decades. There are few written memoirs. Its protagonists preferred to remain silent and remain anonymous, out of discretion, bad conscience or simple discomfort. The Spanish and Portuguese dictatorial regimes disagreed. In Portugal the oblivion was even greater. During a colloquium held in September when the exhibition was inaugurated, the current president of the Portuguese Assembly and former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Augusto Santos Silva, admitted that until a few years ago he himself, with a degree in History, did not know completely the existence of compatriots who had worked in Nazi Germany, some of whom ended up interned in the Buchenwald camp.
Not all Iberian workers had the same status. Those who moved from the Peninsula were provided with passports and had, in theory, consular protection. On the other hand, the exiled Spaniards were left to their fate, as stateless, and with worse working conditions.
The evolution of the war, unfavorable for Germany, caused the treatment of these workers to change for the worse. At the end of the conflict, some Spaniards were trapped in the Soviet occupation zone. Disparate trajectories coincided. In the Soviet gulag (concentration camp) captured soldiers of the Blue Division – who fought on the side of the Germans – came together, Republican prisoners of the Nazi camps and even ordinary Spanish workers who, in the final phase of the war , were forced by the Wehrmacht to fight and fell prisoners of the Red Army.
For one of the creators of the exhibition, the Portuguese professor emeritus Fernando, knowing the history of these workers and opening a public debate on this issue is fundamental “in today’s disturbing days, when we live under the threat of an extreme right that wants to erase the memory of what fascism was”. Marta Simó, UAB researcher, expert on the Xoà and co-author of the exhibition, agrees with Rosas that “knowing the processes of emigration of people from our country and how extremist policies can end up turning them into victims of a dehumanizing system it can help, saving the differences and without comparing it, to reflect on some of the current policies and ideologies”.
