The Gypsies act in Europe as an absolutely strange and parasitic race, just like the Jews”. And precisely the latter is “one of the most terrible towns of all time”. They are not phrases taken from the German propaganda of the thirties and forties, but from the books published by the Burgos doctor Misael Bañuelos, one of the greatest exponents of the intellectual approach of the Spanish far-right to Nazism in those years, the moment of the birth of the Franco’s state and in which the postulates of National Socialism had a great influence.
The philologist Marco da Costa has explored the weight of this ideology in the Spain of the Republic, the Civil War and the 1940s, the latter moment when the spread of National Socialism with indigenous elements began to retreat in parallel to the German defeats in the world war. In his book La España nazi (Taurus), Da Costa explains how this ideology penetrated the country, who were the main disseminators and what differentiated Nazism from Falangism and other local ultra-conservative tendencies.
Although Italian fascism was the reference model for the Spanish far-right, the appeal of Nazism was indisputable from the first good electoral results of the National Socialists in 1930. The right-wing press and a well-nourished book production introduced the public opinion of the country the alleged successes of Nazi Germany along with its ideology. Authors such as Ramiro Ledesma – who went so far as to comb his hair like Hitler and grow a mustache in the style of the Führer – or the first editions of Mein Kampf (My struggle, in that first diffusion), contributed to spreading that ideology in Spain.
When the Civil War broke out, the German influence on the national side was not merely that of an ally providing military support, but that the National Socialist ideology crept into the very foundation of the construction of the new State.
As Da Costa points out in the book, the Falangist intelligentsia saw “the opportunity to transform society in all its aspects, simultaneously defenestration of the ankylosed liberal regime”, which is why other regimes were needed to imitate. Names such as Pedro Laín Entralgo, Zaragoza academic Luis Legaz – influenced by Carl Schmitt, author of the configuration of the Nazi State -, Juan Beneyto or José Pemartín were some of the most notable in this field.
Another aspect in which Nazism influenced was the Jewish question. But in the case of Spain, despite the proclamations, anti-Semitism was more of a rhetorical issue than an effective persecution. “It was more environmental anti-Semitism than anything else, in large part, obviously, because there were no Jews in Spain,” explains Da Costa to La Vanguardia.
In reality, the most extreme postulates of German National Socialism had little chance of taking root in Spain, due to the atheistic nature of Germanic ideology, which clashed with the indigenous Catholic tradition. For this reason, eugenics defended by the psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo-Nájera was not in favor of the physical extermination of dissent and for this same reason the final solution for the Jews was not shared, at least officially, by the Franco regime and their intellectuals. It is, among other reasons, this Catholic component that explains why in Spain in the late thirties and early forties there were many Nazis who, in fact, were not that many.
“In reality – Professor Da Costa explains – although the National Socialist ideology began to penetrate Spain already in the time of the Republic, there were few Nazis who can be considered authentic in Spain; many intellectuals, journalists and writers signed up to these theses due to their eagerness to be opportunistic, as they hoped to share in the benefits of the new European order after a supposed German victory in the world war. The majority of all of them were more Philo-Germanic than Philo-Nazi”.
When things began to go wrong for the Nazis in the world war, the regime began to turn, from an approach close to National Socialism based on a totalitarian state to one that was more indigenous and more typical of a Authoritarian state in the style of Salazar’s Portugal. “Unlike Hitler or Mussolini – points out Da Costa -, Franco was not an ideologue, which allowed him to adapt to the new times without many problems”. With him, many intellectuals changed their orientation and, in an exercise in hypocrisy, even went so far as to proclaim themselves pioneers in disagreeing with Nazism, when years ago they had embraced it even effusively.
In this context, in the years following the Second World War there was an intense production of what the author calls “desmemorialistic literature”, that is to say, memoirs of prominent intellectuals who, after having embraced National Socialism, or they took iron out of it or simply forgot this approach. There were very few who maintained a position close to Nazism after the war – Romano Brunet’s ferocious anti-Semitism was already an exception. Times had definitely changed.
By the way, Misael Bañuelos currently gives his name to a street, a square and an assembly hall at the University Hospital of Valladolid.
