The image that accompanies this article, taken in 1941, in the middle of World War II, is eloquent. The Spanish and Nazi flags preside over the departure from the France station in Barcelona of a contingent of “producers” towards 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, in the process, lent a hand to a conquering Germany that seemed invincible. Berlin urgently needed labor for its factories, especially for weapons.
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 various categories, from those who made the decision almost entirely voluntarily – although conditioned by the misery in who lived – and 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 gain semi-freedom through work. There is talk of about 60,000 people. Two thousand were Portuguese.
The Paris 8 University, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, is hosting an exhibition until the end of October on the adventures, often dramatic and with names and surnames, of these Portuguese and Spanish workers. The initiative is part of a broader international research and memory recovery project, with the support of the European Commission. Among other institutions, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the Nova University of Lisbon have collaborated.
Unlike resistance fighters or those deported to concentration camps, who were at least considered heroes by the opposition to Franco, the experience of many Iberian workers during the Third Reich was eclipsed for decades. There are hardly any written memories. Its protagonists preferred to remain silent and remain anonymous, out of discretion, bad conscience or simple discomfort. The Spanish and Portuguese dictatorial regimes ignored them. In Portugal, the forgetfulness was even greater. During a colloquium held in September at the inauguration of the exhibition, 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, a graduate in History, was completely unaware of the existence of compatriots who had worked in Nazi Germany, some of whom ended up interned in the Buchenwald camp.
Not all Iberian workers enjoyed the same status. Those who traveled from the Peninsula were equipped with a passport and enjoyed, in theory, consular protection. On the other hand, the exiled Spaniards were abandoned to their fate, as stateless people, 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 war, a part of Spaniards found themselves trapped in the Soviet occupation zone. There disparate trajectories coincided. In the Soviet gulag (concentration camp) there were captured soldiers from the Blue Division – who fought side by side with the Germans –, Republican prisoners from the Nazi camps and even ordinary Spanish workers who, in the final phase of the war, They were forced by the Wehrmacht to fight and fell prisoners of the Red Army.
For one of the creators of the exhibition, the Portuguese emeritus professor Fernando Rosas, knowing the history of these workers and opening a citizen debate about it is essential “in today’s disturbing days, when we live under the danger of an extreme right that wants “sweep away the memory of what fascism was.” Marta Simó, researcher at the UAB, expert on the Shoah 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 can help us.” , bridging differences and without comparing, to reflect on some of the current policies and ideologies.”
