The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [92]
Franco had personally assisted in the escape to Spain of Léon Degrelle, the wanted Belgian SS officer about whom Hitler had reportedly once said, “If I had a son, I would want him to be like Degrelle.” In 1949, Franco did the same for wanted SS colonel Otto Skorzeny. The United Nations reported after the war that between 2,000 and 3,000 German Nazis as well as many more war criminals from the Vichy regime lived in Spain. The U.S. government estimated that Nazi holdings in Spain were worth $95 million in late 1940s dollars. The war criminals whose records la ligne had smuggled over the Pyrenees to the British were now safe and comfortable and continued to live openly in Spain, giving interviews to Western press expressing Nazi ideology, even after Franco’s death. Many prominent war criminals died in luxury in Spain in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1994, when the German government sought to prosecute Otto Ernst Remer, Hitler’s security chief, for preaching racial hatred, he fled to Spain. The Spanish court ruled that since there was no such crime under Spanish law, he could not be extradited. He died in a Costa del Sol resort in 1997.
THE BASQUE NATIONALISTS claim that after the Civil War, during Franco’s World War II neutrality, 21,780 Basques were executed. The figure has never been verified. In San Sebastián, by the graceful curve of the world’s most beautiful urban beach, was a prison where Franco’s men shot Basque nationalists almost every day until 1947.
Immediately after the Basque provinces had been taken, Franco outlawed the Euskera language. The Basques were told to “speak Christian.” Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, the “traitor provinces,” were singled out for special punishment and lost all rights of self-rule. Navarra, a very loyal province, still had some fiscal autonomy.
In the summer of 1944, when large numbers of armed Republicans, especially Basques and Catalans, neared the Spanish border, many in Madrid believed that the invasion was about to begin, that Franco would soon be overthrown. But units such as the Guernica Battalion decided to finish the war for France first, thus gaining both the sympathy and availability of the Allies to help them in Spain. In October 1944, a group of Communist Republicans did invade and were defeated.
In March 1945, Don Juan de Borbón, the pretender to the Spanish throne, denounced the dictatorship as an ally of the Axis and called on Franco to step down and make way for a constitutional monarchy.
Ever since the conference at Yalta in February 1945, when the Allies had promised democracy to the countries controlled by the Axis powers, Franco had started a frantic and largely successful project, revising history. He would never again admit that he had wanted to enter the war or that he was a German sympathizer. He claimed he had only 26,000 political prisoners. That did not include those in his forced labor camps. Still, two years earlier the government had confessed to 75,000 political prisoners, none of whom had been released.
The Basque government-in-exile meeting in midtown Manhattan in 1944. Aguirre is in the center at the end of the table and Telesforo de Monzón is on his left. (Sabino Arana Foundation, Bilbao)
To the French, British, and Americans, Franco’s Spain was a pariah nation. Despite constant overtures by Franco, it was to be excluded from the United Nations, NATO, the Marshall Plan, and later, the European Economic Community. In effect, it was shut out of the postwar Western world. But it was not invaded. Spain was not to be liberated. The policy of President Franklin Roosevelt, stated in 1945, was that the United States would not interfere in Spain as long as it was not a threat to world peace. On the other hand, he said, “I can see no place in the community of nations for governments founded on fascist principles.” Ostracism but not intervention. In 1946,