Abstract
How does one erase an inconvenient past in a present that one does not like? This was the question that the Francoist dictatorship asked itself in 1945 when the Nazi regime, which it had much admired, fell. One solution was to change the past. Ditching its most strenuous fascist aspects, the Franco regime reinvented itself as a ‘moderate’ Catholic one whose only fault was to have defeated communism too early, before the Cold War put things straight again. This position did not fly with all sectors of Western societies but for some, particularly in Washington and in Europe’s conservative circles, a way to reconcile with the Spanish regime and to enlist it against the Soviets. However, Spanish diplomats were often shunned, tainted as they were by their own pasts. Technicians and social experts were (or so they said) politically cleaner, and supposedly neutral. They could be used by the regime.
David Brydan has written a concise yet informative book on how this happened. The first group of experts who reconnected with their Western colleagues were health specialists. Spanish doctors had a long tradition of international exchanges and collaboration. Long before the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), thanks to scholarships and grants both from the Spanish government and from international organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Spanish specialists had travelled abroad to improve their education and collaborate in a number of international programmes, many of which had taken place in Spain. The rise of Nazism, the Spanish war, and the Second World War changed this. Spanish Republican doctors ended up in exile, and many of those that remained in the country were attracted to the Nazi sphere of influence, attending conferences and collaborating with their German colleagues (pp. 27–41). Some Spanish doctors shared the crude Nazi theories on race and genetics. Others, however, having volunteered to serve in the Blue Division – the 48,000 strong unit sent by Franco to fight alongside the Nazis in the Eastern Front – soon discovered that Nazi racism was not limited to Jews and Slavs but also extended to Spaniards (pp. 52–3).
All Spaniards paid dearly for Franco pro-Axis policies, but poor Spaniards paid the highest price. The Rockefeller Foundation withdrew from the country after the United States’ entry in the war and, later, Spain was excluded from the World Health Organization (WHO) when it was created in 1946. This international ostracism meant that Spain did not benefit from those organizations’ funds and expertise at a time when starvation and disease killed some 200,000 Spaniards. To the regime’s mortification, in the post-war period the most influential Spanish doctor in the WHO was an exiled Republican, Marcelino Pascua. To counter its bad image, the dictatorship reminded WHO members that during the World War it has collaborated with what was left of the international health organizations, a unique case among the pro-Axis regimes; but, as Brydan argues (pp. 65–6), this was more likely a result of bureaucratic inertia and self-interest than of true commitment to the moribund international organizations.
Spain was finally admitted into the WHO in 1951. In May that year, when the country’s Director General of Health, José Palanca, addressed the body’s assembly in Geneva, he told the audience of Spain’s commitment to ‘humanitarianism’ (p. 57). This speech is another example of the service that Spain’s experts were rendering to the regime. Palanca and many of his colleagues presented themselves as moderates who shared the West’s liberal values and who were trying to make the regime look just like any other in the European political system. That worked well for the foreign specialists and governments who wanted to believe it. In reality, humanitarianism during Francoism was an empty but useful word as the dictatorship kept denying Spaniards their basic human rights.
Doctors were not the only group of specialists who helped with the campaign to normalize the regime’s image. Technicians and professionals, including nurses, also created networks, mostly with like-minded Catholic organizations to emphasize the commonality of the Franco regime with other Western Christian nations. Cáritas, the Catholic charity, enabled representatives of the regime to have an international presence equal to that of members from democratic countries. In the post-war period, Spanish Cáritas helped bring some 20,000 children from war-ravaged Austria and Germany to holiday in Spain, giving the false impression that the country had means to spare (children were starving in Spain) and that the regime was humane. In the context of the Cold War, communist misdeeds were also very useful. When Eastern Europeans fled their countries’ oppressive regimes, Franco’s Spain made very public gestures of support. In 1956, for example, Cáritas and the government launched a campaign to help Hungarians fleeing the Soviet invasion of their country. Three years later, a similar campaign was directed to assist Cubans fleeing the revolution. However, as Brydan states, ‘there was not a single large-scale campaign to support refugees who were not perceived as victims of communism’ (p. 165).
Brydan has written a notable but too short book. This story has many more important angles (such as the Francoist travails to join the International Labour Organization) that have been left out. Let’s hope that he will expand it in future works.