Stone, G. (2009) Italo-German collaboration and the Spanish Civil ...

The German Embassy in Rome was fully aware of Italy‟s serious concern at the
increased communist threat created by the civil war in Spain. The German Foreign
Ministry was informed on 14 August 1936 that:
the situation is considered so serious here because victory for the Spanish [Republican] Government is
regarded as the equivalent of a victory for Communism. Such a development is abhorred in Italy for
ideological reasons...it is feared that Bolshevism, once it had taken hold in Spain, might also spread beyond
her frontiers. 11
With the recent election victory of the French Popular Front movement in mind,
Mussolini was certainly worried that a victory for the Left in Spain might encourage
revolutionaries in France and western Europe, including Italy. As he told his wife,
Rachele: „Bolshevism in Spain would mean Bolshevism in France, Bolshevism at Italy‟s
back and the danger of [the] Bolshevisation of Europe‟. 12 The Duce and Ciano continued
throughout the civil war to regard their intervention in Spain as safeguarding fascism in
Italy. As the Foreign Minister later reflected in October 1937: „At Málaga, at
Guadalajara, at Santander, we were fighting in defence of our civilisation and
Revolution‟. 13
For his part, Hitler was no less committed to fighting the anti-communist cause in
Spain and no less fearful of the potential spreading of the Communist contagion should
Franco lose in Spain. He told the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, after the
Munich Conference on 30 September 1938, that he had supported Franco only because of
his abhorrence of communism and insisted that if he, Hitler, had failed to stop
communism in Spain it could have spread to France, Holland and Belgium. 14 Referring to
his decision to intervene, later still, in February 1942, Hitler explained that „if there had
not been the danger of the Red peril‟s overwhelming Europe‟, he would not have
„intervened in the revolution in Spain‟. 15 His memory was not at fault. According to the
Permanent Under-Secretary at the British Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, who was
visiting Berlin in a semi-official capacity in August 1936 on the occasion of the Olympic
Games, Nazi ruling circles were obsessed with events in Spain and the threat of
Bolshevism. 16 Weeks earlier, on the same day that he took the decision to intervene in
Spain, 26 July 1936, Hitler told Joachim von Ribbentrop before he departed for London
as Ambassador that a victory for communism in Spain would in short time result in the
11
Baron Johan von Plessen, German Chargé d‟Affaires at Rome, to the German Foreign Ministry, 14
August 1936. DGFP, series D, vol. III, no. 40, p. 39.
12
Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 3rd edition, London: Penguin, 1977, p. 353.
13
M. Muggeridge (ed.), Ciano’s Hidden Diary, 1937-1938, New York: Dutton, 1953, diary entry 29
October 1937, p. 26.
14
Robert Whealey, Hitler and Spain: The Nazi Role in the Spanish Civil War, Lexington KY; University of
Kentucky Press, 1989, p. 29.
15 Hugh Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talk: His Private Conversations, 3rd edition, London: Phoenix Press,
2000, p. 320.
16 „A Busman‟s Holiday: Memorandum by Sir Robert Vansittart‟, 10 September 1936. Documents on
British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939, 2nd series, vol. XVII, app. I, p. 760. See also, Glyn Stone, „Sir Robert
Vansittart and Spain, 1931-1941‟ in T.G. Otte and Constantine Pagedas (eds.), Personalities, War and
Diplomacy: Essays in International History, London: Frank Cass, 1997, pp. 133-4.
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