By 1936, the political ideology of right-wing populist governments and their concomitant “strong man” leaders had rooted in many parts of Europe. Antisemitism spread like a virus as political leaders gained popularity by arousing the masses against the mythical “Judeo-Bolshevik” enemy within. Jewish life had been obliterated in Germany. A Jew’s status was reduced to that of a sub-human.
In accord with Poland’s fascist government, its parliament, the Sejm, passed antisemitic laws daily, much of it tracking Germany’s Nuremburg laws and Nazi-style fascism and racism. The boycotting of Jewish businesses was actively encouraged. Polish thugs brandishing razor-tipped sticks attacked Jewish mothers rolling prams in city parks as Polish police looked on. Random killing of Jews occurred daily. Deadly pogroms against Jews in Polish towns and cities were common. Some Polish politicians advocated for the forced mass emigration of at least one million Polish Jews to Madagascar as a solution to Poland’s “Jewish Problem”.
In England, Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascists promoted anti-communism, protectionism, and the liberation of Great Britain from foreigners “be they Hebrew or any other form of alien”. They marched through Jewish neighborhoods, beating and terrifying people. The British government chose that moment to clamp down on Jewish immigration to Mandated Palestine, breaching the promises of the Balfour Declaration that pledged English support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
The blue-shirted, pro-Nazi, fascist party Solidarité Française, formed by the famous, not so sweet-smelling perfume manufacturer, François Coty, was dissolved by the French government in June 1936. Its members promptly turned to Parti Populaire Français, France’s most collaborationist, fascist, and antisemitic political party.
Russia was proclaiming “equality for all”, as it murdered anyone who opposed, had ever opposed, or was thinking of opposing, Stalin.
Fascism was making headway in the “Golden Land” of America. The State Department had closed its doors to Eastern Europeans and Italians in 1924—few Jews were allowed into the country. Fritz Kuhn, the German American Bund leader, dressed himself in Nazi regalia and aspired to become the American Fuhrer. Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest from Detroit, spewed antisemitic vitriol on the radio as his broadcast grew more popular each week. The Silver Shirts in Asheville, North Carolina, called for the expulsion of Jews and non-whites, attempting to emulate Hitler’s and Mussolini’s respective ideologies of racism and fascism.
On February 16, 1936, however, in stark contrast to these authoritarian and Fascist political movements, Spain elected the most democratic government in Europe, albeit by a resounding margin of one percent. Spain had become a republic in 1931, and, as in the United States, ultimate power was vested in the Spanish people and their elected representatives and many of the government’s supporters referred to themselves as “Republicans”. But, unlike the American political party of the same name, they were neither right-wing nor conservative. Its members came from various left-leaning political parties that had joined in the “Popular Front”, a political concept created and fostered by the Comintern, an international communist organization, outwardly independent of Russia, but controlled by the Soviet Union, in fact, Its overt purpose was to prevent the further spread of fascism. Its covert purpose was to promote the spread of communism.
Spain’s “Popular Front” was composed of socialists, anarchists, pro and anti-Stalin communists (although not that many at first), and other left-wing parties. It also included poor and illiterate workers and peasants, who were kept in that condition by the Church and Spain’s upper classes and aristocrats.
The Spanish army (most of the Navy remained loyal to the Republic), the clergy and their Catholic followers (except for the Basques who supported the Republic), the monarchists (Spain’s last king, Alfonso XIII had gone into self-exile in 1931, his supporters hoped he would return to the throne), and the gentry wanted a return to the status quo that existed prior to Spain’s 1936 election; they wanted strict control over the Spanish masses. They referred to themselves as “Nationalists”; the Republicans referred to them as “fascists” and “insurrectionists”.
Although the general election vote was split almost evenly between the liberal Republicans and the conservative Nationalists, the new Republican government took its victory as a mandate, and immediately began dismantling Spain’s ancient feudal system and a simmering political situation came to a rapid boil.
In their zeal to correct centuries of worker and peasant exploitation, the Republicans (in an intensely Catholic Spain), stripped the Church of its power, forcing it to relinquish control over education and civil liberties. These actions alienated the Catholic faithful who might have otherwise allied with the Republican cause. The new Republican government permitted civil divorce, granted women civil rights almost equal to that of men, and dissolved the Jesuit Order. It distributed Church-owned land to peasants who had worked it as tenants for centuries.
The Spanish Catholic Church and the Vatican responded by instructing Roman Catholics throughout the world to reject the new Spanish government, and mostly, they did. This instruction was not, however, heeded by Spanish peasants and workers who had suffered too long under the Church’s yoke.
The Spanish military, accustomed to pomp and power, faced humiliation and restrictions. The Republican government forced the Army’s most senior officers to retire or transferred them to distant colonies. It decimated the number of military officers and closed many military schools.
Many of the right-wing considered the rising aspirations of the Spanish masses a direct threat to their entrenched power as the wealthy bourgeoisie, estate owners, military, clergy, and monarchists soon lost land, wealth, and privilege. But many of them had learned the lessons of the Russian revolution and removed the bulk of their portable wealth from Spain before it was nationalized. The economy toppled.
Reactionary generals began plotting their coup immediately after the 1936 election, calling it “stolen”. Five months later, on July 19, 1936, the military revolted and announced it was taking control. The right-wing autocrats, the Nationalists, anticipated a quick victory, as they were far more united than the left-wing liberals. They expected the newly elected Republican government to hang its head and limp away, as previous administrations had done under similar circumstances.
Not so this time. The Spanish masses, with no weapons, no training, and no military, took up arms. They stormed the armories, grabbed weapons, and defended their cities and elected government. What was expected to be a quick, bloodless coup turned into a brutal, three-year civil war. When it was finally over, a half million Spaniards were dead and a legitimate, democratically elected government had been overthrown.
Worse, the world’s democracies taught the fascists a crucial lesson—they could do as they pleased: violate treaties or bomb unarmed cities, there would be no consequences.
Spain’s Popular Front could not agree on a unified strategy to defeat the Nationalists. It was not prepared to counter the right-wing attack. The anarchists and the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), believed revolution was the best response. They wanted to fight simultaneously against the fascists and for the Revolution. In contrast, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), the Partido Comunista de España (PCE), and other parties loyal to the Republican government, wanted all left-wing parties to unite behind the Popular Front and win the war against fascism first, and then fight for the Revolution. This schism caused many internecine battles, often ending in death and in the significant weakening of the government.
Further complicating the situation was the workers’ social revolution that began within days of the right-wing insurrection. The result was widespread implementation of anarchist and libertarian ideas. This Revolution continued for several years, primarily in Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia, and parts of Valencia, where workers collectivized and managed businesses and agriculture, usually against the true owners’ wishes, thus creating additional chaos for the Republican government. The poor and disenfranchised believed their government wasn’t doing enough for them; the conservative wing of the Republican party believed it was doing too much.
As members of the League of Nations, the democracies were required to come to Spain’s assistance when the fascists attacked Spain. They chose to ignore their obligations. The rationale was simple and cold-blooded. There was no interest in defending a leftist government, even one that was democratically elected. They hoped the communists and fascists fighting in Spain to exhaust each other, thus reducing the threat to them. According to Leon Blum, the socialist French prime minister, the British approach to the Spanish situation was “… we hate fascism, but we hate Bolshevism just as much. If there is a country where fascists and Bolshevists are killing each other, so much the better for humanity…”
France might have helped Spain, being the only other country with a democratically elected Popular Front government. But England threatened France that if she did so, England would not help if Germany attacked her. Unwilling to put herself at risk (and thus prevented from providing aid to Spain), France proposed all nations enter a Non-Intervention Pact whereby Spain would deal with its own problems. There would be no outside interference from any third party. France believed such a Pact would work to the Republic’s advantage because the Republic was winning the war at that time.
The international community agreed to the Pact. No one was interested in engaging in another world war so soon after the first one. In the United States, Father Charles Coughlin, a popular Roman Catholic right-wing priest from Michigan previously mentioned, and Joseph P. Kennedy, a powerful Roman Catholic politician from Massachusetts and the father John F. Kennedy, the future American president, threatened President Franklin Roosevelt with losing the “Catholic vote” if he supported Republican Spain. Concerned with losing the election, Roosevelt entered the Pact and refused to help Spain. (On January 27, 1939, when it was far too late for the democratically elected Spanish Republic, Roosevelt acknowledged to his cabinet that the arms embargo of Spain had been “a grave mistake”.)
Ultimately, France, England, the United States, the Soviet Union and 40 smaller countries, including Mexico, signed the Pact, as did Germany, and Italy. Germany and Italy violated the Pact’s terms within weeks of signing it, sending weapons, matériel, planes, and men to the Nationalists at General Franco’s request. The democracies either did nothing or actively prevented aid from reaching the Republic. Although officially declining to help Spain, France occasionally looked the other way when the Republic smuggled arms into Spain over the Pyrenees mountains.
The Soviet Union, however, presented proof of German and Italian duplicity to the world’s democracies, requesting they help Republican Spain defend against General Franco and his supporters. The democracies refused. Germany and Italy were allowed to patrol Spain’s waters to ensure no foreign aid reached the Republic, while they themselves blatantly breached the Pact and provided aid to Franco’s forces. Ultimately, only the Soviet Union and Mexico supported Spain’s Republican government. Mexico provided the Republican government with two million dollars in aid and materiél, including small arms and aircraft. It also permitted its citizens to fight for the Spanish Republic if they so chose, without consequences. Soviet aid, however, was not cheap. As surety, Stalin demanded, and got, the entire Spanish treasury—six hundred million dollars in gold–the world’s largest treasury at that time.
Many historians believe that, if the democracies had prevented Germany and Italy from providing aid to Franco. Franco’s insurrection would have collapsed within months, if not weeks. Others, more importantly, believed that if a Nazi-supported insurrection had ended in defeat, the generals who opposed Hitler could have removed him from office and prevented World War II. Unfortunately, the democracies permitted Germany and Italy to violate the Pact and continue supplying the Spanish fascists.
The Pact also prohibited foreigners from coming to Spain’s assistance. However, between thirty-five thousand to forty-thousand people from fifty-three countries streamed into Spain to help save the Republic. They would become known as the International Brigades. Between one fourth to one third of these men were Jews who presciently viewed fascism as an existential threat to themselves and their loved ones. They fought in Spain to defeat Hitler.
Who were these Jewish volunteers? Many were communists or socialists. Some were Zionists. Others had no allegiance to any ideological movement. But all were anti-fascist. They knew that coming to Spain violated the Non-Intervention Pact and could subject them to loss of citizenship, rendering them stateless. They came anyway. Upon their arrival, they were assigned to different international brigades, usually according to nationality. They served as shock troops for the Spanish Army. A third of these International Brigade volunteers would ultimately lose their lives on Spanish battlefields.
***
Then, as now, politics was both complicated and cynical.
The Soviet Union continued to support the Republic until Germany, England, France, and Italy signed the Munich Agreement on September 30, 1938, gifting Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Germany. The powers did not invite Czechoslovakia to attend the meeting where she was dismembered.
Stalin had been trying to negotiate treaties with England and France for several years. He wanted their promise to defend Russia if Germany attacked. After the Munich sell-out, Stalin realized that if the democracies refused to help Spain and Czechoslovakia, they would never protect the Soviet Union, regardless of promises made.
Stalin soon made overtures to Germany, attempting to prevent, or at least delay, an attack. In a show of good faith to Hitler, Stalin withdrew Soviet aid from Spain, thus making the Republican defeat inevitable. The Republican government could not defeat Franco, who, despite the Non-Intervention Pact, continued to receive reinforcements of arms, men, and planes from Germany and Italy, and Texaco oil from America.
On April 1, 1939, the Spanish Civil War ended in defeat for the Spanish Republic. On August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany, two bitter enemies, signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Treaty. On September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland from the west. On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Poland from the east. On September 27, 1939, Poland surrendered.
Many historians consider Germany’s attack on Poland the official start of World War II. Others argue that the Second World War truly began when Spanish generals mutinied against their government and the world’s democracies did nothing.
***
In the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, the Spanish Civil War became a footnote to history. But while it was being waged, between 1936 through 1939, this war was of major consequence. It contained the seed of historic lessons for our time. Context is critical to apply the lessons of the Spanish Civil War’s to today’s world events and why that war was of such importance to so many people, especially Jews.
Journey was initially meant to be a translation of a series of Yiddish articles about a war that occurred 85 years ago. But when I began writing these words, in October 2022, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, had launched an unprovoked attack on Ukraine, bombing hospitals. nurseries, and maternity wards.
Thousands of Ukrainian civilians who had been going about their lives just a few months earlier were dead. Millions wandered Europe as refugees. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children will be forever traumatized and Putin is, two years later, threatening even greater carnage.
A straight line leads from the world’s failure to stop Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, interference on behalf of Syria’s homicidal leader against helpless civilians in 2015, to his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Why would Putin think there would be consequences when there had been none before? Putin’s actions echo that of Hitler when he invaded Czechoslovakia, and the democracies cowered in their futile hope for peace. NATO now fears getting involved in the active fight for Ukraine, much as the democracies feared getting involved in the active fight for Spain in 1936. The question NATO fears most is whether Putin will use nuclear weapons if confronted, but NATO’s refusal to challenge Putin only serves to empower him, just as the democratic countries’ fear of getting involved in the 1936 Spanish war empowered Hitler and Mussolini.
Putin, a former KGB thug and president of a kleptocratic Russia, has had political opponents and critical journalists murdered, yet some American politicians heralded him as a “savvy genius”, and others talked of their “great respect” for him. Certain American journalists aided and abetted his lies, spreading Putin’s disinformation throughout our own country.
And so, instead of a translation of a war that happened almost a century ago, Journey now acts as a warning. All that was necessary to prevent shedding blameless Ukrainian blood was for our world leaders to read a history book, preferably one about the Spanish Civil War. The similarities between the Spanish Civil War and the current Russo-Ukraine war are striking. Putin is trying to upend a legitimate election expressing the people’s will, as did Franco. He is seeking military and financial help from foreign autocracies, as Franco sought help from Hitler and Mussolini. He is depending on Syrian, North Korean, and Chechen mercenaries to fight his battles, just as Franco brought Moroccan mercenaries and Nazi and Italian fascists into Spain to fight his war.
President Zelenskyy, however, is begging the world’s democracies for more weapons and planes so that the Ukrainians may fight the invader, as did Spain. President Biden and other world leaders could easily crush Putin’s offensive if it cared to do so. Instead, the world’s democracies are choosing to strangle Putin economically, using a strategy similar to President Reagan’s during the 1980s. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians die as they fight a war against fascism for us. Instead of merely talking about the amount of aid sent to Ukraine, that aid must in fact be sent, not slow-walked, out of fear of Putin’s nuclear threats.
Like Putin today, Spains’s ultra-right Falangists believed in authoritarian rule, hierarchy, and the old order. Like fascism, Falangism was anti-communist, anti-democratic and anti-liberal. The Falangists supported Spanish unity, the elimination of regional separatism, the establishment of a dictatorship led by them, the use of violence to regenerate Spain, and the promotion, revival, and development of the Spanish Empire.
The similarities between the Falangists and Putin are frightening.
Putin believes in authoritarian rule, hierarchy, and the old order. Like Falangism, Putin is anti-communist, anti-democratic and anti-liberal. He supports Russian unity and wants to destroy the break-away Soviet era satellite countries, wanting to re-incorporate them into a new Russian whole. He does not hesitate to use violence, or even the threat of nuclear destruction to promote, revive, and resurrect, the former Russian Empire.
The situation in Ukraine is unlike that of 1940s Europe. When the concentration camps were liberated and the remnant of surviving European Jewry was freed, the world said, “We didn’t know”. And although most world leaders knew but chose to rationalize their failure to help the Jews, that excuse is no longer available. The pictures of destroyed cities and murdered people and children come into our homes, day and night.
Ukraine’s neighbors opened their borders to the fleeing Ukrainians, but how long will that solicitousness last? Most of those countries are financially unable to support millions of fleeing Ukrainians, so this wave of welcome has already started to recede.Despite the large number of Ukrainians who fled, it is impossible for all of Ukraine’s 42 million people to leave.
Still, as Hemingway said when he wrote of the Spanish Civil War: “He [Hipolito, a character in Hemingway’s The Chauffeurs of Madrid], made you realize why Franco…never took Madrid when he had the chance. Hipolito and the others like him would have fought from street to street and house to house as long as any one of them was left alive, and the last ones left would have burned the town. They are tough and they are efficient.”
The same thing may now be said of Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine, hopefully with a happier outcome. Sometimes the past remains in the past, but sometimes it becomes prologue.
The only choice for NATO and the other democracies is to either surrender to Putin or to confront him. Now. There is no other choice.