67. Abendroth, 475, citing a communication to him from Bernhardt. Kube, 165 claims that Hitler’s decision was in support of Göring’s ‘economic concept’. Wolfgang Schieder, ‘Spanischer Bürgerkrieg und Vierjahresplan’, in Wolfgang Michalka (ed.), Nationalsozialistische Außenpolitik, Darmstadt, 1978, 325–59, also emphasizes Göring’s role and the centrality of economic motives. Martens, 66, on the other hand, argues convincingly — along Abendroth’s lines — that Hitler took the decision alone, and that Göring was at first hesitant, indeed shocked at hearing of the decision. Serious economic involvement in Spain only dated from October 1936, when the first substantial military supplies also began. Göring claimed at Nuremberg that he had pressed Hitler, who was still thinking it over, to provide the support, both to combat the spread of Communism and to give him the opportunity to try out the Luftwaffe (IMG, ix.317; and see Kube, 165 n.12). But by the time Göring pressed for action, Hitler was no longer thinking it over; his mind was already made up. Göring’s intentional or unintentional misrepresentation at Nuremberg was presumably aimed, as elswhere in his testimony, at bolstering his self-importance. Alternatively, as Preston suggests (814 n.64), Göring may have conflated two separate meetings with Hitler. Even so, Göring’s claim that he was influential in shaping Hitler’s original decision to intervene stands in contradiction to other evidence on the taking of the decision.
68. Abendroth, 475.
69. Ribbentrop, 59–60.
70. Ribbentrop, 60.
71. Abendroth, 476; Preston, 159–61; see also Schieder, ‘Spanischer Biirgerkrieg’, 342.ÍÍ.; and the careful analysis (concluding that economic considerations were secondary to ideological in the initial decision by Hitler to involve Germany in support for Franco) by Christian Leitz, ‘Nazi Germany’s Intervention in the Spanish Civil War and the Foundation of HISMA/ROWAK’, in Paul Preston and Ann L. Mackenzie (eds.), The Republic Besieged: Civil War in Spain, 1936–1939, Edinburgh, 1996, 53–85.
72. TBJG, I/2, 648 (27 July 1936), dealing as always with the events of the previous day.
73. Martens, 66.
74. TBJG, I/2, 671 (23 September 1936); Höhne, 363. The Republican side in the Civil War also attracted external support, particularly from the Soviet Union and from the International Brigades volunteer forces organized by the Comintern and individual Communist parties, in which some 60,000 men fought the nationalist insurgents. British and French statesmen were concerned at Soviet involvement in Spain, fearing, as Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary put it in September 1937, that as a consequence ‘Communism would get its clutches into Western Europe’. Cit. Denis Smyth, ‘“We Are With You”: Solidarity and Self-interest in Soviet Policy towards Republican Spain, 1936–1939’, in Preston and Mackenzie, 87–105, here 105.
75. This is implied by Kube, 164–5, though the argument, so far as Hitler’s motivation is concerned, seems overstretched.
76. Domarus, 638; TBJG, I/2, 675 (9 September 1936).
77. TBJG, I/2, 743 (2 December 1936).
78. TBJG, I/2, 726 (15 November 1936).
79. Kube, 153–4. Goring informed Hitler verbally of the finalized raw-material plans on 15 August (Petzina, 49).
80. Petzina, 47–8; Richard J. Overy, Goering: the Iron Man, London, 1984, 45–6; Gerhard Ritter, Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung, Stuttgart, 1956, 80–82. For a sketch of Goerdeler, see Hermann Weiß (ed.), Biographisches Lexikon zum Dritten Reich, Frankfurt am Main, 1998, 153–5.
81. In his official biography of Göring, Erich Gritzbach, Hermann Göring. Werk und Mensch, Munich, 1938, 160, remarked that ‘after days of quiet work at the Berghof, on 2 September the Führer gives the Minister President [Göring] detailed directives about the reconstruction of the National Socialist economy which will determine the life of Germany for the present and the future’. Hitler’s memorandum was read out to government ministers at a meeting on 4 September (IMG, xxxvi-489ff., Doc.EC-416).
82. Wilhelm Treue, ‘Hitlers Denkschrift zum Vierjahresplan 1936’, VfZ, 3 (1955), 184–210, here 184; DGFP, C, V, 853 n.1, N0.490.
