Stalin полностью

The Spanish putschists, however, themselves had appealed to Hitler and Mussolini. Franco, bereft of an air force, was cut off from the mainland, but his appeal to the German government failed. He had recourse to a second channel: German expatriates in Spanish Morocco. A nondescript German sales director at a trading firm (kitchen equipment) who was a member of the Nazi Party Abroad wanted to demonstrate his own importance and that of the fledgling organization, and he flew Franco’s emissaries to Berlin, using Nazi party channels to reach Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess on holiday at his country estate. On July 25, Hess, one of the few people to address Hitler with the familiar du, received the emissaries and phoned Hitler, who was at the summer Wagner Festival. Hess dispatched the Spaniards and Morocco-based Nazis by car to Bayreuth, and, following the conclusion of Siegfried, the group hand-delivered Franco’s request for military aid at the Wagner family residence. Hitler had shown no interest in supporting the coup before the generals had acted, and now seemed unsure—his own rearmament had a ways to go—but he launched a monologue and worked himself into a lather. (“If Spain really goes Communist, France in her present situation will also be Bolshevized in due course, and then Germany is finished.”) That very day, support for Franco against the “international Jewish revolutionary headquarters in Moscow” was assured.²⁹ Hitler consulted only the minions in his company and made the decision against their objections.³⁰ “We’re taking part a bit in Spain,” Goebbels noted in his diary. “Not clear. Who knows what it’s good for.”³¹

Hitler appears to have been in a fine mood that evening: the aid to Spain would be dubbed Operation Magic Fire. (“Magic fire” music accompanies Siegfried’s passage through the flames to liberate Brünnhilde.) The Führer even sent twice as many Junkers Ju 52 transport planes as Franco requested. Franco would have eventually gotten his troops over the Spanish Republic’s naval blockade to the mainland, but Nazi assistance accelerated that movement, struck at the Republic’s morale, and buttressed Franco’s standing vis-à-vis Mola. Franco had also approached Italy for support, on July 22, 1936, and the new Italian foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law), was gung-ho. The duce had mocked the Spanish Republic as “not a revolution but a plagiarism,” and had been paying a small retainer to a leader of Spain’s fascist equivalents while vaguely promising support to any would-be putschists.³² Now, emboldened by reports of British acquiescence and French paralysis, he decided to provide substantial military assistance, without consulting his own military men. In parallel to his expansionism in Abyssinia, the duce dreamed of a still larger Italian Mediterranean empire at French expense, via a friendly government in Spain. He also derided Léon Blum as “one Jew who did not enjoy the gift of prophecy.”³³ Spain would push Italy still closer to Germany.

Spain would also push France and the Soviet Union further apart. The French brass feared that any military support for the Spanish Popular Front could ignite a pan-European war, which, overestimating the German military, they felt France was in no position to fight successfully.³⁴ More broadly, French ruling circles viewed reliance on the Soviets to stand up to Nazi Germany as a provocation toward Berlin and an invitation to ideological contagion. “If defeated,” the French foreign minister would note privately, France “would be Nazified. If victorious, it must, owing to the destruction of German power, submit, with the rest of Europe, to the overwhelming weight of the Slavic world, armed with the Communist flamethrower.”³⁵

FABRICATING A “UNITED” CENTER