Hitler's Training Ground

"The Radio General continues to utter extravagant nightly threats over the airwaves with unabashed swagger and bluster. Most evenings, he passes judgement on international politics and advises Great Britain and France to follow the example of Italy and Germany. But sometimes his drunken proclamations are so insidious and perverse that his own engineers cut the power to his transmissions, blaming an external outage or short in the wiring.

The hotels are full of German and Italian diplomats, engineers, journalists and press agents. Hitler and Mussolini have sent their best technicians in the field of propaganda to Sevilla. The Fascist emissaries from Berlin and Rome are giving instructions to the Spanish Falangistas on the establishment and organization of syndicates. They are also quick to give strong-armed advice on the technique of the conquest of power; this is something Franco is keen to understand. It is clear that Queipo and Franco still hope to recruit those who had fought so futilely, though tenaciously, when they took Sevilla.

Despite their early and persistent involvement on the Nationalist side of the Spanish Civil War, I know that history will eventually reveal that neither Hitler nor Mussolini was ever fully satisfied with the Spanish Fascist movement. Spain proved an accessible and fitting training ground for German and Italian soldiers before the onset of World War II, but Hitler would later claim that the Spanish Falangistas were too violent, too much inclined to the elimination of their political enemies by torture and death."

Click here, here and here for more on Hitler's involvement in Spain's civil war.