The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

On 1 October 1936 the Welsh cargo ship Bramhill reached Alicante, having come from Hamburg with a consignment of 19,000 rifles, 101 machine-guns and more than 28 million cartridges, all ordered by the CNT in Barcelona for its militia columns. The presence of the Bramhill in Alicante was observed by officers on HMS Woolwich. Her captain immediately informed the Foreign Office, which investigated the matter. The German government made excuses, saying that Hamburg was a free port, yet it was clear that this cargo had arrived with official blessing. The Foreign Office left the matter there. In fact, the architect of this secret sale of arms to the Republic was Hermann Göring. He used as intermediaries the well-known arms trafficker Josef Veltjens, who had already sold arms to General Mola before the rising, but above all Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiades, a piratical Greek on close terms with the country’s dictator, Metaxas. Bodosakis-Athanasiades was the chief shareholder and chief executive of Poudreries et Cartoucheries Helléniques SA, whose main associate and backer was Rheinmetall-Borsig which, in turn, was controlled by Göring personally.

Bodosakis passed the demands for weapons which he received to Rheinmetall-Borsig and the Metaxas government provided end-user certificates stating that the equipment was destined for the Greek army. When the shipment reached Greece, Bodosakis transferred it to another vessel supposedly sailing to Mexico, but in fact to Spain. As Bodosakis was dealing with the nationalists as well as the Republic, he had to split shipments between vessels, with the best and latest weapons destined for the nationalists and the oldest and least serviceable for the republicans.

In 1937 and 1938, when the sale of German weapons to the Republic was reaching its peak, Bodosakis’s company was ordering shipments from Rheinmetall-Borsig worth anything up to 40 million Reichmarks (£3.2 million at the time). These consignments were almost all for the Republic and one can be fairly sure that Bodosakis was charging five or six times what he had paid Göring. It is more than likely that he then had to pay a significant share of his immense profits to Göring personally, rather than to Rheinmetall-Borsig, and this was on top of payments to the Metaxas regime and other officials.⁴

There was even a Soviet angle to this very free market trade between Nazi Germany and republican Spain. In November 1937 Bodosakis travelled to Barcelona in a Soviet aircraft, accompanied by George Rosenberg, son of the purged Soviet ambassador. Rosenberg, who was a shipping agent and wheeler-dealer, and Bodosakis came to sign a contract with the Republic for £2.1 million to supply ammunition. On this occasion, as on all others, they insisted on full payment in hard currency in advance. The supply of German weaponry to the Republic continued until the very end of the war, as the international commission for the repatriation of foreign volunteers established in January 1939.⁵

The nationalists, exasperated by this extraordinary racket, protested on many occasions to the German authorities.⁶ They identified eighteen vessels with such shipments to republican ports between 3 January 1937 and 11 May 1938, but received little explanation. As far as Hermann Göring was concerned, republican hard currency was as good as nationalist.⁷ The decoration of Karinhall, his country house of magnificent vulgarity north of Berlin, was no doubt subsidized by his enormous profits from the Spanish Civil War.

The Republic could not go on paying for their weapons in gold and hard currency.⁸ By early 1938 the current accounts in gold in Paris and Moscow were running low.⁹ In April Negrín started to sell in the United States the silver of the Banco de España. This was bitterly contested by the Burgos government, which had engaged as its lawyer John Foster Dulles (later the US Secretary of State under Eisenhower), but their attempt failed. On 29 April Francisco Méndez Aspe, the minister of finance, signed the decree of authorization.¹⁰ That summer the government introduced regulations to requisition jewels and precious metals, and confiscate property of ‘declared enemies of the Republic’ for resale. All these sales of silver, jewels and other property raised $31 million, yet the Republic was spending $27 million a month, excluding the costs of Soviet arms shipments.¹¹

The only hope lay in approaching the Soviet Union again. In March, the Republic had been granted a credit of $70 million, negotiated by Pascua, the ambassador in Moscow, the previous autumn at 3 per cent interest, with half repaid in gold. This had forced a second despatch of gold to the Soviet Union. Now another credit was requested, this time for $85 million, mostly for purchasing Soviet arms. The Republic had to wait a long time for a reply and by then it would be too late.¹²