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

Even some Falangists began to turn against Serrano Suñer, but others were determined to increase their power. The situation was becoming dangerous, because German agents were encouraging them. Serrano Suñer felt that his best way to advance was to put increased pressure on Franco to enter the war as soon as possible. The Germans in that spring of 1941 had just conquered Yugoslavia and Greece, and captured Crete.

Franco moved in stages with a series of changes at the top level. Serrano Suñer found that not only had he lost the ministry of the interior and control of the Movement, but his conduct of foreign affairs was being questioned in government circles. Then, on 22 June, the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union. Two days later Falangists launched themselves on to the streets in a great demonstration shouting slogans against ‘atheist communism’. Serrano Suñer thought that this was his chance. In uniform, he made a speech from the balcony of the General Secretariat of the Movement which overlooked the Calle de Alcalá: ‘Russia is guilty! Guilty of our civil war!…The extermination of Russia is demanded by history and by the future of Europe!’ The Falangist demonstrators, in a bellicose frenzy, went on to yell at the British Embassy, ‘Gibraltar is Spanish!’

Serrano Suñer thought that he could recover all his power if he managed to channel the onrush of Falangist energy. A move then occurred to him, which seemed to offer a resounding triumph in the eyes of Spaniards and Germans alike. He went to see Franco and spoke to him of the need to form a division of volunteer Falangists to go to Russia alongside the Wehrmacht to fight the ‘apocalyptic beast’. But the senior generals, using Varela as their spokesman, made it clear that they opposed Serrano’s attempt to meddle in military affairs, especially since this also involved the Falange. Franco once again adopted a double-edged solution. He would agree to a Falangist volunteer division, but it should be commanded by one of his generals.

On 13 July the ‘División Española de Voluntarios’, usually known as the ‘División Azul’, or Blue Division, began to leave for the training camp of Grafenwöhr in Germany. Commanded by General Agustín Muñoz Grandes, it became the 250th Infantry Division in the German army and was sent to the Volkhov front near Lake Ilmen, east of Leningrad.¹⁸ A few days after their departure Franco made a speech on the anniversary of the rising in which he linked Spain’s destiny to Nazi victory and said that the Allies had lost. This speech, combined with the despatch of the Blue Division, alarmed the British and they began to prepare Operation Pilgrim, the invasion of the Canary Islands. In the end, Churchill cancelled it, but increased the pressure on Franco’s regime by reducing oil and wheat deliveries, and demanding that exports of wolfram to Germany should cease.

Even after Hitler’s check before Moscow in December 1941, and the entry of the United States into the war, Serrano Suñer became increasingly confident. But on 16 August 1942, just as Hitler’s armies began to advance on Stalingrad and strike into the Caucasus, a curious incident happened in Bilbao. During a religious festival at the shrine of the Virgin of Begona, a confrontation took place between Carlist traditionalists and Falangists. The clash developed from insults and shoving into something more deadly. A Falangist Juan Domíngo threw a hand grenade, which wounded 30 people. General Varela, a traditionalist, took the disturbance as an assassination attempt against himself, and announced that it constituted ‘an attack against the whole army’ and sent telegrams to all the captaincy-generals. Domíngo was accused of being an agent provocateur in the service of the British and was executed. For Franco, this presented the perfect occasion for his policy of divide and rule. On 3 September he accepted Varela’s resignation in protest at the ‘Falangization’ of the regime, but to balance the account he also dismissed Serrano Suñer. He replaced him as foreign minister with General Gómez-Jordana, an anglophile. His brother-in-law’s political career was at an end.