<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>The crucial aid provided by Adolf Hitler's Third Reich to the Nationalist side during the Spanish Civil War, and the subsequent logistical support and raw materials (primarily food and tungsten) supplied by dictator Francisco Franco to the German Chancellor during World War II, left a lasting legacy, despite the Caudillo's attempts to conceal his Nazi past from the Allied powers. One example of this is the more than one hundred officers from Nazi Germany who received refuge in Francoist Spain at the end of the international conflict.</strong></h4> According to a 1945 report sent by Franco's government to the Allied secret services, and recovered in 1997 by the newspaper El País from the General Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at least 104 Nazi officers found refuge in Spain. The most significant case is that of Johannes E. F. Bernhardt, Hermann Goering's (Nazi Germany's Minister of Aviation) man in Spain, a former SS general who had played a fundamental role in the arrival of Nazi aid to the rebels of July 18, 1936. Bernhardt was one of those who mediated with Adolf Hitler, at the request of the coup leader General Emilio Mola, to request aid. As a result of those efforts, the German dictator delivered 20 Junkers JU-52 aircraft, which transported war materiel and 15,000 soldiers in the so-called ‘Operation Magic Fire’, ‘Unternehmen Feuerzauber’. These favors to the Franco regime allowed him to be appointed honorary consul of the SS in Spain and president of a company called Sofindus, a murky financial network of 350 German companies based in Spain that served Hitler and was responsible for the clandestine transport of supplies to German troops in western France during World War II, as well as the shipment of tungsten from Galicia to Germany. Bernhardt was also rewarded by the dictator Francisco Franco with Spanish citizenship and a luxurious residence in Denia, the ‘House of the Germans,’ where he lived for years. Another emblematic case is that of the Viennese Otto Skorzeny, an engineer and colonel in the German elite forces (the Waffen-SS) from 1943, who came to be considered “the most dangerous man in Europe.” Skorzeny, also known as "Scarface" because of the spectacular scar on his face (a reminder of a duel during his university days), was Adolf Hitler's chosen man to lead "Operation Oak," the mission to rescue Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who had been removed from power and immediately arrested by order of King Victor Emmanuel III in July 1943. After receiving every possible assistance from the Franco regime, Skorzeny moved to Madrid in 1951, where he established his permanent residence and ran an import-export company. Around this time, suspicions arose that he was using his Spanish business activities as a front to help former Nazi war criminals escape to Argentina. "Spain is my second homeland, and I will end my life here," he declared to ABC in 1970. Otto Skorzeny died of cancer in Madrid in 1975 and was buried in a coffin draped with the colors of the Nazi flag. The long list of criminals protected by the Franco regime also includes such sinister figures as the Austrian Reinhard Spitzy, an SS captain who took refuge in a monastery in Cantabria before fleeing to Argentina under a false name; the Belgian Léon Degrelle, a member of the Waffen-SS, exiled in Spain from 1945 until his death in 1994, whose extradition to Belgium was systematically rejected by the Franco regime; the Nazi consul in the Basque Country, Friedhelm Burbach, known as Rudi the German among the locals of the Burgos village where he sought refuge; and the Austrian Josef Hans Lazar, head of German propaganda in Spain during World War II, who avoided repatriation through falsified medical reports and whom Franco systematically refused to extradite. Also on the list were Gerhard Bremer, an SS soldier who took refuge in Denia in the 1950s thanks to Bernhardt's support and prospered as a hotelier in Benidorm; the Austrian Paul Maria Hafner, an SS volunteer and guard at the Buchenwald or Dachau concentration camps, who lived in Madrid from the 1950s until his death in 2010, a Holocaust denier who always described the Holocaust as "propaganda"; Or, to cite another example, the Dutchman Hauke Bert Pattist Joustra, a member of the Waffen-SS who arrived in Spain by motorcycle in 1956 and who, after a brief detention, and despite extradition requests, was able to live a peaceful second life in Asturias and Cantabria until his death in 2001. Among those on the blacklist (generally quite incomplete) are people who went on to hold positions of responsibility in Spain, such as Hans Juretshke, a former member of the Nazi militia, the Sturmabteilung (SA), and of the National Socialist Teachers' Association (NSLB), who was professor emeritus and head of the German Department at the Complutense University of Madrid. Considered one of the leading experts on 18th- and 19th-century Spain, this German Hispanist died in Madrid in 2004 at the age of 95.
