When the Nazis had been desirous about if Franco was Jewish | Culture | EUROtoday

National Socialist Germany felt curious in regards to the origins and character of Francisco Franco, the overall who led the coup aspect within the civil battle in Spain and to which Berlin already supplied a useful navy help. It was the top of 1936. So, when a Bolivian diplomat admirer from Adolf Hitler contacted the German authorities to level out that his Spanish ally can be “Jew”, the anti -Semitic regime that may perpetrate the holocaust took word with curiosity.

“For the sake of importance, the previous report is processed without it being possible to verify its accuracy,” reads a doc sealed in workplace II 112, liable for investigating and chasing Jews within the so -called SD, the Reichsführer safety service of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. The doc, dated December 16, 1936, provides: “We will try to make more inquiries in this direction.”

It just isn’t identified if Himmler or the pinnacle of the SD, Reinhard Heydrich, gave continuity to the sign of the Bolivian diplomat, which was known as Federico Nielsen-Reyes and had been the translator of the primary version in Spanish of Hitler’s e-book, My struggle (My struggle). But the doc, discovered within the Federal Archive of Berlin by historian Marc Navarro (Barcelona, ​​35 years) displays the obsession of the Nazi regime and its supporters for the racial concern. And it highlights the contradictions through which they might place them, of their worldwide relations, anti -Semitic fanaticism.

In 1936, Hitler’s Germany already utilized racial legal guidelines in opposition to Jews. There had been two years for the pogrom of November 1938 and a few extra in order that the decision was absolutely launched Final resolution and the systematic homicide of six million European Jews. At the identical time, as historian Julián Casanova explains within the biography Franco (Criticism, 2025), the Nazis had chosen Franco, since just a few days after the coup on July 18 in opposition to the Second Republic, as their privileged interlocutor among the many common generals in Spain.

“The third Reich authorities that negotiated with Franco the loan of war material pressed him since the end of August to take the reins,” writes Casanova. It quickly occurred. In the autumn of 1936 he was appointed Head of Government of the Spanish State and Germany acknowledged the coup plotters as a professional authorities of Spain. Berlin had already delivered battle airplanes, weapons and ammunition that may serve for the primary assault to Madrid, and despatched Spain to the fight group often known as the Condor Legion.

If it had been true what Nielsen-Reyes identified, that Franco was Jewish, how may Hitler have to carry the sturdy alliance with him? The Bolivian was a diplomat who held costs in Olympism, was involved with battle criminals in Latin America and, in its most picturesque look, it appears like a personality in Roberto Bolaño’s e-book Nazi literature in America. SEguramente knew that, in that decisive yr within the historical past of Spain and Europe, it performed a delicate level.

“Subject: General Franco. Spain,” says the heading of the Office II 112. And follows: “According to information available here, Mr. Nielsen-Reyes, of the Bolivian mission in Berlin, argues that the head of the Spanish National Government, General Franco, would be Jewish.” He provides {that a} information of a Swiss Catholic newspaper “makes the same statement”, based on which “Franco would be a descendant of the Marranos”, the title obtained by the Jews converts suspected of secretly practising Judaism. The doc, signed with an preliminary by one “C.”, concludes with the aim of “making more inquiries in this direction.”

When Marc Navarro found the position within the Federal Archive of Berlin, a kind of lived Moments Eureka that are unstable for any historian accustomed to coping with arid bureaucratic paperwork in tedious periods between folders and microfilmes. It occurred in mid -2023 whereas investigating the doctoral thesis that defended final December on the University of Barcelona, ​​entitled The Embassy of Spain in Berlin, 1931-1945. “I don’t know if it’s really unpublished or not, I can’t put my hand in the fire either,” he says, “but it is the first time I have seen or heard about it.” He introduced the discovering throughout a convention on the similar embassy, ​​on May 15, about Spanish diplomats and shoah.

“When I found it it was a small joy, because they are things that one has read in other authors, things about which it was speculated, whether or not Franco had Jewish roots, as it has also been speculated for many years about whether or not it was a mason,” he explains. “This document absolutely proves anything, but it served me to show that, beyond the rumor, more than one took it seriously, to the point of, in quotes, inform or disturb the SS with the subject.”

According to Marc Navarro’s evaluation, what may occur was the next: “Although I cannot confirm it, I am sure that [Nielsen-Reyes] He wrote or warned all possible people, especially knowing the bicephaly of the German State between government institutions and the Nazi party. In any case, I am sure that both the party and the Nazis government received this information, in one way or another. ”

The position discovered by Navarro paperwork a chance that specialists had contemplated and quoted of their works. In The Holocaust and Franco’s Spain (Turner, 2022), Enrique Moradiellos writes: “Already during World War itself, that rumor on the Hebrew ancestry of Franco’s family circulated through the European diplomatic areas and came to disturb Hitler himself at some point.” Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida, in Anti -Semitism in Spain (Marcial Pons, 2002), defined that, based on the journalist and historian Ramón Garriga, “it seems that Heydrich ordered an investigation on the subject although he did not work any.”

Federico Nielsen-Reyes, the person who transmitted to the Nazis that Franco may very well be Jewish, was not any diplomat, however somebody near the regime in Germany, his father’s nation. He was born in La Paz in 1904. He would die in Madrid in 1987. The first Spanish version of Mein Kampfprinted within the POLITICAL STUDIES MAGAZINE In 2019.

Cap establishes that Nielsen-Reyes is the writer of the non-signed translation of My struggle To Spanish, printed in 1935 in Barcelona by the Araluce Editorial House and, two years later, in Ávila for the editorial of the National Workers Socialist Party, the Nazi celebration. There had been variations of fragments of Hitler’s work, however that is the primary licensed and printed as a e-book, though in an abbreviated model. On the web site of the Belgian public sale home Arenberg, there’s an authentic specimen of the e-book with a dedication to the Bolivian industrialist and emissary in Paris Simon Iturri Patiño, dated August 1936. “How much is missing in our homeland think, feel and work as the great driver of this town Adolfo Hitler has done in Germany,” he writes. Signs as “F. Nielsen-Reyes, book translator.”

That Nielsen-Reyes was a satisfied Nazi is accredited by a memorandum obtained by the president of the USA Franklin Roosevelt in 1942, and who additionally quotes cap, through which he’s described as “a great Nazi propagandist in South America.” Another writer, the German Dieter Maier, signifies, in a textual content printed in 2024, that Nielsen Reyes crossed in some unspecified time in the future, absolutely within the late fifties or early sixties, with the Nazi felony Walther Rauff.

Rauff is without doubt one of the protagonists of the final e-book of the jurist and author Philippe Sands, London Street 38. Two circumstances of impunity: Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia (Anagrama, 2025). After World War II, he fled to Latin America and labored for a time for the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the intelligence companies of Western Germany. Although he was put in in Patagonia, his contacts reached Bolivia. Maier quotes a message to the BND through which Rauff writes, referring to Nielsen-Reyes and in phrases that appear praiseful, as if he gave a seal of credibility: “He has translated My fight In Spanish. Still today is a follower of Hitler. ”

During his investigation within the Federal Archive, Navarro discovered one other doc of the identical time as Nielsen-Reyes on Franco’s supposed Jewish origin. It is a letter dated November 29, 1936 and addressed to the “HEAD ESTIMATED Mr. Reichsführer de las SS”. The Erich Baumeister agency, collaborator of Lorenz Mensch, a trusted man of Himmler, for whom he ready horoscopes of individuals of curiosity.

The letter, from which the journalist Udo Röbel had already echoed just a few years in the past, is hardly readable, however he deduces from her that informs Himmler that an “astrological study” on Franco is being ready. The followers of some Nazis, together with Himmler, is thought for the occult. “My observations are intended to be a totally objective and non -partisan statement on the subject of Spain,” guarantees the astrologer.

“With the astrological study,” Marc Navarro observes, “it is already seen that [el de Nielsen-Reyes] It is not the only document interested in Franco’s figure, with his origins or with his most immediate future in the context of war. ”Nor is it known, in this case, what did the Nazis do with the horoscope, or what would they have served them. About the complaint From Nielsen-Reyes, Navarro says: “I can not exhibit or affirm that it continued to be processed.” But he adds: “I do not suppose they’d get to any figuring out conclusion, as a result of I do not suppose it was potential.” In addition, the economic and military benefit that Germany brought from its relationship the Francoist side was such that “arriving at this level it already gave the identical.”

It was what was what Nazi Germany discovered after the letters of the late 1936, Hitler’s support did not stop. Military aid continued and the Condor Legion bombed Gernika in April 1937. In May 1939, celebrating victory in the war, Franco called to be alert against “the Jewish spirit that allowed the alliance of the great capital with Marxism,” as Julián Casanova recalls in his biography. The dictator would align with Hitler in World War II, although Spain would not go into combat. The biographer recalls that “the primary Nazi hierarchs didn’t positively worth Spanish belligerence, as a result of they thought-about it an financial and navy burden.”

This was the context of the Hitler-Franco summit on October 23, 1940 in Hendaya, which Casanova describes: “Hitler didn’t go to Hendaya to ask Spain to enter the battle and Franco made a protracted evaluation of the Spanish claims in Morocco, the unhealthy materials situations through which the nation was and the checklist of provides he wanted for his navy intervention.” What, finished the interview, Franco told its Foreign Minister Ramón Serrano Suñer, referring to the Germans: “These persons are insupportable. They need us to enter the battle in trade for nothing.” Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the German Secret Service, considered that Franco was not “a hero however a small Mequetrefe.” In spite of everything, as Casanova recalls, “Franco did not break relations with the third Reich until May 8 [de 1945]”That is, the day of the capitulation of Germany.

And Nielsen-Reyes? If at any time, as the Office Document II 112 seems to indicate, he housed doubts about Franco, changed his mind. Professor Casquete quotes in his article the prologue of the second edition in Spanish of My fightpublished in Ávila in 1937. The Bolivian diplomat writes that, in Spain, “the Generalissimo Franco holds denoded battle to save lots of his superb individuals from the communist claw.” If there was a case about Franco’s Judaism, he was quickly archived.