Nazi Stragglers in Spain
MOWRER, RICHARD SCOTT
Appearance of swastikas does not reflect official anti-Semitism, but is a reminder that some notorious Hitler cohorts have found sanctuary under the Franco regime NAZI STRAGGLERS IN SPAIN By...
...As "Poglavnik" (Fuehrer) of the "independent state of Croatia" created by Hitler and Mussolini in 1941, Pavelitch declared war on the Allies...
...Subsequently he was spirited away to Paraguay, and then was lost sight of again...
...It has never experienced the revulsion toward Nazism felt by democratic countries, nor has it ever felt constrained to repudiate its wartime associations...
...have appeared in several different parts of the country, notably on the walls of the American, British and French consulates in the northern city of Bilbao...
...On December 29, 1959, his name appeared in the death list published daily by the Madrid paper, Ya...
...Appearance of swastikas does not reflect official anti-Semitism, but is a reminder that some notorious Hitler cohorts have found sanctuary under the Franco regime NAZI STRAGGLERS IN SPAIN By Richard Scott Mowrer MADRID THE SWASTIKA epidemic that has alarmed opinion in many parts of the world has spread to Spain...
...Admiration of Nazism as an ideology capable of defeating Communism continues to exist, in more or less subdued form, among Franco supporters and within the regime itself...
...He was tried in absentia by a Belgian court and sentenced to death for crimes committed during von Rund-stedt's Battle of the Bulge offensive in the winter of 1944-45...
...Some of the notorious ones, along with an assortment of lesser lights, are still here...
...Founder of the Fascist "Rex" movement, he fought during the war with the rank of colonel in Hitler's SS...
...Members of the Jew-baiting Rumanian Fascist Iron Guard, who sometimes call themselves "Legionnaires of the Archangel Michael," have also found refuge here, and their leader, Horia Sima, lives in Madrid...
...Degrelle evaded capture at the end of the war by a thin margin of 11 miles when the plane in which he escaped crash-landed on the beach at San Sebastian, near the French frontier...
...The Franco regime has no diplomatic ties with Marshal Tito's Yugoslavia, or with any other Communist state...
...Another notorious "wanted" Nazi who found refuge in Spain is the Belgian collaborator, Leon Degrelle...
...One of the worst, Croatian terrorist Ante Pavelitch, showed up in Madrid, dead, less than a week after President Eisenhower's visit here...
...When the Axis collapsed in May 1945, Pavelitch disappeared...
...At the end of World War II "wanted" Nazis, quislings and war criminals who had worked hand-in-glove with Hitler found sanctuary in Spain...
...But if the anti-Semitic inscriptions are taken as a symptom of Nazi resurgence in the politico-ideological sense, then they are not altogether out of place here...
...For a time he lived in discreet obscurity under the name of Juan Sanchez-Dupre, but in 1955 he broke into the news when a Spanish news service listed "the Belgian politician, Leon Degrelle," as being among those present at a meeting of veterans of the Blue Division, the Spanish unit that fought alongside the Germans in the war...
...It only remains to be added that though the Franco regime remains moderately pro-Nazi in its ideological sympathies, it has never been anti-Semitic...
...The Iron Guardists fought on the Franco side in the Spanish Civil War and are esteemed by the regime...
...He is now in the cemetery of San Isidro, gallery four, niche 106...
...The Spanish Government disclaimed any knowledge of Degrelle's presence in Spain...
...He was responsible for the slaughter of half a million Serbs of the Orthodox faith and Jews, including women and children, who were herded into extermination camps at Jasenovac and Stara-Gadicoka...
...It was learned that he had been living in the Monastery of San Francisco el Grande, here in Madrid, and that he had died at the German Hospital, at the age of 70...
...Degrelle's public appearance revived Belgian demands for his extradition and Brussels recalled its ambassador...
...A year later he reappeared briefly in Italy, then in Juan Peron's Argentina...
...A few years ago the Spanish Government might have lamented, through its controlled press, the passing of Ante Pavelitch...
...But the current world-wide eruption of neo-Nazism, while observed with interest, is branded here as a Communist plot designed to disrupt the free world...
...Nazi emblems and scrawls of "Jews get out...
...Otto Skorzeny, the Waffen SS officer who snatched Mussolini from Allied capture in a daring coup which he himself master-minded, resides in Madrid, but he has been cleared by West German courts and is not a refugee...
...It is perhaps noteworthy that nothing of the kind happened now, although in June 1941 Spain established formal diplomatic relations with Pavelitch's "independent Croatia" which it has never severed...
...On April 4, 1957, he was wounded by an unknown assailant...
...Shortly thereafter Degrelle was reported to be living in Tangier, but last March the Moroccan Government denied reports that Degrelle was in the country...
...in Madrid it numbers less than 200...
...Anti-Semitism went out in 1492 when Spain's Jews were forced to choose between conversion to the Catholic faith and exile...
...Taken literally, the anti-semitic slogans are meaningless because there is no anti-Jewish feeling here...
...For Generalissimo Francisco Franco's authoritarian regime was politically associated with Hitler and Mussolini in its early days and was a part-time collaborator with the Third Reich in World War II...
...Most chose exile and today the Jewish population is negligible...
...Members of his secret terrorist organization, the Ustashi (which later became Nazi Croatia's official political party), assassinated King Alexander of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Louis Bar-thou in 1934...
Vol. 43 • February 1960 • No. 5
