GERMAN TROOPS RETURN
EXTENT OF HELP TO FRANCO INDICATED
The Ellesmere Guardian, Friday 28 July 1939
EXTENT OF HELP TO FRANCO INDICATED
The Ellesmere Guardian, Friday 28 July 1939
Adolf Hitler disclosed on June 6 in an address to 18,000 German fighters back from Spain that General Francisco Franco had asked him for help in the first month of the Spanish civil war and “I decided to aid him,” states the Christian Science Monitor.
The number of Germans killed in the Spanish conflict was given for the first time when some 350 members of the Hitler Youth Organisation marched out beside the tribune from which Herr Hitler spoke, bearing a shield with the names of dead wreathed in gold. There were approximately 350 names.
A parade of the veterans before Reichsfuhrer Hitler and his aide, Field Marshal Hermann Goering, was the first concrete indication of the extent of German help to the Spanish Nationalist cause.
The Fuhrer scathingly denounced anti-Franco campaigns in Britain and France, declaring that “for years French and English newspapers disseminated the lie that Germany and Italy intended to conquer Spain and to rob her of her colonies.”
Reviewing the history of the Spanish civil war, he praised General Franco as a “genial marshal who arose to lead his fatherland out of destruction into a greater future.” Herr Hitler began his disclosure of General Franco’s call for help in July, 1936, when the Spanish civil war opened, with the statement that “in the summer of 1936,, Spain seemed to have been lost. . . . The international powers then appeared to be determined to lay Europe in ruins.” Two Classes in Legion The Condor Legion, as the Spanish force is known, was divided into two classes. In one were between 4700 and 5000 men who had just returned to Germany and in the other about 10,000 men who had served and returned previously to the Fatherland. In addition there were about 3000 sailors in the parade. A crowd of about 100,000 filled the tribunes and streets in the vicinity of the reviewing stands as the veterans swung past with flowers in their behfs and wearing overseas caps.
A delegation of 150 Spanish officers accompanied the last force of airmen and technicians to return to Germany. The capital fluttered with flags and the day was a school holiday.
The German public still was learning details of the Legionnaires’ service. The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported that important moves of the war were based on German strategy. The newspaper said a German World War veteran, MajorGeneral Hugo Sperrle, mapped the campaigns against Bilbao and Santander.
