Eleven years ago, the publication on the internet of The Factual List Of Nazis Protected By Spain, by Elijah Meyer, became a sort of yellow pages for German war exiles in Spain after the fall of the Third Reich, their accomplices, French, Romanians, and Italians, and their Spanish collaborators. And the yellow pages reference is not just a figure of speech: this comprehensive list included addresses like "Montaner, 155, Barcelona" or "Goya, 63, Madrid." The document also mentions 43 references to Malaga, seven to Alicante, 24 to the Canary Islands, eight to Huelva, seven to Almeria... There were Nazis in Ribadesella and Gijón, in Vigo and Getxo... A lot of coastline.
The Factual List Of Nazis Protected By Spain sparked the rise of the genre of Nazi microhistory in Spanish bookstores. In almost any province, there has been some university research or non-academic history book about German refugees in the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Tarragona, the Costa del Sol...
This subgenre emerged 10 years after the same topic became frequent in fiction literature, following the trail of the Millennium series and The Time in Between. Like in the works of Stieg Larsson and María Dueñas, RAE academic Clara Sánchez fictionalized the story of the Nazi colony in Denia in What Your Name Hides (2011). Subsequently, we have The Doctor's Patients by Almudena Grandes (2017) and The Germans by Sergio del Molino (2023). And the theme is not limited to Spain: this year, London Street 38 by Philippe Sands reconstructed the story of SS Walther Rauff in Chile.
"Of all the popular ideas about Nazis in Spain, there are some that need clarification," says Fernando Castillo, the author of The Last Flight (Renacimiento), a text that narrates the arrival of many of those defeated in '45 to Spain through the Rattenlinien, the rat line that allowed the escape of thousands of Nazis. "The first idea that needs to be debunked is that they came loaded with money, with suitcases full of gold bars and Matisse paintings: there were some cases like that but they were exceptional," Castillo affirms. "In Spanish exile, there were middle-class Nazis, lower-class Nazis, and upper-class Nazis. The Croats, for example, brought a lot of money, which partly explains why they fought to the death among themselves and why there were attacks between factions. But the majority of refugees arrived with a couple of changes of clothes and little else. Many of them became language teachers and lived off their salaries... An example is Abel Bonnard, who was a member of the Académie Française and Minister of Education in the Vichy Government. He was very significant, and yet, in Spain, he lived on a pension, giving private lessons and facing many difficulties."
Castillo explains that, in reality, the Nazis and fellow travelers who were more qualified, the engineers and physicists fleeing from Germany and France, were recruited by Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, and Brazil. The professional bourgeoisie of the fascist exile tended to make a stop in Spain and immediately leave for America, where the sense of protection was greater. On the other hand, their journalist, propagandist, and mid-ranking military colleagues, lacking money and professional capital, more often stayed in Spain. There are well-known exceptions: the Belgian Leon Degrelle (settled in Constantina, Seville), the Austrian Otto Skorzeny (Alcudia, Mallorca), and the Croatian Vjekoslav Luburi (Valencia) were wealthy fugitives with a high profile. But these are relatively isolated cases.
Gustav Winter settled in Fuerteventura, sparking rumors that Germany was going to build a submarine base on the island
Alcudia, Denia, Valencia, Andalusia... Did Nazi exiles prefer to seek refuge on the coasts of Spain? The answer also depends on their social class. According to Castillo, poor Nazis had to make a living in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, and Seville, the cities where they had more opportunities to find work and get ahead. In contrast, those with money and good connections embarked on the journey to the sea because much of the Spanish coastline in the 1940s and 1950s was sparsely populated and remote. "It was a place to disappear and stretch their savings to the maximum, because everything was almost given away. There was always a provincial governor of the Falange who was very impressed to receive a Nazi," says Castillo.
The Madrid government tried to conceal its old friendship with the Axis, its civil governors, often Falangists, were more favorable to former SS and Ustashi members, who were given a Spanish name, the less sonorous, the better, and disappeared from the world. When the Allies demanded Spain to hand them over, the dictatorship replied that they had lost track of those suspects. Sometimes it was true, other times not so much.
The Costa del Sol is the most interesting case. "Max zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg was an Austrian aristocrat who spent the war spying for the Reich," explains José Manuel Portero, author of the book Nazis on the Costa del Sol (Almuzara, 2021). "Was he a Nazi? We know he celebrated the unification of Austria and Germany and served the Reich throughout the war, but he had no blood crimes, and at the end of the war, Admiral Canariis entrusted him with conversations to stage a coup against Hitler agreed with the Allies." He was not, therefore, a hardcore Nazi. "He was the classic gentleman from old diplomatic circles."
His wife was the daughter of the Mexican ambassador to Spain, so the 1945 defeat caught him in Spain with a comfortable economy. For a while, he worked as a Skoda representative, which led him to a town of 10,000 inhabitants called Marbella, whose potential was evident. "Hohenlohe arrived in Marbella in 1946 or 1947 with his son Alfonso. They bought the Santa Margarita Estate and set up the Marbella Club. The Hohenlohes acted as investor entrepreneurs but also as animators. They attracted a lot of international capital to Marbella, including German capital."
Was the capital suspicious of having a Nazi origin? Partly yes and partly no. Heinrich Nordhoff, the denazified director of Opel after the war, was one of the driving forces behind the Costa del Sol. But the sinister Otto Sokerzny was also involved.
"There is another very important character on the Costa del Sol," says Portero. "Hans Hoffmann had been the interpreter for the Blue Division and for Hitler and appeared in CIA records as a dangerous member of the Gestapo. He was part of a German plan to overthrow Francisco Franco and bring Agustín Muñoz Grande to the head of the State. I think he was more of a Nazi than he seemed, but he was also a pragmatic, elegant, discreet, and charming man."
Hoffmann, like other colleagues in defeat, found shelter in the local powers of early Francoism. His friend was José Antonio Girón de Velasco, a former divisionary in the USSR, former Minister of Labor, and businessman in Malaga. "Hoffmann proposed to Girón to set up a poultry farm together in Fuengirola. Along the way, they saw the success of the Hohenlohes in Marbella and changed their plans. They dedicated themselves to real estate promotion. And they were very successful, obviously with the leniency of the City Council, which had a lot of respect for Girón."
Finally, Wiener only built a recreational villa that sparked all kinds of local legends
Nevertheless, Fernando Castillo argues that the beneficiaries of Franco's hospitality tended to be discreet and seek oblivion. It is not true that they associated in secret business networks or mercantile brotherhoods dedicated to helping each other in business and conspiring. "Except for Degrelle, who was a rare case of exhibitionism, all former Nazis wanted to forget and start a new life, as discreetly as possible. There are very few testimonial books about World War II written in Spain."
There is also no data revealing the existence of small post-Nazi empires, although there are many cases of successful German professionals and businessmen. And even in this regard, there are many myths to be cleared up. In 1936, Spain was the country of residence of 30,000 Germans. Its colony was larger than that of the British and was full of wealthy, educated expatriates. Germans in Spain held skilled positions and managed significant industrial investments. Furthermore, they had a strong sense of community through their German schools and small local casinos.
Beginning in 1933, the German diplomatic mission in Spain was Nazi-ified and exerted significant pressure on that community to join the National Socialist Party. This fact was successful, though no one should underestimate it. Therefore, when the Reich was defeated, many of these Germans were deported to their home country. Other Germans, more established but with their wealth temporarily confiscated, remained in Spain. And, after years of neglect, they once again found success in business. Although some of these Spanish-Germans appear in The Factual List of Nazis Protected by Spain, their case does not fit the myth of the Nazi who arrived in Spain with a substantial capital and many friends in the Franco government, secretly waiting for the right moment to build the Fourth Reich on a beach in Almería.
An interesting example is currently in the news. Casa Winter Cofete, a German, a place, a house... is the title of a book written and published this summer by a psychologist from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria named Gustavo Winter Althaus. Winter is the son of another Gustav Winter, one of those Germans who arrived in Spain during the interwar period and made his fortune in industry. In the 1930s, Winter Sr. sailed to Fuerteventura and believed that the Jandía Peninsula, a strip of land measuring almost 20,000 hectares of mountainous, uninhabited land, had all the conditions for a large industrial fishery: docks, shipyards, oil depots, processing plants, salt mines...
Winter gave an interview in 1938 to a newspaper in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to attract capitalist partners, and someone at the British Consulate on the island took suspicious note, as was the case at the time with any German business move in Spain. In the paranoia of war, this diplomatic report became a rumor: Germany was going to build a base for its submarines on Fuerteventura. Thus, a myth was born, which over the years spread from the island to the magazine Interviú, from there to Cuarto Milenio and a thousand dubious blogs and magazines. Interviú even published the story that Adolf Hitler escaped the fall of Berlin and went into hiding on Fuerteventura.
The reality was that Gustav Winter bought the peninsula but never found financing for his project, and only a rather fortified villa could be built. When his wife saw the house, she said it seemed too lonely, so the family never lived there, and the Winter house became a ghostly structure. Sometimes abandoned, sometimes occupied... In the 1960s, the Winter children hired a family to care for the estate. And, as Winter Althus argues in his book, the son of those caretakers turned the classic local legends about uninhabited mansions into a business: he spread the word that the house was built under conditions of slavery comparable to those of Theresienstadt, that the basement of the house contains a crematorium and a channel for U-boats...
He set up a small museum of Nazi antiquities and even published a book that now denies, point by point, the work of Winter Althus. The simple idea of an underground submarine channel on a gently sloping coast makes no physical sense. Was Winter a Nazi? Even that isn't so clear. His name appears on The Factual List of Nazis Protected by Spain, and there is evidence to show that he adapted naturally to the rules of Hitler's Germany, but his adherence was a matter of survival. His ideology, it seems, was business.
Pájara, on the Jandía peninsula, hasn't changed either. It remains an almost lunar landscape, uninhabited and untouched by tourism on an island that has doubled its population and tourist market in 25 years.