THE SPANISH PLOT
Book of the Hitler Terror." (Gollancz. 5s.). • - Spain in • ReVolt. By Hairy Gannes -and Thttodore
• (Gollancz. 5S.)
THE unsatisfactory nature of most works about the present struggle in Spain arises not only from ignorance, but because the civil war exists on so many planes. Theie is the purely national and traditional struggle, there are the disparate motives of the regions, there is the fight of the rich and most progressive • regions (in the hands of Madrid) against the most markedly • feudal and poor lands (in the hinds' of -Franco) ; and there is, ,finally, the international struggle. Even then one has not -exhausted the complexity of the subject ; but it is the last which has made the Spanish situation the Paradise' of the doctrinaire, 'who sees every thing in Fascist or anti-Fascist terms.
• Messrs. Gannes and Repard are typical of this class. Their story is very rough and ready. Running rapidly through Spanish history in a few pages, they become more expansive about the republic and the fight wa ed against it by Gil Robles, then pass to a good summary of the civil War position at the tine of writing, and finally to a sk m?ed study of the funda- mental causes of unrest. Their knowledge of the Span s people is small. On se trompe toujours sur l'Espagne : the warn- Mg has not occurred to these left wing propagandists with whose case I am, in the main, in sympathy, but whose method is slap- dash and crude and whose omissions are startling.
- The Nazi Conspiracy is quite another thing. It is the most important note on the international aspect of the civil war that has been published, and should be widely read. At the beginning of the struggle the papers of a Nazi organisation in Barcelona came into the hands of the authorities, and they show for how long and how deeply the Germans have conspired to overthrow the Spanish democratic regime in order to further German imperial interests. This intervention is traditional in German foreign policy since Bismarck laid it down that • Spain must be the fly on France's neck." But the real enemy is England, .the immediate prize Morocco. And
however the war ends in Spain, it is the Moroccan question which will present Bucope with its real crisis. The documents in this boat, show hovi theGernians worked to this end and reveal the _Whole system and lechnique of --.N4zi propaganda abroad: -As in the Great War, the Germans found their natural allies in the Spanish reactionaries, gave financial support to their Press, subsidised provincial papers, &c., &c., just as tho Allies (at that time) subsidised the Spanish liberals. Every Fascist -bureau, every business -agency became, prior to July, 1936, a political bureau, and the system led inevitably to politica and Warlike co-operation• between the Right -Parties in Spaa and the Nazis. - The-evidence-is here, unmistakable and extiii, But the most interesting thing about these documents is theft revelation of how the Fascist Inquisition works upon indiT viduals. For it is an inquisition of the most cruel and relentle:ss kind, even though slightly comic to those of us who—as fir' as we know, for presumably the Nazi espionage and propaganda system is happily at work in F.ngjand too—are outside the meth. There can hardly have been a single German tourist or resident in Spain who was not spied upon and whose dossier was naj sent to the Gestapo. A German student, for example, who had spoken against Fascism was visited by the Spanish police at the suggestion of the local Nazi organisation and deported at once in a German ship to Germany where, only too well, we can imagine the treatment he received. Two wretched. German Jewesses start a pension in Granada and immediately they are investigated and the report travels from Granada to Madrid, and then into Berlin. Everyone was watched, including Spaniards. A Spanish journalist who wrote against Fascism in Spain would be immediately deported if he got to Germany.
The Nazis, of course, continually made themselves ridiculous: Their propaganda articles, for instance, in the Spanish Presi, were frequently unusable because of the heavy, abstract -Teutonic style. Spanish audiences were box e I by the continual march past of troops in the German propaganda films, and, of course, even the spies were spied upon. But our final impression. is of the thoroughness with whica the international conspiracy was prepared both in Spain and Morocco—where Mein Kampf, suitably expurgated, with its anti-Semitism underlined, is thrown among the- Arabs and aims to stir up unrest and revolt from Tangier to Suez—and of the human degradation to which the tyranny of Fascism has reduced its agents. The expulsion of the Jews, the establishment of an inquisition= how clearly, by an irony of history, does Germany follow the paranoiac course which brought Spain to her present ruin. '
- V. S. PRITCHETT.
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