Chapter 2

(March 1939 The End of the Spanish Civil War)

“There’s only one law in this game,” Leamas retorted. “Mundt is their man; he gives them what they need. That’s easy enough to understand, isn’t it? Leninism – the expediency of temporary alliances. What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play Cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London, balancing the rights and wrongs? I’d have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens that they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me.”

(Excerpt from “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” by John Le Carre)

Looking back on my third trip into past history, I found it strangely difficult to accurately estimate the distance between southern Germany and the warmer climate of the Spanish Plain. I had visited Spain a few times during my normal life before the adventure of time traveling and I shamefully own up to the fact it was mostly dominated by my incessant searches for friendly willing females ready to tutor me in the nuances of that romantic tongue with the lovely rolling “RRRs”. In all honesty, I remembered the names and particulars of some memorable senoritas with greater clarity than the troop movements of the mostly foreign rebel forces and the black shirted enforcers of the government point of view.

From a military perspective, it was quite a lopsided little conflict with the forces of Generalissimo Franco running roughshod over the religious elite and the progressive thinkers that saw Herr Hitler as a threat to all of Europe as well as neutral-minded Spain.

I had established a “stringer” relationship with a New York City newspaper with international aspirations and my official title was Jack Kruger, Foreign Correspondent, 55 Worth Street, NYC, NY, USA (Attn: Manhattan News Service)

My later in life experiences in Spain were more in places like Barcelona or the beach areas with scantily clad ladies eager to show an American the ropes in establishing an educational niche in foreign affairs.

The people at the American Embassy were all caught up in processing visas for travel to the good old USA for desperate Jews looking for safe harbor in a time of the “long knives” of Nazi propaganda.

I was surprised at the level of resistance on the part of European Jewry to accept the fact that Herr Hitler was not their friend and they were in a lot more danger than their leaders wanted to admit for obvious reasons of panic and despair.

Meanwhile the proxy Spanish Civil War was being played out like a dress rehearsal for the invasions of Poland, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. This was the time when the concept of the “Blitzkrieg” introduced the original “shock and awe” into modern warfare.

My dispatches were filled with human interest stories of the common man caught up in the winds of war and I did my best to explain that the so-called “Civil War” was neither civil or a real war in any sense of the term. The forces of Franco were interested only in protecting their turf as a neutral party in the fast approaching World War Two and the uniformed participants were more often than not German speakers with their Nazi insignia hidden under their military clothing. The Spanish soldiers and the police were more than willing to be the silent partners in this struggle because they had to live with the survivors for a long time after the Germans went back to the Fatherland.

It was more of a dress rehearsal for the Wehrmacht shock troops than an internal squabble between competing factions in the Spanish society.

There was an added element of stretching the muscles of international Communism with support for the anti-Fascist forces allied against General Franco. I saw Franco as sort of a junior partner to Hitler and Mussolini with a lot less long term evil intent against the rights of the common populace.

I never did understand from my perspective of the early twenty-first century why some countries were allowed to gain “neutral” status and others were ruthlessly invaded and treated like second class citizens by the followers of the Third Reich.

My main interest was to understand why the international media choose to ignore the dirty little war on the Iberian Peninsula and swept it under the carpet like it was yesterday’s news when it was actually the forerunner to the death and destruction that was soon to visit the entire globe with millions of deaths and untold suffering because people were mostly unprepared for the “Thousand Year Reich” soon to be released like a juggernaut of sorrow changing people’s lives in ways never anticipated in our wildest dreams.

The SS and the Gestapo had their roots in the Spanish Civil War practicing their nefarious interrogation approaches on unsuspecting detainees expecting at least a modicum of proper behavior and receiving broken bodies instead of justice. The incidence of rape and assassinations rose drastically under the Franco proxy fighters with their hidden swastikas and their allegiance to the devil incarnate in Berlin and not in Madrid clinging to “neutrality” as an excuse for condoning evil in ways too numerous to cover in the scope of this expose.