Spanish Civil War

"In March 1939, just months after the Munich Conference granted Sudetenland to Germany, German troops entered the rest of Czechoslovakia. With the world distracted by Francos recent victory in Spain, Hitler ordered the Czechoslovak state dismantled. Some territory was incorporated into the German Reich, and the old Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia were organized as the Protectorate, a kind of colony. Slovakia became a client state under the government of the Roman Catholic priest Josef Tiso."

"On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe; On that tableland scored by rivers, Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond To the medicine ad and the brochure of winter cruises Have become invading battalions; And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb. Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom As the ambulance and the sandbag; Our hours of friendship into a peoples army."

"If you lose [a war," the great American novelist of the civil war, Ernest Hemingway, exclaimed in 1939, "you lose everything and your ideology wont save you." The Lincoln volunteers – whom Hemingway disparaged as the "ideology boys" – clung to the opposite view. Although they "lost the war," their last commander, Milton Wolff, insisted that "neither the Spaniards nor the [international volunteers], nor anti-fascists of any mettle, lost their ideology, much less everything." To Wolff, writing twenty years after Hemingways suicide, it was precisely ideology that had "saved us. And may yet save the world." Indeed, it was this spirit of commitment- an unyielding optimism in the face of defeat – that distinguished the Lincoln veterans. For them, Spain lived not as the landscape for a novel or as a place of metaphysical inspiration. "Spain" – the word, the country, the cause – embodied ideology and political passion, anguish and hope; the ordeal of Spain became the essential continuity of their lives. Anticipating this half-centurys commitment, the poet Genevieve Taggard composed "To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade" in 1941: Say of them, They are no longer young, they never learned The arts, the stealth of peace, this peace, the tricks of fear; And what they knew, they know And what they dared they dare."

"When the Civil War began in July 1936, Hitler had been in power in Germany for over three years. The ideological affinities between the Nazis and Francos Nationalists (sometimes referred to in German documents as "White Spain," as opposed to "Red Spain") were clear at once, but the German government, like Mussolinis Fascist government in Italy, was reluctant to risk recognizing Francos side as the true government of Spain until it was confident it would win the war. It granted that recognition on November 18, 1936.Throughout the war, Hitler often sought to assist Franco without attracting international attention, and indeed the German government was not alone in seeking involvement. Frances Popular Front government, under the Socialist Leon Blum, had begun to offer the Republicans assistance, but Blum, concerned primarily about threats to French security from a militarily resurgent Germany, did not wish to anger its British ally, and when London made clear its opposition to helping the Spanish Republicans, Frances government reversed its course. At that point, the French pushed for the creation of an international "nonintervention" agreement, which the Germans and Italians (among others) were willing to sign, but which they soon violated. Attempts to enforce the nonintervention pact soon turned out to be ineffective, but Hitler remained at least somewhat concerned with preserving the image of his countrys adherence to the pact."

"The Spanish Civil War and the fight against it did, in part, alert the world to the nature of fascism. The story of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade is generally known. It was a contingent of committed Black and White Americans, three thousand in number, who went to fight against fascism. Had the circumstances been different, some of the Black Americans would have been willing to fight in the Italian-Ethiopian War. Ethiopia was overrun in a matter of months, and there was no organized effort to get Black Americans to fight in this war. Those who were willing to go were left with their frustrations. To some of them fighting with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the war against fascism in Spain was an alternative."

"The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon."