On 27th July, 1936, Adolf
Hitler
sent the the Nationalists 26 German fighter aircraft. He also sent
30 Junkers 52s from Berlin and Stuttgart to Morocco.
Over the next couple of weeks the aircraft transported over 15,000
troops to Spain. The fighter aircraft soon went into action and the
Germans suffered their first losses when airmen Helmut Schulze and
Herbert Zeck were killed on 15th August.
In September 1936, Lieutenant
Colonel Walther
Warlimont of
the German General Staff arrived as the German commander and military
adviser to General Francisco
Franco. The following
month Warlimont suggested that a German Condor Legion should be formed
to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
The initial force consisted
a Bomber Group of three squadrons of Ju-52 bombers; a Fighter Group
with three squadrons of He-51 fighters; a Reconnaissance Group with
two squadrons of He-99 and He-70 reconnaissance bombers; and a Seaplane
Squadron of He-59 and He-60 floatplanes.
Adolf
Hitler hoped this would not be necessary as General Francisco
Franco
claimed he was on the verge
of victory. This prediction proved to be wrong and in November the
International Brigades and aircraft
and tanks from the Soviet Union began arriving
in Madrid.
Hitler now gave permission
for the formation of the Condor
Legion.
The initial force consisted a Bomber Group of three squadrons of Ju-52
bombers; a Fighter Group with three squadrons of He-51 fighters; a
Reconnaissance Group with two squadrons of He-99 and He-70 reconnaissance
bombers; and a Seaplane Squadron of He-59 and He-60 floatplanes.
The Condor Legion, under
the command of General Hugo
Sperrle, was
an autonomous unit responsible only to Franco. The legion would eventually
total nearly 12,000 men. Sperrle demanded higher performance aircraft
from Germany and he eventually received the Heinkel
He111, Junkers
Stuka and
the Messerschmitt
Bf109. It participated
in all the major engagements including Brunete,
Teruel, Aragon
and Ebro.
The Condor Legion was initially
equipped with around 100 aircraft and 5,136 men. Sperrle demanded
higher performance aircraft from Germany and he eventually received
the Heinkel
He111, Junkers
Stuka and
the Messerschmitt
Bf109.
The
Condor Legion participated in all the major engagements including
Brunete, Teruel,
Aragon and Ebro.
During
the war Werner Moelders was credited
with fourteen kills, more than any other German pilot.
In the Asturias campaign
in September 1937, Adolf
Galland experimented with new bombing tactics. This became
known as carpet bombing (dropping all bombs on the enemy from every
aircraft at one time for maximum damage). German
aircraft dropped 16,953,700 kilos of bombs during the war and air
units expended 4,327,949 rounds of machine-gun ammunition.
A total of 19,000 Germans
served in the Spanish Civil War. Of these,
298 were lost, with 173 being killed by the enemy. This included 102
aircrew, 27 fighter pilots and 21 anti-aircraft crew. A large number
were killed in accidents and others died of illness. The Condor Legion
lost 72 aircraft to enemy action. Another 160 were lost in flying
accidents.
(1)
Hermann
Goering, statement at Nuremberg
War Crimes Trial (October 1946)
When
the civil war broke out in Spain Franco sent a call for help to Germany
and asked for support, particularly in the
air. Franco with his troops was stationed in Africa and he could not
get his troops across, as the fleet was in the hands of the communists.
The decisive factor was, first of all, to get his troops to Spain.
The Führer thought the matter over. I urged him to give support
under all circumstances: firstly, to prevent the further spread of
communism; secondly, to test my young Luftwaffe in this or that technical
respect.
(2)
William
L. Shirer,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959)
Though German aid to Franco never equalled that given by Italy, which
dispatched between sixty and seventy thousand
troops as well as vast supplies of arms and planes, it was considerable.
The Germans estimated later that they spent half a billion marks on
the venture 37 besides furnishing planes, tanks, technicians and the
Condor Legion, an Air Force unit which distinguished itself by the
obliteration of the Spanish town of Guernica and its civilian inhabitants.
Relative to Germany's own massive rearmament it was not much, but
it paid handsome dividends to Hitler.
It gave France a third
unfriendly fascist power on its borders. It exacerbated the internal
strife in France between Right and Left and thus weakened Germany's
principal rival in the West. Above all it rendered impossible a rapprochement
of Britain and France with Italy, which the Paris and London governments
had hoped for after the termination of the Abyssinian War, and thus
drove Mussolini into the arms of Hitler.
From the very beginning
the Fuehrer's Spanish policy was shrewd, calculated and far-seeing.
A perusal of the captured
German documents makes plain that one of Hitler's purposes was to
prolong the Spanish Civil War in order to keep the
Western democracies and Italy at loggerheads and draw Mussolini toward
him.
(3)
Ulrich
von Hassell,
German Ambassador in Italy (December 1936)
The role played by
the Spanish conflict as regards Italy's relations
with France and England could be similar to that of the Abyssinian
conflict, bringing out clearly the actual, opposing interests
of the powers and thus preventing Italy from being drawn
into the net of the Western powers and used for their machinations.
The struggle for dominant political influence in Spain
lays bare the natural opposition between Italy and France; at the
same time the position of Italy as a power in the western Mediterranean
comes into competition with that of Britain. All the
more clearly will Italy recognize the advisability of confronting
the Western powers shoulder to shoulder with Germany.
(4)
Alan
Bullock, Hitler:
A Study in Tyranny (1952)
In the course of the next three years Germany sent men and military
supplies, including experts and technicians of all
kinds and the famous Condor Air Legion. German aid to Franco was never
on a major scale, never sufficient to win the war for him or even
to equal the forces sent by Mussolini, which in March 1937 reached
the figure of sixty to seventy thousand men. Hitler's policy, unlike
Mussolini's, was not to secure Franco's victory, but to prolong the
war. In April 1939, an official of the German Economic Policy Department,
trying to reckon what Germany had spent on help to Franco up to that
date, gave a round figure of five hundred million Reichsmarks, not
a large sum by comparison with the amounts spent on rearmament. But
the advantages Germany secured in return were disproportionate - economic
advantages (valuable sources of raw materials in Spanish mines); useful
experience in training her airmen and testing equipment such as tanks
in battle conditions; above all, strategic and political advantages.
It only needed a glance
at the map to show how seriously France's position was affected by
events across the Pyrenees. A victory for Franco would mean a third
Fascist State on her frontiers, three instead of two frontiers to
be guarded in the event of war. France, for geographical reasons alone,
was more deeply interested in what happened in Spain than any other
of the Great Powers, yet the ideological character of the Spanish
Civil War divided,
instead of uniting, French opinion. The French elections shortly
before the outbreak of the troubles in Spain had produced the
Left-wing Popular Front Government of Leon Blum. So bitter
had class and political conflicts grown in France that - as in the
case of the Franco-Soviet Treaty - foreign affairs were again subordinated
to internal faction, and many Frenchmen were prepared
to support Franco as a way of hitting at their own Government.
(5)
Luis
Bolin, Spain, the Vital Years (1967)
In 1936-9 Great Britain and other
European and American countries were beginning to think in terms of
the coming world conflict. The fact that Hitler and Mussolini helped
the Spanish Nationalists was a cause of great and perhaps natural
prejudice in those countries, though it should be noted that those
who criticized us for accepting Hitler's help saw nothing strange
in the acceptance of Stalin, who had invaded Poland with Hitler, as
their ally in World War II. When men
are fighting for all that is dear to them they accept help from wherever
it comes. But the loose habit of referring to all authoritarian regimes
other than the Communist as 'Fascist' made it hard for people to appreciate
the vast differences that separate the Spanish Falange from Nazism.
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