The Spanish Blue Division on the Eastern Front, 19411945 by Xos M. Nez Seixas;

Author:Xos M. Nez Seixas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LCSH: Germany. Heer. Infanteriedivision (1941–1943), 250., 250. – Biography., LCSH: World War, 1939–1945 – Campaigns – Soviet Union., 1939–1945 – Spain., 1939–1945 – Regimental histories – Germany.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

The Noble Savage: An Opportunity for Redemption

According to German propaganda, the ultimate objective of the European crusade against Bolshevism was to banish the threat of Russia to Europe. However, Spaniards seldom gave thought to what the destiny of the Soviet people would be once “liberated,” albeit with a few interesting exceptions.

Thus, the Falangist Manuel Bendala acknowledged the unassailable legal basis on which the Third Reich could justify the appropriation of Soviet wealth. He observed that in Russia there were no “intangible individual rights.” There were only “virgin elements that in the hour of peace would be handed over to those who thanks to their weapons had carried the breath of Europe to the place where hatred had flourished.”129 Russia, however, should not only be “subjected but also divided”: the danger lay in communist appropriation of “Slavic messianism.”130 The Soviet regime had brought its people out of centuries of lethargy and had advanced “by resuscitating all the atavisms and promising that the hardy, combative peoples of the steppes could bathe in Western blood.” However, the peaceful coexistence of Russian civilians and Spanish soldiers led Bendala to conclude that it was possible to incorporate the Russian people into European civilization. How? By economic subjection, tutelage, and control of their natural environment through a much more benign combination of colonization and protectorate than what the German occupying authorities had planned. This seemed to match some of the tenets of Alfred Rosenberg:

The interposition or establishment of strong European colonizing nuclei – as is occurring with the Dutch, Germans, and Romanians – the political independence of the Baltic states, of Ukraine and White Russia, disarmament and abolition of war industries … intensification of agriculture, which would need little more than the re-establishment of private property, direct European intervention in the industries to be preserved, and perpetual concession of the oil wells to Europe.131

This more or less friendly colonization rested on an appraisal of the Slavs as a people not yet come of age, located on the lower rung of civilization. Europe should offer them tutelage and guidance – something akin to the colonized peoples of Asia and Africa – with no clear indication of when emancipation would occur. The narratives of BD soldiers were amplified back in Spain. Domingo Lagunilla indicated in the Falangist journal El Español that the history of the Slavic peoples had always been fraught with “ignorance and fanaticism.” Slavs were seen as culturally inferior because they acted on “intuition, routine, and submission,” they believed in “occult powers” and “visionary messianic religions.”132

An article published in the BD trench journal went so far as to construct arguments similar to the biological-genetic tenets of National Socialism. The “Russian masses” had lived immersed in alcoholism, crime, and sexual degeneration prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. According to “all scientific laws of inheritance,” alcoholic parents could only engender “deficient children with abnormal tendencies.” Communism easily took root in this fertile ground but further aggravated the degenerative state of the Russian people “by spreading pornographic novels and … the theory of free love.

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