Spaniards in Waffen-SS

Discussions on the foreigners (volunteers as well as conscripts) fighting in the German Wehrmacht, those collaborating with the Axis and other period Far Right organizations. Hosted by George Lepre.
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Rodrigo
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Spaniards in Waffen-SS

#1

Post by Rodrigo » 19 Dec 2002, 01:05

This obituary was published the family of Miguel Ezquerra Sanchez, the leader of the spaniards at the Waffen-SS, at the spanish newspaper "El Alcazar" on 30th October 1984.
You can read:

"Falange Old Guard, Warrant Officer, volunteer in the Blue Division, Lieutenant Colonel of the Waffen-SS until the fall of Berlin".

Lieutenant Colonel of the Waffen-SS?
SS-Obersturmbannführer or Waffen-Obersturmbannführer der SS?
It´s possible to confirm this graduation?
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Ostuf Charlemagne
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#2

Post by Ostuf Charlemagne » 20 Dec 2002, 13:52

Well,its a big mistery...... i meet and shake hands with Miguel Ezquerra in Madrid ,November 20th,1976....he was already an old man....i guess you are familiar with the meaning of this special day....i read his war memories after that,where he claims to have been an SS lt-col,promoted personnally by Hitler ,at the same time the Fuehrer was awarding him the ritterkreuz,being the last one to receive this award in Berlin....Since the russians where near and Hitler about to commit suicide,neither the promotion nor the award were officially recorded...wich is not impossible.Now en his book "Forgotten Legions,oscure combat formations of the Waffen-SS", (http://www.paladin-press.com),author Antonio Munoz states Ezquerra as being Obersturmfuehrer,lieutenant,and commander of spanishes Freiwilligen Kompanie der SS 101....from other sources (two belgians vets charged by Degrelle to recruit spaniards for the Wallonie division),Ezquerra comebacking from spain in 1944,after the removal of the Azul Legion,was an officer within "Sonderstab F",a Brandenburg unit in charge to facilitate escape from Spain to spanish volunteers for the german army....they were stationned in the Pyrinnean where they fought the french-spanish communist maquis....then he was made an SS officer,not waffen-Ss,but SD officer..He went to Versailles to follow an SD course and then had an office in the quartier de la reine,recruiting barracks of french SS,where he was in charge to train the spanish volunteers before to be sent to Stablack training camp(austria).....After some battle a pretty lot of spanish volunteers gathered within the Wallonie and some WH units were joined together to form the SS Kompanien 101 and 102...They had a new chief,Ostuf Valdajos.Like Ezquerra,Valdajos was an SD officer ,with some experience of the front (in Russia with division Azul and in Normandy within an SD-Rollkommando) but was more an administrative officer so he suggested Ezquerra to be the chief of what was going to be know as the SS Einsatzgruppe Ezquerra,in fact a very small battalion.
So a lieutenant or a lieutenant-colonel ??????maybe there is another explanation: i know that the HIAG,waffen-ss vet association,keeps raising the ranks of his officers after the war,like if they were regular army reservists...so Lt.Ezquerra may have raised in rank by "antiguedad" up to Lt.Col after the war ????? I saw a picture of Ezquerra in 1973 in Madrid at a CEDADE meeting ,wearing the brown shirt of CEDADE along with his Ritterkreuz.Among the spanish veterans of Blaue Div.and or Waffen-SS,nobody ever challenged his rank or Ritterkreuz.Enough said.
about the differences between an SS Obersturmbannfuehrer and a Waffen-Obersturmbannfuehrer der SS,i think post war authors overexagerate a very thin difference who was not respected even in official SS documents,for instance,i have some documents showing a french SS Lt. as being officially called SS Obersturmfuehrer while serving in the 8.Sturmbrigade and as a Waffen Obersturmfuehrer der SS while serving within Charlemagne some months later..the same man,so....
Coming back with Miguel Ezquerra,too sad to read about his death!! We already loose another famous Azul "divisionario" some few years ago :
Mariano Sanchez Covisa. I'm looking for a spanish book called "el batallon fantasma" Any help ??
Espero te haya servido.Hasta la vista,camarada...
!Arriba Espana!



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Rodrigo
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#3

Post by Rodrigo » 20 Dec 2002, 15:00

Welcome to the Forum Ostuf Charlemagne!!!

Thank you very much for your information..
Do you have any Ezquerra´s photo?
Some years ago (about 20) a spanish magazine published a interview with Ezquerra that now I´m trying to find.
About the book "el batallon fantasma", was published in Alicante (Spain) some years ago by my close friend Carlos Caballero, but I think that now is out of print.
A personal question...Are you from Honduras? Very nice country¡¡¡

Ostuf Charlemagne
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#4

Post by Ostuf Charlemagne » 21 Dec 2002, 12:58

Saludos Camarada!

Sorry,no photo of Ezquerra.I am french,residing in Honduras..i lived also in Spain when i was adolescent,i was a member of OJE and Falange....
about the interwiew of Ezquerra,send me a copie if you get it,you can reach me too at my personal e-mail:
[email protected]

¡brazo en alto !

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Rodrigo
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#5

Post by Rodrigo » 21 Dec 2002, 13:58

I find this in http://www.findarticles.com

THE GHOST BATTALION: SPANIARDS IN THE WAFFEN-SS, 1944-1945.

Author/s: Wayne H. Bowen

In April 1939, after three years of fighting, Generalismo Francisco Franco and his right-wing forces finally defeated Spain's Popular Front army to win the Spanish civil war. Franco had received much support from Adolf Hitler in his revolt against the democratically elected leftist government, which in turn left him indebted to Germany at the war's end. Though Spain officially remained neutral throughout World War II, in 1941, Franco on his own initiative provided a unit of soldiers, known as the Blue Division for the shirts worn by its Falangist enlistees, and an air squadron to help the Nazis in their war against Soviet communism and repay his debt to Hitler. The United States, Great Britain, and the Free French government vehemently protested this violation of neutrality, and as the tide of the war began to turn against Hitler, Franco bowed to Allied political pressure and agreed to end all aid to Germany.

Spain's official military contribution to Nazi Germany ended in spring 1944, when the last soldiers of the Legion Espanola de Voluntarios (Spanish Legion of Volunteers), also known as the Legion Azul, or Blue Legion, were withdrawn from the Eastern Front and repatriated to Spain. The Blue Division had already been withdrawn the previous November under Allied pressure, to be replaced by the smaller 1,000-1,200-man Legion Azul. The official withdrawal did not end Spanish involvement in World War II, however; even as the soldiers of the Blue Division and Legion were crossing from France into Spain, some of their compatriots were headed in the opposite direction.

From late 1943 to the end of the war, several hundred Spaniards enlisted in the Waffen-SS (militarized units of the SS) and the German army, leaving their homes and families to serve Nazi Germany. While most sought adventure or material gain, these Spaniards also represented the persistence of support among certain elements of the Spanish population for the New Order, a "Third Way" that would avoid the errors of communism and liberal democracy. Convinced that they had fought for such a New Order for Franco in Spain and on the Eastern Front, they sacrificed everything for the vision of Hitler. Their numbers were small, however, and their presence had far less impact than they anticipated, certainly not in the way they expected. Rather than being the vanguard of a new Europe, most died in the rubble of a crumbling empire, and their activities remained a black mark against the Spanish government as Franco's regime was branded a collaborationist state and left politically isolated until the mid-1950s.

While there are over 200 books, articles, movies, and other works about the Blue Division, the historiography of Spaniards in the Waffen-SS is much more limited. Two short books, by Fernando Vadillo and Carlos Caballero Jurado, rely on interviews with veterans and selective use of documents, mostly unattributed, to paint a hagiographic portrait of these volunteers. The issue of Spanish volunteers in the SS is also discussed in a dissertation by Kenneth Estes, but his focus is on the broader issue of Western European volunteers rather than those from Spain. Works about the Waffen-SS by Mark Gingerich, Bernd Wegner, Robert Koehl, George Stein, and Felix Steiner pay little or no attention to the issue of Spanish volunteers, whose experience was very different from that of even Western European SS soldiers.(1) Aside from a handful of Swedish, Swiss, and Finnish recruits, Spaniards were the only Europeans to join the SS and German army not from Axis occupied territory. Using Spanish archives, this paper will provide a more complete understanding of the experience of these soldiers.




By May 1944, when all Spanish soldiers and aviators were withdrawn from the Eastern Front and repatriated to Spain, losses in the Blue Division and Legion were high: 4,500 dead, 8,000 wounded, 7,800 sick, 1,600 frostbitten, and 300 prisoners, deserters, or missing: over 22,000 casualties out of the 47,000 total who fought in the division.(2) With the crushing manpower shortage in Germany and the Third Reich conscripting the very young and old, every possible source for combat units had to be tapped. Their open access to Spanish recruits closed, the Germans began to search out other ways to enroll and retain Spaniards in the armed forces of the Third Reich.

Some Spaniards refused to be repatriated at all, though their numbers alone were too few to make a significant contribution to Germany's forces. In Spain, however, potential recruits already had begun to seek out opportunities to enlist in the service of the Nazis. As historian Kenneth Estes has written, Spanish volunteers included "soldiers of fortune, ardent antibolshevists, and those seeking employment and living conditions superior to those of Spain."(3) After the devastation of the Civil War, hunger and unemployment were rampant, and on the dark night of 27 January 1944, Jose Valdeon Ruiz and two of his friends, too young to have served in the Spanish Civil War or Blue Division, sneaked across the Spanish border into France with the firm intention of joining the German army.(4)

Over the next eight months, until the Allies drove the Germans from the Pyrenees, hundreds of Spanish men and boys followed Valdeon Ruiz, crossing illegally from neutral Spain into Nazi-occupied France. The SS even established a special unit in Spain and occupied France, the Sonderstab F (Special Staff F), to recruit these fugitives and provide them with transportation to Germany, work contracts, and identity documents.(5) The Spanish Foreign Ministry and German ambassador in Madrid opposed these activities, as Franco by this time had begun to withdraw aid from Hitler, but elements of the Falange (Franco's political party) and German agencies collaborated in this effort to recruit soldiers for the Nazis.(6) In one week in January 1944, over 100 Spaniards presented themselves at the German embassy in Madrid, attempting to volunteer for military service. As they dribbled across the border, alone or in small groups, these Spanish recruits were taken by train to a holding camp near Versailles, until they reached 300 in number by May 1944.(7)

A third source of volunteers came from Spanish workers already in Germany. At the beginning of the war, Franco had sent 25,000 volunteer workers to Germany. As their factories were bombed and they were displaced by air raids, some of these workers, seeking to leave the country, enlisted in the German merchant marine in hopes of jumping ship in neutral territory. This was also dangerous, however, as Allied air and naval forces ensured that few vessels survived long at sea.(8) Others volunteers, still committed to the Nazi cause, joined the Organisation Todt, a militarized labor force, one of several units of the Waffen-SS, or a Spanish Legion within the Wehrmacht.(9)




Their numbers were supplemented by repatriated veterans of the Blue Division who petitioned the Spanish government to be sent to the Third Reich as common laborers, hoping that their prior service would gain them some kind of preference in contracts. German diplomats and labor representatives were more than happy to sign contracts with these volunteers, but such arrangements were considered invalid by the Spanish government; along with withdrawing his troops, Franco had ended the volunteer worker program in late 1943, albeit with the promise of allowing more workers to go to Germany if needed.(10) Without the official support of the Spanish government, few managed to make it to Germany.

Those who did, along with dozens of other Spanish recruits from elsewhere in the Nazi empire, were then sent to the training base of Stablack-Sud Steinlager in Eastern Prussia. By D-Day, just over 400 had been assembled at this center. At Stablack, the Spaniards were divided into two battalions and deployed to the outskirts of Vienna for eight weeks of training, led by officers who had been liaisons between the Blue Division and the German military.(11) From 8 June to 20 July, another 150 Spaniards joined the Batallon Fantasma (Ghost Battalion), as the unit was called by its soldiers. The name signified two things: first, the unit's shadowy existence in defiance of official agreements between the German and Spanish government; and second, that knowledge of the unit spread throughout the Spanish communities of Europe through rumor and word of mouth rather than through official declarations.(12)

According to the Spanish police attache in Rome, who sent back a detailed report on the unit, the Spanish volunteers insisted to the Germans that they did not want Spanish officers over them; this would reflect unfavorably on the Franco regime, they feared, because Franco had promised the Allies that no Spanish nationals would continue to fight for the Axis. As the unit developed, it had a mix of Spanish and German junior officers, but even those who had held commissions in the Blue Division entered the Ghost Battalion as mere enlisted soldiers, having to earn their rank through merit. The commander of the unit was a former German army artillery officer, SS Captain Wolfgang Graefe, who had been attached to the Blue Division.(13)

While these troops underwent weeks of training to prepare them for the front, other Spaniards were quickly committed to battle. Serving in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security service of the SS, these soldiers, some of whom had been recruited by the Germans from among Spanish Republican exiles, fought and spied against Spaniards in the French Resistance and against the Allies in Normandy. The Spanish embassy in Berlin estimated that in summer 1944 there were as many as 1,500 Spaniards working for German security services in France.(14)

Other collaborationist movements in Europe also provided volunteers for the German armed forces and SS units. For example, approximately 10,000 Frenchmen fought in units such as the Legion des Volontaires Francais (LVF, French Volunteer Legion) and Charlemagne Division of the Waffen-SS between 1941 and 1945. Most of these volunteers were recruited in 1943 and 1944 from members of the Milice Francaise and other collaborationist groups who left France with the Germans to avoid reprisals by the Resistance. Like the Spanish Blue Division, these units fought on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Army, and some, like the Spaniards of the Ghost Battalion, died defending Berlin in 1945.(15) Also like the Spanish enlistees, other Western volunteers joined the Waffen-SS "for such non-idealistic reasons as a desire for adventure, status, glory, or material benefit," as historian George Stein has noted. Fewer, but still a significant percentage, were "adherents of political or nationalist organizations who hoped to improve the fortunes of their movement or to demonstrate their ideological commitment to National Socialism by serving in the SS."(16) Some of the fanaticism among those who remained or joined the Waffen-SS no doubt rested on the fate of foreign volunteers should they fall into enemy hands: repatriation and, in the case of those who came from Allied nations, firing squads or harsh prison sentences.(17)




The Nazis, scrambling to find more soldiers, by D-Day had recruited 450 Spaniards to serve in the Waffen-SS.(18) Spanish diplomats in Germany warned Madrid about this recruitment effort repeatedly during the summer of 1944, but despite Spanish protests, German officials in Madrid claimed ignorance of the matter or an inability to do anything about it.(19) While most recruits were Spaniards already living in Nazi-occupied Europe, to these must be added the 150 Spaniards who crossed into France in June and July 1944.(20)

The Spanish soldiers who had joined the Waffen-SS and other German military units fought most extensively on the Eastern Front, but also in the Balkans, against the Resistance in France, and in the final defense of Berlin in 1945. It is difficult to estimate the numbers of Spanish veterans of the Blue Division who served in the Waffen-SS because German records of these enlistments are scarce. We can say something about the potential manpower pool, however; of the over 40,000 Spaniards who served in the Blue Division and Legion, slightly under 400, excluding casualties, known deserters, and those captured by the Soviet Union, did not return to Spain at the end of their tours of duty on the Eastern Front. Of these, 34 were officers (only one of whom was over the rank of captain), 139 were noncommissioned officers, and 210 were soldiers at the rank of corporal or below.(21) Although exact numbers are unavailable, the best estimate puts the number of these Spaniards who fought in the military and security forces of the Third Reich after June 1944 at just under 1,000.(22)

One Spaniard who established a clear and indisputable record within the SS was Rufino Luis Garcia-Valdajos. Born in 1918, he enlisted in the Blue Division in late 1942, remaining as a volunteer until March 1944, when he remained in Germany rather than be repatriated to Spain. He gained a position with the SD in Paris and worked against the French Resistance until the Nazi retreat forced him to return to Germany in late 1944. There he joined Belgian collaborator Leon Degrelle's SS-Freiwilligen-Grenadierdivision-Wallonie (SS Wallonian Volunteer Grenadier Division) in November 1944. In February 1945, Garcia-Valdajos, now an SS first lieutenant, applied to the SS Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt (RuSHA, Central Office for Race and Resettlement) for permission to marry a German woman living in Berlin, Ursula Jutta-Maria Turcke. After determining that neither Garcia-Valdajos nor his bride had any Jewish ancestry, this permission was granted.(23)

While the case of Garcia-Valdajos is better documented than most because of his request to marry a German, he was not alone in his enlistment. Many of those who left home to enlist in the German army and Waffen-SS were very young, some still in their teens, who essentially ran away from home to sign up with the Germans, much to the consternation of the Franco regime.(24) The Spanish government's attempts to lobby the German government for the return of these men and boys were unsuccessful. As Franco's ambassador in Berlin informed the Spanish Foreign Ministry, Berlin was unlikely to surrender precious laborers and soldiers to an increasingly unfriendly Madrid, especially as these were volunteers who in many cases did not want to return to Spain.(25)




The Allies protested strongly to the Spanish Foreign Ministry about these enlistments in German military and intelligence services.(26) Of particular concern to the United States and the Free French representative in Madrid was the alleged service in the Gestapo of dozens of Spaniards in France and rumors that hundreds more were preparing to join them.(27) The Spanish Foreign Ministry vehemently denied knowledge of any enlistment or service in the German military, indicating that perhaps these soldiers and agents might be Spanish expatriate communists who, for "the spirit of adventure and economic necessity," might have enlisted. In any case, the Spanish government asserted, their numbers could not compare with those of Spaniards enlisting in the ranks of the Allies.(28) According to the Spanish foreign minister, the Spanish government had not and would not authorize the enlistment of Spaniards, Blue Division veterans or not, in German military, security, or police forces, nor allow them to aid German forces in France. The foreign minister did, however, admit knowledge of the many Spaniards who had joined the French Resistance or were fighting for the Allies in Northern Italy. Despite these enlistment on both sides, he declared that Spain would not deviate from its "strict neutrality."(29)

The Spanish Foreign Ministry, despite its statements to the Allies, had extensive knowledge about the illegal service of Spaniards in the Gestapo, Waffen-SS, and Wehrmacht. As early as the spring of 1944, the Spanish Foreign Ministry had confirmed reports from its European embassies that Spaniards were enlisting in German military and intelligence services.(30) This information came, in its most direct form, from Spanish veterans of German service, who began to show up at Spanish legations, consulates, and embassies throughout Europe in early 1944. Often destitute, they told of service in the Balkans, France, and the Eastern Front.(31) While many claimed to have served in the German army, most had worn the uniform of the Waffen-SS.(32)

The Foreign Ministry was also well aware that recruitment of Spaniards occurred in Spain as well as in Nazi-occupied Europe.(33) The Deutsche Arbeitsfront-DAF (German Labor Front) office in Madrid, which formerly had contracted workers openly, was responsible for much of this recruitment, providing papers, funds, and directions to Spaniards wishing to enlist in the Nazi cause. The Spanish Foreign Ministry also suspected that elements of the Falange were aiding Nazi recruitment efforts. In August 1944 one of the foreign minister's deputies sent a letter to Falangist secretary-general Jose Luis Arrese, asking if the party knew anything about a group of 400 young falangistas allegedly preparing to leave Spain for France to join German occupation forces there.(34) For the Spanish government to publicly admit knowledge of Spanish volunteers would have meant admitting it was unable to stop these clandestine activities, however. Franco may also have feared Allied retaliation.




After the dissolution of the Blue Legion, Spaniards served in different units of the German armed forces. Most served in two companies (the 101st and 102d) of a unit in the Waffen-SS, the Spanische Freiwilligen Einheit (Spanish Volunteer Unit), which recruited from Spanish workers in Germany, veterans of the Blue Division, and a few adventurers who had crossed illegally from Spain into German-held France.(35) Others served with Leon Degrelle's SS Division, incorporated into the organization as the 3d Spanish Company of the 1st Battalion. The Belgian unit found it easy to recruit Spaniards from those already serving in Germany, as most Iberians found the Prussian discipline of the Wehrmacht too strict and humorless for their "Latin temperaments."(36)

Throughout the rest of the shrinking Nazi empire, other small units of Spaniards were organized in late 1944 to fight against the Allies in northern Italy, near Potsdam, on the Franco-German border, and elsewhere.(37) The unit in Italy, under the command of a Lieutenant Ortiz, fought against partisans in northern Italy and Yugoslavia. Unlike other Spanish units, it gained a mixed reputation, with accusations of looting, rape, and plunder. Other Spaniards claimed to have served with Otto Skorzeny's commando unit in the Battle of the Bulge.(38)

One of these units, the 101st Company of Spanish Volunteers, fought a desperate rearguard action near Vatra-Dornei, Romania, defending the Carpathian mountain passes against the Red Army. Led by a German officer, this unit contained some 200 men, mostly veterans of the Blue Division and the Spanish labor force in Germany. During the last half of August 1944, these Spaniards fought doggedly until the defection of Romania on 27 August. Turning their backs to the advancing Soviets, on 31 August what was left of the 101st began a slow retreat northwest. Fighting against attacks from both Soviet forces and Romanian guerrillas, deserted by the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, the unit was caught between Soviet armies in Hungary and Romania. At the end of October, the few dozen survivors of the unit finally reached Austria. The 101st and its parallel unit, the 102d, were quartered together in Stockerau and Hollabrunn, north of Vienna.(39) The 102d had fought Tito's Yugoslav Partisans in Slovenia and Croatia during the summer of 1944, where it was as mangled as the 101st. All of these units also suffered from desertions, as individuals and small groups fled the front lines to seek what they hoped would be safety in the hands of the Allies or in the interior of Germany.(40)

Miguel Ezquerra, a veteran of the Blue Division and then a captain in the Waffen-SS, led another small unit into the Battle of the Bulge. He and his men previously had served German counterintelligence in France, fighting against Spanish exiles in the Resistance.(41) Later called the Einheit Ezquerra (Ezquerra Unit), this formation was closely linked to General Wilhelm Faupel, former German Ambassador to Spain, and his Ibero-American Institute, a research center in Berlin that promoted closer Hispano-German and Nazi-Falangist ties.(42) In January 1945, Ezquerra was commissioned to enlist all the Spaniards he could find into one unit, which he would command as a Waffen-SS major.(43) These enlistments greatly troubled the Spanish government, which viewed with alarm news of Spaniards serving in the SS and other Nazi organizations. Apart from the dangers confronting these men, the Franco regime was concerned that they were still wearing the emblem of the Blue Division, a shield with the colors of the Spanish flag, and the word word "Espana" on their uniforms, an obvious and visible compromise of Spanish neutrality. Franco ordered his diplomats remaining in Germany to dissuade Spanish workers from joining the Waffen-SS or German armed forces, but despite the dramatic changes in the European situation, as late as October 1944 some volunteers were still petitioning to be sent to work in Germany.(44)




Even the Ibero-American Institute, long a stalwart ally, had turned against the Spanish party. Still under the direction of General Faupel, in early 1944 the Institute had taken over the publication of Enlace (Liaison), a newspaper for Spanish workers in Germany published by the Spanish embassy in Berlin from mid-1941 to late 1943. Faupel had gained control over the newspaper by paying its debts to the German government. Edited under Faupel's direction by Martin Arrizubieta, a defrocked Spanish Basque priest and former Republican captain in the Spanish Civil War, the newspaper took on a decidedly anti-Francoist bent in the fall of 1944. Promoting a strange mixture of Nazism and Basque separatism, the paper, continuing under its old title, produced a great deal of confusion among the remaining members of the Spanish colony in Germany.(45) Claiming to be both Falangist and National Socialist, the paper insisted that "the salvation of humanity ... is ... in us, the defenders of the New Order."(46) Identifying with Nazism, Arrizubieta promoted anti-Francoist sentiments among Spanish workers, declaring that "if Germany wins the war, it should not respect the Spanish frontier."(47)

Faupel, still bitter at Franco for asking Hitler to replace him as ambassador to Spain in 1937, fought to assert control over the dwindling Spanish community of 1944-45. Together with his wife, Edith, the old general won over the most ardent Falangists left in Berlin. The Faupels hoped to use these collaborators someday to overthrow the Franco regime. Despite the protests of the Spanish embassy, the German government refused to silence Faupel and Enlace.(48)

The Red Army launched its final offensive against Berlin on 16 April, sending into battle hundreds of thousands of men, tens of thousands of tanks and artillery pieces, and an air force that owned the German skies. The city was a fortress, surrounded by five rings of fortifications guaranteed to make the Soviet assault a costly one. Rejecting the pleas of his military and political advisers to fly out of the Berlin pocket, Hitler decided to remain and personally lead the defense of the city, entrusting Joseph Goebbels to embolden the last defenders of Nazism.(49) The Battle of Berlin was an international struggle, pitting Stalin's multiethnic Soviet Army against the outnumbered and outgunned remnants of Hitler's New Order. While the vast majority of Berlin's defenders were Germans in the regular army of the Wehrmacht, Frenchmen, Norwegians, Danes, Italians, Dutch, Romanians, Belgians, Hungarians, and other nationalities, mostly in the Waffen-SS, also defended the dying capital of the Third Reich.(50) In the "apocalyptic atmosphere" of this brutal battle, Spanish accents could be heard from the small band of Iberians remaining in Germany.(51)

Those non-Germans who kept fighting had abandoned their homes and families to fight for the disappearing dream of the New Order. By 1945, this continental vision was confined to a shrunken remnant of Central Europe, stretching from the Alps to the Norwegian Arctic Circle. In the final months only the most deluded could still have expected victory, the rest hoping for a last minute collapse of the Allied coalition.(52) Fantasy was all that remained, with the surviving Spanish soldiers perhaps dreaming of a last desperate battle, where by force of will Germany and its remaining supporters would expel the invaders from the home of the New Order. What else could they do? They had made their choice: 1945 was not a time for second thoughts. For the most part, however, desperation had replaced hope. Surrender meant imprisonment or death at the hands of the Allies. Desertion was still a crime against Germany, punishable by death. In uniform, these exiles could at least hope to die among comrades.




From January to April, the Einheit Ezquerra fought on what remained of the Eastern Front, suffering tremendous casualties without much result. After additional recruiting and transfers from other units, by mid-April Ezquerra cobbled together just over 100 Spaniards for the final defense of Berlin.(53) This recruitment was stymied by the actions of journalist and press attache Rodriguez del Castillo, who used his contacts in the DAF, Nazi party, and Armaments Ministry to secure exit permission, work releases, and safe-conduct passes for several hundred Spanish workers.(54)

Most Spaniards serving in various units of the SS and German armed forces remained at their posts, however.(60) Some, like Miguel Ezquerra, who became a schoolteacher after the war, survived; many did not. Like the millions of Germans and others who laid down their lives to preserve the Third Reich, they did so in the hopes of building a better Europe than the one they had inherited. Whether Falangists or convinced Nazis, the Spaniards of the Ghost Battalion defied their own government to fight for a destructive regime even as it collapsed around them in 1944-45.

Franco, who had boldly declared in 1942 that one million Spaniards would defend Berlin if need be, retreated under Allied pressure from these declarations as soon as the course of the war changed. The hundreds of Spaniards who wore the uniform of the Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht after D-Day made no such retreat. Franco survived the war with his power base intact: they and their ideology did not.

The presence of the Spanish volunteers in the final phase of the Third Reich represented a failure for Spanish foreign policy, which was characterized after 1943 by an effort to end collaboration with Nazi Germany. Ironically, the greatest impact of the Ghost Battalion was to undermine the New Order in Spain. After the war, the Franco regime was branded a collaborationist state, and its subsequent exclusion from the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and the Western alliance structure until 1953 largely resulted from its wartime support to the Nazis, support which it found itself unable to end as cleanly or as quickly as Franco would have preferred.

(1) Fernando Vadillo, Los irreductibles (Alicante, Spain, 1993); Carlos Caballero Jurado, El Batallon Fantasma (Alicante, Spain, 1994); Kenneth Estes, "A European Anabasis: Western European Volunteers in the Germany Army and SS, 1940-1945" (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland), 1984; Mark Gingerich, "Waffen SS Recruitment in the `Germanic Lands,'" Historian 59 (1997): 815-30; Bernd Wegner, The Waffen-SS: Organization, Ideology and Function (Oxford, 1990); Robert Koehl, The Black Corps (Madison, 1983); George Stein, The Waffen SS: Hitler's Elite Guard at War, 1939-45 (Ithaca, 1984); Felix Steiner, Die Freiwilligen der Waffen-SS: Idee und Opfergang (Oldendorf, Germany, 1973).

(2) Gerald Kleinfeld and Lewis Tambs, Hitler's Spanish Legion: The Blue Division in Russia (Carbondale, Ill., 1979), 346; Fernando Vadillo, Balada final de la Divisi, 346; Fernando Vadillo, (Madrid, 1984), 85-86.




(3) Estes, European Anabasis, 165.

(4) Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 11.

(5) Direccion General de Seguridad, Servicio Interior to Doussinague, Subsecretary, Foreign Ministry, 19 June 1944, R2192/31, Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores (hereafter AMAE); Ambassador Vidal in Berlin to Foreign Minister Jordana, 19 May 1944, T77, roll 885, frames 5634559-5634594, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA); Ambassador Vidal in Berlin to Foreign Minister Jordana, regarding the clandestine entry of Spaniards into German-occupied France, 19 May 1944, LegR 2192/31, AMAE.

(6) Carlos Caballero Jurado, "Los ultimos de la Division Azul: el Batallon Fantasma," DEFENSA, October 1987, 58-59; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 13-16.

(7) Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 19-22.

(8) Spanish Police Attache in Berlin Embassy to Spanish Foreign Minister, 8 January 1945, report, LegR2299/3, AMAE.

(9) Robert Brandin, Third Secretary, U.S. Embassy-Madrid, to W. Walton Butterworth, U.S. Charge d'Affaires ad interim-Madrid, 28 July 1944, RG226, OSS E127, box 33, folder 229, NARA.

(10) Delegado Provincial de Sindicatos and the Jefe Provincial de Servicio, Cordoba, to CIPETA, 15 March 1944, T 16262, 13, Archivo General de la Administracion (hereafter AGA); Eberspracher to CIPETA, 9 September 1943, T16256, 5, AGA; CIPETA to the Jefe Provinical de Estadistica y Colocacion, Cordoba, 25 March 1944, T16262, 13, AGA.

(11) Police Attache, Spanish Embassy in Rome, to the Foreign Minister, 30 August 1945, LegR2192/32, AMAE; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 30-33; Estes, European Anabasis, 166.

(12) Fernando Vadillo, interviewed by author, Valdeolmos, Spain, 7 May 1994; Estes, European Anabasis, 166.

(13) Police Attache, Spanish Embassy in Rome to the Foreign Minister, 30 August 1945, LegR2192/32, AMAE; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 32-33.

(14) Spanish Ambassador in Berlin to Foreign Ministry, 18 August 1944, LegR2299/2, AMAE; Miguel Ezquerra, Berlin, a vida o muerte (Madrid, 1975), 27-66; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 38, 40-45.

(15) Bertram M. Gordon, Collaborationism in France during the Second World War (Ithaca, 1980), 244-78, 317-18, 322, 337, 346, 371-72.

(16) Stein, The Waffen-SS, 142.

(17) Gerald Reitlinger, SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945 (New York, 1957), 155-58.

(18) Consul Feijoo, Berlin, to Jordana, 5 June 1944, R2192/31, AMAE.

(19) Various documents, 1944, R2192/31 and R2225/7, AMAE.

(20) Ricardo de la Cierva, Francisco Franco: Un siglo de Espana, vol. 2 (Madrid, 1973), 382.

(21) Internal report, 12 February 1946, LegR2192/32, AMAE.

(22) Berlin Document Center (hereafter BDC) microfilm, T354, A3343, U.S. National Archives; Carlos Caballero Jurado, "Los ultimos de la Division Azul: el Batallon Fantasma," DEFENSA, October 1987, 62 Hans Werner Neulen, Eurofaschismus und der Zweite Weltkrieg: Europas verratene Sohne (Munich, 1980), 170); Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 275.




(23) RuSHA, roll B5052, frames 0656-0722, T354, A3343, BDC.

(24) Various letters from parents and relatives to Spanish Foreign Ministry, LegR 2192/31-32, AMAE.

(25) Ambassador Vidal to Foreign Minister Lequerica, 27 September 1944, LegR2192/31; and various documents, 1944-1945, LegR2225/1, 6, both in AMAE.

(26) British and U.S. embassies in Madrid to the Spanish Foreign Minister, 7 and 11 August 1944, respectively, diplomatic notes, LegR2192/32, AMAE.

(27) Jacques Truelle, Minister Plenipotentiary of the Provisional French Republic to Subsecretary, Foreign Ministry Pan de Soraluce, 8 August 1944, diplomatic note, LegR2192/32, AMAE.

(28) Foreign Minister to U.S. Ambassador, 2 August 1944, diplomatic note, LegR2192/32, AMAE.

(29) Foreign Minister to British Ambassador, 31 August 1944, diplomatic note, LegR2192/31, AMAE.

(30) Raymond Proctor, Agony of a Neutral (Moscow, Idaho, 1974), 263-71.

(31) Luis de Torres-Quevedo, Charge d'Affaires, Spanish Legation in Bratislava, Slovakia (written from Berne) to the Foreign Minister, 21 April 1945, R 2192/32, AMAE.

(32) Feijoo de Sotomayor, Spanish Consul in Berlin, to the Foreign Minister, 5 June 1944, LegR 2192/31, AMAE; Kleinfeld and Tambs, Hitler's Spanish Legion, 345.

(33) Ambassador in Berlin to Foreign Minister, 6 July 1944, R2192/31, AMAE.

(34) Subsecretary Pan de Soraluce to the Secretary General of the Movimiento, 8 August 1944, LegR2192/32, AMAE.

(35) Police Attache, Spanish Embassy in Rome, 23 September 1945, report, LegR2192/32, AMAE; Steiner, Die Freiwilligen der Waffen-SS, 135.

(36) Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 91-96, 100-101; Vadillo interview.

(37) Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 106-7, 218-23.

(38) Police Attache, Spanish Embassy in Rome, 20 August and 23 September 1945, reports, LegR2192/32, AMAE; Estes, European Anabasis, 167; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 80-89.

(39) Ramon Perez-Eizaguirre, interview by author, Valdeolmos, Spain, 7 May 1994; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 53-65, 67-68.

(40) Police Attache, Spanish Embassy in Rome, 23 September 1945, report, LegR2192/32, AMAE; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 68-74.

(41) Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 108-10, 119; Miguel Ezquerra, Berlin, a vida o muerte (Barcelona, 1975).

(42) Spanish Ambassador, Berlin, to Spanish Foreign Minister, 7 December 1994, LegR2299/3, AMAE; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 127-29.

(43) Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 128-30; Ezquerra, Berlin, a vida o muerte, 89-96.

(44) Various CIPETA documents, October-December 1944, T 16259, AGA; Bernardo Acosta and Manuel Lopez to CIPETA, 17 October 1944, T 16258, AGA; Spanish Police Attache in Berlin Embassy to Spanish Foreign Minister, 8 January 1945, report, LegR2299/3, AMAE.

(45) J. L. Yriarte Betancourt, Berlin Territorial Secretary, to DNSE, 11 November 1944, report, P, SGM 54, AGA.

(46) Enlace, 23 November 1944.




(47) Spanish Police Attache in Berlin to Spanish Foreign Ministry, 26 December 1944, report, LegR2299/3, AMAE.

(48) Spanish Ambassador, Berlin, to Spanish Foreign Minister, 7 December 1994, LegR2299/3, AMAE; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 123-25; Ezquerra, Berlin, a vida o muerte, 92-105.

(49) Werner Haupt, Berlin 1945, trans. Angel Sabrido (Barcelona, 1964), 7-8, 13, 57, 61, 77.

(50) Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms (Cambridge, 1994), 820-26; Jean Mabire, Morir in Berlin. Los SS. Franceses (Madrid, 1976), 91, 151-53, 254, 276; Haupt, Berlin 1945, 71.

(51) Mabire, Morir in Berlin, 11, 310; Steiner, Die Freiwilligen, 329; Estes, European Anabasis, 169, 178-79.

(52) Mabire, Morir in Berlin, 74-76; Haupt, Berlin 1945, 91.

(53) Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 181-84; Ezquerra, Berlin, a vida o muerte, 105.

(54) Gonzalo Rodriguez Castillo, in Copenhagen, to Subsecretary, MAE, 15 May 1945; Col. Marin de Bernardo, Spanish Military Attache in Berlin (from Bregenz), 7 April 1945, report; Carlos Sanchez Alterhoff, in Konstanz, Germany, to Cristobal del Castillo, Subsecretary, MAE, Madrid, 14 April 1945, all in LegR2299/3, AMAE; Los irreductibles, 256-59.

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Kiesel
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The Ghost Battalion: Spaniards In The Waffen-SS, 1944-1945

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Post by Kiesel » 31 Dec 2003, 02:47

THE GHOST BATTALION: SPANIARDS IN THE WAFFEN-SS, 1944-1945.

Historian, Wntr, 2001, by Wayne H. Bowen



In April 1939, after three years of fighting, Generalismo Francisco Franco and his right-wing forces finally defeated Spain's Popular Front army to win the Spanish civil war. Franco had received much support from Adolf Hitler in his revolt against the democratically elected leftist government, which in turn left him indebted to Germany at the war's end. Though Spain officially remained neutral throughout World War II, in 1941, Franco on his own initiative provided a unit of soldiers, known as the Blue Division for the shirts worn by its Falangist enlistees, and an air squadron to help the Nazis in their war against Soviet communism and repay his debt to Hitler. The United States, Great Britain, and the Free French government vehemently protested this violation of neutrality, and as the tide of the war began to turn against Hitler, Franco bowed to Allied political pressure and agreed to end all aid to Germany.

Spain's official military contribution to Nazi Germany ended in spring 1944, when the last soldiers of the Legion Espanola de Voluntarios (Spanish Legion of Volunteers), also known as the Legion Azul, or Blue Legion, were withdrawn from the Eastern Front and repatriated to Spain. The Blue Division had already been withdrawn the previous November under Allied pressure, to be replaced by the smaller 1,000-1,200-man Legion Azul. The official withdrawal did not end Spanish involvement in World War II, however; even as the soldiers of the Blue Division and Legion were crossing from France into Spain, some of their compatriots were headed in the opposite direction.

From late 1943 to the end of the war, several hundred Spaniards enlisted in the Waffen-SS (militarized units of the SS) and the German army, leaving their homes and families to serve Nazi Germany. While most sought adventure or material gain, these Spaniards also represented the persistence of support among certain elements of the Spanish population for the New Order, a "Third Way" that would avoid the errors of communism and liberal democracy. Convinced that they had fought for such a New Order for Franco in Spain and on the Eastern Front, they sacrificed everything for the vision of Hitler. Their numbers were small, however, and their presence had far less impact than they anticipated, certainly not in the way they expected. Rather than being the vanguard of a new Europe, most died in the rubble of a crumbling empire, and their activities remained a black mark against the Spanish government as Franco's regime was branded a collaborationist state and left politically isolated until the mid-1950s.

While there are over 200 books, articles, movies, and other works about the Blue Division, the historiography of Spaniards in the Waffen-SS is much more limited. Two short books, by Fernando Vadillo and Carlos Caballero Jurado, rely on interviews with veterans and selective use of documents, mostly unattributed, to paint a hagiographic portrait of these volunteers. The issue of Spanish volunteers in the SS is also discussed in a dissertation by Kenneth Estes, but his focus is on the broader issue of Western European volunteers rather than those from Spain. Works about the Waffen-SS by Mark Gingerich, Bernd Wegner, Robert Koehl, George Stein, and Felix Steiner pay little or no attention to the issue of Spanish volunteers, whose experience was very different from that of even Western European SS soldiers.(1) Aside from a handful of Swedish, Swiss, and Finnish recruits, Spaniards were the only Europeans to join the SS and German army not from Axis occupied territory. Using Spanish archives, this paper will provide a more complete understanding of the experience of these soldiers.



By May 1944, when all Spanish soldiers and aviators were withdrawn from the Eastern Front and repatriated to Spain, losses in the Blue Division and Legion were high: 4,500 dead, 8,000 wounded, 7,800 sick, 1,600 frostbitten, and 300 prisoners, deserters, or missing: over 22,000 casualties out of the 47,000 total who fought in the division.(2) With the crushing manpower shortage in Germany and the Third Reich conscripting the very young and old, every possible source for combat units had to be tapped. Their open access to Spanish recruits closed, the Germans began to search out other ways to enroll and retain Spaniards in the armed forces of the Third Reich.

Some Spaniards refused to be repatriated at all, though their numbers alone were too few to make a significant contribution to Germany's forces. In Spain, however, potential recruits already had begun to seek out opportunities to enlist in the service of the Nazis. As historian Kenneth Estes has written, Spanish volunteers included "soldiers of fortune, ardent antibolshevists, and those seeking employment and living conditions superior to those of Spain."(3) After the devastation of the Civil War, hunger and unemployment were rampant, and on the dark night of 27 January 1944, Jose Valdeon Ruiz and two of his friends, too young to have served in the Spanish Civil War or Blue Division, sneaked across the Spanish border into France with the firm intention of joining the German army.(4)

Over the next eight months, until the Allies drove the Germans from the Pyrenees, hundreds of Spanish men and boys followed Valdeon Ruiz, crossing illegally from neutral Spain into Nazi-occupied France. The SS even established a special unit in Spain and occupied France, the Sonderstab F (Special Staff F), to recruit these fugitives and provide them with transportation to Germany, work contracts, and identity documents.(5) The Spanish Foreign Ministry and German ambassador in Madrid opposed these activities, as Franco by this time had begun to withdraw aid from Hitler, but elements of the Falange (Franco's political party) and German agencies collaborated in this effort to recruit soldiers for the Nazis.(6) In one week in January 1944, over 100 Spaniards presented themselves at the German embassy in Madrid, attempting to volunteer for military service. As they dribbled across the border, alone or in small groups, these Spanish recruits were taken by train to a holding camp near Versailles, until they reached 300 in number by May 1944.(7)

A third source of volunteers came from Spanish workers already in Germany. At the beginning of the war, Franco had sent 25,000 volunteer workers to Germany. As their factories were bombed and they were displaced by air raids, some of these workers, seeking to leave the country, enlisted in the German merchant marine in hopes of jumping ship in neutral territory. This was also dangerous, however, as Allied air and naval forces ensured that few vessels survived long at sea.(8) Others volunteers, still committed to the Nazi cause, joined the Organisation Todt, a militarized labor force, one of several units of the Waffen-SS, or a Spanish Legion within the Wehrmacht.(9)



Their numbers were supplemented by repatriated veterans of the Blue Division who petitioned the Spanish government to be sent to the Third Reich as common laborers, hoping that their prior service would gain them some kind of preference in contracts. German diplomats and labor representatives were more than happy to sign contracts with these volunteers, but such arrangements were considered invalid by the Spanish government; along with withdrawing his troops, Franco had ended the volunteer worker program in late 1943, albeit with the promise of allowing more workers to go to Germany if needed.(10) Without the official support of the Spanish government, few managed to make it to Germany.

Those who did, along with dozens of other Spanish recruits from elsewhere in the Nazi empire, were then sent to the training base of Stablack-Sud Steinlager in Eastern Prussia. By D-Day, just over 400 had been assembled at this center. At Stablack, the Spaniards were divided into two battalions and deployed to the outskirts of Vienna for eight weeks of training, led by officers who had been liaisons between the Blue Division and the German military.(11) From 8 June to 20 July, another 150 Spaniards joined the Batallon Fantasma (Ghost Battalion), as the unit was called by its soldiers. The name signified two things: first, the unit's shadowy existence in defiance of official agreements between the German and Spanish government; and second, that knowledge of the unit spread throughout the Spanish communities of Europe through rumor and word of mouth rather than through official declarations.(12)

According to the Spanish police attache in Rome, who sent back a detailed report on the unit, the Spanish volunteers insisted to the Germans that they did not want Spanish officers over them; this would reflect unfavorably on the Franco regime, they feared, because Franco had promised the Allies that no Spanish nationals would continue to fight for the Axis. As the unit developed, it had a mix of Spanish and German junior officers, but even those who had held commissions in the Blue Division entered the Ghost Battalion as mere enlisted soldiers, having to earn their rank through merit. The commander of the unit was a former German army artillery officer, SS Captain Wolfgang Graefe, who had been attached to the Blue Division.(13)

While these troops underwent weeks of training to prepare them for the front, other Spaniards were quickly committed to battle. Serving in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security service of the SS, these soldiers, some of whom had been recruited by the Germans from among Spanish Republican exiles, fought and spied against Spaniards in the French Resistance and against the Allies in Normandy. The Spanish embassy in Berlin estimated that in summer 1944 there were as many as 1,500 Spaniards working for German security services in France.(14)

Other collaborationist movements in Europe also provided volunteers for the German armed forces and SS units. For example, approximately 10,000 Frenchmen fought in units such as the Legion des Volontaires Francais (LVF, French Volunteer Legion) and Charlemagne Division of the Waffen-SS between 1941 and 1945. Most of these volunteers were recruited in 1943 and 1944 from members of the Milice Francaise and other collaborationist groups who left France with the Germans to avoid reprisals by the Resistance. Like the Spanish Blue Division, these units fought on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Army, and some, like the Spaniards of the Ghost Battalion, died defending Berlin in 1945.(15) Also like the Spanish enlistees, other Western volunteers joined the Waffen-SS "for such non-idealistic reasons as a desire for adventure, status, glory, or material benefit," as historian George Stein has noted. Fewer, but still a significant percentage, were "adherents of political or nationalist organizations who hoped to improve the fortunes of their movement or to demonstrate their ideological commitment to National Socialism by serving in the SS."(16) Some of the fanaticism among those who remained or joined the Waffen-SS no doubt rested on the fate of foreign volunteers should they fall into enemy hands: repatriation and, in the case of those who came from Allied nations, firing squads or harsh prison sentences.(17)



The Nazis, scrambling to find more soldiers, by D-Day had recruited 450 Spaniards to serve in the Waffen-SS.(18) Spanish diplomats in Germany warned Madrid about this recruitment effort repeatedly during the summer of 1944, but despite Spanish protests, German officials in Madrid claimed ignorance of the matter or an inability to do anything about it.(19) While most recruits were Spaniards already living in Nazi-occupied Europe, to these must be added the 150 Spaniards who crossed into France in June and July 1944.(20)

The Spanish soldiers who had joined the Waffen-SS and other German military units fought most extensively on the Eastern Front, but also in the Balkans, against the Resistance in France, and in the final defense of Berlin in 1945. It is difficult to estimate the numbers of Spanish veterans of the Blue Division who served in the Waffen-SS because German records of these enlistments are scarce. We can say something about the potential manpower pool, however; of the over 40,000 Spaniards who served in the Blue Division and Legion, slightly under 400, excluding casualties, known deserters, and those captured by the Soviet Union, did not return to Spain at the end of their tours of duty on the Eastern Front. Of these, 34 were officers (only one of whom was over the rank of captain), 139 were noncommissioned officers, and 210 were soldiers at the rank of corporal or below.(21) Although exact numbers are unavailable, the best estimate puts the number of these Spaniards who fought in the military and security forces of the Third Reich after June 1944 at just under 1,000.(22)

One Spaniard who established a clear and indisputable record within the SS was Rufino Luis Garcia-Valdajos. Born in 1918, he enlisted in the Blue Division in late 1942, remaining as a volunteer until March 1944, when he remained in Germany rather than be repatriated to Spain. He gained a position with the SD in Paris and worked against the French Resistance until the Nazi retreat forced him to return to Germany in late 1944. There he joined Belgian collaborator Leon Degrelle's SS-Freiwilligen-Grenadierdivision-Wallonie (SS Wallonian Volunteer Grenadier Division) in November 1944. In February 1945, Garcia-Valdajos, now an SS first lieutenant, applied to the SS Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt (RuSHA, Central Office for Race and Resettlement) for permission to marry a German woman living in Berlin, Ursula Jutta-Maria Turcke. After determining that neither Garcia-Valdajos nor his bride had any Jewish ancestry, this permission was granted.(23)

While the case of Garcia-Valdajos is better documented than most because of his request to marry a German, he was not alone in his enlistment. Many of those who left home to enlist in the German army and Waffen-SS were very young, some still in their teens, who essentially ran away from home to sign up with the Germans, much to the consternation of the Franco regime.(24) The Spanish government's attempts to lobby the German government for the return of these men and boys were unsuccessful. As Franco's ambassador in Berlin informed the Spanish Foreign Ministry, Berlin was unlikely to surrender precious laborers and soldiers to an increasingly unfriendly Madrid, especially as these were volunteers who in many cases did not want to return to Spain.(25)



The Allies protested strongly to the Spanish Foreign Ministry about these enlistments in German military and intelligence services.(26) Of particular concern to the United States and the Free French representative in Madrid was the alleged service in the Gestapo of dozens of Spaniards in France and rumors that hundreds more were preparing to join them.(27) The Spanish Foreign Ministry vehemently denied knowledge of any enlistment or service in the German military, indicating that perhaps these soldiers and agents might be Spanish expatriate communists who, for "the spirit of adventure and economic necessity," might have enlisted. In any case, the Spanish government asserted, their numbers could not compare with those of Spaniards enlisting in the ranks of the Allies.(28) According to the Spanish foreign minister, the Spanish government had not and would not authorize the enlistment of Spaniards, Blue Division veterans or not, in German military, security, or police forces, nor allow them to aid German forces in France. The foreign minister did, however, admit knowledge of the many Spaniards who had joined the French Resistance or were fighting for the Allies in Northern Italy. Despite these enlistment on both sides, he declared that Spain would not deviate from its "strict neutrality."(29)

The Spanish Foreign Ministry, despite its statements to the Allies, had extensive knowledge about the illegal service of Spaniards in the Gestapo, Waffen-SS, and Wehrmacht. As early as the spring of 1944, the Spanish Foreign Ministry had confirmed reports from its European embassies that Spaniards were enlisting in German military and intelligence services.(30) This information came, in its most direct form, from Spanish veterans of German service, who began to show up at Spanish legations, consulates, and embassies throughout Europe in early 1944. Often destitute, they told of service in the Balkans, France, and the Eastern Front.(31) While many claimed to have served in the German army, most had worn the uniform of the Waffen-SS.(32)

The Foreign Ministry was also well aware that recruitment of Spaniards occurred in Spain as well as in Nazi-occupied Europe.(33) The Deutsche Arbeitsfront-DAF (German Labor Front) office in Madrid, which formerly had contracted workers openly, was responsible for much of this recruitment, providing papers, funds, and directions to Spaniards wishing to enlist in the Nazi cause. The Spanish Foreign Ministry also suspected that elements of the Falange were aiding Nazi recruitment efforts. In August 1944 one of the foreign minister's deputies sent a letter to Falangist secretary-general Jose Luis Arrese, asking if the party knew anything about a group of 400 young falangistas allegedly preparing to leave Spain for France to join German occupation forces there.(34) For the Spanish government to publicly admit knowledge of Spanish volunteers would have meant admitting it was unable to stop these clandestine activities, however. Franco may also have feared Allied retaliation.



After the dissolution of the Blue Legion, Spaniards served in different units of the German armed forces. Most served in two companies (the 101st and 102d) of a unit in the Waffen-SS, the Spanische Freiwilligen Einheit (Spanish Volunteer Unit), which recruited from Spanish workers in Germany, veterans of the Blue Division, and a few adventurers who had crossed illegally from Spain into German-held France.(35) Others served with Leon Degrelle's SS Division, incorporated into the organization as the 3d Spanish Company of the 1st Battalion. The Belgian unit found it easy to recruit Spaniards from those already serving in Germany, as most Iberians found the Prussian discipline of the Wehrmacht too strict and humorless for their "Latin temperaments."(36)

Throughout the rest of the shrinking Nazi empire, other small units of Spaniards were organized in late 1944 to fight against the Allies in northern Italy, near Potsdam, on the Franco-German border, and elsewhere.(37) The unit in Italy, under the command of a Lieutenant Ortiz, fought against partisans in northern Italy and Yugoslavia. Unlike other Spanish units, it gained a mixed reputation, with accusations of looting, rape, and plunder. Other Spaniards claimed to have served with Otto Skorzeny's commando unit in the Battle of the Bulge.(38)

One of these units, the 101st Company of Spanish Volunteers, fought a desperate rearguard action near Vatra-Dornei, Romania, defending the Carpathian mountain passes against the Red Army. Led by a German officer, this unit contained some 200 men, mostly veterans of the Blue Division and the Spanish labor force in Germany. During the last half of August 1944, these Spaniards fought doggedly until the defection of Romania on 27 August. Turning their backs to the advancing Soviets, on 31 August what was left of the 101st began a slow retreat northwest. Fighting against attacks from both Soviet forces and Romanian guerrillas, deserted by the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, the unit was caught between Soviet armies in Hungary and Romania. At the end of October, the few dozen survivors of the unit finally reached Austria. The 101st and its parallel unit, the 102d, were quartered together in Stockerau and Hollabrunn, north of Vienna.(39) The 102d had fought Tito's Yugoslav Partisans in Slovenia and Croatia during the summer of 1944, where it was as mangled as the 101st. All of these units also suffered from desertions, as individuals and small groups fled the front lines to seek what they hoped would be safety in the hands of the Allies or in the interior of Germany.(40)

Miguel Ezquerra, a veteran of the Blue Division and then a captain in the Waffen-SS, led another small unit into the Battle of the Bulge. He and his men previously had served German counterintelligence in France, fighting against Spanish exiles in the Resistance.(41) Later called the Einheit Ezquerra (Ezquerra Unit), this formation was closely linked to General Wilhelm Faupel, former German Ambassador to Spain, and his Ibero-American Institute, a research center in Berlin that promoted closer Hispano-German and Nazi-Falangist ties.(42) In January 1945, Ezquerra was commissioned to enlist all the Spaniards he could find into one unit, which he would command as a Waffen-SS major.(43) These enlistments greatly troubled the Spanish government, which viewed with alarm news of Spaniards serving in the SS and other Nazi organizations. Apart from the dangers confronting these men, the Franco regime was concerned that they were still wearing the emblem of the Blue Division, a shield with the colors of the Spanish flag, and the word word "Espana" on their uniforms, an obvious and visible compromise of Spanish neutrality. Franco ordered his diplomats remaining in Germany to dissuade Spanish workers from joining the Waffen-SS or German armed forces, but despite the dramatic changes in the European situation, as late as October 1944 some volunteers were still petitioning to be sent to work in Germany.(44)



Even the Ibero-American Institute, long a stalwart ally, had turned against the Spanish party. Still under the direction of General Faupel, in early 1944 the Institute had taken over the publication of Enlace (Liaison), a newspaper for Spanish workers in Germany published by the Spanish embassy in Berlin from mid-1941 to late 1943. Faupel had gained control over the newspaper by paying its debts to the German government. Edited under Faupel's direction by Martin Arrizubieta, a defrocked Spanish Basque priest and former Republican captain in the Spanish Civil War, the newspaper took on a decidedly anti-Francoist bent in the fall of 1944. Promoting a strange mixture of Nazism and Basque separatism, the paper, continuing under its old title, produced a great deal of confusion among the remaining members of the Spanish colony in Germany.(45) Claiming to be both Falangist and National Socialist, the paper insisted that "the salvation of humanity ... is ... in us, the defenders of the New Order."(46) Identifying with Nazism, Arrizubieta promoted anti-Francoist sentiments among Spanish workers, declaring that "if Germany wins the war, it should not respect the Spanish frontier."(47)

Faupel, still bitter at Franco for asking Hitler to replace him as ambassador to Spain in 1937, fought to assert control over the dwindling Spanish community of 1944-45. Together with his wife, Edith, the old general won over the most ardent Falangists left in Berlin. The Faupels hoped to use these collaborators someday to overthrow the Franco regime. Despite the protests of the Spanish embassy, the German government refused to silence Faupel and Enlace.(48)

The Red Army launched its final offensive against Berlin on 16 April, sending into battle hundreds of thousands of men, tens of thousands of tanks and artillery pieces, and an air force that owned the German skies. The city was a fortress, surrounded by five rings of fortifications guaranteed to make the Soviet assault a costly one. Rejecting the pleas of his military and political advisers to fly out of the Berlin pocket, Hitler decided to remain and personally lead the defense of the city, entrusting Joseph Goebbels to embolden the last defenders of Nazism.(49) The Battle of Berlin was an international struggle, pitting Stalin's multiethnic Soviet Army against the outnumbered and outgunned remnants of Hitler's New Order. While the vast majority of Berlin's defenders were Germans in the regular army of the Wehrmacht, Frenchmen, Norwegians, Danes, Italians, Dutch, Romanians, Belgians, Hungarians, and other nationalities, mostly in the Waffen-SS, also defended the dying capital of the Third Reich.(50) In the "apocalyptic atmosphere" of this brutal battle, Spanish accents could be heard from the small band of Iberians remaining in Germany.(51)

Those non-Germans who kept fighting had abandoned their homes and families to fight for the disappearing dream of the New Order. By 1945, this continental vision was confined to a shrunken remnant of Central Europe, stretching from the Alps to the Norwegian Arctic Circle. In the final months only the most deluded could still have expected victory, the rest hoping for a last minute collapse of the Allied coalition.(52) Fantasy was all that remained, with the surviving Spanish soldiers perhaps dreaming of a last desperate battle, where by force of will Germany and its remaining supporters would expel the invaders from the home of the New Order. What else could they do? They had made their choice: 1945 was not a time for second thoughts. For the most part, however, desperation had replaced hope. Surrender meant imprisonment or death at the hands of the Allies. Desertion was still a crime against Germany, punishable by death. In uniform, these exiles could at least hope to die among comrades.



From January to April, the Einheit Ezquerra fought on what remained of the Eastern Front, suffering tremendous casualties without much result. After additional recruiting and transfers from other units, by mid-April Ezquerra cobbled together just over 100 Spaniards for the final defense of Berlin.(53) This recruitment was stymied by the actions of journalist and press attache Rodriguez del Castillo, who used his contacts in the DAF, Nazi party, and Armaments Ministry to secure exit permission, work releases, and safe-conduct passes for several hundred Spanish workers.(54)

Most Spaniards serving in various units of the SS and German armed forces remained at their posts, however.(60) Some, like Miguel Ezquerra, who became a schoolteacher after the war, survived; many did not. Like the millions of Germans and others who laid down their lives to preserve the Third Reich, they did so in the hopes of building a better Europe than the one they had inherited. Whether Falangists or convinced Nazis, the Spaniards of the Ghost Battalion defied their own government to fight for a destructive regime even as it collapsed around them in 1944-45.

Franco, who had boldly declared in 1942 that one million Spaniards would defend Berlin if need be, retreated under Allied pressure from these declarations as soon as the course of the war changed. The hundreds of Spaniards who wore the uniform of the Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht after D-Day made no such retreat. Franco survived the war with his power base intact: they and their ideology did not.

The presence of the Spanish volunteers in the final phase of the Third Reich represented a failure for Spanish foreign policy, which was characterized after 1943 by an effort to end collaboration with Nazi Germany. Ironically, the greatest impact of the Ghost Battalion was to undermine the New Order in Spain. After the war, the Franco regime was branded a collaborationist state, and its subsequent exclusion from the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and the Western alliance structure until 1953 largely resulted from its wartime support to the Nazis, support which it found itself unable to end as cleanly or as quickly as Franco would have preferred.

(1) Fernando Vadillo, Los irreductibles (Alicante, Spain, 1993); Carlos Caballero Jurado, El Batallon Fantasma (Alicante, Spain, 1994); Kenneth Estes, "A European Anabasis: Western European Volunteers in the Germany Army and SS, 1940-1945" (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland), 1984; Mark Gingerich, "Waffen SS Recruitment in the `Germanic Lands,'" Historian 59 (1997): 815-30; Bernd Wegner, The Waffen-SS: Organization, Ideology and Function (Oxford, 1990); Robert Koehl, The Black Corps (Madison, 1983); George Stein, The Waffen SS: Hitler's Elite Guard at War, 1939-45 (Ithaca, 1984); Felix Steiner, Die Freiwilligen der Waffen-SS: Idee und Opfergang (Oldendorf, Germany, 1973).

(2) Gerald Kleinfeld and Lewis Tambs, Hitler's Spanish Legion: The Blue Division in Russia (Carbondale, Ill., 1979), 346; Fernando Vadillo, Balada final de la Divisi, 346; Fernando Vadillo, (Madrid, 1984), 85-86.



(3) Estes, European Anabasis, 165.

(4) Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 11.

(5) Direccion General de Seguridad, Servicio Interior to Doussinague, Subsecretary, Foreign Ministry, 19 June 1944, R2192/31, Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores (hereafter AMAE); Ambassador Vidal in Berlin to Foreign Minister Jordana, 19 May 1944, T77, roll 885, frames 5634559-5634594, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA); Ambassador Vidal in Berlin to Foreign Minister Jordana, regarding the clandestine entry of Spaniards into German-occupied France, 19 May 1944, LegR 2192/31, AMAE.

(6) Carlos Caballero Jurado, "Los ultimos de la Division Azul: el Batallon Fantasma," DEFENSA, October 1987, 58-59; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 13-16.

(7) Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 19-22.

(8) Spanish Police Attache in Berlin Embassy to Spanish Foreign Minister, 8 January 1945, report, LegR2299/3, AMAE.

(9) Robert Brandin, Third Secretary, U.S. Embassy-Madrid, to W. Walton Butterworth, U.S. Charge d'Affaires ad interim-Madrid, 28 July 1944, RG226, OSS E127, box 33, folder 229, NARA.

(10) Delegado Provincial de Sindicatos and the Jefe Provincial de Servicio, Cordoba, to CIPETA, 15 March 1944, T 16262, 13, Archivo General de la Administracion (hereafter AGA); Eberspracher to CIPETA, 9 September 1943, T16256, 5, AGA; CIPETA to the Jefe Provinical de Estadistica y Colocacion, Cordoba, 25 March 1944, T16262, 13, AGA.

(11) Police Attache, Spanish Embassy in Rome, to the Foreign Minister, 30 August 1945, LegR2192/32, AMAE; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 30-33; Estes, European Anabasis, 166.

(12) Fernando Vadillo, interviewed by author, Valdeolmos, Spain, 7 May 1994; Estes, European Anabasis, 166.

(13) Police Attache, Spanish Embassy in Rome to the Foreign Minister, 30 August 1945, LegR2192/32, AMAE; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 32-33.

(14) Spanish Ambassador in Berlin to Foreign Ministry, 18 August 1944, LegR2299/2, AMAE; Miguel Ezquerra, Berlin, a vida o muerte (Madrid, 1975), 27-66; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 38, 40-45.

(15) Bertram M. Gordon, Collaborationism in France during the Second World War (Ithaca, 1980), 244-78, 317-18, 322, 337, 346, 371-72.

(16) Stein, The Waffen-SS, 142.

(17) Gerald Reitlinger, SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945 (New York, 1957), 155-58.

(18) Consul Feijoo, Berlin, to Jordana, 5 June 1944, R2192/31, AMAE.

(19) Various documents, 1944, R2192/31 and R2225/7, AMAE.

(20) Ricardo de la Cierva, Francisco Franco: Un siglo de Espana, vol. 2 (Madrid, 1973), 382.

(21) Internal report, 12 February 1946, LegR2192/32, AMAE.

(22) Berlin Document Center (hereafter BDC) microfilm, T354, A3343, U.S. National Archives; Carlos Caballero Jurado, "Los ultimos de la Division Azul: el Batallon Fantasma," DEFENSA, October 1987, 62 Hans Werner Neulen, Eurofaschismus und der Zweite Weltkrieg: Europas verratene Sohne (Munich, 1980), 170); Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 275.

(23) RuSHA, roll B5052, frames 0656-0722, T354, A3343, BDC.

(24) Various letters from parents and relatives to Spanish Foreign Ministry, LegR 2192/31-32, AMAE.



(25) Ambassador Vidal to Foreign Minister Lequerica, 27 September 1944, LegR2192/31; and various documents, 1944-1945, LegR2225/1, 6, both in AMAE.

(26) British and U.S. embassies in Madrid to the Spanish Foreign Minister, 7 and 11 August 1944, respectively, diplomatic notes, LegR2192/32, AMAE.

(27) Jacques Truelle, Minister Plenipotentiary of the Provisional French Republic to Subsecretary, Foreign Ministry Pan de Soraluce, 8 August 1944, diplomatic note, LegR2192/32, AMAE.

(28) Foreign Minister to U.S. Ambassador, 2 August 1944, diplomatic note, LegR2192/32, AMAE.

(29) Foreign Minister to British Ambassador, 31 August 1944, diplomatic note, LegR2192/31, AMAE.

(30) Raymond Proctor, Agony of a Neutral (Moscow, Idaho, 1974), 263-71.

(31) Luis de Torres-Quevedo, Charge d'Affaires, Spanish Legation in Bratislava, Slovakia (written from Berne) to the Foreign Minister, 21 April 1945, R 2192/32, AMAE.

(32) Feijoo de Sotomayor, Spanish Consul in Berlin, to the Foreign Minister, 5 June 1944, LegR 2192/31, AMAE; Kleinfeld and Tambs, Hitler's Spanish Legion, 345.

(33) Ambassador in Berlin to Foreign Minister, 6 July 1944, R2192/31, AMAE.

(34) Subsecretary Pan de Soraluce to the Secretary General of the Movimiento, 8 August 1944, LegR2192/32, AMAE.

(35) Police Attache, Spanish Embassy in Rome, 23 September 1945, report, LegR2192/32, AMAE; Steiner, Die Freiwilligen der Waffen-SS, 135.

(36) Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 91-96, 100-101; Vadillo interview.

(37) Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 106-7, 218-23.

(38) Police Attache, Spanish Embassy in Rome, 20 August and 23 September 1945, reports, LegR2192/32, AMAE; Estes, European Anabasis, 167; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 80-89.

(39) Ramon Perez-Eizaguirre, interview by author, Valdeolmos, Spain, 7 May 1994; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 53-65, 67-68.

(40) Police Attache, Spanish Embassy in Rome, 23 September 1945, report, LegR2192/32, AMAE; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 68-74.

(41) Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 108-10, 119; Miguel Ezquerra, Berlin, a vida o muerte (Barcelona, 1975).

(42) Spanish Ambassador, Berlin, to Spanish Foreign Minister, 7 December 1994, LegR2299/3, AMAE; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 127-29.

(43) Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 128-30; Ezquerra, Berlin, a vida o muerte, 89-96.

(44) Various CIPETA documents, October-December 1944, T 16259, AGA; Bernardo Acosta and Manuel Lopez to CIPETA, 17 October 1944, T 16258, AGA; Spanish Police Attache in Berlin Embassy to Spanish Foreign Minister, 8 January 1945, report, LegR2299/3, AMAE.

(45) J. L. Yriarte Betancourt, Berlin Territorial Secretary, to DNSE, 11 November 1944, report, P, SGM 54, AGA.

(46) Enlace, 23 November 1944.

(47) Spanish Police Attache in Berlin to Spanish Foreign Ministry, 26 December 1944, report, LegR2299/3, AMAE.

(48) Spanish Ambassador, Berlin, to Spanish Foreign Minister, 7 December 1994, LegR2299/3, AMAE; Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 123-25; Ezquerra, Berlin, a vida o muerte, 92-105.

(49) Werner Haupt, Berlin 1945, trans. Angel Sabrido (Barcelona, 1964), 7-8, 13, 57, 61, 77.



(50) Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms (Cambridge, 1994), 820-26; Jean Mabire, Morir in Berlin. Los SS. Franceses (Madrid, 1976), 91, 151-53, 254, 276; Haupt, Berlin 1945, 71.

(51) Mabire, Morir in Berlin, 11, 310; Steiner, Die Freiwilligen, 329; Estes, European Anabasis, 169, 178-79.

(52) Mabire, Morir in Berlin, 74-76; Haupt, Berlin 1945, 91.

(53) Vadillo, Los irreductibles, 181-84; Ezquerra, Berlin, a vida o muerte, 105.

(54) Gonzalo Rodriguez Castillo, in Copenhagen, to Subsecretary, MAE, 15 May 1945; Col. Marin de Bernardo, Spanish Military Attache in Berlin (from Bregenz), 7 April 1945, report; Carlos Sanchez Alterhoff, in Konstanz, Germany, to Cristobal del Castillo, Subsecretary, MAE, Madrid, 14 April 1945, all in LegR2299/3, AMAE; Los irreductibles, 256-59.

Wayne Bowen is an assistant professor of history at Ouachita Baptist University.


COPYRIGHT 2001 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc. in association with The Gale Group and LookSmart.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group

sham69
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SPANISH SS UNITS?

#7

Post by sham69 » 21 Feb 2004, 21:40

were there any spanish ss units?

Kaan Caglar
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#8

Post by Kaan Caglar » 21 Feb 2004, 21:46

Hi sham69,
Yes the Spanische-Freiwillegen Kompnie der SS 101/2. Look here
Cheers
Kaan

sham69
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#9

Post by sham69 » 21 Feb 2004, 22:16

wow ...what a totally cool webiste thanks -Kaan-

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FANGIO
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#10

Post by FANGIO » 21 Feb 2004, 23:04

Hi all!
Was Miguel Ezquerra Sánchez a RK recipient?
I remember seing a picture with his date of death, that he had fought in Berlin ('45) and that he was a holder of the RK. The names of his relatives appeard also. I`ll try to find that pic.
Best regards.

FANGIO

ninoo
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#11

Post by ninoo » 22 Feb 2004, 09:05


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Kurt_Steiner
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Spanish SS

#12

Post by Kurt_Steiner » 22 Feb 2004, 19:54

Ezquerra even claimed to have meet personally Hitler, who told him the was going to receive the RK. Hovewer, as the end of the war was nearer, he received nothing (It was the day vefore of Hilter's own death, I think...). We only have his testimony, nothing else. Who knows...

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FANGIO
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#13

Post by FANGIO » 22 Feb 2004, 20:05

Thanks Nino for the site.
And thanks Kurt for your help.
Best regards.

FANGIO

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#14

Post by ninoo » 24 Feb 2004, 15:12

Your welcome Fangio.
And if you like it, you could visit my new Waffen-SS site at [url]htttp://stosstruppen39-45.tripod.com[/url]

Regards,
Nino

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FANGIO
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#15

Post by FANGIO » 24 Feb 2004, 16:27

Hey Nino I can't enter your site. Anybody has the same problem?
By the way, here's the pic of Ezquerra's death. I was wrong it doesn't say anything about an RK. The name of his relatives appear:
-Consuelo Reinoso Romero (Wife)
-Consuelo, Pilar and Hèctor Guzmán Grossi (sons)

It also says that he was volunteer in the División Azul and Ostubaf of the Waffen-SS till the fall of Berlin.
He died in Madrid: 29.10.1984.

Best regards.

FANGIO
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