Page 106 [106]
OCR
A TIME OF WARS AND COMMON TOTALITARIAN PROJECTS With the advent of the Franco regime in Spain and the beginning of the Second World War, the German presence in Vitoria changed its propaganda priorities. Until the end of 1942 Germany seemed unstoppable in Europe, and its propaganda service concerned itself with building, in its , friendly countries", a feeling of identity with a European and totalitarian focus. Germany would be the country to lead that ,Great Continental Europe”, thanks to its leadership and its technical, technological and military might, thanks to its status of ,vanguard”. This project, evident from the great propaganda effort carried out in local publications like Pensamiento Alavés, lost intensity from mid-1943, after the first great German defeats in the war. Other elements, such as their shared aversion to Bolshevism, led to the creation of other ties, such as the Blue Division, and supported the maintenance of solid relations also from 1943, despite the fact that Francoist Spain began to look, from 1944 onwards, towards another power renowned for its opposition to the USSR: the USA. There is no doubt that Germany tried to become a reference in Spain, and that in many instances, especially between 1936 and 1942/43, Spain was interested in having Germany as a reference. On the basis of this evidence, it was necessary to gauge, beyond the propaganda, the degree of effectiveness of this intense pro-German activity. Reports by local political authorities have helped us to play down the impact of this propaganda on social and identity codes, especially during the development of the Second World War. In a city like Vitoria, small but very complex and varied in terms of identities and ideologies, we know that the sentiment was not unanimously pro-German during the war. On the contrary, and as the reports show, Basque nationalism and the political left, present in the city despite being persecuted by the Franco regime, showed their sympathies to the allies clandestinely, and hoped that a defeat of Germany would return democracy to Spain, ridding it of Franco. However, Franco’s skilful strategy, redefining Spain’s place in the world depending on the progress of the war, negated this possibility. This paper is a first approximation to a phenomenon, that of the existence of a solid and convinced German project which, through military support and strong propaganda, sought to influence a new sense of identity in Spain, based on the projection of an idea of Europe governed by Germany and in which Spain, and Spaniards, had to make an effort to fit in. Through our approach, focused ona small city that is complex yet eminently conservative and with strong identity traits, the effectiveness of this attempt is played down. However, at the same time, it opens up a path for research that is as rich as it is little explored: that of the variables of the scope, the impact and the different contextual determinants that, beyond the narrow geographic limits of our “micro” study, this German propaganda effort had not only in Spain, but also in Europe andperhaps even beyond. - 105 +
