There is something faintly preposterous about the pairing of these names—Franco and Hitler—so radically different in scale and in the range of associations they evoke. And yet, as Stanley Payne shows in Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II, published earlier this year by Yale University Press, we can profit greatly from an account of their peculiar connection.

Payne is perhaps the foremost American historian of 20th-century Spain. Now emeritus at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he has written books on the Falange (the Spanish fascist party founded in the early 1930s), on the Franco regime, on Spanish Catholicism, and on Basque nationalism, among others, as well as a comparative study of fascism. Several of his books shed light on the Spanish Civil War, "probably the most mythic event of the twentieth century," as he observes in Franco and Hitler, and the only event in modern Spanish history with which the general reader is likely to be moderately familiar. (No wonder, then, that popular images of that conflict deal almost exclusively in caricatures.)

In part because modern Spanish history is largely ignored (so that we don't come to it with the background we bring to accounts of France or Germany or Russia or even Italy in the 20th century), and in part because any history seen up close is messy and complicated, Payne's books require multiple readings (unless the reader in question is a fellow specialist). The first time through The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933-1936: Origins of the Civil War (published by Yale in 2006), I had to reread many pages on the spot, so dizzying were the acronyms representing the wild variety of political parties. But the books are worth the effort, and the more you read, the more players you recognize. And if you are moving back and forth between Payne's own books and books by other historians covering some of the same territory, you will increasingly appreciate his scrupulously nonpartisan approach.

Here are some of the salient points that emerge in Franco and Hitler. First, the distinctive character of fascism in Spain was bound up with Catholicism. The early months of the Civil War, when the violence was most intense, "produced the most extensive and violent persecution of Catholicism in Western history, in some ways even more intense than that during the French Revolution." Don't suppose that Payne romanticizes the Nationalist cause—not in the least. He is quite clear about the orgies of violence on the other side as well, directed against Republicans. But unlike many historians—Antony Beevor, for example, in his recent history of the Civil War—Payne doesn't gloss over or rationalize the murderous anti-Catholic rampages. Within a very short time, lines were drawn such that Catholics—even those who had been sympathetic to the Republic—identified with the Nationalist cause:

The military soon responded in kind, and before long their whole cause became closely identified with Catholicism. Franco's troops were soon participating en masse in open-air misas de campana (field masses). La Cruzada would eventually become an official synonym for the entire war effort. Catholicism, not fascism, became the main emotional, psychological and even to some extent ideological support of the Nacionales.

Moreover, there was a marked anti-modern spirit to the movement, a

neotraditionalist revival that affected all culture and mores—even if its effects were often more apparent than real. An equivalent neotraditionalist revivalism had never taken place so officially or extensively in any other Catholic country in modern times, or for that matter in any Christian country during the preceding century.

And here Payne draws a striking parallel: this Spanish "crusade" became "the nearest Christian equivalent to Islamist neotraditionalist revivalism in the Middle East and elsewhere."

Second, this sense of leading an embattled neotraditionalist revival—very much tied to an idealized vision of Spain's Golden Age and a desire to reestablish Spain as an imperial power—formed the basis for Franco's understanding of Hitler, especially at the peak of Germany's triumphs early in World War II:

Franco saw Hitler as an instrument of divine destiny, who would somehow right the wrongs of the deserving nations of Europe, of which Spain stood at the forefront. Since in historical hindsight this notion seems ludicrous, it should be remembered that Nazi and Fascist propaganda was very active in fostering the image of the Axis states as new kinds of powers that would break up the dominance of the Western liberal and Soviet empires. Hitler had been redrawing the map of much of central and east-central Europe, while, ever since World War I, German imperialism had made a special appeal to the Islamic world and both Italy and Germany would be very active in this regard during World War II. Such themes were expounded even more widely and vigorously by the Axis's Asian ally, Japan.

Much later, Franco and his propagandists had the effrontery to suggest that he had cunningly contrived to maintain Spain's neutrality. On the contrary: Franco was quite ready to join the Axis. What kept that from happening (apart from Hitler's calculation, for a time, that his plans would be best served by Spain's quasi-neutrality) was Franco's insistence on what Spain should get in return. The country was in terrible shape economically; moreover, Franco and his inner circle nourished fantasies of a Spanish empire in Africa, inconsistent with German priorities. Dickering over this and that deferred the decision until the certainty of Germany's defeat became clear.

Readers of Jonah Goldberg's bestseller Liberal Fascism would be well advised to follow that up with Franco and Hitler. Goldberg provides a valuable corrective to the slack use of "fascism" as an epithet—still alive and well, alas, as Chris Hedges' American Fascists demonstrates—and he is a witty writer with a sharp eye for intellectual hypocrisy. But he is too impatient to take account of evidence that doesn't fit his argument. He says almost nothing about fascism in Spain, and when he does mention Franco, it is only to exaggerate his role in saving Jews from Hitler (a subject that Payne treats carefully).

What happened in Spain does not give any credence to the notion that passionately orthodox Christianity (Catholic, evangelical, or otherwise) is inherently "fascist" in its tendencies. Indeed, Payne shows how Hitler's loathing for the church fueled his contempt for Spanish culture and the Spanish people—"he particularly detested the Spanish Catholic Church," Payne notes:

Conversely, Hitler considered Islam, with its simple theology and ethos of holy war, the best of the major religions. He believed that the highest culture ever seen in Spain was that of the Muslims, since it was so refreshingly non-Christian, and later lamented that the Muslim expansion had been checked in France. Hitler conjectured that if the Germans had been converted to Islam, rather than to decadent love-oriented Christianity, they might have conquered the world in the Middle Ages.

But if the story Payne tells gives no comfort to those for whom Christianity is essentially fascist, neither does it lend itself to triumphalist accounts. Like many historical narratives, it shows how easily Christian "crusades" go off the rails. It is full of dark ironies and inadvertent consequences.

None of this means that we are left awash in relativism. Indeed, we can only understand the story if we attend to its moral dimensions. (In his characteristically understated style, Payne remarks that "Franco was never able to understand the moral and ideological commitment of the Western Allies to war against Hitler, but continued to interpret it in traditional terms of the balance of power, according to which it seemed to make little sense.") It is a cautionary tale that warns us against pride, excessive certainty, moral smugness, even when in some respects our cause is clearly just.

I hope you will read the entire book, but if you don't have the time for that, you might at least read Chapter 6, which recounts the only face-to-face meeting between Franco and Hitler, at once mundane and bizarre. The Nazi leader found it excruciating to listen to Franco prattling on; "he seemed petty and provincial, a rigid and narrow-minded chatterbox 'with the manners of a sergeant-major.'" Is it possible that Hitler saw in Franco a parodic simulacrum of himself, a man who had somehow risen to godlike status yet remained all too human?

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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