Spain Under Franco

Franco is remembered as Hitler’s Spanish understudy, a fascist who crushed a young democracy. The record tells a different story, and this book lays it out myth by myth.

The Spain Franco rose against was already sliding into revolution. Churches were burning, and the leading opposition deputy was murdered by a squad that included state police. Once the war began, thousands of priests, monks and nuns were killed.

Franco won that war against a side increasingly dominated by the Communists and armed by Moscow.
He met Hitler at Hendaye and kept Spain out of the Second World War. When the Cold War came, he gave America its air and naval bases in Spain, and Eisenhower embraced him in Madrid. He scrapped the failed state controls of the 1940s and opened Spain to markets and foreign capital.

Spain then became one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. He restored the monarchy, trained the king who succeeded him, and left the institutions through which his own parliament voted in democracy.

You come away with the side of the story the textbooks leave out, and the documents to back it up.