Hitler Stopped by Franco

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I AM NOT AN HISTORIAN. ON THE CONTRARY, I WAS A BROADWAY COLUMNIST AND BEGAN WRITING BOOKS AS SAMMY DAVIS, JR.'S BIOGRAPHER (YES I CAN, 1965). MY ONLY CREDENTIALS AND MOTIVATION FOR writing this historical account are that my wife, Jane, and I visited Spain in 1969 as guests of the Australian tennis player Lew Hoad, who lived there. We found it a beautiful, peaceful place where it took a few years to get a telephone (at that time), and it was therefore better suited for writing a book than the red-hot center of Manhattan, where we had time-consuming family obligations. So we rented a house for nine months to get a good start on a novel set in the world of tennis, later published by Random House as World Class. We stayed for twenty-eight years. At the beginning we had no clue that our landlady was the Chief of State's daughter, Carmen, or that we would become intimately friendly with Carmen and her husband, Cristobal, their children, and their circle of lifelong friends. During those nearly three decades, which included many long weekends with Carmen and Cristobal at their home and at ours, we became aware of Spain's quiet and inadvertent role in World War II. Being writers, and Americans who had been brought up to believe: General Franco—Dictator—Bad, we saw it as an eye-opening, little known World War II story. With our Spanish friends' help we researched it and were given extraordinary access to former Ministers and others who had been there. Among them were General Franco's wife, his brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Suñer, who had been his Foreign Minister and was the only surviving attendee at the meeting between Hitler and Franco in the Führer's train at Hendaye, and his daughter Carmen, who has an extraordinary memory and sense of history. Those who know her refer to her as Franco con falda. Franco in skirts.

When we asked Carmen and Cristóbal to help us make appointments to interview former Cabinet members and high-ranking military, they said, If we call they will, of course, receive you with courtesy. But there is a better way…

Franco owned a finca, a farm half an hour out of Madrid called Valdefuentes where once a year he held a cacerÍa, a partridge shoot, attended by his intimates, the very people we wanted to interview. Franco had died in November of 1975, and it was a few weeks before the spring cacerÍa would take place, for the first time without him.

Carmen continued, "If we invite you to Valdefuentes for the shoot they will see you with us and understand that you are de confianza. When you speak to them later they will be much more forthcoming than they normally would be with foreigners." And so it happened. At lunch at Valdefuentes, a sad occasion as Franco's absence caused many a moist eye; Jane and I were pointedly seated beside Mrs. Franco and Carmen. The message was sent and received. All doors opened.

With such friends we are virtually assured of being called apologists and accused of whitewashing Franco. But the facts are the facts. History does not change by the opinion or the gesture of a friend, not to the right or to the left. I repeat, we Americans, as well as most of the world, were taught to view Franco as a Fascist-anti-Semite-friend-of-Hitler.

Decide for yourself.

PREFACE

GENERALΩSIMO FRANCISCO FRANCO, THE CAUDILLO OF SPAIN, WAS THE MOST TENACIOUS AND MOST SUCCESSFUL OF TWENTIETH CENTURY DICTATORS. HE IS REMEMBERED WIDELY AS THE ASTUTE GENERAL under whose leadership the Nationalist cause was victorious in the Spanish Civil War, and the Communist threat exterminated, and as the head of state who successfully negotiated safe passage for Spain through World War Two, played Hitler off against the Allies, modernized his country and orchestrated the Spanish economic miracle of the 1960s. Having deftly schooled the young prince Juan Carlos to be his successor, by the time of his death in 1975 he had steered a unified Spain to worldwide respectability and envy. To many, the Caudillo was Spain incarnate—a heroic figure to match his predecessors El Cid, Charles V and Philip II…

—FRANCO by Paul Preston

HarperCollins (dust-jacket copy)

The above is historical fact. Our book deals with the element of playing Hitler off against the Allies and keeping Germany out of Spain and Spain out of World War II. This is the story of how Franco did it. It was difficult for him, and dangerous, but the record stands: Germany was not able to use Spain to win the war against England in 1939.

We have novelized this story in order to make history more readable and, one hopes, more widely read. But our material is drawn from interviews and conversations with primary sources, family members who were privy to tightly held information. Personal details such as Hitler's physical gestures, Franco's comments and manner, were told to us by Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco's brother-in-law and Minister of Foreign Affairs at that time. They were: Hitler and Franco; their foreign ministers, Serrano Suñer and von Ribbentrop; and one interpreter each.

Among other people we interviewed were personal friends, and their help went beyond normal interviews. An example: the Marqués de Santa Cruz spent many hours with us at dinner in our home in Marbella reminiscing about his life as Counselor to the Duke of Alba, Spanish Ambassador to London during World War II, who was also a cousin of Winston Churchill. These conversations have been used in the scenes with Alba and Churchill.

Much other information came to us from Mrs. Franco, their daughter Carmen (today the Duchess of Franco), some of General Franco's papers and an eight-page letter written by his interpreter at the meeting, the Barón de las Torres, and interviews with the Baron's son.

The only departure from documentable nonfiction occurs in four scenes with invented dialogue such as Hitler alone with von Ribbentrop, or in his office with his General Staff. Enough has been written on Hitler's manner, dialogue and pendular mood swings for us to portray him with reasonable accuracy. And the historical facts supported by his own letters to Franco concerning those moments make it clear as to what he would have been saying.

Other than those four instances (and the Prologue, which is patently fiction, a nightmare scenario intended to alarm the reader with what might have been) every other statement, every scene, every conversation is faithful to historical fact and is supported by unquestionable sources.

PROLOGUE

May 8, 2005

PUBLIC SCHOOL 81, NEW YORK, N.Y. "GUTEN MORGEN, KINDER," THE TEACHER SAYS, WELCOMING THE CHILDREN BACK FROM TWO WEEKS VACATION IN CELEBRATION OF ADOLF HITLER'S BIRTHDAY, APRIL 20TH. Forty-five years earlier the National Holiday had replaced Easter, Christmas and any other celebrations of God or Jesus Christ. Also abolished and long forgotten are the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and other once-traditional American holidays such as Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July.

The teacher and students extend their right arms in stiff salute to the crimson flag with a black swastika in its center, and they all sing the national anthem, Deutschland åber Allus.

This routine start of the day is taking place in every school in every city in the United States of Germany. English, French and Spanish have not been taught in fifty years. Since the Third Reich conquered the world in 1941, the only language spoken is German, except for Japanese throughout the Orient. There are still some people who remember English, and speak it behind closed doors, but they are dying out, as are the elderly who dare speak French in what had been France.

Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Himmler died of old age and were given funerals befitting their leadership of the world. Hitler's tomb is a glass-enclosed shrine atop his favorite mountain in the Bavarian Alps. These leaders and shapers of the New World have been replaced by young, well-schooled Third Reich party-liners. The print press, Hollywood film industry and all radio and television are strictly controlled by the state under the Reichsaussenminister of Culture, Goebbels, a nephew of Hitler's late propaganda chief. There are no synagogues because there are no longer any Jews, an extinct race. In New York's Manhattan, St. Patrick's Cathedral has been renovated into a mansion for the appointed Governor of the Eastern Seaboard. By law, all government officials, including schoolteachers, must be of pure German descent for three generations. Other churches have been turned into office buildings, gymnasiums and meeting halls or into mansions for lesser political leaders. There is no organized religion, only devotion to the state. All Negroes have been repatriated to African countries. Only a few hundred Jews remain in the world, all elderly or ancient. There have been no young Jews born since 1948, when all male Jews were sterilized by castration. In Hitlerton D.C., the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and other American shrines were razed to make room for a massive concentration camp to house the Jews whose lives were spared for humanitarian reasons. Soon they will be extinct. There are no dollars, pounds, francs or pesetas. The world currency is the Reichsmark.

It began sixty years ago…

1940

THE SWASTIKA FLIES OVER THE WHITE HOUSE, AS IT FLIES ABOVE BUCKINGHAM PALACE, THE PALACE OF ELYSâE AND ALL WORLD CAPITALS. ON THE THRONE OF ENGLAND SIT THE FORMER DUKE AND Duchess of Windsor, brought back from Mr. Churchill's out of harm's way exile, where the Duke served as Governor of the Bahamas, and appointed King and Queen of England by Adolf Hitler.

In Hitlerton D.C., Joseph P. Kennedy, the outspoken isolationist, German sympathizer and former American Ambassador to the Court of St. James, is now Hitler's appointed President of the United States.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, their wrists bound by barbed wire, wearing barbed-wire collars around their necks linked together by short chains, and crowns of barbed wire drawn tightly around their heads, blood dripping from their foreheads, are forced to stand in the rear of an open touring car flying swastikas on its fenders, as they are paraded through New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles as Criminals of War. On their chests are cardboard signs reading: I Killed American Boys, I Killed English Boys, I Killed French Boys. Crowds of silent, helpless Americans watch them. When the vilified wartime leaders of the United States, England and France have been seen throughout the country, they will be returned to Hitlerville, where they are sentenced to be hanged for irresponsible villainy and war crimes on scaffolds erected in front of the former Justice Department. Even if they are dead by then. The nooses will be made of piano wire, Hitler's method of twisting the knife, reserved for special enemies.

In New York City an unknown American patriot shoots a storm trooper in the leg. Immediately, 100 Americans are arrested at random, dragged into the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center and machine-gunned to death in reprisal. On NBC radio H.V. Kaltenborn reads: For every German attacked in any way, 100 Americans will be executed immediately. If this lawlessness continues the quota will rise to 500 Americans executed, or 1000…

The Third Reich has nationalized all media. NBC Radio's David Sarnoff, a Jew, is imprisoned. CBS Radio's William Paley, a Jew, is imprisoned. The New York Times owner and publisher Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, a Jew, is imprisoned. All editorial directors are removed as unreliable and imprisoned.

Concentration camps are being hastily prepared in New York State, Illinois, Florida and Southern California for the dangerous Jewish population until a final solution is reached.

From the White House, President Joseph P. Kennedy speaks to the nation in a manner reminiscent of ex-President Roosenfeld's Fireside Chats, using all the facilities of American radio: NBC's Red and Blue Networks, CBS Radio and the Mutual Broadcasting System, reading an address written by Hitler's chief of propaganda Joseph Goebbels: My countrymen, he intones, "and you are my countrymen, stay in your homes, surrender your arms if you have any. Do not be troublemakers. We Americans have nothing to fear from our friends the Germans and particularly from their benevolent, humanitarian leader, the Führer who dreams and works only toward peace in the world. He has sent his people here to protect our freedom from the eternally troublemaking subversive elements…"

There will be no World War II.

The map of the world is black.

1939

ADOLF HITLER GAZES OUT THE PICTURE WINDOW IN HIS TEA HOUSE AT THE BERGHOF, HIS FORTIFIED MOUNTAIN CHALET AT BERCHTESGADEN, A QUIET TOWN IN THE SOUTHEAST OF BAVARIA. Behind him stand his naval chief Grand Admiral Raeder and the chief of his land forces General Jodl, who has just given him the news that France has fallen with hardly a shot fired, that the invincible Maginot Line was a farce, and at that moment twenty divisions of Wehrmacht are rolling through France, climbing the Pyrenees mountains toward the border towns of Hendaye and Spain's Irún.

Jodl, Hitler smiles, I am looking at my beautiful snow-covered Alps, but what am I seeing?

"The world, Führer."

Hitler beams. "And that, my dear Jodl, is why you command our magnificent Wehrmacht."

Happy to be in the good graces of his master, still Jodl understands the time pressure. England is fighting alone with only economic help from the United States. But one day, soon, there will be the dreaded American presence in Europe. Germany needs to win the war before America arms herself. Despite the strong America First movement, German Intelligence has learned that Roosevelt is secretly planning America's physical entry into a decisive war. Germany does not want such a potentially formidable foe.

Führer, Jodl ventures delicately, our glorious march to world victory is predicated on the condition that General Franco will cooperate…

"Cooperate? COOPERATE you say? Little Franco? He will lick the boots of all German troops entering Spain. If I order it, the GeneralÍsimo will personally carry us piggyback across Spain to Gibraltar."

"But Führer, he has not been notified of the Führer's wishes."

The sight of twenty divisions will notify him. He will know his duty to the Third Reich. He knows who won his Spanish Civil War for him. He knows that if I had not intervened he would have lost his petty conflict and would be in a Communist prison today. Or executed. Hitler smiled benevolently, No, Jodl, have no fear. Little Franco is a friend who will perform his historic role…

And so it passed. The black mass of twenty divisions of the Wehrmacht arrived at Hendaye, and as the vast clouds of dust from all those tanks and personnel carriers settled, the Spanish customs officials at the town of Irún raised the barrier, saluted and gestured for the Germans to enter.

Just inside Spain was a car sent by El Caudillo in which his brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Suñer, Spain's Foreign Minister, waited with the Barón de las Torres, Franco's personal translator.

Serrano Suñer put his arms around the German commander, hugging him in the traditional Spanish abrazo. "Mi General," he said, aided by the Baron's fluent German. "I greet you in the name of the Spanish Chief of State, General Francisco Franco Bahamonde, and bid you welcome to our poor country. What little we have is yours. El Caudillo has provided troops to escort the great Wehrmacht safely through Spain's hazardous terrain to Gibraltar. And eternally grateful Spaniards wish you and the Führers mighty soldiers Godspeed."

The black column snaked its way down the mountains to the coast, and then traveled the dirt road along the Mediterranean through Málaga, Torremolinos, Fuengirola, Marbella and Estepona. At every pueblo the streets were lined with Spaniards waving miniature flags of the Third Reich. The German might rolled through La Linea and onto British-held Gibraltar, which, contrary to general perception, is not an island but part of the Spanish mainland. The few lightly armed British soldiers and English Bobbies offered no resistance to the tanks and personnel carriers of the Wehrmacht.

German U-boats had arrived and closed off the Mediterranean to British shipping. Now, as Hitler had planned, the British would be unable to supply themselves without this inland sea, as the alternative long route to their colonies was impossible. America's foreign aid was only money, and they could not fight without food and raw materials imperative to military supplies.

Contrary to British bluster that if needs be the Government would move to Canada and carry on the war against Hitler, Churchill sued for peace and signed a surrender with Germany's Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The ceremony took place at Buckingham Palace and was followed by the raising of the Swastika atop the historical home of the British monarch. The entire Royal Family was removed to prison in Berlin.

Events moved quickly. Now the Master of Europe and Great Britain, Hitler ordered his troops through Africa, where with nothing to oppose them they gained the land, slave labor and vast mineral wealth of the continent. From Africa they swept over South America and Australia, and quickly the map of the world was dominated by black swastikas. There remained only the United States of America.

By January of 1940 the ships of the French and British navies, sailing under German flags and German command, arrived on the coasts of the United States: Boston, New York, southern and northern California and Norfolk, Virginia. Some, for dramatic impact, sailed up the Potomac River to Washington D.C.

The American navy was almost entirely deployed in the South Pacific. The United States had a standing army of 150,000. Half of them carried twenty-two-year-old rifles from 1918, from World War I, with no ammunition or spare parts. The other half had wooden rifles, for marching. The Third Reich had just landed half a million heavily armed soldiers, battle hardened, and victory hungry.

Facing history's greatest firepower were only the state troopers and municipal police departments, who watched in silence as tanks, personnel carriers with light cannons, 50 mm machine guns and an endless mass of soldiers landed on the shores of the United States…

Note

What you have just read is, of course, fiction. It is what might have happened.

The following is what did happen.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

1940

A MAN APPEARED ON THE ROAD NEAR THE GATES OF THE PALACE OF EL PARDO A FEW MILES OUTSIDE OF MADRID. HE WORE A WIDE-BRIMMED HAT AND A BLACK MUSTACHE AND GOATEE. HIS SKIN WAS VERY white. Even though it was nine-thirty in the evening he wore tinted glasses, commonly used by Mediterranean people. His suit was gray. He had no topcoat. It was May, and the Madrid weather was comfortably warm.

Two Moorish Guards on horseback outside the closed iron gates stood still as the man approached, staring directly ahead as if they had not seen him. On foot there were two sentinels of the Spanish Army. At once their rifles snapped from their shoulders and were held at port arms. A door within the gate opened, and two Guardias Civiles stepped out, members of the federal police force under army command. They wore tricornered patent leather hats, belts and holsters. The color of their uniforms, instead of dark green, was khaki, indicating that they were in the personal service of the Chief of State.[1]

One, a sergeant, spoke to the stranger. Your name, please?

Reed Rosas.

Who do you wish to see?

El GeneralÍsimo, por favor.

The sergeant looked at his subordinate, who with a shrug confirmed that they had not been advised of any further visitor. Are you expected?

No.

The sergeant looked at him with curiosity. People did not drop in on El Caudillo, meaning The Leader, as did Führer and Duce.

The man said, Telephone to the office and inform his Excellency that Reed Rosas would be grateful for an audience. He spoke gently but it was a command. His accent was odd. Southern, yet not true Andaluz, though similar… probably South American.[2]

The sergeant returned to the gate. Inside he telephoned to the palace, to the Captain of the Guardias Civiles. Then he waited for the Captain to telephone to El GeneralÍsimo's aide, who, if he felt it appropriate, would speak to the Chief of State.

Spring rain began to fall. The two mounted Moorish Guards turned their horses toward the sentry boxes on either side of the gates, which had been built to accommodate both horse and rider. Their vigil continued through large windows.[3]

There was the sound of horses' hooves, and two more Moorish Guards approached from the left, while two others approached from the right, all at an easy canter. They passed each other and continued on the ceaseless round-the-palace inspection.

The sergeant returned and escorted the stranger through the door in the gate. In the courtyard were a full company of Infantry and two squads of mounted Moorish Guards, sixteen horses in all.[4]

The tight security was not gratuitous. It was impossible to be too careful, considering that El Caudillo could be assassinated only once.[5]

After the Spanish Civil War members of the Anarchist Party made attempts on the life of the man who had won the war and put them and their Popular Front Party out of power. At the end of the war Franco's headquarters had been in Burgos. When he elected to move to the traditional capital, Madrid, his wife, Carmen Polo, selected the Palace of Larios in the city proper, but the Chief of Security vetoed the site because it was surrounded by higher buildings from which a sniper could shoot at the GeneralÍsimo, his wife or daughter as they walked in the garden. The home that could be protected most efficiently would be outside the city where there was less population; a residence that stood alone and could be completely surrounded. The Francos chose the Palace of El Pardo, which had been built in 1547 by Emperor Carlos I as a summer home and shooting preserve.[6] The palace was made independent of outside services with the installation of emergency electrical generators and a Captain of the Army Engineers whose sole work was maintaining the telephone lines.

A Moorish Guard stood before each of the three entrances to the palace. The Ambassadors' Entrance was almost always kept closed. The second, to the left, was the normal visitors' entrance and only the family used the third, to the right.[7]

A man wearing the livery of the Casa Civil, the organization of domestic servants who operated the homes of the Chief of State, approached the stranger. "I will escort el señor to the office of His Excellency."

They passed through the visitor's entrance and went up a flight of stairs. Then, instead of approaching the office of El Caudillo in the usual way, which would bring them through the aide's office where someone was waiting for an audience with Franco, the guide led the way into a library, which provided a different entrance to the office of the Chief of State. There were four: two leading to offices of his aides, one to the Sala de Consejos in which Cabinet meetings were held, and this one through the library that also led to the living quarters. A Lieutenant Colonel of the Army, seeing the stranger approach, used a key to open a door that, like the other entrances to the office of El Caudillo, had no handle or knob.[8]

Francisco Franco stood in the center of the large room, his body erect, his eyes impenetrable. He wore an army officer's uniform, his waist encircled by the red sash, which denotes the rank of General. There was nothing to show that he alone held the rank of GeneralÍsimo: the General of all Generals. It was hardly necessary. All coins from the Spanish mint bore his right profile and the legend El Caudillo de España por la G de Dios, the leader of Spain by the grace of God; his portrait was on postage stamps of all denominations; the legend is that as he passed through a pueblo and people turned out en masse for a look at their Chief of State, a peasant asked his five-year-old son, Do you know who that was? and the boy replied, The man from the stamps. His photograph was displayed in every governmental office in Spain and in most private homes, even those in which he was little admired. There was not a pueblo or city in Spain without a principal plaza, park or avenue named Franco or El GeneralÍsimo. He held supreme power. In his own words, by edict, "The Caudillo is responsible only before God and history."

The crystal lamps and chandelier in his office had been made by the Royal Manufacturer of La Granja, and dated back to the 1700's, the reign of Carlos IV. The tapestries depicting the battles of Carlos I in Tunis were made in Flanders in the sixteenth century while it was still Spanish territory, ordered by Carlos I for this palace, which he then had under construction. The furniture, all the product of the Royal Cabinetmakers was old, fine and comfortable.[9]

There were no personal photographs in Franco's office. On a marble radiator cover behind his desk were autographed pictures of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XII.[10]

On the right and left of his desk were piles of papers ranging from reports from his ministers to Orders of Execution and Pardon, which required his signature. It was orderly disorder in which Franco knew almost precisely where each document rested. On a table were all newly published books in which an aide routinely underlined passages that El Caudillo would find interesting.[11]

He was accustomed to reading with a pencil in hand, blue or red, the red for underlining what he disliked or saw as danger, the blue indicating favorable reaction. He was a pencil biter while reading or pondering, his teeth touching only a half-inch section in the middle.[12]

When the door closed behind the visitor and the two men were alone, Franco's facial expression softened immediately and he walked toward his guest. Reserved, even when feeling effusive, Franco's abrazo, the hug which close friends exchange in greeting, was only a strong handshake, a rapid, solid, patting of the man's shoulder with his left hand, combined with a brilliant smile.[13]

They sat on a sofa and Reed Rosas peeled off his mustache and goatee, rubbed his face, soothing some of the itch of the adhesive. He slipped off the dark glasses and black wig, revealing blue eyes, which few Spaniards have, and slightly thin silver hair on a head that seemed too large for his body.[14]

Excellency, soon Hitler will turn to a friendly and indebted Spain as his key to the Mediterranean. That is part of the reasoning with which I convinced him to lend aid to the Nationalist cause in 1936. Now he is studying a proposal for the taking of Gibraltar and will want to know if your Excellency is interested in re-integrating the Rock of Gibraltar into Spanish territory, in return for entering the war at his side by allowing him access to Gibraltar and North Africa from your southern shore. All studies on the taking of Gibraltar indicate a near-absolute necessity that the attack be launched from Spanish soil.

Franco made no comment, but he had to be thinking: Hardly a year past a civil war, the country decimated, hungry, and now threatened with another conflict. Of course the return of Gibraltar was alluring, but allowing German troops to pass over Spanish territory for such an attack would end his declared neutrality and officially make Spain a belligerent, at Germany's side.

Your Excellency's knowledge of this document could be useful. Reed Rosas handed a paper to Franco. "It is a summary of a series of reports Hitler is studying. They were filed by the Condor Legion regularly between 1936 and 1939, and they include details on the terrain and weather which the Legion encountered here and how it effected their efficiency. They concentrate especially on the north—where the German troops coming through France would have to enter—as being terrible for flying and worse for infantry and mechanized cavalry. The essence is that if Germany had to invade Spain in order to pass through to Gibraltar it is estimated that to get one fighting man over the Pyrenees and into Spain would require losing from six to seven others who would not survive. Clearly it would be more convenient to be invited to enter.

Failing such an invitation, one must confront the unknown, the erratic nature of Hitler's personality. He is emotional, radical and extravagant when it serves him…

Reed Rosas was re-applying his disguise, using the polished inside of a silver cigarette case as a mirror. Excellency, when one day your guards inform you that there is at the gate a pathetic, disheveled-looking person claiming to be Don Ignacio Moreno de Talavera, a monk who has traveled from Toledo on mule, I hope that you will not turn me away.

It was ten minutes past ten o'clock. Franco's wife and daughter would be expecting him for dinner in twenty minutes. He went to his desk and wrote a résumé of the conversation.

If Hitler was examining the cost and hazards of invading Spain did that mean that he was not confident of Spanish friendship? Or was it simply appropriate prudence?

Ready to leave, Franco rang for the aide who was responsible for the key to his office, who locked and unlocked it only for El Caudillo himself, and the maids who cleaned it in the presence of the aide.[15]

At Puerta del Sol, Madrid's Times Square, Reed Rosas got out of a taxi and disappeared into the densely populated streets, threading his way to the Royal Theater. At midnight, when the performance was over, a silver-haired, fifty-ish gentleman with a rather large head and very white skin left the theater and got into a waiting chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz.

Franco met with his Council of Defense: Admiral Moreno and Generals Vigón and Varela, Ministers of Navy, Air and Army. Speaking principally to Varela he described his information on Hitler's desires with regard to Spain. "The Führer could become impatient and decide to enter without our permission. It would be prudent to anticipate that possibility with a force of infantry in the north. Bearing