MovieChat Forums > Lacombe Lucien (1974) Discussion > spain

spain

posted 17 years ago by lucyanne359
3 replies | jump to latest

sorry. another question.

albert and france talk about trying to get to spain to be safe. but spain was a fascist country as well under franco. other films i've seen make it appear as though spain was none to tolerant of minorities, and i don't see how they'd feel safe there. was it supposed to be a stopping point on their way to england or the us? or was spain fairly tolerant as long as one didn't resist the fascist regime?

(i'm not a history buff. i apologize if this is some kind of common knowledge.)

[–] heich1 17 years ago

Your second comment is correct. At least 20,000 Jews fled to Spain and the Franco regime did not send them back.
I was in Spain in 1961 and then the only houses of worship were Catholic, other
religious groups could worship in rooms as long as one could not tell what the building was from the outside.

[–] ansoria 13 years ago

Technically, Spain was not truly fascist. It was extreme right-wing. Franco enlisted the aid of anyone who could help him win the Spanish Civil War: Spanish fascists, Hitler, Mussolini...But Franco was no Hitler. In fact, Franco declared Spain neutral in WW2, and denied Hitler permission to go through it in order to reach Gibraltar (that little bit of Spain which belongs to the British) If Hitler had gotten control of Gibraltar, Germany might have won. Franco hated Hitler and Nazism. Hitler was furious about this.

[–] stevekaczynski 8 years ago

I doubt whether Gibraltar would have been so vital to the war's outcome. Franco sent a division (the Blue Division) to fight on the German side on the Eastern Front, which is hardly neutral behaviour (no other "neutral" country in WW2 did that). Except for diehard Spanish fascists who wanted to fight on and were left behind, Franco withdrew the Blue Division when it became increasingly clear Germany would lose the war, but if German victory had looked certain, he would probably have sent more troops or abandoned neutrality altogether and joined the Axis. Spain had been devastated in the civil war and this was the main reason why Franco was reluctant to get into another war.
Serrano Suner, a brother-in-law of Franco, was particularly close to the Axis but lost much of his influence in late 1942. Suner lived until 2003, dying at the age of 101.

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