The Blue Division

On 20 August 1941 the first trains carrying soldiers of the Spanish Blue Division (División Azul) left the Grafenwöhr training area in Bavaria. In Spain its official name was the Spanish Volunteer Division (División Española de Voluntarios); in the German Army it was the 250th Infantry Division. Some 18,000 volunteers, most of them Falangists and regular soldiers, had completed five weeks of training in Germany and were now on their way to war with the Soviet Union. They were commanded by Major General Agustín Muñoz Grandes. Francisco Franco’s Spain had not declared war on the USSR and officially remained a “non-belligerent” state, but its soldiers, in German uniform, were to fight shoulder to shoulder with the Wehrmacht.

Popular chronologies state that on 20 August the division was “formed” and “began moving to Poland”. The first part of this needs correcting. The decision to send volunteers was taken in Madrid in the last days of June, the first transports left Spain on 13 July, and the division became a Wehrmacht unit on 31 July, when its soldiers swore an oath of loyalty to Hitler. On 20 August training ended and the move east began. The second part is closer to the truth, although Poland was not the destination. The trains took the Spaniards to East Prussia, to Suwałki, which the Germans had annexed to the Reich in 1939, and to Grodno – that is, to the lands of pre-war Poland. From there the division set off on foot on a march of almost 1,000 kilometres to the front.

“Russia is guilty”

Spain emerged from the Civil War in 1939 devastated and exhausted. When the world war broke out Franco declared neutrality, and in June 1940, after the fall of France, he changed it to “non-belligerence”, which meant open sympathy for the Axis without taking part in the fighting. In the autumn of 1940 the dictator was ready to enter the war in return for Gibraltar and France’s colonies in North Africa, but at Hendaye Hitler was unwilling to pay that price, and in December Franco refused to set a date for an attack on Gibraltar. Spain stayed out of the war, above all because it was in no condition to wage one: there was a shortage of bread, fuel and weapons, and supplies of grain and oil depended on the consent of the British blockade.

The German attack on the USSR on 22 June 1941 gave the regime an opportunity to side with the Reich without declaring war on Britain. To the Francoists the Soviet Union was the chief author of the misfortunes of the Civil War, since it was Moscow and the Comintern that had supplied the Republic with arms and advisers. On 22 June itself the Foreign Minister, Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law and the most pro-German of his ministers, proposed to the Reich’s ambassador in Madrid that volunteers be sent to the front. The Council of Ministers backed the idea, and on 24 June Berlin accepted it, although the German Foreign Office had rather been hoping for Spain’s formal entry into the war. That same day Serrano Suñer addressed a crowd of students and Falangists from the balcony of the Falange headquarters on Calle de Alcalá. His cry “Russia is guilty!” – guilty of the Civil War, of the death of the Falange’s founder José Antonio Primo de Rivera and of “the crimes of communism” – became the slogan of the whole enterprise. After the rally some of the demonstrators stoned the British embassy.

Franco agreed to send the division for several reasons. He was a committed anti-communist and wanted to repay Germany’s debt of gratitude for the Condor Legion, and at the same time to show Hitler that Spain stood on his side even if it could not fight Britain. Taking part in the “crusade against Bolshevism” was also meant to secure Madrid a voice in Europe after the expected German victory. Historians also point to a domestic calculation: sending thousands of the most hot-headed Falangists to the front relieved the dictator in the quarrels between the Falange and the army, which were very bitter in the summer of 1941. Madrid later explained that Spain was neutral in the war between the Axis and the Western powers, but not in the struggle against communism. On 17 July, on the eve of the anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, Franco declared in a speech to the National Council of the Falange that the Allies had “lost the war”, a statement received with indignation in London and Washington.

The volunteers and their commander

The Falange and the army argued over the shape of the division. The Falangists wanted a party unit with a commander from their own ranks; the Army Minister, General José Enrique Varela, who disliked Serrano Suñer, insisted that it be a military formation. Franco largely sided with the army. It was agreed that the rank and file would be volunteers, but that the officers and NCOs, roughly half of the cadre, would come from the regular army. Those considered for command included General Juan Yagüe, who was close to the Falange, and the Falangist José Antonio Girón, but in the end the choice fell on Muñoz Grandes. He was a veteran of the war in Morocco, a corps commander in the Civil War and, in 1939–1940, secretary-general of the Falange with ministerial rank – a man acceptable to both sides. From 1940 he had commanded the troops in the Gibraltar area and was regarded as a resolute advocate of Spain entering the war on the Axis side.

Recruitment ran from 27 June to 2 July. Recruiting offices were opened in every provincial capital, and there were far more volunteers than expected – the military academies accepted only half of the officers who came forward. According to English-language studies, more than 18,000 men had volunteered by 2 July; some Polish publications speak of as many as 70,000 applicants, from whom 18,000 were chosen. Spanish figures give 18,104 men sent to Germany. German documents list a slightly smaller number, around 17,900. The volunteers included Civil War veterans, legionnaires and soldiers of Moroccan units, but also a great many students from the Falangist SEU union and young men who had been too young to fight in 1936–1939. Prominent Falange activists signed up, among them the poet and head of propaganda Dionisio Ridruejo. The ranks also included several dozen Russian émigrés with Spanish citizenship, employed as interpreters. Spanish historians point out, however, that not all were volunteers out of conviction: some hoped in this way to erase their own or their family’s Republican past, and in some army units “volunteers” were designated from above. The soldiers were promised double pay, Spanish and German, and allowances for their families.

Since Spain was not at war with the USSR, the men could not leave in Spanish army uniform. A symbolic outfit was therefore devised, combining all the forces of the camp that had won the Civil War: the blue shirt of the Falange, the red beret of the Carlists and the khaki trousers of the Spanish Legion. The unit took its popular name from the colour of the shirts. At the front the Spaniards wore ordinary Wehrmacht uniforms with a shield in the national colours and the word “España” on the right sleeve, but many Falangists wore the blue shirt with its collar turned out over the tunic. Volunteer airmen were recruited alongside the division. From them the Blue Squadron was formed, which after training in Germany fought on the Eastern Front as part of the Luftwaffe from the autumn of 1941.

Grafenwöhr and the oath

On the afternoon of 13 July the first train of volunteers left Madrid’s North Station, seen off by a crowd and a speech by Serrano Suñer. Within ten days nineteen transports had set off from Madrid, Seville, Valencia, Burgos, Vitoria and other cities. At the border at Hendaye the soldiers changed to German trains and travelled across occupied France, where at some stations they were greeted with insults and stones, and then through the Reich, where they were given an enthusiastic welcome. Between 17 and 23 July all the transports reached Grafenwöhr, a large training area in the Upper Palatinate.

There the division was reorganised on the German pattern. Instead of four infantry regiments, as in a Spanish division, it had three – the 262nd, 263rd and 269th, known after their first commanders as the Pimentel, Vierna and Esparza regiments – plus the 250th Artillery Regiment and anti-tank, reconnaissance, engineer and replacement battalions. The Spaniards were issued German weapons and uniforms. Madrid had assumed that the division would be motorised, as the whole German army was imagined to be. In reality it received several thousand horses and wagons, like most German infantry divisions, and the city-bred volunteers had a great deal of trouble handling them. The German instructors had planned training lasting several months. At Muñoz Grandes’s insistence it was cut to about five weeks.

On 31 July the whole division took the oath on the parade ground at Grafenwöhr. It was received on Hitler’s behalf by the commander of the Replacement Army, General Friedrich Fromm. At the Spanish side’s request the wording of the military oath was altered: the volunteers swore “before God and on their honour as Spaniards” absolute obedience to Adolf Hitler as supreme commander of the German armed forces “in the struggle against communism”, rather than without any reservation, as German soldiers did. The ceremony was broadcast on German radio. From that day the Blue Division was formally the Wehrmacht’s 250th (Spanish) Infantry Division, earmarked for Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre, which was advancing on Moscow.

20 August: eastwards

On 19 August loading of equipment and supplies began, and on 20 August the first trains left Grafenwöhr. They travelled north by two routes, via Leipzig and Berlin or via Chemnitz and Cottbus, and then along the old Prussian Eastern Railway through the lands of Polish Pomerania, annexed to the Reich in 1939, and East Prussia. They were unloaded at stations in East Prussia, at Suwałki and at Grodno, which since 1 August had belonged to the Białystok District under German civil administration. The last transports arrived around 27–28 August.

From there the division had to march. The railways in the western USSR were either destroyed or taken up by traffic for the fighting armies, and the promised lorries never materialised. The Spaniards set off for Smolensk via Grodno, Lida, Wilno (Vilnius) – which they reached around 8 September – Molodechno, Minsk, Borisov and Orsha. The march lasted more than a month, in rain and over roadless country, and the soldiers, who in Spain had imagined a lightning war, cursed their uncomfortable German boots and overloaded packs. German reports from those weeks are full of complaints: about poorly maintained weapons, lost bicycles and vehicles, horses dying from neglect, slovenly uniforms and free-and-easy manners. The Spaniards traded with the local population, courted the girls and ignored German prohibitions. In Grodno, where they were quartered at the turn of August and September, there were clashes with the German military police because the soldiers shared food and cigarettes with starving Jews. Polish memoirs from the Suwałki and Grodno regions portray them as friendly towards the local Catholic population and different from the Germans; historians warn, however, against idealising a division whose soldiers also looted and destroyed in occupied Russia in the years that followed.

The Spaniards expected to take part in the advance on Moscow, which Hitler had postponed until the autumn after his August disputes with the generals. This did not happen. On 26 September, as the division was approaching Vitebsk, an order came to change direction. Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb, whose Army Group North was stuck before Leningrad, needed reinforcements, and according to the American historian Raymond Proctor the command of Army Group Centre, alarmed by reports from the march, did not want the Spaniards in the front line of the Moscow offensive. The division was placed under the 16th Army and taken by rail from Vitebsk via Dno to the area of Novgorod. At the beginning of October it took over a sector of front some 50 kilometres long on the Volkhov river, running north from Novgorod, with its headquarters at Grigorovo on the outskirts of the town, and on 12 October it fought its first engagements.

On the Volkhov and before Leningrad

The first winter was the hardest for the Spaniards. In October 1941 part of the division crossed the Volkhov and seized a bridgehead on its eastern bank, but in December, under pressure from Soviet counter-attacks and in frosts reaching −30°C and below, it had to withdraw to the western bank. In January 1942 a ski company crossed the frozen Lake Ilmen to relieve an encircled German garrison; according to Spanish accounts, of more than 200 men only a dozen or so came back from the expedition without wounds or frostbite. In the spring and summer the division took part in the destruction of the Soviet force on the Volkhov, in which General Andrei Vlasov was captured in July 1942. The soldiers whom Nazi propaganda cast as crusaders also left less glorious traces behind them: in Novgorod they used historic Orthodox churches as firing positions and quarters, and the iconostases of some churches ended up as firewood.

In the summer of 1942 the division was transferred to the 18th Army, on the southern sector of the ring of the siege of Leningrad near Pushkin and Kolpino. In December 1942 Muñoz Grandes – in whom, historians believe, Hitler saw a possible successor to Franco – was recalled home, and command passed to General Emilio Esteban Infantes. On 10 February 1943, during the Soviet Operation Polar Star, the Spanish positions at Krasny Bor were attacked by forces many times larger, supported by tanks. According to Spanish figures the division lost more than 1,100 killed, more than 1,000 wounded and some 90 missing that day and had to give up Krasny Bor, but the Red Army failed to break through the German front there.

Place in the war

The Blue Division was the most visible sign that Francoist Spain, although formally outside the war, stood on the Axis side in 1941–1943. Alongside it, Germany received from Spain the tungsten needed to produce armour plate and shells, and Wilhelm Canaris’s Abwehr watched the Strait of Gibraltar from the Spanish coast. The division did not change the course of the Eastern Front – it was one of more than 150 Wehrmacht divisions fighting the USSR – but for Hitler it mattered politically. In his table talk he praised the Spaniards as soldiers who “never yield an inch of ground”, and in January 1944 a separate commemorative medal was instituted for them, the only one of its kind in the Wehrmacht.

When the tide of war turned, the division became an embarrassment for Franco. After the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942 and the defeat at Stalingrad, the British and Americans put increasing pressure on Madrid, and in September 1942 Serrano Suñer was replaced by a more cautious foreign minister. On 1 October 1943 Franco announced a return to strict neutrality, and in October he ordered the division’s withdrawal. Some of the volunteers – between 2,000 and 3,000 according to various sources, mostly Falangists – did not want to go home. They were formed into the Blue Legion, which Spain also recalled in the spring of 1944, and the last die-hards fought on until the end of the war in Waffen-SS units, some of them in the defence of Berlin.

Some 45,000 Spaniards passed through the division and its successors on a rotation basis. According to the most frequently cited figures, about 5,000 of them were killed (the number 4,954 is given) and more than 8,000 wounded; German studies put the number killed at 3,500–4,500. Several hundred were taken prisoner by the Soviets. Because Franco’s Spain and the USSR had no diplomatic relations, the 286 surviving prisoners did not return home until April 1954, after Stalin’s death, aboard the ship Semiramis. Their return was a major event in Spain, and the memory of the division, celebrated by the Francoists for decades, still provokes controversy in Spanish public life.