The meeting at Hendaye

On the afternoon of 23 October 1940, at the railway station in Hendaye, a small French town on the border river Bidasoa, Adolf Hitler met the Spanish head of state, General Francisco Franco. They were accompanied by their foreign ministers: Joachim von Ribbentrop and Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law, who had headed Spanish diplomacy for a week. It was the only meeting between the two dictators. They discussed the terms on which Spain might enter the war on the side of the Axis and help Germany take Gibraltar. In return Franco demanded French Morocco, the Oran district and large deliveries of grain, fuel and weapons. Hitler, who had spoken with Pierre Laval the day before and was to meet Marshal Philippe Pétain the next day, had no intention of handing out the colonies of France, which he wanted to win over as an ally. The talks, interrupted only for dinner, went on into the night, and their sole fruit was a secret protocol in which Spain undertook to enter the war at an unspecified date. Years later Francoist propaganda turned Hendaye into a tale of a cunning Caudillo who outwitted Hitler and saved Spain from the war. The surviving documents present a picture far less flattering to Franco.

“Non-belligerent” Spain

Spain emerged from the Civil War in April 1939 in ruins. Bread, fuel and raw materials were scarce, transport was in disarray, and the country depended on deliveries of grain and oil that came across seas controlled by the Royal Navy. Franco owed his victory largely to Germany and Italy, and in March 1939 he joined the Anti-Comintern Pact, but after war broke out in September 1939 he declared neutrality, because he could afford nothing else.

The defeat of France in June 1940 changed the calculation. On 12 June, two days after Italy entered the war, Spain exchanged neutrality for “non-belligerence”, a formula borrowed from Mussolini, and on 14 June it occupied the international zone of Tangier. Franco’s envoy, General Juan Vigón, handed Hitler a letter on 16 June offering to enter the war, and on 19 June the Spanish ambassador in Berlin set out the price: Gibraltar, the whole of French Morocco, the Oran district in western Algeria, largely inhabited by Spaniards, the enlargement of Río de Oro and Spanish Guinea, and deliveries of weapons, food and fuel. The Germans, confident at the time that the war would soon be over, received the offer coolly. The Spanish press clamoured for Gibraltar, while Vichy aircraft bombed the British fortress in retaliation for Mers-el-Kébir, and in September, after Dakar, subjected it to much heavier raids.

When it became clear in the summer that Britain had no intention of giving in, Gibraltar began to interest Hitler’s staff officers. In July Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr and an expert on Spain, went with a group of officers to inspect the fortress from the landward side, and in August Hitler approved a general plan for its capture, later named Operation Felix. Taking Gibraltar would close the western entrance to the Mediterranean to the British, but it required a march through Spain, and therefore Franco’s consent.

Serrano Suñer in Berlin

In September Franco sent his brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Suñer, Minister of the Interior and president of the Political Junta of the Falange, to Germany to settle the terms of Spain’s entry into the war. In talks with Ribbentrop on 16 and 17 September and with Hitler, Serrano Suñer repeated the Spanish demands; the whole of French Morocco, he said, belonged to Spain’s “living space”, and Portugal, “geographically speaking, had no right to exist”. He was in for a cold shower, however. Ribbentrop haggled over every ton of grain and fuel, and in return for help demanded one of the Canary Islands as a German base, bases at Agadir and Mogador with “appropriate hinterland”, shares in the mines of Spanish Morocco and repayment of the debts from the Civil War. Serrano Suñer, who had expected to be received as a valuable ally, was treated as the representative of a satellite state. The two ministers quickly came to loathe each other. The Spaniard was in Berlin when the RAF bombed the city, and on 27 September he watched the signing of the Tripartite Pact as a guest.

Franco’s surviving letters to his brother-in-law from those days show that it was not Serrano Suñer who was the hawk of the family. The Caudillo wrote rapturously of the Führer’s “lofty vision and good sense”, and blamed the unpleasant demands on the selfishness of his subordinates. By the end of September, however, he had grown more cautious: word was beginning to reach Madrid that the invasion of England was being delayed and that the war would last longer. Franco therefore decided that Spain’s accession to the Axis should be set down in a secret protocol that would guarantee its gains and leave it the choice of the moment.

Hitler, too, was in no hurry to pay the Spanish price. At a further meeting with Serrano Suñer it was agreed that the unresolved questions would be deferred to a meeting between the Führer and the Caudillo. At his meeting with Mussolini at the Brenner on 4 October Hitler explained that if the French learned of promises to hand their African possessions to Spain, the colonies might go over to de Gaulle. After the failed expedition to Dakar, where Vichy forces had repulsed the British and the Free French, Pétain’s government seemed to him a more valuable partner than ruined Spain. On 11 October the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, noted his own opinion and that of Walther von Brauchitsch that Spain’s internal situation was “so rotten” that it made her useless as a political partner, and that Gibraltar would have to be taken without her active participation. The next day the invasion of Britain was postponed until the spring, and Hitler looked for other ways of defeating the British, the Mediterranean among them.

On 16 October Franco reshuffled his government. The pro-British foreign minister, Colonel Juan Beigbeder, who learned of his dismissal from the morning papers, was replaced by Serrano Suñer, and the Ministry of Industry and Commerce went to the Falangist Demetrio Carceller. Mussolini wrote to Hitler on 19 October that the change gave assurance that tendencies hostile to the Axis had been removed in Spain, but added that her non-belligerence was more advantageous to the Axis than her participation in the war. In those same days Spain was visited by Heinrich Himmler, who agreed police co-operation with Serrano Suñer and, according to some sources, also oversaw security arrangements for the meeting at Hendaye.

Hitler’s journey west

Hitler set off for the south of France in his special train to find out whether Franco’s aspirations could be reconciled with winning Vichy France over to a common front against England. On 22 October, at the small station of Montoire-sur-le-Loir near Tours, he received Vichy’s deputy prime minister, Pierre Laval. The next day he travelled to Hendaye, and on the way back, on 24 October, he was to meet Pétain at Montoire. The historian Paul Preston calls this journey a reconnaissance: Hitler did not go to Hendaye to force Spain into the war immediately, but to compare what Franco and Pétain could give him and how much it would cost him.

On the platform at Hendaye, while waiting for Franco’s train, Hitler, according to his interpreter Paul Schmidt, explained to Ribbentrop that he could not give the Spaniards any binding promises at France’s expense, because “with these talkative Latins” the French would sooner or later find out about them, and the whole French colonial empire would then go over to de Gaulle. He still wanted to persuade Pétain to wage active war against England.

The late train

Franco came from San Sebastián, which he had reached by car from Madrid, in an old saloon carriage that had once carried King Alfonso XIII. The train pulled into the station just after 3 p.m., according to most accounts eight minutes late, owing to the poor state of the Spanish track. This trivial delay gave rise to one of the most enduring legends of Hendaye. Franco’s hagiographers later claimed that the Caudillo had deliberately kept Hitler waiting in order to throw him off balance, and Paul Schmidt in his memoirs even wrote of an hour’s delay. Neither contemporary reports nor Serrano Suñer’s accounts confirm this. Franco had no reason to irritate Hitler, and the delay angered him so much that he threatened to dismiss the officer responsible for the journey.

Hitler and Ribbentrop waited at the steps of the carriage. Franco, in military uniform, was visibly moved; photographs show him beaming. Hitler, in party uniform, greeted him with the words: “At last my long-held wish is being fulfilled, Caudillo.” The two men inspected a guard of honour and then went to the saloon car of the German train. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel noticed that the rifles of the Spanish guard of honour were so rusty that they were unusable. The two countries’ ambassadors, Eberhard von Stohrer and General Eugenio Espinosa de los Monteros, were not admitted to the talks. Only the dictators, their ministers and interpreters sat at the table: Gross on the German side and the Baron de las Torres on the Spanish. According to Serrano Suñer and the Baron de las Torres, Paul Schmidt entered the carriage only towards the end, but the surviving fragment of the German record of the conversation is attributed to him.

Two monologues

Instead of the conversation Hitler had expected, there were two monologues. The Führer described the military situation, explained at length and somewhat defensively why England had not yet given in, laying stress on the weather over the Channel, and developed his vision of a great front against the British made up of Germany, Italy, Spain and France. That, he explained, was precisely why meeting the Spanish demands in Morocco was difficult: he needed France’s co-operation, and if France went with Germany, her territorial losses would have to be made good with British colonies. He added a remark that must have been a bitter pill for Franco: if co-operation with France proved possible, the territorial gains of the war might be smaller, but so would the risk, and it was better to achieve a smaller success quickly than to wage a long war. According to some accounts Hitler proposed that Spain should enter the war in January 1941, and that German troops would take Gibraltar and hand it over to the Spaniards.

Franco replied with an equally lengthy discourse, delivered, as Schmidt remembered, in a monotonous, sing-song voice that reminded him of a muezzin’s call to prayer. He spoke of Spain’s historic rights to Morocco and of the country’s hunger and ruin, listed the supplies it needed, asked whether Germany could send 100,000 tons of wheat at once, demanded heavy artillery and aircraft, and assured Hitler that the Spaniards would take Gibraltar themselves. What irritated Hitler most was when he repeated the view that even if England were conquered, the British government and fleet would fight on from Canada with the support of the United States. The Führer leapt to his feet and declared that there was no point in continuing the conversation, but after a moment sat down again.

The account of the Spanish interpreter, written down on 26 October and later used by Serrano Suñer in his memoirs, adds to this scene threats from Hitler, who supposedly said that he was master of Europe and had 200 divisions, and an offer of Oran that Franco is said to have honourably declined. Preston considers this document unreliable, since there is nothing of the kind in the surviving part of the German record, and turning down Oran contradicts what Spain had been demanding for months.

Dinner and the secret protocol

The first session ended at 6.05 p.m. Serrano Suñer and Ribbentrop talked separately, after which everyone dined in Hitler’s dining car. Keitel, who spoke with the Führer during the break, recalled that he was very displeased with the Spaniards’ attitude, would gladly have broken off the talks, and was particularly irritated by Serrano Suñer, who, in Hitler’s view, “had Franco in his pocket”. The Spanish minister, for his part, did not hide from Ribbentrop his surprise that Hitler’s new line on French Africa nullified Spain’s maximum demands.

The ministers were instructed to prepare a secret protocol. The German draft bound Spain to enter the war when the Reich judged it necessary. By the time the Spaniards left, the text had not been agreed. As Franco’s train moved off, it jolted so violently that the Caudillo nearly fell onto the platform; General José Moscardó held him up. Between two and three in the morning, in San Sebastián, Franco and Serrano Suñer reworked the draft, softening the commitment, and before dawn Ambassador Espinosa de los Monteros took it back to Hendaye. Ribbentrop rejected the Spanish amendments, which, as Serrano Suñer himself admitted, he did not tell Franco.

It is often written that the protocol was signed at Hendaye by the two foreign ministers. In fact only its text was agreed at the station. According to Spanish accounts, copies of it reached Madrid at the beginning of November, and only then did Serrano Suñer sign them, sending the German and Italian copies back by courier. In the protocol Spain declared its readiness to accede to the Tripartite Pact and to the German–Italian Pact of Steel, and undertook to enter the war against England at a time to be fixed by the three powers “by common agreement”, once its military preparations were complete. Since it was Spain that decided when its preparations were complete, in practice the choice of the moment lay with Franco. The only firm German promise was Gibraltar. On Africa, a vague assurance sufficed that Spain would receive territories there to the extent that France could be compensated.

“I would rather have three or four teeth taken out”

The first reports from Hendaye were optimistic. Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that everything had gone smoothly and that “Spain is firmly ours”, and Ribbentrop expressed his satisfaction to Galeazzo Ciano by telephone. Private opinions were different. According to Schmidt, on the way back from Hendaye Ribbentrop railed against the “Jesuit” Serrano Suñer and the “ungrateful coward” Franco, who owed the Germans everything and now would not join them. Hitler’s army adjutant, Gerhard Engel, told Halder that the Führer had fulminated against the “Jesuit swine” and “misplaced Spanish pride”. Franco, for his part, complained to his brother-in-law that the Germans were “intolerable”, because they wanted Spain to enter the war for nothing, and that without a binding commitment on territory they would give it nothing after victory.

On 28 October in Florence Hitler told Mussolini about his talks. According to Ciano’s notes he said then that rather than go through that again he would prefer to have three or four teeth taken out. He added that Spain could count at most on a considerable enlargement of Spanish Morocco, and that the moment of her entry into the war depended on the completion of her military preparations.

The Hendaye myth

After 1945 Hendaye became a pillar of Franco’s image as a wise statesman who had “kept Hitler at arm’s length” and saved Spain from the war. It was spread by Spanish propaganda and in part also by Western politicians, who during the Cold War needed an anti-communist dictator. In 2006 an examination of the EFE agency’s negatives showed that the contemporary photographs from Hendaye had been retouched: Franco’s face had been altered, as his eyes were closed in the original, a German decoration had been removed from his uniform, and the figures had been arranged so as to hide the difference in height between the two dictators.

Historians, above all Paul Preston, have shown that in the autumn of 1940 Franco wanted to enter the war on the side of the Axis, and that he differed with Hitler over the price, not the direction. He was counting on a colonial empire at the expense of defeated France, won almost without fighting, at a moment when England was already close to collapse. Three factors kept him out of the war: the catastrophic state of the Spanish economy, dependent on British and American supplies; British obstinacy, which pushed the expected end of the war further away; and Hitler’s unwillingness to pay for Spain with France’s colonies. Serrano Suñer himself claimed years later that had Hitler promised Franco French Morocco, Spain would have entered the war in October 1940. Some scholars, on the other hand, stress that even then Franco was telling Hitler things he did not want to hear, and that in the months that followed his procrastination became increasingly deliberate.

Significance

The day after Hendaye Hitler met Pétain at Montoire, and their handshake became the symbol of French collaboration. On 28 October Italy attacked Greece, and Mussolini’s setbacks in Greece and at Taranto, where British aircraft torpedoed Italian battleships, led Hitler to take Spain more seriously. Directive No. 18 of 12 November announced the capture of Gibraltar under Operation Felix, and on 18 November Hitler received Serrano Suñer at the Berghof. From then on, however, it was Franco who applied the brakes: on 7 December he told Canaris that Spain could not enter the war in January, and a few days later Hitler halted the preparations. Further pressure, Hitler’s letter of February 1941 and Franco’s meeting with Mussolini at Bordighera on 12 February 1941 changed nothing, and the troops earmarked for Operation Felix were needed in the east.

Spain formally remained outside the war, but it was not indifferent to the Axis. After Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941 it sent the Blue Division to the Eastern Front, supplied Germany with wolfram and other raw materials, and German submarines and intelligence made use of its ports and territory. Gibraltar survived the war and in November 1942 became the headquarters of the Allied landings in North Africa – in precisely those French colonies that Franco had demanded at Hendaye. Spain returned to full neutrality only in 1943, when the outcome of the war was already decided, and its dictator, who outlived Hitler by thirty years, owed this in large measure to the fact that in October 1940 he did not get what he wanted.