Sebastián de Romero Radigales and Spanish diplomats in Greece

Franco’s diplomacy was successful in taking immediate control of the Spanish embassy in Athens. In August 1936 Sebastián de Romero Radigales, the consul of the Spanish Republic in Chicago, seen in the photo, abruptly submitted his resignation and went to the Greek capital, where in effect he occupied the embassy building and appointed himself diplomatic representative of the de facto government of Burgos. Ramón Abella, the Republican ambassador serving in  Athens, fell ill and died in October of that year.

With the assistance of the Italian embassy, Romero was able to propagate the ideals of Franco’s Spain by issuing weekly press releases, thus gaining the support of a large part of the Greek bourgeois intelligentsia. More importantly, Romero managed to monitor the smuggling of supplies -arms and food- from the USSR to the Spanish Republic through Greek waters, compiling weekly “blacklists of smuggling ships”.  Romero obtained his information from within the Metaxas government, shipping circles in Piraeus and London, and Francoist diplomats in the Balkans, but also from the crews of the ships involved in the smuggling operation. 

Having signed the Non-Intervention Agreement, the Metaxas government did not react in the face of the Spanish diplomatic coup d'état in Athens. However, like many other governments, it circumvented non-intervention. Metaxas supported smuggling in Spain and made no real effort to conceal it. This was manifested in reports in the Greek press, mainly in the summer of 1937, regarding the capture or sinking of Greek-owned ships. 

The diplomacy of the Spanish Republic reacted rather passively, abandoning the Athens embassy to Romero and sending the Republican diplomatic representative, the Jewish diplomat Máximo José Kahn Nussbaum, to the consulate of “Sephardic Thessaloniki”. The latter’s attempts to claim the embassy in Athens and control the smuggling proved unsuccessful. 

The victor of the diplomatic civil war in Athens was Sebastián de Romero Radigales, who continued to serve in Athens as consul during the Second World War and then as ambassador during the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949. He was posthumously credited with saving hundreds of Greek Jews from the Nazi death camps, and in 2014 was declared by Yad Vashem to be Righteous Among the Nations. Máximo José Kahn Nussbaum fled to Latin America, where he became a member of the Spanish exile intelligentsia and distinguished himself as a writer.

DF