Spain Joins the Anti-Comintern Pact

On 27 March 1939, as the Republic lived its last hours in the middle of its final collapse, Franco’s government joined the Anti-Comintern Pact. 

This was an agreement between Germany and Japan signed on 26 November 1936. It was a brief document.  The goal of the Comintern, it said, was “the disintegration of, and the commission of violence against, existing States by the exercise of all means at its command” and that its activities “threaten the general peace of the world”. The two signatories agreed to “keep each other informed concerning the activities of the Communistic International, will confer upon the necessary measure of defense, and will carry out such measures in close co-operation” and to invite other countries “whose internal peace is menaced by the disintegrating work of the Communistic International” to join them.  Italy signed on in November 1937. The Japanese postcard with the pictures of Adolph Hitler, Fuminaro Konoe, and Benito Mussolini shown here celebrates “Three Friendly Countries”. 

The Italians and Japanese had been pressuring the Franco government to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact for months but, fearful of antagonizing France and Great Britain, it had tried to delay until the war was over.

The document signed by the Francoist government included a number of annexes. It had already signed an agreement on policing with Germany in July 1938 that focused on potential political threats. The new annex committed the two countries to take “strict measure against anyone who, within the country or outside it, works directly or indirectly for the Communist International or collaborates in its disruptive activities” and to create a “permanent committee” to “study and decide upon any additional measures needed to fight [its] activities”. 

On 23 August 1939, only five months after Spain’s adhesion, Japan renounced the Pact to protest against the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, although in 1940 it would sign the Tripartite Pact directed against the United States and the Soviet Union. The Anti-Comintern Pact was renewed in November 1941, again with Spain, which by then had tens of thousands of troops (the Blue Division) fighting alongside the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, as one of the signatories.