Celebrating the Condor Legion

From the start of its intervention in Spain, the Nazi regime made every possible effort to keep its support for the rebels as secret as possible, initially through transport planes and then through the deployment of the Condor Legion. However, this changed completely following Franco’s victory on April 1, 1939. The return of the so-called Spanish combatants (Spanienkämpfer) was turned into a grand propaganda spectacle. Tanned by the Spanish sun and wearing the khaki uniforms of Franco’s forces adorned with new military decorations, the members of the Condor Legion were greeted by Hermann Göring, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. They became the stars of a week of receptions, parades, and speeches. From May 31 until June 6, when the Legion was dissolved and its members returned to the regular army, German media published numerous images of the legionnaires signing autographs, receiving honors, and marching in parades where they were showered with flowers and cigarettes.

Why such ostentatious theatricality after so much secrecy? Franco’s victory created a new reality, and the Non-Intervention Agreement, to which the Nazi regime had been a signatory, was history. There was no longer any need to hide German support for the rebels. Additionally, these celebrations were directed primarily at the German public, presenting the members of the Condor Legion alongside the aviation heroes of World War I and the “martyrs” of the Nazi movement as a new generation of war heroes. They were the first to fight directly for Nazi objectives in Europe—the struggle against international Bolshevism.

The Völkischer Beobachter, the official organ of the Nazi Party, as well as military magazines like Der Adler, celebrated the Condor Legion as the embodiment of the new German army, with its members depicted as the “Führer’s soldiers.” This image was complemented by the Legion’s military victories and its real superiority in the Spanish theater of war, which, following the forced reduction in the size of the military in 1919, helped create a new pride in the restored strength of the German army.

Film was used to achieve the widest possible communication of this message. The documentary Fighting Against the Enemy of the World (Im Kampf gegen den Weltfeind) was shot in 1939. It was to be followed by the never-completed drama The Condor Legion.

The memory of the Condor Legion did not completely disappear after the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945. Although the Federal Republic was based on a consensus of the complete rejection of Nazism, in the Bundeswehr—the West German army created in 1955—some of the old commanders of the Legion were remembered as positive examples for many years. This practice was only ended by decision of the Ministry of Defense in 2005.

SB