Yes, in 1945 Franco woke up one morning and decided he had hated Hitler all time. Hatred here is so obvious.
Yes, in 1945 Franco woke up one morning and decided he had hated Hitler all time. Hatred here is so obvious.
“It is fashionable at the present time to dwell on the vices of General Franco and I am glad therefore to place on record this testimony to the duplicity of his dealings with Hitler... I shall presently record even greater services which... General Franco rendered to the Allied cause.”For an A.K. you seem to have a poor grasp of history. I could post hundreds of photos showing various world leaders greeting each other warmly. Such greetings mean nothing; I recall Leonid Brezhnev being kissed on the mouth by Erich Honecker of the DDR once -- did that mean they were in love?
-- Winston Churchill, writing in The Second World War, Volume II.“However general history may judge him, in Jewish history, [Franco] shall certainly occupy a special place... Jews should honor and bless the memory of this great benefactor of the Jewish people...who neither sought nor reaped any benefit from what he did.”
--From a four page obituary in The American Sephardi Journal of the Sephardic Studies Program of Yeshiva University, volume IX, 1978.James Michener in Iberia, 1968, page 547: "...Generalissimo Franco is highly regarded by Jews; during the worst days of World War II, when pressures from Hitler were at their heaviest, Franco refused to issue anti-Jewish edicts and instead provided a sanctuary, never violated, for Jews who managed to make it to Spain. Many thousands of Jews owe their lives to Franco, and this is not forgotten."
In Resolutions of the War Emergency Conference of the World Jewish Congress, Atlantic City, New Jersey, November 26-30, 1944, page 15: "The War Emergency Conference extends its gratitude to the Holy See and to the Governments of Sweden, Switzerland, and [Francoist] Spain... for the protection they offered under difficult conditions to the persecuted Jews of Hungary..."
In The Congressional Record of January 24, 1950, Rep. Abraham Multer quotes a spokesman for the Joint Distribution Committee: “During the height of Hitler's blood baths, upwards of 60,000 Jews had been saved by the generosity of Spanish authorities.”
Newsweek, March 2, 1970: "...a respected U.S. rabbi has come forward with surprising evidence that tens of thousands of Jews were saved from Nazi ovens by the personal intervention of an unlikely protector. Spain's Generalissimo Franco, in so many other respects a wartime collaborator of Adolf Hitler. "I have absolute proof that Franco saved more than 60,000 Jews during World War II," says Rabbi Chaim Lipscitz of Brooklyn's Torah Vodaath and Mesitva rabbinical seminary.
“[Franco], just out of the Spanish Civil War, had no intention of entering another, greater war on either side, and... by setting an unreachable price for Hitler to pay for his cooperation with the Caudillo was "buying peace with words," tightrope walking between two swords, hoping for the entire conflict to go away without any involvement. Despite the Civil War debt to Hitler, Franco resisted the Führer's threats and cajolery and did not permit the Wehrmacht to enter Spain, carry out Hitler's plan to close the Mediterranean to British shipping and consequently force the end of World War II in 1940 before the United States could be ready to enter. The real events depicted in this narrative did occur and this one man's actions, although entirely self serving on behalf of Spain, may well have tipped the balance of World War II in favor of the allies.”
-- Stanley G. Payne, Hilldale-Jaume Vicens Vives Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
One photograph does not make a case. The historical evidence is clear: Generalissimo Franco and Adolf Hitler shared neither common aims nor affection, and to imply otherwise is to impugn the memory of the man who saved Spain from the communist nightmare.