The work, titled Under the mantle of the Caudillo. Nazis, fascists and collaborationists in Franco's Spain, of which he is the author Professor José Luis Rodríguez Jiménez (Contemporary History Area), supposes the first overall study on political refugees in Franco's Spain, with preferential attention to those who felt a ideological harmony with the winning side in the Civil War, although attention is also paid to the OAS.

Specifically, it delves into the fact that Spain was the European country that welcomed the largest number of Nazis, fascists, extreme rightists and collaborators with the Third Reich starting in the second half of 1944., once the course of the Second World War definitively changed direction. In a dictatorial and then fascistic regime, It was the Caudillo who authorized these escapees to settle in Spain or enter the country in transit to South America.: Spanish politicians, military and ecclesiastics they provided protección to people with whom there was, at least, ideological harmony, although not necessarily convergence of interests. This help materialized by providing them places to hide from Allied intelligence, sometimes new identities, sometimes means to live for a while.

The book addresses both the quantitative and qualitative data, since eIn no other country did such a representation of intermediate and high-level cadres from fascist and far-right organizations come together., included leaders of governments and political parties. Yes ok For three decades Léon Degrelle was the only leader of a fascist party welcomed in Spain, the situation changed with the arrival of poglavnik of the Independent State of Croatia, Ante Pavelić, because this is the highest-ranking fascist leader and prominent genocidal, among those who managed to flee at the end of the war. At that time he was already in Spain Vjekoslav Luburić, who was possibly the most relevant among the military commanders responsible for war crimes and genocides who were not brought before a court. Furthermore, in Spain there were other figures responsible for this type of crime, such as Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Commissioner General for Jewish Affairs in Vichy France, and Karl Bömelburg, SS-Sturmbannführer and head of the Gestapo in France, and several south american rulers, the main one philonazi Juan Domingo Perón, to which we must add several dictators, like the Cuban Fulgencio Batista and Venezuelan Marcos Pérez Jiménez, and offspring of dictators, the most famous Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, alias Ramfis.

Una part of the propaganda work carried out by escaped Nazi criminals and Nazis who decades later left Germany to avoid control of their books and statements had given support for the extreme right and current neo-Nazism. Nazis refugees in Spain, Degrelle and Skorzenyas well as some Spanish fascists, introduced the current in Spain of the denialism, who denies that there was an organized plan behind Nazi racial policy for the elimination of different ethnic groups in Europe, centered in the population of Jewish culture and origin. Their followers have tried to whitewash the Nazi past to accept Nazi history and its ideology without complexes.

Yesterday, April 1, diario El País published a news and review about the book. For read it (under subscription) sigue this link.

• Photography 1: news of the murder of Croatian general Luis Luburic in the Levante newspaper
• Photography 2: Léon Degrelle, in his mansion in Constantina (Seville)