Great escapes

There was a hill ringed by wooded parkland and crowned by a castle, looking out over the deep blue of the Mediterranean. There was an old town with quiet streets, narrow and wandering enough to be picturesque, but not so narrow that they weren’t filled with sunlight. There was a restaurant serving excellent food at a terrace which was neither inside nor outside, but in a tall arcade, keeping it cool as well as light-filled and airy.

Those are my memories of Denia, in the Spanish province of Alicante. Sights of charm. A wonderful meal. An atmosphere of peace and pleasure.

In the old town in Denia

But, it seems, plenty of others have found it charming, and not all were particularly savoury. That’s what makes the subject worth writing about, so I was happy to accept the recommendation of our great friend, Ana Cervera, to dedicate a blog post to it. That suggestion turned out to be just as interesting as the last one she made.

Let’s start with ‘The Tungsten King’, Johannes Bernhardt.

Tungsten is a rare metal used in armaments production. Spain has quite a lot of the stuff. Bernhardt was a businessman who organised shipments of the metal to his native Germany. When the Spanish army mutinied against the legitimate government in 1936, he acted as an intermediary between one of the rebel Generals, Franco, and Hitler. Within days he was travelling in a three-man delegation to see Hitler and obtain his support for rebels. 

Flying to ask Hitler to help the Spanish rebels
Bernhardt (second from the left) is carrying Franco's letter

He told Hitler that “world Judaism and Freemasonry have decided to turn Spain into a Soviet Republic”. 

Hitler poured in aid, starting with planes to carry Franco’s troops from North Africa to Spain to join the mutiny. Along with Italy under the Fascist dictator Mussolini, Hitler provided major and crucial support to the rebels, while the democracies stood by doing nothing and only the Soviet Union provided some help, at a high price, and with serious strings attached. 

Bernhardt had served with distinction in the First World War. That, but above all his role in assisting trade between Spain and Germany – in which he made a fortune – won him the rank of General in the German military. And not in any old service either, like say the army. Oh, no. Bernhardt was a General in the SS.

Bernhardt moved his family to what came to be known as ‘the house of the German’ in Denia at the end of the thirties. He moved there himself after the defeat of the Nazis. Later, when when the Allies began to push Franco to give up people on their ‘Black List’ of 104 Nazi war criminals, one of them Bernhardt, he lost his nerve. Although none of the people on the list were ever handed over, he decided in 1953 to move to Argentina, where the then Dictator, Juan Perón (the one married to Evita, famed in the musical called after her), was as accommodating towards former Nazis as Franco himself. Bernhardt lived there in comfort until his death in 1980. 

Anton Galler, clean-living young fellow,
if you don't count murdering civilians

Then there was SS Captain Anton Galler who organised the 1944 assassination of 560 Italian civilians in the town of Stazzema. Men and women were killed, and at least 107 children, the youngest 20 days old. Well, perhaps not the youngest: after one of the eight pregnant women had been murdered, the killers cut her womb open so the baby could be killed separately.

In 1955 SS Major Gerhard Bremer also moved to Denia. He decided that it was time the sleepy little fishing port developed a tourist business. He built an estate of bungalows which could be rented to visitors, most of them from Germany, and built a thriving business around it. There are some who still remember with gratitude the employment he brought to the town.

Gerhard Bremer
with a couple of nice Aryan girls to go with his SS flashes

Less talked about are his parties, where the municipal band would turn up to perform, and he would emerge in full SS uniform, accompanied by his wife in traditional Bavarian dress. The parties lasted from 1971 to 1980, so well after the transition of Spain back to democracy, and Bremer himself lived there until his death in 1989. No one ever held him to account for the eighteen Canadian prisoners of war his unit murdered in the days following the Normandy landings.

The Denia municipal brass band
playing at one of Gerhard Bremer’s parties

Nor were Bremer’s parties the only ones thrown by the fugitives. Yearly on 20 April, local Nazis would meet in a restaurant to celebrate Hitler’s birthday.  That custom continued until the end of the 1980s. 

Let’s not miss out the most picturesque of these characters. That’s Otto Skorzeny, another SS Major, also known as ‘Scarface’. That’s because he carried a deep scar down his left cheek, the result not of an accident, but of a bizarre student pastime of sabre duels designed to leave such wounds, as a proof of virility.

Otto Skorzeny, complete with scar and little friend

He became famous during World War 2 for having overseen the rescue of Mussolini after Italy’s surrender, before the dictator could be handed to the Allies. He also ran an operation to lead men wearing Allied uniform behind enemy lines, with a view to murdering Eisenhower and other leading officers. He was dubbed the most dangerous man in Europe by the Allies.

After escaping Allied captivity, Skorzeny showed up in Denia too. And later got out, because one of the things the Denia Germans did well, was to organise escape lines for Nazi refugees who needed to move somewhere still safer. Skorzeny chose Argentina – yep, that was something of a destination of choice during Perón’s time. There he became a bodyguard to that much-sung Evita. Which leaves me thinking, “don’t cry for her, Argentina”.

Franco’s Spain, Perón’s Argentina. Hardly examples of what we might think of as exemplary conduct, right? But then, what about the Western Allies themselves?

With a great deal of help from the Soviet Union, they defeated Germany and Italy, the two major Fascist powers of the three in Europe at the time. Then, however, they stopped, leaving the junior partner in that club, Spain, untouched. Many exiles from the overthrown Spanish Republic had hoped that the Allies might indeed not stop with those two, but press on to Madrid (and maybe Lisbon) to cleanse the Continent of the whole lamentable bunch.

But, just as they didn’t intervene to stop Franco seizing power, they didn’t oust him later. And why? Because even before the World War was over, the Western Allies were preparing to take on the next enemy, ironically the very ally they’d relied on so heavily, the Soviet Union. Franco had stayed out of World War 2, apart from sending a division of volunteers to fight the Russians (which was OK in the Western powers’ book, even if the Russians were allies just then), and had never fought the Allies themselves (which deserved top marks). So Franco may have been a bastard, but he was their bastard. They had a cold war to fight against the new enemy, the Soviet Union, and if he was prepared to help, they were happy for him to stay.

As for the Spanish, well, terribly sad that they had to put up with 40 years of Fascist dictatorship, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Collateral damage and all that, don’t you know.

That meant that a load of war criminals got away without being prosecuted. Well, we don’t live in an ideal world. Compromises sometimes have to be made. We need to be pragmatic, even though that sometimes involves us in doing things that, viewed in a harsh light, might admittedly seem distasteful.

In any case, take a look at what happened to old Scarface, Otto Skorzeny. Not only did the Western Allies do nothing to bother him too much (he died of cancer in 1975). Far more astonishingly still, Mossad, the Israeli secret service, has publicly admitted that it recruited him for operations against German scientists working for the Egyptian military.

Curious, isn’t it? If even the Jewish state is prepared to collaborate with an ex-SS officer and former holder of the ‘most dangerous man in Europe’ prize, just how far has pragmatism gone? And what more can we sensibly say?