Franco Remains Dead

Does this surprise anyone?

The Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, whose apologists usually claim that he protected Jews, ordered his officials to draw up a list of some 6,000 Jews living in Spain and include them in a secret Jewish archive.

That list was handed over to the Nazi architect of the so-called "final solution", the German SS chief Heinrich Himmler, as the two countries negotiated Spain's possible incorporation into the group of Axis powers that included Italy, according to the El País newspaper today.

The newspaper printed the original order, recently unearthed from Spanish archives, that instructed provincial governors to elaborate lists of "all the national and foreign Jews living in the province ... showing their personal and political leanings, means of living, commercial activities, degree of danger and security category".

Provincial governors were ordered to look out especially for Sephardic Jews, descendants of those expelled from Spain in 1492, because their Ladino language and Hispanic background helped them fit into Spanish society.

"Their adaptation to our environment and their similar temperament allow them to hide their origins more easily," said the order, sent out in May 1941.

The order creating Spain's Jewish archive treated Judaism as a racial identity, rather than a religious one, referring to "this notorious race" and casting its net wide in a way not seen since the Inquisition sought out false converts to Roman Catholicism.

Such people, it warned, "remained unnoticed, with no opportunity of preventing their easily-carried out attempts at subversion".

Liberal fascists. Har-rumph.