Book Review: Hitler's Shadow Empire

Hitler's Shadow Empire:Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil WarPierpaolo BarbieriHarvard University Press, 2015The common thumbnail characterization of the Nazi government's involvement with Francisco Franco's Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War that began in 1936 has been one of a dress-rehearsal of some kind, an informal preview of the territorial expansions on which Hitler would later embark in earnest elsewhere. Both Hitler and Benito Mussolini's Fascists sent arms, equipment, and men to Franco's cause, and the tyranny Franco established, complete with concentration camps and systematic repression, bore in its initial form all the dark imprints of its Nazi sponsors. Pierpaolo Barbieri, in his engrossing new book Hitler's Shadow Empire, brilliantly swaps out this thumbnail caricature for a far more satisfyingly complex picture. He opens his account with a quick look at the growth and economic success of present-day Spain and uses that very prosperity as a springboard to looking back to the past:

Quite literally, half-forgotten bones lurk beneath the arid Iberian soil. Successful as the society built on them has become, these bones creep up in the most unexpected places. In a fit of Nietzchean recurrence, they return: in courts, in politics, and in culture. Silenced though they have been, silent they are not.

The standard Nazi concentration on Lebensraum was, in the mid-1930s in Franco's Spain, significantly less primary-color, and Barbieri's chronicle concentrates not so much on Spanish issues as on the main architect of the Nazi financial system, its Minister of Economics (and former Reichsbank President) Hjalmar Schacht, a proud, opinionated figure who was brought to power by Hitler two years prior to the war in Spain. “Until mid-1937,” as Barbieri writes, “Nazi economics was – to a large extent – Schachtian economics,” and Hitler had turned to him in a crisis:

There was no way around it: in the summer of 1934 Nazi Germany faced a financial dilemma. Summoning the successful president of the Reichsbank to Bayreuth was part of Hitler's plan to solve the crisis so that he could focus on other pressing political issues. A few weeks earlier, he had unleashed the Gestapo on his own SAs and other political rivals, including the former chancellor. The bloodbath, in what became known as the “Night of the Long Knives,” gave Hitler more power, while pleasing the conservative armed forces, the Wehrmacht. Yet managing the domestic and international backlash required the chancellor's full attention. With Schmitt out and the financial crisis unresolved, it was time for a new face: at Bayreuth Hitler offered Schacht the Economics Ministry.

Barbieri concentrates the bulk of his narrative on bringing to light the Nazi aims in Franco's Spain, and he cannily sifts the evidence on how Franco himself responded to those aims by his most important ally. That there was no love lost between Franco and Hitler comes as no surprise, tyrannical dictators being by a wide margin the chanciest choice of friend, but Barbieri is both comprehensive and quotable on the mercenary strata that lay always just underneath the cordial international relations. “Only after September 1939 were Franco an his government able to successfully resist German economic penetration and debt repayment,” he writes. “World war yielded unexpected benefits to Franco. Debts are rarely paid when creditors are obliterated.”And it wasn't just in Franco's Spain that seismic shifts were felt in the late 1930s, as Barbieri makes clear. In 1938 Hitler replaced Constantin von Neurath as Foreign Minister with Joachim von Ribbentrop, a sharper change than it appeared on the surface. Von Neurath hadn't especially enjoyed his job, but he'd wanted his successor to be “almost anyone but Ribbentrop.” The advent of this man who was so detested by so many signaled a much larger change in the very nature of Nazi government, as Barbieri writes:

The “former champagne merchant,” as he was often referred to, was fervently devoted to Hitler. According to a pithy Goebbels, however, he had “bought his name, he married his money, and he swindled his way into office.” The contrast with his aristocratic, conservative predecessor was stark. Mussolini later complained that Ribbentrop belonged to the “category of Germans who are a disaster for their country, for he [talked] about making war right and left, without naming an enemy or defining an objective” - and that was coming from Mussolini. Schacht was not the only one on the way out; along with him went the last remnants of traditional conservatism from the Nazi Cabinet. Zeal remained.

Francisco Franco learned early and quite sharply to be wary of that particular zeal, which goes a long way toward explaining how his regime was able to survive its Nazi and Fascist benefactors by thirty years, transmuting and even maturing that whole time. For his part, Hitler and his new hyper-zealous government turned their efforts away from the kind of “shadow empire” Barbieri so readably describes in favor of the more overt and brutal versions we typically associate with Nazi Germany. And the whole of it, from the German and the Spanish perspective, feels revelatory in Barbieri's handling. The book's a remarkable feat of re-assessment.