238 ChaPter^5
power of the Catholic Church in Spanish politics. Franco asked Germany and
Italy for help, and both Hitler and Mussolini offered support [in 1937 the air
forces of both countries brutally attacked the Spanish village of Guernica,
depicted in the famous Pablo Picasso painting]. The Spanish government
looked to the West for aid but Britain, France, and the U.S. did little, both
because of their policies of appeasement and isolationism and due to pressure
from the Catholic Church to stay out of the civil war there. To the Catholics
and Franco, the Spanish Republic was dangerous and leftist. Consequently,
even though the Spanish government was not communist, the only country
to come to its aid was the Soviet Union. Since Hitler had gained power in
1933 Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, stood virtually alone in calling for action
against the German leader, since his ideology aimed to destroy not just Jews
but Communists too.
In what was something of a preview of the coming war, the Germans and
Italians stood with Franco against the Soviets and the Spanish government.
In 1939, the Republic fell and Franco and his right-wing supporters took over,
becoming associated, though not officially allied, with Germany. Between
1933 and the Spanish Civil War, Hitler had become increasingly aggressive—
rearming, leaving the League of Nations, remilitarizing the Rhineland, helping
the Spanish militarists—and saw the European policy of appeasement as a
green light for further action. Germany’s first conquest was Austria, in the
Anschluss, which it invaded without much effort in March 1936 and put a
Nazi government in power. Next Hitler looked to Czechoslovakia, particu-
larly an area called the Sudetenland, which shared much of Germany’s western
and northern borders and was inhabited by 3 million Germanic people, which
he invoked to justify his interests there. France and the Soviet Union both
had agreements to defend the Sudetenland against the Germans, but Britain,
to avoid a conflict, agreed that Hitler could take the region if he would refrain
from a military invasion and promise to seek no more territory in Europe. In
March 1938, Hitler even met with the British Prime Minister, Neville
Chamberlain, and others in Munich, where they accepted the German land
seizure, without giving the Czechs a say in the matter. Chamberlain returned
to London proclaiming that Hitler’s expansion would now stop and that they
had achieved “peace in our time.” In reality, they were buying time to start
rearming because they now understood that Germany was seeking to conquer
all of Central Europe, if not more.