damentally leftward inclined.” That amiable gentleman, the
Englishman in the street, was basically pro-German, said
Göring, but not the British Foreign Office, and he went on to
lecture Mussolini about the pervasive influence of Jews and
Freemasons throughout the British Empire.
The Spanish civil war divided Britain and Germany for the
next two years. Aided by Russian, British, and French contin-
gents, the left-wing Republicans lynched and tortured their op-
ponents; aiding the Nationalist insurgents, the German and
Italian “volunteers” machine-gunned and bombed Republican-
held towns. There were horrors on both sides.
On April , , nine German planes three flights of
three Junkers s attacked the Basque town of Guernica to cut
the road junction northwest of the town. “We badly need a suc-
cess against the enemy personnel and equipment,” Colonel von
Richthofen, commanding the air-force contingent, wrote in his
diary. “Vigón [the Spanish ground commander] agrees to push
his troops forward to all roads south of Guernica. If we pull this
off, we’ll have the enemy in the bag.” Tiny though the bomb
load was the planes carried only nine bombs of kilos and
of fifty kilos the little town was wrecked. “As our first
Junkers arrived,” wrote Richthofen in some puzzlement, “there
was smoke everywhere... nobody could see any roads or
bridges or targets in the outskirts, so they just dumped their
bombs on the center.” Afterward, the mystery was partially ex-
plained when townspeople showed him evidence that fleeing
Asturian miners had liberally dynamited entire streets of build-
ings to halt the Nationalist advance. “The Reds,” Richthofen re-
corded after touring the damaged town, “torched ministries,
public buildings, and private houses simply by tossing gasoline
cans into the ground floors.” Most of Guernica’s five thousand
inhabitants had already left, but, the Luftwaffe colonel learned,