Recruiting for the Spanish Second Republic

The uniquely charged global responses to the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) continue to fascinate historians. Exactly why and how support for the Spanish Republic, beleaguered and eventually defeated by a Rebel army supported by Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy, materialised, has been the subject of significant debate. This debate has, for decades, focused first and foremost on those who physically joined the war effort from outside of Spain. Members of the Republic's International Brigades (IB) have been described as either far-sighted heroes desperate to stop the rise of fascism before it was too late, or as ‘useful idiots’ exploited and then abandoned by the Stalinists who headed their ranks and were sent and controlled by the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹ Most more recent works on the IB and on inter- and transnational solidarity with Spain, however, hold that debates over whether those who supported the Spanish Republic were heroic anti-fascists or agents of Stalin merely rehashes civil war-era propaganda by both belligerent parties. New research has therefore branched out into four areas. Firstly, the (long-debated) question of why men and women chose to volunteer has been replaced by a more prosopographic and/or data-driven quest to uncover the salient characteristics of the various national contingents of the International Brigades (e.g. age, Communist Party membership, military experience).Footnote ² Secondly, historians have increasingly analysed the Spanish battlefields as sites of transnational connection and solidarity, as well as strife and conflict, both amongst the different contingents of IB volunteers and between the IB and the Spanish troops, impacting personal trajectories and often producing political and/or strategic effects.Footnote ³ Thirdly, historians of North and South American political culture in the 1930s and beyond have pointed to the Spanish Civil War as providing models for a culture war in which proponents of conservatism, strong government, order and traditional values identified with the Rebels, whilst those who argued for renewal, (radical) democracy, separation of church and state, and a more radical socio-economic policy aligned themselves politically and culturally with the Second Spanish Republic.Footnote ⁴ Finally, the history of the International Brigades has been incorporated in analyses of wider transnational volunteering, in which historians as well as political and social scientists try to find commonalities amongst the complex interactions of push-and-pull factors involved in each individual foreign fighter's decision to join the fighting. Historian Nir Arielli, for one, has argued persuasively that central to any foreign fighter's decision to join a far-away war is a quest for meaning: an honest belief that (s)he can and therefore should try to make a real difference.Footnote ⁵

This article builds on all these four strands of recent research. It argues, generally, that in order to understand why people outside Spain took concrete steps to support the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, such as donating their time and money, or even making the decision to travel to Spain and fight, we need to better understand the background of their decisions. As Arielli has argued, these decisions are not made in a vacuum. In order for a prospective supporter to ‘find meaning’ in taking an active – potentially dangerous and life-altering – role in a war, conditions need to be met. These conditions are, on the one hand, emotional and personal.Footnote ⁶ But that is not enough. The Spanish Civil War also needed to present itself as a worthy cause, one worth taking risks and sacrificing for. In a sense, potential volunteers needed first to be recruited to the Republican cause, in the hopes that mere sympathy would be transformed into some sort of political, financial, and/or material support. This process, we argue, consisted of several steps. First people needed information about the war in Spain, the Spaniards, the Republic and the International Brigades. Likewise, they needed to define the enemy that the Spaniards and their allies in the International Brigades were fighting. Since Spain was a country spoken of, in most other countries, only in the broadest of strokes and cliches, stressing the urgency of the conflict was no mean feat. This urgency also needed to be immediate. Therefore, a connection needed to be forged between ‘them’ in Spain and ‘us’, bridging the considerable physical and emotional distances that separated the Spanish Civil War and its participants from the locales where their supporters could be found. This was done by placing the civil war in a ‘glocal’ explanatory framework incorporating both the war, wider European and international events, and the political, social and cultural environments of the readers, as well as the reciprocal relationships between them.Footnote ⁷

Newspapers played vital roles in this process. As David Deacon and Tom Buchanan have argued, newspapers infused their reports on the Spanish Civil War with ‘deeply politicised views of the conflict and its wider significance’. The socio-political leanings and the ‘mental framework’ of the newspapers’ intended audiences affected the ways the conflict in Spain was presented.Footnote ⁸ Building on their work, we argue here that newspapers are prime sites for recruitment messages, but that these messages needed to be attuned to the various audiences they aimed to reach. This article specifically looks at recruitment messages in various left-leaning newspapers in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, as well as in materials printed for the benefit of the German exile community in Paris, a key destination for those who had fled political persecution at the hands of the Nazi government, in order to study what recruitment messages reached different audiences. We employ a double comparative approach, focusing not only on different glocal frames employed to stress the connection and the urgency between readers in three very different national political contexts and cultures, but also on written sources produced for or on behalf of different political audiences or parties, all with subtly different agendas when it came to soliciting support for Spain.

For the United Kingdom, we have studied the 1936–9 editions of the Manchester Guardian, a liberal-leaning paper friendly to the Republican cause; the Labour-supporting Daily Herald; and the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). For the Netherlands, we have read through the Spanish Civil War years editions of the Communist Party of the Netherlands newspaper De Tribune, renamed Het Volksdagblad (‘The People's Newspaper’) in 1937; Het Volk (‘The People’), closely affiliated with the Dutch Social Democratic Worker's Party; and the biweekly Afweerfront (‘Defence Front’), published by a pro-Republican, anti-fascist organisation secretly affiliated with the Communist Party but addressing a different sector of the public than the Dutch CP's official outlets. For Germany, we looked at the Neuer Vorwärts, a Paris-based weekly newspaper affiliated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany, as well as the Deutsche Volkszeitung, printed in Paris and Prague by the German Communist Party; the Deutsche Tage-Buch, a liberal anti-fascist newspaper published in the Netherlands but distributed in France; and the Socialistische Warte, printed in Paris by the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund, a left-wing socialist party. In most cases, we have searched for relevant articles in digital newspaper repositories that have been made machine-readable through OCR using the keywords ‘Spanish Civil War’ OR Franco OR ‘International Brigades’ (or their equivalents in Dutch and German), and the date range 1 July 1936–30 April 1939. In cases where digital and/or machine readable versions were not available (e.g. Afweerfront, Neuer Vorwärts and the Deutsche Volkszeitung) we have manually selected relevant articles. The resulting corpus of materials we have read through in its entirety, selecting therefrom examples (or ‘sketches’) we felt best exemplify the themes, languages and images found in the newspaper coverage of the entire Spanish Civil War period.Footnote ⁹

Dramatis Personae

To begin our efforts to compare and contrast recruitment messages, interpreted broadly, on behalf of the Spanish Republic, this section will highlight how Spain, the Spaniards, the civil war and the various actors involved in it were introduced to various audiences.

In all the newspaper accounts that we have examined, Spain emerges first and foremost as a country out of focus. Readers are afforded glimpses via descriptions and photographs of usually nondescript landscapes as well as photographs in which the picturesque and exotic are often contrasted with scenes of death and destruction. Precise details about where and when battles were fought are surprisingly rare, and when they are given, such information is usually related in some way to what was apparently believed to be the central conflict: the continuing siege of Madrid by the Nationalists and its defence by the Republicans. This emphasis on the situation in and around Madrid has the odd effect of compressing the Spanish Civil War into a single battle for Spain's capital – albeit with several ‘sideshows’, nearly always explained as relating, in some important way, to the Madrid siege.Footnote ¹⁰ This might be due, in part, to the fact that most foreign journalists reporting on the war were in Madrid, and it may also have had the effect – desired or not – of making the geography and topography of the conflict significantly easier for their readers to digest.Footnote ¹¹ Even those actors we now understand as key individuals in the Spanish Civil War are sketched in broad strokes. A cartoon printed in the Deutsche Volkszeitung (see Figure 1) several weeks after the conflict erupted is supposedly a portrait of Rebel generalissimo (and future dictator) Francisco Franco, but the man portrayed looks nothing like Spain's future dictator.

Figure 1.

Deutsche Volkszeitung, 16 August 1936, 1. IISG, DVZ: Deutsche Volkszeitung (ZF 1086). ‘Franco, the Saviour of Spain', wearing a German uniform, is watched carefully by a picture of Adolph Hitler.

Although the Civil War took place in Spain and was fought primarily by Spaniards, the contemporary accounts we studied understand the Spanish not as the protagonists of the story but as bit players. Spanish people, if mentioned at all, usually assume one of two roles. Sometimes, Spanish civilians and soldiers on the Republican side are portrayed as stoic in the face of the horrible violence visited upon them – something the Neuer Vorwärts attributes to their ‘strong revolutionary temperament’, and Daily Worker reporter Tom Wintringham to Spain's long history of oppression and violence. But much more frequently, they appear simply as victims. Often the descriptions of Spaniards being victimised by violence seem designed to provoke the reader's outrage; their helplessness reinforces the message that aid and support are urgently needed.Footnote ¹² The Volkszeitung, for example, reports on 23 July 1937 of the ‘thousands of women and children’ who have already fallen victim to the enemy: they have been ‘massacred, maimed, burned alive’.Footnote ¹³ The plight of women and children, specifically, served as a key element in pro-Republican ‘atrocity propaganda’. But Spanish men also are denuded of agency: they come across as dedicated and affectionate figures, but mostly lack a understanding of war – an image in keeping with widespread stereotypes casting the Spaniards as an overly emotional, backwards and uncultured people.Footnote ¹⁴

Spain, in short, needed help: their women and children needed protection, and their men guidance. Their predicament was all the more important because, as the Neuer Vorwärts put it, ‘the Spanish people fight not only for themselves, they fight also for the English and French people, they fight for the freedom of Europe’.Footnote ¹⁵ A uniform interpretation that the Spanish Civil War was a key episode in a European or even a global fight against fascism permeates nearly every article, brochure and image put out by pro-Republican outlets, parties and newspapers. That the war was taking place in Spain itself was therefore more or less accidental. What was important was the assertion that General Franco and his fascist allies abroad would not win. Moreover, further underscoring national and gender stereotypes was the frequent portrayal of Franco and the entirety of the ‘Nationalist’ faction as mere pawns at the mercy of and beholden to fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Tellingly, the Deutsche Volkszeitung cartoon of Franco referred to above (see Figure 1) depicts him wearing a German uniform and an iron cross, a portrait of an approving Hitler visible behind him. But it was not just Franco: Nationalist successes in the field are commonly credited directly or indirectly to German and Italian soldiers, advisors, weaponry and leadership.Footnote ¹⁶ Italian and German support led to ‘the preponderance of arms [being] weighed in favour of the Franco party’, writes Das Neue Tage-Buch.Footnote ¹⁷ These arms, which thanks to dedicated foreign technical support could be used with higher levels of technical skill, were unleashed on both the opposing Republican army and the civilian population alike, with devastating effects.Footnote ¹⁸ Descriptions of the misery thus inflicted by ‘German air squadrons’Footnote ¹⁹ and ‘German gas, courtesy of I.G. Farben’,Footnote ²⁰ resonated especially achingly in the German exile press.

The Italian and German presence was joined by another ‘alien’ influence active amongst the Nationalists: the Moroccan units of the Spanish ‘Army of Africa’ fighting alongside Franco. Descriptions of these Moroccans run the gamut: sometimes, they are cast as victims of colonialism, ‘deluded’ by Franco into Rebel service against their real interests.Footnote ²¹ But more often they appear in racialised stereotype, as hired guns devoid of intrinsic political motivations, or as barbarians let loose to loot, rape and kill as they pleased.Footnote ²² Their presence heightened the impression that the conflict had more in common with a foreign invasion than a civil war.Footnote ²³ In late 1936 the Neue Tage-Buch, for example, hailed the role played by the Republican defenders of Madrid against ‘the Italian-German-Moroccan onslaught’. In fact, the vast majority of Franco's troops were Spanish; by the end of the war, some 1.2 million Spaniards had volunteered or had been conscripted in his armies, which were supported by some 80,000 Italians, 20,000 Germans, 10,000 other volunteers from elsewhere in Europe and 75,000 troops from Spanish Morocco fighting with Franco's forces.Footnote ²⁴

Another commonality amongst all the publications we examined, but most evident in the leftist newspapers, is a notable drop-off in articles about the Spanish Civil War from about mid-1937 until January 1939. The weekly Neuer Vorwärts, for example, dedicated forty-two articles to reporting on and editorialising about the war in the twelve months following July 1936, compared to only eighteen from July 1937 up until the end of the war. Similarly, the Dutch communist daily De Tribune/Het Volksdagblad carried 462 articles on the Spanish Civil War during the second half of 1936,Footnote ²⁵ 782 during the first half of 1937Footnote ²⁶ and a comparatively paltry 347 during that year's second half. For the Labour-supporting daily Het Volk, the article count stands at 552 for the second half of 1936, 182 for the first half of 1937, and 83 for its second half, and for the Daily Worker 231, 488 and 284 respectively. This reduction can be explained by the framing of the conflict in all these newspaper. During its first year, it was portrayed as the story of the Republic's unexpected resistance against an all-out assault by the insurgents, as epitomised in the continuing defence of Madrid. What followed was described as a period of Republican consolidation and the build-up of a proper military force during a time when the insurgents were making real but ultimately unimportant military gains. In combination with the rather vague interposition of battles and skirmishes onto the real geography of Spain, this characterisation of the latter phase of the war gave the impression that the conflict had become stalemated, which lent the articles written about the war an air of repetitiveness. Only during the war's final months, and especially after the failure of the 1938 Republican offensive at the Ebro, did the war regain a more dramatic quality – the fall of Barcelona on 26 January 1939 in particular highlighted that the Republic was now in dire straits.Footnote ²⁷

Key differences amongst the publications we have analysed – and the way they inform different audiences about the Civil War – emerge, above all, with regard to the importance accorded the Soviet Union. Publications by (crypto-)communists, Communist Party officials and outlets stress the Soviet Union's critical role in the war. As part of the Popular Front strategy devised and promulgated by the Communist International (Comintern), headquartered in Moscow, Soviet-affiliated parties pursued a course aimed at forming or joining broad anti-fascist coalitions in order to prevent Hitlerite takeovers – a tactic presented internally as a necessary, intermediate step to establishing classless societies.Footnote ²⁸ Publicly, the Soviet Union was hailed as a natural and loyal friend to Spanish democracy, supplying the Republicans with critical aid and assistance. Often such support flagrantly violated the Non-Intervention Agreement of 15 August 1936, which had been signed by most European governments, including the Western democracies, the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy. The accord had been designed to localise the conflict and therefore sought to prevent weapons shipments to any of the belligerent parties.Footnote ²⁹ But the agreement was either ignored outright or its breach was rationalised as a necessary response to earlier German and Italian violations or to Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar's decision to allow weapons to be shipped to Franco through Portugal. Non-communist pro-Republican sources adopt a much more critical view of the Soviet Union, suspecting that Stalin had ulterior motives in sending assistance to Spain or that, conversely, his interest in aiding a democracy was half-hearted.Footnote ³⁰ As the Dutch socialist daily Het Volk opined: ‘If the Soviet Union was really that concerned over the fate of the Spanish Republic, she would send massive arms shipments. But she does not.’Footnote ³¹

Another major difference we find in the treatment of Spain and the Spanish Civil War involves the portrayal of the International Brigades, which, though an integral part of the Spanish Republican Army, had been set up and was led by prominent communists. Naturally, in communist publications, the International Brigades are afforded pride of place. In fact, perusing communist periodicals, one walks away with the impression that the International Brigades were the primary fighting force opposing Franco and the Italian, German and Moroccan forces in Spain – further heightening the impression that the Spanish were bystanders in their own civil war. What is more, these International Brigades are consistently portrayed as consisting of committed anti-fascists from all walks of life (including, but not exclusively consisting of, communists) fighting ‘shoulder to shoulder’, ‘marching together for the same cause’.Footnote ³² ‘By her composition and her goal’, gushes the Dutch Volksdagblad, the International Brigades are said to form ‘the Brigades of the Popular Front of Europe’, fighting on behalf of all its peoples for ‘bread, peace and honest labour’.Footnote ³³ Most anti-communist, majority socialist periodicals, by contrast, scarcely mention the International Brigades – fearful, perhaps, that an overt focus on illegal transnational volunteering and a fighting force under the formative and continuing influence of the Comintern would tarnish the case of Republican Spain. When the International Brigades are mentioned, as in an interview with one of their members in a September 1937 issue of the Manchester Guardian, pains are taken to avoid showing even a hint of sympathy for Stalin or the Communist International. ‘I am not a Communist’, prefaces the interviewee, ‘nor have I any sympathy with the aims and ideals of that party, but I do object to the fascist movement in any shape or form, and, prompted by anti-fascist motives, I decided that I would go to Spain and fight on the side of the Government’.Footnote ³⁴

When it comes to describing the ‘what’, the ‘where’ and the ‘who’ of the Spanish Civil War, the periodicals we have analysed paint a remarkably uniform picture that remains mostly static throughout the entire 1936–9 period. Spain emerges only in soft focus, a place of exotic mystery whose hapless inhabitants are fighting a great and foreign evil. In a very real sense, it mattered little that the Spanish Civil War was being fought in Spain; what mattered was that the world had arrived at a chance to stop fascism before it was too late. Two armies do battle: one an invasion thinly disguised as a domestic uprising, the other consisting of mostly faceless Spaniards fighting to preserve their government – in communist variants of the tale, they were led or at the very least were inspired by a mass of international volunteers (in reality, only about 35,000 International Brigades personnel served in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, supporting some 750,000 Spanish troops).Footnote ³⁵ In nearly all the periodicals we studied, the stakes are clear: a fascist victory would spell disaster. But how to motivate people to contribute their time, money and/or effort into preventing this disaster from happening, when other matters of concern – nearer and quite possibly dearer to their hearts – also vied for their attention?

Closing the Gap

The previous sections have highlighted how Spain was framed as the almost accidental site of a larger conflict between international fascism and the forces opposing it. But to get people to spend time or money on the Spanish Republican cause, to advocate on its behalf, to participate in clothing or medicine drives, to provide humanitarian relief in situ or to volunteer for the Republican army, the Spanish Civil War had to be presented as having immediate, urgent resonance. Within the Dutch and British publications advocating most strongly for support for the Republic via all available means, the danger posed by the victory of Franco and his allies was therefore brought as close to home as possible.

The Dutch pro-Republican magazine De proletarische vrouw (‘The proletarian woman’), for example, impressed on its readership that ‘[w]e know the Fascists will not stop with Spain, they will move on to France and then to Holland'.Footnote ³⁶ The Daily Worker, too, spelled out what was at stake – in less emotive but equally pressing terms. Since Franco's victory would give the fascists a chokehold on the Mediterranean and access to vital raw materials to fuel their future war against the democracies, the defence of Madrid was ‘strategically and geographically inseparable from the immediate defence of London’.Footnote ³⁷ Exiled Germans, of course, needed no reminders of the threat of fascism. Their homeland was already lost to it, and Spain was now also in danger of becoming a Nazi Zuchthausstaat (‘prison state’).Footnote ³⁸ Instead, pro-Republican German publications such as the Sozialistische Warte emphasised that a Franco victory in Spain would embolden the Hitler dictatorship at home and place the Axis powers in a position allowing them to start and then to win a Second World War.Footnote ³⁹ Interestingly, the Warte drew parallels between Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland and his support for the Spanish insurrectionary forces: both were supposedly designed to tie down French forces in border regions, making it more difficult for the French to come to the aid of Central European allies, chiefly Czechoslovakia, when Hitler launched plans to conquer Lebensraum to Germany's east.Footnote ⁴⁰

Another crucial difference between Dutch and British pro-Republican outlets on the one hand, and the German Exil press on the other, is that amongst the former the intensity of the support for the anti-Franco forces in Spain was bound up with the position taken vis-à-vis the country's own government. In both Britain and the Netherlands, communist outlets scolded their own respective governments for signing and supporting the Non-Intervention Agreement of 1936, which withheld from ‘the lawful government of Spain all weapons for its defence’ while papering over the reality that ‘Germany, Italy and Portugal, despite their signature on the neutrality agreement, continue to send arms to the rebels’.Footnote ⁴¹ In their unwillingness to force a break with the dictatorships, they saw evidence of incompetence or, worse, a willingness to turn a blind eye towards fascism. In the Netherlands, the communist daily habitually lambasted the country's right-wing coalition government as crypto-fascist, while the Daily Worker typified the ruling Conservatives as ‘the friend of profiteers and fascists’.Footnote ⁴²

Mainstream socialist parties in both Britain and the Netherlands had a tougher line to walk. In Britain, Labour, despite pressure from a significant number of its (institutional) members, did not denounce non-interventionism, fearing that to do so would play into the hands of communists and would put the party in the same camp as the Soviet Union. In the Netherlands, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiders Partij, SDAP) was still feeling the political effects of its failed 1918 attempt to follow the Russian and German examples by starting a revolution. Its party executives argued that its effort to return to the political mainstream would be fatally hampered by undermining the country's support for non-intervention, especially since doing so might be construed as a break with the widely-supported Dutch policy of neutrality. Labour changed its stance in 1937, chiefly due to pressures from below, but the change was also buoyed by Franco's naval attacks on British merchant shipping and by atrocities committed during the Nationalist invasion of the Basque Country. An 8 January 1937 article in the Labour-supporting Daily Herald, for example, denounced non-intervention (‘the farce of official neutrality towards the civil war in Spain’) as ‘a scandal and a positive danger to the peace of the world’,Footnote ⁴⁴ but its official editorial line on the Non-Intervention Agreement would shift only in autumn 1937, following Labour's about-face. Similarly, the Manchester Guardian would occasionally print articles critical of non-intervention, but only officially changed tack in spring 1938, after the Liberal Party altered its position.Footnote ⁴⁵

In the Netherlands, Het Volk more closely toed the party line, echoing the SDAP's position that had the democracies been genuinely serious about stopping Hitler and Mussolini, they would have taken a real stance towards Italy's invasion of Ethiopia or Germany's re-militarisation of the Rhineland.Footnote ⁴⁶ While sympathising with the Spanish people, who wanted nothing more than ‘peace and democracy’,Footnote ⁴⁷ Het Volk's sister magazine, De Socialistische Gids (‘The Socialist Guide’), argued that their defeat ‘would be a new disaster for the cause of democracy, but an ever greater one would be war. That disaster the world would not recover from’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Moreover, the ‘leading role’ the communists had taken in organising the International Brigades, turning it into a ‘gigantic propaganda machine for their cause’, meant that armed interference in Spain not only endangered world peace but might also play into the hands of Stalin, an avowed enemy of social democracy.Footnote ⁴⁹ It took until March 1938 for the party to withdraw its support for non-intervention, but only when the International Brigades were withdrawn from Spain in late 1938 did it show any measure of support for those who fought fascism in Spain.Footnote ⁵⁰

Dutch and British representations also differ in the connections drawn between the Spanish Civil War and issues related to the respective countries’ political specificities and histories. In the United Kingdom, for example, reports and editorials on the civil war frequently reference the Great War. They liken the siege of Madrid to that of Verdun in 1916 and hear in the Spanish Republicans’ famous rallying cry ¡No pasarán! an echo of General Robert Nivelle's Ils ne passeront pas. More importantly, left-wing representations of the Spanish Civil War invoke the notion, increasingly widespread over the course of the 1930s, that the Great War had been a betrayal. On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the Armistice in 1938, the Daily Herald lamented:

A cartoon printed in the Daily Worker on Armistice Day (11 November) 1936 was even more sanguine in its suggestion that the rise of fascism and Nazism in Italy, Germany and Spain was the ultimate betrayal of working men's sacrifice during the Great War (see Figure 2). But the communist daily also offered a more positive take on the connection between the Tommys of 1914 and those that were fighting in Spain. While the former had been duped by press barons and government elites, their hearts had been in the right place. Their spiritual successors could finally finish their fight and ‘make the world safe for democracy’, by halting the fascists before they could start and possibly win a new world war, thereby securing a ‘victory for the democratic peoples of the world which would last for all time’.Footnote ⁵²

Figure 2.

Daily Worker, 11 November 1936, 5. ‘Did they die that these might live?' Nazis, fascists, Franco-ist rebels and ‘death’ ironically salute a monument to the Great War dead.

In the Netherlands, meanwhile, the First World War lacked the emotional resonance it possessed in Britain, as the country had not been a belligerent. However, a conflict from a more distant past struck a chord with readers: the Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648) fought against the Spanish Habsburgs, the prime foundational myth of the Netherlands. Since the nineteenth century, popular memory of this war had turned into a righteous crusade of freedom-loving Dutchmen against their backwards, monarchical, cruel Spanish overlords. The Dutch Communist Party – which even before the Spanish Civil War's outbreak had been counselled by Moscow to align itself more closely with Dutch political culture so as to make its Popular Front strategy more palatable – lost no time in presenting the war in Spain as a spiritual successor to the War of Independence. The monthly Afweerfront was the first to make the connection. When (rhetorically) asking its readers what came to mind when thinking of Spain, the first response was: ‘The Eighty Years’ War! Now, it is our turn to fight the invaders [sic!] in Spain’.Footnote ⁵³ The poet and novelist-turned-propagandist Jef Last explicitly compared the Dutch members of the International Brigades to the famed Geuzen (‘Beggars’), the name assumed by some of the most noted fighters in the War of Independence. Just like the Geuzen, Last claimed, the International Brigades were made up of volunteers fighting alien tyranny; support for the Spanish Republic was painted in the same idealistic terms used to characterise the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.Footnote ⁵⁴

German newspapers, meanwhile, naturally looked to their own country's recent history to underscore their readership's responsibilities vis-à-vis Spain. They highlighted the incursions of the German (and Italian) war machines and personnel into Spain seeking to crush yet another democracy. Moreover, Spain represented a second chance to contest fascism before it came to power. Whereas in Germany the coalition of anti-Hitler forces had crumbled before it had even had a chance to fight, the Spaniards, stated the Neuer Vorwärts in July 1938, had taken a stance and ‘sacrificed themselves’, even when the fight seemed hopeless, for the cause of their own freedom and for ‘European culture and civilization’.Footnote ⁵⁵

In their attempts to close the gaps between their readerships and ‘Spain’, periodicals of different political stripes pursued varying aims, with different goals in mind. For socialist parties and the newspapers and periodicals supporting their position, a key factor determining how much intervention on behalf of the Republic they would advocate was the domestic situation. In the Netherlands, the Labour Party could not bring itself to associate with communists, and its efforts to promote itself as a reformist party rid of revolutionary tendencies and ready for government made it difficult to attack non-interventionism. What's more, the obvious compatibility between longstanding Dutch neutrality – which had evolved from merely a foreign policy choice to a constituent element of Dutch political culture in the 1930s – and the Non-Intervention Agreement made it hard, even when the Labour Party decided to oppose it for its obvious one-sided application in favour of the Nationalists, to advocate any sort of intervention. Communists, on the other hand, advocated intervention as a position in line with an (imagined) venerable Dutch tradition: a love of justice and freedom supposedly dating back to the War of Independence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the United Kingdom, the First World War emerged as a historical point of reference, and Labour-supporting newspapers – albeit hesitantly at first – and communist periodicals alike used non-intervention as a club with which to beat the ruling elites. Moreover, arguments in support of the Republic, whatever shape or form they took, were often couched in the language of geopolitics and empire: the call to protect the country's European and especially their Mediterranean interests was even more prevalent than more emotional appeals to ‘finish the fight’ of ‘14–’18 or to protect innocent victims of war either abroad or at home. Finally, the German newspapers’ appeals are tinged both with shame at Germany's role in the war as well as their own failure to prevent the rise of fascism in their own country, and with hope at the prospect of dealing Hitler the blow he should have received in 1933, if not before. What is also quite evident is that not everyone who advocated the cause of Republican Spain did so with the aim of recruiting fighters for the Republican Army: Dutch socialist newspapers, up until the final months of the war, advocated for supporting the Republic only in the widest, vaguest sense, whereas their British counterparts went much further. Communist or Popular Front-supporting periodicals, meanwhile, argued more often and much more loudly for far more concrete forms of activism.

‘Everything Is Great’

In addition to explaining why it was so important to lend aid to the Spanish Republican cause, there was also the question of how to render the necessary assistance. There were legal ways to support the enemies of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini in Spain, all of which required investment in terms of time, money, and/or some form of social or political capital. One could show one's political support for the Spanish Republic by voting for a political party that supported it at the ballot box; one could participate in clothing and medicine drives to benefit the Rebels’ victims, send care packages intended for civilians suffering under the onslaught and Republican soldiers, or even volunteer for hospital duty in Spain under the auspices of either the Red Cross or the International Red Aid, an organisation established by the Comintern. But joining the International Brigades was illegal in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France: their governments had introduced and subsequently tightened directives outlawing ‘foreign volunteering’ during the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁶ However, in the early months of the Spanish Civil War, communist newspapers in Dutch, English and German took advantage of the relative obscurity of legal obstacles to foreign enlistment and skirted the edges of the law. In an article published on 16 August 1936, a Deutsche Volkszeitung reporter wrote that, after meetings held in Marseille and Paris in support of the Spanish Republic, ’75 volunteers approached me to ask me how they might join the antifascist militias’.Footnote ⁵⁷ And the Daily Worker published, on 21 October 1936, a call for a ‘British Labour Legion’, which might comprise ‘tens of thousands’ and perhaps even ‘millions’ of British volunteers, to join the Republican Army and help it achieve ‘glorious victory’.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, the British, Dutch and French governments introduced new laws between late 1936 and early 1937 in response to reports of a groundswell of volunteers joining the International Brigades, and as part of their official commitment to the Non-Intervention Agreement. To suggest people join up or to provide instruction how to do so even in the vaguest of terms was now equally illegal as the act of volunteering itself.Footnote ⁵⁹ Nevertheless, communist or Popular Front newspapers and publications in Britain and the Netherlands launched what we might call a surreptitious recruitment campaign. Their key tools were interviews with members of the International Brigades, reportage and letters sent to or from the front, and obituaries of fallen soldiers.

After the ban on all forms of direct recruitment, newspaper articles and other publications on and in support of the International Brigades served a dual purpose. Of course, they informed the reader of the critical role these fighters played in safeguarding democracy and stopping fascism, underscoring the pan-European and even the global aspects of the civil war. But they also underscored the need for getting personally involved, often without specifying exactly how. A poster by a Dutch pro-Republican organisation, for example, depicted a Republican soldier dying of his wounds, using his last breath to point an accusatory finger at the onlookers and asking of them: ‘What did you do for Spain?’ (see Figure 3). In this none-too-subtle effort to shame supporters of the Spanish Republic into action, one might read both a call for political and financial support and a call to arms.

Figure 3.

Beeldband Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Collectie C.A.J. van Angelbeek, 010013000383. ‘And you? What did you do for Spain?’, enquires a poster depicting a dying Republican soldier of Amsterdam passers-by. The poster was published by the Dutch Aid Spain Committee (‘Hulp aan Spanje’), ostensibly an unaligned pro-Republican organisation but one whose board was composed solely of ‘crypto-Communists’, who kept their membership of or affiliation with the Communist Party a secret.

Quite a different tack was the often-made suggestion that the opportunities and benefits of service in the International Brigades extended beyond direct participation in a good cause. Reports from the front as well as printed letters by members of the International Brigades – some of whom were also journalistsFootnote ⁶⁰ – speak of the truly transnational friendship bonds amongst the various individuals assembled in Spain to fight Franco and Hitler. ‘Never have I seen such spontaneous geniality as amongst our comrades-in-arms, even though we do not even speak the same language’, reported the Dutch propagandist Jef Last from Spain.Footnote ⁶¹ Making friends was easy, and life in Spain was cheap and filled with abundant pleasures, thanks in part to the gratitude the Spaniards were showing to their foreign saviours. ‘Everything is great, the food is good, and we don't have to pay for the cinema because everyone is so grateful for our service’, added a Dutchman serving in the International Brigades via a letter printed in the Tribune.Footnote ⁶² Letters and first-person reportage were widely seen to be powerful and relatively recent modes of persuasion, since they lent an air of authenticity to reporting: because other, more mainstream newspapers had a much harder time getting access to the front, communist and Popular Front publications could claim that they were the only outlets able to get the ‘real story’ out – even though their accounts were frequently ghostwritten by journalists far, sometimes very far, away from the front lines.Footnote ⁶³ These letters and reportage were therefore the tools of choice dedicated to undermining the narrative that the International Brigades were wholly made up of communists out to establish a Red Spain, and to suggesting that anti-fascism, a love of freedom and patriotism – expressed in its members’ collective desire to spare their homelands the (further) horrors of fascism and Nazism – were its core values.Footnote ⁶⁴ These values, in turn, gave the International Brigades an edge over their enemies.Footnote ⁶⁵ Even the technological superiority of the Nationalists and their German and Italian supporters could be nullified by the ‘indescribable enthusiasm and heroism’ of the International Brigades.Footnote ⁶⁶ For, wrote Der Neue Vorwärts, ‘in war higher morale always wins, […] successes on the battlefield are achieved through courage and a warrior's mentality [Kampfbegeisterung]’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This line of thinking, however ridiculous it might seem now, echoed contemporary notions that the only way to overcome the massive firepower of an enemy barrage was through sheer force of will. It also serves to bridge the gap between two very different narratives characterising Spain: one highlighting the violence committed by the Nationalists and their allies – which served as ‘atrocity propaganda’ – and one highlighting the easy-going comradeship experienced by those serving in the International Brigades. After all, who would sign up for the International Brigades if one did not stand a fighting chance?

Nonetheless, despite all their conviviality and bravery, fighters in the International Brigades did die in combat while fighting the supposedly soulless Nationalists. And when they did, printed obituaries were used not only to honour those who had given their lives for the cause of democracy but also to highlight their heroism – and thereby make conspicuous the opportunities for personal heroics that could be found in Spain. ‘[T]heir actions will be recalled, their names honoured’, wrote The Daily Worker after reporting on the death of a British International Brigade soldier.Footnote ⁶⁸ Occasionally the dead were summoned as calling out to those left behind, whose duty it was now to take up their task and ‘to win a victory for the democratic peoples of the world which would last for all time’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Sometimes attempts are even made to quantify the benefits of their sacrifice. In one such case, an obituary of several fallen International Brigades fighters is accompanied by the suggestion that their ‘[b]rave actions’ had caused several Nationalist planes ‘on a punitive expedition, killing civilians’, to be diverted from their mission.Footnote ⁷⁰

It is telling that an emphasis on personal heroics infuses much of the reporting on the International Brigades. Stories of men fighting off tanks, of defending Spanish civilians against all odds, of a man ‘who went out as a pilot, single-handed, took up a plane, brought a Fascist bomber to the ground, and drove off two others before he crashed with five bullet wounds in his leg’Footnote ⁷¹, served to highlight that in Spain a man could make a stand against evil and win the day for democracy. If these fighters died, eternal glory would be theirs, and if they were wounded they would receive the best of care. One telling example is the tale of a British hero who, despite his body having been ‘riddled with bullets’, is nevertheless ‘extremely comfortable’ in a ‘private ward’, where he spends his time ‘learning Spanish from a buxom Spanish nurse’.Footnote ⁷² Fighting in Spain, is the barely veiled suggestion, offers opportunities on and beyond the battlefield.

Thus the communist-affiliated newspapers, books, and brochures that were printed for Dutch and British audiences served up recruitment campaigns that suggested to their readers that service in the International Brigades would bring opportunities for glory, for lasting friendships, for exotic fun (!), and, most importantly, it would allow the recruit to personally help bring about the defeat of soulless fascism. Of course, there were the risks of injury and death – tellingly, hardly any attention is paid to the possible legal consequences of breaking the laws against foreign enlistment – but these threats only underscored the vastness of the prizes to be won. In printed material directed towards the German exile community in France, however, such reporting is comparatively rare. This might seem odd; in contrast to the left-wing press in the Netherlands and in Britain, German-language newspapers and periodicals were united in their support for Republican Spain, the International Brigades, and anti-fascism. But amongst German-language publications of social-democrat and communist leanings alike, we find mostly calls to support the Republic financially for their procurement of food, medicine and/or weapons. Direct calls to arms are rare, much more so than in the Dutch and British communist press. The difference might be explained by the particular vulnerability of the presses serving the German exile communities to legal action by the French authorities, which were suspicious of the hundreds of thousands of exiled Europeans now making Paris their temporary home. But conversely, it might also be due to the fact that most German exiles who were politically active in either the German Communist or Social Democrat parties – who, despite continuing political differences, were united in their support for Republican Spain – formed a more closely-knit community than their compatriots in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.