2. Madrid est près de Berlin: An Untold Story from the Spanish Civil War in the German Federal Archive

Susanne Zepp

Narrative texts fulfll a signifcant role in research on the Spanish Civil War, especially if we understand them as vehicles for the production, transformation, and reproduction of cultural meaning in a social context. This is particularly the case for autobiographies, other ego-documents, and self-testimonies. In literary studies, the identity of author and narrative self is not automatically assumed to be the same, but this distinction is less frequent in historiographical studies. For an adequate treatment of self-testimonies, it is crucial to attend to the textuality of the historical source material and to accept that they do not provide direct access to history as such. This distinction applies to all historical contexts but is particularly pertinent in the case of such an ideologically charged confict as the Spanish Civil War. This, of course, does not imply that these texts cannot serve as pivotal sources for reconstructing past social practice, contexts of experience, and life worlds. Self-testimonies can reveal historical actors as sentient and acting persons. These texts are self-constructions into which individual experiences have certainly been incorporated, but they are not mere reproductions of actual historical events.

This issue is raised in a particularly signifcant manner in the case of anonymous sources that are constructed as self-testimonies. In a meticulously prepared literature review, Emily Ross demonstrated in 2013 how often we are confronted with anonymous sources in our work in historical archives and, on the basis of her discussions of existing research, made a convincing plea not to exclude anonymous documents from historical analyses.[1] In doing so, she highlighted how diverse the reasons for anonymity can be—selfprotection or even lack of authorship can be reasons for anonymous sources just as much as coincidence or unintentional contexts.

Robert J. Grifn once described the challenges of dealing with anonymous texts as follows: “Anonymity, as I began to discover, puts in question not only historiographical narratives, but also almost all of our ingrained assumptions and procedures for dealing with texts.”[2] Anonymous publications make it palpable how much we have become accustomed to an automatic mutual construction of authors and texts. The distinction between these two dimensions can provide important insights for historical analysis.

In this chapter, I examine an anonymous text on the Spanish Civil War that has preserved a distinctly German perspective (that of the German Popular Front in Exile, the so-called Lutetia Committee) in French. This text has been preserved in the Foundation for the Archives of Political Parties and Mass Organizations of the GDR (SAPMO), a collection of archival materials that are preserved today in the German Federal Archives Berlin-Lichterfelde. The SAPMO archive includes documents, photographs, flms, and other materials that were created by or for political parties and mass organizations, such as the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), the Free German Youth (FDJ), and the Democratic Women’s League of Germany (DFD). These materials provide a unique insight into the political, social, and cultural life of East Germany during the period of socialist rule. The archival materials cover a wide range of topics, including political ideology, propaganda, education, youth culture, gender issues, and international relations. They also include materials related to the repression and surveillance that took place under the socialist regime, including fles on individuals who were monitored by the secret police (STASI) and reports on dissent and opposition movements. The SAPMO archive is an important resource for researchers studying the history of East Germany, the Cold War, and socialist politics and culture more broadly. The collection ofers a wealth of primary source materials that can be used to deepen our understanding of the complexities and contradictions of life under socialist rule.[3]

The SAPMO collection also comprises the archival material of the Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. The Institute for Marxism-Leninism was founded in 1949. In the early years, the institute’s main duties were to publish the oeuvres of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin and to create a research library for the party. From the mid-1950s onward, the work of the institute focused on research into fundamental issues in the feld of labor movement history. This included editing sources, and speeches and essays by functionaries of the workers’ movement were published in this process. From 1969 until autumn 1989, research and editing projects were carried out by the History Department. In the beginning of the 1970s, the institute began saving documents from the archive on microflm.

Among these materials from the History Department at the institute is a substantial collection on the Spanish Civil War. This collection did not emerge by coincidence. In February 1968, in preparation for the celebrations planned to mark thirty years since the end of the Spanish Civil War in the GDR, Franz Dahlem, the former chief political commissar for all the International Brigades in Spain and then Minister for National Defense, issued a call asking former volunteers in Spain to transcribe the memories of their experiences in the International Brigades and to submit these narrative accounts to the History Department of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. The Spanish Civil War was an important event for the GDR’s collective memory—in terms of its ideological battles, its international alliances, and its impact on the country’s cultural and intellectual life. Many volunteers who fought for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War became leading members of GDR society, and their engagement on the Republican side helped to establish the GDR’s legitimacy as a socialist state, while the memory of the war in Spain continued to shape GDR cultural and political life for decades to come. As Arnold Kremmer put it:

In no country, however, would the veterans of the Brigades be as welcome or exert as much infuence after the second world war as in East Germany. Many of East Germany’s future leaders, bureaucrats, generals and writers had been [members of the brigade] Thaelmann. Eventually, East Germany itself ofcially acknowledged that “the German-speaking units of the International Brigades represented the nucleus of the armed forces of the future GDR.”[4]

The SAPMO archive contains a letter from a man called Hans Rosenkränzer from Cottbus written in May 1968, with which he responds to Franz Dahlem’s appeal:

Lieber Genosse Teubner! Ich möchte Dir als erstes brüderliche Kampfesgrüße übermitteln. Genosse Franz Dahlem richtete mit Schreiben vom Februar diesen Jahres an alle ehemaligen Spanienkämpfer einen Appell, dessen Inhalt Dir sicher bekannt sein wird. . . . Ich möchte Dir zum Geschichtsbuch einen Artikel, der anlässlich des 30. Jahrestages der Gründung der Inter-Brigaden in der neuen Cottbuser Zeitung veröfentlicht wurde sowie ein Foto aus Spanien zur Verfügung stellen. . . . Leider kann ich mich aus zeitlichen Gründen nicht mit der Geschichtsschreibung meines persönlichen Kampfes in Spanien befassen, da ich berufstätig und gesellschaftlich stark eingespannt bin sowie aufgrund der Krankheit meiner Frau und Betreuung meiner Kinder, die meine Freizeit vollkommen auslasten. Ich hofe, dass Du von dem wenigen, was ich übermittle, etwas verwerten kannst. Ich wünsche Dir persönlich alles Gute und verbleibe mit einem kräftigen Salud Deine Genosse Hans Rosenkränzer.[5]

This document reveals three important items: frst, it introduces us to the addressee of the materials, Hans Teubner, who had been in charge of the History Department at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism since 1963 and had himself been an instructor for ofcers in the International Brigades in Spain. Teubner was born in 1920 in Aue, Germany, and grew up in a working-class family. After the war, Teubner became a professor of philosophy and political science at the University of Leipzig, where he taught for many years. Despite facing signifcant challenges and obstacles in his career, including government surveillance, prohibition to work and censorship, Teubner remained a respected and infuential fgure in the intellectual and cultural life of the GDR. Teubner’s experiences in Spain, where he fought alongside other antifascist volunteers, deeply infuenced his political and intellectual outlook. After the end of the civil war, Hans Teubner reached Switzerland via France, where he became head of the Communist party’s southern section in March 1939. He also had contact with the Red Chapel resistance circles in Berlin around Harro Schulze-Boysen, Kurt Schumacher, Walter Küchenmeister, and Elfriede Paul. In 1940, he was interned by Swiss authorities as a fugitive and sentenced to a prison term. In May 1945, together with Bruno Fuhrmann, he returned to Germany and was in charge as Editor-in-Chief of the Deutsche Volkszeitung. In April 1946, Teubner joined the Socialist Unity Party (SED).

In 1950, like many other so-called Western immigrants, he came into confict with the Party Control Commission. He was accused of being a “Zionistimperialist agent.” He was relieved of all party functions and worked as a statistician at the VEB Bunt-und Samtweberei, a textile weaving cooperative, until 1952, after which he was a lecturer in social sciences at the technical school for energy in Zittau. In 1956, the suspension was lifted, and he became a university lecturer, institute director, and vice dean of the Faculty of Journalism at Karl Marx University in Leipzig. From 1959 to 1963, he was editor-in-chief of the Leipziger Volkszeitung and a member of the party’s district leadership in Leipzig. He then became a staf member at the Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party.[6]

But Hans Rosenkränzer’s letter, quoted here in part, highlights another issue: as the responsible coordinator of the historical department, Teubner has safeguarded all the material that was sent to him by former brigadists after Franz Dahlem’s appeal. A letter like this, which only announces the actual material, was kept just as carefully as postcards, posters, or private photos that were being sent in. Only a fraction of what was sent in at the time was published, but it is evident from the material that Teubner kept every single item and worked through everything in detail. In many materials, we can read his notes and comments, and Teubner even wrote short abstracts of the texts. Thanks to his meticulous eforts, a very diverse collection has been preserved, which includes an unpublished manuscript of a novella by Willi Bredel with an unpublished foreword by Heinrich Mann, as well as many handwritten stories of the experiences of former volunteers. Teubner also preserved the accounts of children’s fates published by the Unitarian Service Committee shortly after the civil war, posters, fyers, handwritten newspapers of individual battalions, poems, stories, and pamphlets.

Historical sources can help to illuminate the ways in which narratives are shaped by larger historical forces, such as political and social movements, technological changes, and cultural shifts. Understanding these larger historical forces can help to shed light on the ways in which narratives refect and shape the societies in which they are produced. The 1968 call was an explicit request to write and submit narrative accounts of personal experiences. This is why these texts about the Spanish Civil War need to be examined in a conversation between historiography and literature to distinguish, for example, the autobiographical person writing from the biographical author and to avoid a merely referential reading of these autobiographical accounts. It is necessary to examine these texts both in terms of their participatory and relational dimensions and in their performative function. The narratives use rhetorical procedures, although frst and foremost they are frst-person documents without explicit literary pretensions. The fact that all texts submitted to the institute refer consciously to realistic narrative models demonstrates the extent to which the material from the SAPMO archive in Berlin-L ichterfelde must be understood as a rich source of untold stories.

Among this material is a text written in French that was inventoried under the title “An anonymous account of a French author.” The archive folder is inscribed with a handwritten note by Teubner that reads “Two articles by unknown authors concerning the Spanish Civil War,” and of these two fles, a text of just less than forty pages is the aforementioned unknown author’s narrative titled “Madrid lies close to Berlin.” Dealing with an anonymous historical source presents several challenges. Since the author is unknown, it can be challenging to establish whether the source is genuine or a forgery. One must be especially cautious and scrutinize the content, provenance, and other contextual information to ensure the source’s authenticity. Without knowing the author’s identity, it can be difcult to determine their credibility, biases, and potential agenda. Nonetheless, this text written in French from the SAPMO archive provides valuable insights into historical events and perspectives of a German experience of the Spanish Civil War; the following will thus demonstrate why it is worthwhile to undertake an in-depth examination of this text. If we triangulate this anonymous source from the SAPMO archive with other sources to corroborate or refute its claims and assess its reliability, this French text reveals an untold story of the Spanish Civil War that is certainly valuable to read.

The document has been preserved as a typewritten text; there is no indication as to whether this text was transcribed by Hans Teubner or whether it already reached the institute in this form as an anonymous typed submission. It was typed on neutral white paper and is slightly yellowed, but it has not signifcantly deteriorated. The use of a mechanical typewriter is evident through certain irregularities in each stroke of the letter due to variations in pressure, ink saturation, and other factors. The presence of a table of contents and the division into eleven chapters suggest that the document is well organized and structured in a way that is intended to make it accessible and easy to use. In his short archival note, Hans Teubner dated the creation of this French text to the summer of 1937. The text begins with a representation of the situation in Nazi Germany at the time of the war in Spain.

The narrative is informed by the agenda of the German Popular Front in Exile. While the national German Popular Front was a predominantly Social Democratic resistance group against the Nazi regime founded in Berlin in 1936 and crushed by the Gestapo in 1938, there were also notable Popular Front aspirations in exile, based on various initiatives to form a Volksfront of Social Democrats and Communists. Infuenced by the model of the Popular Front governments in France and in Spain, a committee was formed in Paris in 1936 to prepare a German Popular Front in Exile, the so-called Lutetia Committee. The anonymous account in French is strongly invested in their agenda. The committee was active in Paris from 1935 to 1937 and gathered actors from various political currents who shared an anti-fascist conviction. This nucleus of the German Popular Front in Exile movement became known as the Lutetia Committee after the meeting place in the Hotel Lutetia on the Boulevard Raspail in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. The German Popular Front in Exile was primarily composed of socialist and communist exiles who had fed Nazi Germany. The movement sought to unite antiNazi German exiles across ideological lines to work toward the overthrow of the Nazi regime. The movement engaged in various activities to achieve its goals, including publishing anti-Nazi propaganda, organizing resistance cells within Germany, and supporting the Allied war efort against Germany during World War II. Members of the German Popular Front in Exile also participated in the International Brigades, fghting against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. The German Popular Front in Exile faced many challenges during its existence, including internal disagreements over tactics and strategy, as well as external pressures from the Nazi regime and its allies. Despite these challenges, the movement remained active throughout the war.

The archival text features eleven chapters. Chapter 1, “La Guerre clandestine” (The secret war), reveals the fact that numerous German soldiers are fghting on Franco’s side, although the German public in 1937 is not aware of this. The narrative presentation of this chapter is as follows: The section begins with a quotation from a letter written by a schoolteacher in Hamburg in January 1937, and interspersed with this is a direct address to the Gestapo that the author of this letter would no longer be in Hamburg and that it would therefore not be worth trying to arrest him. The text is written in a collective “we,” which throughout the course of this chapter clearly demonstrates that this “we” does not believe the propaganda of the Nazi regime and instead advertises a diferent way of seeking the truth. The text emphasizes not only that the Reichstag fre was set by the Nazis themselves but also that German planes deliberately killed numerous civilians in Guernica. The critical view of the state of the media in Nazi Germany concerns not only socialists and communists but also German middle-class citizens who take an active interest in the fate of the Spanish Republic.

Chapter 2, “Nuits et jours aux prises” (Days and nights in violence), continues with a harsh critique of the propaganda about the events in Spain spread by the Nazi regime. This chapter criticizes the portrayal of violence against clergy and priests in Spain. These narratives would be exaggerated if they portrayed these outbreaks of violence as omnipresent. Rather, they were exceptional occurrences. The German press and radio stations were dedicated to disseminating “Goebbels’s tale” claiming that the Soviet Union wanted to transform Spain into a Soviet colony in its own likeness. The propaganda orchestrated by Goebbels is said to have a disastrous efect on children and young people in German schools and university barracks, among peasants and representatives of the middle class. As evidence of the destructive efects of propaganda, the text gives an anonymous quotation from a devoted democrat who expressed his disgust at the events in Spain. Among the German workers, Goebbels’s propaganda is said to have less efect, because their class instinct would protect them from his deception. The text argues that international worker solidarity can take many forms: international worker solidarity was demonstrated not only through fghting on the front lines but also through humanitarian aid and support for the Spanish people. Many workers’ organizations and labor unions around the world sent money or medical supplies to the Spanish Republic to support the fght against the fascist forces. The text underlines the international solidarity of German workers who secretly collected money for Republican Spain, thereby putting themselves in danger. For example, the anonymous author states that workers at a coal mine in the Ruhr collected seventy-three Reichsmark to support the republic, a war industry factory in Berlin collected ffty Reichsmark, factories in Bavaria and Württemberg collected between fve and sixty-seven Reichsmark, and workers in Saxony and an aircraft factory in Nordhorn collected 100 and 180 Reichsmark, respectively. These acts of solidarity, according to the author of the text, represent the Germany of the workers, the “true reality” of the country. This is the fnal sentence on page 7: “Oui, c’est là, parmi les ouvriers, que bat le cœur de l’autre Allemagne, de la vraie Allemagne.” (Yes, it is there, among the workers, where the heart of the other Germany, the real Germany, is beating.)

Chapter 3, “Franco a un plan quadriennal” (Franco has a four-year plan), focuses on the support given to Franco by German and Italian fascists from the very frst moments of the coup. It reinterprets the support of the clerical fascists under Franco as a fght against the Soviet Union. This narrative was disseminated with such persistence that it led to doubts even among convinced Nazis. It should not be forgotten that a large part of the German male public had war experience from 1914 to 1918, which is why it was already completely evident in the Germany of 1937 that Nazi propaganda concealed relentless warmongering that would severely harm the German people.

Chapter 4, “Du beurre au lieu de canons” (Butter instead of cannons), criticizes a central aspect of Goebbels’s and Göring’s propaganda, namely that the production of weapons would be much more existential than the food supply for the German population. The German workers, however, saw through this propaganda. This chapter provides an account of Franco’s active support from Nazi Germany in the form of war material, soldiers, and air force, which is supported by (again anonymous) testimonies and sources. One example is a small resistance newspaper by dockworkers, Norddeutsche Tribüne, in which port employees give testimony of the shipment of vast amounts of war material to Franco from October 1936 until March 1937. The source accuses Nazi Germany of providing a massive supply of war equipment to Franco’s troops, thus making a mockery of the international principle of non-intervention. It seems that the text wants to reveal to a French audience the sinister side of the non-intervention policy adopted by their own and many other governments toward Spain.

Chapter 5 reads “Goering envoie du chocolat aux enfants de Espagne” (Göring sends chocolate to Spanish children). This chapter lists the vast number of transport ships from Stettin, Kiel, Lübeck, Flensburg, Stralsund, and Hamburg that are sent out by Nazi Germany to support the putschists under Franco with war material. This chapter states that pacifsts observing the North German port cities would have noticed more than sixty ships containing the heaviest war material, aircraft parts, heavy and light rifes, defense batteries, anti-aircraft missiles, aerial bombs, ammunition of all calibers and machine guns, and, fnally, soldiers. However, the containers would have been labeled as containing food, and the boxes of bombs were labeled as containing chocolate. The text highlights the viciousness with which these false labels ridicule the targeted murder of civilians. This chapter also quotes an anonymous report from port observers, naming Mr. Matthias Rode and his transport company on Ferdinandstraße in Hamburg as one of the companies involved in organizing the arms transports to Franco. The text takes this report as another opportunity to protest harshly against the non-intervention policy.

Chapter 6 is titled “Mon Fils est en Espagne” (My son is in Spain). This chapter begins with the testimony of an anonymous friend of the narrator from a large city in central Germany, which is presented as paradigmatic of many other experiences. The friend reports a conversation with a father whose son is serving in the German air force and who has not been in touch for several weeks, making the family very worried. Days later the man receives a letter from his son, and it was posted in Spain. The text quotes anonymous reports from all parts of Germany, where parents tell similar stories of their sons in the air force: reports that they are now regularly stationed in Spain.

Chapter 7 carries the title “Guadalajara, Jarama—. . . et 25:4” (Guadalajara, Jarama—. . . and 25:4). This chapter highlights two historical events that have contributed to a change in the German public’s perception of the Spanish Civil War: the devastating defeat of the Italian troops in Guadalajara and the similarly dramatic, albeit partial, defeat of the German special forces in Jarama. The news of the ofensive from the Republican side at the gates of Madrid also changed public opinion. Hitler and Mussolini had great hopes for the battle of Guadalajara, since Franco had already wanted to take Madrid, which was close to Guadalajara, in March 1937. The fascist press had presented these battles as a series of victories. In fact, it was a catastrophic defeat, which the German public also became aware of. The capital Madrid, rich in symbolism, was still frmly in Republican hands, and the defeats on the German and Italian sides were devastating, but the propaganda in both countries depicted a completely diferent account of the factual events.

Chapter 8, “Nous crevons du plan quadriennal” (We cannot aford the fouryear plan), reveals how, amid Goebbels’s propaganda and in light of his proposed “fght against the Soviet Union in Spain,” a massive policy of mobilizing, producing weapons, and preparing for war was being pursued in Germany. This chapter again quotes from the banned journal Norddeutsche Tribüne from June 1937, in which an unnamed merchant from Hamburg wrote the following:

L’existence de 1’honnête commerçant est basée sur la paix et cesse avec la guerre. Les méthodes d’économie de guerre et les armements ont dressée contre nous le monde entier. Des millions de pacifstes en Europe et dans le monde entier considèrent, à l’heure actuelle, le national-socialisme comme le principal coupable de la course internationale des armements. L’adoration illimitée de la force a mis en marche contre noua les Etats-majors des autres pays. Toutes les fanfaronnades ne peuvent rien changer à ce que l’Empire anglais possède d’immense ressources, la Banque de France de gigantesques réserves d’or et la Russie des richesses inépuisables, tandis que nous fouillons dans les boîtes à ordures. Le boueux est devenu un élément si important de “l’économie allemande”, que le “paragraphe aryen” a dû être appliqué dans cette profession jusqu’à la dernière conséquence. D’une façon générale, nous sommes contre la guerre. Je pense d’ailleurs qu’il ne faut pas tolérer que 1’Allemagne soit en entrainée dans une guerre dans laquelle elle sera battue avant même que la guerre ait vraiment commencée.[7]

This text is peculiar in that it repeatedly quotes bourgeois, business, and middle-class protagonists in order to underline the thesis of a deep inner resistance against the Nazi regime in all of German society. The merchant quoted in this chapter is not a socialist, and he is said to have taken part with conviction in the Great War of 1914–1918, but even he argues that the mass mobilization and aggressive war industry would be destructive to the German economy.

The main focus of Chapter 9, “L’Espagne, fanal du Front Populaire allemande” (Spain, the beacon of the German Popular Front), is making the agenda of the Lutetia Committee accessible to a French readership and illustrates the activities of the German Popular Front in Exile. This is accomplished through an intriguing narrative, an essential feature of the text that deserves special attention. The agenda of the Lutetia Committee is skillfully woven into a sense of suspense in the account and appears at the height of its tension; the anonymous author thus creates a gripping text. The story culminates in a description of how almost the entire resistance in Hitler’s Germany secretly gathers to listen to the radio station of the German Popular Front in Exile, Deutscher Freiheitssender 29.8:

Les ouvriers de Berlin, de Hambourg, de la Ruhr et de Saxe font une heure de chemin, par des moyens de transport ou même à pied, afn de pouvoir écouter, tranquillement et dans une sécurité relative, des

émissions de T.S.F. antifascistes. Les tribunaux fascistes on beau prononcer des condamnations à la prison et aux travaux forcés, la vérité, aux yeux de ces braves, vaut plus que la liberté. Sept fois par semaine, ils risquent le camp de concentration, les tortures et les travaux forcés, rien que pour pouvoir écouter Moscou, Kiev, Strasbourg, Luxembourg, Prague et Brno. “Sans les informations de l’étranger, nous tombions efectivement dans la stupidité la plus complète; camarades, il est impossible d’exprimer par des paroles ce que le poste émetteur de la liberté, sur l’onde courte 29,8 signife pour nous”, voilà ce qu’a dit un vieil ouvrier de Berlin. C’est ainsi que, deux fois par semaine, il va “écouter la T.S.F.”, bloc-notes et crayon en poche. Ecoutant en silence, notant seulement des faits, deux, tout aux plus trois hommes sont assis devant l’appareil, alors que la femme ou le fls, debout à la porte, fait attention aux mouchards. Les informations terminées, on compare les notes avec la presse de M. Goebbels, on les discute et on les apprend à peu à près par cœur. Ensuite, la tournée commence. Chaque auditeur connait dix à douze familles qui, grâce à “l’appareil récepteur populaire bon marché” de M. Goebbels qui constitue bien le plus rafné de tous les “bienfaits sociaux” du Troisième Reich, son simplement coupées de l’étranger et ne peuvent s’ofrir un grand poste. Alors, on relate point par point, on rectife, on démasque le mensonge de Goebbels. Et chacun va à son usine où, à leur tour, des camarades de travail attendent l’information pour l’emporter chez eux. C’est un grand travail que de difuser la vérité en Allemagne, et on risque son bonheur, sa liberté, sa santé et sa vie. Mais il faut que le monde sache; il y a des centaines de milliers d’hommes qui courent ce risque![8]

In 1986, Conrad Pütter published a comprehensive handbook on Germanlanguage radio activities between 1933 and 1945.[9] However, there has not yet been a study attending specifcally to the numerous radio broadcasts in German from Spain. In the summer of 1936, German radio programs began to be broadcast by Radio Madrid, “La Voz de la España Republicana,” and by Radio Barcelona. The latter was primarily for the use of the United Socialist Party of Catalonia but also for the Partido Obrero de la Unifcación Marxista and the Iberian Anarchist Federation. In the autumn of the same year, German-language broadcasts also began from the station of the Generalitat, the Catalan regional government. These transmissions were broadcast via the facilities of Radio Barcelona. Finally, at the beginning of 1937, the station of the Spanish Communist Party and the station of the Spanish trade unions also broadcast German-language programs from Madrid.

Nevertheless, the German anti-fascists, fghting alongside the Spanish Republic against Franco’s troops, established their own radio station as a voice of the opposition coming from anti-fascist Germany and not primarily from Republican Spain. Starting on January 10, 1937, the German Freedom station broadcast on shortwave 29.8, the frequency mentioned in this text. The station was broadcasting directly adjacent to the fascist Deutschlandsender, which was spreading Goebbels’s propaganda on the 30-meter band. The purpose of this was twofold. On the one hand, listeners to the Deutschlandsender would accidentally become aware of the Freedom Station’s broadcasts, and, on the other hand, the work of the jammers would be made more difcult. Since the two stations were on such close frequencies, the jammers’ interference measures had to remain limited so as not to make their own radio inaudible. Franz Dahlem and the German publicist Gerhart Eisler had agreed on the establishment of the station with the Spanish Minister of Information Jesús Hernández.[10] The Spanish Republic considered the station to be another way of fghting Germany, whose realpolitik was becoming increasingly aggressive against the Spanish Popular Front government and made Hitler’s Germany a powerful supporter of the Franco putschists. For the Freedom Station’s broadcasts, the team used a facility that had been built near Madrid only the year before by the German airline Lufthansa as a radio link for its South America route.

At the beginning, the station had two responsible journalists, frst in Valencia and later in Barcelona. One of them was Erich Glückauf, previously special correspondent of the Deutsche Volkszeitung in Paris. The other was none other than Hans Teubner. The later coordinator of the materials on the Spanish Civil War at the Institute for Marxism-Leninism in the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party was indeed a protagonist of the story told here. However, this is not made explicit at any point in the text. This is may be due to a double ideological caveat in the GDR: the popular front movements were to be nominally continued by the National Front of the German Democratic Republic, an alliance of political parties, but de facto controlled by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). The actual purpose of the National Front was to give the impression that the GDR was a democracy governed by a broad-based coalition. In fact, all parties were subservient to the Socialist Unity Party and had to ofcially accept the SED’s leading role as a condition of their existence. In elections, voters only had the option of approving or rejecting a single “united list” of National Front candidates. The historical popular front movements functioned diferently in building real coalitions and were therefore seen in the GDR as an ambivalent historical case. Second, Hans Teubner had fallen out of favor with the GDR leadership in 1950 when he was accused of being a “Zionist-imperialist agent.” Even though he was rehabilitated in 1956, Teubner cannot have had much interest in highlighting his own involvement in the story told in this text, a story that was recounted by an anonymous French author. But was it indeed an anonymous French author who penned this text? I have discussed this question with the scholar Marc Sagnol, and he confrmed that the French in the text was indeed written by a native speaker. However, we were both uncertain whether the text is in fact a translation of an account that was actually written in German, because it quotes exclusively German sources, and the text testifes to an intimate knowledge of the circumstances in Germany. For instance, the Norddeutsche Tribüne was a minuscule newspaper produced by dockworkers, not a national newspaper, and certainly not that well known in France. One should perhaps also consider the target audience. Why the need for a text in French explaining the situation in Germany in 1937 in such detail? This can be at least partially explained by its argumentative structure, since many pages are devoted to proving that only the democratic countries adhered to a policy of non-intervention, while Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany massively supported Franco’s troops.

It is tempting to speculate who from the environment of the Lutetia Committee could have written the original text in German. After all, some prominent individuals can be considered as possible authors. One candidate would be Heinrich Mann, for whom the Popular Front in Exile still appeared in his autobiography as a historical road not taken that he strongly lamented. Unfortunately, it is not possible to prove that Heinrich Mann was the author of the text. There are many other convincing candidates for the author of this text. The frst major Popular Front in Exile conference in the Hotel Lutetia was a huge event with more than one hundred participants. Among them were Willi Münzenberg; Franz Dahlem; the editor-in-chief of the Red Flag, Alexander Abusch; the members of the Social Democrat Party Rudolf Breitscheid, Max Braun, Albert Grzesinski, Erich Kuttner, and Kurt Löwenstein; and many writers, including Klaus Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Ernst Toller, Ludwig Marcuse, Emil Ludwig, and Leopold Schwarzschild.

Last but not least, it also could have been Hans Teubner himself who authored this text, or one of the other writers mentioned. The translation could have been done by the later resistance fghter Jacques Decour, who was connected to the Lutetia Committee and had personal contact with many emigres from Germany, among them Bertolt Brecht and Klaus and Heinrich Mann. Decour was arrested by the French police in February 1942, together with Georges Politzer, Jacques Solomon, Danielle Casanova, and Georges Dudach, and handed over to the Germans, who executed him. Narrative diction and style of the text evoke Decours’s translations, but it is once again impossible to prove that he was the translator of the text.

However, an untold story in its own right is the fact that a narrative account containing the agenda of the Lutetia Committee has been preserved in the archives of the GDR. And in the same manner, the story of the Deutsche Freiheitssender 29.8 is a piece of Spanish Civil War history that still needs to be told.

I will conclude with a fnal passage from the text that ofers a juxtaposition worthy of commentary. First, the text repeats the slogan “Hitler will be defeated in Spain.” The following paragraph mentions a certain Blomberg. This refers to Werner von Blomberg, the frst Minister of War in Hitler’s government. Following the Nazis’ rise to power, he was named Minister of War and Commander-in-Chief of the German Armed Forces, and in this capacity, Blomberg played a central role in Germany’s military build-up during the interwar years. However, in January 1938, he was forced to resign by his rivals Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler. Hans Teubner’s dating of the text to the summer 1937 can thus be substantiated when the author mentions Blomberg as a politician still in power:

Comprends-on les dangers que Hitler et Blomberg y ont fairé pour leurs projets de guerre ? Comprends-on pourquoi le gouvernement hitlérien décida d’élever désormais les hideuses méthodes appliqués par Streicher contre les juifs au rang d’une grande action d’Etat dont l’envergure, ne s’était jamais vue dans l’Histoire ? . . . Ainsi, nous sentons que la lutte de l’Espagne pour la liberté ne lance pas en vain son appel, et qu’elle nous engage à créer le Front populaire aussi en Allemagne.[11]

In the Institute for Marxism-Leninism, Hans Teubner preserved a text in the archives of the Institute for Marxism-Leninism that provides a lucid analysis of the situation in Europe in the summer of 1937. This applies frst to the very astute assessment of the danger of war, which the author sees proven by Nazi Germany’s strong support of Franco’s troops. The revision of the international order after the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 was a central component in the program of the Nazi Party, which had been in power in Germany since 1933. By 1935, Hitler’s government had taken deliberate steps to dismantle the Versailles peace order with the reintroduction of universal military conscription and the invasion of the demilitarized Rhineland in March 1936. On July 7, 1937, the Japanese war in China began—another incident that led toward World War II.

But the foresight of the anonymous author of this text goes even further: when writing in summer of 1937, he interprets the deprivation of rights and persecution of German Jewry (which had begun immediately after the transfer of power to Hitler in 1933) not as a side efect of fascist politics but as a full-scale governmental operation in its own right. We are aware that the author of this text was afliated to the German Popular Front in Exile movement. The commitment on behalf of the elected Popular Front government in Spain, the struggle of the volunteers in the International Brigades, and the realization that a full-scale state action was being prepared in Germany against its own citizens are here part and parcel of the author’s political analysis, suggesting yet another untold story.

Anonymous sources of this character, which provide access to individual and collective interpretations, evaluations, or social knowledge about the international perception of the Spanish Civil War because of their anonymity and not despite it, are preserved in archives worldwide. The SAPMO archive is not the only archive in the German-speaking context. There are also archival holdings at the Dresden Military Museum and many regional and city archives.

The Deutscher Freiheitssender 29.8, which started broadcasting in January 1937, is remembered today as one of the frst anti-fascist broadcasting stations of the exiled Communist Party. The text analyzed goes beyond such a profle in including the agenda of the Lutetia Committee among antifascist eforts; the anti-fascist perspective here is not exclusively communist. Through the multiple anonymizing strategies of the text (no author’s name, presentation of the German Popular Front in exile in French, use of anonymized sources and quotations in the text itself), it becomes evident the extent to which these perspectives were problematic in the European public sphere of 1937. But it also becomes clear how rarely these perspectives were remembered in the GDR and the Federal Republic and how crucial it can be to include them in research on the Spanish Civil War and German history.

Bibliography

Grifn, Robert J. “Anonymity and Authorship.” New Literary History 30 (1999): 877–95.

Grifn, Robert J. “Working with Anonymity: A Theory of Theory vs. Archive.” Literature Compass 4, no. 2 (2007): 463–69.

Kießling, Wolfgang. Partner im “Narrenparadies.” Der Freundeskreis um Noel Field und Paul Merker. Berlin: Dietz, 1994.

Kremmer, Arnold. “The Cult of the Spanish Civil War in East Germany.” Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 4 (2004): 531–60.

Pütter, Conrad. Rundfunk gegen das “Dritte Reich”: deutschsprachige Rundfunkaktivitäten im Exil, 1933–1945. Munich: Saur, 1986.

Ross, Emily. “The Problem of Anonymity in Archives: A Literature Review.” BİLGİ DÜNYASI 14, no. 2 (2013): 240–50.

Scheer, André. “Die Stimme der Freiheit in deutscher Nacht. Der Deutsche Freiheitssender 29,8.” In Schriftenreihe Politische Untergrundsender, n.p. Göttingen: Kurzwellen-Pressedienst, 1991.