Basque History of the World

by Mark Kurlansky

  You will do it, you who encompass all the old blood in your new heart. And on that day, the Tree of Guernica—a universal symbol—will again give shade to a land of freedom.

  A YOUNG Flemish Belgian Red Cross volunteer in Brussels, Andrée De Jongh, determined to resist the German occupiers, joined a small underground group with more conviction than skill. Soon the Germans had dismantled the group and arrested all its members except De Jongh and a man named Arnold Deppé.

  Wanting to continue to resist, the two decided to establish a kind of underground railroad that could give shelter to Allied pilots shot down over northern Europe and return them to England. Before the war, Deppé had lived in St.-Jean-de-Luz, where he worked for the film company Gaumont. He knew a number of Basques who trafficked in contraband across the Pyrenees, and on several occasions during the Civil War, they had gotten him in and out of Spain. Deppé reasoned that he and De Jongh could get fliers to Paris and down to the Basque coast, to St.-Jean-de-Luz, where Basques could help them over the Pyrenees.

  This was the beginning of “Operation Comet,” or as it was more commonly called in the Resistance, la ligne. Operations began in May 1941, and by the time France was liberated in the summer of 1944, 1,700 agents had been involved in returning to combat 700 highly trained and valuable British, Canadian, and American fliers.

  St.-Jean-de-Luz, a seaside town of a few narrow streets, a medieval church and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stone houses, with bright-hulled tuna boats moored in the inner harbor and a curved beach along the oceanside, does not look like a place where many secrets could be kept. But numerous Resistance operations were centered there sponsored by the Communists, the Socialists, trade unions, the Free French of Charles de Gaulle, the American intelligence service known as the OSS, the Basque Nationalist Party, and the government-in-exile.

  In St.-Jean-de-Luz, la ligne made contact with a refugee from Elizondo in northern Navarra, a smuggler who worked the passes. When in St.-Jean-de-Luz, he could be found at the Hotel Eskualduna. The informal café on the ground floor of the fine old stone corner building, even then was a popular meeting place, a place where someone could contact a smuggler.

  All kinds of documents and information were passed through the Hotel Eskualduna by the owners Kattalin Aguirre and her teenage daughter Joséphine, called “Fifine,” women of friendly but rugged demeanor and unmistakably Basque faces. They gave rooms and other help to Basque refugees in need. The Eskualduna became the central point of la ligne in Basque country.

  One of the regulars at the café was a sturdy, thick-built Basque named Florentino Goikoetxea, whose name means “the house above.” He was born in 1898 outside San Sebastián. His passion for hunting led to a deep knowledge of the land, which, in time, led to smuggling. Arrested by the Guardia Civil at the outbreak of the Civil War, he escaped to Ciboure, where he continued smuggling. La ligne recruited him as a guide to lead fleeing fliers through the mountains.

  The fliers were usually taken from Brussels to St.-Jean-de-Luz by train. Most of them did not speak French and were accompanied by female agents who pretended to be strangers while watching out for them. At Bayonne or St.-Jean-de-Luz, the fliers had to slip out of the train station, past German inspectors, often through the men’s room, which had a door to the street.

  They were fed and rested, sometimes at the Eskualduna, which was near the train station, or at the Ocean Hotel by the beach. After nightfall Basque operatives took them to a nearby farm, from where Florentino Goikoetxea led them up along a small stream, climbing 1,600 feet in the dark over a mountain the Basques call Xoldocagagna, to an area of thick ferns. Then they would be led through a small pass to where the trail winds around to another pass and then down along a creek.

  All this was done in complete darkness, because the Germans had ordered a total blackout at night. Stumbling in the dark off roads and paths, tripping over branches and into ruts or streams, is slow, exhausting work. It could take hours to gain a few miles. Finally arriving on the Spanish side, they would only be minutes by road from where they started in France. But now they were on the Spanish side and no longer in the sheltering darkness of the blackout. From a distance they would begin to see the lights of Irún and Fuenterabbía, even glimpses of the Fuenterabbía lighthouse at the mouth of the bay. But they had been better off back in the blackout. The lights on the Spanish side helped the Guardia Civil, in their black shiny triangular hats, to closely watch the road. The Basques would try to get the fliers to the Spanish side at about 4 A.M., at the end of the long night when the bored Guardia Civil were chatting or resting. Sometimes the Basques and their refugees would grope across a black and swift Bidasoa to rest at a farm, Sarobe, in a deep and winding valley. Fliers remember the good red wine, fine omelettes, and pungent sheep’s milk cheese the farmer offered them. To avoid arousing suspicion, the fliers were often dressed in traditional Basque peasant shoes, rope-soled espadrilles. Now they could soak their bruised feet in salt water and get a change of shoes. But they always had to be ready to run, to jump out a window at the first odd rustle heard over the noisy rush of river water.

  The Basques and their refugees walked for miles, dodging streetlights and main roads until they reached the town of Renteria, a few miles upriver from the ports of Pasajes. In Renteria, they got on the coastal tramway like any Basque commuter, hoping not to raise suspicion for the half hour it took to get to San Sebastián. They could rest in Hernani, a village on the southern edge of San Sebastián that is famous for its cider. The owner of a cider mill sheltered them. Or they could rest in San Sebastián at the home of Bernardo Aracama, a Guipúzcoan in his early forties. In 1936, Aracama had escaped the Francoists in Guipúzcoa and gone to Guernica. By chance, he decided to leave only hours before the bombardment had taken place, and he fled to Ciboure. In 1941, he somehow managed to get his papers in order and moved back to San Sebastián, where he worked as a garage mechanic.

  The journey from St.-Jean-de-Luz to San Sebastián, today twenty minutes by highway, would take at least five hours—up to sixteen hours if the rivers were flooding with rain. The final destination of the Basque part of la ligne was the British consulate in Bilbao, which would then get the pilots back to England either through Lisbon or Gibraltar.

  One night a German patrol on the French side opened fire with machine guns at shadows moving in the riverbed. The Germans captured a Basque smuggler, wounded in four places, and took him to the hospital in Bayonne. Not knowing that their prisoner was Florentino Goikoetxea, they placed him under light guard, while at the Hotel Eskualduna, the regular crowd was whispering frightening scenarios. Would the Germans be able to identify Florentino? Would they interrogate him? Could they get him to talk? The Gestapo could learn every Basque name in la ligne. The operatives decided that the only solution was to free Florentino before the Germans grew suspicious, while he was still just another casually guarded Basque smuggler. To communicate with him without the Germans knowing, the oldest of Basque tricks was used: Euskera. An operative visited him in the hospital and said, “Florentino, bihar zure bila etorriko dira, arraltsaldean,” a sentence that aroused no curiosity from the guards but means: “Florentino, tomorrow afternoon, they will come to get you.”

  The next day it took three people and a truck exactly two minutes to get Florentino out of the hospital. He was then taken through the back roads of Labourd until hidden at a safe house, where he remained until the Liberation. He had personally escorted 227 pilots, mostly Royal Air Force, to safety.

  Many were not as lucky as Florentino Goikoetxea. Juan Manuel Larburu’s farm in Hernani, supposedly safe in neutral Spain, was a rest stop for fliers until Larburu was turned over to the Gestapo in March 1944, only months before the Liberation, and deported to Germany, where he disappeared.

  The final operation of la ligne before the liberation of France carried documents, a captured list of Gestapo operatives in France and Belgium who were escaping to Spain. The Basques got the list to the British to b
e used in the hunt for war criminals, which the Basques assumed would take place after the Allied occupation of Spain.

  IN 1944, WHEN combat shifted to French soil, the Basques fought in small units attached to Allied forces. A Basque unit landed in Normandy on D-Day, and Basques fought in the liberation of Paris, insisting that the ikurriña fly among the victorious flags when de Gaulle entered the capital. They also fought with the French resistance, especially FFI, the Forces Français à l’Intérieur, and in small guerrilla bands in the Pyrenees.

  Aguirre, wanting the Basque Nationalist Party to have its own unit, formed a battalion of 200 men commanded by a veteran of the Basque Army, Kepa Ordoki, a stonemason from Irún. Ordoki had commanded a battalion in the defense of Bilbao, had been taken prisoner and sent across the border to a camp in occupied France. Escaping, he became an expert at sabotage. The Germans captured and tortured him and were about to execute him, when he escaped again.

  The new unit Ordoki commanded was called the Gernika Batalloa, the Guernica Battalion. Sixty percent of its troops were combat veterans from the Civil War.

  After the Allies landed in Normandy and even after Paris was liberated, the Germans left behind a force of 25,500 troops in the southwest of France, mostly dug in so solidly along the Atlantic coast that their concrete bunkers can still be seen there today. De Gaulle attached considerable importance to flushing out this rear guard that was able to remain supplied by the Franco-controlled Basque ports of Spain. As the front shifted to Belgium and into Germany, FFI, the Guernica Battalion, and Moroccan volunteers fought the last battles in France.

  Suddenly, from their bunkers German soldiers would hear a cry in a strange language, “Gora Euskadi!” and look through their concrete fortifications at an attacking army, at last with modern weapons in their hands, waving a red, white, and green flag, singing an indecipherable hymn, “Eusko gudariak gera,” We Are the Basque Fighters.

  Once more the Basques, outnumbered, had waited to take their revenge, attacking the last of the rear guard. Driving the Germans from their bunkers and fortifications was their vengeance, but the Basques also believed that they were at last beginning the final great campaign of World War II. Franco would now go the way of Hitler and Mussolini.

  April 14, 1945, three weeks before the end of World War II, the Guernica Battalion led a joint attack on the last Germans in the Gironde, the Bordeaux wine region on the Atlantic coast. With their former comrades of the Spanish Nationalist Union, a Communist Republican unit on one flank and the Moroccans on the other, they led an attack on 4,000 Germans of the Festung Gironde, fortress Gironde. The Germans were entrenched in Pointe-de-Grave, a point of land guarding the entrance to the mouth of the Gironde, the river that leads to Bordeaux.

  Basques always said Mass before going into battle. Standing on a grassy field, bareheaded for prayer, Kepa Ordoki addressed his troops after the service: “The hour of battle has arrived, to defeat the enemy, to let the people of France know that the Basques know how to fight and die for freedom. Those of you who are veterans, take the young with you to victory. Avenge the dead of Euskadi. These are the same Germans who caused the deaths at Durango and Guernica. Do not forget that France will be proud of your example. Gora Euskadi askatuta!”

  Long live free Basqueland!

  Like medieval warriors, they unfurled their colors, the ikurriña, fastened their helmets on their heads, shouted back “Gora Euskadi!” and, singing their battle hymn from 1937, an ancient language of an ancient warrior people rolling over the budding vineyards, they began a fifteen-hour assault.

  Liberated France wanted to give the Croix de Guerre, to the soldiers of the Guernica Battalion. But the Basque veterans refused, insisting instead that the medal go to the ikurriña itself. Only forty-two years after Sabino Arana’s death, the secret flag of his underground organization received full French military honors. When the medal was presented to President Aguirre by the commander of the Foreign and Moroccan Mixed Regiment, he told the Basque leader, “When we go to liberate your country, I will meet you under the tree at Guernica.”

  Basque soldiers saying Mass before a battle, photo by David Seymour, 1937. The Ikurriña is in the foreground and pinned on some of the uniforms. (Magnum Photos, Inc.)

  * * *

  11: Speaking Christian

  And like the Basque poet who saw the immaculate snowflake disappear the instant he held it in his hand, I found myself with all my dreams turned to foam at the moment I possessed them.

  —José Luis Alvarez Enparantza, a.k.a. Txillardegi,

  HAIZEAZ BESTALDETIK (Beyond the Wind), 1979

  * * *

  FRANCO, FOR THE most part, was a successful liar. Though few people completely believed his explanations of Guernica, subsequent generations of Basques, having grown up going to Franco’s schools, often believe the Guernica death toll to be far less than the staggering numbers asserted by witnesses and accepted by historians in the rest of Europe. One of Franco’s most successful lies was that through his cleverness, he had outmaneuvered Hitler and kept Spain out of World War II. Then, according to him, he seduced the Americans. Even today, Spaniards of Republican families who grew up hating Franco but attending his school system believe these myths.

  In reality, Franco had desperately wanted to get into the war. The war machine the Germans and Italians had shown him stretched his military imagination to its limits. At the outset of World War II, it did not even occur to him that other nations might possess the military power not only to stop but to defeat the Germans. Certain of German victory, he hoped for a share of the war booty. He was especially interested in gaining more of Morocco at France’s expense. But the Germans thought that he was an ineffective general and that his army was poorly equipped and backward. After the Civil War, the Spanish economy having collapsed, hunger and unemployment were widespread, and the Germans reasoned that if Spain were an ally, Germany would have to feed its people, arm them, train them, even, as the Germans had done in the Civil War, fight for them. Hitler repeatedly spurned Franco’s offers.

  The two met on October 23, 1940, at the train station in Hendaye, which is about 100 yards from the border, the St. Jacques Bridge over the Bidasoa. The meeting resembled a comic encounter from Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator, which was made the same year. Hitler and the German command were kept waiting, stiffly pacing in the train station. Franco’s slow chugging train arrived, depending on whose version is believed, either eight minutes or one hour late. There were rumors of an attempt on Franco’s life by grenade-throwing Spanish anarchists. No such attack took place, though a plot may have existed. Franco, mortified at being late, fumed and ranted, threatening to fire the officer responsible for his travel arrangements, but recovered in time to step down on the Hendaye platform, tears of joy glistening in his eyes. The Caudillo, as Hitler addressed Franco, was evidently overcome at the moment of meeting the man he addressed as the Führer.

  Franco made his case for entering the war. Hitler talked of his war problems. Franco talked of his supply needs to ready for war. The two conversations rarely intersected. Hitler began to grow irritated. Franco, to show a knowledge of war strategy, suggested, as an aide had told him, that once England was defeated, the British would still fight on from Canada. The Führer did not find this an interesting point and, hopping to his feet, announced with notable agitation that it would be pointless to continue the conversation.

  From this meeting, Franco let it be widely known in Spain that he, their Caudillo, had held off the Nazis at Hendaye, that they had come threatening to take over Spain, and he had masterfully negotiated Spanish neutrality. According to Franco, Hitler had said, “I am the master of Europe and, as I have 200 divisions at my orders, there is no alternative but to obey.”

  There is no record of this remark, and German records show that Hitler and his divisions wished to stay far away from Spain. Hitler’s only known comment on leaving the Hendaye meeting was “Mit diesem Kerl ist nichts zu machen,”
You can’t do anything with this character. Later, he said to Mussolini of his meeting with Franco, “I would rather have three or four teeth pulled, than go through that again.” Curiously, another time, on the subject of the Hendaye meeting, the Führer muttered something to an adjutant about “Jesuit swine.”

  It was one of many times that Franco was saved by luck. Had he succeeded in persuading Hitler to let him join the Nazi war effort, Spain would have been overrun by the Allies in 1945 as the Basques had hoped. But as it was, Spain was a neutral country, albeit one that supplied raw material and armaments to the German war effort. The Wehrmacht fought with Spanish-made cartridges, rifle barrels, engines, uniforms, and parachutes. And they also fought with a Spanish volunteer division, the Blue Division, whose veterans continued, even years after Franco’s death, to proudly display the iron crosses they had won from Germany.

  Franco had personally assisted in the escape to Spain of Léon Degrelle, the wanted Belgian SS officer about whom Hitler had reportedly once said, “If I had a son, I would want him to be like Degrelle.” In 1949, Franco did the same for wanted SS colonel Otto Skorzeny. The United Nations reported after the war that between 2,000 and 3,000 German Nazis as well as many more war criminals from the Vichy regime lived in Spain. The U.S. government estimated that Nazi holdings in Spain were worth $95 million in late 1940s dollars. The war criminals whose records la ligne had smuggled over the Pyrenees to the British were now safe and comfortable and continued to live openly in Spain, giving interviews to Western press expressing Nazi ideology, even after Franco’s death. Many prominent war criminals died in luxury in Spain in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1994, when the German government sought to prosecute Otto Ernst Remer, Hitler’s security chief, for preaching racial hatred, he fled to Spain. The Spanish court ruled that since there was no such crime under Spanish law, he could not be extradited. He died in a Costa del Sol resort in 1997.