Coincidentally, I watched a terrible Spanish-made zombie movie on Netflix yesterday that was set during the civil war. It made me wonder if modern Spanish people think the right side won the war and how they would treat that in the movie, after all the fascist won. They handled it by having the "good guys" on both sides of the conflict and the "bad guys" being the Nazis who created the zombies.

It was definitely worse than that movie. Being so bad allowed me to go down a little bit of a rabbit hole and I googled how Spain was able to stay out of wwii. I learned they were close to entering on the axis side, maybe a couple of times, but either on purpose or happenstance they did not. At least not fully and the US played a big role in that with economic pressure. Although their obvious favoring of the axis powers still cost them in the post war era. That is the wiki version anyway.

pmart said:

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It was definitely worse than that movie. Being so bad allowed me to go down a little bit of a rabbit hole and I googled how Spain was able to stay out of wwii. I learned they were close to entering on the axis side, maybe a couple of times, but either on purpose or happenstance they did not. At least not fully and the US played a big role in that with economic pressure. Although their obvious favoring of the axis powers still cost them in the post war era. That is the wiki version anyway.

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The Abwehr (German MI5, OSS), more specifically Canaris, played an important role on keeping Spain out of the war as well.

Google the Blue Division, it was an entire Wehrmacht division of Spaniards. The Spaniards would cross over the Pyrenees to enlist in the German army in France. They did some heavy fighting on the east front. Interesting to see casualty reports for the German Army with dead Gomezs and Perezs.

I did see reference to an agreement made to allow "volunteers " to fight only on the eastern front. I see now that this was the Blue Division. Thanks for the reference. I thought by volunteers it meant like the American volunteers that fought on the republican side of the Spanish civil war. This was a much, much bigger force.

It was a very nasty war indeed. Far more intricate and complicated than our Civil War even was.

There was a real good PBS dicumentary on it in the 80s. I found it on You Tube. Search for it.