German friends, help us!

Dear German citizens,

Allow me to address you with a problem that concerns the Catalans in two important ways. First, because we have no other choice and second because I believe you will understand me, because German society, just as Catalan and other European societies, have long suffered the consequences of a terrible and violent fascist state.

In Spain - and this will surprise you - not only does the Franco dictatorship's single party remain perfectly legal, but any journalist writing about the criminal nature of this fascist organization, responsible for thousands of deaths during the Civil War and the subsequent repression, runs the risk of ending up in court. For your information, my German friends, Madrid still displays eight streets and an avenue dedicated to the dead or the foremost members of the 250. Infanterie-Division of Spanish volunteers, Franco's Blue Division, who served at the siege of Leningrad. Some of them went on to defend the bunker of the Chancellery fiercely until Adolf Hitler committed suicide.

The People's Party (PP), today Spain's ruling party, was founded by Manuel Fraga, one of Franco's ministers, who led the party until his death about a year ago. Fraga never expressed regret at his political career at the pinnacle of the dictatorship, and in fact, the PP refuses to condemn Franco's fascism even now. Most of those murdered in the repression still remain where they were shot, in their roadside graves. Their relatives, some of them very old, have been denied permission to recover their remains and give them a proper burial.

I write this as briefly as possible, because —paradoxically— the whole of this Spanish ideological sphere, politicians and the media, are constantly accusing Catalans of being of a Nazi, fascist nature, when the history of the Catalan parties is scrupulously democratic, even to the extent that the Catalan Lluís Companys was the first democratically elected president in Europe who was shot merely for the fact that he had been just that, democratically elected. In 1940 he was arrested and deported in a combined operation of Franco's police and the Gestapo.

An example of my argument is the video by Telemadrid, a public television which is controlled — I insist on this: controlled— by the PP government. In the video, Stalinism and Nazism are trivialised and Stalin and Hitler are openly compared with the current Catalan president, the successor of that president who was murdered by the people who today still approve of the actions of their grandparents. They even refuse to revoke the sentence, which is still legally valid, as are all those of the political trials of Franco’s regime.

I am aware that I am explaining a problem that the Catalans have, but many of you probably believe in Europe and the vast majority, in democracy. This is why I am writing to you in the hope that soon a free Catalonia, European and fully democratic will contribute together with Germany to the final extinction of the last traces of fascism in Europe.

Salvador Cot
salvadorcot@naciodigital.cat

Spanish version
German version