In 1936, soon after the start of the Spanish Civil War, Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera Munro, a senior press officer for the far-right military forces fighting to overthrow the Spanish Republic, offered a theory to explain the conflict’s origins. “You know what’s wrong with Spain?” he asked John Whitaker, a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News.
Modern plumbing! In healthier times—I mean healthier times spiritually, you understand—plague and pestilence used to slaughter the Spanish masses. Held them down to proper proportions, you understand. Now with modern sewage disposal and the like, they multiply too fast. They’re like animals, you understand, and you can’t expect them not to be infected with the virus of Bolshevism.
Aguilera, who had been educated at Jesuit boarding schools in England, was the Count of Alba de Yeltes, the eleventh-generation heir to enormous latifundios (estates) in Salamanca and Cáceres provinces. He played polo, read The New Yorker, and cut a flamboyant figure on the battlefield with his high boots and riding crop. The economy of agricultural Spain was a precapitalist feudal system in which workers were essentially slaves. Aguilera sought to preserve this structure. “It is a race war, not merely a class war,” he said to H.R. Knickerbocker, an American reporter.
You don’t understand because you don’t realize that there are two races in Spain—a slave race and a ruler race. Those reds, from President Azaña to the anarchists, are all slaves. It is our duty to put them back into their places—yes, put chains on them again, if you like.
Rural discontent had been building in Spain throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, culminating in 1918, when agricultural workers began a wave of strikes. After three years the military, which was aligned with the landowners, succeeded in suppressing the revolt. For much of the next decade the country was ruled by a military dictatorship. Unrest and violence increased after the resignation and death of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1930, and elections held the next year led to the creation of the Second Spanish Republic, the country’s first real democratic government. The new coalition of center-left and socialist parties enacted reforms that included the creation of a secular public education system and the seizure of portions of the latifundios for redistribution to peasants.
Landowners like Aguilera openly flouted the government, and in the 1933 elections the right won power. Soon after, a drought caused rural unemployment to spike to more than 40 percent in some areas. Starving agricultural workers took to the roads, desperately searching for fallen olives and acorns, which were ordinarily used for feeding pigs. In February 1936 the rural masses, along with Spain’s growing urban proletariat and its small professional class, elected a left-leaning Popular Front coalition government. It too tried to enact economic and social reforms. But in July 1936 a group of reactionary military officers staged a coup.
The coup plotters meant to restore the supremacy of Spain’s elite—the right-wing officer corps, the Catholic Church hierarchy, and wealthy landowners. The coup failed, morphing instead into a three-year civil war that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 people; tens of thousands more were killed after it ended. “The wholesale execution of prisoners and civilians were the trump cards of the ‘best’ elements in Spain,” Whitaker wrote of the rebel leaders, who were backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. “They were outnumbered by the masses; they feared the masses; and they proposed to thin down the numbers of the masses.” Aguilera was more blunt. “We’ve got to kill and kill and kill, you understand?” he told Whitaker.
As Paul Preston shows in his revelatory Architects of Terror, Aguilera was no outlier. The book is structured around six chapter-length biographies of figures who shaped the fascist revolt that destroyed the Spanish Republic and led to General Francisco Franco’s nearly four-decade dictatorship. In addition to Aguilera, they include Mauricio Carlavilla, an undercover police agent, best-selling propagandist, pimp, and organizer of a plot to murder the republic’s prime minister, Manuel Azaña; Juan Tusquets, a Catalan theologian and antisemitic author; José María Pemán, a member of the Falange (Spain’s fascist movement), incendiary antisemitic poet, and orator; General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, who led the rebel forces in the country’s southern provinces and became a popular radio broadcaster known for encouraging his soldiers to rape and murder civilians; and General Emilio Mola, who was responsible for the forces in the north, where he oversaw the killing of more than 40,000 civilians. Franco, who emerged as the rebellion’s supreme military leader through cunning and luck, is a presence in each profile, by turns a collaborator, tormentor, and rival.
They all shared a strong belief in an antisemitic conspiracy theory called the contubernio judeo-masónico-bolchevique, which Preston translates as “filthy Jewish–masonic–Bolshevik concubinage.” Rooted in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the nineteenth-century forgery that claimed to document a Jewish conspiracy that controlled the world, the contubernio was a strange, contradictory, all-encompassing theory that Jews had created Freemasonry and communism to destroy Spain and achieve world conquest. (Since their expulsion in 1492, virtually no Jews lived openly in Spain; in 1936 the country had fewer than six thousand Jews and about the same number of Freemasons.)
Preston’s account shows the extent to which antisemitism animated and unified the Spanish far right during this time. It is particularly timely given the American far right’s renewed admiration for Franco, the debate over whether the term “fascist” applies to Donald Trump and his strain of right-wing populism,1 and the Trump administration’s weaponization of antisemitism as a cudgel against universities across the country. Although the histories of Italian and German fascism continue to be in the foreground, there is far less discussion of Spanish fascism, which endured much longer and is more openly venerated.2
In a moment when spurious accusations of antisemitism are regularly launched against the left, Preston’s account is a useful reminder of the left’s general, if inconsistent, antipathy to it and of the far right’s reliance on it. During the Spanish Civil War an estimated 20 percent of the International Brigades, the volunteer army of more than 35,000 men and women who helped defend the republic, were Jewish. Meanwhile Franco’s last public speech, delivered several weeks before his death in 1975, made clear that he still believed in the contubernio.
For the propagandists (Tusquets, Pemán, Carlavilla) the myth of the contubernio became the single most important means of uniting the Catholic, monarchist, and fascist factions of the right. In 1932 Tusquets, the contubernio’s most influential proponent, published Origins of the Spanish Revolution, a conspiratorial survey of the past century of Spanish history based on the Protocols. The book was an enormous success and made Tusquets a star of the European far right. In 1934 the International Anti-Masonic Association invited him to tour Dachau, which had recently opened as a concentration camp for political prisoners. “They did it to show us what we had to do in Spain,” Tusquets wrote afterward.
Pemán, a novelist, poet, and playwright, propagated the idea of the “anti-Spain,” an internal enemy nation populated by those citizens who were deemed not conservative, religious, or nationalist. Like many fascists, Pemán obsessed over purification. In a 1937 radio broadcast he called the civil war a “magnificent struggle to bleed Spain.” His most influential work, Poema de la bestia y el ángel (1938), drew on the Protocols. (The fictitious Elders of Zion are described as “leaning over the map of Spain, one hundred hooked noses like crows’ beaks…plotting the division of Spain.”) Pemán’s influence was more than just rhetorical. During the civil war Franco named him president of a new education commission; Pemán wasted no time in purging 16,000 teachers, sending many of them to prison and ordering several hundred to be executed.
The military officers Preston profiles also believed in the contubernio. “The Jews,” Mola told his staff, “are an accumulation of age-old malice, evil intentions and ancient racial resentments.” The racism and brutality that Mola, Franco, Queipo de Llano, and Aguilera displayed throughout the civil war had already been evident during their colonial service, when they enforced Spain’s occupation of northern Morocco. Africanistas, as these officers were called, blamed the contubernio for the decline of Spain’s empire and were especially enraged and motivated by the loss of Cuba and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War.
In the 1920s the Africanistas suppressed a series of rebellions of Berber tribesmen in the Rif Mountains. In his memoirs, Mola wrote that he delighted in walking over a ravine filled with the crushed skulls and exposed, discolored intestines of a group of rebels. Soldiers under his command cut out the hearts of their opponents with a machete. Like Aguilera, Mola wanted to restore Spain’s feudal system. “This war will solve for us the agrarian problem,” he wrote in his diary.
During the civil war Mola oversaw the execution of close to three thousand Republican men in Navarre. He had women’s heads shaved and forced them to drink castor oil. Many were raped. “Death would be insufficient” for the defeated Republicans, he said. In areas he controlled, lists were drawn up of vegetarians, Esperanto speakers, Freemasons, nudists—anyone who behaved differently from the far right’s ideal Spaniard—to be arrested, tortured, and sometimes executed. At times Mola’s nihilistic military strategy went too far even for some of the Nazis aiding him. During the siege of Bilbao, he implored a shocked Nazi air force colonel to bomb the city’s industrial factories, even though they were about to be seized by the fascist forces. “If half of Spain’s factories were destroyed by German bombers, the subsequent reconstruction of Spain would be greatly facilitated,” Mola told the officer, who appealed to Franco to overrule him. (Franco gave partial authorization for Mola’s request.)
Mola’s contentious relationship with Franco may have cost him his life. Franco was suspected of sabotaging the plane that crashed and killed him. But he also had his admirers, notably Adolf Hitler. “The real tragedy for Spain was the death of Mola,” Hitler said. “There was the real brain, the real leader.”
Most of Preston’s subjects tried to whitewash their pasts after World War II, perhaps none more successfully than Pemán, who reinvented himself as a liberal monarchist. In 1981, two months before Pemán’s death, King Juan Carlos awarded the ailing poet the Order of the Golden Fleece, one of the highest honors for Catholic nobles. Aguilera had a more notorious end. One afternoon in 1964 his son Agustín began massaging his father’s sore feet. Suddenly Aguilera pulled out an old revolver from his African service and shot Agustín in the chest. Aguilera’s elder son, Gonzalo, burst into the room, and Aguilera shot him in the chest, too, killing him instantly. Aguilera then went looking for Agustín, who had stumbled out, and found him lying dead in a pool of blood. His wife hid until the Guardia Civil arrived. “Kill him, he’s a savage,” she implored them. Aguilera died in a psychiatric hospital nine months later. He was never charged for the murders.
In January 1939 Franco’s troops captured Barcelona. Soldiers ransacked the city’s two synagogues and bolted them shut. Three months later the republic fell. Franco’s regime expelled all the Jews who had come to the country after 1931 and barred Jewish children from attending public schools. Republican prisoners were forced to produce two new editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In his first New Year’s Eve radio address as the country’s leader, Franco praised the antisemitism of the Third Reich and the Spanish Inquisition. “Now you will understand the motives that have impelled some nations to combat, and to block the activities of, those races marked by the stigma of greed and self-interest,” he declared. “By the grace of God and the clear foresight of the Catholic Kings, we were freed many centuries ago from such a heavy burden.”
After his victory Franco permitted the Nazis to capture German Jewish refugees and transport them back to the Third Reich. In 1941 he established the División Azul (Blue Division), a unit of some 47,000 Spanish soldiers who fought on the eastern front alongside the Nazis, despite Spain’s official neutrality. That same year his government handed a detailed registry of Jews living in Spain to Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief and the architect of the Final Solution. At Franco’s request, Tusquets also created a “Jewish-Masonic” section within Spain’s military intelligence service to hunt for those presumed to be Jews or Freemasons.
After the German defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943, Franco began to shift his foreign policy to curry favor with the Allies. Central to this effort was covering up his regime’s antisemitism. (The campaign also reflected Franco’s belief that the international press was controlled by Jews.) Grudging, limited permission was granted to some Jewish refugees to travel through Spain, as long as they did not stay. In 1943 Nazi officials informed Franco’s government that they would soon end the “special treatment” of Spanish Jews in occupied Europe and begin arresting and deporting them as they did with Jews from other countries. They urged Franco’s government to repatriate the Spanish Jews. “We run the risk of an intensification of the international hostility against us, especially in America, where we will be accused of being assassins and accomplices of murderers,” the senior official José María Doussinague explained to Francisco Gómez-Jordana Sousa, the minister of foreign affairs. But “it is unacceptable to contemplate the solution of bringing them to Spain where their race, their wealth, their Anglophilia and their freemasonry would turn them into agents of all kinds of intrigues.”
The regime floated a plan to let small numbers of Jewish refugees stay while they awaited visas to go elsewhere. “Only after one group leaves Spain—going through the country like light goes through glass, without a trace—do we allow in the next group,” Gómez-Jordana wrote. Meanwhile, as Preston details, the Franco regime was fully aware of the Holocaust. There were, for example, dispatches sent by Ángel Sanz Briz, a Spanish diplomat stationed in Budapest, directly to Franco. Sanz Briz had obtained the testimonies of two prisoners who had escaped from Auschwitz. They described the systematic murder of some 45,000 Jews from Salonica. The Hungarian government granted Sanz Briz permission to issue two hundred passports, but he defied these limits, ultimately distributing about two thousand. Similar efforts by Spanish diplomats in Greece, Romania, France, and Bulgaria managed to save several thousand more Jews, but Preston makes clear that they were acting without the approval of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After the war Franco issued two decrees aimed at expelling Sephardic Jews.
In 1949 Franco’s government released a fifty-page propaganda pamphlet claiming it had acted out of “sympathy and friendship towards a persecuted race” during the war, but his antisemitism continued. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he published a series of articles under the pseudonym Jakim Boor praising the Protocols for exposing “the Talmudic doctrines and their conspiracy to seize the levers of power in society” and dismissing the Holocaust as “a handful of Jews falling foul of race laws.” The fifty-odd Jakim Boor articles were eventually published as a collection called Masonería, and the regime released a cartoonish announcement that Franco had granted an audience to Boor.
Preston notes that the White House was fully aware that Franco was the author of the articles. It didn’t matter. Spain had been excluded from the United Nations and the Marshall Plan, but the United States and Franco were eager to establish a cold war alliance. The myth Franco propagated that he had been a savior of the Jews during World War II and defeated communism during the civil war gave them cover to do so. In 1953 the two countries signed the Pact of Madrid, which allowed the US to build five military bases in Spain. Soon after, Agustín Muñoz Grandes, Franco’s minister of the army and the former leader of the Blue Division, spent two weeks in Washington meeting with counterparts. The United States created a bespoke Marshall Plan for Spain, rescuing its moribund economy. Franco’s far-right Catholic dictatorship would become a model across Latin America; Francoism could be found in Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguay, Jorge Rafael Videla’s Argentina, and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, among other places. (Pinochet, one of only a few heads of state to attend Franco’s funeral, used the occasion to meet with neofascist Italian terrorists who had recently shot two Chilean dissidents exiled in Europe in an attempted assassination.)
It was William F. Buckley who was perhaps more responsible than anyone for Franco’s absolution among American conservatives. “General Franco is an authentic national hero,” Buckley wrote in National Review in 1957. “He is not an oppressive dictator. He is only as oppressive as it is necessary to be to maintain total power, and that, it happens, is not very oppressive, for the people, by and large, are content.” Buckley, who admired Franco’s authoritarian Catholicism, failed to mention that the war the general helped launch against a democratic government caused half a million deaths and sent several hundred thousand people into exile or that after the war his regime executed tens of thousands of Republicans and imprisoned as many as a million people in concentration camps and used them for slave labor. Nor did Buckley mention Franco’s antisemitism, which never abated. Twelve editions of the Protocols were published during his dictatorship.
Preston has made a lifelong investigation of twentieth-century Spanish history. Architects of Terror, which draws on some of his earlier writings, showcases his particular strength as a politically engaged, rigorous, and accessible historian who is unafraid to imbue his work with moral outrage. Its narratives are gripping, with telling, often macabre details. “En route from Valladolid to Burgos, Mola had been annoyed when his car was delayed while the road was cleared of a large number of corpses,” he writes. “He demanded that future executions take place away from main roads and that the bodies be buried immediately.”
Preston grew up poor in postwar Liverpool. When he was a baby, he and his mother contracted tuberculosis. His mother died after seven years in a sanitorium, and Preston was raised by his grandparents. This background, he has said, gave him an affinity for the Spanish Republic. “You could not really be from working-class Liverpool and not be left-wing,” he told Sebastiaan Faber, a Spanish professor at Oberlin, in 2013. “In my feeling for the Republic I think there is an element of indignation about the Republic’s defeat, solidarity with the losing side.”
Preston won a scholarship to Oxford, then studied at the University of Reading under Hugh Thomas, an upper-class historian who later sat as a Tory peer. Thomas’s book The Spanish Civil War (1961) became, for a time, the definitive account of the conflict. (Preston was Thomas’s research assistant for a later edition.) Franco banned the Spanish translation, but clandestine copies still circulated widely in Spain. Previous Spanish-language histories of the civil war were largely written by either supporters of the regime or exiled Republicans who lacked access to historical records and often bore political grudges. Preston called Thomas’s book “the first attempt at an objective general view.”
An even greater influence on Preston was Herbert Southworth, a former copper miner from Oklahoma. During the Depression Southworth landed a job at the Library of Congress and began writing book reviews about the Spanish Civil War for The Washington Post. The articles drew the attention of the Spanish Republic’s ambassador in Washington, who asked Southworth to work for the government’s information bureau. During World War II Southworth was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner to the CIA) and stationed in Morocco, where he broadcast radio programs into Francoist Spain attacking the regime. After the war he stayed in Morocco, bought abandoned radio transmission towers, founded a radio station, and made trips to Spain to buy books. In 1960 the Moroccan government nationalized the station. Southworth left for France, where he bought a chateau to house his library, which by then was the largest private collection about the Spanish Civil War in the world. He waged war on the Franco regime in books—The Myth of Franco’s Crusade (1963), Antifalange (1965)—which were smuggled into Spain. They were so damaging to its image that Franco created a special propaganda unit largely to counter him.
Before completing his thesis, Preston had sent Southworth one of his articles and received an enthusiastic response. “After that, I felt as if he had made me his heir,” Preston recalled in an interview with Enrique Moradiellos, a Spanish historian. “I visited him often and he became my teacher, a sort of adoptive father.” Preston followed Southworth’s model of political commitment. In the late 1960s he learned Spanish from Colombian exiles in London and later became an adviser to left-leaning groups during Spain’s democratic transition. Franco (1993), his groundbreaking biography, exposed the caudillo as a venal and brutal dictator. The Spanish Holocaust (2012), a dark, magisterial accounting of the depth of violence and repression during the civil war and the dictatorship, further destroyed the myth of a benevolent caudillo.
Preston has also challenged some of the left’s hagiography—including George Orwell’s depiction of the anarchists in Homage to Catalonia—but never abandoned his overarching empathy for the Spanish Republic.3 And he has pushed back against historians who have accused him of bias, notably the revisionist American Stanley Payne. “It’s accepted that being critical of the Nazis is a reasonable place to start,” Preston told Faber.
That is obviously not the case with a critical stance on the Spanish Right during the Civil War or the Franco dictatorship thereafter. It’s a real problem. You’ve almost got to argue from first principles every time.
Payne laid the foundation for the far right’s recent embrace of Franco and even dismissed Franco’s antisemitism. “Though a certain amount of anti-Jewish language was inherent in the regime’s ultranationalist discourse, the caudillo was not particularly anti-Semitic,” Payne claimed in his influential biography Franco (2014). Recently Payne has offered further absolution in First Things, a right-wing Catholic journal, praising Franco’s “modernization and transformation” of Spain. Besides the mass executions and concentration camps, this “modernization” included making it illegal for a woman to have a driver’s license without permission from her husband or father, reviving legal acceptance of “honor killings,” and providing sanctuary to war criminals like Karl Bömelburg, the head of the Gestapo in France, and Ante Pavelić, a Nazi collaborator and the founder of the Ustaše, Croatia’s fascist movement. Franco’s regime, which protected hundreds of Nazis along with high-ranking officials from Vichy France and Mussolini’s government, was far more hospitable to fascist refugees than it ever was to Jewish ones.
Despite this history, or perhaps because of it, Franco’s reputation continues to grow on the American far right. Some activists associated with the Claremont Institute, a California think tank that has become a leading center of the MAGA right, have taken to celebrating him. “America is going to need a Protestant Franco,” Josh Abbotoy, a former Claremont fellow, tweeted. Others in the pro-Trump orbit, like Jack Posobiec, have been even more enthusiastic. Posobiec had a “Franco Fridays” series on X that regularly shared paeans to Franco with millions of followers. “FRANCO SAVED SPAIN AND FOUGHT FOR CHRIST,” Posobiec wrote in 2023. Posobiec’s Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) (2024) devotes a chapter to the Spanish Civil War, which praises Franco as “A Great Man of History” and features a jacket blurb from J.D. Vance. Posobiec and his coauthor, Vance writes, “show us what to do to fight back.”
In Spain, the effort to revive Franco’s reputation has been accompanied by ostentatious philosemitism. In 2015, for example, the government headed by the Partido Popular, which was founded by members of Franco’s regime, enacted a law offering descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled during the Inquisition a path to Spanish citizenship. This not only obscured the antisemitic roots of Francoism but also served as a useful cloak for the right’s increasing hostility to Muslims.
This shift has only intensified with Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and it is not limited to Spain. A deputy from France’s far-right National Rally dismissed Palestinian civilian victims as “collateral damage” even as the party’s candidates in the 2024 legislative elections included a lawmaker who tweeted that “gas brought justice to the victims of the Shoah” and another who was photographed wearing a hat with a Nazi insignia. Last May, on the day the Spanish government recognized a Palestinian state, Santiago Abascal, the leader of Vox, Spain’s far-right party, went to Israel to denounce the measure.
This blend of philosemitism and antisemitism has also become a feature of the Trump administration. In June, for example, Trump bombed Iran at Israel’s behest and shortly after referred to “Shylocks” at a rally in Iowa. More recently, The Boston Globe reported that a Justice Department attorney defending the administration’s crackdown on Harvard over allegations that the university fostered antisemitism wrote an essay “from the perspective of Adolf Hitler” as a Harvard undergraduate and later praised Mein Kampf. Last month Tucker Carlson dispensed with the pretense of philosemitism altogether by interviewing the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes on his podcast. Fuentes told Carlson that “organized Jewry” was a threat to the United States. After Carlson was widely condemned for not pushing back, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, defended him.
Meanwhile, senior members of Vox have expressed their belief in the “Great Replacement,” an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims Jews are orchestrating the extinction of the white race by promoting nonwhite immigration to the West. “There is a real will in Brussels to implement a population replacement in Europe,” Jorge Buxadé, a former vice-president of the party, said in March 2022. Pedro Varela Geiss, another Vox deputy, is a former bookseller who specialized in Nazi and other antisemitic literature. But Vox and Israel are also drawing closer to each other. In February the Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, established formal communication channels between Israel and several European far-right parties with antisemitic roots, including Vox. This Janus-faced game (made easier by Israel’s own ethnonationalism) is reminiscent of how Franco, who was once praised by Golda Meir, masked his antisemitism with outreach to Israel.
Some of those even to the right of Vox have been more explicit about reviving the contubernio. Preston concludes his book with a 2021 rally led by Isabel Peralta, an eighteen-year-old far-right activist, at a Madrid cemetery, beside a monument to the Blue Division. “It is our supreme obligation to fight for Spain and fight for a Europe that is weak and has been brought down by the enemy,” she said.
An enemy that is always the same, albeit with different masks: the Jew. Because there is no greater truth than that the Jew is to blame. The Jew is to blame and the División Azul fought for that reason. Communism is a Jewish invention.
But there have also been more hopeful echoes of the Spanish Civil War reverberating in Europe. Last year Raphaël Glucksmann, then the leader of the Socialist Party in France, who is also Jewish, helped organize the New Popular Front, a coalition of France’s fractious left parties with other political leaders. They chose the name as an homage to the Popular Front of the 1930s, when in France, as in Spain, left parties came together to defeat an ascendant far right in the 1936 elections. (León Blum, a Jewish socialist who entered politics in response to the Dreyfus Affair, became prime minister.) The New Popular Front came in first in the 2024 legislative elections, defying virtually every prediction, with the National Rally relegated to third. As the results became known, a crowd of tens of thousands filled the streets of Paris, chanting “¡NO PASARÁN!,” the defiant cry of Republican Spain, which had once, at least for a time, turned the fascists back.
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