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WORK TITLE: Hitler’s Shadow Empire
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CITY: New York
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https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/experts/pbarbieri * https://www.linkedin.com/in/pierpaolo-barbieri-4686851b/ * https://www.gmantle.com/ * http://www.belfercenter.org/person/pierpaolo-barbieri
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Harvard University, A.B. (magna cum laude); Trinity College, Cambridge, M.Phil.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, consultant, and administrator. Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, MA, Ernest May Fellow, 2011-13; Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), New York, NY, strategic advisor, 2011-13; Greenmantle, Cambridge, MA, executive director; Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Cambridge, MA, associate in applied history; also worked for Goldman Sachs, Soros Fund Management, Bridgewater Associates, and as the head strategist for Brevan Howard Argentina.
AWARDS:Elected Lt. Charles Henry Fiske III Harvard-Cambridge scholar, Trinity College, Cambridge; the Thomas T. Hoopes ’19 prize, for senior thesis; recipient of scholarships.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, and El País. Also a contributor to the CNN television network. Hitler’s Shadow Empire was published in Spain and Italy, as well as Latin America.
SIDELIGHTS
Originally from Argentina, Pierpaolo Barbieri, who studied economics and social history in graduate school, works as the executive director of a geopolitical consulting firm. Barbieri is a contributor to periodicals and the author of Hitler’s Shadow Empire: The Nazis and the Spanish Civil War. The book presents a revised account of the Axis intervention in the Spanish Civil War. The war, which took place from 1930 to 1939, is often depicted as a dress rehearsal for World War II, with Francisco Franco’s Nationalists, a conservative and largely aristocratic group, coming out the winner over the left-leaning Republicans due largely to military help from Germany and Italy.
One widely held view was that the German and Italian aid to Franco was due to regimes with similar philosophies joining together to halt the spread of global Bolshevism. Barbieri, however, argues that the Axis intervention was not due to similar ideologies with Franco’s Nationalists but rather was based on economic considerations. According to Barbieri, the war represented a testing ground for the Nazis as they sought to establish an economic empire in Europe.
“This book seeks to unearth the project of Nazi informal empire on Iberian soil, to explain how it came to be, an to elucidate the economic framework within which it operated,” Barbieri writes in the introduction to Hitler’s Shadow Empire. Barbieri went on to later point out in the introduction: “Strictly speaking, this is to a book about Spain. Rather, it is a story of political economy and war in the tumultuous 1930s, one that by definition transcends national borders.”
Barbieri points out that the support Franco’s Nationalists accepted from the Nazis, in the form of weapons and various material support, ultimately led to the Nazis gaining control over numerous Spanish resources. The Nazis then used these resources to help build its own war industries. Barbieri devotes much of his attention early on to Hjalmar Schact, an international finance expert and Hitler’s economic czar. According to Barbieri, it was Schacht who developed the policies that made Hitler’s plans for Spain work.
Schacht had already played an important role in consolidating Hitler’s dictatorship in Germany via his economic policies, which helped Germany recover from deep economic problems that rapidly grew after Germany lost World War I. Barbieri points out that Schacht’s economic strategy was ultimately replaced by a focus on developing a racial empire, he nevertheless maintains that Schacht’s politics would ultimately have been a better option for the Hitler. Barbieri presents his case that the Nazi’s could have ended up dominating almost all of Europe more effectively via Schacht’s policies that indirectly controlled German neighbors than Hitler’s decision to do so through exploitation and subjugation. The result, according to Barbieri, would have been a “shadow empire.”
The final two chapters of Hitler’s Shadow Empire contrasts Germany’s intervention in Spain with another intervention and another empire. One chapter focuses on the intervention in Spain by Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. According to Barbieri, the Italians were far more invested in Spain than the Germans to the extent that the intervention in Spain essentially crippled Italy’s economic standing even before World War II started. The book’s final chapter revolves around the difference between Hitler’s plans for empire in Spain and the ultimate path the Nazis ended up taking to build its empire. The chapter includes a discussion of how Germany’s dominant influence in Spain eventually dissipated as Hitler focused on subjugating all of Europe.
Hitler’s Shadow Empire “is a very well written and complete book that sets out its arguments clearly,” wrote H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online contributor Fernando Mendiola, who added: ” It correctly synthesises the characteristics of the economic relationship between Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain, and opens up interesting debates on the reasons and consequences of that collaboration.” R. Spickermann, writing for Choice, noted that Barbieri reveals how Hitler’s policy in Spain “was not merely a straightforward political approach but showed more long-term economic strategies with effects on Spanish development.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Barbieri, Pierpaolo, Hitler’s Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2015.
PERIODICALS
Choice, June, 2016. R. Spickermann, review of Hitler’s Shadow Empire, p. 1535.
ONLINE
Belter Center for Science and International Affairs Web site, http://www.belfercenter.org/ (May 26, 2017), author profile.
Center for Islamic Pluralism Web site, http://www.islamicpluralism.org/ (October 26, 2015), Stephen Schwartz, review of Hitler’s Shadow Empire.
Greenmantle Web site, https://www.gmantle.com/ (May 26, 2017), author profile.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, http://www.h-net.org/ (July 1, 2016), Fernando Mendiola, review of Hitler’s Shadow Empire.
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (May 26, 2017), author profile.
Institute for Economic Thinking Web site, https://www.ineteconomics.org/ (May 26, 2017), author profile.
Open Letters Monthly, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/ (April 5, 2015), Steve Donoghue, review of Hitler’s Shadow Empire.*
Alumni Associate
Pierpaolo Barbieri
Former Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy, International Security Program, 2011–2013
Associate, Applied History Project
Expertise:
South America Europe
Attended: Oct 2016
- Jun 2017
Biography
Pierpaolo is Executive Director at Greenmantle, a macroeconomic and geopolitical consulting firm, and is head strategist of Brevan Howard Argentina, the largest Argentina-dedicated fund.
Originally from Argentina, Pierpaolo graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University. He conducted research with the support of the Weatherhead Center for International Studies, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and the Real Colegio Complutense. His senior honors thesis was awarded the Thomas T. Hoopes ’19 prize.
He was elected Lt. Charles Henry Fiske III Harvard-Cambridge scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was awarded an MPhil in Economic and Social History and a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.
In 2011-2013, he was Ernest May Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and Strategic Advisor at the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). He is also special advisor to the Berggruen Council on the Future of Europe.
His first book, Hitler’s Shadow Empire: The Nazis and the Spanish Civil War, was published in the USA, UK, Spain, Latin America, and Italy.
Pierpaolo’s journalism has been featured in The New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, New Republic and El País.
Pierpaolo also worked for Goldman Sachs, Soros Fund Management, and Bridgewater Associates.
Last Updated: Jan 6, 2017, 12:57pm
Pierpaolo Barbieri
Executive Director, Greenmantle
Pierpaolo Barbieri is the Executive Director at Greenmantle.
Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, he studied at Harvard University, where he did research with the support of the Weatherhead Center for International Studies, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and the Real Colegio Complutense. His senior thesis, part of which appeared in Tempus, the Harvard College Historical Journal, was awarded a Thomas Hoopes ‘14 prize. Later, Pierpaolo was a Lt. Charles Henry Fiske III Harvard-Cambridge scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge University, where he obtained an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History and was a research fellow at the Centre for History and Economics.
His first book, Hitler’s Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War is published by Harvard University Press in 2013. On the 75th anniversary of the war, it explores the economics of Nazi Germany in the midst of the monetary wars of the 1930s Depression and the shipwreck of globalization. The book seeks to elucidate what the economic model implied for Hitler’s first true military intervention — his decisive support for dictator-to-be Francisco Franco and his Nationalists. It argues the Nazis sought to create an informal empire in Spain to profit from the economic dislocations created by the civil war in an attempt to extend power in Europe in a radically different way than the formal empire that they sought in World War II.
Pierpaolo has worked for Goldman Sachs and Soros Fund Management, and his writing has been featured in the the New Republic and the Weekly Standard, among others.
Pierpaolo holds an AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and an MPhil from Cambridge. He was Lt. Charles Henry Fiske III Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge and more recently Ernest May Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is a strategic advisor to the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET) and the Berggruen Council on the Future of Europe in addition to leading research activities at Greenmantle. His first book, Hitler's Shadow Empire: The Nazis and the Spanish Civil War has been published in the U.S., UK, Italy, Spain, Argentina and China. He is fluent in Italian, Spanish and French.
Pierpaolo Barbieri is the executive director at Greenmantle. He holds an AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and an MPhil from Cambridge. He was Lt. Charles Henry Fiske III Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge and more recently Ernest May Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is a strategic advisor to the Institute of New Economic Thinking and the Berggruen Council on the Future of Europe, in addition to leading research activities at Greenmantle. His first book, Hitler's Shadow Empire: The Nazis and the Spanish Civil War, was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. He is fluent in Italian, Spanish and French.
www.hitlersshadowempire.com
Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Pierpaolo holds an AB magna cum laude, PBK from Harvard University. There he conducted research with the support of the Weatherhead Center for International Studies, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and the Real Colegio Complutense. His senior honors thesis was awarded the Thomas T. Hoopes '19 prize.
Later, he was elected Lt. Charles Henry Fiske III Harvard-Cambridge scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was also research fellow at the Centre for History and Economics. While at Cambridge, he was awarded an MPhil in Economic and Social History.
More recently he was Ernest May Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and Strategic Advisor at the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). He is also a advisor to the Berggruen Council on the Future of Europe.
His journalism has been featured in The New York Times, the Financial Times, El Pais of Spain, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, La Nación, and the New Republic.
In the private sector, he is executive director at Greenmantle, a geopolitical and macroeconomic advisory firm. He has also worked for Bridgewater Associates and Soros Fund Management.
Barbieri, Pierpaolo. Hitler's shadow empire: Nazi economics and the Spanish Civil War
R. Spickermann
53.10 (June 2016): p1535.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Barbieri, Pierpaolo. Hitler's shadow empire: Nazi economics and the Spanish Civil War. Harvard, 2015. 349p index afp ISBN 9780674728851 cloth, $29.95
53-4546
DP269
2014-36049 CIP
Economic history is becoming relevant again in Third Reich historiography, as this work demonstrates. Barbieri (executive director, Greenmantle) argues that the Third Reich could have dominated Europe more effectively not through direct subjugation and exploitation, but by indirect control of neighbors using trade treaties to economically subordinate these countries to Germany. The consequent economic hegemony in Europe would have been a "shadow empire," in his terms. This idea is not new--it is well known that Germany did just this with several Balkan countries in the 1930s--but applying it to Spain generates new insights concerning both Spain and Germany. His discussion of the rise and fall of Hjalmar Schacht, the architect of this hegemonic policy, shows how much foreign policy ultimately hinged not on economics but on political and racial dominance, so that the Spanish case would not be repeated. Likewise, Barbieri's discussion of German policy in Spain provides new depth, revealing that it was not merely a straightforward political approach but showed more long-term economic strategies with effects on Spanish development. While Balkan comparisons are still necessary for even greater context, this book is a highly useful contribution. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate through faculty and research collections.--R. Spickermann, University of Texas--Permian Basin
Spickermann, R.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Spickermann, R. "Barbieri, Pierpaolo. Hitler's shadow empire: Nazi economics and the Spanish Civil War." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1535. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942957&it=r&asid=344c582ff9192355fb7755dcec219139. Accessed 3 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942957
Pierpaolo Barbieri. Hitler's Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War. Cambridge/MA.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 349 S. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-72885-1.
Reviewed by Fernando Mendiola
Published on H-Soz-u-Kult (July, 2016)
P. Barbieri: Hitler's Shadow Empire
Before all else, Pierpaolo Barbieri’s gaze has produced an interesting book, containing abundant historical documentation and written in a polished prose, that tackles an essential aspect for understanding the outcome of the Spanish civil war: the reasons, importance and economic consequences of the aid that Nazi Germany provided to the armed forces in Spain that rebelled against the II Republic to implant a new fascist regime: Franco’s dictatorship.
To this end, Barbieri sets out a global analysis of the economic relations between Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain from the start of the civil war. He starts from a central thesis according to which the key motive for the Nazi aid to the Francoist side was an attempt to establish an informal empire on the European periphery. This informal empire would provide a cheap and reliable source of some of the main raw materials needed by German industry, while at the same time guaranteeing markets for its industrial production that was experiencing rapid growth. This is the main idea of the book, an idea that is explained in a reiterated and convincing way throughout a narrative in which there is a confluence of two evolutions that the author argues are key to understanding how Spain became part of Hitler’s empire in the shadows.
On the one hand, Barbieri dedicates a large part of his proposal to tracing the intellectual foundations of the economic policy of Nazi Germany in Spain. For this purpose he employs a quasi-biographical analysis which traces the career of the architect of the Germany economic recovery under Nazism, the minister and director of the Bundesbank: Hjalmar Schacht. Irrespective of the support Schacht gave to Hitler’s rearmament plans and his development of financial engineering that enabled colossal public expenditure to take place without generating an inflationary spiral, Barbieri insists time and again in his analysis that this economist’s strategy was not the development of a formal empire. Instead it was to establish advantageous trade alliances that would solve some of the structural problems of the German economy, such as the provision of raw materials. This overall strategy found a favourable place for development in Spain thanks to the outbreak of the civil war.
On the other hand, the second object of analysis of this book is precisely the outbreak of the war and the subsequent need of armaments of those who rebelled against the II Republic. In this respect, Barbieri rightly underscores the importance of the businessman and Nazi party member Johannes Bernhardt, and his role as the main bridge between Franco and Hitler, as well as in founding two business conglomerates (HIMSA and ROWAK) that managed and coordinated Hispano-German trade. Barbieri also traces the attempts, promoted by Göring in Germany and developed by Bernhardt, which aimed to obtain increasing control over the ownership and management of mining companies, at times at the cost of British capital.
These two pivotal ideas, the German need for raw materials and the Francoist need for arms, are the tracks along which Barbieri’s discourse advances, and they form the basis for explaining his central thesis. Without doubt, there are other elements that deserve attention, such as the comparison of the German economic strategy in Spain and that developed by Franco’s other great ally, Mussolini’s Italy (chapter 7), or the change of conjuncture marked by the outbreak and subsequent development of the World War II (chapter 8). However, in spite of their interest, I believe it to be more interesting to focus on the book’s central theses and to raise some questions that can help us to discuss the author’s interpretation.
In the first place, it is necessary to point out that the book’s opening chapter presents Spain and the civil war making use on several occasions of old clichés drawn from a historiography that has in part been surpassed, mainly, but not only, regarding the latest research on the strategies and use of political violence in the months preceding the coup d’état Eduardo González Calleja, La historiografía sobre la violencia política en la Segunda República española: una reconsideración, in: Hispania Nova: Revista de Historia Contemporánea 11 (2013). or the difference between the repressive processes unleashed in the rear-guards of the two sides. Amongst others, see Francisco Espinosa, Violencia roja y azul. España, 1936–1950, Barcelona 2010; Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, London 2012. Evidently, although these shortcomings do not affect the subsequent development of Barbieri’s theses, the book lacks the recent contributions of historiography on Spain in those years, contributions that improve on the clichés that are reproduced in chapter 1.
In the second place, in spite of Barbieri’s presenting his book as a new contribution, the reality is that the greater part of the data he presents in chapter 7, which deals with Spain’s inclusion in that informal empire (with what that implies for the mechanisms of payment for aid and the reorientation of Spanish foreign trade towards Germany), had already been made known years ago by Leitz Christian Leitz, Economic Relations between Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain, 1936–1945, Oxford 1996. and García Pérez Rafael García Pérez, Franquismo y tercer Reich: las relaciones económicas hispano-alemanas durante la segunda guerra mundial, Barcelona 2010. , authors cited by Barbieri in support of his affirmations. In addition, there is a noticeable absence of references to the monumental and exhaustive work of Sánchez Asiaín José Ángel Sánchez Asiaín, La financiación de la Guerra Civil Española: una aproximación histórica, Barcelona 2012. on the financial aspects of the war or to the study by Martínez Ruiz Elena Martínez Ruiz, Guerra Civil, comercio y capital extranjero: el sector exterior de la economía española (1936–1939), in: Estudios de historia económica 49 (2006), pp. –105. on foreign trade during the war. In spite of that, Barbieri presents the data in a clear and solid way, with the result that the book, and that chapter especially, are a very useful explanation of the way that Germany was able to obtain raw materials, basically minerals, from Spain at good prices throughout the war.
A third question, not free from historiographical controversy, is related to the German motives for helping Franco. In this respect, the book is also – and perhaps above all – an interesting and solid biography on the intellectual and political trajectory of the helmsman of the German economy, Hjalmar Schacht. Chapters 3 and 4 and later sections are dedicated to these questions. The logic of the intervention in Spain is presented as the materialisation of Schacht’s ideas on the informal empire. However, facing debates such as the primacy of economic questions over other political or geostrategic questions, Barbieri’s argument, which is set out emphatically and coherently, does not provide conclusive proofs. In fact, it is not clear to the reader, just as it is unclear in the greater part of the historiography on Nazi Germany, whether the attempt, promoted by Schacht, to create an empire in the shadows and the option of an imperial advance that would satisfy the theoreticians of Lebensraum, were as mutually exclusive as this book makes out. Especially since one of the promoters of the latter line was Göring, who controlled the conditions of the German military aid to Franco. In this sense, the doubt that arises facing Barbieri’s argument is not whether Hitler tried to develop an empire in the shadows (it is clear that he did, and not only in the Spanish case), but whether that empire in the shadows was posed as an alternative to the creation of a formal empire or as a complement to this. In fact, the opposition to starting the war in the East of Europe was often marked more by questions of opportuneness and the conjuncture (also in Göring’s case in 1938) than by any questioning of such a war; this has been pointed out by Adam Tooze Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, London 2006, pp. 268–269. , amongst others.
In short, what we have is a very well written and complete book that sets out its arguments clearly. It correctly synthesises the characteristics of the economic relationship between Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain, and opens up interesting debates on the reasons and consequences of that collaboration. All of this is certainly less than what Barbieri’s claims for the book in his introduction, but it is more than sufficient as a recommendation that the book should be read and its arguments debated.
Book Review: Hitler’s Shadow Empire
By Steve Donoghue (April 5, 2015) No Comment
Hitler’s Shadow Empire:hitler's shadow empire cover
Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War
Pierpaolo Barbieri
Harvard University Press, 2015
The common thumbnail characterization of the Nazi government’s involvement with Francisco Franco’s Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War that began in 1936 has been one of a dress-rehearsal of some kind, an informal preview of the territorial expansions on which Hitler would later embark in earnest elsewhere. Both Hitler and Benito Mussolini’s Fascists sent arms, equipment, and men to Franco’s cause, and the tyranny Franco established, complete with concentration camps and systematic repression, bore in its initial form all the dark imprints of its Nazi sponsors. Pierpaolo Barbieri, in his engrossing new book Hitler’s Shadow Empire, brilliantly swaps out this thumbnail caricature for a far more satisfyingly complex picture. He opens his account with a quick look at the growth and economic success of present-day Spain and uses that very prosperity as a springboard to looking back to the past:
Quite literally, half-forgotten bones lurk beneath the arid Iberian soil. Successful as the society built on them has become, these bones creep up in the most unexpected places. In a fit of Nietzchean recurrence, they return: in courts, in politics, and in culture. Silenced though they have been, silent they are not.
The standard Nazi concentration on Lebensraum was, in the mid-1930s in Franco’s Spain, significantly less primary-color, and Barbieri’s chronicle concentrates not so much on Spanish issues as on the main architect of the Nazi financial system, its Minister of Economics (and former Reichsbank President) Hjalmar Schacht, a proud, opinionated figure who was brought to power by Hitler two years prior to the war in Spain. “Until mid-1937,” as Barbieri writes, “Nazi economics was – to a large extent – Schachtian economics,” and Hitler had turned to him in a crisis:
There was no way around it: in the summer of 1934 Nazi Germany faced a financial dilemma. Summoning the successful president of the Reichsbank to Bayreuth was part of Hitler’s plan to solve the crisis so that he could focus on other pressing political issues. A few weeks earlier, he had unleashed the Gestapo on his own SAs and other political rivals, including the former chancellor. The bloodbath, in what became known as the “Night of the Long Knives,” gave Hitler more power, while pleasing the conservative armed forces, the Wehrmacht. Yet managing the domestic and international backlash required the chancellor’s full attention. With Schmitt out and the financial crisis unresolved, it was time for a new face: at Bayreuth Hitler offered Schacht the Economics Ministry.
Barbieri concentrates the bulk of his narrative on bringing to light the Nazi aims in Franco’s Spain, and he cannily sifts the evidence on how Franco himself responded to those aims by his most important ally. That there was no love lost between Franco and Hitler comes as no surprise, tyrannical dictators being by a wide margin the chanciest choice of friend, but Barbieri is both comprehensive and quotable on the mercenary strata that lay always just underneath the cordial international relations. “Only after September 1939 were Franco an his government able to successfully resist German economic penetration and debt repayment,” he writes. “World war yielded unexpected benefits to Franco. Debts are rarely paid when creditors are obliterated.”
And it wasn’t just in Franco’s Spain that seismic shifts were felt in the late 1930s, as Barbieri makes clear. In 1938 Hitler replaced Constantin von Neurath as Foreign Minister with Joachim von Ribbentrop, a sharper change than it appeared on the surface. Von Neurath hadn’t especially enjoyed his job, but he’d wanted his successor to be “almost anyone but Ribbentrop.” The advent of this man who was so detested by so many signaled a much larger change in the very nature of Nazi government, as Barbieri writes:
The “former champagne merchant,” as he was often referred to, was fervently devoted to Hitler. According to a pithy Goebbels, however, he had “bought his name, he married his money, and he swindled his way into office.” The contrast with his aristocratic, conservative predecessor was stark. Mussolini later complained that Ribbentrop belonged to the “category of Germans who are a disaster for their country, for he [talked] about making war right and left, without naming an enemy or defining an objective” – and that was coming from Mussolini. Schacht was not the only one on the way out; along with him went the last remnants of traditional conservatism from the Nazi Cabinet. Zeal remained.
Francisco Franco learned early and quite sharply to be wary of that particular zeal, which goes a long way toward explaining how his regime was able to survive its Nazi and Fascist benefactors by thirty years, transmuting and even maturing that whole time. For his part, Hitler and his new hyper-zealous government turned their efforts away from the kind of “shadow empire” Barbieri so readably describes in favor of the more overt and brutal versions we typically associate with Nazi Germany. And the whole of it, from the German and the Spanish perspective, feels revelatory in Barbieri’s handling. The book’s a remarkable feat of re-assessment.
Hitler's Shadow Empire
Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War
by Pierpaolo Barbieri
Harvard University Press, 368 pp., $22.00 hardcover
Reviewed by Stephen Schwartz
The Weekly Standard
October 26, 2015
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The 9th c.-14th c. CE Alhambra in Granada, symbol of Spain's eternal Islamic legacy.
The Spanish Civil War is among the 20th-century military conflicts about which the most continues to be published, and in many languages. Often, new volumes on the three-year (1936-39) bloodbath recapitulate old themes: the ideological drama of fascist militarism versus a leftist republic; subversion of the republic by its alleged allies in Moscow; and heart-rending details of cruelty, on both sides of the trenches.
Hitler's Shadow Empire is one of few recent studies offering fresh information, specifically describing German trade in the Franco-controlled zone. While it is typically assumed that Nazi Germany, like Stalinist Russia, became involved in the Spanish Civil War for ideological reasons, Pierpaolo Barbieri, an economic analyst, shows that the motives of the two main powers were quite different. His research took him to the German and Spanish archives, as well as those of Italy, Germany's partner in supporting the Spanish Nationalists.
Soviet Russia did, indeed, want to bring the Spanish left, which was Western European in culture, into line with its habits of repression—and to the point of preferring a Republican defeat to the dominion of its anti-Stalinist rivals. In addition, Moscow influenced the Spanish republic because the republic had been refused military support by France.
Barbieri passes lightly over Soviet mischief in Spain. But he demonstrates that Nazi Germany, starved of treasure and hard currency, and lacking foreign markets for its products, viewed Francisco Franco's Spain as an "informal colony" that would receive German goods while providing Germany with resources it badly needed. Those resources included iron ore, as well as other raw materials, and agricultural output.
To account for German policy in what he (correctly) calls "a full-fledged colonial endeavor" and "a world war in miniature," Barbieri first explains the difference between a trade-based, if rapacious, Nazi policy in Spain and
the later mass atrocities the Germans committed in Eastern Europe. It was, he writes, a contrast between Weltpolitik, or global strategy, and the ideology of Lebensraum—genocidal conquest—that obsessed Hitler and led to the horrors of the Holocaust and similar crimes.
The difference, as recounted by Barbieri, was based in competition between a German economist with the improbable name of Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, who was head of the Reichsbank, Germany's central economic institution, and a crowd of political demagogues who flattered Adolf Hitler by praising his vision of Germanization in the east. The main figure in this second group was Hermann Göring, who created a system of bloated, inefficient enterprises under his personal control.
Hjalmar Schacht was a conservative economist, uninterested in internal Nazi quarrels. He favored German penetration of colonies where the Deutschmark would circulate as an exchange currency and from which resources would be exported to boost German production and consumption. That meant expansion in existing markets (including Argentina and the Balkans) and recovery of German colonies in Africa and the Pacific that were lost at the end of World War I. Some colonies could be "informal," or economic, retaining their own political systems and cultures, while others would be "formal," under complete German sovereignty.
Göring and other Nazis, however, believed in Autarkie, a self-sufficient German bastion in the center of Europe that would provide a foundation for conquest and defense. Hitler, who was ignorant of economics, obviously preferred the melodramatic vision of a German fortress-state over a nation of vendors. Nevertheless, both Schacht and Göring favored German rearmament in defiance of the Versailles treaty.
When the Spanish fighting began in mid-1936, Schacht was appointed minister of economics by Hitler. Schacht's policy of "informal empire" was soon applied to Nationalist Spain. With Hitler's approval, German aircraft and artillery were sent to Spanish Morocco, where the Nationalist General Franco's supporters were based, through a newly created private company: HISMA, a Spanish acronym for the Spanish-Moroccan Transport Company. In Berlin, a parallel firm, ROWAK—for its German title as the Raw Materials and Goods Buying Company—was established to receive payment from the Spanish Nationalists. This was Schachtian economics in microcosm. Barbieri describes HISMA and ROWAK as a "dual monopoly"—that is, German firms interested in Spanish business operations would sell to ROWAK, which would transfer goods to Nationalist Spain through HISMA. Both entities added generous commissions to their transactions.
As "informal" as it might have been, the economic relationship between Nazi Germany and Nationalist Spain was not without problems. As long as Schacht was in charge of the German economy, the trade-based model prevailed, notwithstanding the rhetoric of Hitler, Franco, and Benito Mussolini about a common struggle against communism. The Nationalists were not blind to the reality that they were being robbed and cheated by Germany no less than the Republicans would be swindled by the Russians, who charged excessively for weapons and received payment in the form of Spain's gold bullion reserve, the fourth largest in the world.
The Nationalists reacted to German avarice most often by acceding to German demands. Until 1937, Franco pressed the Germans for financial and trade arrangements that would reduce the burden of HISMA and ROWAK on the Spanish economy, and German vendors agreed in resenting the HISMA-ROWAK "dual monopoly." But Franco gave up when he realized it might threaten his necessary supply of German weapons.
One problem for the Nationalists in dealing with a voracious Germany involved the Rio Tinto mining company, which was British owned. Germany was short of mining assets, and in September 1936, with the Spanish war only three months old, a Rio Tinto metals shipment was redirected from London to Hamburg with Nationalist authorization. As the civil war continued, the shift of Rio Tinto assets to Germany grew—a danger for Britain, since the metals involved would clearly be intended for German war industries. But of all the European powers that dealt with the Spanish war, Britain was the feeblest in its response. When Rio Tinto's chairman Sir Auckland Geddes wrote to the Foreign Office proposing British naval action to block the export of metals to Germany, Britain was mollified by a Francoist monthly payment of £10,000 in foreign exchange. But Spanish trade, mainly oriented to Britain before the civil war, was now to be placed fully in Germany's grasp.
Both the Nationalists and the Republicans were victims of internal weaknesses and manipulated by outside forces. Nationalist Spain was at an economic disadvantage and forced to submit to Hjalmar Schacht's model of "informal colonization." Republican Spain was politically undermined by Soviet agents and was abandoned in 1938 as Stalin prepared for his non-aggression pact with Hitler, consummated the following year. Barbieri states that although the Spanish War was over by then, Franco and his colleagues were surprised at the sudden turn of their former patron, Hitler.
Still, Francisco Franco won the war—and had his revenge on the Germans in 1940, when Spain refused to enter World War II as a full member of the Axis. As Stanley Payne described in his excellent Franco and Hitler (see "Spanish Revision," June 1, 2009), General Franco eluded the fulfillment of promises the Germans thought were ironbound. And as Pierpaolo Barbieri emphasizes, Hitler committed suicide in his burning capital in 1945 while Franco ruled Spain for 30 years more.