Francisco Franco, the former fascist dictator of Spain, gave the Nazis a list of every Jew in his country in order to facilitate efforts to locate, deport and destroy them, according to a document found recently in a Spanish archive and reported on Sunday by the Spanish daily El Pais.
The paper said that in 1941, Spain prepared a list of all 6,000 Jews in its territory and gave it to the architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution, Heinrich Himmler. At the time, Spain and Germany were negotiating over Spain’s entry into the Axis alliance.
After the Nazis’ defeat in 1945, the Spanish government tried to destroy all evidence of its cooperation with the Germans. But the document recently found in an archive in the city of Zaragoza, in northeastern Spain, sheds light on what Franco sought to hide.
