Today, none of the Balearic survivors of the ‘Blue Division’ remain. A few years ago, historian Juan José Negreira had the opportunity to interview some of them. They all agreed on the same thing: “They told me that war is mythologized by cinema. There was no epic at the front. The priority was to survive”.During World War II, many soldiers found solace listening to the famous song Lili Marleen, initially known as Song of a Young Sentinel. Its story can be traced in Rosa Sala Rose's book titled Lili Marleen: Song of Love and Death (2008). The piece was based on a poem written in 1915, during World War I, by the German Hans Leip from a barracks in Berlin. While preparing to leave for the front lines, filled with fear and nostalgia, the soldier recalled his farewell with his fiancée, Lili Marleen.The song began to be broadcast every night from 1941 onwards from Radio Belgrade, the German military station. It soon crossed borders thanks to its seductive power. The civilian population also adopted it. The person who sang it for the Allies was the Hollywood diva of the time, the German Marlene Dietrich, considered a “traitor” by her compatriots.Legend has it that minutes before the broadcast of Lili Marleen, the two opposing sides would observe a brief truce to listen to lyrics that would touch their hearts. Indeed, it speaks of a soldier who knows he will die in the war. In the poignant final stanza, he assures that, when he dies, the love of his Lili will be able to raise him from the grave and return him to her arms: “If something happens to me and no one is with you, when the night fog falls, I will come, under the streetlamp, to wait for you and be by your side, as always, Lili Marlen”. These final, defeatist verses did not please the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, at all, who tried to ban it. However, the continuous protests from his soldiers prevented him from doing so.The author of one of the most listened-to melodies in 20th-century history was the German Norbert Schultze, who spent the last ten years of his life in Mallorca. He died in 2002 at the age of ninety-one in a discreet Bavarian town. In our region, from his house in Portals (Calvià), the composer enjoyed a golden retirement thanks to the substantial profits from Lili Marleen. Here he met Arpad Bondy, a musician and filmmaker who in 1993 decided to make a documentary in the form of an interview titled Did you kiss the devil's ass. In an act of sincerity, Schultze admitted that his rise to musical prominence in Germany was thanks to the exile or extermination of many Jewish musicians, who were more talented. As a reward, he was spared from going to war.
The islanders of the Blue Division
In 1942, a contingent of 700 Balearic soldiers departed for Russia with the famous unit with which Franco thanked Hitler for his help during the Civil War.
At 3:40 PM on October 23, 1940, a Mallorcan, Bartomeu Tous, a native of Santa Margalida, witnessed the historic handshake that Hitler and Franco exchanged at the French station of Hendaye. Tous was part of the Army General Staff's team of translators. Ultimately, he was not chosen to interpret a meeting where Spain's entry into World War II was to be decided.
Franco played his cards strongly: in addition to food and weapons, he mainly demanded Gibraltar and French Morocco. The Führer considered those demands disproportionate. Spain was still recovering from a devastating civil war and, rather than an effective ally, could become a heavy burden. Thus, after almost nine hours, Hitler, enraged, declared the meeting over. He would later explain to the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini that, before repeating a meeting with his Spanish counterpart, he would have preferred to have "three or four teeth pulled".
Despite the lack of agreement, Franco agreed to sign a "secret protocol" of collaboration with the Axis powers of Rome-Berlin. This protocol would materialize with the well-known Blue Division. The participation of the islanders in this military contingent that fought 6,000 kilometers from home has been studied by the historian Juan José Negreira, author of several books on the Balearic legionaries. He estimates that there were about 700. "This figure, however," he assures, "includes the Balearics who were already in the Peninsula and the peninsulars who were stationed in the Islands." The Blue Division was born in June 1941 with the start of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. A year had passed since the Hendaye meeting. Officially, that brigade was called 'Spanish Division of Volunteers'. "It was the idea," recalls Negreira, "of the Falange, whose color is blue. Hence the name by which the troops were popularly known".
Unlike the Third Reich, which had colonial ambitions, the Falangists wished to go to the USSR to combat communism. “Thus -assures the historian- they stated it to Franco, who immediately saw in the Blue Division a way to thank the Führer for his help in the Civil War with the Condor Legion. It was what was known as a 'blood debt'. He did not want it to be a purely Falangist unit, however. Then, to neutralize the party of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the dictator ordered that the superior command of that brigade be army personnel”.
“Russia is guilty!” The franquist squadron in the USSR has also been studied by the historian from Sineu, Rafel Cifre, author of the book " Division: experiences of Majorcans enlisted in the Blue Division, 1941-1944 (self-edited, 2018). Remember that 20 percent of its members were university students: “There has not been another Spanish combat unit so intellectually prepared”. Among the blue recruits there were also Muslims who had fought in the Civil War with Franco: “Paradoxically, those people of such a different ideology went to help the precursors of a superior race”.
In July 1941, the first contingent of divisionaries left. They were spurred on by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Falangist Serrano Suñer. The very brother-in-law-ish of Franco had clear what the objective of that mission was: “Russia is guilty! Guilty of our Civil War. Guilty of the death of José Antonio, our founder, and of the death of so many comrades and so many soldiers fallen in that war due to the aggression of communism. The extermination of Russia is a requirement of history and of the future of Europe”.
The volunteers from Balearic Islands, however, did not leave until a year later. They were needed in the Islands due to the fear of an attack by Allied or Italian troops. Once the threat passed, in March 1942, they left for Germany. Negreira dismisses the idea that they enlisted for economic reasons: “They received two coins: one from the German army and one from the Spanish. They did not go, however, for money. The economic conditions were not published until three days after the enlistment order of 1941, when practically everyone had already enlisted.” Cifre recalls that among the divisionaries there were also left-wing people who wanted to clear their records. “This is the case,” he says, “of a young man from Mallorca, Antoni Homar Font, from Esporles, who was the first Mallorcan to die in the USSR. He was the secretary of the socialist youth of his town”.
The Spanish thought that mission would be a military walk. “There was a feeling –says Negreira– that Germany would soon rise to victory. They were, however, quite mistaken. Upon arriving in Poland, they immediately realized the dimension of the war.” Cifre insists that the divisionaries were convinced they were fighting against communism and not against the local population: “They had a very good relationship with both the Russians and the Jews, which led to more than one clash with the Germans.”
Throughout the two years of its existence, the Blue Division would come to have nearly 45,000 soldiers. Of these, 8,700 were wounded and some 5,000 died, among whom were about 70 from the Balearic Islands - out of the initial 700. In November 1943, faced with the failure of the Nazi strategy, the Francoist squadron began its withdrawal. One of its high commands was the Majorcan José Alemany Vich, father of the journalist Antoni Alemany, who died a week before returning home, during a military celebration. To please Hitler, Franco decided to replace the Blue Division with the Blue Legion, a smaller contingent of 2,199 soldiers.
Eating nettlesThose who were left with the honey on their lips were about 500 divisional soldiers who, before repatriation, ended up being captured by the Soviets. They then began an eleven-year ordeal through different concentration camps. They did so alongside republican soldiers and some of the famous Spanish war children who had been left destitute and whom the USSR did not want to return to a country that had fallen under the yoke of fascism.
Among the captured divisional soldiers were two from our home: Bartomeu Oliver, from Binissalem, who would end up being murdered for stealing potatoes to eat, and Andreu Alcover Sanseloni, from Manacor. His son, the socialist politician Andreu Alcover, still remembers him well. He was born in 1966, twelve years after his father returned to the island. “Initially, my father - he recalls - participated in the Civil War with the insurgents, first in Mallorca and then on the Peninsula. In 1942, at 27 years old, he left with the Blue Division. He always insisted that he did not go as a volunteer. It was a superior who forced him”.
Alcover was taken prisoner by the Soviets on February 10, 1943, at the fateful Battle of Krasny Bor, fought near Leningrad. For two hours, 5,900 divisional soldiers faced 44,000 Russians. 1,125 Spaniards died. “My father - his son admits - didn't like to talk much about the war or his subsequent years of confinement in those very cold latitudes, from where he returned forty kilos lighter. He did say, however, that he lived through very dramatic situations. Hunger caused him, like the rest of the inmates, to eat nettles. He said that when they ate them, more of them survived. Since then, at home, whenever we make arròs brut, we put nettles in it”.
Ship ‘Semíramis’ “My father -Alcover continues- was twice in front of a firing squad. They didn’t shoot him because they wanted to scare him. After seven years of not hearing anything about him, they held a funeral for him in Manacor”. That hell ended in 1954. With Stalin’s death a year earlier, all Spanish prisoners were repatriated aboard the ship Semíramis. At that time there were only 229 survivors of the Blue Division. The ship arrived in Barcelona on April 2nd, coming from the Ukrainian port of Odessa. Alcover’s family learned of that news two months earlier. “There was a radio amateur from Campos -his son assures- who heard it on the radio. Then he got on his motorbike and went to tell us at our home, in the countryside. My grandfather died one month before his arrival. My father always told us that he dreamed of his progenitor’s death that day”.
In Barcelona, the reception of the Semíramis was triumphant. Franco, however, did not go. “At that time -Cifre recalls- Spain was under the orbit of the United States and the Blue Division was clear evidence of Francoist aid to fascism, even though the excuse had been to combat communism”. From Barcelona, Alcover returned with another ship to Mallorca, where he was also received by a crowd of people. From then on he would be known as “the Russian”. He died in 1998 at the age of 82. Before that, in 1962, he and the rest of the 45,000 legionaries were named adopted sons of Santa Eugènia. “This act of homage -the Sineu historian assures- has not been carried out in any other town in Spain”.
