When the Nazis wondered whether Franco was Jewish

Nazi Germany was curious about the origins and character of Francisco Franco, the general who led the coup in the Spanish Civil War and to whom Berlin had already provided invaluable military support. It was the end of 1936. So when a Bolivian diplomat who was an admirer of Adolf Hitler contacted the German authorities to tell them that their Spanish ally was probably Jewish, the antisemitic regime took note.

“Because of its urgency, the above report is being processed without verification regarding accuracy,” says a sealed document found in Office II 112, part of the so-called SD, the Security Service of the SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. Dated December 16, 1936, the document goes on to say, “Further inquiries will be made in this direction.”

It is not known whether Himmler or his deputy Reinhard Heydrich followed up on this information from the Bolivian diplomat, Federico Nielsen-Reyes, who had been the translator of the first Spanish edition of Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. But the document, which was found in the Federal Archive in Berlin by the historian Marc Navarro, reflects the obsession with race of the Nazi regime and its sympathizers. It also underscores the contradictory positions in which its fanatic antisemitism could place the regime vis-à-vis its own international partners.

By 1936, Hitler’s Germany was already persecuting Jews. The pogrom of November 1938 was two years away and would soon lead to the so-called Final Solution and the systematic murder of six million European Jews. At the same time, as the historian Julián Casanova explains in his 2025 biography Franco, the Nazis had chosen Franco, a few days after his uprising of July 18 against the Spanish Second Republic, as their interlocutor of choice among the rebel generals in Spain.

“The authorities of the Third Reich who were negotiating with Franco for the loan of war material pressured him from the end of August to take the reins,” writes Casanova. It didn’t take long for this to take place. In the fall of 1936, Franco was appointed head of government of the Spanish state and Germany recognized him and his supporters as the legitimate government of Spain. Berlin had already delivered warplanes, weapons and ammunition that would serve for the first assault on Madrid, along with the combat group known as the Condor Legion.

If what Nielsen-Reyes pointed out had been true, that Franco was Jewish, how could Hitler have maintained his alliance with him? The Bolivian was a diplomat who competed as an equestrian in the Olympics, was in contact with war criminals in Latin America and bears an uncanny resemblance to a character in Roberto Bolaño’s book Nazi Literature in the Americas. Surely, he knew that he was touching on a sensitive issue at a delicate moment in European history.

“Subject: General Franco. Spain,” reads the heading of Office II document 112. And it continues: “According to information available here, Mr. Nielsen-Reyes, of the Bolivian mission in Berlin, maintains that the head of the Spanish national government, General Franco, is Jewish.” It adds that a news item in a Swiss Catholic newspaper reiterates the claim according to which Franco would be a descendant of the Jewish converts suspected of secretly practicing Judaism in Spain, known as the Marranos.

When Marc Navarro discovered the document in the Federal Archive in Berlin, he experienced one of those eureka moments. It happened in 2023 while he was researching for his PhD, entitled The Spanish Embassy in Berlin, 1931-1945. “I don’t know if it’s really unpublished or not,” he says, “but it’s the first time I’ve heard of it.” He announced the finding during a conference on May 15, on Spanish diplomats and the Shoah.

“When I found it, it was amazing, because I was aware there was speculation over whether or not Franco had Jewish roots, just as there was speculation for many years about whether he was a Freemason,” he explains. “This document proves absolutely nothing, but it served to show me that, beyond the rumors, some people took it seriously, to the point of informing or bothering the SS with the issue.”

Navarro adds: “Although I cannot confirm it, I am sure that [Nielsen-Reyes] wrote or warned as many people as possible, especially knowing the two-headed machine that was the German state government institutions on one hand and the Nazi party on the other. In any case, I am sure that both the Nazi party and the Nazi government received this information, one way or another.”

Other authors have also mentioned the possibility of Franco being Jewish. In The Holocaust and Franco’s Spain, Enrique Moradiellos wrote: “Already during the world war itself, the rumor about Franco’s Jewish ancestry was circulating in European diplomatic circles and at some point came to worry Hitler himself.” Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida, in Antisemitism in Spain, explained that, according to the journalist and historian Ramón Garriga, “it seems that Heydrich ordered an investigation into the subject although it did not yield any results.”

Federico Nielsen-Reyes was not just any diplomat, but someone who was close to the Third Reich, probably due the fact he had a German father. He was born in La Paz in 1904, and died in Madrid in 1987. “A Nazi from the word ‘go’ and a member of the elite of the Andean country,” was how Jesús Casquete, from the University of the Basque Country, defined him in his study The first Spanish edition of Mein Kampf, published in the Journal of Political Studies in 2019.

Nielsen-Reyes was the author of the unsigned translation of Mein Kampf into Spanish, published in 1935 in Barcelona by the Araluce Publishing House and, two years later, in Ávila by the publishing house of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Fragments of Hitler’s work existed, but this was the first authorized book, albeit in an abridged version. On the website of the Belgian auction house Arenberg, there is an original copy with a dedication by Nielsen-Reyes to the Bolivian industrialist and emissary in Paris, Simón Iturri Patiño, dated August 1936. “In our homeland, we need to think, feel and act as the great leader of this people, Adolf Hitler, has done in Germany,” he writes. He signs off as “F. Nielsen-Reyes, translator of the book.”

That Nielsen-Reyes was a believer in Nazism is attested to by a memorandum received by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt in 1942, in which he is described as “a great Nazi propagandist in South America.” The German author Dieter Maier indicates in a text published in 2024 that Nielsen-Reyes crossed paths at some point – probably in the late 1950s or early 60s – with the Nazi criminal Walther Rauff. Rauff is one of the protagonists of the latest book by the jurist and writer Philippe Sands, 38 London Street. On Impunity: Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia (Anagrama, 2025). After World War II, he fled to Latin America and worked for a time for the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), West Germany’s intelligence services. Although he was based in Patagonia, his contacts reached as far as Bolivia. Maier quotes a message to the BND in which Rauff refers to Nielsen-Reyes in terms that seem complimentary, “He has translated Mein Kampf into Spanish. He is still a follower of HITLER today.”

During his research in the Federal Archive, Navarro came across another document from the same period. It is a letter dated November 29, 1936, addressed to “most esteemed Mr. Reichsführer SS.” The signature belonged to Erich Baumeister, a collaborator of Lorenz Mensch, Himmler’s confidant, for whom he prepared horoscopes of persons of interest.

The letter, which had already been mentioned a few years earlier by the journalist Udo Röbel, is difficult to read, but it can be deduced that it is informing Himmler that an “astrological study” on Franco is being prepared. The fondness of some Nazis, including Himmler, for the occult is well known. “My observations are intended to be, of course, a totally objective and non-partisan statement on the subject of Spain,” said the astrologer.

According to Navarro, “With the astrological study, it is clear that [Nielsen-Reyes’s] is not the only document interested in Franco, his origins and his most immediate future in the context of the war.” It is not known what the Nazis did with the horoscope, or what it would have been used for. Regarding Nielsen-Reyes’ information, Navarro says: “I cannot prove or affirm that it was still being processed.” But he adds: “I don’t think they came to any decisive conclusions, because I don’t think it was possible.” In any case, the economic and military benefit that Germany derived from its relationship with Franco was such that “at this point it didn’t matter.”

Whatever Nazi Germany discovered after the letters of late 1936, Hitler’s support for Franco was unwavering. Military aid continued and the Condor Legion bombed Guernica in April 1937. In May 1939, when celebrating the Nationalist victory over the Republicans, Franco called for vigilance against “the Jewish spirit that allowed for the alliance of big capital with Marxism,” as Julián Casanova recalls in his biography. Franco would align himself with Hitler in World War II, although officially Spain would not enter combat. The biographer recalls that “the main Nazi hierarchs did not value Spanish aggression positively, because they considered it an economic and military burden.”

This was the context of the Hitler-Franco summit on October 23, 1940 in Hendaye, in southern France, which Casanova describes as follows: “Hitler did not go to Hendaye to ask Spain to enter the war, while Franco gave him a long review of the Spanish grievances in Morocco, the terrible conditions in which the country found itself and the list of supplies it needed for its military intervention.” He says that, after the meeting, Franco commented on the Germans to his Foreign Minister, Ramón Serrano Suñer, saying: “These people are intolerable. They want us to enter the war and offer nothing in return.” Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the German secret service, considered Franco not to be “a hero but a little scumbag.” Despite this, as Casanova points out, “Franco did not break relations with the Third Reich until May 8 [1945].” In other words, the day of Germany’s surrender.

And Nielsen-Reyes? If at any time, as Office II document 112 seems to indicate, he harbored doubts about Franco, he changed his mind. Professor Casquete cites the prologue of the second edition of Mein Kampf in Spanish, published in Ávila in 1937, in his article in the Journal of Political Studies. The Bolivian diplomat writes that, in Spain, “Generalissimo Franco is fighting hard to save his glorious people from the communist clutch.” If there was a case about Franco being Jewish, it was soon dismissed.

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