Polish MEP praising General Franco sparks parliament clash

Many people did not realize and are dazzled by the fact that among the biggest saviors of Jews during Holocaust were formally Hitler allies--Generallisimo Franco of Spain and Field Marshal Mannerheim of Finland. In fact they were the only allies of convenience with Hitler. Mannerheim joined Hitler against USSR to recover the lands lost in the 1940 Winter was with USSR. Franco used Hitler help to crush pro-Soviet Spanish "Republicans" during Spanish Civil war of 1936-1939.

However, it was General Franco who refused Hitler to close Gibraltar in 1940 by not allowing Wehrmacht to enter the Spain. This was a tremendous boost to allies (especially Britain), and allowed crucial WWII shipping of troops and supplies between Meditteranean and Atlantic to continue.

It was Franco who ordered Spanish Ambassador to pro-Nazi southern French Vichy regime to issue Spanish Passports to French Jews when Vichy regime and Nazi occupied Northern France began rounding up its Jews and send them to Auschwicz. Some estimates are that Franco noble action saved 60,000 French Jews from Gas Chambers.

Mannerheim flatly refused to send Finnish Jews to Nazi concentration camps. To prevent Wehrmacht from taking over Finland to round up and deport Finnish Jews, Mannerheim assigned all Finnish Jewry to Military or Military related Factories--from babies to elders ! Whenever Hitler demanded Mannerheim to round up Jews and send them to concentration camps in Nazi Germany occupied territories, Mannerheim reply was standard--all Finnish Jews are either in Finnish Military fighting alongside Hitler or working for Finnish military war effort. Overall, Franco and Mannerheim saved literally tens of thousands of Jews from Gas Chambers and they deserve the Highest Possible praise for that.

To be fair, Mannerheim and Franco had their share of wrongdoings too I.e. Franco did not help ordinary Spanish republican soldiers interned in France from being shipped to Mauthausen when Hitler took over France condemning to almost certain death tens of thousands of Spanish citizens. Though they weren't innocent by fighting for pro-Stalinist regime, they were still Spanish citizens. There were also quite a number of excesses during Franco rule. After Mannerheim crushed Lenin supported Finnish Bolsheviks with German help in 1918, thousands of ordinary Finnish red guard soldiers were thrown into Finnish Concentration camps where they perished. Overall, their regimes weren't free of excessive brutality, but if we poot their good and bad deeds on the symbolic judgement scale, their good deeds surely far outweigh their bad ones.

Here is an interesting article mentioning Mannerheim.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/11/21/222226.shtml

"In 1943 Nazi "diplomat" von Ribbentrop traveled to Helsinki, Finland, with an empty boat. He told the Finnish leader, Baron von Mannerheim, "We have a ship in the harbor to take your Jews back to Germany for forced labor."

"Mannerheim was a decent man. (At least politically. His admirers claim his womanly exploits were such as to make Bill Clinton look like a homosexual.)"

"Mannerheim was furious. "We have no Jews here," he said to von Ribbentrop. "We have only Finns. And if you touch so much as one of our Finns we will give up the northern front and let the Russians descend upon you."

"The ship returned to Germany empty."

"We need to create strong international pressure to fight against such tendencies as we are definitely not going to tolerate them."

They are not going to tolerate even *a speech* in praise of regimes they dislike? I am no fan of Franco's dictatorship or any other fascist government, but I support the right of any admirer of said dictatorship to peacefully voice his views. Of course, the Polish delegate deserves to be criticized for what he said, but he should be tolerated as well. He should not be punished merely for being wrong or for being controversial.

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One of the many serious blunders made by that Red lover FDR was giving the cold shoulder to Franco including looking the other way when the highly illegal, US based and financed Lincoln Brigades went to fight on the side of the so called "Republicans" in the Spanish Civil War. Imagine how different the outcome might have been in Europe had we befriended Franco back when he gained initial power? We'll never know if we might have convinced him to be somewhat less neutral. I'd like to think that we might have convinced him to allow forward deployment of US forces as early as 1942. Stalin never would have had a chance if we'd have been in there that early. We would have marched to the Dneiper.

We can recall that Woodrow Wilson too was very lukewarm about strangling Bolshevism in Russia in its crib. Did you read Margaret MacMillan book: "Paris, 1919" about post WWI negotiations that ended with Versailles Peace Treaty ? Winston Churchill, then British Secretary of War, was adamant about helping Russian White guard and other anti-Bolshevik forces to destroy Bolshevism with full scale Entente military intervention (Britain, France, US) or much more active assistance to the anti-Bolshevik front. However, Wilson and then British PM Lloyd George where not convinced that Bolshevism was a real threat. They thought that Bolsheviks will play around a bit with Red terror and then become nice Social-Democrats with whom deal is possible. The end result is well known, and ultimately it proves once again that Liberals lost their touch with reality long long time ago.

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