The Spanish Civil War was really a foretaste of a much larger conflict to come, but in many respects was no less savage, as terrible atrocities were committed on both sides. As so often happens in times of violent flux the situation polarized, the moderates were pushed aside, and the extremists gained the upper hand. On 15 May 1937 Largo Caballero (a Freemason) resigned as Prime Minister, and Dr Juan Negrin (a non-mason) became Prime Minister until 31 March 1939, and his Government was dominated by Communists.
    On 18 July Franco made a broadcast on the National Radio of Salamanca to mark the first anniversary of the military rising. He ranted about the burning of churches, the assassination of businessmen and the interference of ‘foreign powers and lodges’. He accused the chief military masons of ‘vacillation’ and denounced the peaceful overtures made by Diego Martinez Barrio on the eve of the rising as ‘the treason of the lodges’. In November he explained his actions to the Spanish journalist Nena Belmonte:

… the Spanish Republic did not find itself free of obligations. For the most part the leaders were Freemasons. Before their duty to their country came their obligations to the Grand Orient. In my opinion, Freemasonry, with all its international influence, is the organization principally responsible for the political ruin of Spain, as well as the murder of Calvo Sotelo, who was executed in accordance with orders from the Grand Secretary of Freemasonry in Geneva.

The Republican government meanwhile had retreated north to Barcelona, and within a year, a fierce battle raged for the city. By January 1939 Franco’s stranglehold on the remaining Republican pockets was all but complete, and on 27 February, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, recognised Franco’s government. With the republic all but lost Manuel Azaña resigned as President. Within a month the Nationalists entered Madrid and Franco announced that the war was over.
    However the war was not over for Franco. In March 1940 he issued a decree banning Freemasonry and Communism. All Masonic assets were to be ‘confiscated immediately’ and anyone deemed to be a mason would be subject to a minimum twelve-year jail sentence. It was further declared that ‘any mason or communist’ must ‘notify the Government of his affiliation within two months’, and a Special Tribunal was subsequently established to enforce the law. Masons of the 18º and above were deemed guilty of ‘Aggravated Circumstances’, and usually faced the death penalty.
    Alarmed by the draconian nature of the law, the British Ambassador in Madrid, Sir Maurice Peterson, wrote to Lord Halifax in London and drew his attention to the plight of the Anglo-Scotch lodges:

I should endeavour to persuade the competent authorities of the essential difference between British Masonic Lodges and the more political Lodges of the Continental type. But I fear that the new law may increase the difficulties with which the British community in Spain are already confronted.

A number of Spanish masons, such as Diego Martinez Barrio, did manage to escape but were tried and sentenced in absentia. Others were not so fortunate. The former Catalan President and organiser of the Workers Party (POUM), Luis Companys, was arrested by the Gestapo in northern France and sent back to Spain where he faced a firing squad.

Franco’s Obsession

As part of his overall campaign against Freemasonry Franco had a masonic lodge constructed in Salamanca, complete with three hooded black manikins occupying the chairs in the East, to illustrate the supposed evils of the movement in three-dimensional form. Originally intended as the showpiece exhibit in an anti-masonic museum, it never actually opened to the general public and today forms part of the official government archives of the Spanish Civil War.
    On 17 July 1943 Franco circulated a secret letter to three of his military chiefs announcing that a secret international masonic plot had been uncovered. He claimed that the plotters were attempting to re-establish the monarchy in Spain with the heir to the throne, Don Juan de Bourbon (father of the present King, Juan Carlos), but Franco claimed this would only return Spain to its pre civil war chaos. He repeatedly referred to foreign pressure for democratic change as ‘the masonic offensive’, and assured a cabinet meeting that there were fifteen million Freemasons in England who all voted Labour. Yet he was also wary of the probability of an allied victory, and subsequently informed the German Ambassador that he was recalling the Spanish Blue Division from the Eastern Front whilst assuring him of his unerring resolve to continue the struggle against Bolshevism, ‘Jewry and Freemasonry’.
    On 11 September 1945 Franco told the women’s section of the Falange in Madrid: ‘We have torn up Marxist materialism, we have disorientated masonry,’ and thwarted the ‘satanic machinations’ of ‘the masonic super state’ which, he alleged, controlled the world’s press and many international politicians. He described Spain’s struggle as a ‘crusade’ because it carried the evangelism of the world and that its men were the ‘soldiers of God’.
    On 14 December 1946, using the alias Jakin Boor, after the degrees of Freemasonry, Franco embarked on a series of forty-nine articles for the Falangist Madrid diary Arriba (‘Forward’). In his first article, ‘Masonry and Communism’, Franco asserted:

The whole secret of the campaigns unleashed against Spain can be explained in two words: masonry and communism . . . . we have to extirpate these two evils from our land.

He alleged that, although deadly enemies, Freemasonry and Communism had united and were allied against Spain. He asserted that the United Nations Secretary-General, the Norwegian, Trygve Lee, the Belgian President of the General Assembly, Paul-Henri Spaak, and the Spanish Republican refugee and former Minister, José Giral, were all thirty-third degree masons in the clandestine service of Moscow and this was why the UN had condemned his regime in its opening session.
    Franco naïvely believed that his alias hid his true identity but Washington was well aware who was behind the articles. In 1949 he mooted the idea of having his articles translated into English but his Minister of Foreign Affairs cautioned against it reasoning that it would annoy the allies, most especially President Harry Truman who was a 33º mason. Yet Franco continued to regularly sound-off about masonic plots. The following year he hosted a meeting of television media in Madrid at which he ranted about the evils of the masons and how they controlled the BBC. And when, in 1952, he published his articles in a book entitled, Masoneria, once again under the pseudonym Jakin Boor, he convinced himself that the masons had bought all the copies to prevent it from being read.
    For the remainder of his life Franco remained paranoid and obsessed. In 1959 the secret policeman Mauricio Carlovilla published Anti-España and denounced the monarchist cause as a tool of Freemasonry accusing Don Juan de Bourbon of being a Freemason. Franco warmly greeted the publication of the book as he similarly believed Don Juan was so ‘tainted’.
    On 20 December 1973 the President of the government, Admiral Carrero Blanco, was assassinated by the Basque separatist group ETA. Franco was so distraught that he cancelled all his engagements and went into retreat in order to spend time analysing the attack. In his self-imposed isolation Franco privately told a friend that the assassination had been a ‘masonic’ revenge killing, a claim later repeated in Leo Ferraro’s El Ultimo Protocolo – Las Claves Secretas de Sionismo Mundial (‘The Last Protocol - The Secret Keys of World Zionism’), published in Madrid in 1986. And even in his farewell address to the nation on 1 October 1975 a tearful and infirm Franco told huge crowds that the two greatest enemies that confronted Spain were Communism and Freemasonry and he warned that the EEC was a conspiracy of ‘left-wing masonry’.
    Franco died on 20 November 1975. His chosen successor, Juan Carlos de Bourbon, was crowned king and Spain began a peaceful transition to a constitutional democracy. However, when voters failed to choose the candidates of the Right, the latter claimed it was due to ‘Jewish-Masonic-Communist’ propaganda. In 1979 César Casanova in his, Manual de urgencia sobre el sionismo en España (‘Urgent manual on Zionism in Spain’), asserted that everything happening was predicted in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
    In 1981 a military coup attempted to halt the return to a liberal democracy. Curiously, in the same year, Franco’s Masoneria was also republished, only this time under his own name and by the National Foundation that bore his name.
    Today Freemasonry is once again free to practise in Spain. In 1987 the United Grand Lodge of England recognised the Grand Lodge of Spain, and on 3 March 2001 the Grand Lodge officially merged with the Spanish Grand Orient, bringing one of the darkest periods in Freemasonry’s long history to a peaceful close.

© M. D. J. Scanlan 2004.

Matthew Scanlan MA, is a member of the Duke of Wharton Research Lodge, No. 18, Barcelona and of the Centro Estudios Historicos de la Masoneria Espanola, Zaragoza.