Authors: Preston Paul
After I arrived in Spain I covered the front news and political news of the government – just the ordinary work the correspondent does – and I became very sympathetic to their cause because I felt that if Fascism was defeated in Spain, it would not only be a victory for Democracy and a defeat for Hitler and Mussolini who were already intervening there, but also that a victory for Democracy in Spain was the best way of preventing the Second World War which some of us already saw coming at that time.
When asked if he had ever been a member of any Communist party anywhere in the world, Fischer replied categorically ‘Never’. ‘In general, I am not a “joiner”, even with all the political contacts that I have now and had years back. I don’t think that I was a member of any so-called front organization. If I were I would have no hesitation to say so, because I even had sympathies, up to 1939, with some of these so-called front organizations.’ When asked why, he replied: ‘Because many of them were more or less anti-Fascist. They were doing things which I then thought would prevent the war, would bring victory over Fascism and would strengthen Democracy in various parts of the world.’
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Certainly, there could be no mistaking his sympathies:
If 200 superior officers of the army had been arrested six months ago in one unexpected swoop, Spain might have been spared the
80,000 men and women, who, it is roughly estimated, have died in the last ten weeks of civil war. Azaña, however, pure-minded intellectual that he is, preferred partial action to drastic action. His land reform alarmed the landlords without seriously weakening them. His delicate transfer of some generals from Madrid to distant posts warned them of possible events to come and told them to prepare for revolt. The coincidence of the semi-feudal class’s fear for its property with the militarists’ fear for their positions as protectors of the classes from which they spring explains the present rising against constituted authority. Pedants may split hairs about the legality of the situation; the reality is that the landlords, generals, fascists, and their allies are making a last effort to curb the popular revolution which started when Alfonso was driven out. It is a revolution against widespread poverty, for human rights, for progress.
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This was the same article which, because of its brutally realistic account of the disorganization and panic of untrained militiamen outside Toledo, earned him the virulent criticism of Mikhail Koltsov. He had argued then that his obligation to his readers was to report the facts: Koltsov, however, made it brutally clear that he believed that there were higher values than the truth. In his own diary, for instance, Koltsov played down the presence of Russian arms and advisers because he knew that this was something that was being used against the Republic. This was not a point of view shared by Fischer. In one of his articles about the International Brigades, he referred to asking the men in one unit about their machine-gun: ‘The reply was “Mexican”, but the characters on the gun were Russian. “Mexican” is a formula, and the word is never pronounced without a wink. I prefer my facts straight.’
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Fischer believed the Spanish war to be crucial to world peace and democratic freedoms: ‘I had so much sympathy with the Loyalist cause that I felt it wasn’t enough just to write about it. I wanted to do something more concrete so I enlisted in the International Brigades.’
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He joined after leaving Madrid on 7 November and recalled later: ‘I am as proud of that as I am of anything I have done in my life. A nation was
bleeding. Machine guns were being mounted on the ivory tower. It was not enough to write.’ He was briefly their quartermaster, staying for about two months, although never wore any uniform other than a corduroy jacket and trousers and never carried a weapon. His job was to organize food, clothing and equipment for the brigades. According to Martínez Amutio’s fevered imagination, Fischer was Moscow’s paymaster for the brigades. This was nonsense not least because Fischer’s relationship with the brigades was short-lived. It came to an unhappy end when he clashed with André Marty, the paranoid and fiercely authoritarian Stalinist who really was Moscow’s controller of the Internationals. Marty was fiercely jealous because Fischer spoke such good Russian and had good relations with senior Soviet advisers. He bitterly resented Fischer’s open criticism of his dictatorial ways. Fischer claimed later that their conflict was inevitable ‘perhaps, because I am an independent character but, chiefly, probably because I was not a Communist and couldn’t be ordered around as he liked to order around all people, I felt that I wasn’t wanted there. I sort of stuck out like a sore thumb and so it was just a friendly understanding that I should quit the Brigade.’ Fischer himself implies that Marty manoeuvred to have him replaced. That would have been unusually subtle on Marty’s part given his notoriously authoritarian tendencies and his readiness to dish out the most brutal punishments for the slightest infringements of his arbitrarily imposed discipline. On the other hand, given Fischer’s connections with Rosenberg and Gorev, with Orlov and Koltsov, with Álvarez del Vayo, Negrín and Largo Caballero, Marty must have felt the need to operate more circumspectly than usual. Moreover, it is also possible that the Comintern judged, and instructed Marty, that the fellow-travelling Fischer could be of more use elsewhere.
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In this regard, it may well be of some significance that, in his diary, Fischer says that he brought with him from Paris ‘a note of recommendation from “M”’ which secured him a room at the Hotel Florida. It is probable that ‘M’ was Willi Münzenberg, the Comintern propaganda wizard who lived in Paris. Certainly, according to Münzenberg’s wife, Babette Gross, Willi and Fischer were ‘on friendly terms’.
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He was similarly acquainted with Münzenberg’s deputy, Otto Katz. Indeed, according to letters intercepted by British Intelligence, he would soon
be liaising with Katz about getting the Republic’s case put forward as widely as possible in England and America.
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It is impossible to reconstruct exactly the sequence of events as to who put whom in contact with whom, but it is indisputably the case that, very shortly after his arrival in Madrid, Fischer was in touch with his old friend Julio Álvarez del Vayo, the Socialist journalist who on 4 September had become Foreign Minister in the government of Francisco Largo Caballero. One of Álvarez del Vayo’s first priorities was to reverse the non-intervention policies of the democracies by getting the Republic’s case before an international audience. It is hardly surprising that he should turn to Fischer for help in organizing the press and propaganda services of the Republic, nor indeed that Münzenberg and Katz should have wanted to encourage Fischer to help in this task.
Fischer wrote with indignation about what was happening to the Republic and with a burning determination to change the nonintervention policies of the democracies. In November 1936, after a week of bombing raids on Madrid, in which many children were killed, he commented: ‘That Italian and German pilots should attack non-combatant Spaniards with bombs and machine-guns without provoking a protest as to force democracies to intervene to protect Spain’s progressive republic is a pretty fair gauge of the world’s moral calibre these days.’
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In early December, after finding himself in the midst of the carnage produced by a bombing raid on Madrid, he wrote passionately of the wounded women, children and old people, of those left homeless and of those who piloted the waves of Junkers. He also wrote perceptively of the wider international implications:
In Spain two vast world forces are testing each other out. So far the fascists have displayed more initiative and greater daring. They were the first to send airplanes and equipment. Now they are the first to ship troops. Their submarines and other naval craft spy on and interfere with the operations of the loyal Spanish fleet in eastern harbours. Their impudence is unequalled because England and France showed them in a score of situations – Ethiopia, the Rhineland, and so on – that he who dares wins. Democratic diplomacy is no match for fascist
arrogance. If Franco conquers, Europe will be black or Europe will go to war as soon as Hitler and Mussolini are ready.
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In mid-December 1936, he went to Paris, still haunted by what he had seen in Madrid. He wrote to Freda Kirchwey: ‘I wish you could do something about it. Can’t you organize a committee to send relief, medicines – help in the evacuation?’ He proposed going to New York to get something done to raise money for the Republic. His identification with the Republican cause was evident in his writing: ‘
We
need men and women – nurses – and money and materials. You mustn’t allow America to get away with passivity in this great fight. Spain will suffer, but America too.’
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That the democracies were turning a blind eye to the implications of what was happening in Spain filled Fischer with indignation. At the beginning of 1938, he would write: ‘The Spanish people are paying heavily for the privilege of fighting the world’s battle against fascism, paying not merely in dead, wounded, and captured, in the daily nervous strain, and in destroyed wealth, but in unrelieved undernourishment.’
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In his eloquent and lucid articles, Fischer returned over and over again to underline the absurdities of non-intervention. He pointed out that there was no control over Portugal whence arms flowed unimpeded to Franco. Realizing that the Germans and Italians were concerned not to antagonize Britain prematurely, indeed while Hermann Göring was in Rome discussing with Mussolini just how far they could go, Fischer wrote perceptively: ‘If Great Britain called “Halt!” Hitler would mend his behaviour unwillingly and Mussolini happily.’
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He believed that Washington’s neutrality over Spain played into Hitler’s hands and made American involvement in a future war inevitable. He showed how Germany and Italy could buy American arms that found their way to Franco, while the Republic was deprived of its rights under international law to buy the weaponry with which to defend itself. He wrote in vain that ‘the only way to guarantee peace is to stop the fascist aggressors who alone want war. It can still be done in Spain. If Hitler and Mussolini are checked there, they will be weakened and sobered.’
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Fischer’s friendship with Álvarez del Vayo and Negrín flourished on the basis of their shared commitment to the Republic and their belief
that its survival depended on international opinion putting pressure on British, French and American politicians to abandon non-intervention. Certainly, Fischer made Herculean efforts to influence American and European public opinion in favour of a lifting of the US embargo on arms sales to the Spanish Republic. In December 1936, he went to Switzerland to cover Álvarez del Vayo’s appeal to the League of Nations to scrap non-intervention. From Geneva he went to Moscow to see his family. In the course of his stay, he was treated by senior Kremlin figures as a valuable informant on Spain. He was received by Maxim Litvinov and by Georgi Dimitrov, Bela Kun’s successor as head of the Comintern. He was grilled on the Spanish situation by General Semyon Petrovitch Uritsky, the chief of Soviet Military Intelligence, the GRU, who was in charge of aid to Spain. It was in Uritsky’s home that Luli, the daughter of Constancia de la Mora, was staying after being evacuated to Russia. Fischer was not an agent – his relationship with these people was one of mutual benefit. He would tell them forthrightly what he thought was happening and what they should be doing. For them, his knowledge was useful, for him there was the frisson of mixing with men of power and of feeling that he was influencing them. Nevertheless, while he was in Russia, the second bout of trials of Old Bolsheviks had begun. His faith in the Soviet system was dwindling fast. For Fischer, like Koltsov, Spain seemed to be the only place where the hopes of anti-fascism could flourish: ‘I was glad to leave Russia and immerse myself in a new vibrant situation where Russia showed its finest face.’
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From Moscow, he returned briefly to Valencia, where he reported to Prieto, Álvarez del Vayo and Largo Caballero on the meeting with Uritsky and then to Ambassador Rosenberg on their reactions. Fischer’s ubiquity and influence can just be deduced from the opening of an article that he published in January 1937:
I left Madrid on December 7 to fly to Geneva for the special Spanish session of the League Council. Thereafter I spent a week in Paris and eight days in Moscow and then flew back to Barcelona, where I arrived on January 6. I have now been in the Spanish capital four days, in which time I have interviewed
Prime Minister Caballero, four members of the federal cabinet, a number of party leaders and several well-informed generals.
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From Spain he went to the United States, where he gave several lectures. He was afflicted with an acute bout of arthritis while in New York and he used his enforced leisure to write up his material into the lengthy pamphlet
Why Spain Fights On.
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It was probably on this trip that Louis attended a fund-raising event for the Spanish Republic at the New York home of two Hollywood scriptwriters, the humorist and poet Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, her actor husband. Campbell wrote to him on the next day to comment sarcastically on his insensitivity:
I am afraid that you misunderstand the reason for my annoyance last night. It was not the fact that you were so tactless as to mistake my wife for my mother. After all, I have been in Hollywood for the past two years and am accustomed to all kinds of stupidity and lack of perception. (Although, since the great disparity in age between my wife and myself is six years, she would have been an enterprising young girl in order to give birth to me.) The point I was trying to make is that you were at my house for presumably the same reason that I was – to get money for the Spanish Loyalists. Therefore, since I am deeply interested in the cause, I hate to see not only myself but numerous other people (names furnished on request) antagonized by your boorishness and your indiscreet comments on the people present who, after all, were here with a common interest. As to your question to Miss Parker, ‘Are you as rich as Hemingway?’ (and there’s a way to win all hearts!), may I answer it by saying that if Hemingway’s entire fortune at the moment is $825.60, the answer is ‘Yes’. Because Miss Parker, like all poets, make enormous sums of money and keeps it all. In conclusion, may I suggest that you solicit funds for General Franco for the next few months. I guarantee you will thereby draw thousands of supporters to the Loyalist cause.
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