Controlled Spanish Press Raps Eichmann Trial, Hides Hitler Horrors

Spain is exhibiting “a recurrent nostalgia for nazism, ” and the controlled Spanish press is denouncing the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem as “ridiculous and nauseating, ” according to a Madrid dispatch in the Guardian of Manchester.

The Guardian quoted Roderigo Royo, editor of the Spanish newsweekly, SP, as saying editorially: “The Nazi-Fascists were not as bad as the Jews have painted them. If there was some persecution of Jews under Hitler, the persecution of the Nazis by the Jews in the past 16 years has been infinitely more ferocious.”

The dispatch quoted Royo further as declaring “there were no gas chambers for the extermination of Jews,” and the Spanish editor continued: “I have been in the German gas chambers. They were technical installations of the army for testing the soldiers’ gas masks. All that’s been said on the subject is sheer fabrication. The Jews invented an Eichmann in Argentina. They caught him the way you net a butterfly, then they indoctrinated him the way a clown in a second-rate circus is taught his role.”

According to the Guardian, these “publicized and officially condoned pro-Fascist outbursts make no impact on Spaniards in general, who are neither Fascist-inclined nor anti-Semitic. ” On the other hand, the Manchester newspaper declared, “the Spanish press accounts of the Eichmann trial have been superficial, giving the impression that it is Government policy (since the press is State-controlled) that it does not wish to reveal to Spaniards the full horror of the Hitler era.”