(Yes, it's a lame Pink Floyd pun)
Well, well, well.... Since I already posted once about the lovely town of Dénia on the Costa Blanca when we stopped on our way South, I was wondering if it was worth posting another blog article when we returned to it this month. After all, this is a sleepy town and our days are mostly filled working, gymming, swimming and enjoying beach walks. We did go to the neighbouring picturesque town of Altea so, at first, I thought I might post about "flowers and plants" around here. But then something quite Indiana Jonesey happened, so I will shift my flowers and plants theme to next month' post, which should bring back the lighter side of Dénia.
Bear with me, because the story behind this post is a fascinating one!
Note: for anyone who is interested, bits in blue on this post are extracts from News articles, which are linked in the References sections.
A book
Thinking back, it all started with a habbit I have, before going to a new country, to find a couple of interesting related films or books, whether to do with history or fiction, which help me get into the "local culture". So googling something like "great books Valencia", I came across The scent of lemon leaves by Clara Sanchez. It had mixed reviews but the plot sounded interesting and was set "in a village on the Costa Blanca: "a woman befriends an elderly Norwegian couple with whom she enjoys hanging with. They become substitute grandparents to her until a former concentration-camp inmate reveals to her they are retired Nazis he's been tracking."
2 months ago in March when we first reached Dénia, I read the book, chatted about it with Cuong as I usually do, and he half listened as he usually does. It was entertaining and raised interesting questions but I didn't find it particularly inspiring plus there wasn't any mention of Dénia or the area as such, so, not entirely sure why it won the Nadal literary prize in Spain, I concluded it was a normal fiction story that could have been set anywhere and completely forgot about it.
Dénia's Ghost Town
Back in Dénia after spending April in Torremolinos, yesterday 27 May we decided to head to a tourist spot nearby called Pueblo Fantasma (Ghost Town) to walk Didi. Dénia's official site says it is:
"The skeleton of the El Greco urbanization, a huge real estate complex that was called to be one of the largest developments on the coast of the Marina Alta. However, the project was halted to protect the area, so the houses that now sit naked on the slopes of Montgó were never finished. For years it has assumed another by which it is known today among the population of Dénia: the ghost town. These dozens of houses to be finished have been for years surrounded by legends that encouraged the youngest to visit El Greco at night, not for nothing is it one of the ten most terrifying places in Dénia. However, during the day now he receives a very different type of visitor, who has seen on his forgotten walls a canvas to use to unleash his art."
Ghost Town is indeed covered in Graffiti. It is located SouthEast of Dénia, 10 mn by car of the town centre and on the side of the 753 metre high Montgó nature reserve. It is accessible through a lacey road up the mountain starting from the beautiful beach coves of "Les Rotes" and bordered by luxurious villas perched on the hills, hidden by beautiful masses of Bougainvillea. Overall, a posh area for well-off people.
It sounded good for a drive and a walk! So we were surprised, when we arrived at the bottom of the lacey road in question, to spot several "no-entry road" and "private property" signs. A tourist spot advertised on google with a single access road but no access allowed through that road and too far to walk up, that's just bizarre. So we drove through anyway, and decided if anyone asked, we'd say we were "visiting friends".
We reached Ghost Town. There was some sort of parking which was completely empty. We parked the car and found a small entrance, through the bushes, to Ghost Town. The view and graffitis were as impressive as we'd expected. The atmosphere however was a tad unnerving: given the large amount of graffitis and abandonned buildings we were wondering about possible presence of druggies or dodgy youth in hoodies, which may, or may not be safe. There was noone around, but we heard some hammering noise coming from the back of one of the buildings. Since Didi's snail-pace would not allow us to leg it in case of trouble, we agreed it was prudent not to linger and head back to the "bush entrance". Just before reaching it, Cuong still made a loud joke about the likelihood of bodies being buried in the derelict buildings.
The encounter
I was still laughing at this when I almost jumped out of my skin, emerging out of the bush entrance with Didi in tow to find (instead of a dodgy youth) a 6ft tall and strong looking elderly man (looking pretty much like the pic below but without the smile) standing there upright blatantly waiting for us to come out. He sure heard Cuong's body joke! Expecting him to tell us off for tresspassing the no-entry road sign to access Ghost Town, I wasn't too surprised that he didn't respond to my falsely chirpy " ¡HOLA!" and just stared back. Cuong arrived and without checking whether he spoke his tongue, the man directly spoke to him in German (without a Halo or Guten Tag either).
Cuong, who as you all know is a usually very open and smiling person, sternly and monollabically responded "ja", then "okay" and another "okay" to the what the man was saying. The man made no effort to translate in Spanish or English, but no need to be multilingual to deduce we weren't welcome from is hard look and face! No smile or goodbye for us, but having said his bit, he patted waggy Didi on the head (she loves dodgy people), then took off.
Needless to say we didn't hang about and hopped back in the car, where Cuong explained the man had first asked if we lived here, to which Cuong lied that we did, then after a pause, the man said he would walk around the small road loop behind the parking and then he would be back, we should visit and chat sometime. Something was off because his body language and look were so ice cold it sounded like a passive aggressive warning rather than a warm invite!
We joked that if we didn't totally misread the situation, or instead of a the man being a grumpy resident fed up about pleb tourists or taggers ruining the peace of the luxury villas, he might have been an ex-Nazi (at that point neither Cuong or I thought at all about my book), but we quickly did our math that he would have had to be at the bare minimum 100 years old while he only looked about 80. So he would have had to be a son of...
Graffitis and investigation trigger
Since our walk had been cut short, we drove down swiftly to the lovely beach of Les Rotes, just at the bottom of the No-access road to Ghost Town, also lined with expensive villas as above. There, contrasting with the high end style, we saw the "Dead Nazi, Happy punk" graffiti on a wall. We started making more giggley jokey 'imagine if" silly scenarios about the man being related to Nazis and the Taggers youths from Ghost Town not being happy about it (we were still not thinking about the book).
Back home, I googled access restriction to Ghost Town, and saw this graffiti picture on one of its derelict buildings, which we had seen and not paid particular attention to at the time:
OK at that stage there were a:
Weird German encounter
Anti-Nazi graffiti by punks
Rising Genesis/Phoenix graffiti
All in the same area. Needless to say my innate obsession with adventures, investigations and criminals was triggered. Cuong being Cuong, he was skeptical about any relevance of points 2. and 3., but he did share the weird impression the man made on us and the joke.
So, giggling, as you do, I googled:
"Dénia - Spain - Nazi"
And guess what...
Franco Spain and Hitler Germany
I will spare you the hours of reading I have done since yesterday (my memory from History in High School was really patchy about this), and will paste just some of the links in case you want to know more.
The rough jest of the Spanish-Nazi relationship is:
Franco, the general that overthrew the Spanish democratic republic in the Spanish Civil War in 1939, made a deal with the Nazis: they support him taking over the leadership of Spain, and Spain sides with Germany and Mussolini's Italy. It wasn't a totally smooth alliance as you would expect between two dictators with their own goals.
Nevertheless, the Franco regime sent the Blue Division (mark that name for later in this post), made up of nearly 50,000 soldiers who aided the German army, to the Russian front. Spain also helped economically, for example providing Germany specific metals needed for armaments.
Once the Second World War was over, the Franco dictatorship was subjected to a hard international isolation by the victorious countries. Spain did not get aid from the US Marshall Plan to finance reconstruction of Europe, and was not admitted in the United Nations created in 1945.
Many other Nazi political leaders and fascist collaborators fled to Francoist Spain after the war. For decades, General Franco protected these war criminals and provided a safe haven against extradition.
Surprisingly, after the death of the dictator and the political transition in Spain, this legal protection remained largely unchanged.
References
Dénia and Nazis
The first article (out of about 50 articles in French and Spanish and still counting) that I found in relation specifically to Dénia and Nazis, was a 2021 article from the Guardian that you can read in full here titled:
"A mirror of now’: the Valencian Nazis who inspired Óscar Aibar’s new film, El sustituto".
The article speaks about the inspiration for the film: The Spanish director was in Valencia for the summer when he looked up from his plate to study the pictures of famous people on the restaurant walls. "Among them was a very small one that showed five or six men wearing SS and Wehrmacht uniforms and with hairstyles from the 1960s,” says Aibar. “I thought they must have been dressed like that for a film or something, but when I asked about the photo, they told me they were the Germans from Dénia.”
The “Germans from Dénia”, it transpired, were just some of the 300 high-ranking Nazis who sought refuge in Spain after the second world war. Not only were they welcomed and protected by the Franco regime; many flourished and built profitable businesses.
At that point, I thought "er....."
Soon after, I came across a reference online to my "Scent of lemon leaves" book and learnt it had been a fiction inspired by the true story of Dénia's Nazis....
I asked myself, well all that was in the 40s to 60s, what's the relevance to today? And I found this article, published on the official site of the Town of Dénia!
Part of the article reads:
"Gerhard Bremer: the criminal that the City Council tried to bury with honors":
One of these criminals was the former Waffen-SS officer Gerhard Bremer, who participated in the Nazi invasion of Poland. After serving several years in prison, in 1954 he moved to Dénia with his wife and created a luxury resort called the Bremers Park Bungalows, where, according to the author of the thread, he organized spectacular parties full of Dénia inhabitants and German personalities. "Even the municipal band participated in them, he wore his SS uniform.", comments @Albersicambias. Apparently, these parties took place until 1980.
After his death, in 1989, he was buried in Dénia at a funeral that the City Council tried to do with honors, according to the author. The mayor at the time would have proposed to the municipal band to play in said act of honor, which refused to participate.
Incidentally, Bremer's luxury resort is in Les Rotes, at the foot of the private road to Ghost Town (still no idea why it is Private, would it be to keep a 'special' community Private? so many questions to solve)
So at that point, I wasn't laughing at all any more, I was more like...
Bremer's picture is the one I put above to illustrate the elderly man we met near Ghost Town, because they look pretty much the same! Though it would have to be a relative of his. Which is not impossible, given that Bremer's son was raised in Dénia. I guess one cannot choose their parents, so that would not make him a Nazi if he were his son, but Bremer-related or not, the commanding cold tone he used to speak to Cuong would definitely have won his approval!
Gerhard Bremer was no small fry. He was awarded the Knight's Cross (also known as the Iron Cross, the highest awards) by Hitler in the early days of Operation Barbarossa and the invasion of the Soviet Union. Mariupol, currently in the news as the Ukrainian city martyred by Putin, was also martyred by Hitler. The "tough SS lieutenant" who conquered Mariupol was... Bremer.
Another unsavoury character who is known to have enjoyed the sun and luxuries of Dénia in peace with his family until his death in 1995, is Anton Galler. In 1944, in the Italian town of Santa Anna di Stazzema, he was responsible for the execution of 560 people, including women and children; later, he ordered the bodies to be sprayed with gasoline. Galler was arrested by the Germans, but a bureaucratic error caused him to flee to Spain in the 1940s and settle in a house in the Florida area of Dénia.
There was also Johannes Bernhardt, an honourary general of the SS and businessman who had supplied weapons to Franco, who then rewarded him with Spanish nationality in order to prevent his deportation.
And Gertrudis Sommer Ficher who died in 2005 in Dénia without heirs and leaving no will, so her assets were passed on to the Valencia regional government. Inside a box, was a collection of medals, crosses, insignias and gold coins, as well as shares. The swastikas on one of the medals jumped out immediately...
Here are the tombs of Galler and Bremer in the local Dénia cemetary, which we decided to visit today. We didn't have the grave numbers yet this morning and the place is massive, so just walked about carrying Didi without finding them. Lovely place by the way, loads of trees and fragrant plants...
References
You can watch Europe's most dangerous man: Otto Skorzeny in Spain on Netflix about another high-rank Nazi retired in the Spain.
And here is a link to the "Dead Nazi Happy Punk" song referred to by the Graffiti in Les Rotes if you're into that kind of music.
Final thoughts
It would probably take years to get to the bottom of this dark topic and figure out to what extent it relates to the recent raise of the Neo-Nazi movement in Spain, including some Neo-Nazi Marches against the LGBT and Jew communities in Madrid and a gang attacking a man in Valencia in 2021. Clearly, the aging community of ex-Nazis was very well-off, well connected and quite influential in Spain. They seem to have a network of restaurants, hotels, villas which may connect their relatives but also sympathisers to their beliefs, and probably some nostalgia for a time where both Spain and Germany were Axis powers. Tellingly, Neo-Nazis participating to the Marches two years ago referred to the "Blue Division", a small neo-Nazi network which derives its name from the units of Spanish volunteers who fought in Russia during World War II alongside the troops of Hitler as mentionned above in this post. The location they chose for the March was the Madrid cemetery where Veterans from that detachment are buried....
I imagine the bafflement of the film maker who, hanging out in a Dénia local bar while making his movie, overhead locals saying "hey someone is making a film about our Nazis", as if they had been talking proudly about a local species of special tomatoes.
It was a bit of a heavy subject for a sabbatical year travel blog post. Still, there is often some crazy sh@t that comes out when scratching the shiny surface of a diamond! (yes, it's another shameless reference to Pink Floyd for no particular reason else than I like the album). We can't always be ostritches with our head buried in the sand.
OK, ok, I'll stop the bad puns.
We're planning to watch "El substituto", filmed in Dénia, and I now have downloaded 5 more history books to read on my kindle. Talk about soaking in the local culture... But to transition into a lighter mood a bit after all of this because one must, we watched the 1966 French movie classic "La grande Vadrouille", about French civilians who help the crew of a Royal Air Force bomber shot down over Paris to make their way through German-occupied France to safe territory. I think that's what fueled my bad puns, I love the "l'hélice, hélas, c'est l'os" line at the end when they're about to fly to the free zone on the gliders !!!🙄 [incidentally on 11 September 1943 Skorzeny who features in the documentary about Nazis who retired in Spain, was sent by Hitler to liberate Mussolini who was imprisonned on a mountain. He used gliders for the rescue!!]
I'll stop here on this topic, keeping my fingers crossed that noone related to our Bremer Dénia neighbours will find this post by googling Dénia - Spain - Nazis before we leave, as this is a bit too murky a topic even to my usual standards to dig into!
Bye for now, and next month, I will post those wonderful pictures of flowers, bar those from the Dénia cemetary!
For those wondering, Didi is doing great, her likeable presence and non judgemental tail wag may well have been what saved our butts from being lost forever in Dénia's Ghost Town! 😁
PS: this post may be deleted at short notice. 🤣
PS2: if we vanish, you know where we are!
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