Ture Nerman - in Franco's Spain

In Franco's Spain

In 1937, Ture Nerman and his friend August Spångberg, traveled to Spain where General Francisco Franco's National faction had taken power and a civil war was ravaging the country. They went through Nazi Germany and managed to get to Barcelona. The civil war was a chaos. At times the Stalinists were fighting the Trotskyists, and at other times the Anarchists were fighting everyone, and the Nationalists benefited from the turmoil within the left. Ture Nerman decided he could not side with any of the groups, all he knew was that he was an anti-fascist.

On 3 May, the serious fighting between the different leftist groups broke out in Barcelona, and Hotel Victoria, where the Swedes were staying, was caught in the crossfire which lasted for three days. At the same hotel, Ture Nerman for the first time met Willy Brandt, (the German Social Democrat who would later live in exile Sweden during World War II and after that become Chancellor of West Germany.) On 7 May, the fighting in Barcelona, was over with more than 500 dead and over 1,500 wounded.

Afterwards, by orders from the Comintern, Stalinist press all over the world would claim that the Swedish "Trotskyist Fascists" Ture Nerman and August Spångberg were the masterminds of the battle in Barcelona. Nerman wrote in his autobiography: “I was falsely accused by the Stalinists of being in a pact with Hitler. But in reality, not much more than a year later, Stalin himself would be in a pact with Hitler.”

When he return home to Sweden from the chaos in Spain he was met by a chaos in his own Socialist Party, the independent communist party.

Nils Flyg had taken power and expelled the former party leader Karl Kilbom. Flyg wanted Ture Nerman to stay but he didn’t like the development of the party and left voluntarily. (A couple of years later, Nils Flyg would suddenly become pro-Nazi and take the Socialist Party with him on this new course.)

For the next two years Ture Nerman was without a party and he also lost his seat in the Parliament. In 1939, choosing the date of First of May, Ture Nerman re-joined the Swedish Social Democratic Party.