The 'Blue Squadrons'

When on 22 June 1941, the news reached Spain of the attack that the Third Reich had initiated against the Soviet Union, it was received with great satisfaction, since they had just come out of a civil war in which the Soviet Union’s ‘allies’ had been defeated, putting an end to plans to impose communism on Spain with the help of the USSR. General Francisco Franco, Head of the Spanish State, offered to send a volunteer unit to fight on the Eastern Front alongside the German army – an offer that w