Spanish Circle of Friends of Europe

The Spanish Circle of Friends of Europe (CEDADE) was a group of National Socialist ideology created in Barcelona in 1966 and dissolved in 1993. CEDADE constituted the ultimately an international neo-Nazi propaganda dissemination network. He was associated with the creator of the Belgian Rexist Party and General of the Waffen SS Léon Degrelle, Jean Thiriart's Jeune Europe and related Blue Division ex-combatants to the Nazi ideology.

History

The circle's statutes were approved in September 1966, establishing itself as an entity under the presidency of Ángel Ricote, although according to a report from the European Parliament dated 1985, the group originated in 1965 in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the creation of this organization "they had the support of Nazi officers of the Waffen SS protected in Spain, such as Léon Degrelle and Otto Skorzeny, as well as Falangists from Barcelona linked to Franco's Guard, combatants of the Blue Division, police commissioners and army officers."

In any case, Pedro Aparicio soon had his visible head, gradually passing from a first fascist era to fully opting for Nazism, adopting all its points and ideas, to the point of wearing brown shirts in the style of the SA. Under these conditions, it was the first neo-Nazi group of notable importance created in Spain since the 1936 coup d'état that broke with the Falange imagery — many media have compared it in this regard with the Spanish National-Socialist Party (PENS), formed soon after and that counted among its most prominent leaders Ernesto Milà.

According to the historian Xavier Casals, a heterogeneous group formed by "members of Franco's Guard", "Nazi-fascist exiles" and young people associated with "a 'Wagnerian' Nazism" converged on the new organization.

In 1969 it was the host organization for the XI Congress of the Europäische Neue Ordnung ("New European Order"), held in Barcelona. Just one year later, the administrator Jorge Mota Aras was elected president of CEDADE. He made the public presentation of CEDADE in Madrid on May 30, 1974, after the act was prohibited in the Catalan capital. After 1975 the group expanded to practically the entire Iberian Peninsula, growing its militancy considerably.

Pedro Varela Geiss, owner of the Librería Europa in Barcelona, became president of CEDADE in 1978, became disinterested in internal Spanish politics and focused on propagating the importance of the racial issue and historical denial activities with its publications distributed worldwide. CEDADE then became a supposedly elitist nucleus based on a supposedly "renewed, modernized and improved" neo-Nazism. As a result, it became a benchmark for global neo-Nazism with more serious and intellectual aspirations, being able to settle outside of Spain in places like Argentina (Buenos Aires and Posadas), Bolivia (La Paz), Ecuador (Quito), Uruguay (Montevideo), and France (Aix-en-Provence).

That same year of 1978, CEDADE accused the far-right leader Blas Piñar and his organization Fuerza Nueva of "being at the service of Zionism, breaking relations. Also, during that same year, the organization launched the Catalan National-Socialist Party.

CEDADE, at the request of Pedro Varela, specialized in Holocaust denial, supporting the theses that doubt the official figures of the same (maintaining contacts with Robert Faurisson, introducing books from publishers such as Bright Rainbow and publishing authors from the Institute for Historical Review as Arthur R. Butz). To facilitate his work, he created the Centro de Estudios Históricos Revisionistas (CEHRE) in Alicante, where, from 1985 to 1990, the magazine Revisión was published under the direction of Carlos Caballero, in which Robert Faurisson and David Irving had a place. Also around those dates, the Center for Revisionist Orientations Studies (CERO) was prepared, directed from Palma de Mallorca by J. Negreira. Both groups were especially concerned about the pamphlet 55 questions about the Holocaust, from the US Institute for Historical Review and translated into Spanish by CEDADE.

The organization disappeared in October 1993 due to the successive political crises stemming from the new legal framework and for remaining headless without the direction of Pedro Varela, effectively retired to his bookstore. Before formally disappearing, CEDADE gathered in Madrid in May 1992 some neo-Nazi and revisionist personalities in defense of freedom of expression. The meeting was attended by, among many others, the Argentine Horacio Punset, the Germans Manfred Roeder and Thies Christophersen, and the Austrian Gerd Honsik, all of them prosecuted for crimes of apology of racism and/or Holocaust denial in their respective countries.

The leader of the Party for Freedom, José María Ruiz Puerta, "was the secretary of CEDADE from October 1982 to June 1983" and he worked as a lawyer for the far-right union Manos Limpias, whose general secretary was Miguel Bernad Remón, & # 34; in the first case against the then magistrate of the National Court Baltasar Garzón & # 34;.

Overall evaluation

The importance of CEDADE is undeniable for understanding the panorama of Spanish and world Nazism, since it always maintained contacts with personalities of international fascism and World War II veterans such as Léon Degrelle.

Explaining the reason for the formation and permanence of an organization like CEDADE in Spanish territory requires going back, at least, to the end of the Spanish Civil War. It can be argued that at least two factors made Spain one of the main exile destinations for multitudes of European Nazis and Fascists during the 1940s and 1950s, including Charles Maurras, Otto Skorzeny, Léon Degrelle (whose extradition the Belgian government spent decades demanding, unsuccessfully):

• Almost forty years of dictatorship. In the absence of openly entering the war, the Francoist dictatorship did not suffer the fate of Nazi Germany or fascist Italy; however, it did not significantly move away from much of its more clearly fascist doctrinal origin until the 1950s had entered.
• The virtual absence of laws against incitement to racial hatred and anti-Semitism in Spain, due largely to the previous point, but also to the religious homogeneity of the Spanish population and the shortage of Jewish or extra-European immigration presence.

It is not surprising then that, due to these same two factors, and especially since the irruption of fashionable Holocaust denial in the 1960s at the hands of the American George Lincoln Rockwell, Spain became a true paradise for denialist and Nazi ideologues prosecuted in their own countries for expressing their ideas. Starting in the 1970s, many of them were welcomed through the mediation of Varela (who had been prosecuted in Austria in 1992 for apology for Nazism at a rally that he had given before a large audience in the city of Weyr, to be definitively acquitted of said charge). charge in jury trial in the city of Steyr), giving shelter to prominent leaders such as the Austrians Gerd Honsik and Walter Ochsenberger, the German officer Otto Ernst Remer and the denialist author Thies Christopheren. As a result of these and other collaborations, the German-language magazines Halt and Sieg were published from Spain. The group maintained contacts with the World Anti Communist League, although no study has been published on links with Operation Gladio, related to it and to various parapolice groups such as the OAS or the GAL. The increase in the number of militants caused some alarm in the media during the 1980s, and the European Parliament demanded special attention for the group and its activities in 1990, considering it one of the most active and numerous in the European Union.

Trouble with the law

Already in 1996, the Mozos de Escuadra intervened by a judicial order the Librería Europa, which served as CEDADE's headquarters until 1993, and seized 21,900 books. In addition to a vast volume of denialist literature, the organization's archive was also confiscated, which three years after its official dissolution was still in the hands of its last president. The operation led to the prosecution of Varela for "advocacy for genocide and incitement to racial discrimination, hatred and violence."

Featured Members

Among its members best known by the media are Pedro Varela, Christian Ruiz Reguant, Enrique Aynat Eknés, Javier Nicolás, Laureano Luna, Joaquín Bochaca, Ramón Carbó i Vert (he went on to Unió Democràtica de Catalunya and now in the PDeCAT as a councilor with a government pact with the PSC). Isidro-Juan Palacios and his brother Jesús Palacios. Both Luna and Ruiz Reguant were part of the leadership of National Democracy years later until their break with Manuel Canduela. Ernesto Milà was also part of that leadership, although there is no written evidence in the media to show that he had become a member of CEDADE. There is also no evidence that Juan Antonio Llopart Senent was, although he has publications such as & # 34; CEDADE: Something like a story (1966-1993) & # 34; and joint conferences with Pedro Varela, Javier Nicolás and Ramón Bau among others. Bartomeu Puiggros i Oliver, was one of the founding members of CEDADE and well-known in the mountain environment of the time, he lost his life in a climbing accident in Montserrat in 1975. In his memory, a book was published with his memories and mountaineering activities.

Jorge Mota Arás, for his part, was described as a "person linked to the Popular Party" by the prosecutor of the National Court Enrique Molina.

Ramón Bau Fradera, grandson of the minister of Franco's first provisional government, Joaquín Bau Nolla, was another of the most prominent members of CEDADE, as well as editor of Mundo NS and, later, leader of the Circle of Indo-European Studies. Both Bau and María Teresa Varela, sister of the last CEDADE leader, appeared on the list for Barcelona of Juan Antonio Llopart's Movimiento Social Republicano (MSR).

Later evolution

After his disappearance, most of its members dispersed towards parties such as Democracia Nacional or Alianza por la Unidad Nacional or became involved in new projects of an apparently divergent nature: the members of CEDADE were divided around two possible exits. The first of these options called for a conversion into an openly Nazi political party. This possibility was opposed by those who preferred to continue with the ideological indoctrination of the "cultural project" type. However, everything seems to indicate that the discrepancies were rather minimal and the group, although officially dissolved, continues to act divided into factions. Thus, Mundo NS continued to be published until 2004 in Barcelona by Ramón Bau from Ediciones Wotan, although with slight editorial changes and under the temporary name of Bajo la Tiranía. Enrique Aynat continues to be active through his eventual collaborations with the ABC newspaper and Juan Antonio Llopart led the MSR until its dissolution. European Nation State has been another of the electorally viable platforms of a good part of the ex-militants.

Aside from the above, CEDADE had a good relationship with well-known influential figures outside the so-called "national-revolutionary" environment.

According to the writer and journalist infiltrated in the Spanish skin groups (the threatened Antonio Salas, a pseudonym with which he has written several books) in 2002 he met Xosé Ríos, a Galician high school teacher who was denounced by his own students because during his classes he advocated Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden, and director of Handschar, one of the Islamic magazines published in Spain by former members of CEDADE and other Nazi groups with international projection. The journalist affirms that historical members of the Spanish Nazi movement are introduced into the international Islamic community, from which they obtain many funds for their ideological struggle, for the "holy war" against the common enemy Israel.^{[citation required ]}