It was such a secret operation, carried out with so much secrecy and diplomatic precautions, silenced by the din of the beginning of a war, that it will not appear in the exhibition Graphic History of the Port of Seville. On September 30, 1936, two months and two weeks after the Uprising, two merchant ships, the Passages and the Girgenti, They left the Polish port of Szcezin on the Baltic Sea. The passage was made up of 267 German soldiers with false tourist passports who a week before had volunteered in the cities of Neuruppin and Schweinfurt, in what would become East Germany. A Blue Division upside down. In the warehouse they had 41 Panther tanks, 28 anti-tank guns, 19 tank platforms, 18 motorcycles, six workshop trucks …
The two ships docked on October 7 in the port of Seville. They entered through Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where the five ships commanded by Admiral Fernando de Magallanes had left half a millennium ago. They docked near the Torre del Oro that celebrates its eight hundred years of history. The cargo was transported by trains to Aldea del Cano, in the vicinity of Cáceres, and deposited in the castle of Arguijuelas de Arriba.
From a love story, Fernando Lumbreras unravels an unpublished plot
Thus began Operation Drohne, Buzz in German. It is the title of the novel by Fernando Lumbreras, with the expressive subtitle of Nazis in Cáceres. The starting point is a fishing day by Alberto with his two children and the discovery of a can of La Estrella paprika with a photograph dated 1937 and a declaration of love between a German soldier and a young woman from Cáceres. Alberto tells the discovery to his old professor, now retired. With the collaboration of a granddaughter of the girl in the photo, they embark on an exciting adventure that takes them to the German city of Neuruppin and Seville. A love story from the past built on a heartbreak story from the present.
The great merit of Fernando Lumbreras (Cáceres, 1963) is that he flees from the canons of the historical novel to make a fictionalized story. Magical realism (those novels that came from America, reversing the trajectory of the Extremaduran conquerors) made the real seem invented and the fictitious a part of reality. That happens in Lumbreras’ novel. The old professor and his former student have a generational difference like that of the characters in Return to the future or the second part of Raiders of the lost ark (Sean Connery y Harrison Ford).
Two German soldiers play an essential role: Admiral Franz Wilhelm Canaris and Lieutenant Colonel Walter Warlimont. They both spoke Spanish correctly. Canaris meets with Franco in Salamanca and Warlimont in Cáceres. The admiral is sent to Spain to bypass the Versailles Treaty that prohibited Germany from manufacturing submarines. He entrusts a consignment to a shipowner from the Cádiz shipyards and even tries to sell some to Alfonso XIII. Canaris and Warlimont represent the two Germanies, not that of the East and that of the West, but that of Adolf Hitler and the one that faced the Führer. Canaris participated in Operation Valkyrie, the attempt to end Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944. He was hanged a year later. Warlimont remained faithful to Hitler and was wounded in this operation. The German dictator promoted him to colonel and Franco presented him with the Grand Cross of the Yoke and the Arrows. He was a prosecution witness at the Nürmberg trial.
Cáceres was one of Franco’s first stopovers after his initiatory flight in the Rapide Dragon. Before that, he passed through Seville, where he stayed in the palace of the Marquis of Yanduri (the site where Vicente Aleixandre, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977, was born in 1898) so as not to coincide with Queipo. Two stories linked by a can of paprika, the Maltese falcon in this story. The detectives they find the track of an Olympic athlete from the GDR, silver in Seoul 1988, a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, a city that in 1936, that of Operation Drohne, hosted the Olympic Games. With the blushing triumph of Jesse Owens with Hitler in the box.
The dual objective of Operation Drohne was to train Franco’s rebel troops and test new war materials in the face of a hypothetical Second World War that went from hypothesis to reality in the same year 1939 that the Spanish civil war ended. José Luis Comellas defended the thesis of a single war that began in ’14 and ended in ’45 with the long vacations of ’36 as a tragic domestic snack. Drohne, a very quiet drone from the Baltic Sea to Extremadura.
