Author Date

2025-06-04

Degree Name

Department

History

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Defense Date

2025-05-07

Publication Date

2025-06-04

First Faculty Advisor

Paul Kerry

First Faculty Reader

Cacey Farnsworth

Honors Coordinator

Mark Christensen

Keywords

WWII, history, Spain, Soviet Union, art

Abstract

This thesis examines the cultural encounters and artistic interactions between Spanish Blue Division volunteers and the Soviet Union during World War II. While scholarship has long focused on the grand-scale looting conducted by the Nazis, Spain’s role—particularly that of the Blue Division—in wartime art theft and cultural exchange has been significantly underexplored. Sent by Franco’s fascist regime to support Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the Blue Division served not only as military auxiliaries but also as cultural intermediaries. Drawing on memoirs, letters, and the Blue Division’s own newspaper Hoja de Campaña, this study analyzes how Spanish soldiers encountered, interpreted, and at times plundered the religious and artistic traditions of Orthodox Russia.

Blue Division members engaged deeply and inconsistently with Russian culture: admiring Orthodox icons, looting historic churches, participating in religious ceremonies, and desecrating sacred spaces. In particular, the stolen cross of Novgorod's St. Sophia Cathedral—later returned to Russia in 2004—serves as a case study of the contradictions within Spanish behavior, oscillating between reverence and appropriation. This paper reveals how art and architecture became lenses through which soldiers filtered ideological biases, reinforced nationalist myths, and projected religious solidarity, even as they disrupted the very culture they claimed to admire.

By analyzing Spanish memoirs and their newspaper, Hoja de Campaña, this thesis uncovers how the Blue Division’s interactions with religious Soviet art and architecture reflected broader ideological tensions between Catholic Spain and Communist Russia.