Technoscientific Synergies between Germany and Spain in the Twentieth Century: Continuity amid Radical Change

摘要

This article describes the collaborations between German and Spanish scientists and engineers in the twentieth century. Special attention is devoted to the mechanisms by which these relations were established and the changes they underwent in conjunction with both the domestic and international political situation over three historical moments: World Wars I and II and the Spanish Civil War. Institutional and personal links were important in both countries to work around international isolation during the 1920s, 1940s, and 1950s, in that they contributed especially to the shaping of the Spanish technocratic elite under the Franco dictatorship during the 1940s and 1950s. In the twentieth century, several German groups, always with the agreement of authorities in Madrid and military circles in Berlin, and later Bonn, used Spain as a testing ground for activities first banned by the Treaty of Versailles (June 1919), and then by the Allied High Commission (1946) and the Treaty of Paris (May 1955) with the accession of the Federal Republic of Germany to NATO.