Global Fascist Actors and the Spanish Civil War: On Nazi Spy Roland Strunk

The current historical research is reinterpreting both the phenomenon of fascism and the Spanish Civil War from the perspectives of global history. Building on this area of historiographical innovation, this article focuses on a single ‘global fascist actor’: the hitherto nebulous figure of Roland E. Strunk (1892–1937), a Nazi journalist and spy who acted as informal emissary between Hitler and the Francoist rebels in the summer of 1936. By drawing on a broad range of primary sources, including untapped materials from German archives, the article situates Strunk in a much broader, and global, historical context. Observing Strunk's multifaceted experiences in the interwar period, the article establishes significant connections between the experience of Strunk in the Great War, the Sino-Japanese conflict, the Ethiopian war and the Spanish conflict. The article argues that reconstructing, in their full historical complexity, the biographical trajectories of transnational actors such as Strunk allows us to better understand the place of the Spanish Civil War within a broader European and, in fact, global history.