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April 29th - May 12th 2020
LA CULTURA
SPECIAL DISPATCH: A secret Nazi U-boat base, macabre facilities for facial reconstruction surgery, bank transactions traced to the highest echelons of the Third Reich. Conor McGlone (right) asks how Fuerteventura’s mysterious past sheds light on Spain’s troubled history
ISOLATED: Windswept Jandia peninsula where Villa Winter allegedly hid fleeing Nazis
The shadow of fascism
S
cores of roosting doves erupted from the decrepit courtyard as we entered. I'm not easily spooked but something in the air felt very wrong. A punch bag and gloves hung in one corner, a couple of chained-up rottweilers were in the opposite. Budgies languished in a birdcage, next to an inscription that read: "History is the cage that imprisons us." There was an unnatural stillness to the air and a strong scent of sedentary humanity but there was no turning back now - it had been no small feat getting here. While the Canary Islands bring to mind neatly packaged cheap winter sunshine, there is much more to Fuerteventura than sunburn and cervezas. This you will know if like us you have risked the 40-minute hair-raising offroad drive on Fuerteventura's rugged southern tip, the Jandía peninsula, to be rewarded with epic views of a ridge of volcanic mountains trailing like a giant's stepping stones to the sea. At the foot of the mountains lie miles of windswept beaches, with perfect white sand and barely a speck of civilization in sight, a tapestry of cloud, light and blue, changing quickly in the
blustery weather. exterior, gulls wheel and cry piteThere is one conspicuous ex- ously. A rooster calls. ception. Few visitors make it A gruff, stocky man barred our up a second dusty track, to Vil- way, demanding a 'donation' as la Winter, a grandiose turreted he gestured at a lopsided piece building, nestled impossibly at of wood with 'museo' scrawled the base of the mountains. In on it. This man, I later discovthe 1930s, when the building ered, was Pedro Fumero. was constructed, the setting Fumero's grandfather had would have been even more re- helped to build Villa Winter and mote, accessible only by donkey his four uncles were hired by or camel. Winter's family as guards of the Disturbing rumours had brought house at the end of the 70s. us here. Legend In the 90s the has it that the Winter's sold the base was conhouse to a large High-ranking structed by the hotel and conSS officers German engineer struction compaGustav Winter, ny and his relafinanced by the underwent facial tives - unaware of Nazi regime. surgery to alter the sale - ceased During the Secto receive the ond World War, it their appearance small salary they is said, the base had formerly reacted as a secret ceived to look aflaunchpad for U-boats, utilizing ter the house. a subterranean network of vol- Returning from Tenerife in 2012 canic caves. After the war, it be- and finding the place in a state came one of the last refuges of of utter disrepair, with his relthe Third Reich, where high-rank- atives barely surviving in the ing SS officers fled to undergo fa- squalid conditions, a heart-brocial surgery to alter their appear- ken Fumero decided to stay to ance, on the way to new lives in look after them. Remembering South America. the stories his grandfather had Now, wandering goats and don- told him about the "upside-down keys roam about the ramshackle ships" (as he called the subma-
rines), Fumero vowed to uncover the truth. Gustav Winter's own life is shrouded in mystery. We know that in 1928 he built the power plant CICER on neighbouring island Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, which has been described as "a masterpiece of German engineering". During his time working on Gran Canaria, Winter (pictured top right) became fascinated by the Jandía peninsula. Legend has it that In 1939, Winter arrived on Fuerteventura with a suitcase filled with cash on a special mission to purchase the strategic peninsula for the Nazis. While Winter denied this until his death in 1971, historians agree that there were German submarines in the Canaries archipelago during the war. This is despite Franco declaring Spain to be neutral at the outbreak of the Second World War. He was, after all, heavily indebted to Hitler for helping him brutally win the Spanish civil war. During the Second World War, the Jandía peninsula was blocked off from the rest of the island. The local inhabitants were only allowed back in the 1950s, when the Franco regime finally removed a fence which
crossed the peninsula from coast to coast. As we nosed about the small museum located in a stifling back room, I was struck by the uncomfortable thought that the exhibits, laid out without any explanation or context, could be treated as pure memorabilia, a Neo-nazi shrine (see below). There were old Nazi uniforms and news clippings, huge wartime radio sets and photographs of dead soldiers. There were test tubes and nasty looking syringes as well as serious-looking batteries, alleged by Fumero to have powered submarines. Darwin Vidal, a German engineer who has been working with Fumero for the last four years to investigate the rumours, told me ‘everything indicates’ that the Winter house was used as a na-
val base. Local documents date the house as being built in 1946, but Vidal claims the "bunker" or base of the building was built before the war. According to Vidal, the 1.4-metre-thick reinforced concrete walls, the vaulted ceiling, and imposing tower - that looks suspiciously like a lighthouse - are all clues that the villa was used to provision German U-boats. The rest of the house was built after the war, in Vidal's opinion as "an ideal place to hide and escape allied arrests". The presence of several windowless rooms, for example, could have been used to conceal people. Vidal, who has been tirelessly combing the national archives in Germany, said there is ample evidence that Winter collaborated with the Nazi regime, bringing
MYSTERIOUS: Villa Winter and its cornocopia of Nazi memorabilia while (top) museum boss Fumero