The Riddle of the Rock: A Reassessment of German Motives for the Capture of Gibraltar in the Second World War

Abstract

In the summer and autumn of 1940, the German military planned the capture of Great Britain's naval base at Gibraltar. The operation promised success. Spain was willing to enter the war on Germany's side and provide land access for the attack. Britain could scarcely hope to hold Gibraltar against a determined assault. Germany could strip the Royal Navy of its key western Mediterranean base and thus imperil British communications with the Western Hemisphere and the Middle East. Yet the attack never occurred. On 7 December 1940 Generalissimo Francisco Franco refused Berlin's request that Spain enter the war. Franco blamed the refusal on Spain's economic difficulties. Yet the reasons for his reticence were more complex. They resulted from Adolf Hitler's motives for Gibraltar's capture. A reexamination of these motives provides the topic of this article. Previous scholarship on Germany's interest in Gibraltar has defined the Rock's importance in terms of a peripheral strategy in the Mediterranean against Great Britain. The argument runs as follows. The defeat of France in June 1940 left Germany unable to compel Great Britain's surrender despite the direct measures of blockade, bombardment and the threat of invasion. Hitler thus seized upon the suggestions of his advisers that the Axis could end the war with attacks on Great Britain's Mediterranean targets of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. As 1940 progressed, Hitler hoped that this strategy could end British resistance so that Germany's flank would be clear by the spring of 1941 for his primary aim - the annihilation of the Soviet Union and the acquisition of Lebensraum in the East. The planned attack on Gibraltar then, was part of an interim stategy to permit the isolated war in the East that France's defeat alone had failed to create.'