A la caza del primer Lehendakari

Berlin, May 14, 1941. A short man walked up and down the platform of the Friedrichstrasse station. He was waiting for the arrival of a train from Brussels. A woman with her two children was supposed to get down from one of the cars. Time was running out and his chances of escaping from Nazi Germany were diminishing. The visas had an expiration date and the Gestapo followed him very closely. But who could think of traveling to Berlin with Hitler's feared secret police behind him? Behind the false identity of Panamanian José Andrés Álvarez Lastra, the figure of José Antonio de Aguirre y Lecube was hidden. The first lehendakari in the history of the Basque Country was aware that the worst bloodhounds of the Francoist police and the Gestapo were chasing him. For that reason he was convinced that if he managed to get to safety he would prove that Nazism was beatable. The democratic world needed to obtain a small victory in its fight against fascism, which since 1939 had not ceased to triumph on all fronts. Aguirre's escape through Belgium and Germany takes us from the battlefields to the underground, from the sewers of the secret services to the political and police labyrinths that characterized the ambiguous Spanish-German relations. The odyssey of the first lehendakari allows us to delve into the repressive complicity that existed between the Franco and Hitler regimes, but also to learn about the differences and disputes that arose between Madrid and Berlin.