There is something faintly preposterous about the pairing of these names—Franco and Hitler—so radically different in scale and in the range of associations they evoke. And yet, as Stanley Payne shows in Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II, published earlier this year by Yale University Press, we can profit greatly from an account of their peculiar connection.

Payne is perhaps the foremost American historian of 20th-century Spain. Now emeritus at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he has written books on the Falange (the Spanish fascist party founded in the early 1930s), on the Franco regime, on Spanish Catholicism, and on Basque nationalism, among others, as well as a comparative study of fascism. Several of his books shed light on the Spanish Civil War, "probably the most mythic event of the twentieth century," as he observes in Franco and Hitler, and the only event in modern Spanish history with which the general reader is likely to be moderately familiar. (No wonder, then, that popular images of that conflict deal almost exclusively in caricatures.)

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Here are some of the salient points that emerge in Franco and Hitler. First, the distinctive character of fascism in Spain was bound up with Catholicism. The early months of the Civil War, when the violence was most intense, "produced the most extensive and violent persecution of Catholicism in Western history, in some ways even more intense than that during the French Revolution." Don't suppose that Payne romanticizes the Nationalist cause—not in the least. He is quite clear about the orgies of violence on the other side as well, directed against Republicans. But unlike many historians—Antony Beevor, for example, in his recent history of the Civil War—Payne doesn't gloss over or rationalize the murderous anti-Catholic rampages. Within a very short time, lines were drawn such that Catholics—even those who had been sympathetic to the Republic—identified with ...

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