The coastline of Cadiz is one of the most international that surrounds the Iberian Peninsula. The Beni de Cádiz repeated it like this: “To the south it borders Morocco, to the north with Spain, to the west with the USA [Rota base] and to the east with England [Gibraltar]”. Among its treasures is the beach known as Playa de los Alemanes and is located between Cabo de Plata or Gracia and Playa de Agua en Medio.
Gustav Draëger, the Nazi spy who dynamited the Third Reich from Seville
To know more
Next to Zahara de los Atunes, the cove is in the municipality of Tarifa. It is a magnificent inlet of about 1,500 meters long and 50 meters wide. Nobody endorses the name “los alemanes” (the Germans) but the locals insist that the name was not given by chance. Not in vain, it is known that many Germans spent seasons in the area since before the forties. But around this piece of coastline there are legends and a good handful of facts that justify its name.
Why “the Germans”? The story goes back to the beginning of the 20th century where the rumour circulates that there is “a German every 30 km along the Spanish coast” due to the interest that Kaiser Wilhelm II had in the control of the Strait of Gibraltar. History confirms that the Kaiser was deployed in Tangier in 1905 with colonial appetites although it is not known if any of his spies were located on the aforementioned beach.
What is certain is that this beach, even before the Second World War, housed German neighbours in its surroundings, which could be the origin of the nomenclature. As it is also true that during the Second World War served as a place of surveillance and provisioning of Nazi ships and submarines that circulated through the Strait of Gibraltar. Its plots, in Zahara, emerge in the novel ‘Para olvidar quién fuiste’ (Ateneo de Sevilla Award, Algaida 2019) by Fernando García Calderón, based on historical reviews.
This is confirmed by Margarita Neuer, the Consul’s daughter and spy.Gustav Draëger, who declared to José María Irujo (El País) what Fernando Soto affirms categorically: his father moved assiduously -during the Second World War- to the Playa de los Alemanes to supply provisions to Nazi submarines that landed in that place. In fact, the historian Alfonso Escuadra, one of the experts who has most investigated the Nazi footprint in Cadiz, in the work ‘A la sombra de la Roca’ (Cajastur, 1997), documented raids and shipwrecks carried out by units of the navy of the Third Reich, between the period of June 18, 1941 to February 22, 1944 in Andalusian coasts. Two of them are located on the beach of the Germans.
Claudio Bonifacio, an Italian shipwreck expert based in Seville, even located the coordinates (N 36° 04′ 265″ W 5° 47′ 453″) of a sunken German submarine near this beach. In addition to this evidence, there is a theory that places in the submersible a load of gold bars and jewels stolen from the Jews by the Nazis. The cause of the shipwreck could be accidental or because the crew sunk it. The wreck has never been refloated. Just when Bonifacio and Luis Ángel Valero de Bernabé were processing the finding rights before the Junta de Andalucía, they were implicated in the Bahía 2 case. The sentence of the case, 12 years later, imposed them a symbolic fine. In his work ‘Galleons and submerged treasures’ (Editorial Lulu, 2010) it is clear where the submersible is: near the beach of the Germans.
It has also been accredited that the submarines U-208, U-451, U-732, U-340, U-761, U-392 and U-731 during the Second World War sank between the beginning of 1942 and the end of 1944 while trying to cross the Strait of Gibraltar from the Atlantic. It is recorded by U-Historia, spokesman of the Ubootwaffe (fleet of German submarines in the Nazi era) and many of them rest in the depths of Cadiz near the Playa de los Alemanes. And it is tangible that, in the mid 40’s, a bunker was built that delimits the beach of the Germans and Atlanterra. Franco’s phobia of being invaded in fact sowed the Cadiz coast of these defensive forts.
After the war
The investigation into what happened after the end of the war with the Nazis who escaped leads to many cases in Andalusia, of course, also on the coast. In the case of Cádiz, the documentary ‘Playa de los Alemanes’, made in 2019 by Daniel Marí and Johannes Hofman, searches – with effort and few results – for traces and testimonies about Nazis who took refuge after the war there. It is not clear if they used such a remote place for ODESSA, the network that was orchestrated after the conflict by Nazi hierarchs to get them out alive and shelter them in other parts of the world. The hypothesis says that the Nazis were introduced by the route from Valencia-Madrid/Seville to the United States.illa/Algeciras-Tangier/ and then shipped them to South America. And in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay they basically got rid of their identity and erased their past. Another novel, which repeats the title ‘Playa de los Alemanes’ (Jirones de Azul, 2010) is signed by Javier Compás. This historian insists that “in this beautiful cove lived German refugees after the end of World War II.
In any case, the area’s relationship with Germany does not end there. According to the journalist, writer and contributor to elDiario.es Juan José Téllez Spanish military espionage investigated, decades ago, near this beach a kind of logistics platform to supply ships of the former Democratic Republic of Germany (GDR). The presence of agents of that country of the Warsaw Pact alerted the Spanish counter-espionage. But nobody knows what our military spies concluded.
The harshest reality is that the Playa de los Alemanes was difficult to access from the nearest towns until the fifties. Although there are records of houses and Germans using horses to get in and out of their homes. Near the beach there were huts; from the sea it was easier to reach this short strip of beach.
Specifically, on the slope leading up from the beach, only three German families lived there permanently. According to Marí and Hofman’s documentary, they were wealthy Nazis who had little contact with the locals. Their descendants, already in the fifties and sixties, returned to Germany.
“To the East and to the West
This could be considered the moment of the beginning of German tourism in the area. But it was not until the early sixties when tourism was activated in Zahara. And it was done in a somewhat curious way, as the Zahara tourism website tells. It is said that a group of German businessmen came to the office of Álvaro Domecq, then President of the Diputación de Cádiz. They told him very politely about their investment intentions. Don Alvaro was perplexed by the proposal. It was a millionaire what they were planning to invest in such an inhospitable place. The surprise of the President of the Provincial Council was not concealed, as the area was battered by easterly and westerly winds. The man asked the man a question in response to such a crazy proposal: “Have you taken into account the winds? The Germans answered in smiling unison: ‘In the east and west it is very healthy‘.
From that first interest we moved on to an emblematic building that increased the German presence in the city.It is located on the beach that gives its name to that name. In 1970 work began on the Atlanterra and Zahara Hotels (demolished in 2002) directed by the architect Alvis Franz Rotter. Franco’s minister Sánchez Bella endorsed the project and supervised it in 1973, after arriving at the emporium by helicopter.
Bankruptcies, delays and non-payments postponed the hotel projects. Only the Atlanterra was inaugurated in 1983. It was the key to gather numerous urbanizations around it. The tenacity of the new architect Horts Mankel achieved the postponed hotel opening together with the entrepreneur Kurt Schlichtkrull, nicknamed ‘Juanaco’ by the locals. Both the hotel and the surrounding urbanisations are known by the locals as “the Germans” after the builders and the first owners who settled there. To add to the mystery, there are rumours and unconfirmed stories circulating in the area that speak of dinners at the hotel attended by elderly and discreet Nazis, although this is unconfirmed. Be that as it may, in 1987 the Hotel Atlanterra, owned by German businessmen, changed owners and managers. The sale was discreet. Since the late eighties the establishment has been operated by the multinational Meliá.
What is clear is that Playa de los Alemanes has plenty of reasons, legends, facts and stories to boast the name by which everyone knows it.
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