For some it was a monument dedicated to a Nazi pilot who died in 1939. For others it was a monolith evoking the last aerial combat of the civil war in Catalonia, in which the Republican air force shot down the pilot Friedrich Windemuth, of the Condor Legion. Yesterday, as a result of a prank that coincided with Hispanic Heritage Day, unknown assailants destroyed that stone monolith located on the road from Vilajuïga to Garriguella (Alt Empordà), next to what was a Republican airfield in which there was heavy air combat on February 6, 1939.
This funerary stele had previously been the subject of graffiti and was already damaged on one occasion by hammer blows. Some radical group had included it on a list of fascist symbols to be eliminated. And for a long time it was said that the flowers that periodically appeared at the foot of the monument were deposited by former Nazis living in Empuriabrava or by members of the extreme right. But the republican pilot Josep Falcó, who was the one who shot down Windemuth, revealed to La Vanguardia in 2009 that every summer he returned from his residence in Toulouse to lay some red flowers next to this grave. "We met face to face, he died, but it could have been me," declared Falcó at 92 years old. Both pilots were then 23 years old.
In recent times, visits to the anti-aircraft shelters and bunkers that remain of this old Republican airfield had been organized with the aim of explaining the history and events of those last days of the civil war. In fact, the aerodrome is part of the historical memory spaces compiled by the Generalitat, although no action has ever been undertaken to museumize or contextualize that episode. The news has caused discomfort in different associations and individuals who understood that this monolith, contrary to the idea of its detractors, served to explain the support of the fascist powers to the Francoist army.
The Government of the Republic had ordered a withdrawal of the last planes it had in Catalonia with the intention of going to reinforce the area of Valencia and Madrid that was still in its hands. To this end, it concentrated more than thirty planes at the Vilajuïga-Garriguella aerodrome with the intention of leaving on February 6 for the south of France. But information from some infiltrated spy caused six German Messerschmichtt Bf 109 to appear at dawn that day, and before the Republican planes could take off, they practically destroyed the airfield and the different devices on the runway. A few were able to take off, including Josep Falcó's Polikarpov I-15, which confronted the Germans in the air and was able to shoot down Windemuth's Messers (the version of the victors of the war was that the pilot wanted to fly over the runway and crashed). The German pilot, mortally wounded, was finished off on the same runway by another Republican aviator. His body was left there semi-calcined until the Francoist army arrived two days later. The Condor Legion recovered the body and some time later the German authorities or relatives of the pilot, it is not known exactly, requested permission to install that monolith in a vineyard near the road. “Friedrich Windemuth, born on 27.5.1915 in Leipzig, fell here on 6.2.1939 in the fight for a national Spain,” the tombstone read. Above the inscription, the silhouette of the iron cross, without any other symbols. Until today.
