Wolfram Crisis

The Wolfram Crisis (Spanish: Crisis del wolframio) was a diplomatic conflict during World War II between Francoist Spain and the Allied powers, with the later seeking to block the Spanish exports of Tungsten ore to Nazi Germany.

The high demand for the scarce strategic mineral in war time had created a bubble in prices, with otherwise desolate Post-Civil War Spanish economy heftily profiting from it, as its income from Wolfram exports had increased from £73,000 in 1940 to £15.7 million in 1943.[1] Wolfram exports accounted for nearly 1% of the Spanish GDP and 20% of the exports by 1943–44.[2] On 18 November 1943 the US Ambassador to Spain delivered a memorandum to the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding for the unconditional end to Wolfram exports to Germany.[3] After the repeated rejection by Spain to comply with the US demand, the later decreed an embargo on oil supplies to Spain on 28 January 1944.[4] Soon later an additional restriction on Spanish exports of cotton products was enforced, threatening the Catalan textile industry.[5]

On 2 May 1944 a secret deal was signed between Spain, the US and the United Kingdom, in which Spain, in exchange for the re-establishment of oil supplies and a compromise for negotiating future economic concessions, pledged to drastically limit the tungsten exports to Germany (a cap of 20 tonnes in May, 20 tonnes in June and 40 tonnes from then on), to close the German Consulate in Tangiers and expel its members, to prevent any logistic support to Germans in airports, to expel German spies and saboteurs from Spanish soil, to solve a litigation regarding Italian ships frapped in the Balearic Islands and to recall the last remaining Spanish volunteers on the Eastern Front.[5][6]

Despite the Spanish capitulation, the Spanish diplomacy sold the deal as a success as the full termination of Tungsten exports to Germany ultimately ended up being "just" a heavy cap limiting the exports to a symbolic amount.[7] The US, the most uncompromising part in principle, put the blame on the failure to achieve a complete end to the exports on the British diplomacy, while Winston Churchill kindly commended Spain for its "services" in a late May intervention in the House of Commons.[8]