In the middle of the Spanish Civil War the inhabitants of four small villages of Castellón see appear three airplanes in the horizon. Some children go out to greet them, adults look at them with innocence and curiosity. But the planes maneuver, plummet and bomb houses and churches. They kill 38 neighbors. They never understood who was responsible. Until now.
Almost 80 years later one man find a folder in the military archive of Freiburg, Germany, with 66 aerial photographs. Germans took interest to document the bombing. The inhabitants of Benassal, Ares, Albocàsser and Vilar de Canes will finally know that they were victims of a Nazi experiment.
The pilots belonged to the Condor Legion, sent by Hitler to help Franco. They bombed in the morning and spent the afternoon drinking beer on the beach. It was May of 1938. In their hands, the first three models of the Junkers 87A, knowns as ‘Stuka’. The prototypes got into Spain secretly and they had to calibrate if these ones would hold up a new 500 kilos bomb, twice heaviest as those launched until then. The lethal success of the experiment was crucial in the German decision to build the Stuka massively to raze Europe in the still unsuspected World War II.