General Franco dispatched the Blue Division to the Eastern Front to help Germany, Spain's ally. The division was incorporated in the Wehrmacht to fight in the vicinity of the besieged Leningrad, and in the Novgorod and Volkhov area.
Jose Bono, Spain's Defence Minister, will restore the cross to the ancient city as he visits Russia next month, ministerial PR said to Novosti.
Blue Division engineers brought the cross from Russia in 1942. Since that day, the relic is preserved at the Military Engineering Academy museum in Hoyo de Manzanares near Madrid.
The gilded cross of hammered copper, 2.5 metres high, is crowned with a metal dove. Advancing Soviet artillery brought it down with a shot as the battle for Novgorod was on, and Spanish soldiers saved the holy article from desecration by godless Soviet men, Blue Division veterans say now.
Spanish lawyer Fernando Garrido Polonio was the first to say Russia was to regain the cross. He is president of the Association of Missing Blue Division Fighters, which seeks and inters the remains of Spanish soldiers fallen at the Eastern Front during WWII.
The matter surfaced again when King Juan Carlos visited the academy in Hoyo de Manzanares as Spanish Army Commander-in-Chief, October 2003. Lengthy talks were launched.
There were many arguments against ceding the cross. First, it was big and unwieldy, and so defied transportation, reasoned General Jesus Herrero Chacon, Academy Director.
Next, Spanish soldiers demanded to have an exact replica of the relic as precious part of their wartime mementoes. Spain's Defence Ministry vouches to meet their demand.
There is something more to the matter-a proviso harder to meet. "We have nothing against ceding the cross-but we don't want to be insulted and accused of pillaging during the war," says General Jose Luis Aramburu Topete, 82. Once Blue Division officer, he was later in command of the Spanish gendarmerie.
Many Spaniards regard the Novgorodian cross as their country's lawful trophy.
"We ought to have long restored this old Russian relic to its legal owners. It was not done to hush up an act of piracy, banditry and terrorism made in Spain during Franco's dictatorship," Dolores Cabra, leader of the Civil War and Banishment Archive, influential public organisation, said in a Novosti interview.
