Juan Tusquets Terrats

Tusquets would come to have influence within the Spanish Right - and specifically over Franco - who enthusiastically devoured his anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic diatribes. Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco's brother-in-law and right-hand man 1937-41 would later praise Tusquet's contribution to "the creation of the atmosphere which led to the national uprising". Tusquets was on the periphery of the military plot against the Republic further through his links with Catalan Carlists. When Tusquets finally became a collaborator of Franco in Burgos during the Civil War, his files on alleged Freemasons would provide an important part of the organisational infrastructure of the repression.

In 1933, Tusquets was invited by the international Anti-masonic Association to visit a newly established concentration camp - Dachau concentration camp. He commented they did it to show what we had to do in Spain. He claimed later to have been shocked by what he saw - 'at the time however the flow and intensity of his anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic publications did not abate.'

Tusquets was ordained in 1926 and noted for his piety and culture. As a teacher in the seminary of Barcelona he was commissioned to write a book on Madame Blavatsky's theosophism. He developed 'an obsessive interest in secret societies'. By the time of the Spanish Second Republic his obsession had developed into a fierce anti-semitism and an even greater hatred of Freemasonry. He turned against Catalanism and falsely accused the Catalan leader Francesc Macia of being a Freemason. Working with another priest, Joaquim Guiu Bonastre, he built up a network of "informants" - Freemasons who told him about lodge meetings. He contributed articles to the Carlist newspaper El Correo Catalán.

Juan Tusquets Terrats (March 31, 1901 – 1998) was a Catalan priest, author of the best selling book Orígenes de la revolución española. Turned into a fierce antisemite and even fiercer antimasonic hate speaker during the Spanish Second Republic, he became one of the main disseminators of the "contubernio judeomasónico" conspiracy theory in that period.