Venerable Evidge Carboni (ironically raised to such a status by Pope Francis) claims that she witnessed Benito Mussolini entering heaven after going through purgatory.
The Spanish Civil War and the period of time leading up to it included the republicans/communists during thousands of churches and assassinating thousands of priests and nuns.
So you could see why Spanish Catholics might have strong positive feelings about Hitler and Mussolini and consider them defenders of Christian civilization.
>During the Russian Civil War, many clerics were killed. Some died as a result of spontaneous violence endemic in the power vacuum of the war and some were executed by state security services for supporting the White armies. The church claimed that 322 bishops and priests had been killed during the Revolution.[36] Between June 1918 and January 1919, official church figures (which did not include the Volga, Kama and several other regions in Russia) claimed that one metropolitan, eighteen bishops, one hundred and two priests, one hundred and fifty-four deacons, and ninety-four monks/nuns had been killed (laity not recorded).[37] The estimate of 330 clergy and monastics killed by 1921 may have been an underestimate, due to the fact that 579 monasteries/convents had been liquidated during this period and there were widespread mass executions of monks/nuns during these liquidations.