During the 1970s and 1980s a small elite of economists based in the central bank and economic departments have been credited with embedding economic liberalism in Spain. Their ideas about state-market relations can be traced back to their graduate education in the UK during the postwar decades or before the Civil War. Yet my research also reveals that what is equally important for the triumph of economic liberalism in post-authoritarian Spain has been Friedrich von Stackelberg, an ex-Nazi economics professor recruited by the Franco regime in 1943 through the transnational epistemic networks linking the authoritarian regimes of Spain and Germany.