Spanish Civil War

An introduction to the crimes of Franco by Paul Preston: Harrowing at times.

The remains of General Franco lie in the gigantic mausoleum of the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), built with the sweat and blood of twenty thousand slave labourers.

Paul Preston on the post-war repression

Occupied Catalonia experienced an all-pervading terror in a period when merely to stay alive was a major achievement for many.   Research into daily life for the defeated in rural Catalonia in the 1940s is deeply shocking, revealing an appalling catalogue of hunger and illness, arbitrary repression and fear – fear of arrest, fear of denunciation by a neighbour or by a priest.  The entire process was underpinned by the complicity of thousands of people who for many reasons  –  fear,  politics,  greed,  jealousy  –  became  informers  and  denounced  their  neighbours.   The sheer misery of life for the defeated in Franco’s Spain accounts for the notable rise in the suicide rate, which  was  often the  consequence  of  economic  and  sexual  extortion  by the  powerful.    Considerable cruelty  was  visited  upon  women  under  the  rhetorical  Francoist  umbrella  of  ‘redemption’  –  rape, imprisonment as retribution for the behaviour of a son or husband and confiscation of goods.   Soldiers billeted on poor families often took advantage of the unprotected women of the household.   There was no  shortage of priests  ready to defend the honour of male parishioners and to denounce their female victims as ‘reds’.

The Splintering of Spain Chris Ealham, Michael Richards

In 1940, the dictator established by decree the Causa General, which is in effect an archive containing evidence for a prosecution of the Second Republic for crimes against Spain.28 Public prosecutors were sent into all the provinces that had formed part of the republican zone, with authority to collect documents, conduct inter-views and compile witness statements. Over 1,500 files were compiled to complement the military and political repression carried out in Spain before 1943–5. The archive was ostensibly to have a purely informative or exemplary character, part of Franco’s vainglorious ambition to be answerable only ‘before God and history’. Legal standards of proof were not observed and the quality of the information varies considerably from province to province.