The Francoist Military Trials

In Spain between 1936-1945, the Franco regime carried out one Europe’s more brutal but less remembered programs of mass repression. Many were murdered by the regime’s death squads, and in some areas Francoists also subjected up to 15% of the population to summary military trials. Here many suffered the death sentence or jail terms up to thirty years. Although historians have recognised the staggering scale of the trials, they have tended to overlook the mass participation that underpinned them. In contrast to the discussion in other European countries, little attention has been paid to the wide scale collusion in the killings and incarcerations in Spain. Exploring mass complicity in the trials of hundreds of thousands of defeated Republicans following the end of the Spanish Civil War, The Francoist Military Trials probes local Francoists’ accusations whereby victims were selected for prosecution in military courts. It also shows how insubstantial and hostile testimony formed the bedrock of ‘investigations’, secured convictions, and shaped the harsh sentencing practices of Franco’s military judges. Using civil court records, it also documents how grassroots Francoists continued harassing Republicans for many years after they emerged from prison. Challenging the popularly prevalent view that the Franco regime imposed a police state upon a passive Spanish society, the evidence Anderson uncovers here illustrates that local state officials and members of the regime’s support base together forged a powerful repressive system that allowed them to wage war on elements of their own society to a greater extent than perhaps even the Nazis managed against their own population.

In this sophisticated study, Antonio Míguez Macho and his team of expert scholars explore the connections between violence and memory in modern Spain. Most importantly for a nation with an uncomfortable relationship with its own past, this book reveals how sites of violence also became sites of forgetting. Centred around places of violence such as concentration camps and military courts where prisoners endured horrific forced labour and were sentenced to death, this book looks at how and why the history of these sites were obscured. Issues addressed include: how Guernica came to represent Francoist front-line brutality and so concealed violence behind the lines; the need to preserve drawings made by concentration camp inmates that record a history the regime hoped to silence; the contests over plaques and monuments erected to honour victims; and the ways forging a historical record through human rights cases helps shape a new collective memory. Shining a spotlight on these important topics for the first time, this book provides a new perspective on one of the major issues of 20th-century Spanish history: the history and memory of Francoist violence. As such, Sites of Violence and Memory in Modern Spain is an invaluable resource for all scholars of modern Spain, memory culture, and public history.

'Today with the Red Army captive and disarmed, the Nationalist [nacionales] troops have achieved their final military objectives. The war is over.' With these two sentences, General Franco announced on April 1, 1939 that his writ ran across the whole of Spain. His words marked a high point for those who had flocked to Franco who, since the start of the Civil War in July 1936, had carried out what was regarded as the steady occupation of the country. The history of this occupation remains conspicuous by its absence, and the term occupation lies discredited for many historians. The danger of leaving the history of the occupation unexplored, however, is that a major process designed to control the conquered population remains in the shadows and, unlike many other European countries, the view of occupation as an imposition by outsiders remains unchallenged. Friend or Foe? explores how Francoist occupation saw members of the state and society collaborate to win control of Spanish society. At the heart of the process lies the challenging task in civil war of distinguishing between supporter and opponent. Occupation also witnessed a move from arbitrary violence towards selecting opponents for carefully graded punishment. Such selection depended upon fine-grained information about vast swathes of the population. The massive scale of the surveillance meant that regime officials depended on collaborators within the community to furnish them with the information needed to write huge numbers of biographies. Accordingly, knowledge as a form of power became as crucial as naked force as neighbours of the defeated helped define who would gain reward as a friend and who would suffer punishment as a foe. [Subject: Spanish Civil War, History, Military Studies]

"Helen Graham highlights the domestic and international context of the Spanish Civil War, and reveals its origins in the political and cultural anxieties provoked by the rapid modernization of Europe. Using personal narratives, she combines a powerfully human account of the war an its aftermath with a disturbing ethical enquiry into its legacy for the 21st century."--BOOK JACKET.

On 20th November 1975, General Francisco Franco died in Madrid, just before his 83rd birthday. At the time of his death he had been the head of a dictatorial regime with the title of 'Caudillo' for almost 40 years. In this book, Enrique Moradiellos redraws Franco in three dimensions - Franco, the man; Franco, the Caudillo and Franco's Spain. In so doing, he offers a reappraisal of Franco's personality, his leadership style and the nature of the regime that he established and led until his death. As a dictator who established his power prior to World War II and maintained it well into the 1970s, Franco was one of the most central figures of twentieth-century European history. In Spain today, he is a spectre from a regrettable recent past, uncomfortable yet still very real and significant. Although a realtively minor dictator in comparison with Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin, Franco was more fortunate than them in terms of survival, long-lasting influence and public image. A study of his regime and its historical evolution sheds new light on fundamental questions of European history, including the social and cultural bases for totalitarian or authoritarian challenges to democracy and sources of political legitimacy grounded in the charisma of a leader. In this book, Enrique Moradiellos Garcia examines the dictatorship as well as the dictator and, in doing so, reveals new aspects to our understanding of General Franco, the Caudillo.

Madrid became one of the key symbols of Republican resistance to General Franco during the Spanish Civil War following the Nationalists' failure to take the city in the winter of 1936-7. Yet despite the defiant cries of 'No pasarán', they did eventually pass on 28 March 1939. This book examines the consequences in Madrid of Franco's unconditional victory in the Spanish Civil War. Using recently available archival material, this study shows how the punishment of the vanquished was based on a cruel irony - Republicans, not the military rebels of July 1936, were held responsible for the fratricidal conflict. Military tribunals handed out sentences for the crime of 'military rebellion'; mere passivity towards the Nationalists before 1939 was not only made a civil offence under the Law of Political Responsibilities but could cause dismissal from work; and freemasons and Communists, specifically blamed for the Civil War, were criminalized by decree in March 1940. However, contrary to much that has been written on the subject, the post-war Francoist repression was not exterminatory. Genocide did not take place in post-war Madrid. While a minimum of 3113 judicial executions took place between 1939 and 1944, death sentences were largely based on accusations of participation in 'blood crimes' that occured in Madrid in 1936. Moreover, and unlike most other accounts of the Francoist political violence, this book is concerned with the question of when and why mass repression came to an end. It shows that the sheer numbers of cases opened against Republican 'rebels', and the use of complex pre-war bureaucratic procedures to process them, produced a crisis that was only resolved by decisions taken by the Franco regime in 1940-1 to abandon much of the repressive system. By 1944, mass repression had come to an end.

The Spanish Civil War was fought not only on the streets and battlefields from 1936 to 1939 but also through memory and trauma in the decades that followed. This fascinating book reassesses the eras of war, dictatorship and transition to democracy in light of the memory boom in Spain since the late 1990s. It explores how the civil war and its repressive aftermath have been remembered and represented from 1939 to the present through the interweaving of war memories, political power and changing social relations. Acknowledgement and remembrance were circumscribed during the war's immediate aftermath and only the victors were free to remember collectively during the long Franco era. Michael Richards recasts social memory as a profoundly historical product of migration, political events and evolving forms of collective identity through the 1950s, the transition to democracy in the 1970s, and in the bitterly contested politics of memory since the 1990s.

Toward the Retrieval of the Historic Memory of Spain In Ancient Rome, the senate would impose a dishonour known as the damnatio memoriae (obliteration of memory) as a form of punishment inflicted upon traitors or anyone who was not in the Roman emperors good books. In Francos Spain, this punishment provided the framework for the new states genocidal policy to exterminate all those opposed to the Fascist regime, that is, half of the Spanish population. The military coup that overthrew the legal Republican government with a bloody civil war that began July 18, 1936, inflicted a totalitarian regime under General Franco that remained in power until the Caudillos death in 1975. More than three-quarters of a century later, supporters of the movement to restore the Historic Memory of Spain strive to unearth and publish the stories of the hundreds of thousands of loyal men and women whose memory the Francoists have endeavoured to consign to oblivion and to damn for eternity. They shall not be forgotten.