More than a ‘Tune Up’ to World War II
Eighty years ago, Nationalist rebels in Spain launched an uprising against the democratically-elected Republic that plunged the country into chaos and violence. Today, the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) seems largely lost to history. It barely registers a blip on the media radar screen.
The reasons for this historical amnesia are complex and telling. The enormous human losses generated by the Second World War and the Holocaust quickly overshadowed Spanish death toll. The Cold War further encouraged collective forgetfulness by transforming Nationalist dictator, Francisco Franco, from an erstwhile ally of Mussolini and Hitler into a friend of the West in the struggle against Communism. In Spain itself, political parties from the left to the right agreed to bury the nation’s bloody past in order to maintain domestic harmony.
If the Spanish Civil War is remembered at all it is because of the cultural masterpieces it inspired: Picasso’s Guernica, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and Robert Capa’s photographs. Prominent writers flocked to Spain to cover the fighting or to participate in it. An International Who’s Who of 20th-century literature wrote about the conflict, including John Dos Passos, Arthur Koestler, Langston Hughes, Ilya Ehrenburg, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender. No other modern-day conflict, with the possible exception of the First World War, engaged Western intellectuals like the Spanish Civil War.
For Spender it was “a poet’s war,” a conflict “in which the individual, with his passion and his comparative independence of mechanical methods, still counted.” Such romantic images of heroism combined with ideological commitment drove tens of thousands of men and women to join the fight. More than 35,000 volunteers from 52 countries around the globe, including former prisoners released from Nazi concentration camps, joined up. Some 3,000 American citizens served in the International Brigades to defend the Spanish Republic. A smaller number of internationals joined Franco’s rebels.
What they found was mass death. The Spanish battleground revealed the shape of things to come. Hemingway correctly characterized it as “the new style war, the total war, where there is no such thing as a non-combatant, where everybody who lives across a line on a map is a target.”
What began as a right-wing military coup in the summer of 1936 quickly turned into the bloodiest conflict Western Europe had experienced since the end of the First World War. Some 500,000 people died in the fighting, about 200,000 of them civilians. Many of these lost their lives behind the lines as the result of shootings, torture, and other brutalities. It was raw, ideologically-driven violence, in which both sides committed atrocities.
Republican militias targeted the Catholic clergy, large landholders, and right-wing politicians. Imbued with fears of a largely imaginary “Fifth Column” — a term coined during the Spanish Civil War — they killed some 55,000 people, the vast majority in of them in the first three months of the war.
General Francisco Franco’s Nationalists took a more systematic approach to violence, calling for a violent purge of the “Jewish-Masonic-Bolsheviks” whom they claimed ruled the Republic. The rebels killed about 100,000 Republicans during the war and another 50,000 after the fighting ended. They rounded up hundreds of thousands of political opponents and placed them in concentration camps. Countless Republican women were raped or suffered public humiliation.
Today mass graves still fill the Spanish countryside, reminders of the horrific violence that tore the country apart. As in the German-occupied Soviet Union, and in more recent examples of mass atrocities, the victims were murdered in or close to the towns and villages in which they lived.
During Franco’s dictatorship (1939 to 1975), Republican families were prohibited from mourning the deaths of their loved ones. Memory of Nationalist crimes was repressed in favor of an official narrative of the Spanish Civil War that presented the Republicans as rebels and criminals.
Franco’s death in 1975 and the subsequent restoration of democracy in Spain brought little solace to the victims or their families. Instead of confronting the past, the country’s parliament tried to bury it by enacting as its first order of business a law providing amnesty to those individuals who carried out politically-motivated crimes during the civil war and under the Francoist regime. National reconciliation and healing took precedence over justice and accountability.
What was buried, however, came to the surface in the 21st century, when the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory began exhuming the mass graves of Republican victims. It opened the floodgates of long-hidden memories as neighbors disclosed the sites of killings and relatives sought to identify murdered family members.
The exhumations spurred on a heated public debate in Spain that resulted in the Law of Historical Memory, which, among other things, recognized all the victims of political violence in the Civil War. Streets bearing Francoist names were changed and statues removed, but the government balked at authorizing criminal investigations into Nationalist crimes.
Human rights activists in and outside of Spain called for judicial inquiries claiming that Franco and his followers had committed crimes against humanity. The passage of time and the amnesty law should not guarantee the perpetrators impunity from prosecution. Legal scholars cited the precedents in international law set by the Nuremberg Trials in addressing the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Others have called from the establishment of truth commissions.
While it may be too late to bring the perpetrators to justice — most of them are long dead as are the eyewitnesses to the violence — it is not too late to set the historical record straight. One can honor the memory of the dead by identifying all the killing sites, along with the individual victims and perpetrators, and by interviewing the few remaining victims, witnesses, and perpetrators. Exhumations, archaeological excavations, and oral testimonies have enriched our understanding of the Holocaust and how mass violence was played out at the local level. Coming to terms with a country’s violent past is always difficult, but maintaining a pact of silence makes the problem worse.
Written by Steven Luckert, Ph.D., senior program curator at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
