David Gilmour

‘Viva la muerte!’

Even after years of studying the Spanish Civil War, David Gilmour is far from inured to its atrocities

The Spanish Holocaust is a book that will give readers nightmares: it gave me two in a single night. Even people who think they have read enough about the Spanish Civil War to feel inured to its horrors will still be appalled by the intensity of the cruelty and repression here revealed.

‘Of the folly and wickedness of the military rising’, wrote Gerald Brenan in The Spanish Labyrinth, ‘there can today be no two opinions.’ Nor today, more than 60 years after he wrote those words, can there be two opinions about the sadistic and merciless repression planned and perpetrated by General Franco and his conspirators.  Reading Paul Preston’s narrative is like watching a Spanish Schindler’s List without a Spanish Schindler.

Francoist propaganda at the time led Winston Churchill and many other people to believe that the atrocities carried out by the Republicans were very much greater than those committed by the Nationalist rebels. Later, during the dictatorship, it was generally deemed that the nastiness on either side had been roughly equivalent.  Only in democratic Spain, with the end of censorship and the opening up of archives and mass graves, have Spanish historians been able to provide us with the truth: that the Right killed about three times as many people as the Left. It is upon their research that Preston has based his meticulously compiled account.

The rebels claimed for propaganda purposes that they had risen to save Spain from communists (of whom there were very few in the country in 1936) and anarchists (of whom there were many). Yet their enemies — and future victims — also included socialists, regionalists, Jews, freemasons, moderate Republicans and even liberals. That is why in captured villages, teachers, lawyers and mayors were targeted and executed as ferociously as anarchist militiamen.

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