fought with complete conviction in the righteousness of their respective causes, which explains the Civil War’s reputation as the quintessential conflict between freedom and fascism. By the time of Franco’s coup, the political center had disappeared, and politics had been reduced to a zero-sum game dominated by political groups at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.2 Under the last government of the Second Republic, the Popular Front (elected into office in 1936 and headed by labor leader Largo Caballero), Spain took a decisive turn toward the extreme left, backed by a “workers’ alliance” embracing socialist, communist, and anarchist unions. The opposition, the National Front, a coalition of right-wing parties led by the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), a fascist-leaning party, represented its own kind of political extremism. Unsurprisingly, an intense ideological battle fueled the violence of the Civil War. As Crozier (1967: 216) put it, “The revolutionaries massacred the bourgeoisie because this, as they saw it, was their mystical and exalted class duty. The counter-revolutionaries killed because the ‘Marxists’ whose death they ordained represented the ‘anti-Spain’.”
Franco declared victory over the Republican army on April 1, 1939, and soon thereafter all hostilities came to a halt. Aiding in the Nationalist victory was a significant military advantage: the most experienced troops in the Spanish army were those under Franco’s command. These troops, made up of many lower-echelon and young military officers, began to defect en masse to the Nationalist side as soon as the war started. The Republicans also made many tactical errors, and none more prominent than the decision to concentrate on a socio-economic revolution rather than on developing a strategy to defeat Franco and his army of rebels. At the inception of the Civil War, the CNT and UGT devoted much of their energies to collectivizing industry and farmland while ignoring the military conflict. Despite dealing a big blow to urban capitalists and the oligarchs, the socioeconomic revolution left the Republican side ill-prepared to defend itself against Franco.3 As noted by Payne (1985: 15): “What was left of the Spanish army in the Republican zone was largely disbanded in favor of leftist militia battalions that were full of revolutionary zeal and reasonably well-equipped but lack discipline, leadership, and military skill.”
The Civil War’s international dimensions also favored a Nationalist victory. Sympathetic foreign leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini supported Franco’s uprising from the start of the Civil War by providing the military weapons (aircraft in particular) and expertise that proved critical to crushing the Republicans. Britain, France, and the United States, despite “the intense degree of psycho-emotional solidarity with the struggle of the Spanish left” on the part of hundreds of thousands of French, British and American citizens, decided to sit out the war in Spain fearing that their involvement would trigger a European-wide conflict (Payne 1970: 275).4 Such fears left the International Brigades, the foreign, volunteer army that gathered in Spain to fight Franco, which organized some 40,000 soldiers, including 2,800 members of the American Lincoln Brigade, as the main source of foreign support for the Republicans (Richardson 1976: 11). Abandoned by its fellow democracies, the Second Republic turned to the Soviet Union for help in the form of aircraft, tanks, and political and military advice.5 But this assistance in the end proved incapable of overcoming Franco’s rebellion.
The Human Toll of the War
How many people perished during the Civil War remains highly debated among historians, and it may well be the case, as noted by Richards (1996: 157), that “we will never know the true figure.” One million is the popularly accepted figure in Spain since it was adopted, for very different reasons, by both the Franco regime and its opposition. For Franco, the figure of one million dead underscored his claim of having saved Spain from bloodshed, chaos, and destruction. For the opposition, it highlighted the grotesquely violent nature of the Franco dictatorship. Historians of the Civil War, however, have questioned the veracity of the figure. Arguably, the most respected accounting comes from Jackson (1965: 539), in no small part because it comes from a foreigner. This study puts the total number of the Civil War dead at 580,000. But even this greatly reduced figure, as seen in Table 1, makes the Spanish Civil War the deadliest by far of all European civil conflicts of the interwar era. Jackson (1965: 539) estimates that between 1939 and 1943 100,000 Spaniards were killed in direct combat, 10,000 in air raids, 50,000 from disease and malnutrition, 20,000 from Republican “reprisals,” 200,000 from Nationalist “reprisals,” and 200,000 “red” prisoner deaths resulting from execution and disease.
Table 1. The Spanish Civil War in Comparative Perspective
Source: Kissane and Sitter (2005: 186–88, 196).
Republican violence targeted the sectors of society that sided with the coup’s plotters: the business community, landed oligarchs, and clergy. Of these targets, the clergy are probably most closely associated with Republican violence, given the deep-seated anti-Catholicism of the Republican leadership. “Spain is no longer a Catholic country, even though there are many millions of Spanish Catholics,” declared Manuel Azaña, the Second Republic’s first prime minister, as he launched an unprecedented attack on the church that ended state financial support for the clergy and nationalized the church’s vast property holdings (Amodia 1976: 11). The estimated number of clergy murdered by the Republicans, however, remains in dispute. After the end of the Civil War, the Nationalist side claimed that 7,937 religious persons were killed out of a total community of around 115,000, but this figure is probably inflated.6 That noted, there is little doubt that “wanton cruelty” was imposed on the clergy, with some reports stating that some priests were “burned to death in their churches” while others were “buried alive after being made to dig their own graves” (Beevor 1982: 70).
Nationalist violence is considered to have been more indiscriminate than the “red terror” imposed by the Republicans (Balcells 2007: 5). Obtaining control of Republican strongholds or areas of the country thought to have been infiltrated by “reds” often involved air raids intended to eradicate entire villages and towns as a prelude to a Nationalist occupation. Territories “conquered” by the Nationalists were also often subjected to limpiezas (cleansings) designed to “flush out internal enemies,” and frighten the civilian population from aiding the Republican resistance (Vincent 2007: 151). The “cleansings” often degenerated into orgies of killing and abuse, involving raping women. General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, Franco’s main propagandist during the Civil War, famously urged his troops to rape Republican women, a fact that helps explain a common piece of graffiti that appeared in towns and villages conquered by the Nationalist rebels: “Your women will give birth to fascists” (Treglown 2009: 21). Ironically, the eradication of “reds” was often most brutal in areas where there was no large-scale resistance to the Nationalist rebellion, such as Castile, where known left-wing sympathizers were easily picked up and treated to enforced “purging and purification” by Franco’s army (Vincent 2007: 151).
Given the differences in the nature of the violence generated by the Nationalists and Republicans, it is not surprising that the Nationalist side perpetrated the majority of the killings the Civil War. Jackson made this point explicitly in his 1965 study and it has been sustained by more recent research conducted during the democratic period. A widely publicized study organized by Juliá (1999b: 407–12) concludes that during the years of civil conflict the Republican side committed 37,843 killings and the Nationalist side 72,527. This is a partial account with 25 of the 50 Spanish provinces studied. An earlier study (Casanova 1992: 8–9), with 90 percent of all provinces studied, reached a somewhat similar conclusion with respect to the imbalance of the Civil War killings: 45,000 by the Republicans and 98,000 by the Nationalists. Most of the dead, regardless of side, were hurriedly buried in makeshift graves in remote parts of the country, and their fates after the end of the war pointedly reflect the terms of the Nationalist victory.
As the absolute winner of the Civil War, Franco proceeded to exhume and give proper burials to the remains of those who died defending the Nationalist side. The remains of those resting in Republican graves were forgotten as punishment for betrayal of their country. For the duration of the dictatorship, and at least several decades into the democratic