The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain

Paul Preston is a history professor at the London School of Economics. He is widely regarded at the foremost scholar on the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime. It would be more accurate in my view to call him the foremost anti-Nationalist writer and this book is just one more effort to totally de-legitimize that cause and place it utterly beyond the pale. One's suspicions are immediately aroused by his use of the words 'Holocaust', 'Inquisition', and 'extermination' in the title of a book about Spain.

Obviously, he wishes to associate Nationalist Spain with the 16th century's version of the 'Great Satan', the English manufactured myth of the 'black legend'. British authors are blind sided by this apparently eradicable prejudice. It never seems to dawn on Preston that the bloody reigns of Henry VIII and Elizebeth I killed more people for religious reasons than the entire 350 history of the Inquisition in the global Spanish empire. He also obviously wishs to associate the Nationalist cause with 20th Century German National Socalism. General Eisenhower called his memoire of the war in Europe "Crusade in Europe". This crusade was to destroy the German National Socialist regime--the 'brown socialists', ideologues who hated Christianity and the Catholic Church in particular just as much as the Spanish 'Reds' did. To this end the Allies terror bombed German cities and civilians in hundreds of 'Guernicas' and, after the war set about purging Germany of these brown socialists. Would Preston be prepared to use the word 'Holocaust' for the terror bombing, and the word 'Inquisition' for the Nuremberg trials and the de-nazification programme? The Spanish nationalist battled the 'Red' rather than the 'Brown' version of socialism, perhaps sensing the the human cost of the 'Red' version would ultimately be very much greater than the brown.

Several facts to not fit with Preston's interpretive framing. For instance he makes a lot of noise about the Spanish Right's alleged obsession with a so-called "Jewish/masonic" conspiracy against historic and Christian Spain, the Jewish element being tied to the Communist conspiracy. Somehow this too elides into a fear that these conspiracies want to 're-Africanise Spain as in the days of the Moorish conquest.

Now I am quite sure that Spain had it share of anti-Semites but this hardly included Franco and his associates. If this was a motivation of the military rebels how was it that the Jews of Spain and Morocco failed to notice it? Preston and other have long neglected to record that the 30,000 Jewish community of Morocco supported Franco in the civil war and even partially provided the finance to buy planes from Italy and Germany to transport the army across the Straits. Why did they support him? Well one reason might be that, in 1924, this alleged 'anti-semite' had recommended the restoration of Spanish citizenship to the Sephardic Jews--that is Jews descended from those who were expelled in 1492. Also, eying the influence of Communism on the Republic and the very orthodox Marxism of the Socialists, they were keenly aware that, by 1936, Stalin had killed more Jews than Hitler.

It is also a fact, that whatever about rhetoric, during World War II, Franco's government went to considerable lengths to protect Sephardic Jews and to facilitate fleeing Jews through Spain. This included extracting trainloads of Sephardic Jews (from Salonica in Greece) from the transit camps at Belsen and transporting them back to the safety of Spain. In responding to the real Holocaust Franco's Spain has a much better record than, for instance, Switzerland or indeed any of the allies.

As regards the alleged Spanish Catholic paranoia about Freemasonry, for the record, of the ten leading generals in the coup, only four were identfiably Catholic, and some of the rest were Freemasons, including General Cabanellas, who chaired the Junta after the death of Sanjurjo and before the election of Franco. Queipo de Liano also was an unbeliever and notoriously anti-clerical. General Mola was hardly better and in his initial negotiations with the Carlists strongly resisted their efforts to secure privileges for the Church in the new Spain. All these generals came from empeccable republican backgrounds.

So we are to believe that in a rising designed to defend 'Christian' Spain from a "Jewish/Masonic/Africanist" threat the Crusaders were led by generals who were mostly unbelievers and some of whom were freemasons. In the vital early stages of the war finance was provided by the Jews of Morocco. And to top it all a large portion of these 'Christian' crusaders were Moslem troops from North Africa.

The statistics of non-combatant deaths are dubious to say the least and Preston has simply taken up where Loyalist propaganda left off in 1939. Someone could write a book about the American Civil War and by dwelling relentlessly on the atrocities of Grant and Sherman 'prove' conclusively that Abraham Lincoln was a monster like Hitler, and a worse 'Inquisitor' than Torquamada! That in the initial stages, the Nationalists shot large numbers indisciminately was already well known and was first reported by the French Catholic writer Georges Bernosos. But Hugh Thomas's depiction of the depaved and sadistic killings by the Loyalist Cadres has stood the test of time, as has their diabolical record of even digging up and desecrating the dead.

The use of the word 'Holocaust' obviously invites us to compare 'Francoism' with German National Socialism and to liken Franco to Hitler. This just does not gel. For one thing Hitler detested Franco and his 'clerical' regime every bit as much as he is detested by the denizens of the London School of Economics, the Guardian, the New Stateman and the BBC and the rest of the British Left. The fact that he accepted help from Hitler and Mussolini does not make him a 'fascist' or a 'totalitarian' any more that Churchill's alliance with the hideous Stalinist regime made him a Stalinist. Military alliances of convenience do not necessarily imply ideological alignment. A more relevant comparision is with the Finnish Civil War and with Marshal Mannerheim, who like Franco fought and defeated the attempt to violently bolshevize his country. In his book "The Soviet Tragedy" (Free Press 1994) the author Martin Maria speculated what might have transpired if the Right rather than the Bolsheviks had won the Russian Civil War in 1917-20 and Russia had thereafter been ruled by a "Russian Franco". All civil wars are brutal and tragic, but we know from Maria's book, among others, just how dark and tragic the Russian experience was for the following years, a tragegy glossed over by the Webbs, those benighted founders of the London School of Economics. But by 1975, the year of Franco's death Spain had ascended from poverty to become the tenth most significant economy in the world and with the basics of her civil society still intact was thus enabled to transition successfully to a new constitutional order.

To use a phrase coined by Salvador de Madariaga, Preston has written another book to fit his ideological "prepossessions".

To all of you here who are pro-leftist and who are ignorant of the atrocities and bloodshed your heroes and confreres of yore committed, I suggest you read this following book: "Catholic Martyrs of the Spanish Civil War," by Justo Perez de Urbel. It should make your jaw drop and help extract you like a butterfly out of your little red cocoons! Plus aside from just Spain, Communism in general has over 100,000,000 acts of bloodshed on its hands, committed in just one generation! Don't talk to me about Nationalism and Fascism!

Professor Preston's book is dense but quite absorbing. He called the killings under General Franco during the Spanish Civil War a 'holocaust', and I felt it appropriate after reading the book. Because it was limited to Spain while the bigger holocaust was being perpetrated by the Germans, this chapter in the Spanish history seems to have been buried and forgotten.

It was eye-opening, disturbing, and heartbreaking to read about all the horrific killings and tortures against mostly innocent civilians, and I got the sense that the wounds are not yet completely healed in Spain. After all, General Franco was a revered figure well into the 21st century, and it's often harder to lay bare the open sores when the wounds are inflicted from within. And I felt there is a lesson for all of us. Just like it happened in Spain and more recently in other countries such as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the freedom we often taken for granted can be easily swept away unless we are constantly vigilant and defend our rights to speech and freedom.

And more often than not, it's the women and children who bear the brunt of the harm. Briefly mentioned were the cases of children being forced into orphanages and indoctrinated and/or adopted by their parents' murderers, much like the cases of the disappeared in Argentina. I've noticed a few other reviewers accusing the author of left-leaning bias. Since I am not familiar with the Spanish history, I can't comment on that, but I believe the book offers universal insight and lessons for all people, regardless of their political beliefs.

I have finally had a chance to read this book. Prior to this I must say I was fascinated by the hateful nature of the reviews on here that wholly dismiss it as Leftist biased, or who eagerly push other material on those of us who just want some idea of this book's validity. I think this speaks more about the spiteful and self-preserving instincts of such lost souls rather than about what Preston has written. Actually, though, they seem to illustrate a crucial tenet of the civil war: hell hath no fury like a reactionary scorned.

One thing I realized from reading about the 'Spanish Holocaust' (learn about Preston's reasons for carefully choosing this title in the preface) is that the casualties of this civil war were far more numerous and unspeakable on the rebel side than the republican side. That much would be clear no matter how you want to boil it down to statistics or records which hadn't already been wantonly destroyed by the fascists. This clear and unflinching text is often gutwrenching in its descriptions of violent acts; both sides certainly contributed to the body count, but again it becomes apparent that those who identify with tradition and values of 'hearth and home' undeniably perpetrated the most glaring atrocities.

While we know much about Germany and Italy at this time, it is utterly tragic that Spain's inner conflict is so misunderstood and overlooked today. This book does a great job of laying it out and detailing the passage of events up to and throughout the civil war. I think it's worthwhile to study this subject because there are many parallels with the breakdowns (imminent or underway) of many Western nations now. Much as authoritarians like to warn us of a dangerous and violent underclass that needs to be subdued and controlled, they are themselves the true instigators of violent acts in all significant cases. They are after all much better armed and connected than a few piffling insurrectionists.

In the game of My Holocaust Was Worse Than Your Holocaust, the Spanish always lose out because the carnage that took place during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was immediately dwarfed in scale and popular memory by the Grand Guignol that was World War II. Paul Preston has done a superb job of dragging the horrors of the Spanish Civil War out of the shadows, and at the same time making a compelling argument that the atrocities committed by the Republicans and, most of all, the Franco-led rebels, should be considered as part of a genocidal program.

Tossing around the term "holocaust" isn't something historians do lightly. It's a politically-charged definition that continually sparks controversy; the best example being the continuing scuffle over whether or not the massacre of Armenians in Turkey from 1915-23 was a genocidal holocaust. The Turkish government, not surprisingly, has consistently denied the claim, and, most controversially, some Jewish groups have been accused of denying the Armenian Genocide in the interest of protecting the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust. Historian Howard Zinn has a short but effective piece on this issue here.

Preston methodically assembles his evidence and shows that the rebels, a coalition of the military, police, landowners, industrialists and the Catholic Church, and led by General Franco, were quite clear in their intentions even before the war broke out. What we now call "eliminationism," the belief that political opponents must and should be removed from society through expulsion or killing, was rife in Spain in the years preceding the war. Political, economic and social relationships between the ruling classes and the peasantry and industrial proletariat in pre-Civil War Spain were still essentially feudal in nature. In short, the upper classes saw those at the bottom as beasts of burden, as virtually another (inferior) race. With the rise of unions and left-wing political groups (Anarchists, Communists, Socialists), the ruling classes became possessed with a hysterical and fanciful fear of a Jewish-Masonic-Marxist cabal that was somehow plotting to bloodily overthrow all that they held dear.

When the war broke out, rebel-held areas became the scene of mass executions of anyone with the slighest, most ephemeral link to the left wing. Preston estimates that over 150,000 people were massacred by the rebels, but cautions that since the Francoist forces held power in Spain for decades afterwards, there's a reasonable suspicion that the historical record has been altered to reduce the evidence of rebel atrocities, and the true figures of those killed may be far higher. What's undeniable is that the rebel killings were genocidal in intent. Time and time again they stated that their opponents were sub-human or perverted, and the ferocity and cruelty of their actions against leftists are bloody proof of their beliefs. Not content with merely killing their enemies, the rebels also indulged in mass rapes of lower-class women that rival anything the Soviet Army did in Germany at the close of World War II. The role of the Catholic Church in the war deserves special criticism. Not only did high-ranking members of the Church advocate war on the left and the lower classes, more than a few rank and file priests actually took part in the killing.

The killing wasn't all on the right hand side of the ledger. The Republican forces are reliably credited with 50,000 extra-judicial killings. These murders also had an eliminationist flavour as some hardcore leftists, especially the Anarchists, saw the upper classes as irredeemably parasitical. The main difference between the right and left when it came to extra-judicial killings was that the Republican government did not advocate genocidal killings and even took steps to stop them. The problem was that the Republican government was shambolic, ineffectual and hesitant. The rebels, on the other hand, made murder, torture and rape an unofficial policy.

What gives this conflict an additional layer of horror is that its victims are almost completely forgotten. The Spanish Civil War now stands as a historical footnote, known mostly as a warmup for World War II, and as a venue in which various famous writers (Orwell, Hemingway, Koestler) earned some street cred. Even in Spain there's evidently a lot of resistance to digging up the past, and I wonder if that's had a subtle influence on Spanish filmmaking, which has produced some excellent horror/fantasy films (The Devil's Backbone, The Orphanage, Pan's Labyrinth) that have their roots in the Civil War. One recent Spanish film that seems to be all about the corrosive heritage of the Civil War is The Last Circus. My review's here. And if I was a wealthy Spaniard whose recent ancestors owned large rural estates, this book would make me wonder not if, but how much blood was on the hands of my grandfathers.

The only fault I can find with this book is that it feels like it needs an additional chapter, rather than a brief epilogue, to describe how the post-1945 Franco regime worked to suppress the history of its crimes. That aside, this is a fantastic history of crimes that are largely unknown and have certainly gone unpunished.

Read more of my reviews at JettisonCocoon dot com.

I have just begun this book and it will be a more time consumming read than many other books I have read. I immediately found it interesting having had three uncles that fought in the Spanish civil war. This is new information never revealed altho' my family and I were aware of the consecuences suffered depending on who's side you fought with. Will be very interesting and heart rending story. I am not familiar with the author but see he has good credentials as I often question takes on disasters as viewed by the bystander.

"Holocaust"? "Inquisition"? "Extermination"? Preston's tendentious and hysterical (i.e. neurotic, overwrought) title instantly reveals the obsessions of perhaps the most bigoted and sectarian "historian" (?? apologist, surely?) on the circuit. Preston has been regurgitating the same tired invective for decades now, but more serious scholarship has bypassed him. Payne and Palacios have written the definitive work on Franco.

The Spanish civil war has been part of the literature I have read during my life, but through skilful manipulation and political amnesia, the scale of the killing in 1930's Spain was something I had not learned.

This large heavy book, was an exercise in horror for me. I could not fathom the hatred generated by the deposed "ruling" classes after they lost a democratic election in early 1930's Spain with the subsequent liberalisation of employment laws and land ownership.

Using the political opposition to Marxism, Freemasonry and anti-Judaism the rich estate owners, their political representatives, the Catholic Church and the military rebelled against the new Republican government, hence the Civil War.

Behind the front lines, the Falange (Franco), the Fascists and many murderers and criminals let loose a maelstrom of killing and violence, rape and illegal judicial courts.

As the war turned against them the Republicans too turned in revenge on the right, also killing, massacring thousands. The final death toll is about 1,000,000 dead, but the exact figure will never be known as Franco, after winning the war continued the fatal repression until the 1960s. On his death, documents and archives from the civil war and Franco era were destroyed, thereby destroying evidence and records of who and how many were exterminated.

Eugenics, greed and politics all collide to produce a horror story!

Hard work but worth reading!

Mr. Preston writes carefully researched history and has no qualms about his opinion of Franco's 36-year dictatorship.

Very good book