The Spanish Holocaust

Siege of Teruel, April, 1938

Professor Paul Preston's recent book, The Spanish Holocaust is available now.

One of the many remarkable things about this narrative of butchery is, indeed, how it proves Garzón's central accusation – that Franco enacted a ruthless plan involving the "detention, torture, forced disappearance and physical elimination of thousands of people for political and ideological motives … a state of affairs that continued, to greater or lesser extent, after the civil war ended".

Preston provides facts, figures and harrowing descriptions in the first full and proper attempt to explain the horror. He does not shy away from strong words – "holocaust" is deliberately chosen to describe the extent of cold-blooded killing "because its resonances with systematic murder should be evoked in the Spanish case, as they are in those of Germany or Russia". Nor does he ignore the undoubted cruelty and the crimes committed on the Republican side of a three-year civil war sparked by a 1936 military rightist uprising against an elected government. Two-thirds of the clergy in the Catalan province of Lleida were killed. A third of all monks in the Republican zone also died. That is extreme religious persecution. I attended a talk by Professor Preston last week and it was a salutory one. None of us can afford to be complacent as the forces of fascism gather strength across Europe and in the US under an assortment of mendacious flags and pretexts.