Paul Preston: the Crimes of Franco (The 2005 Len Crome Memorial Lecture, Delivered at the Imperial War Museum on 12 March 2005
Paul Preston: The Crimes of Franco (The 2005 Len Crome Memorial Lecture, delivered at the Imperial War Museum on 12 March 2005. The remains of General Franco lie in the gigantic mausoleum of the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), built with the sweat and blood of twenty thousand slave labourers. Franco’s monument to his own greatness and to the fallen of his own side in the Spanish Civil War, it took nearly twenty years to carve the 850 foot long basilica out of the hillside of the Valle de Cuelga- muros in the Guadarrama mountains north east of Madrid, and to erect the immense cross which towered 500 feet above it.1 The fate of his enemies could not have been more different. To attempt to answer the question, regarding deaths other than those on the battlefield or in bom- bing raids, we have to recognize that ‘after the civil war’ is a phrase that means different things in different parts of Spain. In Old Castile, Seville, Granada, Córdoba, Huelva, Cádiz, Cáceres, Galicia and Zaragoza, that meant within hours or days of the military coup. Accordingly, the fi- gures that matter are those regarding deaths at the hands of those who had untrammelled control of each area. Deaths in the Republican zone were carefully registered. They were fully investi- gated by the machinery of the state as one-time Republican areas fell to the Francoists. Detailed research has produced figures of approximately 50000. Deaths in the Nationalist zone were not similarly registered other than in those cases where the deaths were as a result of summary (and, of course, totally illegal) courts martial.
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