- The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 Diary -

Epilogue by Tomas Capdevila Cavero

In July 1936, foreboding World War 2, the Spanish Civil War broke out, causing the end of democracy in Spain for four decades and the death of hundreds of thousands. After WW2, with its millions of casualties, the holocaust on the European Jews, the rebuilding of personal lives, and the cold war starting in the 1950's, the Spanish Republic was nearly forgotten.

The events in the Spanish Civil War are often the cause of falsification and deliberate misinterpretation. The victors could not allow the truth to come out, and other involved fractions had their own reasons for finding excuses and bending the accounts.

The Diary of the Spanish Civil War might also be a "misinterpretation", the misinterpretation of a Spanish Republican who mourns his country, and the many uncorrected wrongs. Wrongs that are politically affecting Spain till today, one example is the continued existence of ETA. But unlike some other historical accounts about the Spanish Civil War, the Diary makes sense. It makes it easier to see why the Republic lost, why so many volunteers fought till the absolute end to defend it, and why the democratic European powers didn't help the Spanish Government. The Diary and its conclusions make sense simply by respecting the time and succession the events took, by letting them unfold by themselves. If there are errors in the Diary I'm sorry, they are mistakes and not intention.

The telling of these accounts is biased, as I think these events cannot be retold otherwise. Neutrality might be good for telling news, but it does not grasp the suffering of those involved, and sometimes hides the monstrosity of the events. Unbiased accounts of the Spanish Civil War? I never read even a single one! Calling the troops of Franco "Nationalists", for example, is already repeating the propaganda of the Franco regime and a sign of sympathy towards them. Calling them "Fascists" is admittedly a simplification, but in contemporary context and overall historicaly more accurate.

"The National Army", that rose against the government to save the country so heroic and selfless, as the Fascists wrote in their history books, consisted of less than half the lower ranks in the Spanish ground troops, the bigger part of the lower officer's ranks, but only a handful of high ranked officers. In fact, the first move done by the Fascists was *against* the Spanish army, by assassinations of many of the commanding generals.

Five years earlier, in 1931, the Spanish army had proclaimed, some might say enforced, the 2. Spanish Republic. In the late 1920's and early 1930's the Republican movement was also a military movement, not shared by all officers, but by most of them. General Franco was however a devout catholic and monarchist, he had only distaste for the Republic. Democracy could make "peasants" part of the government, telling Generals what to do. He and other monarchist officers used excessive brutality in the abatement of the leftist Asturian revolt in 1934, reason for an investigation by the Popular Front government in 1936. They were facing possible imprisonment at worst, but least the end of their military careers.

The political situation in Europe had changed significantly since 1931. With Mussolini and Hitler, two strong Fascist powers were nearby, the Fascist movement within Spain rising. The Fascists could count with the sympathy of the former ruling classes, and very important in Spain, the sympathy of the Catholic church and even the Pope in Rome. Franco and his fellow conspirators were not Fascists themselves, but used the political situation to forge a movement of "National Unity", merging fundamental Catholic radicals with Monarchists and Fascists, in short most of the antidemocratic movements. With the military support of Mussolini and Hitler, together with Chamberlains political support, the stakes were reasonable.

The conspirators were ruthless and murderous, only concentrating in their own personal agendas, indifferent to the suffering they would cause, and misleading the sentiments of the movements they used in the Civil War and afterwards. Franco wanted to preserve his own military career, and make sure nobody could judge him for his crimes as long as he lived. This is the simple reason why he declared Spain to become a monarchy, but only effective *after* his death.

He led a minority of Spaniards, together with foreign mercenaries, on a war and terror campaign against the Spanish people. In 1938 two thirds of the Spanish population had fled from the Fascists to the roughly one quarter of Spain still held by Republican forces.

How could they win the war, how could they prevail after WW2?

Franco won the war solely by the military help of Mussolini and Hitler, and by the political help of Neville Chamberlain. Without the one or the others, he would not have been able to win, not even to make it through the first year of his mutiny. After WW2 his regime was protected by the USA, whose foreign politics became more and more influenced by extreme right wingers like Cordell Hull, who already helped Franco throughout the civil war and tried without success to prevent the US from declaring war against Hitler.

The Diary clears many of the myths around the war spread by the main fractions, as they had their own history books written after WW2. Neither was the Republican army incompetent, nor did Franco save Spain from the Reds. And the recriminations between Anarchists and Communists were disgusting at least, but not relevant for the outcome of the war.

In the end, when the Republic was crushed, and millions of Spaniards fled the country or were imprisoned, tens of thousands were executed and murdered by the victors. The tragedy continued for uncountable individuals and families.

Republican refugees had to make a living in France, in Britain, Mexico, the USA, and many other countries. Those in Europe endured WW2 as well, some were murdered in German concentration camps like Mauthausen, where more than 6.000 Spaniards were killed by the Nazi regime. Many Republican soldiers enlisted in the European democratic armies to continue their fight for freedom, most of them in the British Army and de Gaulle's Army Of Free France. They fought on the Belgian border when the Nazi army penetrated France, they covered the retreat in Dunkirk, and they were among the first ones to enter Paris as liberators, their tanks bearing names like Madrid and Teruel.

And the Spanish Republic?

The Spanish Second Republic did not end politically in 1939, as many of us were taught in school. There was an exile government, first in the Spanish Republican Embassy in Mexico City, together with the Catalonian "Generalitat", that later moved to France, ignored by the world except Mexico and Yugoslavia. France and Britain tried to reestablish the Republic within Spain and overthrow Franco by diplomatic means, but the USA put an end to these efforts in the 1950's. The Spanish Republican exile government stopped its work in 1977, while the first democratic elections in Spain after the war took place, two years after Franco's death.

And through all these times in the hearts of many people, young and old, the dream of the Spanish Republic lives on...

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