THE FRANCOIST GENOCIDE IN SPAIN

In Ancient Rome, the senate would impose a dishonour known as the damnatio memoriae (obliteration of memory) as a form of punishment inflicted upon traitors or anyone who was not in the Roman emperor’s good books. In Franco’s Spain, this punishment provided the framework for the new state’s genocidal policy to exterminate all those opposed to the Fascist regime, that is, half of the Spanish population.

The military coup that overthrew the legal Republican government with a bloody civil war that began in Cordoba July 17, 1936, inflicted a totalitarian regime under General Franco that remained in power until the Caudillo’s death in 1975. Between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Republicans are estimated to have died during this period, many military but many more civilians.

The book, Damnatio Memoriae, supported by dozens of eye-witness interviews, addresses the dark period in great detail as it sheds light on the repression that destroyed the lives of hundres of thousands of disenting men and women imprisoned for many years in more than 180 concentration camps (campos de concentración de prisioneros), countless prisons and slave labour workers battalions (batallones de trabajadores de prisioneros de guerra) where many died from torture, starvation and disease.

Map of concentration camps (CC) and workers battalions (BT) in the province of Cordoba between 1938 and 1942.