The Spanish Holocaust

Starred review from December 19, 2011
The murder of 200,000 Spaniards and the deaths of countless more from disease, slave labor, and the ravages of concentration camps was a deliberate plan by Franco’s troops to eliminate their opponents, says Preston, a leading scholar of 20th-century Spanish history at the London School of Economics. Preston (The Spanish Civil War) provides more than enough illumination of this lesser-known holocaust in this thick, intensely detailed, indignant account. Spain entered the 20th century impoverished and largely rural. Industrialization and the rise of militant unions after WWI provoked conflicts that worsened after the passing of a reformist 1931 constitution, which outraged landowners, army officers, and the Catholic Church. They supported the rising Falangist movement, which denounced the government in familiar fascist rhetoric. The 1936 rebellion was led by Gen. Francisco Franco, who, after taking power, “perfect... the machinery of state terror” in order to maintain power. Although Preston describes many Republican atrocities, a relentless stream of gruesome trials, executions, and massacres presses his case that the Right committed the lion’s share. Many conservatives, finding much to admire in Franco, have accused Preston of bias, and this latest work is unlikely to silence them. Illus.