Unburying Franco and the Crimes of the Spanish Civil War
For Six Decades, Spain Told a Dictator’s Story. For the Past 22 Years, Citizens Have Been Creating a New Memory Landscape
Provocatively deemed “The Spanish Holocaust” by historian Paul Preston, the Spanish Civil War—a conflict, extending from 1936 to 1939 that resulted in the repression, torture, and death of hundreds of thousands of people—weighs heavily in Spain’s collective memory. The traditional narrative of the war, asserted by the victorious dictator Francisco Franco, held that Franco and his Nationalist forces defeated an oppositional leftist coalition, the Republicans, to restore Spain to its past greatness. This interpretation of events remained essentially unchallenged in Spanish popular memory for decades, aided by censorship and repression …
