A prior post looked at former Judge Baltasar Garzon’s call for a Spanish Truth Commission to investigate and report on the crimes of the Franco regime during the period 1936-1951.
Now a new book paints a comprehensive picture of the crimes of that era: The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. The product of meticulous scholarship and research, it lays out in gruesome detail how and why Generalisimo Franco and his supporters killed 200,000 civilians during the war for not being supporters of fascism and an additional 20,000 supporters of the Republic after the war.
The author of this book is Professor Paul Preston of the London School of Economics and Political Science, who is usually regarded as the world’s foremost historian of 20th-century Spain.
The New York Times review called the book a “magisterial account of the bloodshed of that era” that evoked the worst of medieval times. Examples were Franco’s “parading soldiers who flourished enemy ears and noses on their bayonets, the mass public executions carried out in bullrings or with band music and onlookers dancing in the victims’ blood.”
