The end of the Spanish Civil War

On 1 April 1939 the headquarters of General Francisco Franco in Burgos issued its last war communiqué. Its text, read out on Radio Nacional that evening, ran to only a few lines: “Today, with the Red Army captured and disarmed, the Nationalist troops have achieved their final military objectives. The war is over. Burgos, 1 April 1939, the Year of Victory. Generalísimo Franco.” On the same day the United States recognised Franco’s government. So ended a war which since July 1936 had claimed, by various estimates, between some 300,000 and 500,000 lives. The Second Spanish Republic did not, however, fall in a final battle. In its last weeks it disintegrated from within, and most of its army had laid down its arms before the Nationalists launched their final offensive. For hundreds of thousands of the defeated, 1 April was not a day of peace but the beginning of prisons, camps, executions and exile.

The Republic after the fall of Catalonia

The outcome of the war was decided in the winter. After its defeat on the Ebro in the autumn of 1938, the Republican army was unable to halt the Catalonia offensive that the Nationalists launched on 23 December. On 26 January 1939 they entered Barcelona without a fight, and by 10 February they had taken the whole of Catalonia up to the French border. In those weeks nearly half a million soldiers and civilians crossed into France. For most of the refugees this exodus, known in Spanish as la Retirada, ended behind the wire of camps that the French authorities had hastily set up on the beaches of Roussillon, at Argelès-sur-Mer, Saint-Cyprien and Le Barcarès, and later at Gurs at the foot of the Pyrenees. People slept on the sand, without shelter, in the winter wind; in the first weeks they died of cold, exhaustion and dysentery. On 22 February the poet Antonio Machado, worn out by the flight, died in the seaside town of Collioure. Gurs also held the Dąbrowszczacy, the Polish volunteers of the International Brigades, who had been stripped of their citizenship by the government in Warsaw and had nowhere to return to.

The Republic still held the central-southern zone: Madrid, Valencia, Alicante, Murcia, Almería and parts of Andalusia and Extremadura – about a third of the country, with well over ten million inhabitants. Its army numbered, according to various sources, between 250,000 and over 400,000 men, but it lacked rifles, ammunition, boots and greatcoats, and the air force was down to a few dozen aircraft. Madrid was starving. The Prime Minister, Juan Negrín, returned from France to the central zone on 10 February and kept repeating the slogan “to resist is to win”. He was counting on a European war breaking out any day and forcing London and Paris to help the Republic; failing that, he hoped that continued resistance would at least extract guarantees against reprisals and allow the evacuation of those most at risk. The Communists supported him. Most of the military, the Socialists, the anarchists and the Republicans, however, believed that further fighting was pointless. On 16 February, at a meeting near Albacete, the army commanders told the Prime Minister that the army could no longer defend itself.

The victor left the defeated no illusions. On 9 February 1939 Franco signed the Law of Political Responsibilities, which made it possible to punish political activity retroactively back to October 1934, as well as “passivity” towards the “National Movement”. At the end of February the Republic lost its last support abroad. On 25 February France concluded with the Burgos government the arrangement known as the Bérard–Jordana Agreement, undertaking to hand over to Spain the Republican gold, weapons and ships on its territory. On 27 February the Britain of Neville Chamberlain and the France of Édouard Daladier recognised Franco’s government. On the same day the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña, who was already in France, resigned his office. At the beginning of March Marshal Philippe Pétain became French ambassador in Burgos.

Casado’s coup and the “war within the war”

On 5 March 1939 Colonel Segismundo Casado, commander of the Republican Army of the Centre, moved against Negrín’s government. He set up a National Defence Council in Madrid, chaired from the following day by General José Miaja, the defender of the capital in 1936. The council’s political authority was the respected Socialist Julián Besteiro, and its armed backing came from Cipriano Mera’s anarchist IV Corps. Casado accused Negrín of being a tool of the Communists and of Moscow. His real aim was to conclude an “honourable peace” with Franco, and he regarded the removal of Negrín and the Communists as a precondition for talks. He was in contact with agents of the Nationalist intelligence service and with the “fifth column” in Madrid, who assured him that professional officers without blood on their hands had nothing to fear. He was also counting on British mediation.

On the same day the Republican fleet – three cruisers and several destroyers – sailed from Cartagena, where fighting had broken out between supporters and opponents of Negrín. It made for Bizerte in French Tunisia and was interned there, and the Republic lost the means with which it could have evacuated people from its ports. When on 7 March the Nationalists sent troopships to Cartagena, believing the town to be in the hands of their sympathisers, the coastal batteries sank the transport Castillo de Olite; according to the most frequently cited figures, more than 1,400 soldiers were killed. Negrín, his ministers and the Communist leaders, among them Dolores Ibárruri, known as La Pasionaria, flew to France on 6 March from an airfield between Elda and Monóvar, so as not to be arrested and handed over to Franco.

In Madrid Republicans fought Republicans. Corps of the Army of the Centre loyal to the Communists, under Colonel Luis Barceló, took most of the city and shot several of Casado’s officers. After several days of fighting, in which between several hundred and about 2,000 people were killed according to various authors, Mera’s corps prevailed; by 12 March Communist resistance had collapsed. Barceló was sentenced by a court martial and shot. At the same time, on 15 March, Hitler seized Prague, and the European war on which Negrín had been counting was closer than ever. For the Republic, however, it came too late.

Unconditional surrender

The National Defence Council offered Franco peace with a guarantee of no reprisals and a period during which those who wished could leave Spain. Franco replied that he would accept only unconditional surrender and that individual cases would be dealt with by his courts. On 23 and 25 March Casado’s emissaries, Colonel Antonio Garijo and Major Leopoldo Ortega, held talks with Nationalist staff officers at Gamonal airfield near Burgos. They were told that the Republic was to hand over its air force on 25 March and that its troops were to hoist white flags on 27 March. When on 25 March the aircraft were not handed over, partly because of bad weather, Franco broke off the talks.

On 26 March the final offensive began, dubbed the “Victory Offensive” by Francoist propaganda. The troops of General Juan Yagüe struck in the Sierra Morena and within a single day overran a large area, taking tens of thousands of prisoners. On 27 March the armies on the Toledo front and in Extremadura went over to the attack, together with General Gastone Gambara’s Italian Corpo Truppe Volontarie. The Defence Council ordered that no resistance be offered. The front ceased to exist: soldiers threw down their weapons and went home or into captivity. On 28 March the commander of the Army of the Centre, Colonel Adolfo Prada, handed Madrid over to the Nationalists, who entered the city without a fight after a siege of two years and four months. Supporters of the victors, released from embassies, hiding places and prisons, poured into the streets with Falangist slogans and pictures of Franco. Besteiro, who had refused to flee, remained in his office at the Ministry of Finance and was arrested there. Sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment, he died in 1940 in the prison at Carmona.

Casado and most members of the council went to Valencia and from there to the port of Gandía, where a British cruiser took them off in the last days of March. Over the following days the Nationalists took Jaén, Ciudad Real, Cuenca, Albacete, Valencia, Alicante, Murcia, Almería and Cartagena without a fight. By 31 March the whole of Spain was in their hands.

The port of Alicante

The most tragic scenes were played out in the Mediterranean ports. Tens of thousands of Republicans who knew that death awaited them under Franco – officers, commissars, party and trade-union activists, officials – converged on Alicante, Valencia, Gandía and Cartagena. They waited for the ships promised by the Defence Council and by relief organisations in France and Britain. Most shipowners cancelled their contracts for fear of the Nationalist navy and air force, and the governments in London and Paris organised no evacuation. On the evening of 28 March the British collier Stanbrook under Captain Archibald Dickson left Alicante; against the owner’s instructions she took on 2,638 people, crammed on deck and in the holds, and brought them to Oran in Algeria. She was the last large ship to get away.

Some 15,000 people were left in the port of Alicante. On 30 and 31 March the port was surrounded by units of the Italian Littorio Division. Gambara was inclined to allow the evacuation of those most at risk, but on 31 March the Spaniards took over command. Several dozen people took their own lives on the quayside rather than fall into the hands of the victors. The rest surrendered on 31 March and on the morning of 1 April. They were herded into a makeshift camp in the Los Almendros almond grove near Alicante, and then to the camp at Albatera, where prisoners were screened in search of those with “blood on their hands”. Many of them were shot, and many died of hunger and disease.

1 April

Franco issued his last war communiqué in Burgos, where, according to his biographers, he lay ill with influenza. The communiqué spoke not of reconciliation or peace but only of the “Red Army” disarmed and taken captive. In the weeks that followed the victory was celebrated lavishly. The new Pope, Pius XII, congratulated Franco on the “longed-for victory of Catholic Spain”, and on 16 April, in a radio message to the Spanish people, spoke of “immense joy”. On 19 May a great victory parade was held in Madrid, in which Italian soldiers, the Condor Legion and Moroccan Regulares marched alongside Spanish units; on that day Franco received Spain’s highest military decoration, the Laureate Cross of Saint Ferdinand. The United States recognised Franco’s government on 1 April, and on the same day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt lifted the arms embargo on Spain. The only great power that did not recognise the new state was Joseph Stalin’s USSR.

The victor immediately showed which side he would take in Europe. On 27 March, before the fighting was over, Spain signed its accession to the Anti-Comintern Pact in Burgos, which was announced at the beginning of April. On 31 March it concluded a treaty of friendship with Germany, and on 17 March in Lisbon a pact of friendship and non-aggression with the Portugal of António de Oliveira Salazar. In May and June 1939 the Italian corps and the Condor Legion left Spain and were welcomed in Naples and Berlin like victorious armies.

The victors’ peace

The defeated were treated as criminals. Franco’s troops took some 150,000 prisoners in the final offensive, and in the course of 1939 hundreds of thousands passed through concentration camps. Historians have counted between over a hundred and nearly three hundred camps of various sizes during and after the war, in which prisoners were divided into the “recoverable” and the “irrecoverable”. Official statistics for 1940 showed some 270,000 prisoners. Military courts passed sentence by summary procedure, often on the basis of denunciations. Historians estimate the number of people shot after 1 April 1939 at no fewer than 20,000, and according to some studies at nearly 50,000. Tens of thousands were sent to forced-labour battalions that built roads, dams and mines, and later also the mausoleum of the Valle de los Caídos. Teachers, officials and doctors were purged from their jobs, and the families of the defeated paid fines under the Law of Political Responsibilities.

Some half a million Spaniards went into exile in 1939. Some returned within a few months, often straight into screening camps, but according to various estimates between over 100,000 and about 200,000 people remained in exile for many years. Most of them stayed in France. The Mexico of President Lázaro Cárdenas, which had supported the Republic throughout the war, took in some twenty-odd thousand refugees, among them many scholars, writers and artists. The ship Winnipeg, whose voyage was organised by the poet Pablo Neruda, carried over 2,000 Spaniards to Chile. Negrín and his government-in-exile did not accept defeat, but the Republican emigration split into supporters and opponents of his policy and never regained its unity.

What followed

The end of the war in Spain came in the weeks when Europe was heading straight for war. The day before, on 31 March 1939, Chamberlain had announced the British guarantee to Poland, and a week later Italy was to attack Albania. Hitler and Mussolini came out of Spain convinced that the democracies would not fight: for almost three years they had looked on idly as the Axis powers intervened in Spain, and in the end they had recognised their protégé. The Luftwaffe brought back from Spain experience that it put to use over Poland a few months later. Stalin, for his part, concluded that London and Paris could not be relied on, which in August 1939 pushed him towards an agreement with Hitler.

Exhausted Spain, however, was in no condition to fight. When the Second World War broke out, Franco declared neutrality; in June 1940, after the fall of France, he changed it to “non-belligerence” and occupied the international zone of Tangier. He was ready to enter the war in return for Gibraltar, French Morocco and large deliveries of grain and fuel, but at the Hendaye meeting on 23 October 1940 Hitler was unwilling to pay that price. Spain stayed out of the war, although in 1941 it sent the volunteer Blue Division to the Eastern Front, and German arms industry received tungsten from it. The war also caught up with the defeated. Spanish Republicans from the French camps were drafted into labour companies and the Foreign Legion, and fought in the Resistance and in Free French units. After the fall of France the Germans deported more than 7,000 of them to Mauthausen, where over 4,000 died; the authorities in Madrid made no effort on their behalf. The Gestapo handed over to Franco the President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Lluís Companys, who was shot in Barcelona in October 1940. The dictatorship that Franco built on the victory of 1 April 1939 outlived the defeat of his allies and lasted until his death in 1975.