‘Viva la muerte!’

The Spanish Holocaust is a book that will give readers nightmares: it gave me two in a single night. Even people who think they have read enough about the Spanish Civil War to feel inured to its horrors will still be appalled by the intensity of the cruelty and repression here revealed.

‘Of the folly and wickedness of the military rising’, wrote Gerald Brenan in The Spanish Labyrinth, ‘there can today be no two opinions.’ Nor today, more than 60 years after he wrote those words, can there be two opinions about the sadistic and merciless repression planned and perpetrated by General Franco and his conspirators.  Reading Paul Preston’s narrative is like watching a Spanish Schindler’s List without a Spanish Schindler.

Francoist propaganda at the time led Winston Churchill and many other people to believe that the atrocities carried out by the Republicans were very much greater than those committed by the Nationalist rebels.