White Terror (Spain)

The "White Terror" in Spain is one of the names given to the atrocities committed on the Nationalist side of the war during its course and after. [ Antony Beevor , "The Battle For Spain; The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939" (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2006), pp.89-94.] The terror included the repression of political opponents in areas under Nationalist occupation, mass executions in areas captured from the Republicans, bombing of civilian areas such as Guernica, Madrid and Barcelona by the Luftwaffe and Italian air force and the establishment of Franquist prisons in the aftermath of the Republicans' defeat.

In areas controlled by the Nationalists, government officials, Popular Front politicians, union leaders, teachers, intellectuals, suspected Freemasons, Basque, Catalan or Galician nationalists, military officers who had supported the Republicans or who wavered, and people suspected of voting for the Popular Front were targeted, usually brought before local committees and imprisoned or executed.

Concrete figures do not exist, as many Communists and Socialists fled Spain after losing the Civil War. Estimates range from 200,000 to four times this figure (800,000) people. They died either as a result of the war or as a result of Nationalist repression after the war. [ Antony Beevor , "The Battle For Spain; The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939" (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2006), p.94.]

Red and White terrors

Following the outbreak of full-scale civil war there was an explosion of atrocities in both the Nationalist and Republican zones. Stanley Payne notes, "during the first months of the fighting most of the deaths did not come from combat on the battlefield but from political executions in the rear--the White and the Red Terror. The bloodiest days of the red terror were at the beginning of the civil war, when the government failed to control of much of its forces in the aftermath of the generals' rising, and large areas of the country fell under the control of local loyalists and militias. [ Antony Beevor , "The Battle For Spain; The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939" (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2006), pp.83-86.] Describing specifically the Red terror, Payne reports that this "began with the murder of some of the rebels as they attempted to surrender after their revolt had failed in several of the key cities. From there it broadened out to wholesale arrests, and sometimes wholesale executions, of landowners and industrialists, people associated with right-wing groups or the Catholic Church." [ [http://libro.uca.edu/payne2/payne26.htm Payne] p. 649]

References

ee also

*Spanish Civil War
*Spain under Franco
*Red Terror