The original idea for Postwar Trials in Catalonia was born during the fall of 2020. I was writing a paper for the seminar Archives, Records and Memory about a compilation of letters written by victims of the immediate postwar repression (1939-44) in the province of Girona, Catalonia (Spain). While doing research on the current legal status of these crimes, I found out they were officially declared null in Catalonia in 2017, while still continuing to be legally binding in the rest of Spain. As a part of the process of reparation to the family of the victims, the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalonia’s regional government) gave permission to the National Catalan Archive to publish all the names and information they could find on the archives of the 63,961 defendants that had to undergo court-martial trials between 1939 and 1978. This publication has been, since then, available for everyone to consult online or download, titled La sèrie documental: Procediments judicials militars sumaríssims (Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya, 2017).
But while browsing the list, I realized how useful it would be to make the data contained in that PDF file more accessible and easily searchable to the public. Thus, Postwar Trials in Catalonia was born. Its principal objective is to illustrate the data contained in that lengthy dataset in order to make it more accessible and comprehensible to the public, as it contains information that had not been available for the last 80 years to the general audience. In addition, this project will also offer some data contextualization, and will ponder on the questions this data lays out for future research and discourse around this topic.
"En el día de hoy, cautivo y desarmado el Ejército Rojo, han alcanzado las tropas nacionales sus últimos objetivos militares. La guerra ha terminado" [Today the Red Army has been captured and disarmed, and the National troops have reached their last objectives. The war is over]. With this brief message to be broadcasted of the National Radio, written by Francisco Franco himself on April 1st 1939, the Spanish Civil War was over. After the fall of Catalonia, which had been acting as the Republic center of operations in January, and Madrid's in late March, the Francoist army culminated the coup started in 1936 against the Republican government. However, not satisfied by the violent response against Republican troops and civilians during the war years, the newly appointed totalitarian administration set out to work on an extensive piece of legislation with the objective of prosecuting any ideological or political dissidence to the movement of La Falange.
This process would be called Causa General (1940) and it targeted and prosecuted any belief that went against the ideals the insurgent side upheld (Religion, Fatherland, Family, Order and Property) and required the eradication of, in General Emilio Mola’s words, "those who don’t think like we do” (Preston, 28). Under the Ley de responsabilidades políticas [Law of Political Responsabilities] (1939), the decade of purge and violence known as the First Francoism saw the prosecution of those who had hindered “el triumfo providencial e históricamente inaludible del Movimiento Nacional” so they could erase “sus yerros pasados (…) y puedan convivir dentro de una España grande y rindan a sus servicio todos sus esfuerzos y todos sus sacrificios” [the providential and historically inevitable triumph of the National Movement ... their past mistakes and could coexist within a great Spain to which they can dedicate all their efforts and sacrifices] (BOE, 02/13/1939, 824).
This judicial process was also to bring justice to the victims of the repression on the sites where the Republic had resisted during the three years the civil war lasted. Preston quotes the calculations of José Luis Ledesma of 49,272 victims as the most accurate, and attributes this precision to the records of identified bodies kept by Republican authorities, as well as the subsequent investigations made by Franco's dictatorship (Preston, 29). However, the deaths of Republican soldiers or civilians on the Francoist side are much more difficult to estimate due to the lack of records -since there was a deliberate destruction of records and archives during the sixties (Preston, 31-32) and that no serious investigations could be carried out before Franco’s death in 1975. Preston estimates the number of extra-judicial victims to be “no fewer than 150.000” (35), to which we must add 20.000 more executions of Republican people after Franco’s victory in 1939 (16).
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This piece of legislation, approved on February 9th, 1939 (just under two months before the Civil War ended), called for the "expiation of culpability" of those who had contributed --by act or omission-- to the "red subversion" (referring to the Second Spanish Republic, 1936-9), and to "keep it alive for two years".
However, as we can see in the visualization below, while systematic executions (often by firing squad) were one of the most infamous elements of the Francoist repression, they represented a small -albeit significant- percentage of the total amount of sentences called by martial-courts during that first period of repression. While that doesn't make the number any less significant (4,275 death sentences in total --3,368 of which were executed--, out of 63,961 trials), it also highlights that despite often focusing on the most brutal ones, postwar retaliation and ideological prosecution may take many forms. It also shows how, despite the initial reaction of retaliation decreasing after 1944, the number of martial-court cases had an unsteady growth and decrease all through the dictatorship, which can lead us to question what events took place during those years that sparked these peaks in political prosecution. We can also observe how, during the Transition Period, characterized by protests and riots, the number of martial-court cases shows a minor but unwavering increase.
One of the most significant effects of the Causa General was the attempt to forge a new national identity "according to the National spirit of the War effort" (Richards, 127) and therefore, eliminate any discourse that threatened Francoism’s main narrative. Richards refers to it as “an imposed quarantine or silencing signified the continuation of war as a work of cultural destruction in the broadest sense” (2), and points out that, thanks to this institutionalization of victory and defeat, the Falange were able to monopolize the public memory and the public voice (4).
Vital to this domain of the public narrative about the revolution and the war was the silencing of the repressed parties through the Causa General, in which the atmosphere of fear "had real effects on social relations to memory: morality and solidarity were undermined in the rush to demonstrate loyalty", since even those who were desperate and fearful would denounce their neighbors. Richards points out this fear even divided generations within families, and kids were kept in the dark about their parents' recent past out of the concern they might share it with others, and they would be accused of having aided or sympathized with the Republican side (127).
This might explain the tendency towards decreasing long prison sentences and executions after the first few years: once those susceptible of being investigated witnessed the ferocity of the retaliation, terror of facing a military court acted as a dissuasive element. For instance, in 1939, 7,566 men were sentenced to 12 years of jail in 1939; 3,350 to 20 years; 2,989 to 15 years, and 3,527 to death and 277 sent to labor or concentration camps. However, by 1946, out of 369 total trials, 127 were let go under varying degrees of responsibility; 116 received prison sentences between 6 months and 6 years; 17 were sentenced to 20-year sentences and 14 received death sentences. After seven years of suspicion, denunciation and institutionalized executions of political dissidence, the fear of being accused and tried often acted as a deterrent to any kind of organized resistance.
The data visualization below not only permits us to see the evolution of the type of sentencing the defendants received over the years, but also the disparity in numbers and sentences between men and women. In 1939, 41,900 men underwent a martial-court trial in Catalonia, compared to 4,049 women. Out of these women defendants, 2,177 received different degrees of acquittal, while we have to go to the fourth most recurring sentence to see the first major prison sentences (395 were condemned to 12 years of reclusion), and finally, 33 were sentenced to death. The Falange, the only party allowed by the Franco administration, was intensely catholic and conservative and therefore, women were relegated to the private sphere, and that seems to have included the avoidance of institutional public castigation.
Figure 2. Despite executions being the most infamous result of court-trials, data shows that long prison sentences were the prevalent repressive sentence given to defendants in the first years. Despite this, it's relevant to notice that up to the last years of the dictatorship, there were still executions for political reasons.
Out of the four provinces of Catalonia, the one with a more elevated concentration of cases is Barcelona. In the stacked chart below (Figure 3) we can observe that, as time moves forward, the total amount of cases in the province of Barcelona, where the Catalan capital is located, quadruples the number of trials the remaining Catalan provinces (Girona, Tarragona and Lleida).
Figure 3. The evolution of total cases per province over the years (1939-1979).
Barcelona has historically been the most demographically dense region in all Catalonia, with around one million residents in 1936. It also was the political center of the Republic in Catalonia and 1936's revolution in response to the military coup, and even hosted the Spanish Republican government from 1937, as well as the Basque government. So the sum of all these factors paint a very clear picture of why Franco and his administration might have been particularly ruthless in their retaliation against the Catalan capital since, as we can see in Figure 3, the capital also has the largest number of total executions over trials from all regions. The based-on step values graph (Figure 4) shows how the migratory movements from the people that appear in the dataset at the beginning of the 20th century can explain the large distance between the number of cases in Barcelona and the other provinces. It is also significant how Barcelona was the main place of residence of the defendants that had been born outside Catalonia (represented in the category "Other"). All of the factors mentioned above might have lead to this province having a positive net migration rate, whilst all the other ones had a negative one.
Figure 4. The flows of migration between the 4 main Catalan provinces.
Outside Barcelona, we can see the density of repression tends to go hand in hand with density of population. In the municipal map that appears in the Figure 5 below, we can see how Barcelona has the highest number of cases (21,311), followed by some of the cities in the so-called Metropolitan Area (municipalities that surround the capital). The cities of Lleida, Tarragona and Girona --capitals of the homonymous provinces-- also amass the highest numbers in each region.
It is also significant how generally lower populated areas like the province of Lleida and Tarragona have a relatively high number of cases per municipality. One possible explanation could be that, as we mentioned above, the Francoist troops carried out the "Catalan offensive" by entering the region from the front of Aragon (next to the province of Lleida) and the Delta de l'Ebre. In that area was were the famous Battle of Ebre took place, which cleared the path to Barcelona for the falangist military. The immediate retaliation after this battle against anyone who had fought or supported the Republic in any capacity might explain why less dense municipalities have a similar number of cases than much larger cities. For instance, if we look at the current demographics for Catalan municipalities in the National Institute of Statistics of Catalonia, the Idescat, and we take into account that most municipalities had a similar number of residents all through the 20th century, Amposta has a total of 313 cases for its current 21.115 residents, and Tremp accumulates 553 cases for its 33.000 residents. To put it in perspective, Manresa concentrates a similar amount of cases (690) with more than double the citizens (78.000 residents); or Girona, with 103.000 residents, amounts to 790 total martial-court cases. Of course, and taking on Preston's previously mentioned observation, the proximity of Girona to the French border might have favored the evasion of those susceptible to being put on trial, while this might have been more difficult in more remote areas like Tarragona.
Besides that, this map presents interesting individual cases that might be a good first step towards more localized research. That would be the case of Santa Coloma de Queralt, a small municipality that has oscillated between 2,000 and 3,000 habitants all through the 20th century and that, yet, it has a total number of 355 cases. This is a good cut off point between the possibilities and impossibilities of data. It gives us an opportunity to formulate questions that need to be answered with in-person research.
Figure 5. Map of total amount of trials (1939-1979) per Catalan municipality. Please zoom in to properly explore the map.
For the moment, it is not possible to create a map like the one above with all the locations of the victims that appear in the dataset, as the coordinates provided in it don't correspond to individual points but rather a standard location in the municipality they lived in. That prevents us from being able to give each of the people behind the numbers in the dataset their own representation in this map. While some of the cases are prominent enough to not need the creation of a digital visualization for remembrance, most of the people that appear in that list are only remembered by their families, 80 years later. This difference can be appreciated in the dataset itself, where all the names were left in Spanish (the Francoist administration banned all Catalan on an administrative level, including Catalan names), except for Lluís Companys'. Companys was the president of Catalonia in 1934, and was captured by the Gestapo when France was invaded by the German army in 1940. He was deported back to Spain, where Franco had him executed by firing squad on October 15, 1940, while still being President of Catalonia. The official annulment of all sentences dictated in Catalonia also means, in this particular case, a legislative step towards reclaiming Companys' execution as a state crime, rather than the the result of a court-martial trial sentence for his trajectory as a Catalanist Republican, and for "adhering to the military rebellion" (meaning the Republican goverment, DOGC, XXVIII). His death certificate points out his death was caused by "traumatic internal hemorrhage" (DOGC, XXXIII).
While the elaboration of an individual map is a project that will have to be shelved for now, we still wanted to elaborate a piece of data visualization that allows for people to look for individual defendants. This is the objective this hierarchy tree graphic has, since we often refer to "Republicanism" as a movement, but Richards warns against the agglutination of different political causes under the "Republican identity". The reason for this is that it presents a much more widespread and generic political cause, and it distances it from many of the class-struggle movements like marxism or anarchism, and national movements like Catalan or Basque, that integrated it. Likewise, when we talk about the "Republican victims" we do it in an abstract way, placing thousands of different biographies, identities and political struggles under one big umbrella, that depersonalizes them. However, many of those who had been arguing for the annulment of the Franco era political crimes have been the descendants of those who were unjustly tried decades ago. Figure 6 aims to name each of the tens of thousands people who were tried for their involvement or association with any political cause that did not agree with La Falange's.
Figure 6. Tree map with all the individual names of each defendant organized by their municipality of residence.
“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory”: this is the first sentence of Viet Thang Nguyen Nothing Ever Dies (2016), about the dispute for memory in the Vietnam war. This adage can also be applied in the current struggle in forming a public conversation about historical memory in Spain. Much like wounds need to be sanitized before they can properly heal, the past often needs to be addressed in order to be able to move forward. If these crimes and executions are still a matter of contention nowadays is because of the Amnesty Law of 1977, that prevented the prosecution and trial of any crime related to the dictatorship era. Many decades of inactivity towards any kind of investigation by the Spanish government of the crimes committed by Franco's dictatorship could be considered part of the “structural violence caused by the bureaucracy and especially, recordkeeping” (or a lack of thereof) Gilliland and McKemish mention when, in a similar historical context, they reflect on the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars (111). Archives, records and data can be and usually are tools to determine who controls the narrative that the mainstream collective memory discourse takes, particularly on an institutional level. Even after the democratic transition, Preston points out (32), it was not until 1985 that the Spanish government started to take steps to protect the state archive’s resources. In this context, any kind of action with the goal of giving visibility or investigating these crimes is already a conscious effort to partake in this conversation.
Labanyi reflects on if there’s any forgiveness and reconciliation possible after the Amnesty Law of 1977, especially since when it comes to distributing responsibilities, this area that has barely been broached in Spain, “unlike Germany, France or Holland, where there has been a considerable debate on the widespread complicity with Nazism of the population at large” (199). She addresses the issue of the power imbalance between victims and perpetrators citing, for example, the strategy to depoliticize the narrative in collections that compile the atrocities Republicans committed during the Civil War, and those that equalize both sides present the Civil War as a time of collective madness in order to avoid any kind of responsibility for the insurgent side. The question implicit in Labanyi’s writing is, then, how can there be forgiveness and healing when, for more than sixty years, there has been a lack of interlocutors that are willing to assume any kind of responsibility. In fact, she points out that not only there were no official attempts to any type of investigation, but that there also have not existed any steps towards reconciliation (201-3).
So far, the amnesty is still in place, and the new Historical Memory Law proposed in 2020 in the Spanish Parliament has sparked a fiery debate. On both occasions (2007 and 2020), the strongest opposition to these Laws of Memory has come from the conservative Partido Popular (amongst the founders of which there are well-known members of the Franco executive, led by the Francoist Minister for Information and Tourism (1962-69) Manuel Fraga Iribarne). In 2007, the then party spokesperson, Ángel Acebes, declared that the law "was a profound mistake” that supposed an attack to “everything the Democratic Transition represents” and that focused it on “remembering the worst of our history instead of highlighting the best” (20minutos, 10/09/2007). Nowadays, the conservative party maintains the discourse that looking back is a disservice towards reconciliation, and it is joined by the extreme-right party Vox, which in October 2020 demanded the derogation of the latest Memory Law saying it is “a threat to freedom of expression”, and that Lluís Companys should be recognized as “one of the main murderers of the Republic and Catalonia” (Tolosa, El País, 10/13/2020). On the other hand, there have been petitions to derogate this amnesty and calls to action to investigate Franco's administration crimes; international ones, like U.N.’s call to revoke this so-called “deal of silence”, as well as calls from the republican leftist party Unidas Podemos, as well as multiple Catalan and Basque nationalist parties. In fact, it was the coalition of Junts Per Catalunya and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, both parties with a nationalist and secessionist agenda, those who drove the piece of legislation that passed in the Catalan Parliament in 2017. It acknowledged, for the first time on an institutional level, that the names that appear in the dataset as victims of war crimes, rather than the perpetrators of them. This attests to the difficulty of this topic still in present day Spain and the significance of contesting the decades-long official narrative of oblivion through the research, analysis and conversation to counterbalance decades of silence.
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