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SPANISH HISTORY

The unknown story of Spain’s concentration camps

The history of Spain's Civil War and dictatorship is well known and remains divisive in modern society. What many might not realise is that Spain had up to 300 concentration camps and the last wasn't closed until the mid-1960s.

Published: 7 November 2023 15:50 CET
Updated: 11 November 2023 08:22 CET
The unknown story of Spain's concentration camps
As many as a million Spaniards (as well as a small number of International Brigade fighters) were held in concentration camps in Spain. Photo: Public Domain/Wikipedia

The history of Spain’s bloody Civil War and brutal dictatorship that followed is well known.

For many Spaniards, it is still something of an open wound in society, and modern day political divides often follow those historical fault lines.

Recent legislation passed by the Spanish government has attempted to make amends with that history, but it has proven very controversial.

It is also fairly well known that although Spain stayed out of the Second World War, the Franco regime was sympathetic to Hitler and Nazism.

Many historians suggest that Franco’s nationalist army would not have won the Civil War without crucial supplies from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and Franco even moved the Spanish clocks forward by an hour in homage to Hitler, an historical oddity that remains to this day.

READ ALSO: Why Spain is still in the wrong time zone because of Hitler

What is lesser known, however, is that like in Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain had concentration camps.

In fact, in recent years Spanish historians have re-estimated the extent to which concentration camps were used during the Civil War and dictatorship, with experts now putting the number at almost 300.

As many as a million Spaniards (as well as a small number of International Brigade fighters) were held in concentration camps in Spain, spending an average of five years there. Incredibly, the last camp was not shut down until the mid-1960s.

According to the website Los campos de concentración de Franco: “In Spain there were also concentration camps in which tens of thousands of men and women ended up murdered, suffered mistreatment, died of hunger and disease, endured the onslaught of an army of lice on their bodies and were subjected to a cruel process of “re-education” aimed at renouncing their principles and accepting the dogmas imposed by Francoism and the Catholic Church.”

The first camp was opened in the city of Zeluán, in the former Protectorate of Morocco, near Melilla (still a Spanish autonomous city to this day) on July 19th, 1936, and the last was closed in Fuerteventura at the end of the 1960s.

Andalusia had the most concentration camps, with 52. The Valencian Community came next, with 41, followed by Castilla la Mancha with 38, Castilla y León (24), Aragon (18), Extremadura (17), Madrid (16), Catalonia (14), Asturias (12), Galicia and Murcia (11), Cantabria (10), Basque Country (9), Balearic Islands (7), Canary Islands (5), Navarre (2), La Rioja (2) and Ceuta, along with the former Spanish colonies in North Africa, with 5 in total.

Around a third of the total camps were “what we aesthetically imagine as concentration camps, that is, outdoor land with barracks surrounded by barbed wire. Seventy percent were in bullrings, convents, factories or sports fields,” Carlos Hernández, author of The Concentration Camps of Franco, told El Diario.

None of the prisoners had been tried or formally accused, even by Franco’s courts, and the vast majority were captured Republican fighters, although there were also “mayors or left-wing militants” captured after the war.

A distinctive feature of Spanish concentration camps was that “prisoners were considered criminals and lost the status of prisoners of war,” Gutmaro Gómez Bravo, historian from the Complutense University of Madrid, told El País. “They had not been accused of anything nor had they been convicted”.

Concentration camp inmates forced to do the fascist salute before singing the Spanish fascist anthem ‘Cara Al Sol’. Photo: Spain’s National Library
 

However, unlike Nazi camps, being sent to one was not necessarily a death sentence. Javier Rodrigo, Professor of History at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, told El País that although “there was no particular desire to treat the prisoners well, there was no extermination plan either, because they were interested in reusing them for their army.”

“They (the concentration camps) were spaces in which prisoners of war are interned, classified and re-educated,” Rodrigo adds.

Each of the prisoners was investigated, mainly through reports from local mayors, priests, Guardia Civil agents and Francoist officials.

Based on this information, prisoners were put into three groups: the forajidos, outlaws considered “unrecoverable”, many of whom were sent to prison or shot; the “forced brothers”, that is, those thought to be Franco sympathisers but forced to fight for the Republicans during the war; and the “disaffected” or “deceived”, those who were on the Republican side but the repressors valued that they did not have a firm ideology and that they were “recoverable.”

The “disaffected” were usually sentenced to forced labour, and during the Civil War they were forced to dig trenches. When the war ended, they were mainly used to rebuild villages or roads.

Hernández’s research has revealed that the prisoners suffered physical and psychological torture along with ideological brainwashing.

They were forced to go to Mass, take Communion, and sing the fascist anthem Cara Al Sol every day. Research has also uncovered testimonies of famines and diseases such as typhus, tuberculosis and lice plagues killing thousands of prisoners. Many were killed in the camp itself by fascist troops, and many died of starvation or disease.

In November 1939, months after the end of the war, a number of the concentration camps were closed, officially at least.

However, some camps, what Hernández calls the “late concentration camps,” continued. More were even created during the 1940s and 1950s for different groups of prisoners and people deemed undesirable by the dictatorship.

Notable post-war camps include Nanclares de Oca (Álava), La Algaba (Seville), Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura, the latter two of which were designated for Moroccan prisoners of the Ifni war and closed in 1959.

Shockingly, it wasn’t until 1966 that the Agricultural Penitentiary Colony in Tefía, Fuerteventura, a camp where homosexuals were imprisoned and “re-educated”, was finally closed.

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SPAIN EXPLAINED

Why does Spain have no nuclear weapons?

Despite a top secret project to build them during the dictatorship, Spaniards have never been keen on the idea of nuclear weapons, especially since the US accidentally dropped four nuclear bombs on Almería.

Published: 15 April 2024 16:36 CEST
Why does Spain have no nuclear weapons?

Spain isn’t part of the reduced group of nations that have nuclear weapons, which includes European neighbours the UK and France.

It has never tested nuclear weapons, does not manufacture them, nor has it bought them from nuclear allies who make them.

Spain is still a NATO member and doesn’t shy away from involving itself in foreign policy debates, often taking positions against the mainstream.

But it has still never joined the nuclear club nor have Spaniards ever really wanted to, even though former dictator Francisco Franco had different ideas (more on that below).

In fact, Spaniards seem to have an indifferent if not abnormally negative view of nukes, largely stemming from an accident by an American air force on Spanish soil in the 1960s.

READ ALSO: How important is nuclear power to Spain?

A 2018 study on state attitudes towards nuclear weapons concluded that Spain had “little to no interest in nuclear weapons.” Yet Spain still benefits from NATO’s so-called ‘nuclear umbrella’ defence and has nearby neighbours, including France and the United Kingdom, that are nuclear powers. It is also home to several American military bases.

In that sense, Spain balances a somewhat unique position of being pro-nuclear for other countries and as a broader defence deterrence at the global level, but not on Spanish territory because it knows that would not sit well with Spaniards.

But why is this? Why doesn’t Spain have nuclear weapons?

Anti-nuclear sentiment among Spaniards

According to an article for Institut Montaigne by Clara Portela, Professor of Political Science at the University of Valencia, the Spanish people are “sensitised on nuclear weapons, if not negatively disposed towards them.”

Much of it comes down to history and, in particular, an accident involving nuclear weapons on Spanish soil. As part of post-war defence and security agreements Spain made with the U.S, American nuclear weapons were kept on Spanish soil.

Spaniards weren’t keen on the idea. Portela notes that “their presence at the Torrejón base near Madrid was a controversial issue” among the public, but it was an accident in 1966 that really soured Spaniards to nuclear weapons after an American aircraft carrying a hydrogen bomb crashed and dropped the device in the waters near the town of Palomares off the coast of Almería.

READ ALSO: Ten of the best documentaries about Spain

The incident caused “one of the bombs to fall to the seabed and leak radioactivity” into the surrounding area, Portela states, something that would have no doubt hardened many Spaniard’s perceptions towards nuclear weapons, especially as the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still in living memory for many.

A NATO-nuclear referendum

This scepticism towards nuclear arms was solidified twenty years later in a referendum on NATO membership. Though the government of the day campaigned for continued membership of the military alliance, it made it conditional on Spain also continuing as a non-nuclear power. A clause in the referendum consultation outlined this condition: “The prohibition to install, store or introduce nuclear weapons on Spanish soil will be maintained.”

Spaniards backed their continued, non-nuclear NATO membership by 13 percent.

A year later, in 1987, Spain formally signed the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), further cementing its non-nuclear stance.

And that was it — with this and the result of the referendum, Portela suggests that “the issue of nuclear weapons was all but archived. It hardly re-surfaced in public debates for decades.”

An atomic bomb of the type nicknamed “Little Boy” that was dropped by a US Army Air Force B-29 bomber in 1945 over Hiroshima, Japan. (Photo by LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIFIC LABORATORY / AFP)

The nuclear dictator?

Despite the Spanish public’s distrust of nuclear weapons, there was one Spaniard in particular who was quite keen on the idea: Franco.

In what may be one of the most terrifying historical ‘what ifs’ ever, the fascist dictator wanted to equip Spain with a nuclear arsenal, started a project to do so, and came very close to achieving it.

The ‘Islero Project’, as it was known, was top secret and lasted for several decades of scientific research until it was finally abandoned in the 1980s after his death.

Firstly, a brief consideration of the geopolitics of the time is worthwhile here, and it concerns the Americans again. When the Second World War ended in 1945, Spain immediately became isolated on the international stage owing to its support for Nazi Germany and fascist Spain. It was excluded from the UN and shunned as a real player in international relations.

As the Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation grew throughout the 1950s, Franco’s fierce anti-communism combined with the strategic geographical positioning of Spain led the U.S. to form closer ties with the dictatorship, promising financial aid and image rehabilitation in return for allowing American military bases in Spain.

READ ALSO: Where are the US’s military bases in Spain and why are they there?

The Junta de Energía Nuclear was created in 1951, undertaking research and atomic energy development more broadly, and it sent promising researchers to study in the U.S. When they returned, the Islero project continued in secret.

Rather bizarrely, it was the accident at Palomares years later that actually gave the scientists the key to designing an atomic bomb. Unconvinced by the American’s explanations for the debacle, the Spaniards working on plans discovered the Ulam-Teller method, which was fundamental to the development of the thermonuclear bomb or H-bomb.

However, the project was then frozen by Franco himself because he feared the United States would discover that Spain was trying to develop its own atomic bomb and impose economic sanctions.

After Franco’s death in 1975, Spanish scientists secretly restarted the project, but in 1982 the new Socialist government discovered the plans and disbanded the project. By 1987 the González government announced Spain’s accession to the Non-Proliferation Treaty NPT and the issue has rarely even come up as an issue since then.

And despite that, Spain is a NATO member, regularly attends the G20, and often plays a leading role on the global stage. Certain elements of the dictatorship had eyes on building a nuclear arsenal, but it never happened. Franco ultimately worried about the economic repercussions of being discovered, and Spaniards were themselves sceptical about the idea based on the experience in Palomares.

In terms of nuclear weapons, Spain is what Portela describes as a ‘de-proliferation’ state – in other words, a country that aspired to have nuclear bombs but reversed it.

It doesn’t look like changing anytime soon either. A survey in 2021 showed that Spain had the highest level of support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, with a massive 89 percent majority.

READ ALSO: Why is Spain not in the G20 (but is always invited)?

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