As the Nationalists captured Republican-held
territory, prominent Republican leaders, civil and
military, were murdered in their tens of thou-
sands. Terror was a weapon used to cow working-
class populations. On the Republican side attacks
were indiscriminately directed against the Church.
The Church’s political identification with the right
(except in the Basque provinces) was beyond
doubt, but the Church had not participated in
the uprising. Twelve bishops and thousands of
priests and monks were murdered. Many thou-
sands suspected of sympathy with the Nationalists
were summarily executed. The government of the
Republic could not control its followers in this
bloody lawlessness. The bitter hatreds of the frat-
ricidal war have lived on as long as survivors of
both sides remain to recall the atrocities of three
years of war. These murders on both sides have
been estimated to total a ghastly 130,000 (75,000
committed by the Nationalists and 55,000 by
the Republicans). To these losses must be added
deaths in battle – 90,000 Nationalists and
110,000 Republicans – and death from all other
causes, about 500,000, out of a total population
of 25 million.
The Republicans had the difficult task of
welding together an effective central government
in Madrid from all the disparate forces of the left,
and a cohesive army from the many military for-
mations that had gathered spontaneously. The
Communists, declaring that the ‘revolution’ had
to be postponed, joined the moderate Socialists
and Republicans. Largo Caballero headed a
Popular Front government in the autumn of
1936 which even the anarchists, dominant in
Catalonia and Barcelona, joined. But the left
could not maintain unity through the war. Their
‘fraternal’ strife, with the communists fighting the
anarchists and the anti-Stalinist Marxists (known
by their initials as POUM), was the main cause
of the ultimate defeat of the Republic. On the
other side, despite the heterogeneous political
complexion of the Nationalists, Franco and the
army dominated and created an effective unity
and an impressive fighting force.
After the Nationalist advances in August to
October 1936, the Republic still held half of Spain
- the whole east and south-east, as well as a strip in
the north. Madrid remained in government hands,
having repulsed the Nationalist advance. In 1937
the Nationalists finally overcame Basque resistance
in the north. In Madrid the government was reor-
ganised to take a stronger line against dissidents.
The Communists, whose strength rapidly grew,
took a lead in fighting against the POUM and the
anarchists. Caballero was replaced as premier by a
socialist professor, Dr Juan Negrin. By now the
Republicans had organised a well-disciplined army.
In the winter of 1937 the Republican army
launched an offensive against the Nationalists.
Franco’s counter-offensive, however, recovered all
the lost territory and went on to split the Republic
in half, separating Barcelona and Catalonia from
central and southern Spain. The defeat of the
Republic appeared imminent. Unexpectedly the
Republicans won a short-lived victory in the sum-
mer of 1938, but then in the autumn suffered a
catastrophic defeat when Franco counter-attacked.
Internationally the Republic simultaneously sus-
tained devastating blows. France, which intermit-
tently had allowed arms to pass the Pyrenees
frontier, closed it, and Stalin gave up sending aid to
the Republic. Franco’s victories and the desertion
of the Soviet Union and France doomed the
Republic. In January 1939 Barcelona fell. Still
Negrin inspired the final resistance. The Republic
came to an end in confusion, with part of its own
armed forces in rebellion. At the end of March
1939, Madrid finally capitulated to Franco’s army.
The Spanish Civil War was over. It had
dragged on with enormous loss of life. Refugees
now flooded across the Pyrenees into France. But
Europe’s attention was only momentarily fixed on
the final agony. War between the European
powers had been only narrowly averted in the
autumn of 1938, and now in March 1939 Hitler
again held the centre of the stage. The world
would soon turn upside down. The Communists,
seen by the left-wing idealists as the real oppo-
nents of the Fascists and Nazis in Spain, would
that same year, in September 1939, praise Hitler
and condemn the imperialist-capitalist Western
democracies for going to war to check Nazi
expansion in Europe.
German and Italian help had been critical in
the early stages of the war and favoured Franco’s
advance to the gates of Madrid. But massive
Soviet military assistance including planes and