SPANISH REPUBLICANS AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR

The Spanish Civil War raged for three years from 1936 almost until the outbreak of World War II, when the Fascist General Franco finally defeated the democratically elected Republican government. Franco was supported by the Fascist regimes of Mussolini and Hitler in Italy and Germany, while European nations including Britain and France maintained neutrality, even in the face of such atrocities as the bombing of civilians at Guernica, immortalised in the painting by Picasso. This gripping book tells the story of the defeated Republicans, many of whom joined the French army to fight the Nazis in World War II, although when the occupation of France brought Hitler's troops closer to the Spanish border there were also those who collaborated with the German army. In the autumn of 1938 the desperate Republican troops retreated eastwards with obsolete weaponry supplied by their so-called ally Stalin, while the US continued to ban the supply of arms to either side. When Barcelona fell, many refugees crossed the Pyrenees to France as German planes strafed the columns. The refugees were herded into concentration camps, for instance Gurs near the Pyrenean border, later used as a transit centre for Auschwitz and other extermination camps. The Vichy regime seized the opportunity of using Republican refugees as cheap labour, some of them in German civil and military engineering projects. The author follows those who escaped to north Africa and retells the incredible story of the double agent Pujol, who established 22 fictitious spies in Britain supplying fake intelligence to the Germans. 114,000 people who disappeared at the hands of the Franco dictatorship are still unaccounted for, as leaders like de Gaulle and Churchill left Spain to sort out its own affairs. 304pp, glossary, photos.