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It's April 1939. Officially, the Spanish Civil War is over. In reality, the violence rumbles on. General Francisco Franco has declared himself El Caudillo, Spain's warlord and savior. Governments across Europe and the world, including the UK and France, recognize him as a legitimate ruler. But the schism through Spanish society, the division between the left-wing Republicans and Franco's right-wing nationalists, has arguably never been deeper.
Coming to power in such a divided land, after such a bloody civil war, many leaders would do their utmost to heal the country and bring the people together. But Franco has absolutely no intention of offering an olive branch to his defeated enemies. Instead, he means to wipe them off the face of the earth. This is part four of the story of Francisco Franco. And this is Real Dictators.
Even before he officially won the war, even before he declared victory on April 1st, 1939, Franco was already intent on creating the legal structures, the judicial structures to persecute his political enemies or his opponents. By the time he declared victory, the beginnings were already there to basically illegalize everything the republic had stood for.
Franco issued a decree known as the Law of Political Responsibilities. The Law of Political Responsibilities basically said that anybody who had supported the opposing side in the civil war would face fines for their political involvement. So I think that tells us quite a lot about Franco's uncompromising attitude to the defeated.
Franco gave a speech on the anniversary of the start of the Civil War, saying that after the Civil War it would be dangerous to let down the guard, that these enemies that they'd been fighting in the Civil War would always be enemies. As he assumes power in the Spanish capital, Madrid, Franco's campaign of terror becomes government policy. He's aided in this endeavour by the FET, the Falange Española Tradicionalista,
The FET is a fusion of different right-wing groups. On one hand, the Falange. They are Spain's vanguard of fascism. On the other hand, the traditionalist Communion. They, like the Falange, are right-wing authoritarians. But what they emphasize is slightly different. The traditionalist Communion are ultra-Catholic and ultra-monarchist. Simply put, the Falange want to transform Spanish society into something brand new.
In their minds, they want Spain to become a hierarchical far-right utopia, with new institutions and new politics. They've been inspired in no small part by Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany. The traditionalist Communion want to wind the clock back. They're extreme conservatives who want the monarchy and the Catholic Church back center stage. Through the Spanish Civil War, these factions have often jostled for position.
vying for the leadership of the right and for the chance to take over the country. Franco steered a careful course between these two groups. Then, in 1937, he officially merged them into a single organization. In Franco's new Spain, this FET will be the only legal political party in the country. Instead of rival interest groups competing for attention, Franco has made sure he only has to deal with a single beast. At Franco's behest,
Death squads round up and gun down known Republican supporters. The FET's treatment of Republican women is particularly brutal. Rape is used as a political tool and as a punishment, as so-called "red women" are attacked and captured by soldiers. Troops march through conquered towns waving rifles adorned with the underwear of women they've violated and murdered. Tens of thousands of women have their heads shaved and are forced to drink laxatives.
They are then paraded through the streets and jeered at as they soil themselves. Many are branded with the Falangist symbol on their breasts. Under the Second Spanish Republic, women enjoyed a brief period of relative liberation. Now the Francoist regime is making an example of them.
Those ideas of the regime affected not just who was in charge of the country, and affected not just what religion was allowed and which one was not, but it affected day-to-day things like gender relations and gender roles, so that all the women who had been liberated, who had felt liberated by the Republican regime, which had legalized divorce, legalized abortion, and secularized marriage,
The Franco regime turned back the clock radically on all that, and everybody who had taken advantage or benefited or just used those new liberties made available by the republic was therefore punished. Marriages that had been conducted by the republic were declared null, which then meant that children coming out of those marriages were illegitimate children.
Children who weren't baptized were discriminated against. So the repressive apparatus targeted people whose ideas didn't align with the regime. But women in particular were very specific targets of that repression as well. Then, after this period of intensive slaughter and sexual violence, come the military trials.
The initial period of occupation when the army first moves in is often accompanied by murders and shootings of political opponents. Gradually over time, those start to decline and the Franco regime moves towards a military trial system. You tended to get large numbers of people tried in the same case
sometimes 60 people, sometimes 40 people, sometimes 20 people, on different charges but in the same case, in cases that were heard in one hour or two hours. So absolutely terrible summary justice with large numbers of executions. We're talking around about 50,000 people killed in the post-Civil War period. Many people also receive long prison sentences.
They're accused of rebellion, which is quite ironic given that Franco revolted against the elected government. But in a piece of twisted logic, he claimed that those people who opposed him in the Civil War were opposing his authority and order and therefore were rebels.
Under the military code of justice, lots of people received sentences of 30 years, 20 years, 12 years. Hundreds of thousands of people suffer those kinds of sentences. It's important to realize that in some areas of Spain and in some villages, between 10 and 15% of the male population are passing before these military tribunals. Those sentenced in the tribunals are sent to concentration camps or packed into grotesquely overcrowded prisons.
Around 300 camps detained somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million Spaniards, linked to the defeated Republic. Those detained are not just Republican politicians or soldiers. They include homosexuals, Romanies, immigrants. The camps, it seems, are places to dump lots of people who simply don't fit Franco's vision for Spain. Historians are unsure about the exact number of detainees in these camps. That's because very few documents survive that prove their existence.
Those documents we do possess have taken, in some cases, decades to resurface. The Francoist regime is careful not to leave much of a paper trail. They destroy the evidence as they go. One of the major projects the concentration camp prisoners will help to build is the Valley of the Fallen, the massive monument that Franco claims represents a national act of atonement and reconciliation. It's here, years later, where Franco's own body will be laid to rest.
There were always these moments of clemency. There were ways in which prisoners could reduce their sentences. A huge program was the redemption through work, where prisoners could quote-unquote volunteer to do forced labor. And this has come out fairly recently, the extent to which this happened. Political prisoners were used in large infrastructural projects financed or developed by the government itself: roads, railroads, bridges, monuments.
But they were also rented out for cheap or almost free to corporations, construction corporations, factories. So there was slave labor, let's say. Some of the country's largest corporations benefited by that good relationship to the dictatorship, among other things, through this endless supply of cheap or free slave labor from political prisoners. And that's a story that isn't super well known yet in Spain, and nothing in terms of reparations has occurred there yet.
To fill the concentration camps and to create a massive cheap labor force to rebuild Spain after the civil war, the Francoist regime encourages Spaniards to inform on their fellow citizens. The regime needed huge amounts of information, so they would write to the local authorities in the town where the people came from and it would ask for political reports.
The mayors and local authorities would compile these reports either through their own knowledge or by talking to the neighbors of those who were being investigated. So really the concentration camp system and the decision to prosecute or release depended on vast collaboration from ordinary members of civil society. So it's a repression that's carried out by the state but with strong support from the Francoist grassroots.
The Franco regime encouraged the idea of civilian informants. All this together allowed for the authorities in Spain to basically criminalize half of the population, more than half of the population. Hundreds of thousands had left into exile, but hundreds of thousands were in Spain in concentration camps, in prisons. This mass complicity helps mask the horrors of the Franco regime for years to come. In 2018,
A historian called Carlos Blanco finds proof of a concentration camp in the popular tourist destination of Tormolinos in Andalusia. Blanco claims that prisoners were kept in squalid, open-air conditions with no medical attention. It's impossible to know exactly how long the camp remained open or how many prisoners passed through it. Mere shadows of its existence remain: a bullet-scarred wall in a local cemetery, which was used for executions by firing squads.
a portion of Malaga airport that was likely built by government prisoners. Today the site of the Tormolinos camp is occupied by the Aqualand water park. No plaque or statue exists to commemorate it. Patrons of Aqualand splash in its pools, sunbathe and slide down its rainbow-coloured waterslides, blissfully unaware of the horrors that took place here mere decades ago. On top of the terror, people are desperately hungry.
Probably at least 200,000 people die in the post-war period, either from hunger and starvation or from diseases, diarrhea and dysentery and typhus that are associated with malnutrition, poor living conditions and poverty.
There are a number of historians who are starting to argue that this was essentially a famine. The definition of a famine being hunger produced essentially by government policy rather than something made by a climate disaster or war. And it's in that context that we get these tremendous numbers of deaths. Despite the devastation which surrounds him, Franco declares that Spain is entering a glorious new age. He has finally achieved everything he always wanted.
He's respected, feared, powerful beyond imagination. In Franco's mind, he has been chosen by God to punish those who oppose him and to rebuild Spain in his image. Franco only had pity for himself. When you see his discourses, his speeches, he always is the martyr and the hero. He always is the only one who suffers for Spain, who works tirelessly for Spain. And if anything goes well, it's because other people did it.
The typical person with no adult personality, which is incapable of accepting that we all have shortcomings, that we all commit mistakes. Most of the things we achieve is because other people somehow help us. He was incapable of accepting that. Franco and those who supported him through the Civil War become enormously wealthy by diverting state revenues into their own pockets. Dr. Ángel Viñas is an historian and expert on the Spanish Civil War.
I came to the conclusion that Franco had become a millionaire during the Civil War. So at the end of the war, Franco had accumulated the fortune of $400 million.
With this, he invested in a number of real estate ventures, the most important of which was a domain, a very big domain near Madrid, where he invested a lot, which was theoretically under the name of his wife. So we have now Franco, a liar, a killer, a cheat,
Franco himself is deeply corrupt, amasses a huge fortune. He's not particularly keen on the pleasures of the flesh, not someone who had any interest in fine dining or fine wines or anything like that, but he makes a colossal fortune. And the decadence of the ruling class during this time is mind-boggling. It's like the last days of the Roman Empire. Franco, the man who was hidden behind masks all of his life,
expertly hides this unsavoury truth from the public. He launches an aggressive propaganda campaign. It's so sweeping, so comprehensive, that it will take historians decades to piece together the true story of his time in office. Taking inspiration from Hitler and Mussolini, Franco delivers triumphant speeches at fascist rallies throughout Spain. The man who was once ridiculed for his diminutive stature holds forth on balconies high above roaring crowds.
Franco also floods every Spanish town and city with images of himself. Portraits and murals depict El Caudillo as an almost religious figure, calmly posing in front of battle scenes draped in furs, leading soldiers atop a white horse which tramples a snake beneath its hooves, emerging from a battlefield bathed in light while brandishing a gleaming sword, through pamphlets, newspapers, and even school textbooks.
Franco is comprehensively rewriting his own history. Perhaps the strangest and most ambitious relic of Francoist propaganda is a film called Ratha, or Race. Written by Franco himself under a pseudonym and released in 1942, this film offers fascinating insights into his insecurities and vanities. Ratha is the closest thing to an autobiography that Franco will ever produce. The film follows a military family from the countryside.
a family clearly modelled on Franco's own relatives. The movie serves two functions: one is to rewrite Franco's own family story, to present his kin as glorious patriots. But the second and far more important purpose is to provide an official account of the Spanish Civil War. Franco begins writing Rafa in 1940, mere months after the Nationalists' victory.
He knows that he must present an optimistic, simplified version of events to enshrine victory in the history textbooks. The fascist characters in Ratha stand for God, family, and the Spanish race. The Republicans, on the other hand, are depicted as a destructive force, getting drunk off communion wine and living in filth. Franco diverts over one and a half million pesetas of state money, a fortune at this time, to the project.
To say that Franco takes a keen interest in Rafa's production would be an understatement. As filming gets underway, a car arrives at set almost every day, bringing precise written instructions from Franco himself on how each sequence is to be shot. Once the film wraps, Franco schedules a private viewing at his home just outside of Madrid. At the end of the screening, he turns to the director and simply says, "Very good. You've done it."
In the years to come, Franco will repeatedly re-edit this motion picture to suit his evolving political needs. After the Axis powers are defeated in World War II, Franco decrees that every old copy of Ratha must be destroyed. Then he re-releases the film. All digs made at the United States, soon to be Spain's ally, have been edited out of this new cut. All sequences within the movie that contained fascist salutes have been removed. The enemies within the story are no longer the Republicans,
They are specifically the Communists. Franco holds a monopoly on Spanish history and political commentary. While he tweaks and re-releases his own movie, art produced by anyone else is heavily censored. One of the defining features of Franco dictatorship was its very strict censorship, especially until the late 1960s. The censorship becomes really important to control the narrative of the war and history in general.
The official history of the Spanish Civil War that comes out in the 1940s is called literally "History of the Crusade." And there's a famous mural in the military archive that portrays Franco as a crusader dressed in medieval armor with a big knight's sword. In histories of Spanish literature, for example, the impact of Franco's censorship is still noticeable.
At first, as Hitler and the Axis powers stormed into World War II, Franco was at pains to stress his sympathy for their far-right cause.
Franco has this ambition to create an empire. The possibility in his mind opens up with the beginning of the Second World War and the defeat of France. He thinks there's a chance to get the French Empire. He's talking all the time about entering the war on Hitler's side. One of the great myths is that Franco, with genius and courage, kept Spain out of the Second World War when in fact he was gagging to get into the Second World War.
The problem was he wanted to get in in order to be around the table when the spoils were divided up. Hitler did not want him in. He would have quite liked to have permission to send his troops through Spain in order to capture Gibraltar.
but he did not want Spain as an ally because Spain was militarily and economically useless. The only way Spain could have come into the war and been beneficial to the Third Reich would have been if Hitler had completely rebuilt the Spanish economy and the Spanish military, which he couldn't afford to do because what he really wanted to be doing was invading Russia. It was in Hitler's interest for Franco to remain neutral and it was in the interest of the Western allies
for Spain to remain neutral in the war. So again, there we have the basis of another of the great myths that Franco had heroically kept Spain out of the war when in fact he was kept out of the war by military and economic realities. In early 1943, Germany's disastrous defeat at Stalingrad forced this Franco to rethink his allegiances. When Mussolini is overthrown in July that same year, Franco begins to make efforts to distance himself from fascism.
Rather than portraying himself as an out-and-out fascist, he seeks to redefine, to rebrand himself and his regime as anti-communist. In the end, this move will keep him from being toppled by the Allies.
In his heart of hearts, he always remained committed to the Axis. Throughout the rest of his life, there were ceremonies celebrating Hitler and Mussolini. You know, he always spoke very highly of them. However, he began to curry favour with the Western Allies because, of course, already by 1943, you can see the beginnings of the Cold War.
the fear on the part of the British and Americans that Russia is going to be the threat of the future. And Spain, much as they dislike Franco, Truman in particular loathed Franco because of his treatment of Freemasons and Protestants and so on.
But nonetheless, Franco has the huge advantage of Spain's geopolitical position. Spain, if you look on the map, is like a kind of gigantic aircraft carrier. It's got access to the Atlantic, it's got access to the Mediterranean, and it is guarded, it is shielded by this near impossible range of mountains, the Pyrenees.
So there is this idea that Spain would be the ideal base from which to reconquer Europe for the Western Allies. So that was the advantage he had. And of course, he, you know, curried favor with the Western Allies and got the economic aid, which kind of kept his regime alive. On June the 6th, 1944, news of the Allied advances at D-Day spreads throughout the world.
In Spain's Pyrenees Mountains, Republican guerrilla fighters huddle around radios, following the developments closely. In the years following the end of the Spanish Civil War, these exiled guerrillas, known as the Maquis, have continued to fight against Francoist Spain. They've carried out sabotage and robberies to fund their activities. They've assassinated Francoists and aided the French resistance in their fight against Nazi Germany.
They are key to the liberation of southern France, as Allied troops begin pushing back the German forces. When they hear the news of D-Day and subsequently the fall of Berlin, they believe that Spain will be next. But their salvation never arrives.
the Allies decide not to invade Franco Spain. The key moment there is D-Day in June '44, the armies march on, Paris is liberated, Berlin is liberated, but they stop at the Pyrenees. To the Spanish exiles, Spanish guerrilla fighters exiled to France and been fighting the Nazis in France for five years.
That was a tremendous betrayal of the Western democracies, which hadn't stepped in when the Spanish Republic was attacked in 1836, and yet again left Spain out in the cold in 1945, leaving Franco where he was. The Maquis will continue to fight the Franco regime until the 1950s. Franco instigates a policy of total silence on the actions of these guerrillas. Outside of the specific areas that see Maquis agitation, the public has virtually no knowledge of their existence.
Over time, government forces isolate the guerrillas. They struggle to recruit new members. By the 1950s, most of the Maquis are middle-aged or older. After years of being exposed to the elements, with inadequate nutrition and a lack of proper medical supplies, many of them are in poor health. Some flee to France, others are captured and sentenced to lengthy jail terms. Many are executed or summarily shot by the civil guard.
Franco has, for now at least, erased the Mackie from public memory. The Mackie had hoped that aid would be forthcoming from the Allied powers, especially the United States. But behind the scenes, the Americans have begun carefully laying the foundations for an allyship with General Franco. On December 6, 1947, the military attaché at the Spanish embassy in Washington, D.C., sends an encrypted telegram to Spain's Central General Staff.
The coded message urges the need to improve relations with the United States, but the message insists both sides proceed discreetly. In 1948 Franco gives US military personnel stationed in Europe, and their families, permission to enter Spain without a passport. When the Korean War breaks out in 1950, Franco offers help to those on the side of the United Nations forces, thus furthering his anti-communist image.
The Pact of Madrid is signed on the 23rd of September 1953 by Francoist Spain and the United States. The agreement allows the US to build air and naval bases on Spanish soil. In return, the United States will provide economic and military aid to Spain.
Franco started feeling safe when in the late '40s the Americans started approaching him in the context of the Cold War. They signed the famous military agreement with the United States, in which the United States basically, by giving some military and economic assistance, made Spain a base for their nuclear weapons in the Cold War. On December 5, 1955, Secretary of State Foster Dulles meets with Franco in Madrid. Just one month later,
Francoist Spain is admitted to the United Nations. Four years later in 1959, US President Eisenhower visits Spain. Filmed by news cameras, the dictator and the president stand together on a podium. Their respective flags are flown as the national anthems are played. The two men smile and shake hands in front of the crowd. In this moment, Francisco Franco's extraordinary transformation is complete.
Many of those watching on from abroad have simply forgotten, or chosen to forget, the long years of state-sponsored violence and civilian repression, the fascism, the alliances with Hitler and Mussolini, all forgotten. General Franco, the deadly authoritarian, has been allowed to morph into a Cold War warrior, a key ally in the fight against international communism. In the next episode of Real Dictators,
Embracing capitalism, General Franco paints himself as a great modernizer. Spain experiences rapid economic growth, as the country becomes one of Europe's top holiday destinations. Later, as his health declines, Franco assumes the role of benign elder statesman. As he dies peacefully in his bed, El Caudillo will leave his country with one burning question: What next? That's next time on Real Dictators.
Real Dictators is presented by me, Paul McGann. The story of Francisco Franco was written and produced by Addison Nugent. The show was created by Pascal Hughes, produced by Joel Dodal. Editing and music by Oliver Baines, with strings recorded by Dory McCoy. Sound design and mix by Tom Pink, with edit assembly by George Tapp. Follow Noisa Podcasts on Twitter for news about upcoming series.
If you haven't already, follow us wherever you listen to your favorite shows or check us out at realdictators.com. Tune in on Wednesdays for new episodes.
