Accounts repository lay unclothed miseries of Francos forced work camps

Graham Keeley, Madrid & , : {}

Ticket for dual bottles of divert for a ill restrained from a red stay on doctor"s orders. So reads the brief, relief note, hammered with the sign of the troops authority at Fraga prison, in Huesca. The date: Feb 23, 1938.

It reveals zero of the predestine of the different Republican restrained or either the dual bottles of divert were sufficient to save his life.

Instead, the note forms piece of the accounts kept on one of the 132 thoroughness camps and 541 forced work battalions over that General Franco presided during and after the Spanish Civil War.

Today, for the initial time, kin of those hold in the camps will find how an armed forces of faceless polite servants done certain that the books were offset evoking comparisons with the potency of their Nazi counterparts when hundreds of files go on arrangement at the Historical Memory Documentary Centre, in Salamanca.

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A reduction of official torpor and counsel stonewalling by officials meant that the writings remained dark in supervision repository until the 2007 Law of Historical Memory eventually gave calibrate to the victims of the Franco dictatorship.

Behind the thousands of pages detailing monthly payments in cool, isolated tones are the stories of as most as 500,000 prisoners. Among them were Britons, Germans, French, Polish and a little Jews.

The repository show how the prisoners of fight were customarily kept in the thoroughness camps, whilst domestic detainees were sent to tougher work battalions.

Thousands of Republican prisoners worked on the building a whole of scores of projects, together with the Valley of the Fallen, the huge monolith nearby Madrid, where General Franco was buried in 1975.

Simple numbers on the yellowing writings discuss it chilling stories: when Huelva thoroughness camp, in Andalusia, non-stop in Feb 1938 it hold 3,202 prisoners. By the time it sealed in July, usually 662 remained alive.

Some writings exhibit how the predestine of the prisoners mostly depended on the humanity of stay commandants. One battalion, that enclosed 303 foreigners, was set to work rebuilding the locale of Belchite, in Aragon.

The month prior to we could not cut down the reserve for the stores, remarkable the commandant, who appeared reluctant to cut rations further. In contrast, the commandant of Miranda de Ebro camp, in Burgos, available assets of 14,277.6 pesetas. It appears that he was not concerned to outlay it on prisoners.

The annals emerged from the Court of Audit after Francisco Espinosa, a historian, in use a counsel to force the authorities to concede him access.

A orator for the Court of Audit denied that researchers were prevented from accessing the records.

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