The day fascism won the war in Spain | E …

"Today, captive and disarmed of the Red Army, the national troops have reached their last military objectives.The war is over.Francis General Franco Burgos, April 1, 1939." The voice of the Announcer announced on the radio that nearly three years of war were over. The two Spaniards were again in the shadow of Francisco Franco. A few hours earlier, what was left of the Republican government had left Madrid for the Mediterranean coast, leaving a country in the hands of fascism by military means. Spain was devastated after a war of half a million deaths and Franco was erected as a dictator until his death on 20 November 1975.

Just five months after the fall of Madrid, Nazi Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began. Spain had served as a prologue to the new war and Hitler could test his weapons in the peninsula. Three years before German planes ravage London, Guernica suffered the horror of an aerial bombardment. Italy's Mussolini also lent its support to Franco. On the other hand, the Republicans did not have the help of the Soviet Union, but only with the help of militant international brigades, coming from different parts of the world to defend the legitimate government.

Republicans and nationals

The tensions accumulated by five years of republican government, after the fall of the monarchy in April 1931, had erupted on July 18, 1936, when the military insurrection failed to overthrow Manuel Azaña, elected by the Popular Front in February elections. The army, upset by what she saw as a communist threat (and after episodes such as the secessionist Catalan challenge and the rebellion of the Asturian miners of 1934), succeeded in Andalusia and Aragon, but failed at strategic points such as Madrid and Barcelona There was no turning back: the situation would be resolved by weapons. During these hours, the chief of the plot, José Sanjurjo, lost his life in a plane crash. The destination therefore placed Franco at the head of the rebels and installed his government in Burgos.

The generalissimo turned war into a conflict of wear. A German military adviser told Berlin that "Franco ignores the concept of synthesis". Instead of concentrating on Madrid and ending quickly with a competition in which the balance of power had largely favored it, the Caudillo dedicated itself to spreading terror among the civilian population, who lost all will to fight. . In April 1937, all the detainees among the rebels were cut off when the future dictator of the four decades promulgated the decree of unification, which placed the coup forces under his command and beheaded the groups. Extreme right who conspired on 18 July. It was a blow in the coup d'etat, the founding act of his dictatorship. And a message of unity towards Hitler and Mussolini, who knew who was leading in Spain, rebelled. One week after the signing of the decree, the Condor Legion attacked Guernica.

The monolithic unit that ended up showing the national side had its reverse in the Republicans. Various factions of the left united in the defense of the Second Republic, but in all sorts of internal ranks among the Socialists, the Anarchists, the Communists and the Trotskyists. The USSR is not involved in the war and the brigadists are working as irregular forces against a line army, the worst organized in Europe, but with enough discipline and weapons (with the help of Italy and Germany) to end the war. Republic

One of the greatest moments of friction among the Republicans occurred in 1937 with the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification), an independent force of Moscow, resolutely anti-Stalinist and having a Trotskyist influence. Its leader, Andres Nin, disappeared after being arrested in May by Republican officers in Barcelona. The Catalan capital was the scene of an internal conflict, settled with nearly a thousand dead, between Republicans and anarchists, who wanted to settle disputes before the war by launching them instead of facing the conflict. Common enemy, Franco's army.

Defeat and dictatorship

In this context of Republican disintegration, Franco's war of wear took effect, even though the extension of the conflict was longer than expected until the unexpected offensive of the valley of l & # 39; Ebro. The Republic burned the ships during the second half of 1938, which meant the largest troop deployment since the beginning of the conflict. After the successful pbading of the Ebro in July, the Republicans lost the initiative and the final outcome of the war was sealed. Almost at the same time, England and France, dispensing with the conflict, yielded to Hitler the Sudetenland in Munich. The defeat of the Republicans lasted a few weeks.

Count Ciano, Chancellor of Fascist Italy and Duce's son-in-law, noted in his diaries: "Showing the open Atlas on the page of Spain, Mussolini said to me:" There was opened here for three years; Now that's enough. But I already know that I have to open it in another page ". Spain was the military triumph of fascism, which presupposed a Europe at its feet.

"This man has no prisoners of war: he has slaves of war," said the dispatch sent to Berlin, which informed, not without fear, the workers that Franco had used to erect the mausoleum of the Valley of the dead: a dark celebration of his military victory, which according to the dictator returned Spain on the path of imperial grandeur lost with the last American colonies.

The only military victory of fascism led to a long dictatorship that survived in 1945 and to Franco's partners, thanks to the work and grace of the cold war. Hundreds of thousands of people were exiled and Spain remained a backward country and was traversed by the repression of a totalitarian state. Franco inaugurated his sad mausoleum in 1959 and has lived there since 1975. Two years later, on the eve of the first free elections since 1936, Adolfo Suárez dissolved the General Secretariat of the Movement, the last Francoist scaffolding. It was April 1st. El País used a title recalling the end of the war: "April 1: the movement is over". The yoke and the seven arrows, the Franco counterpart of the swastika, have ceased to be part of Spanish life. June 10, 2019 is the date to end the necrophilia surrounding the corpse of the dictator. That day should be exhumed from the Valley of the Dead to be taken to El Pardo Cemetery.