The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

In fact, Negrín’s declaration on 21 September to the League of Nations did not represent a great sacrifice for the Republic because the number of foreigners serving in the ranks of the People’s Army had greatly reduced already. The ‘International Military Commission to Observe the Withdrawal of non-Spanish combatants in Government Spain’ observed, ‘It may be said that the decision of the Negrín government to withdraw and send away the international volunteers and to let this happen under the supervision of the League of Nations was a way to make a virtue out of necessity.’¹⁰ It was an astute propaganda move, because both the Republic and the nationalists had greatly exaggerated their role. In September 1938, only 7,102 foreigners were left in the International Brigades. The balance had been made up with Spaniards.

The stories of communist heresy hunting and the treatment of volunteers who wanted to leave, which had circulated in the second half of 1937, affected recruiting so seriously that the handfuls of new arrivals had done little to replace the losses suffered at Teruel and in Aragón. (The death rate among non-Spaniards in the International Brigades was just under 15 per cent up to the end of the Aragón campaign according to Soviet army statistics. A total casualty rate of 40 per cent is the figure most frequently cited.) The international military commission, which supervised their withdrawal, was later surprised to find how old many of the foreign volunteers were. The Swedish Colonel Ribbing paid particular attention to his own countrymen. ‘As for the Swedes, whom I checked in Sant Quirze de Besuara, I noted: “Remarkably many in and around their forties.”’¹¹

On the Ebro front, Negrín’s plan to withdraw foreigners was not communicated to the Americans, Canadians and British of XV International Brigade, because they were about to attack Point 401 on the following day and the news might affect their morale. During the last week of September, the survivors were brought back from the front to Barcelona for their official farewell, although more than half of them were given Spanish nationality and transferred to the People’s Army. They usually consisted of those men for whom the secret police would be waiting in their home country: Germans, Italians, Hungarians and those from other dictatorships in Europe and Latin America.¹²

André Marty, however, rewrote the last editorial of the International Brigade newspaper, Volunteer for Liberty, telling the ‘anti-fascist fighters’ to return to their home countries to lead the struggle against fascism there. It was a way of saying that only selected senior cadres would be given refuge in the USSR. Marty was also terrified that proof of his summary executions might threaten him in the future, and headquarters personnel at Albacete only just escaped with their lives in his mania to suppress the truth.¹³

On 28 October, seven weeks after their withdrawal from the front, the International Brigades assembled for a dramatic farewell parade down the Diagonal in Barcelona past President Azaña, Negrín, Companys and General Rojo, along with many other republican leaders. There were 300,000 people lining the streets and aircraft flew overhead ready to defend them against a nationalist raid. La Pasionaria said in her speech, ‘Comrades of the International Brigades! Political reasons, reasons of state, the welfare of that same cause for which you offered your blood with boundless generosity, are sending you back, some of you to your own countries and others to forced exile. You can go proudly. You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of democracy’s solidarity and universality. We shall not forget you and, when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves again, mingled with the laurels of the Spanish Republic’s victory–come back!’¹⁴

It was a moving occasion. Even the passionless expression on a huge portrait of the Soviet leader who was secretly considering an alliance with Hitler could not belittle the emotion of internationalism which made the tears of the Brigaders and the crowd flow. They were leaving behind 9,934 dead, 7,686 missing and had suffered 37,541 wounded.¹⁵