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

On 25 September 1941 the decree of the Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI), the main mechanism for economic control and autarchy, was established.⁸ It covered almost everything: war production, mineral prospection, coal, iron and steel, copper and non-ferrous metals, chemicals, explosives, rubber etc. The INI intervened in aircraft production and later in all types of vehicles, as well as synthetic oil production, a concept which greatly appealed to Franco, who saw autarchy as a particularly Spanish virtue as well as a necessity. The fact that it was far from cost-efficient does not appear to have dawned on him or his ministers until 1950. He proclaimed that ‘Spain is a privileged country which can survive on its own. We have everything we need to live and our production is sufficiently abundant to assure our survival. We do not need to import anything.’⁹ Autarchy would only diminish after the bulk of the nationalist debts to Germany and Italy had been settled. To pay its debts to Germany required, between 1939 and 1943, the equivalent of 12 per cent of the value of all its imports and 3 per cent in the case of Italy.¹⁰

Franco also liked the idea of cheap energy and agricultural irrigation from hydroelectric dams, the great projects which had appealed to Calvo Sotelo during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship and nearly bankrupted Spain. On 7 October 1939 he launched a plan for their construction and republican prisoners of war were put to work. The financing of such projects as well as much of the nationalist economy had created a very close relationship between the regime and the five major Spanish banks. In return for their co-operation they were protected from competition–no new banks were set up in Spain until 1962–and given great power in the economy, allowing them to amass huge profits and create veritable commercial empires.¹² As one historian wrote, ‘The architectural symbol of the new Spain was not the church, as Carlists wanted before the war, but the bank.’¹³

This anti-communist state also proceeded to nationalize the railway network, paying its owners in shares which were worth nothing.¹⁴ At a time when the shortage of petrol and its high cost appeared to favour railways, the RENFE managed to achieve pitiful results due to appalling management. Some commentators have observed that the effects of Franco’s nationalization programme were very similar to those of Soviet satellite states after 1945.¹⁵

Another paradoxical parallel between Franquism and Stalinist Russia was the obsessive fear of foreign ideological contagion. While most of the senior Soviet advisers from Spain were being forced to confess by the NKVD to treasonous contacts abroad and then shot, in nationalist Spain the rhetoric called for drastic surgery to save the body politic. The Bishop of Vic called for ‘a scalpel to drain the pus from Spain’s entrails’.¹⁶ Franco’s press attaché, the Count de Alba y Yeltes, said during the war to one Englishman that they had to rid Spain of the virus of bolshevism, if necessary by eliminating a third of the male population of Spain.¹⁷ Now that the nationalists had almost all the republican prisoners in their power, they could embark on their thorough cleansing.

Prison camps were set up all over the country. Including temporary and transit camps, there were 190 of them, holding between 367,000 and half a million inmates.¹⁸ During the final offensive 45,000 had been taken in the central zone, 60,000 in the south and 35,000 in Levante.¹⁹ When the summer of 1939 arrived, numbers had to be reduced, especially in the temporary camps. Some prisoners were given provisional liberty, 90,000 were sent off to 121 labour battalions, and 8,000 put to work in military workshops. Executions, suicides and escapes also reduced the total. Certain ‘special’ camps were maintained, such as those at Miranda de Ebro and San Pedro de Cardeña, for foreign combatants in the International Brigades. Some of those prisoners were sent off to rebuild Belchite–‘You destroyed Belchite and you will rebuild it,’ they were told.