That is what Paul Preston, a leading British hispanicist and highly respected historian in Spain, has done in The Spanish Holocaust. The result is an essential read for anyone wishing to understand Spain and its recenthistory. It is also a damning indictment of Franco's deliberate and far-reaching brutality, which destroys the myth cherished by some Spaniards that he was a "soft" dictator.
One of the many remarkable things about thisnarrative of butchery is, indeed, how it proves Garzón's central accusation – that Franco enacted a ruthless plan involving the "detention, torture, forced disappearance and physical elimination of thousands of people for political and ideological motives … a state of affairs that continued, to greater or lesser extent, after the civil war ended".
Preston provides facts, figures and harrowing descriptions in the first full and proper attempt to explain the horror. He does not shy away from strong words – "holocaust" is deliberately chosen to describe the extent of cold-blooded killing "because its resonances with systematic murder should be evoked in the Spanish case, as they are in those of Germany or Russia". Nor does he ignore the undoubted cruelty and the crimes committed on the Republican side of a three-year civil war sparked by a 1936 military rightist uprising against an elected government. Two-thirds of the clergy in the Catalan province of Lleida were killed. A third of all monks in the Republican zone also died. That is extreme religious persecution.
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