Atrocities
Death totals remain debated. Antony Beevor writes in his history of the Civil War that Franco's ensuing 'white terror' resulted in the deaths of 200,000 people and that the 'red terror' killed 38,000. Julius Ruiz contends that, "Although the figures remain disputed, a minimum of 37,843 executions were carried out in the Republican zone with a maximum of 150,000 executions (including 50,000 after the war) in Nationalist Spain."
In 2008 a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, opened an investigation into the executions and disappearances of 114,266 people between 17 July 1936 and December 1951 (Garzón has since been indicted for violating a 1977 amnesty law through his actions). Among the executions investigated was that of the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca; mention of his death was forbidden during Franco's regime.
The view of historians including Helen Graham, Paul Preston, Antony Beevor, Gabriel Jackson and Hugh Thomas, is that the mass executions behind the Nationalists lines were organized and approved by the Nationalists rebel authorities while the executions behind the Republican lines were the result of the breakdown of the republican state and anarchy:
Though there was much wanton killing in rebel Spain, the idea of the limpieza, the "cleaning up" of the country from the evils which had overtaken it, was a disciplined policy of the new authorities and a part of their programme of regeneration. In republican Spain, most of the killing was the consequence of anarchy, the outcome of a national breakdown, and not the work of the state; even though some political parties in some cities abetted the enormities, and even though some of those responsible ultimately rose to positions of authority.
Read more about this topic: Spanish Civil War
Famous quotes containing the word atrocities:
“It is unheard-of, uncivilized barbarism that any woman should still be forced to bear such monstrous torture. It should be remedied. It should be stopped. It is simply absurd that, with our modern science, painless childbirth does not exist as a matter of course.... I tremble with indignation when I think of ... the unspeakable egotism and blindness of men of science who permit such atrocities when they can be remedied.”
—Isadora Duncan (1878–1927)
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)