Spaniards in Mauthausen: the Camp of the Spaniards and the Memorial in Almeria

In the summer of 1940, the German Foreign Office asked Madrid a simple question: what should be done with the thousands of Spanish Republicans who had fled to France in 1939 and were now in German hands? Franco’s government declined to claim them. Ramón Serrano Suñer, the Interior Minister and Franco’s brother-in-law, put the position plainly — those traitors could not be regarded as Spaniards. The consequence was administrative, and it was lethal. Having no state to answer for them, the Spaniards entered the camp system as Staatenlose — stateless persons. At Mauthausen they were issued the blue triangle of the stateless, with an S for Spanier. No consulate would ask after them, no protecting power would intervene, and no exchange would ever be negotiated on their behalf. About 7,000 of them passed through Mauthausen and its subcamps between August 1940 and the liberation in May 1945. More than half did not come out. They were the first large national group in the camp after the Germans and Austrians; they were sent in disproportionate numbers to the granite quarry, and they gave the place the name it still carries in Spain: el campo de los españoles — the camp of the Spaniards.

This article follows that story from the end of the Civil War to the present day: the flight across the Pyrenees in 1939, the French internment camps, the decision taken in Madrid, the quarry at Mauthausen, and the long silence that followed in Spain — where the fate of these men was not publicly discussed until after Franco’s death, and where the state did not publish their names until 2019. It ends where I went to see it: in Almería, on the seafront, at a field of 142 concrete columns raised in 1999 by the last local survivor of Mauthausen.

 

FRANCO’S WAR AGAINST SPAIN

‘Guerra Civil Española’ or in English ‘The Spanish Civil War’ (1936-1939): its significance, as well as its horrors, has been overshadowed (not without a reason) by the long shadow of the Second World War. It is conventionally mentioned as the pretext for the larger conflict in Europe, a proving ground for the German, Italian, and Soviet forces. Since Spain stayed largely out of WWII except by sending volunteers to the Eastern Front, and its economy showed a kind of recovery in the 1960s, the reign of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco has been for decades perceived through the lens of established myths and clichés. While the pro-Franco historians still see the Spanish Civil War as a necessary evil to withstand Communism, half a million of its victims were not the last martyrs. For those who fought against Franco or were in one way or another considered the enemy, or politically unreliable, the Spring of 1939 was only the beginning of a much more prolonged period of terror and suffering in the hands of those who regarded themselves as victors. Mass executions, malnutrition, work battalions, the spread of disease, displacement, exile, and later death in the Nazi concentration camps: this was the fate of those who lost that war. 

Francisco Franco Bahamonde, the leader of the Nationalist forces, who unleashed a brutal civil war to overthrow the government of the so-called ‘Second Spanish Republic’, ruled Spain until his death from health problems in 1975. From the very beginning of his rebellion, he made no secret of his intention to unleash terror against his enemies and opponents. The cessation of fire in April 1939 brought neither safety to the opposing troops nor the civilian population. The deaths from shells and bullets on the battlefronts and bombings of the cities gave way to other means of relieving people of life. From now on, the war against the population was fought by less obvious means: extrajudicial executions, military courts, harsh conditions in the POW and concentration camps, prisons across the country, labor battalions, lack of medical treatment, and malnutrition, pursuing the exiles and deportations. Franco and his institutionalized regime used the repressions of unprecedented scale as a long-term undertaking, and the machinery of state terror was eager to classify and punish people en masse. The martial law declared in 1936 would not be repealed until 1948. The repressive framework of the pseudo-legal state apparatus emerged during the war and targeted Republicans and their supporters as key objectives. 

The cleansing of the recently conquered and surrendered provinces, taking hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, at once overcrowded the prisons all over Spain, which now had to incarcerate ten to fifteen times more people than they had been created for. Many detainees were held for months, some for more than a year, even before any interrogation and trials, and the establishment of temporary prisons and the former military barracks, schools, and hospitals brought no relief to thousands of inmates. In the first year of the state repression between April 1939 and May 1940, at the very least 100,000 people faced trials and were sentenced either to death or to incarceration, and 270,000 were awaiting their fate. The regime used forced labor as a means of oppression, providing the construction of railways, roads, mines, dams, and irrigation channels, and the private sector with prisoners. The regime forced these people to ‘reconstruct’ the regions devastated by the war, largely by the Nationalists themselves, so the Republicans had no way but to pay for the war unleashed against them by Franco forces, as well as for their own incarceration. More people died in Spain from the spread of disease and malnutrition in the prisons and penal battalions than from executions due to unsustainable conditions in the prisons and work camps, particularly during the cold winter of 1940-1941. 

 

EXILE TO FRANCE: THE CAMPS AT ARGELÈS, GURS AND RIVESALTES

As the Spanish Civil War was moving to its end in the Spring of 1939, tens of thousands of Spaniards, mainly those who fought or supported the Republic, streamed across the Eastern border into France. Apart from the former soldiers and political activists, journalists, and pro-communist intellectuals, women with children and elderlies sealed protection from the intense air and artillery bombings and the Nationalists’ reprisals. The French government expressed no enthusiasm toward accepting thousands of exiles, particularly due to the existing prejudices against foreigners and immigrants, in no small measure previously intensified by the migration of the German Jews in the 1930s. Those who crossed the border for protection from Franco’s forces were taken to the hastily created refugee camps, mainly in the Southern part of France near the sea. Only a small proportion of those exiles would get their lucky tickets to leave for England or the United States, and the greatest part were cramped in dirty and crowded camps. Since the win of the Civil War by the nationalists, it became apparent to the strong supporters of the Republic that they had no way but to stay in unsustainable conditions in France. To stay alive and relatively safe, they had to live beyond the barbed wire, with lice and mud in exile. 

Among those camps created in 1939 to hold the unwanted foreigners from Spain, the most notorious is known as the ‘Gurs’ camp, set up particularly for the Spanish refugees. The camp got its name from the nearby village at the foot of the lower Pyrenees in southwestern France, approximately 80 kilometers from the Spanish border. After covering tens of kilometers of mountain roads, the refugees would have to experience malnutrition, poor medical care, and infectious hepatitis and dysentery, and live with rats and lice beyond the wire. The camp was established in the April of 1939 wat, before the start of WWII and the establishment of the notorious Vichy Regime. In early 1940, Gurs accepted 4000 German Jews as well as political opponents inside France. Even the choice to live in unbearable conditions instead of at the hands of the enemies did not last long, as France lost the war with Germany and signed the humiliating armistice in the forest of Compiègne on June 22, 1940. The fate of the German Jews, as well as Spanish Republicans and other refugees from two nationalistic regimes, was now in great danger. 

The Franco regime wasted no time in getting their revenue from the French defeat, though Spain did not participate in the conflict. Once the armistice in Compiègne was declared to be signed on June 22, 1940, on the same evening, the Spanish government sent a message to the French embassy in Madrid with the list of the prominent Republicans they expected to get back. This first appeal was followed by another in August directly to Marshal Philippe Pétain with a demand to extradite 636 prominent Republicans immediately under threat of Spanish territorial claims to French colonies in North Africa, supposedly backed by the Nazi regime in Germany. Pétain felt no sympathy for the Spaniards’ exiles as he regarded them as communists, yet the old Marshal ignored Franco’s appeal. The Vichy government replied that the case of every refugee would be reviewed in the French court individually, per the Franco-Spanish treaty of extradition from 1877. The Spanish government was infuriated with such a solution. At the same time, the Vichy police put many prominent refugees under surveillance. 

Getting back to the infamous Gurs internment camp in southern France, since the summer of 1940 under the Vichy administration, the living conditions continued to deteriorate, resulting in the death of 800 refugees in the following year. While Marshal Philippe Pétain rejected mass deportations from his unoccupied zone of France, in October 1940 the Germans deported 6500 Jews to southern France from the Baden region. A greater proportion of them was sent to Gurs, thus making the issue of overcrowding more severe than ever. In total 22 000 men, women, and children would pass through the Gurs camp until 1944, 18 000 of them were Jews. It is estimated that at least 1100 detainees died on the territory of the camp. Gurs camp was mostly closed in November 1943 but was opened again in 1944 to incarcerate political opponents and resistance fighters. After the liberation of France, the camp was used to hold former collaborators as well as German POWs until the end of 1945 and the final closure of Gurs. 

The stubbornness of Marshal Pétain in fact made it possible for up to 150 000 Spanish refugees to stay in South France until liberation and thus avoid mass deportations to Franco’s forces. The Spanish communists among the exiles even managed to form resistance guerrilla units, particularly the so-called ‘XIV Corps’, which possessed the strength of 3400 fighters in South France at the time of the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. In one of the departments, the proportion of guerrilla men meant a significant presence of the Spaniards. Technically, they were incorporated into ‘Francs-tireurs et partisans français’ (FTPF), but their final goal was the liberation of Spain from the Nationalists of Franco. 

 

HITLER, HIMMLER AND FRANCO: GERMANY IN SPAIN, 1936–1940

While the Nationalists in Spain lacked no manpower in the Civil War, the final result of the rebels against the legally elected government was not possible without support from two other European dictatorships: Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Francisco Franco particularly derived inspiration from the success of National Socialism established by Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933. The Nationalists relied on the Italian and German military support in materials and weapons, which gave Franco a strategic advantage in the war that was underestimated. Apart from the supply of modern equipment, the Germans used Spain as a military exercise battleground for their Wehrmacht, particularly by bombing Spanish cities, notably Guernica. This involvement in the Spanish Civil War also provided Hitler with a means to draw attention to the German rearmament and annexations in Europe he himself made since 1935. Another reason was the fight against communism. 

Military assistance in fighting against its own people was not the only means of cooperation between Hitler’s Germany and Franco’s forces in Spain during and after the Civil War. As early as April 1938, one year before the end of the war, Heinrich Himmler, the notorious Reichsführer-SS and one of the architects of the upcoming Holocaust, suggested Franco’s government more transparent cooperation in police matters. The Germans were interested in extraditing the Jews, communist activists, and Socialists who had fled to Spain since 1933, and the Spanish Nationalists targeted left-wing opponents in Germany and later in France. As early as July 31, 1938, the two sides signed an agreement that significantly simplified the exchange of leftists between the two regimes. The German exiles were handed to Gestapo interrogators in their office in Madrid, and many were later transferred to Germany without bureaucratic procedures. The permission to take the most prominent German targets was given by Franco personally. The cooperation between the Gestapo and Franco’s political police went even further, and the latter was trained by the former. Later, Heinrich Himmler was awarded ‘Orden Imperial del Yugo y las Flechas’ (Imperial Order of the Yoke and Arrows), the highest state and military order in Franco’s Spain. This order would be formally abolished only in 2022, eighty-five years after the establishment and forty-seven years after Caudillo’s death. 

After the humiliating defeat of France in 1940 and the signing of the Armistice, the Franco-Nationalists experienced far fewer difficulties in the German-occupied part of France than in the Southern Vichy area, when it came to the extradition of their political opponents. As time showed, the Spanish refugees in France were among the first groups to suffer from the June 1940 consequences. The Nazis had neither the Mexican sentiment to accept exiles nor the judicial scruples of the Vichy government. In August 1940, the same month the Francoists demanded getting back the Spaniards in the Vichy area, José Finat and Escrivá de Romaní, Spanish General Director of Security since 1939, visited Berlin and had meetings with both Himmler and the notorious Sicherheitsdienst chief Reinhard Heydrich. The two sides agreed to improve the networks of police liaisons with full diplomatic immunity in Spain and Germany, thus giving Franco’s officers direct access to the Republican exiles in Germany and the occupied part of France. Along with that, the Germans included the exiled Spaniards in the list of potential enemies of the state. Toward 1944, up to 30 000 refugees were deported from France to Germany, and from 10 000 to 15 000 of them were taken to the Nazi camps. Also, at least 10,000 Spaniards were regarded as prisoners of war, and the Vichy government did nothing to protect them. At least 4000 were sent to the Channel Islands, British land occupied by the Germans, where forced labor left only 59 of them alive toward the end of the war. 

 

THE JEWS IN FRANCO’S SPAIN AND SPANISH JEWS IN EUROPE

The historical fate of Jews in the Middle Ages in Spain is probably more notoriously known than elsewhere in Europe. As far back as 1492, the same year Columbus discovered America, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the benefactors of that journey, expelled all Jews and Muslims from their country, leaving only those who agreed to convert to Christianity. Even four centuries later, when the Civil War in Spain absorbed the country, there still were very few Sephardic Jews in the Iberian Peninsula. Nevertheless, even before the triumph of the Nationalists led by Franco, the Spanish Jews experienced a generally hostile attitude encouraged by the Catholic Church, an institution that even Adolf Hitler strongly disliked in his relations with Franco. Both Hitler and Caudillo had paranoia of the supposed Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy, yet Franco never issued either the expulsion of the Jews or the annihilation, despite his 1939 speeches condemning the ‘Jewish spirit’ and the ‘Anti-Spanish alliance of the capital and Marxism’.

The Spanish Jews had legal equality in the state following the laws of the Second Republic (1931-1939), but after the seizure of power, Franco’s government made efforts to repeal the former law. While during the Civil War, more people fled Spain and came in, since 1939 Franco’s government restricted the entry of Jews, including the Sephardic Jews with Spanish passports, and the Synagogues were not permitted to reopen. While the government tried to minimize the flow of refugees, especially during and after the Battle of France in 1940, even the harsh restrictions allowed refugees to travel through Spain if they had visas to Portugal, England, or the United States, though severely limiting the number of Jews. 

While Franco’s government imposed even more severe restrictions in October 1940, between 1940 and 1942 up to 30 000 Jews passed through Spain on their route to other countries, thus saving themselves from the Nazi’s genocide in Europe. After the German occupation of Southern France in late 1942, Spain experienced a new flow of Jewish exiles from France, which forced Franco to close the border to anyone without a transit visa in March 1943, yet the wave of illegal refugees became a reality. Franco’s government established several internment camps and later agreed to let 7000 Jews stay there after the intervention of the Western Allies, particularly England. The government even let several relief agencies, including the Red Cross, take care of the detainees in the camps. At the same time, the belief that the Spanish dictator was a savior of Jews is Franco’s myth, as his refusal to provide safe passage to more Jews left tens of thousands of people in Nazi hands. More than that, his pure involvement in WWII did not mean that Franco was not aware of the fate of thousands of Spanish citizens in the Nazi camps, including Mauthausen. He experienced personal disdain toward Republicans, whose death was more acceptable to him than their survival. Only a small proportion of the 4000 Sephardic Jews with Spanish citizenship in German-occupied Europe were permitted to enter and pass through Spain, particularly from the Greek city of Thessaloniki. 

 

SPANIARDS IN MAUTHAUSEN: THE CAMP OF THE SPANIARDS, 1940–1945

While the first 1939-1940 year after the end of the Civil War saw the greatest proportion of atrocities, non-martial executions, exploitation of the POWs, incarceration, and political repression inside the country, the fate of the exiled Spaniards in occupied France and Nazi Germany is a shocking example of Francoists’ indifference and revenge against political enemies. After the fall of France in June 1940, as I have already stated above, Franco wanted a limited list of prominent Republicans for extradition, yet tens of thousands of refugees were left in Nazi hands without a clear position. In fact, the Germans sent several inquiries in the summer of 1940 to Madrid, but Franco’s government failed to accept the offer to take all exiles back. The Spanish Nationalists openly regarded their political opponents, prisoners of war who fought in France, and even women and children as ‘criminals’ and those who were no longer considered Spaniards. The lack of definite agreement and the passive position of Franco left the Spanish refugees in France in the hands of the Nazi regime, which had even fewer sentiments toward tens of thousands of people; at least 10 000 of them (the highest estimate goes up to 15 000) ended up in the German concentration camps, most of them in the Mauthausen-Gusen network of camps in Austria near Hitler’s favorite Linz. 

The location of the Mauthausen and later the Gusen camp, twenty kilometers from Linz, was largely based on economic considerations, particularly combining the setting up of concentration camps with the exploitation of national resources. The prisoners in this camp were not only targeted racially to be worked, malnourished, and gassed to death, but also to supply the Nazi regime with industrial value; thus their death was exploited by the SS economically. As early as April 1938, Heinrich Himmler initiated the creation of Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH (DESt – German Earth and Stone Works Company) to exploit the lives of the prisoners in the building materials industry. The camp rose next to the giant granite quarry and took its first prisoners as early as August 8, 1938, less than half a year after the German Anschluss of Austria. Toward 1939, the camp was in full operation, and the work in three nearby quarries (the Gusen subcamp was set up in 1940) was the most brutal assignment, which often implied a certain death. Work there served as a source of materials for building the Nazi Empire, particularly Hitler’s Linz, at the expense of the lives of the workers. The brutal abuses by both the SS and the Kapos among prisoners, harsh working conditions, malnutrition, and poor medical treatment gave Mauthausen not only a high production rate but also a high mortality rate, supervised by 15,000 SS men, who served here from 1938 to 1945. 

Among those 190,000 men and women from 40 nationalities who passed through the Mauthausen network between August 1938 and May 1945, and among at least those 90,000 who perished here, were the former Spanish refugees, particularly Republican fighters. The first Spaniards who entered the main camp on the hill on August 6, 1940, were the former Republican fighters, who fled to France and later fought against Germany in 1940. Having previously been incarcerated in Stalag VII-A, a POW camp in Moosburg an der Isar near Munich, these four hundred men were shocked by the severe conditions and humiliation in Mauthausen. They were openly told that the only way to leave the camp was through death. While those first Spaniards in Mauthausen were men and former soldiers, as early as August 24, 1940, another train came to the camp. The twenty overcrowded cattle wagons brought 927 Spanish refugees; only 430 of them were men, and the remaining were women and children from the refugee camp near the French city of Angoulême. While women with children were then sent to Spain (they were interrogated, some imprisoned, most separated from their children), of those 430 men, 357 would die in Mauthausen. 

Within a year after the first convoy with Spaniards in August 1940, more than six thousand former Spanish citizens were taken to Mauthausen, with hundreds more in small groups until the end of the War and camp liberation. Toward 1942, at least 7500 former Republicans, classified as ‘Spaniards’ or ‘Red Spaniards’, many of them indeed former Communist Party members, entered the gates of Mauthausen and its subcamps, thus forming the first large national group of prisoners apart from Germans and Austrians. The number of prisoners in the camp at one time rose from 1475 in May 1939 to 7400 by the end of 1941, of whom 60% were Spanish. A greater proportion of the Spaniards were assigned to construction works and quarries due to their previous pre-war experience in construction. While being hardened by the Civil War, the Spaniards got the most brutal tasks, minimal rations, were forced to work to death in the quarry regardless of the weather, and were beaten and shot to death by the SS because of their strong anti-fascist and leftist beliefs. The Mauthausen documents never recorded old men or those incapable of work, and they were generally killed upon arrival. Such an attitude provided the Nazis with means to eliminate political prisoners, people considered a threat to the regime. Spaniards were forced to wear the blue triangle with the ‘S’ letter on their camp cloth. To the SS, the Spaniards fought against Germany’s ally, Franco’s Spain, and were the bearers of the political conspiracy. 

The blue triangle was not a Spanish marking. It was the marking for people without a country

In the Nazi camp system, the coloured triangle recorded the category of the prisoner, and a national letter recorded where he came from. Prisoners of enemy states wore their own markings and, in theory, had a government somewhere that might ask about them. The blue triangle was used for the stateless — Staatenlose — people no state acknowledged. The Spanish Republicans at Mauthausen wore it with the letter S, for Spanier.

They wore it because of a decision taken in Madrid. After the fall of France in June 1940, tens of thousands of Spanish exiles — many of whom had joined French labour companies or the French army — fell into German hands. Berlin asked Madrid what to do with them. Franco’s government did not answer that they were Spanish citizens. It asked for the extradition of a short list of prominent Republicans and left the rest unclaimed. The position attributed to Ramón Serrano Suñer, Interior Minister and the architect of post-war repression, was that those traitors could not be considered Spaniards.

In practice this meant something very specific. A French, Polish or Belgian prisoner had a nationality on file, and with it at least the theoretical possibility of consular enquiry, of a Red Cross list, of an exchange. A Spaniard at Mauthausen had none of these. He was not a prisoner of war, not a foreign national and not a citizen of anywhere. Administratively he had ceased to exist, and the blue triangle said so on his jacket. The claim that Madrid did not know is not sustainable. Historians have the correspondence between the Mauthausen commandant’s office and the Spanish consulate concerning Spanish prisoners, their personal effects, their letters and their ashes. Serrano Suñer maintained for decades afterwards that the Spanish government had no idea that thousands of its former citizens were in German camps. The files say otherwise. This is the single fact that separates the Spaniards at Mauthausen from every other national group in the camp, and it was made in Madrid, not in Berlin.

The only source of information for the Spaniards in Mauthausen was the new inmates, as they were not permitted (until the end of 1942) to contact anyone from the outside world and, in fact, it was impossible to get messages from Franco Spain even if they still had relatives there. Starting in early 1943, the administration allowed the Spanish prisoners to send a postcard no sooner than once every six weeks. The message in Spanish had to include no more than twenty-five words, which were carefully checked and censored anyway. As the years passed, some Spaniards got privileged positions (‘Prominenten’) in the camp administration office and some even became Kapos, who unleashed brutality toward other prisoners. While in 1940 and 1941 the death toll among Spaniards was the highest among political prisoners in Mauthausen and Gusen (in 1941 Poles and Spaniards formed the majority of the T4 victims in the notorious ‘Action 14f13’ against sick and weak), since 1942 the SS shifted their brutal focus on the Soviet prisoners of war, and after that, the chance of a Spanish prisoner to survive was higher than in other nationalities. 

The exact number of Spaniards who passed through Mauthausen and died in the camp or its subcamps has several estimates. The problem with the calculation lies in the fact that the preserved documents and records of the prisoners do not include those Spaniards who were killed on the road, killed upon arrival, particularly sick and old. The second challenge for historians is the last weeks before liberation in 1945, when there was no record-keeping. The first estimates became public soon after the liberation and originated from the Spanish prisoners, who used to work at the so-called ‘Politische Abteilung’ in the camp administration. According to those records, of 7200 Spaniards who entered Mauthausen between August 1940 and April 1945, only 2183 welcomed the liberators, 238 were sent to other locations, and 4765 perished, or 65%. It should be mentioned that the final death toll is higher, as up to 50% of the Mauthausen survivors died in the weeks after liberation. We should also remember that hundreds of Spaniards were sent and died in other Nazi camps: Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, and Treblinka. On 9 August 2019, the Spanish government published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado the names of 4,427 Spaniards who died at Mauthausen and Gusen

In Spain, Mauthausen is not usually called Mauthausen. It is called el campo de los españoles — the camp of the Spaniards. The name is Spanish, not German. It appears in the memoirs of the survivors, in the work of Spanish historians, and in the Spanish press; it was never an SS designation. It stuck for three reasons, and all three are matters of record.

The Spaniards were there first. The first convoy of some 392 Spanish prisoners reached Mauthausen on 6 August 1940, from Stalag VII-A at Moosburg. Within a year more than six thousand had followed. Apart from Germans and Austrians, they were the first large national group in the camp — arriving before the Poles, before the Soviet prisoners, before the Jewish transports.

They were sent to the quarry. Mauthausen existed because of the Wiener Graben granite quarry, and a disproportionate share of the Spaniards were assigned to it and to construction work — in part because many of them were bricklayers, stonemasons and labourers by trade before the war, and the SS knew it. The camp the world photographs — the walls, the gate, the 186 steps — was substantially built by them.

They were there longest. Those who survived the first two winters stayed for years, and by 1945 Spaniards held positions across the camp’s internal administration. It was Spanish prisoners in the Politische Abteilung who compiled the first count of their own dead, and it was a Spaniard, Francesc Boix, who hid the SS photographic negatives that were later produced in evidence at Nuremberg. A French survivor’s line is quoted in Spain to this day: every stone of Mauthausen represents the life of a Spaniard.

 

REMEMBERING THE SPANISH VICTIMS: FROM FRANCO’S SILENCE TO THE 2019 OFFICIAL LIST

The history of commemoration of the Spanish victims in Nazi hands has been long, challenging, and full of debates. For decades, the understanding of the Holocaust was limited to Jews and Holocaust survivors. Jewish survivors have not represented the wider categories of the victims of the Nazi genocide. A more inclusive perception of the Holocaust gives us a deeper conception of what happened between 1933 and 1945. Gradually, scholars expanded their focus of attention to non-Jewish victims: handicapped and disabled persons and other victims of Euthanasia, Romas, homosexuals in the Third Reich, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet POWs, and other categories, but for decades the historiography of the Holocaust lacked a thorough investigation of all Spanish victims killed in the Nazi hands after fleeing from Franco’s Nationalist regime. 

Of course, Spaniards in the Nazi camps and particularly in Mauthausen were not subjected to extermination based on their race, such as Jews, yet they faced and died from the same genocidal practices, particularly malnutrition, beatings, unbearable labor, lack of medical care, shootings, even gassing. While each of those targeted groups experienced Nazi persecution in its own way, the genocide in one way or another targeted them all, including the Spaniards. This Nazi war against the ‘undesirables’ implied to the Spanish people in Mauthausen and their post-war testimonies expand our understanding of the genocide and made them, if not the survivors of the Holocaust, but the witnesses of it. Those Spaniards who lived until and weeks after liberation in 1945 left testimonies, whose significance has been deliberately underestimated after WWII, particularly in the prism of the pro-Franco ‘official’ history of the Civil War in Spain. 

Throughout the decades of Franco’s dictatorship and years after his death, the story of the Republican victims of the regime after the Civil War, as well as the fate of the Spaniards left in Nazi hands, has been outside the public awareness in Spain and beyond. Ramón Serrano Suñer, the Minister of the Interior in 1938-1940 and thus one of the architects of the persecution of the leftist forces, and also Franco’s brother-in-law, would claim many years later that the Spanish government had no idea of the thousands of Spaniards in the Nazi camps. This false self-excusing statement, of course, was untrue and debunked not only by the preserved correspondence between Berlin and Madrid regarding the refugees and Spanish Jews. The scholars possess direct correspondence between the Commandant’s office in Mauthausen and the Spanish consulate regarding the Spanish prisoners, their belongings, correspondence, and even ashes. 

Franco’s repressive regime prevented public awareness of the fate of the Spanish citizens in WWII and the Nazi concentration camps. While the 1960s witnessed a new wave of scholarship and public discussion of the genocide in Europe and around the world, Spain remained terra incognita on the subject, even when considering individual testimonies by the Mauthausen survivors, made generally private or even public. Only after Franco died in 1975 and a period of transition did new evidence of his cooperation with Hitler and the fate of the Spaniards in WWII and the Holocaust emerge in public discussion in Spain. Amical de Mauthausen, an organization to commemorate the memory of the victims, became public as late as 1978. Spanish citizens found out that thousands of their fellow citizens perished at the Nazi hands and particularly at Mauthausen, a word only a few of them had previously heard. Unfortunately, the process of free exchange of opinions and information about both the Civil War and the Spaniards in WWII became obvious only in the late 20th century, when many of the survivors had already passed away.  

It was in the 2000s that Spanish citizens paid attention to the legacy of the 1930s and 1940s and the years of Franco’s dictatorship on a full scale, which made the revaluation of the historical memory possible. Both scholars and people were challenged with the prism through which they should speak about the Holocaust, while Spain was formally neutral in WWII and the majority of the Spanish victims of the genocide were non-Jews. The history of the prisoners and victims of Mauthausen finally reached the 2000s generation through published memoirs, testimonies of the survivors and the recollection of their children, documentaries, cinema, the internet, and free access to information. The legacy of the Spaniards in Mauthausen finally made its impact on the modern conception of the Holocaust and the Nazi racial and political means. 

The new millennium brought two rivers of commemoration of the historical legacy into Spanish society. The first one is the public memorialization of the Republicans and the opponents of Franco’s regime killed or persecuted during and after the Civil War. The second one is the representation of the Spaniards in the Nazi camps, and evidently in Mauthausen, in collective memory in Spain, those who were dehumanized by the Nationalist regime in Spain, then left in the hands of Hitler and finally left out of Spanish memory for decades. Although the Spaniards in Mauthausen were not subjected to systematic extermination for their race or religion, they were persecuted and killed in many of the same ways as the Jews.

 

THE MONUMENTO A LA TOLERANCIA: ALMERIA’S MEMORIAL TO ITS MAUTHAUSEN DEAD

The modern tourist destination in Southern Spain, Almeria, with its palm trees and 20+C in the winter, has a long and challenging history since the X century. After a millennium under the reign of different rulers, the city became an important port with a population of 50,000 at the turn of the XX century. In 1912, the Bishop of Almeria was among twenty-two Spanish regional Christian leaders who supported the so-called ‘National Anti-Masonic and Anti-Semitic League’. Nevertheless, the proclamation of the necessity of war with Judaism brought harsh consequences to the region. In 1931, Almeria’s population was in general enthusiastic toward the establishment of the leftist ‘Second Republic’, which would later result in the brutal reprisals under Franco. During the Civil War, the population of Almeria went through not only the state of war but also direct attacks. The most notorious one took place on May 31, 1937, when the German heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer, 186 meters in length, and another four destroyers bombarded the city of Almeria at dawn. The attack destroyed thirty-five buildings and claimed the lives of twenty people. 

In February 1937, Almeria, or more precisely the road to the city, became a scene of tragedy. Málaga fell to Franco’s forces on 8 February 1937, and the wave of repression and more than 1500 executions drove up to 100,000 left Málaga in the direction of Almería. During their exile of almost 200 km long, women, children, and the elderly were constantly attacked from the sea, air, and on the ground, thus turning the escape route into a massacre for people without military protection, causing the death of more than 3000 refugees. Once the columns reached Almeria, the city was severely bombed by the Nationalist air forces, killing both the exiles and the local population in the streets and destroying the city center. After the so-called ‘liberation’ in 1939, the province witnessed brutal reprisals: arrests, trials, and executions. 1507 people were tried in Almería toward the end of 1939, 1412 in 1940, and 1717 in 1941, with a total number of executions of 375 and more than two hundred prisoners who died in the overcrowded city prison, which was cramped with six thousand people instead of the five hundred it had been built for. 

When it comes to the number of people from the region who went through or died in the Mauthausen camp, historians put the figure of Andalusians as high as 1500, of whom more than a thousand died in the camp; 142 of those deaths were from Almería particularly. ‘Amical de Mauthausen’, an organization to commemorate the memory of the victims, emerged from hiding as late as 1978, at the time when Spain finally saw the testimonies and memoirs of the Mauthausen survivors, including those from Almería. The exiled Spaniards outside the country donated to the construction of the monument at the memorial park in the camp in 1962, but the wave of monuments in Spain itself became a reality at the end of the XX century. The necessity to incorporate the history of the Spaniards during WWII and in Mauthausen was backed by the few survivors who were still alive half a century after the end of the War. 

Antonio Muñoz Zamora, the former fighter for the Republican army, was the most recognized Mauthausen survivor in the Andalucia region and a passionate advocate of the construction of the memorial in Almeria. At sixteen, when the Civil War broke out, Zamora fought in several battles and fled the country to France with his division in February 1939. After years of hardship, first in French, then in the German camps, including Dachau, in August 1944 he entered Mauthausen. Zamora weighed only 29 kilograms on the day of the camp’s liberation on May 5, 1945. After a period of recovery, he left Austria for France and returned to Spain as late as 1963, where he continued his undercover work against Franco’s dictatorship. Antonio Munoz Zamora was a prominent representative of the ‘Amical de Mauthausen’ organization.

In 1999, Zamora finally promoted the construction of the memorial aimed at commemorating the memory of the Almeria people, who lost their lives in Mauthausen. The Monumento a la Tolerancia was unveiled on May 5, 1999, the anniversary of the camp’s liberation, in the Almadrabillas Park next to the old freighter depot, in the presence of local authorities and Zamora with his family. In the same year, the former prominent Mauthausen survivor was awarded the Andalusian Medal. He used to visit the memorial until his death on October 8, 2003. His ashes were buried beneath the memorial. 

The memorial was created by the Almeria sculptress Mariángeles Guil (born 1959), an author of unique works in Spain, Mexico, and Italy. She is regarded as the only Andalusian avant-garde sculptor of the twentieth century. The memorial consists of two spaces. The first one is the monument in the form of a staircase, which resembles the way many of the Mauthausen prisoners were worked to death in the nearby quarry. The statue is surrounded by a field of 142 stone columns for every victim of the camp from Almería. Later historical investigation revealed that at least 252 people from Almería went through Mauthausen; 142 of them perished in the camp between 1940 and 1945. Since 1999, the site has become not only a place to visit once a year in May, but also a meeting point. Unfortunately, the Mauthausen Memorial in Almería was vandalized several times. In 2000, the memorial became part of the documentary made by the director, Felipe Vega, devoted to the Mauthausen survivors, particularly to Muñoz Zamora and Joaquín Masegosa Rodríguez (1918-2001). 

Austria itself was in no hurry to commemorate anything. The country’s first prominent public monument to the victims of the Nazi period — the Monument Against War and Fascism in Vienna — was unveiled only in 1988, more than forty years after Mauthausen was liberated.

The memorial goes by two names. Its formal title is the Monumento a las Víctimas Almerienses de Mauthausen — the monument to the Almería victims of Mauthausen. Locally, and on the city’s own tourist listings, it is the Monumento a la Tolerancia, the Monument to Tolerance. Both names refer to the same place, and it is worth knowing both: ask for the first in the street, and you may get a blank look.

Where it is. On the seafront, in the Parque de las Almadrabillas, on the Paseo Marítimo at the eastern end of the old port — about ten minutes’ walk from the cathedral quarter and a few minutes from the intermodal station. It shares the park with the Cable Inglés, the 1904 ore-loading pier that dominates every photograph taken here. There is no gate, no ticket, and no opening time: it is a public park, and the memorial is part of it.

What you see. Two elements. The first is a staircase in stone, with the figure of a man bent under the weight of a block — a direct reference to the quarry steps at Mauthausen, which the prisoners climbed carrying granite. The second is the field of 142 concrete columns that surrounds it, one for each person from Almería who died in the camps. The work is by the Almería sculptor Mª Ángeles Lázaro Guil, and it was unveiled on 5 May 1999 — the anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen — by Antonio Muñoz Zamora, the last Almería survivor of the camp, who had spent years campaigning for it. His ashes rest at the site.

Its legal status. In 2011, the Junta de Andalucía designated the monument a Lugar de Memoria Histórica de Andalucía, a place of historical memory — which matters, because the site has needed protection.

When to go. The columns read best in low sun, which in Almería means early morning or the hour before sunset; these photographs were taken at sunset in December 2019. There is a commemorative act here each year in early May, around the anniversary of the liberation, organised with Amical de Mauthausen — the association founded by the survivors themselves, which operated underground in Spain until it could go public in 1978.

It takes twenty minutes to walk around. Spanish press has described it as the largest monument in Spain to the victims of the Nazi camps, and almost nobody who comes to Almería for the beaches knows it is there.

The monument is vandalised repeatedly. Participants in the 2019 commemorative march arrived to find graffiti and Nazi symbols, including swastikas, on the columns; local reporting since describes graffiti reappearing within days of each cleaning. The city carries out periodic maintenance, and the argument in Almería is whether what the site suffers is vandalism or neglect. There has also been a more serious threat. In June 2020, Amical de Mauthausen issued a public statement calling on the authorities to guarantee the integrity of the monument in its present location, after building work nearby raised the possibility that it might be altered or moved. The association pointed out what is easy to forget when you stand there: this is not only a memorial but a grave, since the ashes of the man who built it are interred on the spot.

 

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Why were the Spanish Republicans at Mauthausen classified as stateless?
Because Franco’s government declined to claim them. When Berlin asked in the summer of 1940 what should be done with the Spanish exiles who had fallen into German hands in France, Madrid requested the extradition of a small number of prominent Republicans and left the rest unclaimed. Having no state to answer for them, they were registered as Staatenlose and issued the blue triangle of the stateless with an S for Spanier.

How many Spaniards were sent to Mauthausen, and how many died?
Estimates range from about 7,000 to 7,532 deported, and from 4,427 to about 4,900 dead. The USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia gives “some 7,000,” with more than half dying. A count made inside the camp by Spanish prisoners working in the political department gave 7,200 entering and 4,765 dying. On 9 August 2019, the Spanish government published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado the names of 4,427 Spaniards who died at Mauthausen and Gusen — the only officially certified list, and lower than the estimates because it counts only the identified.

Why is Mauthausen called the camp of the Spaniards?
It is a Spanish name — el campo de los españoles — not an SS designation. The Spaniards were the first large national group in the camp after the Germans and Austrians, arriving from August 1940; they were assigned in disproportionate numbers to the granite quarry and to construction; and they remained there longer than almost any other group.

When did the first Spaniards arrive at Mauthausen?
On 6 August 1940, when some 392 men were brought from Stalag VII-A at Moosburg, near Munich. On 24 August 1940, a second transport, the so-called Convoy of the 927, arrived from the Les Alliers camp near Angoulême in France — the first mass deportation of entire families from Western Europe to a Nazi camp. The men were kept at Mauthausen; the women and children were sent on to Spain.

What does Appellplatz mean?
Appellplatz is German for the roll-call square — the open area where prisoners were counted, often for hours, in any weather. At Mauthausen it lies immediately inside the main gate, and it survives today, with several of the wooden barracks still standing along it. The word is spelled with two l’s: Appell (roll call) plus Platz (square).

Did the Spanish government know its citizens were in the camps?
Yes. Ramón Serrano Suñer claimed long afterwards that the Spanish government had no idea, but historians have the correspondence between the Mauthausen commandant’s office and the Spanish consulate concerning Spanish prisoners, their effects, their letters and their ashes.

Where is the memorial to the Spanish victims in Almería?
In the Parque de las Almadrabillas, on the seafront beside the Cable Inglés pier. It is known both as the Monumento a las Víctimas Almerienses de Mauthausen and as the Monumento a la Tolerancia. It was unveiled on 5 May 1999 and consists of a stone staircase with a bowed figure, surrounded by 142 columns, one for each victim from Almería. Access is unrestricted.

Who was Antonio Muñoz Zamora?
A Republican soldier from Melilla, born on 8 October 1919, who crossed into France in February 1939, was interned at Argelès, Barcarès and Le Vernet, and was deported through Compiègne and Dachau to Mauthausen, which he entered on 18 August 1944 as prisoner 90009. He weighed 29 kilograms at the liberation on 5 May 1945. He returned to Spain in the 1960s, campaigned for the Almería memorial, received the Medal of Andalucía in 1999, and died on 8 October 2003 — on his eighty-fourth birthday. His ashes rest at the memorial he built.

 

I am very grateful to war archives, museums, libraries, private collections, and writers for the historical photos in this article. To the extent that some author or a copyright owner may not want some of the above black-and-white photos to be used for educational purposes here, please contact me for adding credits or deleting the pictures from the article.