(Mirror.)
Within Franco’s repressive system there was a specific procedure applied to Republican women (Espinosa 2002; González‐Ruibal 2014). They suffered a specific violence as consequence of their political activity during the Republic or because they were the wives, mothers, sisters or relatives of Republicans (Nash 2015; Sánchez 2009; Solé 2016).
The different repressive strategies used against female groups by Spanish fascism were motivated by the perception of women as second‐class citizens and therefore inferior to men.
According to Francoist ideologues like Juan Antonio Vallejo‐Nágera, women intellectually inferior and unreliable and used social revolutions to unleash their sexual appetite and cruelty (Vallejo‐Nágera and Martínez 1939).
The consideration of women as subaltern led to the application of different types of punishment that not always implied death (Solé 2016). On the one hand, it could be physical, through the execution, torture and rape of women (Richards 1999; Preston 2011) first during the war and later in Franco’s prisons (Rodrigo 2008).
On the other, it could also be psychological, by eliminating aspects of their femininity through the shaving of their hair and their public exposure after having ingested castor oil, which caused them severe diarrhoea — the alleged purpose was to ‘throw communism out of their bodies’ (Richards 1999, 58–59).
Republican women were caricatured as prostitutes (Gómez 2009), due to their efforts to achieve emancipation and equal rights during the Republic and their struggle against patriarchal culture and Catholic morality (Nash 2015). After the war, many women that had been left destitute and were marginalized due to their Republican credentials were driven to prostitution (Casanova 2002).
[…]
According to the available testimonies, a priest went to the site with the new authorities in order to give extreme unction to the detainees. For that purpose, he placed a crucifix in front of each of the victims to be kissed. When the priest asked Josefa Fernández Catena, known as ‘La Galla’, to kiss the crucifix, she refused to do so.
In response, the priest hit her mouth with the cross and broke her teeth. In the group of civilians executed in the Romanzal stream at least two women were pregnant:
“La Galla” had her teeth broken […] she was pregnant […] she said when she was going to be executed: “you will not kill one, you will kill two”5
“We do not know if the child was born dead or not. They said the child was born dead, but we never found out”6
(Emphasis added.)
Events that happened today (August 8):
1881: Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist, Axis field marshal, worsened life with his presence.
1940: Wilhelm Keitel signed the ‘Aufbau Ost’ directive.
1944: The Third Reich executed Axis field marshal Job Wilhelm Georg Erwin Erdmann von Witzleben for planning to murder the Chancellor. Coincidentally, the Allies successfully killed Waffen‐SS tank commander Michael Wittmann and his crew.
1945: France, Imperial America, the United Kingdom, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics signed the London Charter, establishing the laws and procedures for the Nuremberg trials.
1969: Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, Axis eugenicist who misinformed students (including Josef Mengele) for a living, finally perished.
2003: Dirk Hoogendam, SS officer, finally dropped dead.
Brutal. The scary thing is, most people aren’t really aware of who and what Franco was. Apparently, many of those who do would rather pretend the bad bits didn’t happen – in order to salvage his and his regime’s reputations. Surprise surprise.
When I first started learning Spanish I went to a language class. They asked why I was learning Spanish. I said I wanted to learn more about Spanish history, the civil war, etc. The teacher replied: ‘You’ve got to be careful with these topics as many people in Spain haven’t come to terms with them yet and it’s a sore subject as many families can’t bring it up or they’d fall out.’ I’ll be damned if I’m holding my tongue so that I don’t upset someone who supported Franco. They can get fucked. I didn’t go back to that class. I didn’t quite realise how bad it was at the time. It’s quite difficult to really imagine the cruelty. I think I made the right choice avoiding Franco apologists.
(Paul Preston’s The Civil War in Spain isn’t a terrible overview if you’re interested. It’s not Marxist by any means, and I listened to it in Spanish in the earlier days of picking up the language so if I misunderstood parts, it could be bad.)
