This article analyses the memorialization of Ion Moța and Vasile Marin, two Romanian Legionary movement volunteers who died while fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, as an entangled history of Romanian and Spanish fascisms. The commemoration practices and narratives recounted in the Spanish and Romanian newspapers and archival sources from the period 1937–41 show that commemorating foreign ideological peers and appropriating symbolic elements of foreign fascisms in order to memorialize fallen comrades served as resources for legitimizing the struggle against domestic competitors. Although the […] ambitions of Spanish and Romanian fascists remained unfulfilled, the Spanish–Romanian entanglement contributed to consolidating Moța and Marin as martyrs of transnational fascism.
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In the successor states of Austria–Hungary, where victimhood nationalism developed as a common post‐war cultural phenomenon and a means of justifying the reclamation of lost territories and failed attempts at independence, claims of self‐martyrdom were a powerful instrument for establishing legitimacy in the political arena. For example, in the Polish domains of Eastern Galicia, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (O.U.N.), which co‐operated with and was receptive to the ideas and practices of Italian Fascism, attempted to humanize its fallen terrorists as martyrs at the hands of the Polish authorities. The main function of praising fallen O.U.N. comrades in articles, songs, poems and icons was to integrate violence into everyday life and instil courage for further extremist actions. With the [Axis] occupation of 1941, these cults competed with those organized around the ‘victims of Soviet barbary’, which were conceived by Nazi Germany as a means of mobilizing the population in favour of the goals of the Third Reich and against the political project of the O.U.N.