The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain by Paul Preston | eBook

Adam Hochschild

…magisterial…The Spanish Holocaust is not really a narrative but a comprehensive prosecutor's brief. With its immense documentation—120 pages of endnotes to both published and unpublished material in at least five languages, including corrections of errors in these sources—it is bound to be an essential reference for anything written on the subject for years to come.
—The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

The murder of 200,000 Spaniards and the deaths of countless more from disease, slave labor, and the ravages of concentration camps was a deliberate plan by Franco’s troops to eliminate their opponents, says Preston, a leading scholar of 20th-century Spanish history at the London School of Economics. Preston (The Spanish Civil War) provides more than enough illumination of this lesser-known holocaust in this thick, intensely detailed, indignant account. Spain entered the 20th century impoverished and largely rural. Industrialization and the rise of militant unions after WWI provoked conflicts that worsened after the passing of a reformist 1931 constitution, which outraged landowners, army officers, and the Catholic Church. They supported the rising Falangist movement, which denounced the government in familiar fascist rhetoric. The 1936 rebellion was led by Gen. Francisco Franco, who, after taking power, “perfect... the machinery of state terror” in order to maintain power. Although Preston describes many Republican atrocities, a relentless stream of gruesome trials, executions, and massacres presses his case that the Right committed the lion’s share. Many conservatives, finding much to admire in Franco, have accused Preston of bias, and this latest work is unlikely to silence them. Illus. (Mar.)

Adam Hochschild - New York Times Book Review

Magisterial account... it is bound to be an essential reference for anything written on the subject for years to come.

Ian Kershaw

A harrowing and moving account of the immense terror and enormous atrocities, especially perpetrated by General Franco's followers, during and after the Spanish Civil War, meticulously researched and superbly written by an outstanding historian.

Jon Lee Anderson

Paul Preston is the outstanding scholar of Spain's Civil War, and The Spanish Holocaust, is unquestionably his opus magnus. For the first time, the horror of the Spanish conflict has been placed in its appropriate historical context. As documented by Preston in this moving, brilliantly rendered account, Spain was not only the scene-setter for World War Two, but also the proving ground for the campaigns of mass-murder that became its ghastly hallmark. A deeply important, powerful work of history.”

Thomas Snyder - The New Republic

What Preston knows about the years of civil war, 1936-1939, is astounding… Preston’s work is a powerful intervention in a Spanish discussion. It’s significance transcends the events it brings to light, and suggests some basic re-evaluations of recent European history.

New Yorker

Fascinating... Unflinchingly, Preston sifts through the pillage, torture, and mass executions of this bleak chapter in Spanish history.

Sebastiaan Faber - The Volunteer

Monumental study... [The Spanish Holocaust] directly links Spain’s Nationalists to the Nazi regime, stressing that Franco’s reign of terror, like that of Hitler and Goebbels, was carefully planned and systematically executed.... The Spanish Holocaust draws on Preston’s vast research, as well as scores of recent historical studies, to establish the most accurate possible estimates of numbers of Spanish victims—statistics that, ever since the outbreak of the war, have been notoriously subject to manipulation and distortion.... [Preston] has produced an indispensable, important book.”

New York Times Book Review

Magisterial account... it is bound to be an essential reference for anything written on the subject for years to come.— Adam Hochschild

The New Republic

The Volunteer

Monumental study... [The Spanish Holocaust] directly links Spain’s Nationalists to the Nazi regime, stressing that Franco’s reign of terror, like that of Hitler and Goebbels, was carefully planned and systematically executed.... The Spanish Holocaust draws on Preston’s vast research, as well as scores of recent historical studies, to establish the most accurate possible estimates of numbers of Spanish victims—statistics that, ever since the outbreak of the war, have been notoriously subject to manipulation and distortion.... [Preston] has produced an indispensable, important book.— Sebastiaan Faber

John Brademas

Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust, is the most illuminating study I have seen of the complex, modern conflict that observers of Spain today still find difficult to understand. Anyone wanting to know modern Spain will read with great interest, this brilliant, well-informed analysis.”

Library Journal

Figuring in America's imagination largely as the place noble young men went to fight, the Spanish civil war was a particularly dark and bloody moment in European history. Perhaps the (English-speaking) authority on the subject, London School of Economics professor Preston offers a detailed account of the terror that reigned in Franco's Spain. Not as much coverage as there should be on this crucially important issue, so take a good look.

Kirkus Reviews

Chilling history of the class-fueled institutionalized violence perpetrated mostly by the reactionary Francoists during the Spanish Civil War. Scholar Preston (London School of Economics; We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War, 2009, etc.) uses the word Holocaust self-consciously but deliberately in this exhaustive treatment of the horrendous violence the Spanish waged against each other to annihilate mutually "undesirable" elements. The friction between the agrarian oligarchy and the landless day laborers and radicalized leftists had been escalating throughout the 1920s, culminating in the establishment of the Second Republic in 1931. However, the reactionary defenders of order, alarmed by the fall of the monarchy and breakdown in status quo, believed the new regime was a "Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy to take over Spain"--therefore violence against it was justified. While the Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero propounded revolutionary slogans that incited the hungry masses, the fascist Falange led by General Franco spoke repeatedly of the conspiracy masterminded by the Jews and international foreigners (the contubernio, or "filthy cohabitation"). Preston concentrates on the systematic spread of terror and repression by forces of the right in specific areas of Spain; they moved from town to town, hunting out "reds," often with the enthusiastic collaboration of the local landowning class. (During this time the poet Federico García Lorca was dragged out and shot.) The right-wing uprising particularly targeted leftist women, who had enjoyed new status and rights under the Republic. Using techniques of terror perfected against the Moroccan population, Franco and his hardened Africanistas moved to subjugate Madrid by slaughter, dismemberment and rape. Preston focuses on the staggering toll of the violence and the Francoist spin that stretches well into the present without proper reckoning. A rigorous, scrupulously researched study.

The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain

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