Valle de los Caídos in Spain. The Valley of the Fallen.
Nearly half a century after the civil war,
the men who created and won that war,
have preserved this massive monument.
General Franco called the uprising against
the republican government, ... a crusade.
A fight for Christian civilisation.
Others called it fascism
It was for nearly 3 years the world's moral arena.
Inside this mausoleum today,
there is no hint of reconciliation
This huge tomb for Franco's men
was hewn in a granite mountain by his defeated enemies,
republican prisoners of war.
Before this altar of Christian piety and Francoist victory
lies a man who led Spain's Fascist Party,
... José Antonio.
The great dome celebrates the victorious nationalist
almost as a celestial host.
And below it, behind the altar, the Generalissimo himself,
Franco, now deeply part of the Spanish language
in homage, or hate.
As a soldier, Franco had served the republic,
and his heart was monarchist.
He was called a fascist, and died a dictator.
The contradictions of Franco are part of the heart of Spain itself.
It was said, in time to come,
that Franco was a cautious and even reluctant conspirator
in the army's coup d'état, which began the civil war.
But he became Europe's longest ruling dictator of our century.
The archetype of dominant endurance.
When Franco was born in 1892,
Spain was still a proud imperial power.
Franco was a child when that empire dissolved.
The American wars lost Cuba and the Philippines.
It was a grievous blow to Spanish pride,
and also a knock for the young Franco.
He had wanted to follow his father and brother into the Spanish navy.
But with the dissolution of an overseas Spain, that was cut back.
So for Francisco Franco, it had to be the unglamorous
and rather disgruntled army.
For Franco, and so many of his class and generation,
the army was his education.
It confirmed the political images of the past,
which were romantic, or ambitious,
... or probably both.
Spain had lost its empire, but it still clung desperately and bitterly
to its last vestige of glory abroad.
In its protectorate of Morocco,
Spain sought to erase its humiliations far away
by redoubling its military dominance.
At home, as so often in military restlessness,
party politics meant very little.
The officers were either indifferent, or vaguely hostile.
The only consideration, almost religious,
was "patria" ... the fatherland.
As a career army officer, Francisco Franco flew
very high and very fast.
He became in succession, the youngest captain, major and colonel.
By the age of 33, he was a general.
He had commanded the Spanish Foreign Legion for 4 years,
following his personal mentor, a much wounded and scarred hero
General Millán Astray.
Millán Astray was the founder of this disciplined
and brutal elite of the Spanish army.
The Foreign Legion was used to suppress
the Asturias rebellion against the republican government in 1934.
This was the regiment's first military use at home.
It was an experience never forgot, and Franco
advised on the conduct of the operation.
Later he was appointed chief of staff,
and served under the republic.
As such he represented Spain at the funeral of
the English King George V at Windsor in January 1936.
Franco himself was personally and politically a monarchist.
He supported the restoration of the Spanish king
who had fallen from power four years earlier.
Few people know that Francisco Franco
once nudged his fame to the movie business.
After the war he wrote a feature film under a pseudonym.
which reveals his contempt for democratic politics.
The script follows the lives of three brothers.
It's a situation not unlike Franco's own family.
His younger brother Ramón was a republican.
In this scene, one brother, who wants to be a republican politician
is arguing with another, an army officer, about
using his inheritance for a political career.
Their mother has agreed to share out the estate.
It was perhaps, easier for Franco to understand, than for us.
The film's breathless commentary goes on to describe
the five years of Spain's fragile democracy.
In Franco's version of events, at least.
Destruction of traditional values.
Communist revolution.
These were the catchwords with which the insurgent generals
rallied most of Spain's middle class against the republic.
Petra Roman de Bondia was a young girl
from a conservative family in Salamanca.
I thought the military uprising would bring
an improvement in every sense.
Our ideals, and what we thought
Franco and his army were going to defend
were God, the homeland, the family and order.
We thought that the rising would change everything.
We never imagined that it would be such a long war.
Before the war, in the 5 years of democracy 1931 to 1936,
the Spanish republic had not just been a new order.
It had questioned all the assumptions of accepted society,
and now some people wanted to put the clock back.
Tomas Garicano Goñi was a young army officer.
I think that most of our hopes were fundamentally negative.
That is to say we wanted to stop certain things.
Public disorder, the labour upheavals,
which did so much harm to both management and workforce.
We wanted to do away with religious persecution.
Not only was religious education banned,
but also any teaching by the religious orders.
We wanted really to return to a more traditional Spanish way of life.
A peaceful one, which this republican government had failed to bring.
The social upheavals of the republic had led to
a progressive breakdown of law and order.
In the countryside, peasants hungry to own
the land the worked, ... seized it.
Some landowners had been killed,
and others feared for their lives.
Peace was impossible, so we had to head for the hills.
If it's just not possible to live, then you have to find a different solution,
which was the rising against the republic.
Franco had begun with curious discretion.
He had joined the army coup in Morocco with expressly limited aims
of restoring order, and crushing the revolution.
But his proclamation did not invoke the church, or any crusade
He did, to be sure, hint darkly about
foreign influences assailing traditional values.
What was surprising to some was that his proclamation
concluded with the unexpectedly democratic slogans
for eternity, liberty, equality.
But that, he said, was the absolute order of their priority.
The first army decrees gave instant comfort
to its middle class supporters ... that was fairly easy.
All the land the republican reforms had shared out
was to go back to the owners. Trade unions were banned.
So were all political parties of the popular front.
But first the army had to face the fact that its initial coup had failed.
Armed working class resistance had defeated the army rising
in five key cities. Spain was divided.
The republican government held Madrid, the Basque country,
and nearly half the rest of Spain.
And the nationalist command was split.
General Mola in the north, and in the south ...
Franco with his Army of Africa.
The nationalists original plan had been to install
General Sanjurjo as commander in chief
But he died in a plane crash as he left Portugal
to take command in Spain.
It left a difficult gap.
Two months later, the rebel generals
gathered for a meeting in Salamanca.
A strong lobby for Franco was gaining ground.
All but one voted in favour of a single commander in chief.
The sole objection was from Miguel Cabanellas.
who had been temporarily appointed leader of the military junta.
Next, Franco was proposed.
Again, all but Cabanellas agreed.
The decision was delayed.
What was desperately needed was a man
who all under arms on the insurgents side would support.
Already the insurgents were split with differences.
There was the old peninsula army.
There was the Civil Guard, the Army of Africa,
Spanish units and Moors.
Let alone the armed militias of the fascist Falange,
and columns of monarchists and traditionalists
All these armed factions had conflicting expectations of their leader.
Alone among the rivals, Franco seemed to satisfy the factions.
He was the man in the middle.
His reputation as a soldier ensured him popular support.
and this was immediately reinforced by events.
Driving on to the relief of Toledo,
the advance of General Franco's columns from the west
is pushed on remorselessly. White troops and Moors,
well armed and trained in modern methods of warfare,
supported by powerful artillery, overcome the resistance
of government militia, who's retreat is on Madrid rather than Toledo.
General Franco arrives to embrace and honour Colonel Moscardó,
the brave and bearded commander.
The victory at Toledo inflated Franco's prestige.
Even before his appointment as commander in chief was announced,
his supporters were planning higher office for him.
They proposed he should be, not only supreme military commander,
but head of the government.
Some of his colleagues were doubtful.
Nevertheless, Francisco Franco emerged as the undisputed leader,
and called himself, "Head of State".
On October 1st, 1936, Franco was granted all powers
of the new state of Spain, at least for the duration of the war.
My personal reaction to Franco's appointment was one of relief.
Nationalist soldiers were saying:
"A single command wins a war. Split command loses a war."
Franco's appointment was unquestioned.
There wasn't anyone else who could hold a candle to him.
It was a source of great relief all round.
The army generals who appointed Franco as head of government
as a military necessity, may not have realised
they were establishing a personal dictatorship.
Many different groups had supported their rising.
First the conservatives, who had supported
the right-wing parliamentary coalition CEDA before the war
Second the monarchists, who sought the restoration of King Alfonso.
Third the Carlists, mainly from Navarre.
There were also called traditionalists.
They were religious, supported a king too,
... albeit, a different claimant, and fought for their regional rights.
Fourth, the Falange, the fascist party,
... outlawed by the republic.
They claimed to transcend the right and left of politics,
but called for a radical social revolution.
General Mola for one, was fully aware of
the wide complexity of the various factions.
He had successfully negotiated the support
of both the Carlists and the Falange for the plot.
Soon after Franco's appointment, Mola spoke to
Pedro Sainz Rodríguez, the right-wing monarchist intellectual,
who had joined the uprising, and later joined Franco's government.
I remember very well there was a large armchair in front of the desk,
and General Mola was sitting on the arm of it with his feet on the seat,
and he asked me: "What do you think will happen when the war ends."
I said there will be a problem with all the different political interests.
He said: "I'm pleased to hear you say that".
When the war is over it will be necessary to have
some sort of constitution and parliament.
In Franco's plan, there was no question of a parliament.
The army decree gave all powers of the new state to him.
He referred to himself as head of state,
twice in his first proclamation.
For many people, his own political ideology was a mystery.
Did he have a political theory?
Many people thought he was a man who was keeping a secret,
but I called him: "The Sphinx without a secret".
He had the air of a sphinx, but there was no secret.
He was silent on many subjects because he had no opinion on them.
Franco had never claimed to be a politician,
but he was of the intuitive right,
an instinctive defender of capitalism.
With his brother Nicolás as secretary, he prepared his program.
No working class trade unions.
Help for peasants, but land for landowners.
Concord with the church. Above all, no democracy.
That way perhaps, the working class opposition
could be wiped out forever.
These aims of the Spanish right
could only be secured by repression.
Even before Franco took command, working class resistance
was physically extinguished by advancing nationalist columns.
Franco himself continued the purge.
One day when I went to see Franco,
he had called me for an interview before I was a minister,
he was sitting at a table drinking chocolate,
dunking bits of bread and biscuits into it.
He had a heap of files on the left, and was classifying them.
Some he put on a table, others on a chair.
Afterwards on leaving, I asked an adjutant:
"What were those files which General Franco had?"
They were the death sentences.
Those on the chair were for signing, and the others for division.
It was something done quite calmly.
For him it was simply a military matter.
There were few critics of these methods in the nationalist zone.
Franco's supporters were united in the common cause
of defeating the republic.
But as to what to replace it with, there was much dispute.
First there were the fascists, the Falange.
Before the war and his imprisonment, their leader José Antonio,
had tried to present a doctrine of seductive simplicity.
The Falange's fascism was disguised by revolutionary jargon.
Narciso Perales was one of its first members.
The Falange was a revolutionary movement, which wanted to carry out
profound changes in the Spanish society of those times.
Changes which are still necessary today.
José Antonio proclaimed a doctrine which resolved
opposing doctrines in society.
It upheld spiritual values and belief in the fatherland
as our common and universal destiny,
and at the same time, it aimed for a social revolution.
Agrarian reform would turn the land over to the peasants,
so the division of giving the land to those who work it would come true.
Banks would be nationalised because it was considered unjust
that the savings of all the Spanish people should be controlled
by a few who dominated the economy of the country.
The Falange's leadership was predominantly
middle class or aristocratic young men.
But the movement was designed to appeal to working class sentiments,
albeit, staunchly anti-Marxist.
Raimundo Fernandez Cuesta later became secretary general
of the Falange
We discussed whether we should wear any distinctive clothing.
José Antonio said we should wear a blue shirt,
the same colour of the proletariat's overalls.
It was the same for the flag. It was black and red because
that was the flag of the anarchist trade unions
We wanted ours to be similar.
The same with the word "comrade", traditionally used by the communists.
José Antonio said: "I don't see why we shouldn't claim it ourselves.
Give the word "comrade" a different meaning.
In spite of its pretensions, the Falange never became
a mass fascist party with large working class membership.
Unlike what had happened in Germany and Italy
fascism had not taken root in Spain before the war.
For one thing, the economic conditions were very different.
Spain was still economically in the nineteenth century.
The groups that might have been attracted by fascism
were either satisfied by conventional politics,
... or just non-existent.
There was no large petty bourgeoisie
scarred by recession, or defeat in a world war.
The middle class was reassured that the dominant presence of the army
would protect them from revolution.
While the working class had suffered no disappointment
that might provoke them to find an alternative to
Marxist, socialist or anarchist ideals.
In 1936 however, after the February elections
when democracy disintegrated into political violence,
conservative youth had begun to defect to the radical alternative.
And once the war began, people flocked to the Falange.
It was a demonstration of allegiance to the nationalist cause.
And moreover, with a purge of working class organisations,
It became a safe haven for anybody who's background
was suspiciously leftist.
The blue shirt became known as a salvavidas, a life jacket.
Some nationalists however, viewed the Falange's
populist and violent image with distaste.
There were many people who joined the Falangists,
but I could never join them because I didn't consider them
to be virtuous in the Christian sense of the term.
I did not think that the Falangists were Christians.
I did not think they acted in a way that I considered to be correct.
And I never liked them.
There was a phobia against Falangism in my family partly because
the CEDA and the Falange were totally opposed to each other,
and we all belonged to the CEDA.
The greatest contrast to the Falange was
another faction of nationalists, the Carlists.
The deeply traditionalist group based in Navarre.
They lived in the romantic, almost mediaeval past.
We were defending God, the fatherland, and our king.
This was the traditional slogan of Carlism.
By God, we meant religion in its true sense,
with no interference by the church, and the government of the state.
As for politics, we were in favour of regional rights.
That is we saw Spain as a conglomeration of regions,
which had from time to time been united by
a common cause of Spanish nationality.
Franco was no fool.
He recognised the potential danger of disunity in the nationalist camp.
To his brother in law, Ramón Serrano Suñer
he gave the job of devising a formula for uniting the factions.
The objectives were to avoid internal conflicts and rivalry,
which were bound to debilitate the nascent state.
This was Franco's view.
And as commander in chief and leader in the war,
I think he was right.
He sought to establish and maintain a certain
order and discipline in the rearguard.
If the rearguard was left to the whims of the different groups,
things could get out of hand and could affect
the situation on the fighting fronts,
as happened in the republican zone.
The Falange was in trouble.
José Antonio had been killed in a republican jail.
All other potential candidates were in prison or dead,
and the organisation was riddled with ideological
and personal schism.
On April 17th 1937,
a former mechanic, Manuel Hedilla was confirmed as leader.
He had no formal education, was unimaginative and ineffective.
He was easy meat for Franco.
Two days after his election, Franco, as head of state
declared the Falange and the Carlists would be unified
in one national movement under his own direction.
When Hedilla challenged Franco's authority, he was sentence to death,
although this sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
By bringing the red beret-ed Carlists and the blue shirted Falange
under his direct leadership, Franco assured the triumph
of his personal brand of authoritarian conservationism,
and the unity of his supporters.
The man who claimed to support the restoration of the monarchy
had made himself a dictator.
True supporters of the king like Eugenio Vegas Latapie were outraged.
It seemed as if the new state created by Franco,
wasn't so much a state as a dictatorship.
A dictatorship run exclusively by him.
Don Pedro Sainz Rodríguez says with some accuracy,
that the difference between laws and decrees in Franco's regime
was that Franco pulled decrees out of one pocket, and laws from the other.
Everything was the exclusive wish of the Generalissimo.
Franco's regime was a conservative dictatorship,
but it was cloaked in symbols and ritual of fascism.
In the European economic depression of the thirties,
fascism could be seen, and was seen by many,
as an up-to-date alternative to the politics of class struggle.
To unite a nation, even forcibly,
in one supposed common interest,
was a superficially attractive doctrine.
At least it provided Franco, the reactionary soldier,
with a facade of modern political ideology.
Franco saw his task as blending the conflicting elements
of the new Spain by maintaining the traditional values of the old.
The charismatic fascist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera
was gone ... shot in a republican jail.
Franco assumed his mantle.
One could say Franco misrepresented José Antonio.
He emphasized the inoffensive side,
at least, what was inoffensive to conservative people,
and he silenced and buried anything that threatened them.
José Antonio had argued for the revolutionary upheaval
of Spain's old order. But now he was dead,
his name was carved in the stone of Burgos Cathedral.
Every church in Spain carried this potent legend.
Thus the Falange revolution became absorbed within
the symbolism of Spain's deepest reaction ... the church.
And Franco presided.
José Antonio's memory was preserved,
but the radical aspirations of his brand of fascism
were laid to rest.
What José Antonio had predicted before the war came true.
He had said that the Falange could contribute, without knowing it,
to the restoration of a conservative bourgeois mediocrity
of which, he commented, there is such a generous sample in Spain.
And it would be adorned, to add to the mockery,
with the choreographic figures of the blue shirts.
The regime presented a mask which was basically fascist,
but deep down this wasn't the case.
I would describe it as an economically conservative,
authoritarian government, because order had to be imposed,
but with a facade and certain details from totalitarian regimes
to be found elsewhere in Europe.
Franco drew on support from all aspects of the old Spain,
but especially, and naturally, he found
an enthusiastic champion in the church.
The republic had attacked it, both ideologically and physically.
There was never any doubt as to where the church would stand now.
It protested at republican atrocities, but on the whole,
turned a blind eye to the same on the nationalist side.
Two months after the start of the war, the Bishop of Salamanca
declared that the military rebellion was a crusade.
It didn't seem to matter that it was being fought
by Moorish Muslim troops, whose religious symbol
was not the cross, but the sword.
The church's endorsement was reinforced by a letter
from Spanish bishops to Catholics all over the world.
In their words, the war was between the spiritual crusade
in defence of law and order, and the materialism of Russian Soviets.
This letter was published two weeks after
the rebels conquered the Basque country.
Priests there, like other conservatives,
served with the Basque Republican Army.
For them, the defence of the Catholic faith
was far from the same thing as Franco's crusade.
They had seen the wartime republic
as a cause of freedom for Basque regionalism.
They had appealed to the Pope, but although the Vatican wavered,
the Pope eventually recognised the Franco regime in the summer of 1937.
He later sent a nuncio to represent him in Burgos.
Undoubtedly, many Spaniards believed that Franco's campaign
was a holy task, and Rome's approval
was a great reinforcement to the devout.
A very moving experience for me was my meeting with my younger brother
who was later killed on the northern front.
He'd asked for leave to come and see me.
He said to me: "Look Christina, I wanted to see you
"because I wanted to ask you something.
"Those of use who die in the war,
"if we fight to defend God and Spain, as I am doing,
"are we going to go to heaven as martyrs,
"even if the church doesn't give us an official place in the register?"
I said I was sure they would, if they fought with that spirit
in the name of God and the motherland.
Then God would give them a place among the martyrs in heaven.
The Spanish church's endorsement, even sanctification
of Franco's rebellion, was well rewarded.
Religious education in state schools was again authorised;
church property was exempt from taxes;
civil marriage and divorce outlawed.
Now Spain could properly be called, National Catholic.
Propaganda films carried the message to the faithful.
This was how the rebel regime wanted, or needed, to be seen.
Apart from the Foreign Legion and the Moors,
the backbone of Franco's army were the catholic peasants
of Spain's agricultural heartland.
In spite of their poverty stricken standard of living,
they chose to defend traditional values,
... the village, and the church.
They were frightened too by stories of forced collectivization
in the republican zone. With Franco, on the other hand,
the price of their main crop ... wheat,
was guaranteed against ruinous fluctuation.
Their income, however meager, was secure.
In Castro ???, in Old Castile, the peasants had no doubt
about supporting the right-wing during the war,
as they had done before it.
During the republic we supported the right.
We had to support them because they were under attack.
During the republic we were persecuted, but after we were free.
We could go home any time. Before we couldn't even go out.
Florentino and Agapito were typical of a simple peasantry,
reassured by the nationalist regime's maintenance
of traditional values embodied in the church.
Their faith was their dignity.
I believe that with the church there was respect.
We respected each other more.
Without religion there could be no respect ... that's what I think.
Without the church, the priest, they just bury you like a dog.
Other people are against religion, but I've always been for it.
We joined Falange, and my brother was going to go to the front
But because he's my older brother, and he did more work than I did,
my father said I should go in his place.
In the end, he went off too.
The nationalist propaganda films
idealized the traditional image of Spain,
as distinct from the modern anomalies of the republic.
The contrast between the position of women
in the nationalist part of Spain,
and that in the republican zone, was extraordinary.
The republicans had emancipated women;
divorce was legalized; discriminatory laws abolished.
Now with the civil war, some women even went to the front to fight.
But in the nationalist zone, the señoras and señoritas of old Spain,
were revered in a subsidiary role.
Pilar Primo de Rivera was the sister of José Antonio
She had been trapped in republican Madrid at the start of the war.
They had no sense of family duty,
and the divorce law had already divided us even more,
because our catholic way of life meant we could not accept it.
In the nationalist zone, everything was much more constructive,
more efficient, orderly and effective.
There was a reason for everything.
On the other side, there was chaos, and a jumble of weird ideas.
That is the truth.
When Pilar escaped to the nationalist zone, she set up
a special woman's section of the Falange ... the fascist party.
Our women didn't go to the trenches,
they were auxiliaries at the front, in the infirmary;
in the washroom; in the hospitals.
But our view was always that the woman's
most important mission and her real place
was in the family, ... at home.
So we defended the integrity of the family.
The devotion of the woman to the family, particularly
when the children are small, and can't look after themselves.
Later, the woman could apply herself
to her vocational work, her studies, or whatever,
but without taking that too far.
We have always wanted to maintain a balance,
and give due priority to the defence of the family.
Of course, it will be a man who is entrusted to direct
the mission of women within the national movement.
The nationalist propaganda emphasized
the wholesome, domestic aspects of the regime.
Franco's daughter promoted this in a newsreel made for German children,
... with a little help from her father.
As the rebel's army secured more territory,
the propaganda cameras show the charitable work of the nationalists
in the captured republican towns.
A women's organisation, Auxilio Social,
modeled on its Nazi counterpart, Winter Help
... doled out bread.
From the start of the war, the rebels held
most of the food producing regions of Spain.
This gave them a powerful weapon, both in preserving morale in their own zone,
and taunting the increasingly hungry republicans.
The enforced unity and morale of the nationalists
seemed in stark contrast to the dejected squabbling
that had beset the republic even before the war.
Everything on the radio boasted of victory
We were always winning, we were triumphant, we were strong.
That's what we all felt at that time.
So we were the victors, we were winning,
We were the ones with God on our side.
All the soldiers carried a small piece of material
with the image of Jesus' heart.
It was thought that God was helping us because
that was how it should be, ... it had to be.
Nazi Germany and Italy had formerly recognised the rebel regime
during the siege of Madrid.
From the first day they had been supplying more and more military aid.
When the German ambassador, General von Faupel,
took the salute at the recognition ceremony
Franco described his allies as the bulwarks of culture, civilisation,
and Christianity in Europe.
"This moment," he said, "marks the peak of life in this world".
Franco did not, however, follow his Axis allies
too far down the path of fascism.
Nor did he, much to their annoyance, follow them into the Second World War.
But he willingly, if not gratefully, accepted their practical aid,
simply because without it, he could not have carried on the war.
When it was finally over,
Spain had to repay Germany 116 million pounds,
nearly two billion pounds in today's money (1982).
But the Germans were not altruistic.
They needed a steady flow of minerals for their own Nazi war machine.
They suggested taking over Spanish mines.
For a long time Franco resisted,
but later, when he desperately needed supplies for a final offensive,
he agreed to a German majority shareholding of five mining companies.
The fact of this odd triangular relationship was
that Franco's Spain was much closer in temperament to Italy.
The Italians encouraged Franco to be more fascist,
thereby to remove the well-founded suspicion that his was merely
a conservative reactionary regime.
They were only marginally successful.
Spain adopted fascist style institutions,
but only one piece of legislation of Franco's new state
reflected the revolutionary fascist influence of Italy.
A labour charter setting up corporate trade unions.
When Franco set up his first cabinet in the winter of 1937,
it faithfully reflected the traditional forces of conservative Spain.
It had four men from the new unified political movement,
but only one of them had any connection with the prewar revolutionary Falange.
There were two personal friends of Franco,
there were four military men, and two monarchists,
including Pedro Sainz Rodríguez
He was supported by the army, but he took great care that
the military men who went to the government would not take it over.
What he presented was not exactly a military dictatorship,
but a government of the Falange and the traditionalists.
Nevertheless, the Falange was just a sort of loin cloth
of his personal dictatorship.
The genuine Falangists and traditionalists
were prepared to do anything for the sake of their cause.
So Franco could trust neither.
Thus the true party people were replaced with
psuedo-Falangists and psuedo-traditionalists.
And even they were gradually pushed aside
as Franco increasingly relied on the right-wing groups
which, although they were not proper parties,
supported him until the end of his life.
We had absolute confidence in him.
The Falange wanted to run things and he sent them packing.
He wanted his brother-in-law to sort out the Falange,
and he got rid of him too. He couldn't have cared less.
His attitude was: "I'm following the path I've set for myself".
and that was that. And that's what he did.
As his Minister of Public Order
Franco appointed General Martínez Anido.
This mans reputation was based on
his brutal repression of anarchists in Barcelona in the twenties.
Anido's appointment marked Franco's determination, above all,
to strictly suppress any working class resistance.
If anyone was caught with any association with working class parties,
or trade unions, they were summarily dealt with.
Francisco Poyatos Lopez, a lawyer
had escaped assassination squads in republican Madrid.
But he found justice was no fairer in the nationalist zone.
20 people would go in and the trial would take
less than a quarter of an hour. There wasn't even time for them
to make statements ... nothing at all.
It was even worse than the executions without trial because
on top of everything, it was making a mockery of justice.
Giving an appearance of legality to something, which was not legal at all.
Also, as I learned later, Franco insisted that
only one in five people could be acquitted.
That was the highest proportion.
The nationalist passion for the unity of Spain
meant stamping on all aspirations for autonomy
in the traditionally distinctive regions of Catalonia and the Basque country.
In the Basque country, the physical devastation was matched
with the attempt to destroy the spirit of Basque nationalism.
The Basque language was prohibited.
Even the road signs were painted out.
In April 1938, as Franco's army was poised to invade Catalonia,
he announced the abolition of the region's home rule.
The decree proclaimed that Catalonia would now have the honour
of being governed on an equal footing with the rest of Spain.
Before the war was over, it became clear
what that honour entailed.
The so-called Law of Political Responsibilities,
retrospectively made anyone who had been an active republican
for 18 months before the war, liable to prosecution.
It included anyone who resisted Franco during the war.
More often than not, the sentence was death,
even if it wasn't always carried out.
By the spring of 1938, he was already rounding up
thousands of republican soldiers,
and sending them to concentration camps.
And the war still had a year to run.