The Transfer of Spanish Prisoners, 9 August, 1940

One of the most striking things about the Spanish prisoners who arrived at Mauthausen was that most of them wore a blue triangle with the letter S (spanier) sewn into the middle. In theory, this indicated that they were “emigrants” or “stateless” Spaniards. This did not fully correspond to the original meaning of the symbol, which had been created to designate Jews or political refugees who had fled Germany after the Nazis came to power but had been arrested when they returned to the country. This anomaly was unique to Mauthausen since in all the other camps Spaniards were given the red triangle of political prisoners.

The first Spaniards arrived at Mauthausen on 6 August 1940, after a brief period of internment in the Stalag, prisoner of war camps, where they were sent after being arrested following the German invasion of France. (The document included here shows some of the transfers on 9 August.) From the outset, they were hard to categorize, since they were arrested as combatants in the French army and then had to go through reidentification process in which they were classified as “emigrant workers”, the category used by the Vichy regime.

The Spaniards endured an anomalous classification process in the KL, especially in Mauthausen, where they always wore an insignia that did not correspond to the real nature and motives for their arrest and transfer but did not affect their treatment as political prisoners in protective custody, a category into which Spaniards in all German concentration camps shared. The explanation for the Spanish peculiarity in the Austrian inferno is unclear, although it was probably a response to questions related to the need to deal in the same way with all members of a certain group of prisoners who, after January 1944, would be the essence of an entirely new category. This was the rotspanier (Red Spaniards): those individuals who had dared to join the fight against fascism in Europe.

The bureaucratic evolution of the camp makes it possible to confirm that their nationality was always used as the basis for differentiating the Spaniards, not just in the main camp, but throughout the entire Austrian camp complex. The Francoist regime’s refusal to recognize the existence of these prisoners never influenced the way Nazi Germany treated the Spaniards interned in its web of terror.

GGB