Franco’s concentration camps

Between 1936 and 1947, there were 303 campos de concentración in Spain, in which more than 750,000 prisoners were incarcerated. Most of them were prisoners of war, but there was also a significant percentage of non-combatant civilians. Thousands perished due execution, beatings, illness, torture, exhaustion, or malnutrition. The concentration camp system grew and developed independently of the Francoist regime’s other repressive instruments, such as prisons and forced labor belonging to under the Redemption of Sentences Board.

The first concentration camp opened in Zeluán, near Melilla, just hours after the uprising began. From that moment on, similar facilities were established in the regions that fell under the control of the rebel army. In 1937, seeking to optimize the exploitation of prisoners as slave labor, Franco decided to centralize the control of all the camps under a single institution that reported directly to him: the Prisoner Concentration Camps Inspectorate (ICCP). 

From that moment on, the creation of Labour Battalions accelerated. These prisoner units were formed in the concentration camps and sent wherever trench digging, infrastructure or village reconstruction, agricultural work, or any other type of labor was needed. The end of the war led to the closure of most camps, but dozens of them and hundreds of Labour Battalions remained operational for nearly another decade.

The main objectives of Francoist concentration camps were:

1. Classifying prisoners: Franco did not want them to be released without first being investigated and, if necessary, purged.
2. Labour exploitation: generally in the Labour Battalions
3. Confinement and punishment: prisoners had to pay for resisting the coup with their suffering
4. Re-education: prisoners were to be made to accept the new regime, to be crushed ideologically and religiously. They were made to attend mass and “patriotic talks” and to take part in Francoist performance, giving the Roman salute, singing hymns like “Face to the Sun”, etc.
5. Selective murders, which some writers have considered an attempt at extermination: focusing on those prisoners identified as leaders or notable members of Republican organizations or the Republican military, or whose actions the victors deemed criminal. Many were murdered in the camp itself or “taken for a ride” by groups of Falangists.

CHM