Miranda de Ebro concentration camp, 1937-1947

On July 5, 1937, an order published in the Official Bulletin of the Francoist government officially established a committee to create concentration camps in Spain. Under the supervision of Gestapo and SS officer Paul Winzer, the Francoist camps followed the Nazi model. Because of its privileged location close to the front and its excellent rail and road connections, Miranda del Ebro was chosen as the location for one of the first. It was opened in 1937 and remained open for a decade. It was the last concentration camp to close. 

To begin with, the camp was built using material from the Corzana circus, with its canvas tent serving as dwellings for the prisoners. They later built their own barracks; the first ones were crude and basic. Eventually there were thirty barracks aligned in symmetrical rows.  

The camp housed thousands of foreigners: members of the International Brigades, Jewish refugees, Allied soldiers, and Spanish Republicans who were grouped by nationality and lived in separate barracks.  They suffered the same hardships as the Republicans: overcrowding, lack of food, disease. However, in January 1943, prisoners staged an eleven-day strike that led to improved conditions and an acceleration of the liberation of prisoners from Allied countries, something that was required of a neutral country, which Spain officially was. All told, roughly 60,000 people from more than fifty countries passed through or spent time at the camp. 

The first Nazi prisoners, German soldiers who had been cut off in the south of France by the Allied advance, arrived in 1944. Continuous fights between German soldiers and the Allied and Republican prisoners led to the erection of a fence within the camp to separate them. The Germans lived better than the other prisoners because Franco treated them differently and the German embassy provided them funds to purchase better food and clothing.  

Since 2019, the department of Historic Memory of the municipal government of Miranda de Ebro has been carrying out research and documentation projects devoted to the camp and to the residents of the town who suffered reprisals during the Civil War. It has created a memory route with guided visits to the Garden of Memory, the Emiliano Bajo Park, named after the last Republican mayor, the memorial to those who died in the camp, the remains of the camp and the Interpretation Centre. All of this can be accessed on the website www.mirandamemoria.es.