Quotes from Helen Graham

the rule of law.

the Republic was seeking to defend itself against a rebel onslaught backed by the industrial might and military muscle of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Known collectively as Paracuellos, for the village outside Madrid where the shootings took place, this was the clearest equivalent in the history of the Republic at war to the prison sacas

in 1939 a British police chief was due to make an official visit to Dachau in order to observe "modern policing techniques

The Republic continued to behave as a democracy, albeit one at war and in the most difficult of conditions.

But other priests were perpetrators, participating directly in the firing squads.62

After 1939 the Church would regain enormous social influence in exercising new disciplinary functions on behalf of the Francoist state. Religious personnel played a key role en masse in the running of prisons, reformatories and other correctional facilities.

There was an uncanny mixture of terror and fiesta – executions followed by village fêtes and dances, both of which the local population was obliged to attend.64

The kind of killing perpetrated by civilian vigilantes – often called the "hot repression" – tended to be what happened in the period immediately after rebels took control of a specific town or village.

those who had defended the Republic were court-martialled and executed en masse for "military rebellion", a punishment that would continue after 1939.

Terror could only happen because the military allowed it.

Franco's coalition was driven by a very particular desire: that of both the colonial military elite and its civilian supporters to subject social change to court martial and restore their ideal of a static society.

The 1930s in Spain saw the development of a series of culture wars that would play out during the years of the Civil War itself. As in all culture wars, the way people mythologized their fears generated violence.

the military coup detonated all manner of private hatreds, as well as social fears and prejudice – all of which were legitimized by the coup's pervasive rhetoric of "purification", to become an integral part of the "crusade", with lethal results.

the fear-driven social purification underpinning Francoism,

long, slow and painful recuperation of Republican history and memory

the tens of thousands of people killed in the Francoist repression – by the end of the 1940s the figure was at least 150,000

The fascist Falangist or clerical Carlist militia and other volunteers of the right could at any time have been disciplined by the military authorities that underwrote public order from the beginning. Not only did this not happen, but instead the military actively recruited thousands of civilian vigilantes to carry out a dirty war.11

called upon the Catholic faithful to join the war against "Soviet Jewish-Masonic laicism".

Among the military rebels and all their immediate supporters there was an especially pathological fear and loathing of emancipated women

Spain's historic form of extrajudicial murder, the ley de fugas, inherited from the long-lived Restoration monarchy, was now operating on an industrial scale against those who had sought a voice and a vote.

a Phrygian bonnet (a well-known symbol of the Republic)

the death squads came, by night to "take out" of gaol in the deadly sacas, exactly the same form of extrajudicial execution that ended the lives of her two brothers and of tens of thousands of others across Spain.

red" women had forfeited their right to nourish their young,