Quotes from Helen Graham

The Franco regime's imperative of "cleansing" repression borrowed heavily from an apocalyptic, manichean brand of Catholicism (harking back to the Counter-Reformation) with its dialectic of fire and sword, where the suffering of the "heretic", his or her "penitence" was a necessary part of the process.

Francoist military psychiatrists carried out psychological tests on both captured International Brigade prisoners and Republican women prisoners.

press reports as uncovering how Francoist medicos were hunting for the "red gene".

purification" – which is an absolutely crucial word in Francoist Spain,

military court (consejo de guerra)

In spite of Franco's close political identification with the Nazi new order in Europe, he did not align Spain militarily with the German–Italian Axis and thus never directly threatened Allied imperial interests.

the Franco regime's highly tendentious view of the civil war as a war of liberation against those without ethics or value – a mythology on which Franco never ceased to stake his legitimacy.

pact of silence".

crossing the lines, which is probably as good a definition of how social change happens as one can find.2

those with the habit of line-crossing as a mode of being would never and could never fit the requirements of any state narrative.

In fighting fascism in Spain these exiles and migrants were, then, explicitly taking up unfinished business that went back at least as far as the 1914–18 war.

For the mobilization of young people was another singular feature of the Republican era. In the early 1930s, many middle-class university students had become Republican activists.

That there were so many Jewish volunteers among the International Brigaders – around a quarter of the total – is unsurprising

indeed the idea of a "judeo-masonic-bolshevik" conspiracy against "eternal Christian Spain" was one of the Franco regime's founding myths.22

many saw their antifascism as a more important mark of personal identity than their Jewishness

The Spanish Civil War was the first fought in Europe in which civilians became targets en masse, through bombing raids on big cities.

The Spanish Civil War began with a military coup.

For the Nazi "war against hybridity" was not waged "against the European grain" at all. Though Hitler certainly pushed it to the limit, ethnic homogeneity as supposed political "coherence" and psychological "integrity" was an idea shared by very many people in European countries east, south, west and north.

League of Nations' "minority protection" which intimated that normality and assuring a "conflict-free condition" required ethnic homogeneity.

Notwithstanding the currency of ideas about 'two Spains' ready to confront each other on 18 July 1936, 'us' and 'them' were categories actively made by the violent experience of the war and did not fully exist prior to it.

in rebel territory, the onslaught against "red" women was integrally linked to the reimposition of traditionalist forms of social order

Bill Aalto, the working-class Finnish-American boy from the Bronx, the tough, intelligent, street-wise kid who became a guerrilla captain and came out of Spain with the highest commendation of any awarded to a Lincoln brigader.

The loss of empire deprived Spain's over-large officer corps, which had been inherited from the continuous wars of the 19th century, of any meaningful external defensive role. In so doing, imperial defeat turned the military into a powerful internal political lobby determined to find a new role while guarding against any loss of income or prestige in the interim.