The Spanish prosecutor’s office announced Monday, May 5, the opening of an investigation into the death of almost 4,500 Spaniards on Monday, May 5 in the Nazi extermination camps, where they had been deported during the German occupation after exile in France to flee from Franco’s dictatorship.
The prosecutor wishes to determine if there has been a “joint strategy between the Spanish dictatorship led by (the general) Francisco Franco and the Nazi regime in the arrest and subsequent transfer of thousands of Spaniards exiled in France, to different extermination camps,” he said in a press release.
Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards fled to France during the Civil War, between 1936 and 1939, or at the end of this conflict, which ended with the defeat of the Republicans and the establishment of the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.
4,435 Spaniards who died in these extermination fields
Some 450,000 people crossed the Pyrenees after Franco’s victory during the “withdrawal” (retirement), before being locked in the camps by the French government of Édouard Daladier (radical party).
A few months later, during the occupation of France by Nazi Germany and Vichy’s collaboration regime, thousands of these Spanish refugees in France were deported to the Nazis fields.
The Spanish prosecution evokes on Thursday the figure of 4,435 Spaniards who died in these fields of extermination, a figure established on the basis of the death laws.
They had been sent mainly to “Mauthausen (Austria) and Gustan (Germany), where they were subjected to forced labor, torture, where they disappeared or were killed,” said the Human Rights and Democratic Memory section, which will carry out the investigation.
“Democratic Memory Law”
This announcement occurs when “the 80th anniversary of the launch of the Mauthausen extermination camp is celebrated,” said the press release.
This initiative follows “of the provisions of the Democratic Memory Law, promoted by the left government of Pedro Sánchez and approved in mid-2012, adds. This legislation aims to rehabilitate the victims of Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975).
The Democratic Memory Law was Sánchez’s second important initiative in this area, after Franco’s exhumation of his monumental mausoleum near Madrid to bury him in a cemetery in the north of the Spanish capital.
The correct opposition has clearly criticized this law, accusing to the left of reopening the injuries of the past under the appearance of memory, and promised to repeal it if it returns to power.
Source: BFM TV
