White Terror (Spain) - Estimates

Estimates

Concrete figures do not exist, as many supporters and sympathizers of the Republic fled Spain after losing the Civil War. Furthermore the Francoist government destroyed thousands of documents relating to the White Terror and tried to hide the executions of the Republicans. Gabriel Jackson states that:

Prisons records and the death registers are misleading, since it is known that certificates of release were regularly signed by or for men who were then taken out and shot, and that certificates alleging heart attacks or apoplexy were made out for corpses left on the open road. Execution techniques deliberately disfigured the corpses so as to make them unrecognizable. Officials of the time have testified that families were afraid to report missing male members, and did not come to identify the bodies of the dead.

Thousands of victims of the White Terror are buried in hundreds of unmarked common graves (over 2,000), more than 600 only in Andalusia. The largest common grave is the common grave at San Rafael cemetery on the outskirts of Malaga (with perhaps more than 4,000 bodies). The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Historica or ARMH) says that the number of disappeared is over 35,000.

Estimates range from 150,000 victims to 400,000; for example, in the collective work Victimas de la guerra civil: 150,000; the Spanish historian Josep Fontana: 175,000; Hugh Thomas: 175,000; Paul Preston: 180,000; Antony Beevor: 200,000; and Gabriel Jackson: 400,000. There are, however, regional and partial figures. For example, in the province of Cordoba the victims of White Terror are 9,579 (the historian Francisco Moreno Gomez has increased the number to 11,581)., On the other hand, the victims of the Red Rerror in the same province are 2,060; in the province of Sevilla the White Terror 8,000 (the Red Terror 480); in the province of Granada the White Terror 5,048 (including the poet Federico García Lorca) (the Red Terror 994); in the province of Zaragoza the White Terror 6,029 (the Red Terror 742); in the province of Valencia the White Terror 3,128 (the Red Terror 2,844); in the province of Malaga, the White Terror 7,000 (the Red Terror 2,607); in Navarra the White Terror, 2,789 (the Red Terror zero); in the province of Zamora the White Terror 3,000 (the Red Terror zero); in the province of Valladolid the White Terror 3,430 (the Red Terror zero); in La Rioja, the White Terror 2,000 (the Red Terror zero); in Asturias, the White Terror 5,592; in Cadiz 3,000 (the Red Terror 95); and in the occidental part of the province of Badajoz, the White Terror 6,600 (the Red Terror 243). According to the historian Francisco Espinosa, the victims of the Nationalists in only five Spanish provinces (Seville, Cádiz, Huelva, a part of Badajoz and a part of Cordoba) out of fifty were 25,000. The historian Paul Preston says that the number of victims judicially executed in 36 out 50 Spanish provinces were 92,462 (many other victims were executed without a trial). They died either as a result of the Nationalist repression during the war or as a result of Franco's dictatorship repression after the war.

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