Names and surnames of all those who died in the Spanish Civil War

Liv­ing wit­nesses

In the early days, liv­ing wit­nesses were of great help. “We could still go to vil­lages and in­ter­view peo­ple who had been there. It was an in­valu­able re­source.” At the same time, there was a huge short­age of archived ma­te­r­ial. “In mu­nic­i­pal of­fices, in the 1980s, I re­mem­ber going into at­tics and find­ing doc­u­ments cov­ered with pi­geon ex­cre­ment.” Oliva has spent many months of his hol­i­days re­search­ing archives through­out Spain. Get­ting ac­cess to the ma­te­r­ial has not been easy. “The prob­lem is the lack of in­for­ma­tion that ex­isted in 1938. For ex­am­ple, the archive of the Re­pub­li­can army’s sta­tis­tics ser­vice, which man­aged the re­turn of be­long­ings of sol­diers killed to rel­a­tives, has been lost.”

The dif­fi­cul­ties in car­ry­ing out the study have been var­ied, with the lack of re­sources and, above all, a lack of will tor­pe­do­ing it on mul­ti­ple oc­ca­sions. “The pro­ject has had to live in a per­ma­nent state of com­ing and going, be­tween short-term in­ter­est fol­lowed by scan­dalous obliv­ion, ac­cord­ing to fash­ion and media in­ter­est,” says Oliva. The most crit­i­cal time was from 1995 to 2004 when the pro­ject was frozen. It was res­ur­rected in the wake of the ex­plo­sion of media in­ter­est in his­tor­i­cal mem­ory.

The new man­age­ment of the Cen­tre for Con­tem­po­rary His­tory en­trusted Oliva with re­sum­ing the study with new goals: to com­put­erise all the data col­lected, to in­cor­po­rate for­eign peo­ple who lost their lives in Cata­lan ter­ri­tory, and to ex­pand the in­for­ma­tion on each death. “In the first lists, we only listed name and sur­name, age, place and date of death. From 2005, we added the date of birth, par­ents’ names, mar­i­tal sta­tus, postal ad­dress, ed­u­ca­tion, pro­fes­sion, cir­cum­stances of death, place of bur­ial, and every­thing else known about the per­son,” notes Oliva.

The study has al­ways been rig­or­ous and that has often led to sur­prises. “Few peo­ple know that many fight­ers who died at the bat­tle of the Ebre ended up buried far away, in Girona, Cervera, Man­resa, Vall­fog­ona de Ri­ucorb... This is be­cause the med­ical units were so over­whelmed that the wounded were evac­u­ated, even though they were reg­is­tered as dying in the Ebre,” Oliva re­veals.

The study has not ended and “will al­ways be sub­ject to cor­rec­tion and im­prove­ment”. Nor is the total num­ber of vic­tims known: it cur­rently stands at some­where be­tween 70,000 and 80,000. More work is still to be done, such as ap­ply­ing the more de­mand­ing pa­ra­me­ters that were set 20 years ago to all coun­ties, es­pe­cially in the Girona re­gion and Barcelona, where the ob­sta­cle has al­ways been the cap­i­tal city. “It’s very com­pli­cated to do re­search there,” the scholar notes.

Analy­sis of the data paints a re­veal­ing pic­ture of the im­pact that the war had on Cat­alo­nia: 55% of the deaths took place in Cata­lan ter­ri­tory it­self, with be­tween 25% and 30% in Aragon. Ob­vi­ously, male mor­tal­ity in con­flict sit­u­a­tions out­weighs all other deaths, and by age, the high­est mor­tal­ity peaks were among sol­diers aged 18 to 20 (the Biberó levy from 1938 and 1939 was the most pun­ished). The pic­ture of the dis­placed Cata­lans flee­ing the ad­vance of Franco’s troops and the refugees from other parts of Spain who fled to Cat­alo­nia is very dif­fer­ent. Here deaths of men and women are bal­anced at al­most 50%, with the high­est mor­tal­ity among chil­dren under four years old, while 1938 was the dead­liest year. Dur­ing the re­treat be­fore Franco’s ad­vance, the vic­tims climbed to al­most 15% of the total, twice as many as in the first six months of 1936. Mean­while, the dif­fer­ence be­tween the num­ber of deaths on each side is huge: “for every dead Fran­coist sol­dier, there were nine Re­pub­li­cans”.

In 2019, the human cost pro­ject be­came de­pen­dent on De­mo­c­ra­tic Memo­r­ial with Oliva as its sci­en­tific ad­vi­sor. In re­cent years, the his­to­rian, with Noemí Ri­u­dor and Martí Picas, has been un­earthing un­pub­lished doc­u­men­ta­tion on the ex­tent of the vic­tims (al­ready over 5,000) in exile in France dur­ing the im­me­di­ate post-war pe­riod. “The human cost of the war did not end in Feb­ru­ary 1939 when Franco’s troops oc­cu­pied all of Cat­alo­nia. The study goes fur­ther and there is still more to do. It should go as far as the last re­pres­sion of the maquis in the post-world war pe­riod,” Oliva says, adding that it would be good to delve deeper into the con­cen­tra­tion camps, the bat­tal­ions of work­ing sol­diers and the mili­tia in the first years of the dic­ta­tor­ship. Also still to be fin­ished is the work of up­load­ing all the data to the on­line data­base and mak­ing it open for con­sul­ta­tion.

“Know­ing what hap­pened has begun to in­ter­est third gen­er­a­tions more than the im­me­di­ate gen­er­a­tion of the de­ceased, who car­ried the fam­ily drama in si­lence. Grand­chil­dren and great-grand­chil­dren want to know. They are the ones who mourn the Civil War dead today,” says Oliva, who gives an ex­am­ple from the study: a young man from Madrid, whose grand­mother died con­vinced her brother was mur­dered in Puente de Val­le­cas, but who was buried in Cervera. “The grand­son has been to the ceme­tery to find clo­sure.”

“The his­to­rian Benet said that the best way to move for­ward in mem­ory is to do his­tor­i­cal re­search,” says Oliva, who de­fends keep­ing the human cost pro­ject alive so the list can even­tu­ally be com­pleted.