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GENERAL FRANCO’S INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES is a dynamic history of the Spanish Civil War that reveals the vital role played by foreign volunteers and fascist dictators in helping Francisco Franco and his right-wing rebels overthrow the Spanish Republican government.
Foreigners, whether unknown individuals like British pilot Cecil Bebb or infamous figures like the German dictator Adolf Hitler, were essential to Franco’s victory. Hitler and the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini sent 90,000 conscripts to help the rebels. A further 80,000 men from all around the world volunteered to fight for Franco, motivated by money, religion, politics and adventure.
Today the only foreign volunteers the world remembers are the 35,000 young men who joined the International Brigades to stop Franco’s fascist coup. But new research has revealed that Franco attacked Spanish democracy in the unlikely company of Moroccan Arabs, Irish Catholics, British adventurers, Belgian aristocrats, and Finnish film stars.
Using memoirs, interviews and archive material GENERAL FRANCO’S INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES picks out key moments in the civil war to show how important foreign fighters were in toppling the Spanish government, and how ungrateful Franco became for their help the closer he came to victory.
Little has been written about Franco’s foreign help. The victorious Nationalists could not admit they had needed foreigners to win their patriotic crusade, and erased them from the history books. For the Republicans, the volunteers were an embarrassing reminder that not all international support was on their side. In the years after WWII, the volunteers themselves did not want to admit they had fought for a nation supported by the Third Reich, in case they were tainted with Hitler’s crimes. Most chose to remain silent. This is the first book to tell their stories.
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