New research raises hopes of exhumation of foreign victims of the Spanish Civil War | Spain

Researchers in Catalonia have identified 522 members of the International Brigades, including 286 American and 86 British volunteers, who died or disappeared in the region during the Spanish Civil War, raising hopes that their remains could be found and buried with dignity nine decades after their deaths.

Between 1936 and 1938, approximately 35,000 people from 50 countries traveled to Spain to join the brigades and help defend the democratically elected Spanish government against the military coup of General Francisco Franco.

Almost 10,000 foreign volunteers died in Spain and many still lie in unmarked mass graves.

Since 2022, the Department of Democratic Memory of the Catalan regional government, which is responsible for identifying and exhuming the victims of the civil war and the subsequent Franco dictatorship, has been working to narrow down the places where foreign volunteers disappeared and to track down their living relatives.

After two years of combing through civil records, International Brigades databases and the Russian State Archive of Political and Social History, the department has confirmed the identities of 286 American brigade members, 96 Canadian members, 86 British members, six Irish members and 48 members from other countries.

By tracking troop movements and studying hospital records, the historian who led the project, Jordi Martí, found that most of the brigade’s members died or disappeared in 1938 on the Ebro Front, the scene of the longest and largest battle of the war.

“We weren’t trying to find new people,” Martí said. “We wanted to find out exactly where in Catalonia the people we knew had come to fight had disappeared.”

“We wanted to narrow down the areas from which they had disappeared because some of the information we had was not very precise.”

Although the department has exhumed the remains of 900 people since 2017, only 30 people – none of them a brigade member – have been identified.

Martí hopes that the new research will contribute to the recovery and exhumation of some of the brigade members who died in northeastern Spain.

“If we can determine the area where these people disappeared, when we exhume a mass grave in that area, we can hypothesize who might be in that grave,” he said.

“This allows us to pass this information on to families. And if we have DNA from relatives, the chances of identifying them are greater.”

Martí and his colleagues are appealing to people whose relatives have fallen fighting in the International Brigades to come forward and provide them with DNA samples that could help identify some of the foreign fighters.

“We must have exhumed the remains of some brigade members, but we don’t know who they are because we don’t have the DNA for comparison,” he said.

“We know that some of them were buried in cemeteries near the hospitals where they died. But in other cases, if we know in which section of the Ebrofront they disappeared and if we have DNA traces from families, and if we open a mass grave in that area, we have more options.”

Alfons Aragoneses, general director of the Department of Democratic Catalan Memory, said his priority was to give some retrospective dignity to the dead.

“It is important to remove the remains from the mass graves, as the graves could be damaged by flood or fire, and rebury them in a cemetery,” he said.

“It is not right that remains are still appearing in mass graves. We urgently need to exhume them and bury them with dignity in cemeteries.”

The experts of the International Brigades welcomed the research results.

“Combined with current DNA analysis, this should lead to the identification of many people currently lying in unmarked graves,” said Richard Baxell, a historian of the Spanish Civil War.

“Although it is obviously of enormous value to historians, its real value lies with the descendants of those killed in Catalonia, some of whom can now finally find and visit the final resting place of their loved ones.”

Jim Jump, chairman of the UK’s International Brigade Memorial Trust, called it an “impressive, groundbreaking piece of research” and expressed hope that it could help find the dead still lying in unmarked graves.

He also contrasted the Catalan regional government’s support for democratic memory projects with the revisionist attitude of the authorities in neighboring Aragón, which is governed by a coalition of the conservative People’s Party (PP) and the far-right Vox party.

The governments of Aragon, Valencia and Castile-Leon, all led by the PP and Vox, have come under criticism from UN experts, historical memory associations and the Spanish government, which have accused them of seeking to introduce laws that “whitewash” the crimes and human rights violations of the civil war and the dictatorship.

Martí said the search for the missing was a simple service to the dead, their descendants and Spanish history.

“Even when 85 years have passed, the disappearance of a family member often leaves a hole in the family,” he said. “Knowing what happened, even three or four generations later, can really mean a lot to families… Then there’s the question of what exactly happened.

“We need to understand the story – and ultimately, the search for the missing is also a way to explain what happened.”