Eps 1: The Spanish civil war
The Republicans received aid from the Soviet Union as well as from the International Brigades , composed of volunteers from Europe and the United States .
Seeking allies against the threat of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union had embraced a Popular Front strategy, and, as a result, the Comintern directed Spanish communists to support the Republicans.
By March 28 all of the Republican armies had begun to disband and surrender, and Nationalist forces entered Madrid on that day.
Host
Isobel Graves
Podcast Content
In July 1936, Spain saw a military uprising, and General Francisco Franco led a revolt by Spanish troops against the Spanish in Morocco. The Spanish Civil War began in 1939 when Francisco Franco led an uprising against his elected Spanish government and the Popular Party .
The summer of 1936 was never ending and it became clear that Spain was engaged in a civil war as the country disintegrated geographically and ideologically along nationalist and republican lines. At that time the cause was ideology: should the world be democratic, fascist or communist? General Francisco Franco took power in a military coup, but it swelled into a coup d'etat similar to the recent coup attempt in Turkey.
Fascism is known to have been on the rise in Europe when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, when a new generation of strongmen emerged. The war is seen as the beginning of the rise of fascism, which eventually consumed Europe during World War II.
Warplanes sent by Hitler and Mussolini attacked and bombed the republican stronghold of Guernica. The war in Spain played a key role in what was to come, a global catastrophe in which liberal democracies were besieged by the rise of fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, France, and the United States.
Thousands of volunteers also went to Spain to fight on the side of democracy, including nearly 3,000 Americans. The battleground of Aragon, where George Orwell fought alongside revolutionary Marxist militiamen, is housed in a small museum that documents the fierce battles on this crucial front. There is also a museum dedicated to the full history of the Civil War, when Franco's troops launched their attack on the elected Republican government of Spain in Guernica on 17 July 1936.
A gallery that shows local experiences of the conflict is housed in a former air raid shelter, and as Pages puts it, a museum dedicated to the country's darkest hour can help secure its future. It was the prologue to a Second World War, and it created a dictatorship that lasted almost 40 years, and whose effects will continue for a while. The Civil War was a decisive turning point in the history of Spain and one of its most important events.
It is eighty years since General Francisco Franco launched his coup against the newly elected Republican government of Spain on 17 July 1936. It was a revolt that triggered a civil war in Spain, supported by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and drove out hundreds of thousands of Spaniards. The Spanish Civil War, the first of its kind in Europe, was launched in response to the fall of the republican government elected in the spring.
The army, allied with the Spanish National Liberation Front and made up of fighters from Spanish Morocco, rose and swarmed south into Spain, conquering Seville relatively easily.
The coup d'état of July 1936, carried out by the carefully planned Emilio Mola, commander of the uprising, began. On July 18 Franco took command of the Legion and began to engage with the opposition.
Republicans fought a coalition of left-wing parties backed by labor unions and the labor movement. The coup was more successful in areas where people voted for rights, and failed more than in areas where the Popular Front won, such as Catalonia.
The Spanish Civil War was the result of many things, but they all had something in common, namely that they were all part of the same social and political problem: the gap between rich and poor. Ultimately, the Spanish Civil War was surrounded by huge gaps between rich and poor, which highlighted each other. There were many factors at play, such as the fact that in Spain there were two major political parties, two different political movements, one political party in the United Kingdom and one in France, which all had something in common.
The Spanish Civil War was ultimately won by Francisco Franco when the Republicans capitulated in Madrid. The two sides that fought in the Spanish Civil War were called the Nationalists, whom they called right-wing, and the Republican Party of Spain. They called themselves a government of anarchists and lower-class people, made up of Republicans, while the right was made up of the middle class, the working class, and even the upper class.