However, Madrid was not only the capital of the killed according to different models. During
front line, the “Heroic Madrid” was praised by the summer of 1936 most of the murders were
the political organizations that participated in the committed by different popular committees with a
resistance against the rebels who were militarily relative autonomy; however, between October and
supported by the German Nazi and Italian fascist December of the same year, a series of committees
regimes, as a consequence of which it won a and parties - with representation in the formal
worldwide repercussion for the anti-fascist cause. structures of government - designed and
Madrid was also the capital of the rear-guard; in executed a secret and never-recognized plan for
this city took place a kind of social “revolution” the murdering of thousands of alleged “hostile”
since the moment different working and anti people. This systematic plan of murdering claimed
fascist organisations (trade unions with socialist, the lives of around two thousand men according
communist and libertarian ideologies) obtained to the most rigorous studies, extra-judicially
important share of the political power in the city executed around the nearby towns of Aravaca,
through a committed defence during the second Paracuellos and Torrejón de Ardoz. The form used
half of 1936 and part of 1937. This process was and the premeditated nature of the massacre,
only possible thanks to the particularly dramatic i.e. prisoners were get out under pretext of their
conditions of the summer and, above all, the transfer to Valencia and their execution on the
autumn of 1936, with the enemy at the gates of edge of the gutter at the outskirts of the capital,
the city and the Republican government fleeing also left a deep mark on the popular memory of
to Valencia. This revolutionary dynamic lasted the city’s middle and upper classes, especially in
well into 1937 and generated a repressive process those neighbourhoods in the centre surrounded
against all those people who were branded as by the working class suburbs. The “slaughter of
enemies or “hostile” to the Republic, according to Paracuellos” would thus become an important
different popular committees with a particularly part of the memory built by the victors in 1939 as
strong position in the working class districts of one of the main atrocities carried out by the “Red
the suburbs. As a result, thousands of people were Madrid”.
Annual acts of homage to the people shot in the walls of the
East Cemetery of Madrid | www.memoriaylibertad.org.
Detail: Annual acts of homage to the people shot in the walls
of the East Cemetery of Madrid | www.memoriaylibertad.org.
OVERVIEW
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