Emergency summarily number 103370.
Historical Archive of Defense.
Apologia memoriae
and repression
Furthermore, these names were stamped on the
plaques of the streets of thousands of towns and
cities for everyone’s information, beginning with the
April 1, 1939, is the official date of the victory over capital city where there are still a good number of
the legally constituted authorities of the Republic, them.
and from this date on, the new military regime was
almost obsessively engaged in building a whole It is dramatically remarkable that this process
“memorial policy” with the aim of justifying and of memorial exaltation, particularly speaking of
legitimizing the military “uprising” and its triumph the cemetery in Madrid, took place at the same
after the three years of war, sanctioned, by the time that a systematic physical elimination of the
way, as a “Crusade” by the Catholic Church. In the defeated in the same space. Between April 1939
case of Madrid, the “victims of the red barbarism” and early February 1944, almost three thousand
were remembered and praised. Their corpses were people were executed by firing squad in the
exhumed from ditches and ossuaries to be buried in vicinity of the Almudena cemetery and buried
dignified tombs for payment, at the expense of the there in cheap, emergency graves, the so-called
public funds. As for their names, they have since “charity graves”. In a formally occupied city, and
appeared in witness books, in school textbooks of a country in a state of war until 1948, General
several generations, in stone monuments, on bronze Franco’s military dictatorship tried hundreds of
plaques and on the crosses installed on the walls thousands of people throughout the country in
of so many churches in the Spanish territory, thus court-martials or emergency military summary
physically and symbolically shaping the tenacious trials, imposing all kinds of prison sentences and,
account of the “Fallen for God and for Spain”. of course, death by firing squad or “garrote vil”,
66
Observing Memories
ISSUE 2