The Spanish prosecutor’s office announced Monday May 5, 2025 the opening of an investigation into the death of nearly 4,500 Spaniards in Nazi extermination camps where they had been deported during the German occupation after having exiled to France to flee the Franco dictatorship. The prosecution wishes to determine if there has been a “Joint strategy between the Spanish dictatorship led by (the general) Francisco Franco and the Nazi regime in the detention and the subsequent transfer of thousands of Spanish exiles in France, to different extermination camps”he said in a press release.
Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards fled to France during the civil war, between 1936 and 1939, or at the end of this conflict, which ended with the defeat of the Republicans and the establishment of the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. Some 450,000 people crossed the Pyrenees after Franco’s victory during the «Withdrawal» (retirement), before being locked up in camps by the French government of Édouard Daladier (radical party).
An initiative arising from the Democratic memory law
A few months later, during the occupation of part of France by Nazi Germany and the collaborationist regime of Vichy, thousands of these Spanish refugees in France were deported to the Nazi camps. The Spanish prosecution evokes Thursday the figure of 4,435 Spanish who died in these extermination camps, a figure established on the basis of death acts.
They had been sent mainly to «Mauthausen (Austria) and Gusen (Germany), where they were subject to forced work, to torture, where they have disappeared or were murdered “underlines the human rights and democratic memory section of the public prosecutor, which will conduct the investigation. This announcement comes when celebrating “The 80th anniversary of the release of the Mauthausen extermination camp”explains the press release again.
This initiative follows “The provisions of the Democratic memory law”driven by the left government of Pedro Sánchez and approved in mid-2022, he adds. This legislation aims to rehabilitate the victims of the Dictatorship of Franco (1939-1975).
The Democratic Memory Act was the second important initiative of Sánchez in this area, after the exhumation of Franco of its monumental mausoleum near Madrid to bury it in a cemetery in the north of the Spanish capital. The right opposition has clearly criticized this law, accusing the left of reopening the injuries of the past under the guise of memory, and promised to repeal it if it returns to power.
