Output details

El terror rojo

This 175,000 word monograph is the primary output of a postdoctoral research project that began in 2003. Its theses are based on extensive archival research in three countries (Britain, Holland and above all Spain). The sheer quantity of collated material necessitated the creation of a database to facilitate analysis of the historical data.

This included the socio-economic backgrounds of 4,500 policemen who served in Madrid during the conflict. This research has shed significant new light on some of the most polemical events of the Spanish Civil War.

Approximately 50,000 Spaniards were extrajudically executed as 'fascists' in Republican Spain following the failure of the military rebellion in July 1936. This study, based on a wealth of scholarship and archival sources, examines the terror in Madrid, which witnessed over 8,000 executions in 1936. It shows that the perpetrators of terror were ‘respectable’ members of all leftist Popular Front organisations. It also emphasises that the terror was organised and was carried out with the complicity of the police. Indeed, the physical elimination of the internal enemy was seen as integral to the antifascist war effort.