‘Through Spain, my generation came to know the taste of defeat for the first time: we discovered that you could be right and still be beaten, that force could overcome spirit, and that there were times when courage was not rewarded.’
Albert Camus, 1945
The volunteers who went to save democracy in Spain were sent home before the war was over. In September 1938, when the Battle of the Ebro was still raging, the Spanish Prime Minister agreed to withdraw the International Brigades, hoping Hitler and Mussolini would also withdraw their troops. This didn’t happen.
Some Brigaders would go back to their countries, some into exile, some to concentration camps. Many were already prisoners of war, or missing. At a farewell parade in Barcelona, cheered by thousands, surviving volunteers were addressed by the Republic’s most gifted speech maker, Dolores Ibárruri, ‘La Pasionaria’.
‘Go proudly,’ she told them. ‘You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of the solidarity and the universality of democracy . . . We will not forget you; and, when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves, entwined with the laurels of the Spanish Republic’s victory, come back!’
The Republican Army was forced into retreat in November 1938. But the Spanish Civil War only ended on 1st April 1939, when the USA joined Britain and France in recognising Franco’s regime. By this time Czechoslovakia was in German hands. Britain’s policy of appeasement had been abandoned.
Almost as many Republicans were executed by Franco’s regime after the war as had already been killed in combat. As many again were interned in concentration camps in southern France, where precise death rates have yet to be established. Spain remained a dictatorship until the death of Franco in 1975.