I haven't read this yet, but have read Antony Beevor's book, which was excellent. Not so long ago there were few books on the Spanish Civil War, likely because 1) it was immediately followed by WWII which exceeded it in every way (and thus provided the basis for countless books and movies), and 2) until Franco's regime ended, the Spanish government would likely cooperate very little in any such effort. Now, there are many books, but many are slanted, mostly leftwards, for reasons of Spanish politics, as explained by Prof. Stanley Payne in a current and rather scathing review of this book in the Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2012, [...]. Apart from examining the whys and wherefores of the relative flood of such books lately, he in detail has cricism for a good bit of Preston's work, while acknowledging it (and the author's) strengths. In part,
"For all that, though, "The Spanish Holocaust" is burdened by an age-old perspective of the left in which the atrocities committed by the Republicans are at least partially excusable because they were carried out by "uncontrollables," mainly anarchists, and not as part of a central policy, whereas the crimes of the Francoists are considered to have been centrally planned. The revolutionary regime was indeed semi-pluralist, as political scientists would say. But the different leftist groups frequently collaborated when they killed, sometimes with the cooperation and participation of the Republican government.It was, moreover, the Republican government that had originally armed the revolutionary movements and enabled them to embark on arbitrary executions. The atrocities by each side were not at first simply a "response" to the other, as their partisans maintain, but began simultaneously and on a large scale. The stage had been set by the ever-increasing violence that attended the revolutionary process during the years of the Republic, climaxing in 1936.
The idea of "accidental" leftist terrorism versus a central plan by the Francoists for "extermination" was a mainstay of Republican stories from the early days of the civil war. Nowadays in Spain even a few of the partisan left-wing historians have gone beyond it. Mr. Preston, rather than presenting a fully objective historical analysis or interpretation of violence against civilians during the Spanish conflict, is recapitulating civil-war-era propaganda.
He presents no evidence of any plan of "annihilation," "extermination," "genocide" or "holocaust," to use his favorite terms. It is clear enough that the Francoists generated more victims than did their opponents. In such affairs, the winners always kill more. Yet the special military tribunal set up by Franco toward the end of 1936 to purge newly occupied areas of Republicans examined more than 30,000 cases during the next two years and dismissed half of them. Hardly a process of "extermination" or "holocaust." It was a brutal war for combatants and civilians, but, in contrast to the contemporary horrors in Turkey, Russia or the Nazi imperium, the overall loss of life was not great.
Nor is the evidence that Mr. Preston does present quite as clear as he makes out. The truth of the matter is that definitive research concerning the political executions has been completed for only a few regions of Spain. Most monographic studies suffer from methodological flaws or limitations and will have to be redone, and it is still necessary to be cautious with regard to statistics. Yet there are enough careful studies to make some reliable estimates, and the ones offered by Mr. Preston are within an appropriate range. His figure of 50,000 executions by the Republicans cannot be far wrong. The conclusion that the Francoists did away with slightly more than 100,000 people is probably an exaggeration, but not a wild one. A figure nearer 70,000 might be more accurate. Curiously, the figure he gives for executions by the Franco regime after the war ended (20,000) is, in my judgment, too low. The correct statistic is probably nearer 30,000.
What is more serious is Mr. Preston's failure to explain how this "holocaust" or policy of "extermination" came to an end several years after the war with the vast majority of the defeated left in Spain still very much alive. When Franco finally had the Republicans completely at his mercy after the collapse of the republic in 1939, he did not "exterminate" them. That there was not a true "holocaust" is shown by the census of 1940, which revealed that population growth had not been greatly impeded by the events of the preceding decade. And any concern that this was an inaccurate census is put to rest by the fact that its data are consistent with the 1950 census.
One needs only to do the math. At the end of the civil war, Spain had a population of approximately 25 million, some four million of whom at one time or another had participated in leftist organizations. Of these, Franco's police arrested about 10%. If we accept my upwardly revised estimate of 30,000 postwar executions, that would indicate the killing of approximately eight-tenths of 1% of Spain's actively leftist population, with 99.2% surviving. This amounts to neither "holocaust" nor "annihilation," however much it must offend our more humane 21st-century sensibilities. Rather than implementing some radical new Hitlerian or Pol Pot-like scheme, the essentially traditionalist Franco followed the policy of victors in civil wars throughout most of history: slaughtering the leaders and main activists of the other side while permitting the great bulk of the rank and file to go free.
Mr. Preston declares that one of his chief goals with "The Spanish Holocaust" is to place the repressions in broader perspective, but here his failure is absolute. There is not the slightest attempt to compare the atrocities in Spain with those in any of the other revolutionary civil wars of early-20th-century Europe. If he had bothered to do the work, Mr. Preston would have found that, for example, the repression carried out by the democratic parliamentary government of Finland in 1918 was equivalent to that of the Spanish, whether of the "good" left or the "bad" right.
The literature of atrocity is currently enormously popular and almost universally applauded, but a historian has the responsibility to put such matters in critical perspective. "The Spanish Holocaust" is a monumental exercise, one presenting a great deal of data and research but also reproducing some of the oldest stereotypes of the Spanish Civil War. It must be judged a failure."
He also suggests 5 other works which cover the Spanish Civil War from diverse perspectives, from the encyclopaedic ("The Spanish Civil War" by Hugh Thomas) to the local ("Republic of Egos: A Social History of the Spanish Civil War"
By Michael Seidman). Read the review and perhaps get The Spanish Holocaust on its strengths, knowing of its weaknesses.
