Photo archive of the Propaganda Delegation of Madrid during the Civil War

3,051 images, some photographs allow to identify victims of the repression suffered during the War

It is a photographic background created by the Delegate Board of Defense of Madrid, whose origins date back to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, in 1936, although it contains images of events prior to the contest, such as the Jaca uprising of 1930. At present it is composed of 3051 images, which remain from a much larger initial set after a long historical evolution. They are made in black and white and mounted on cardboard supports, as was usual for the time. The documentary units that compose it are organized by thematic categories, following the original inventories, so we can know and recognize in them its original meaning.

In 1940, at the end of the War, the Francoist government passed a law by which machinery, materials from printing workshops and publishing houses that were contrary to the national movement and had been confiscated became the property of the National Delegation of FET and JONS. Among them was the Photographic Archive of the Propaganda and Press Delegation of Madrid during the Civil War.

This change of hands meant his conversion into a powerful instrument of repression, since his photographs were used as testimony of the opposition to the Regime of many of the people who appeared immortalized in them. This process, in addition to changing the original sense and function of the Archive, meant its devirtuation and disintegration, since numerous images were extracted from it to become part of the summaries of the General Cause.

In 1975 the Photographic Archive of the Propaganda and Press Delegation of Madrid during the Civil War was housed in the General Archive of the Administration, after its transfer from the Ministry of Information and Tourism, which had guarded it for years.

Today it constitutes an important historical legacy for the study and public knowledge of the recent memory of our country.

State Social Media Photo Archive

It contains photographs of a very varied origin. To the National Movement Press, which ended up becoming the State Social Media during the Transition, must be added the one from the newspapers seized after the civil war, whose photographic archives ended either directly in the National Press and Propaganda Delegation or in the archives of the new headers linked to the Movement Press. In this case, those newspapers that were not sold during the Transition, their archives were handed over to the State Media. This was the case of the newspaper Arriba.

General Record of Spanish Sephardites

File formed to gather all the administrative background related to the actions carried out by the Spanish diplomatic corps regarding the protection of Jews during the Holocaust.

The isolation of Spain, as a consequence of its non-belligerent alliance with the Axis powers, manifested itself with the withdrawal of a large part of the diplomatic corps accredited in Spain, as well as in a condemnation of the Franco regime by the new international community of the United Nations (The Spanish Question).

The dictatorship experienced an international asphyxiation that during the years of the international conflict had not suffered. Franco’s regime tried to clear and distance itself quickly from a recent past and with which it had enormous coexistence of interests for about ten years, that is, since the coup d’état of July 1936. Not in vain, the dictatorship used in a recurrent way, especially during its first years, the idea of the Judeomasonic conspiracy or contubernium as a justification of morality. In any case, Spain was aware of the fate of the Jews since the end of 1941.

When the contest began to be favorable to the allies, the dictatorship changed its attitude to the Jewish problem, allowing transit through Spain to other destinations, not allowing residence in the country. However, faced with this attitude, the Spanish diplomatic missions in Europe began to protect the Jews, regardless of their Sephardic origin. All this served to organize an international campaign that would cleanse the image of the dictatorship and present Franco as savior of Jews and publish "Spain and the Jews" in 1949.

Translated into English and French, the campaign of propagation took effect, especially in those countries with Israeli communities. Franco became mitigated by much of the international Judaism, even though the naturalizations granted to the Jews during the contest were declared null and void for all intents and purposes in July 1945, breaking the legal principle of non-retroactivity.

The Auschwitz reports or Protocols are a fundamental document of the history of the Holocaust, in fact they were used as proof of charge in the major Nuremberg trials. They are composed of three reports written by prisoners who were able to escape from the camp. The first of these is the "Vrba-Wetzler Report", written by two Slovak prisoners towards the end of April 1944. The second is the "Polish Main Report", written by Jerzy Tabeau, also fled from Auschwitz, and typed in Geneva in August 1944, and quickly circulated by the Polish government in exile and groups of Jews. And the third, the Rosin-Mordowicz report, also by Slovak prisoners who fled at the end of May 1944. They all carefully relate the living conditions, the gas chambers, the crematoriums. In short, the policy of extermination carried out in the Auschwitz camp.

With absolute certainty, the document was distributed among the diplomatic corps stationed in Budapest to denounce the intensity of the deportations led by Adolf Eichmann himself since May 1944. They were disseminated from Switzerland through George Madello, first secretary of the Salvadoran embassy in Geneva, and of Jewish origin, in mid-June 1944. Its publication in the Swiss press, the Vatican’s knowledge of the situation of prisoners in the camps, after having interviewed the refugees who wrote the reports, and finally its publication in the New York Times in early July, led the allies to put pressure on Horthy’s government with retaliation if the deportations did not cease immediately.

The office of Angel Sanz Briz, the highest representative at that time of the Spanish Legation in Hungary, sends precisely to Minister Lequerica a copy in French of the first two, although in reverse order, and a letter from a woman deported from Svaliana (Ukraine) on May 17, 1944. As Sanz Briz indicates, the report was handed to him by the Budapest Rescue and Aid Committee, the Zionist organization he refers to in his office, under the title "Rapports sur les camps de travail de Birkenau et d'Auschwitz".

The deportations were reactivated in October 1944, after the coup d’état that overthrew Horthy, and two months after the report was sent to Madrid. It was then that diplomats became involved in the protection of the Jews, and among them Sanz Briz who established a network of foster homes and Spanish nationality to the Jews, which allowed the salvation of 5,200 people from a safe death.