ABSTRACT
The Civil War cost the Spanish nation dear in terms of loss of life, in terms of soldiers and citizens left disabled and mutilated, in terms of talented and able individuals lost to Spain through exile, in terms of the continuing severe food shortage, in terms of the impoverishment of the nation, and in terms of Spain’s isolation throughout the long and repressive dictatorship that followed it. Table 12.1 indicates the enormity of the toll exacted by death and by exodus on a country whose population at the outset was only 24,000,000. The austerity of the postwar years was so harsh that a member of the staff of the American embassy claimed that in certain regions the infant mortality rate exceeded 50 per cent (Plenn 1943: 153), but it did have a paradoxically beneficial effect in preventing Franco from entering World War II on the side of the Axis. The victors seem to have had plans for loyalist soldiers disabled through injury (Archivo General Militar CGG 1939 e). The Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Centre, in a memo to the Generalísimo in Burgos in June 1939, suggested collecting, in a central hospital, those who on account of their treatment would remain a burden on the national economy. They would comprise numerous amputees and the blind, and if the centre was provided with workshops and a rehabilitation regime for both their corporal and spiritual lesions, after a couple of months or so there would be no reason why they might not be reintegrated into the bosom of the Patria. The similarly disabled among the conquerors, on the other hand, were honoured as members of the Cuerpo de Caballeros Mutilados headed by—and who better qualified?—the deranged General Millán Astray. Approximate loss to Spain of the Civil War https://www.niso.org/standards/z39-96/ns/oasis-exchange/table">
Deaths from direct military action (10 percent of combatants)
200,000
Murders, executions
130,000
Aerial bombardment
10,000
Malnutrition & and war-associated disease
25,000
Executions, assassinations in posguerra reprisals
150,000
Total
515,000
Loss through permanent emigration
300,000
Loss to population
More than¾ million
Note: There are no reliable records, and these figures reflect various estimates from sources quoted elsewhere in this book.
