ABSTRACT
In January of 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Reichstag (German Parliament) burned, and in March Hitler became the de-facto dictator of Germany. One Republic, Weimar, ended, another one, Spain’s Second Republic (1931–1936) was not faring much better. In the 1933 elections the right-wing CEDA party (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas) won by a narrow margin and Alejandro Lerroux, leader of the Radical Republican Party, became prime minister of a coalition government. The CEDA leader José María Gil Robles served as minister of war in Lerroux’s government and is responsible for ordering General Franco to repress the protests of Asturian miners in 1934. While the Popular Front, a leftist coalition, won the elections in February of 1936, only a few months later, a coup d’état headed by Francisco Franco led to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and to the Republic’s end.
