ABSTRACT
We have said that the principal credit for giving an organized form to the resistance at Mauthausen goes to the Spaniards. It is important not to repeat the exaggerations of authors such as Razola and Constante, who would claim more for the resistance than was the case. Manuel Garcia, excustodian of the Mauthausen museum, after considering the matter for 50 years, says outright, without anyone bringing the matter up: ' Resistencia, nada! Armas, nada!' ('Nothing, that is to say, up to the last moment. The rest is farce.') 1 Indeed, for most of the time, resistance was merely an organized attempt to maintain morale and save its members whenever possible. But even that much, in the context of Mauthausen, was a major achievement. A non-Spanish eyewitness, Michel de Bouard, has said of the Spanish 'collective' that it alone, up until 1943, had the character of a solid organization in which communists joined with anarchists, socialists, and republicans. 2
