ABSTRACT
In May 1945, the Second World War was approaching its end in Europe. Troops of the Red Army had reached Berlin, and Hitler had taken his own life in an underground bunker in the city. The capital of the Third Reich, which Hitler had hoped to transform into the metropolis of a great empire, lay in ruins. Spain lay far away from these ruins, but was nonetheless undergoing its own painful recovery from the devastation of its civil war. Even so, and despite post-war devastation and economic debility, Franco’s Spain had festooned the country’s towns and cities with crosses to the fallen by the Spring of 1945. Indeed, the vast majority of the crosses to the fallen in Spain had been raised, stone by stone, under the cover of wartime mobilisation (1936–1939) and in the euphoria of the ‘Victory’ after April 1939.
