ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the memorials, held since the 1940s in Majadahonda, Spain, to honour Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin, two leading members of the Romanian Legionary movement who fell there while fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The memorials were established by the diplomacies of the Spanish and Romanian fascist dictatorships in 1941 and continued by legionaries resettled in Spain after 1945. The chapter contextualizes the memorials within Franco's dictatorship and investigates the relationship between this and the legionaries. First, it shows that commemoration serves an important connecting function. The chapter reveals that, since the late 1940s, the memorials received support from Spanish fascists who had patronized the legionaries’ settlement in Spain. Second, the chapter discloses that political contexts and international relations influence heavily memory work. In the 1950s, once the regime promoted an anti-communist crusade, the memorials became part of the officially endorsed celebrations for Francoist war heroes. In the mid-1960s, when Spain sought to establish an economic partnership with communist Romania, the authorities treated the old legionaries unceremoniously, and the press muted the memorials and their anti-communism. Ultimately, the transnational and transgenerational “passing of the torch” enabling the continuity of the memorials is an unintended consequence of the legionaries’ networking with Spanish ideological peers, not an intended outcome.
