Archival History:

Biography / Administrative history:

Name of the creator(s):

Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores (España)

Scope and Content:

The UN General Assembly agreed at the end of 1950 to lift the recommendation for the withdrawal of accredited diplomatic representations in Spain, a measure that had been dictated during the San Francisco Conference of 1945 during the debates on the Spanish Question. The Franco dictatorship, after its international isolation as a result of its manifest friendship with the defeated Axis powers, was gradually integrated into an international community conditioned by the Cold War.

European public opinion, on the other hand, continued to identify Spain as a vestige of fascism that had been defeated in World War II. Not in vain, at the end of 1945, and according to the statistics of the Spanish government itself, there were more than eighteen thousand political prisoners, who from an European perspective were antifascist fighters.

The International Commission against the Concentrative Regime, constituted in 1949 by the ex-deportee and French journalist David Rousset, decided to investigate the situation of the prisoners and to know if the material conditions of life of the Spanish penitentiaries resembled that of the Nazi concentration camps . This conviction was given in part by the testimonial numbers of family members, opponents, exiled Spanish assets and international organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The assimilation of Franco's prisons, governed by the severe prison regulations of 1948, with the Nazi Lager or with the Soviet Gulag was based on the use of inmates as almost free labor by the State and the companies awarded the contracts. public work, which since October 1938 was operating under the name of Redemption of Penalties for Work. This system allowed the convicted person to reduce his sentence by establishing days of compensation per day worked. However, not all prisoners could access this system, remaining at the mercy of the discretion of the Government. But it was not only the use of the prisoner as voluntary labor, which identified in the imaginary the Spanish prison with the Nazi or the Soviet prison, also the extreme and severe living conditions of the inmates, especially that of the politicians. For these reasons, the International Commission decided to investigate Franco's jails in 1950.

The dictatorship initially refused to have the prisons inspected. However, the threat of convening a public process in which the Spanish prison was compared with the Lager and Gulags, at a time when Spain was integrating into the international community, led to a change of attitude and agreement between both parties. The inspectorate could meet with the inmates. On the contrary, Spain did not put any obstacle in the way of the inspectors choosing the centers to visit, although they were prevented from accessing their archives, and they promised that there would be no reprisals against the interviewees and their families.

The Delegation, formed by the same Rousset, the French Elisabeth Dussauze, the Norwegian Lise Borsun and the Belgian André Alers, all of them antifascist fighters and former deportees, were developed between May 9 and June 5. Seventeen centers, two of them women, and five labor camps or penitentiary colonies were visited, collecting the testimony of one hundred and thirty-seven inmates.

The conclusions of the White Paper were, among others, the following: police brutality in the arrest and interrogation, application of a war legislation to the political detainee, lack of defense rights, detention not subject to procedures adjusted to law.

Regarding the conditions of the prisoner's life, these varied depending on the place of internment. If in the prisons the hygienic situation was mediocre or acceptable, in the penitentiary colonies it was insufficient, not to mention the medical assistance. On the contrary, the diet and the disciplinary regime were better in the colonies than in the prisons.

The report determined that the spaces inspected did not meet the Nazi-type concentration conditions, although they were harsh places to serve the sentence. Regarding work for the benefit of the State, that is, the redemption of penalties for work, it was determined that the wages paid were similar to those of free labor.

However, the drafters of the White Paper indicated that this situation, as of 1952, corresponded to a recent evolution. According to the report, the situation began to improve from 1946 and 1947 because, until then, there had been massive and arbitrary arrests, judicial or extrajudicial executions in large numbers, overcrowded prisons with high mortality rates as a result of lack of food or medical assistance. Despite the systematic use of compulsory labor in the labor battalions and penitentiary colonies and their extremely harsh conditions, the redemption of penalties for work was, in the opinion of the inspectors, a transitory institution rather than a substantial part of the country's economic system.

After analyzing all the information the International Commission against the Concentratory Regime determined that in the Spain of Franco there were neither Lagers Nazis nor Soviet Gulags, that was their objective, not another one. The publication of the report in 1953 had a deep repercussion that ended up improving the Spanish prison system with the promulgation of a new regulation, the one of 1956, also in accordance with the Basic Norms for the treatment of prisoners agreed upon in the United Nations in 1955. European organizations such as the one led by Rousset were those that little by little were forcing changes in the dictatorship. That year Spain joined the UN, the following year university unrest took place and the dictatorship was questioned from within. The Spaniards could never read this report of the International Commission until 1976, which was partially published under another title and in France by the publisher Ruedo Ibérico. In Spain, two copies are kept, in principle, one of them is in the General Archive of the Administration.

General accessibility conditions:

©MCD. Archivos Estatales (España). La difusión de la información descriptiva y de las imágenes digitales de este documento ha sido autorizada por el titular de los derechos de propiedad intelectual exclusivamente para uso privado y para actividades de docencia e investigación. En ningún caso se autoriza su reproducción con finalidad lucrativa ni su distribución, comunicación pública y transformación por cualquier medio sin autorización expresa y por escrito del propietario.

Image accessibility condition:

Images/documents have no access restrictions

Language and Scripts:

Español (Alfabeto latino).  Writing type: Impresa. 

Description Indices:

Alers, André (1906-1993)

Børsum, Lise (1908-1985)

Cárceles

Comisión Internacional contra el Régimen Concentracionario

Dictadura de Franco, 1939-1975

Dussauze, Elizabeth (1914-1983)

Livre blanc sur le système pénitentiaire espagnol (1953)

Presos políticos

Rousset, David (1912-1997)

State of conservation:

Good

Medium/Archival Material:

Digitized 

Fuentes:

Kuby, Emma. Political Survivors.The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945.. Ithaca (United States): Cornell University Press. 2019.

Notes:

This document was pre-selected for EXILES, MIGRATORY FLOWS AND SOLIDARITY, exhibition of the "European Digital Treasures" project, funded by the European Union's Creative Europe Programme.