Foreign News: Aftermath

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The death penalty was prescribed for those possessing unauthorized radio transmitters or receivers or those who received or spread news damaging to the Franco cause. Other crimes punishable by death: sniping, robbing, pillaging, sabotage. Also high in the list of "criminals" were those responsible for having prolonged the war.

Serfs? By week's end 100,000 persons had been rounded up. The total number of prisoners had reached 600,000. From Spain came only vague rumors of the number of courts-martial that ended in death verdicts. Censorship was tight, the frontier into France was closed for all but a chosen, trusted few.

The fate of prisoners who will be allowed to live was scarcely a secret, however. In a special article to the New York Herald Tribune, Manuel Chaves Nogales, former editor of the Madrid Journal Ahora who left Loyalist Spain in disgust early in the war and has since been a neutral observer in France, gave his idea:

"The vanquished armies of the civil war, transformed into serfs, will be called upon to reconstruct the country without wages. It is in order to obtain this virtually free labor that the Spanish concentration camps have been created and that the Government is preparing a law based upon the principle of 'redemption through labor of political delinquents.' ... It is possible that the number of Spaniards retained in the camps may exceed 1,000,000. The law recently enacted with regard to political responsibilities, together with that on the principle of 'redemption through labor,' will convert this 1,000,000 men into 1,000,000 slaves whose labor will form the basis of the totalitarian state."