Spanish prosecutors on Monday stated they had been investigating whether or not Basic Francisco Franco’s dictatorship collaborated with Nazi Germany throughout World Battle II to ship hundreds of exiled Spaniards in France to loss of life camps.
Hundreds of Spaniards fled to France after Franco’s Fascist-backed nationalists overthrew a republic within the 1936-1939 civil warfare, solely to seek out themselves below Nazi occupation in France from 1940.
The investigation will “make clear the related duties and the existence of a potential joint technique” between Franco’s dictatorship and Nazi Germany “within the detention and subsequent switch of hundreds of Spaniards exiled in France to totally different extermination camps”, the general public prosecutor’s workplace stated.
The Mauthausen camp in Austria was among the many websites the place the republican exiles “had been subjected to pressured labour, torture, disappearance and homicide”, the prosecutor’s workplace added.
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The human rights and democratic reminiscence part of the workplace will lead the inquiry into the 4,435 recorded lifeless.
The prosecutors’ workplace stated the probe coincided with the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen and was launched in accordance with a divisive 2022 democratic reminiscence legislation.
READ ALSO: The unknown story of Spain’s concentration camps
The left-wing authorities handed the laws in a bid to deal with the legacy of the civil warfare and honour victims of violence and persecution below Franco, who dominated with an iron fist till his loss of life in 1975.
The fitting-wing opposition says the left is making an attempt to reopen the injuries of the previous with the legislation and has vowed to repeal it in the event that they return to energy.
READ ALSO: How a town on Spain’s Costa Blanca became a Nazi retreat
