Resistance and Violence in Europe, 1936-1947: Study 2: (Hall) In the Fight for Freedom: German Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 sparked a widespread social revolution in Spain, particularly in the northeastern provinces of Catalonia and Aragon. Here, the Spanish anarchists began to build a society based on their anarcho-communist and anarcho-syndicalist principles, and to fight a revolutionary war against the forces of the Right . Both the revolutionary society created in Spain and the war against what was broadly termed fascism attracted a wide variety of leftists from all over Europe. One of these groups, the German anarchists who lived in Spain when the war started, came to play a pivotal role in the progression of the revolution and the war. Simultaneously, they came to frame their own struggle in very German terms, often portraying the Nazis, who backed the Spanish Nationalists, as the enemy, rather than the Nationalists themselves. Both the narrative of the German anarchists\u27 experience in Spain and this interplay between their German ethnicity and anarchist internationalism form the basis for my research