The Operation of Franco’s concentration camps in Catalonia

Abstract

For Franco’s army, concentration camps represented a tool for the socio-political classification of prisoners of war. In Catalonia, this process began in the spring of 1938, with the stabilization of Franco’s Catalan front. An analysis of the operation of Catalonia’s concentration camps leads to an explanation of how the ‘Nuevo Estado’ adapted an extrajudicial system that had been developed in the context of the Civil War to meet its needs to maintain the separation of different sectors of Spanish society at the end of the war and the beginning of the postwar period.