The Struggle for Holocaust Memory in Francoist Spain

O'Donoghue, Samuel (2026) The Struggle for Holocaust Memory in Francoist Spain. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures . Legenda, Cambridge. ISBN 9781839544699 (In Press)

Abstract

The Franco regime had good reason to fear public awareness of the Holocaust. Having supported Nazi Germany in World War II, the regime was anxious to avoid scrutiny of its own past conduct and to suppress knowledge of the Spanish Republicans among the victims of Nazi atrocities. But Francoist censorship did not go unchallenged. Drawing on archival research and on an analysis of cultural works published since 1945, Samuel O’Donoghue contests the assumption that Nazi crimes were universally overlooked and forgotten. He tells the story of those Spaniards who were intent on defying the silence imposed by an ideologically tainted regime and traces the process by which Holocaust memory became a site of cultural opposition to Francoism, a rallying point for public intellectuals determined to undermine the National-Catholic order, and subsequently a catalyst for dismantling the regime’s legacy.