Refugee Survey Quarterly, 2022, 41, 196–217
https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/hdac005
Advance Access Publication Date: 26 February 2022
Article




           Before the Convention: The Spanish
         Civil War and Challenges for Research on




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                     Refugee History
                       Javier Rodrigo                * and David Alegre Lorenz**


                                                    ABSTRACT
    This article uses the tools of comparative history to address an important aspect of the
    Spanish Civil War: the fact that it generated waves of both internally displaced persons
    and cross-border refugees. Situating the conflict within the context of inter-war
    Europe, and particularly historical processes of deportation, forced migration, and exile,
    it analyses the challenges that the crisis of the war and subsequent post-war period in
    Spain introduced in the realm of humanitarian protection for displaced populations,
    and how existing international policies largely failed to protect those displaced by the
    conflict. Drawing on the Spanish Civil War example, the article shows how this kind of
    engagement with the history of refugees can produce insights that are useful for the
    broader body of scholarship on refugees, even for scholars who are not historians.
    K E Y W O R D S : displacement, refugees, exile, Spanish Civil War/post-war period,
    Refugee Convention

                                1. INTRODUCTION
As has been noted by such renowned scholars as Michael Marrus and Philipp Ther,
the statistical, conceptual, and historical complexity inherent to the study of a topic
like refugees in contemporary Europe is a major issue that conditions research into



 * Associate Professor, Departament d’Història Moderna i Contemporània Edifici B - Universitat Autònoma
   de Barcelona Spain. Email: javier.rodrigo@uab.es
** Postdoctoral Researcher, Departament d’Història Moderna i Contemporània Edifici B - Universitat
   Autònoma de Barcelona Spain. Email: david.alegre.lorenz@gmail.com
   This work was supported by the following institutions: The European Commission by means of the
   Horizon2020 Project “Enhancing Social Cohesion through Sharing the Cultural Heritage of Forced
   Migrations - SO-CLOSE”. SO-CLOSE project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon
   2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 870939, The Spanish Ministerio de
   Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades by means of the Research Project “Posguerras civiles: violencia y
   (re)construcción nacional en Espa~  na y Europa” (PGC2018-097724-BI00); The Institució Catalana de
   Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) through its ICREA-Acadèmia programme.


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                                                                      Refugee Survey Quarterly          197


refugee history.1 With noteworthy exceptions, there has been a remarkable lack of
work on this subject in the field of history, in contrast to its importance as a research
area in the social sciences. Of particular note is the scarcity of studies focusing on the
first half of the 20th century, despite the fact that it was precisely in this period that
the historical and legal framework began to be laid for dealing with the successive
refugee and exile crises that took place on the continent.2
    The historical and current legal frameworks for access to protection, asylum, and
humanitarian treatment in both destination countries and transit countries are the re-




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sult of a long and complex historical process shaped by specific contexts. In this art-
icle, we seek to reconstruct how the refugee problem emerged and developed in the
context of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and consider how the humanitarian
crisis resulting from the conflict fits into the broader history of the development of
legal frameworks for refugee protection.3 From the conviction that the Spanish con-
flict has a crucial place in the history of forced migration, the displacement of refugee
populations, mass flight, and political exile, we aim to contribute to a better under-
standing of the dimensions of the “refugee question” in Europe in the years before
1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (1951 Convention).4
    But we want to go further. We are aware that the necessarily interdisciplinary ap-
proach to the subject encompasses sociological, legal, and political aspects, in add-
ition to historical ones. For this reason, it is expedient to explicitly state what this
case study can contribute to refugee studies: 1) evidence of a humanitarian crisis situ-
ation prior to the Second World War, repeatedly forgotten in studies on the 1951

1 For an introduction to the topic from a historical perspective, M. Marrus, The Unwanted: European
  Refugees in the Twentieth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985; T. Kushner & K. Knox, Refugees
  in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives during the Twentieth Century, London, Frank
  Cass, 1999; R. Bessel & C. B. Haake (eds.), Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World,
  Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009; P. Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, Oxford, Oxford
  University Press, 2013; E. Fiddian Qasmiyeh, G. Loescher, K. Long & N. Sigona (eds.), The Oxford
  Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014; M. Frank & J.
  Reinisch (eds.), Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959. A Forty Years’ Crisis?, London, Bloomsbury, 2017; P. Ther,
  The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1492, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019; D. Diaz, En exil.
  Les refugies en Europe, de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours, Paris, Gallimard, 2021.
2 C. Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe: The Emergence of a Regime, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.
  A summary can be found in R. Black, “Fifty Years of Refugee Studies: From Theory to Policy”,
  International Migration Review, 1, 2001, 57–78. Another summarised account is J. O. Kleist, “The History
  of Refugee Protection: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges”, Journal of Refugee Studies, 2, 2017,
  161–169.
3 See E. M. Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Change, 1917-1947, New York, Columbia
  University Press, 1948; M. Proudfoot, European Refugees 1939-1952: A Study in Forced Population
  Movement, London, Faber and Faber, 1957; E.H.S. Chandler, The High Tower of Refuge: The Inspiring Story
  of Refugee Relief Throughout the World, New York, Praeger, 1959; R. Kee, Refugee World, London, Oxford
  University Press, 1961. On ethnic cleansing and minorities in Europe, N. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic
  Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002, 45; M. Frank, Making
  Minorities History: Population Transfer in Twentieth-Century Europe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017.
  S. Monaghan, Protecting Democracy from Dissident: Population Engineering in Western Europe, 1918-1926,
  London, Routledge, 2018.
4 On the precedents of mass flight and exile in contexts such as those of the Great War (13 million refugees,
  only a quarter of whom were able to return to their places of origin), P. Gatrell & L. Zhvanko (eds.),
  Europe on the Move: The Great War and its Refugees, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017;
  Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 29.
198      Javier Rodrigo and David Alegre Lorenz j Before the Convention

“origins” of international refugee protection; 2) knowledge of the legal and adminis-
trative treatment received by displaced civilians in Spain as internal “refugees” (a
term that was indeed used by Republican authorities for some of the internally dis-
placed) prior to the mass flight to France that occurred in 1939; 3) the nature of this
latter event, the Retirada, as a gigantic humanitarian and legal problem that high-
lighted the limits of asylum and refugee policies and the differential application of
these policies by country, in the absence of an operational and recognised supra-
national agency; 4) evidence that the lack of clear criteria (explicitly recognised by




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the different countries and political actors) made it necessary to establish normative
and administrative frameworks that would guarantee the humanitarian treatment
that was denied to the exiled Spanish population in 1939; and 5) that the compara-
tive, long-term perspectives of historical research, when accompanied by the use of
multidisciplinary tools, can further understanding of both the past and the present of
the phenomenon of refugees and forced migrations.
    In addition to our conviction that historical experience is important in the study
of the experiences of refugees and policies towards them, we firmly believe that the
analysis of historical contexts helps to more clearly establish, in comparative perspec-
tive, the factors that cause people to become refugees and lead to different refugee
outcomes (whether they are able to obtain refugee status and integrate into the
receiving society). Academic and political frameworks change and so, in turn, do the
definitions of the subjects of research and policy, in this case refugees, and the rights
accorded to them. And they change according to historical contingency. One of the
first academic approaches to the refugee issue, the special issue on refugees which
appeared in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in May
1939, established that the refugee problem was basically one of (national and polit-
ical) minorities marginalised and persecuted by “dominant majorities”, and this was
in fact the case during and after the First World War.5 But the Spanish case was one
of the contexts in which new elements emerged in the broader phenomenon of refu-
gee status, the refugee regime, and the dynamics of displacement that clearly pushed
the boundaries of this analytical framework. In the Spanish case, beyond the undeni-
ably political character of exile, flight from the consequences of total war was the cen-
tral factor behind 1) the generation of masses of internal refugees and 2) the flight of
civilian populations. While Spanish exiles would subsequently be recognised as refu-
gees by international agencies and by third-party states (such as Mexico), the condi-
tion of “refugee” was prior to that of “exile”, as a description used during the war
that was fundamentally internal and humanitarian in nature. The reality of forced mi-
gration in Spain therefore differed profoundly from the (more or less flexible) model
that had existed up until that point, and in fact contributed, albeit passively, to the re-
formulation of the concept of “refugee”. In this sense, and despite not being men-
tioned as a relevant case in the final formulation of the 1951 Convention nor in the
preceding debates, the Spanish Civil War contributed to forging a new model of
forced migrants and refugees, based on concrete historical experiences.


5 J.S. Roucek, “Minorities—A Basis of The Refugee Oroblem”, Annals of the American Academy of Political
  and Social Science, 1, 1939, 1 (we thank Giorgia Priorelli for bringing this publication to our attention).
                                                                         Refugee Survey Quarterly           199


    The model codified in the 1951 Convention is the one that has been most exten-
sively explored in the academic literature. The publication of a special issue of the
International Migration Review in 1981 was proof of the growing interest in this field
and represented a starting point for refugee studies, which subsequently began to de-
velop as an autonomous research area. Among the 30 articles contained in this spe-
cial issue, Egon Kunz’s work on the elements affecting refugee outcomes in the areas
preceding and succeeding flight stands out, as it delineated an analytic framework for
the development of a refugee theory for the very first time.6 It was no longer only a




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question of minorities, but also a matter of flight from war, bombings, violence, and
genocide.7 The proliferation of studies on this topic in the past four decades has
made the issue of refugees so scientifically relevant as to become a major area of
study, also in historical areas. However, history continues to occupy a secondary
place in refugee studies and, dare we say, in the scientific consideration of scholars of
this specific subject.8
    This article discusses the specifics of the Spanish case as part of the global phe-
nomenon of refuge, flight, and humanitarian asylum, with the aim of contributing to
a better understanding of the variables that determined policies towards refugees
throughout the 20th century. The body of the text will be divided into two main sec-
tions. The first will describe the dynamics of flight, refuge, and forced migration be-
hind the front lines between 1936 and 1938, as well as the first cross-border exiles,
while the second will analyse how and in what phases the Retirada and the mass exile
of 1939 took place and discuss the significance of this event.9 In the conclusions, we
will outline the major questions which we believe remain to be answered in the study
of forced displacement and the “refugee question” in Spain. Finally, we will propose


 6 E.F. Kunz, “Exile and Resettlement: Refugee theory”, International Migration Review, 1–2, 1981, 42–51. It
   should be noted that this article is an extension of previous research by Kunz, published eight years ear-
   lier. See E.F. Kunz, “The Refugee in Flight: Kinetic Models and Forms of Displacement’, International
   Migration Review, 2, 1973, 125–146.
 7 A refugee research bibliography was also included in the volume. It consisted of more than 800 entries
   which, compared to the 100 bibliographical entries contained in the 1939 special issue of the Annals of
   the American Academy of Political and Social Science, clearly signalled the growth of this field of research:
   B.N. Stein, “Refugee research bibliography”, International Migration Review, 1–2, 1981, 331–393.
 8 On the importance of comparative historical analysis, see P. Marfleet, “Refugees and History: Why We
   Must Address the Past”, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 26(3), 2007, 136–148; P. Gatrell, “Refugees – What’s
   Wrong with History?”, Journal of Refugee Studies, 30(2), 2017, 170–189 and P. Gatrell, A. Ghoshal, K.
   Nowak & A. Dowdall, “Reckoning with refugeedom: refugee voices in modern history”, Social History, 46
   (1), 2021, 70–95.
 9 An overview of the refugee situation during the Spanish Civil War can be found in the PhD dissertation
   by J. Clavijo Ledesma, La polıtica sobre la població refugiada durant la Guerra Civil, 1936-1939, Girona,
   Universitat de Girona, 2003. The book of reference on Catalonia is J. Serrallonga, Refugiats i desplaçats
   dins la Catalunya en guerra, 1936-1939, Barcelona, Base, 2004. See also J. C. Collado, Los evacuados de la
   Guerra Civil de la provincia de Toledo (1936-1939), Madrid, Universidad Nacional de Educación a
   Distancia, 2015; E. Barranquero & L. Prieto, Población y Guerra Civil en Málaga: caıda, exodo y refugio,
   Málaga, Centro de Ediciones de la Diputación de Málaga, 2007; G. Arrien and I. Goiogana, El primer exili
   dels bascos. Catalunya, 1936-1939, Barcelona, Fundació Ramon Trias Fargas & Fundación Sabino Arana,
   2000. On international agencies, G. Pretus, La ayuda humanitaria en la Guerra Civil espa~nola (1936-
   1939), Granada, Comares, 2015. Very recent and explicitly tied to refugee studies is A. Martınez, Las refu-
   giadas del exilio republicano espa~nol en Francia. Genero, identidades y experiencias (1939-1978), PhD disser-
   tation, Universidad de Granada & Universite Paris 8, 2021.
200      Javier Rodrigo and David Alegre Lorenz j Before the Convention

some challenges for future research – in history, but also in other fields – on forced
migration, displacement, and violence, based on the Spanish case.

          2 . C I V I L I A N S IN F O R C E D D ISPLACEMENT, 1936 –1 938
Synthesising the factors that determine Republican Spain’s place among the major
cases of forced displacement and migration in the history of the 20th century is no
easy task. To begin with, the dimensions of internal forced migration during the war
can only be discussed in terms of estimated figures, rather than knowledge of the




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exact numbers. There is a certain amount of agreement on the figure of three million
displaced persons (particularly those who arrived in Murcia, Alicante, Valencia,
Tarragona, Barcelona, and Girona), of whom around 1,800,000 are thought to have
received institutional assistance. Similarly, the accepted figure for the exile to France
of January and, above all, February 1939 is around 440,000 people.10 Vilar gives a
total of 724,000 people for the “exodus of 1936-1939”, including 15,000 people dis-
placed by the Gipuzkoa campaign in 1936, 160,000 by the campaign in the North
(from Biscay to Asturias) in 1937, 24,000 from Upper Aragon in 1938, 470,000 as
part of the Retirada, and 15,000 who fled the final offensive, as well as some 40,000
people granted asylum and exchanged11 over the course of the war. This figure is
open to modification, given that it is certainly possible that people evacuated from
the North returned to Republican-controlled Spain, only to be displaced again as
part of the Retirada in 1939.12 In the Spanish Civil War, the distinction between the
terms “evacuee” (those evacuated by order of authorities) and “refugees” (those who
fled of their own accord) quickly lost its explanatory potential.
   In general terms, displacement during the conflict occurred in five main phases.
In chronological order: forced displacement resulting from the triumph or failure of
the coup d’etat of July 1936 in different parts of Spain; that which occurred in the
Cantabrian North in 1937; that which resulted from the occupation of eastern
Aragon and western Catalonia by Franco’s troops in 1938; the Retirada of early
1939, which was the principal origin of what is referred to as the Republican exile;
and, finally, the waves of migration at the end of the war, which included people who
returned to Spain from abroad, people who returned to their places of origin from
elsewhere in Spain following the defeat of the Republic, and people who left Spain
during the victors’ final offensive.



10 J. Rubio, La emigración de la guerra civil de 1936-1939. Tomo I, Madrid, San Martın, 1977, 72; A. Alted,
   La voz de los vencidos. El exilio republicano de 1939, Madrid, Aguilar, 2005.
11 The mission of the International Committee of the Red Cross led by Marcel Junod played a key role in
   facilitating prisoner of war exchanges. Junod had previously worked for the organisation during the Italian
   invasion of Ethiopia. The mediation and humanitarian work carried out by his group was vital given that
   the Spanish Red Cross had split as a result of the coup of July 1936. They were able to observe first-hand
   the situation of nearly 90,000 prisoners from both sides up until August 1938, when insurgent authorities
   refused to allow them to continue working in the territory they controlled. See J. Rubio, Asilos y canjes
   durante la guerra civil espa~nola. Aspectos humanitarios de una contenida fratricida, Barcelona, Planeta, 1979,
   355–448.
12 J. B. Vilar, La Espa~na del exilio. Las emigraciones polıticas espa~nolas en los siglos XIX y XX, Madrid, Sıntesis,
   2006.
                                                                             Refugee Survey Quarterly              201


    Broadly speaking, it can be affirmed that 12 per cent of Spain’s pre-war population
of 1936 was affected.13 However, this is merely an estimate, conditioned by how the
Republican Government defined refugees. This definition, published in the official
journal of the Republic, the Gaceta de Madrid, on 14 October 1936, referred to them
as “emigrados from occupied zones, not hostile to the regime, lacking means and any
network of relatives or friends, [who have] emigrated with the permission of civilian
or military authorities”. These refugees were forced migrants or evacuees who lacked
resources and were unable to rely on relatives for support; they needed guaranteed




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aid, which the Government of the Republic – as well as the autonomous
Government in Catalonia and other sub-state entities like the Madrid Defence
Council (Junta Delegada de Defensa) – tried to provide, even as the territory under
Republican control continued to shrink.14 Nonetheless, the historical definition used
by the Government of the Republic is not entirely satisfactory, given that it excluded
anyone who did have access to basic means of survival and was able to adapt, how-
ever minimally, to the conditions of displacement. Indeed, the definition was purely
administrative and openly restrictive: refugees were, coarsely speaking, “the people
we have to take care of”.
    At all events, defining the problem amounted to recognising its existence. The
first forced movements and migrations dated from the first days of the conflict in
1936. In the weeks that followed the July coup, people fled the revolutionary vio-
lence that broke out in Catalonia, Madrid, La Mancha, eastern Aragon, and Valencia
because their lives were at risk. In many cases, these people fled to other parts of
Spain, generally travelling short distances until they reached territories or spaces
where they were safe. This initial flight led to the first official classification of
“refugees” during the war, which the insurgents applied to the estimated 10,000 peo-
ple who found asylum and refuge in international embassies and consulates.15 These
early days also saw the departure of 45,000 people who departed from Catalonia
(30,000 of them Spanish, 6,000 German, and the rest foreigners of other national-
ities). They embarked from Republican ports for a variety of destinations, including
Italy and Latin America.16 This episode is not insignificant, insofar as aid and evacu-
ation policies were a way for Nazi Germany to demonstrate its power on the inter-
national stage, particularly before like-minded countries. By late October 1936, the
German war fleet had evacuated 15,500 people, 8,000 of them citizens of the Reich,

13 S. Morón, “Refugees and Internal Displacement during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)”, in Javier
   Rodrigo and Miguel Alonso (eds.), Forced displacements: a European history, Kraków, Vila Decius
   Association, 2021.
14 D. Oviedo & A. Perez-Olivares (eds.), Madrid, una ciudad en guerra (1936-1948), Madrid, Catarata, 2016;
   G. Gómez Bravo, Asedio. Historia de Madrid en la Guerra Civil, 1936-1939, Madrid, Ediciones
   Complutense, 2018.
15 On the living conditions of refugees in embassies, consulates, and diplomatic missions in Madrid, J.
   Cervera, Madrid en guerra. La ciudad clandestina, 1936-1939, Madrid, Alianza, 2006, 353 ff.; A. M. Moral
   Roncal, Diplomacia, humanitarismo y espionaje en la Guerra Civil espa~nola, Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva,
   2008.
16 R. Doll-Petit, Els “catalans de Gènova”: història de l’èxode i l’adhesió d’una classe dirigent en temps de guerra,
   Barcelona, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2003; A. Gonzàlez Vilalta, Humanitarisme, consolats i
   negocis bruts. Evacuacions a Barcelona (1938-1938), Barcelona, Base, 2020, according to which 28,000 peo-
   ple were evacuated by sea and 15,000 by land; and J. L. Martın Berbois (ed.), 1936: Desplaçaments forçosos
   i primers exilis, Barcelona, Generalitat de Catalunya, 2020.
202      Javier Rodrigo and David Alegre Lorenz j Before the Convention

from Republican territory.17 Around the same time, the evolution of the campaign in
Gipuzkoa led thousands of people to flee across the Basque border (crossing at Irun,
via the two bridges over the Bidasoa, or by sea). It is estimated that the Gipuzkoa
campaign caused 15,000 people to become refugees. The majority of them, some
10,000, quickly returned to Republican Spain.
   During the first weeks and months of the war, people also fled in the face of the
insurgent troops’ advance on Madrid, the result of a plan of occupation and column
warfare that involved taking no prisoners and pushing any civilians and soldiers who




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might offer armed resistance to flee. This strategy was designed to occupy the max-
imum amount of territory in the shortest possible amount of time, using four col-
umns of military occupation that, starting from Andalusia, Navarra, and eastern
Castile, would converge on Madrid. It produced waves of migrants, many of whom
fled to the very capital that the insurgents aimed to reach. Rather than political perse-
cution, with all it entailed, the primary factor behind forced displacement during the
Spanish Civil War was the nature of total war and the conditions it created. The
most common experience was to leave one’s home only to face continuous displace-
ment, insecurity, and terror. As a place of refuge, the Republican capital, which had
approximately one million inhabitants at the time, became the first major destination
for these fluxes of displaced persons. We do not know how many of these people
came to Madrid (though the estimated total is between 300,000 and 500,000)18 be-
cause no research has been done on this specific topic. Indirect sources, such as the
mayor of Madrid, Rafael Henche de la Plata, provide the figure of approximately
200,000 people who arrived after 19 July 1936.
   According to the Trotskyist journalist Julián Gorkin, the number of people who
came to Madrid from rural Extremadura and Toledo was equivalent to half the city’s
population. Some of them were transferred to pavilions on the university campus,
which only had the capacity to provide food and beds for 1,500 people.19 People
from nearby places “stormed all the tramways returning to Madrid”, fleeing the prox-
imity of the front lines. The “hospitality that Madrid expended in those fateful days
was unlimited”, the novelist Eduardo Zamacois wrote. But it was limited. The avail-
able housing was occupied by the first refugees who arrived from Toledo and
Segovia, and later arrivals “scattered about the city”, sleeping anywhere they could:
unused commercial premises, abandoned houses and plots, parks, and squares. The
archways of the Plaza Mayor became a place to spend the night, a “meagre
campsite”.20 People likewise began to sleep in metro stations.
   The Government’s first response was evacuation. “Evacuate Madrid. Entrust your
family to the Republic” was, as is well known, one of the slogans deployed by the
Propaganda and Press Office (Delegación de Propaganda y Prensa) of the Madrid
Defence Council, used to promote the order to leave the capital. This order was
made effective in January 1937, but it had in fact begun to be carried out the previous
October, when the Committee for Refugees was created, and November, when the

17 I. Gómez Garcıa, La Marina alemana y la Espa~na de Franco, 1936-1945, PhD dissertation, Universidad del
   Paıs Vasco, 2020, 78–79.
18 Alted, La voz de los vencidos, 31.
19 J. Gorkin, El Proceso de Moscú en Barcelona, Barcelona, Aymá Sociedad Editora, 1974, 33.
20 D. Jato Miranda, Madrid capital republicana, Barcelona, Ediciones Acervo, 1976, 638.
                                                                        Refugee Survey Quarterly          203


insurgent army was on the verge of reaching the city. The Madrid Defence Council
and the Catalan Generalitat (where the Department of Supplies, under the Partit
Socialista Unificat de Catalunya, and the Department of Health and Social
Assistance, under the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, would compete for the
control of related duties) had to activate or even improvise contingency and evacu-
ation plans.21 Faced with the advancing front lines and the real possibility that the
city might fall into insurgent hands, many refugees left Madrid, to the extent that
from October there was a full-blown exit “column” of people departing in all manner




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of trains and coaches. The Madrid Defence Council itself recognised in January that
the city was “a large stomach difficult to provision” and that it was necessary to
evacuate by force those who did not wish to leave.22
    With winter came the major evacuations of civilians to safe areas further from the
front lines. As has already been mentioned, the Madrid Committee for Refugees was
created in October 1936. It later became the National Committee for Refugees,
which had its own provincial and local committees. Within the framework of self-
Government in Catalonia, and as ordered by the Generalitat’s Department of Health
and Social Assistance in November 1936, the four Catalan provincial capitals and all
cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants had their own Refugee Aid Committees
from October 1936 to August 1937.23 In February 1937, the Republican
Government, which had already moved to Valencia, created the Central Office for
Evacuation and Assistance to Refugees (Oficina Central de Evacuación y Asistencia a
Refugiados, OCEAR), which replaced the National Committee and was part of the
Ministry of Health and Social Assistance. After the summer of 1937, the
Commission for Assistance to Refugees (in Catalan, Comissariat d’Assistència als
Refugiats) became the organisation charged with managing the growing refugee prob-
lem in Catalonia. It was no easy task, as demonstrated by the fact that as late as June
1937 the general in charge of the defence of Madrid, Jose Miaja, was still ordering
the evacuation of civilians at the behest of the OCEAR: first, those who had “come
from provinces invaded by the rebels”, and later those from the capital and surround-
ing areas. Doorkeepers and “neighbours’ committees” helped ensure compliance,
reporting empty rooms that had been abandoned or seized. Furthermore, it was for-
bidden to rent housing or any other type of civilian or military accommodation out-
side the control of the Central Office for Evacuation.
    Republican authorities insisted that anyone who could not contribute to the war
effort leave Madrid. The number of evacuees reported by the disbanded Department
of Evacuation (Consejerıa de Evacuación) was approximately 700,000 for the period
from November 1936 to April 1937, and this figure therefore includes most of the
compulsory evacuations from Madrid. The province of Alicante received 60,000 refu-
gees, equivalent to nearly 12 per cent of the local population, in January 1937.24 The

21 Clavijo Ledesma, La polıtica sobre la població refugiada durant la Guerra Civil, 216–222.
22 J. M. Reverte, La batalla de Madrid, Barcelona, Crıtica, 2004, 515.
23 J. Serrallonga, “Refugiats i desplaçats”, in M. Duch (ed.), La guerra civil a la comarca del Tarragonès,
   Tarragona, Arola, 2010, 111.
24 J. C. Collado, “Desplazados y evacuados de Madrid a Alicante durante el primer a~           no y medio de la
   guerra”, Historia del presente, 27, 2016, 149–163. Refugees could encounter difficulties on arrival, particu-
   larly if they were adults; see the stories narrated (and remarkably normalised) in J. Pique, La crisi de la
204      Javier Rodrigo and David Alegre Lorenz j Before the Convention

delegate for evacuations, Enrique Jimenez, believed that the departure of 350,000 to
400,000 people was necessary in order to ensure that the capital had enough sup-
plies. For this reason, from January 1937 evacuation was made obligatory for every-
one except those who held public office or had responsibilities related to the war
effort, as well as their family members who had already been living in Madrid prior
to 19 July. The Ministry of Health’s Directorate of Social Assistance (Dirección de
Asistencia Social) organised the departure of entire contingents of children, many of
them orphans, for the eastern Mediterranean coast. Children’s “colonies” became the




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symbol of the reception of vulnerable populations in Republican territory and, at the
same time, gave endangered children their own space. In September 1937, the
National Conference on Refugees held by International Red Aid affirmed that there
were 195 group colonies, home to 12,027 unaccompanied children, and 406 colonies
for families, including 33,121 children.25
    The brief winter respite caused by the strategic draw of 1936 was broken in
February 1937 due to the initiative of the Italians and the fall of Málaga, which led to
one of the most notorious and well known cases of forced displacement during the
Civil War, when an estimated 150,000 civilians fled in the direction of Almerıa along
a coastal road and were met with bombs dropped by the air force and fire from three
of the insurgent navy’s ships. Nonetheless, what most defined the course of the con-
flict in 1937 was the decision to shift the war to the Northern front following the
insurgents’ defeat at Guadalajara in their final attempt to attack Madrid, which by
then had lost its status as the capital of the Republic. The fall of the Cantabrian
North – including Bilbao, Santander, and Gijón — to the insurgents led to the de-
parture of an estimated 125,000 to 150,000 refugees, most of them to France. Up to
two thirds of these refugees were from the Basque County, with those from
Cantabria and Asturias making up a much smaller portion.26 They included 4,000
Basque children evacuated to Southampton and another 4,500 to Bordeaux (for
1,495 of them, the French port was a stopover on the way to the Soviet Union), the
beginning of a practice that would continue with the departure from Asturias of
1,100 children bound for the Soviet Union.27 French authorities, for their part, main-
tained until 1938 a policy of forcibly repatriating soldiers, who were given the choice
of re-crossing the border into either Republican or insurgent territory, while women,
children, the elderly, and the sickly were distributed among reception centres. By the
end of 1938, 45,000 Spanish refugees, nearly half of them children, had been sent to
departments in inland France.
    Thus, while not approaching the numbers that would be seen in January and
February 1939, the fact is that there was already a significant contingent of displaced
persons in France. In addition, there was a minimal infrastructure for evacuating peo-
ple in Spain. In order to centralise resources, the Government of the Republic

   rereguarda. Revolució i guerra civil a Tarragona (1936-1939), Barcelona, Publicacions de l’Abadia de
   Montserrat, 1998, 611.
25 On children’s experiences of the war, see V. Sierra, Palabras huerfanas. Los ni~nos y la Guerra Civil, Madrid,
   Taurus, 2009.
26 Rubio, La emigración de la guerra civil de 1936-1939. Tomo I, 38.
27 A. Alted (ed.), El exilio espa~nol de la guerra civil: los ni~nos de la guerra, Madrid, Ministerio de Cultura-
   Fundación Largo Caballero, 1995.
                                                                      Refugee Survey Quarterly          205


replaced the OCEAR with a new General Directorate for Evacuation and Refugees
(Dirección General de Evacuación y Refugiados) in January 1938. The eastern
Mediterranean coastal regions, from Catalonia to eastern Andalusia, were receiving
the majority of displaced persons and evacuees. For instance, in 1938, the city of
Almerıa had 65,000 inhabitants and 10,000 refugees; there were 7,000 refugees under
the age of 12 in Murcia; and, according to the International Commission and
Commissioner Malcolm de Lilliehöök, Madrid had become home to up to 198,000
refugee children, 65,000 of whom were under 5 years of age, while there were around




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100,000 in Catalonia. In his opinion, there were as many as 100,000 children suffer-
ing from malnutrition and 200,000 from severe undernourishment in Republican
Spain, while up to 100,000 were at risk of starvation, primarily as a result of internal
displacement and deficiencies in evacuation and aid networks. While the exact num-
ber of children under 14 who died from causes related to the war between 1936 and
1939 has not been calculated, it has been estimated that the number was around
138,000, with the most common causes being starvation, exposure to the elements,
and disease.28
    Evacuation and aid networks always acted in reaction to the course of the war.
Each major battle generated a new flux of refugees. Particularly significant was the
evacuation of as many as 12,000 people from Teruel and nearby towns, organised by
Republican authorities while fighting for control of the city was ongoing.29 Indeed,
the characteristics of total war seen in the winter of 1937–1938 would be maintained
throughout the rest of the conflict. This, in turn, meant a change in policies of occu-
pation and for controlling the population. Beginning with the battle of Teruel, events
such as the bombardment of civilian targets became even more commonplace. These
factors had a considerable impact on the acceptance of flight and refuge as a means
of escaping the war. The occupation of Upper Aragon between April and June 1938
caused 24,000 people to flee to Republican territory, which was continuing to shrink
and becoming increasingly unsafe. The loss of territory, along with population
growth due to previous evacuations and displacements, led to worsening living con-
ditions. By November 1938, the estimated number of refugees in Catalonia, which
had a population of 2.8 million people, was 600,000. This amounted to a 25 per cent
increase in the total number of people living in Catalonia. Some 600 children arrived
in Barcelona by train each day, and some days there were as many as 2,500. They
were taken to the Casa de Misericordia. In addition to Catalonia’s population of near-
ly three million people, according to the 1936 census, there were an additional one
million people in transit during the war. There were 399,000 from Extremadura,
153,000 from Andalusia, 60,200 from Madrid and Castile, 50,000 from the Basque
Country, and 39,000 from Asturias and Santander, in addition to displaced persons
and refugees from elsewhere in Catalonia.30 As for these Catalan refugees, they came

28 R. Salas Larrazábal, Perdidas de la guerra, Barcelona, Planeta, 1977, 52, 426.
29 A. Peiró, ¡Evacuad Teruel! La odisea de 12.000 turolenses durante la Guerra Civil espa~nola, Zaragoza,
   Comuniter, 2014. Most of them ended up in the Valencian comarca of Alto Palancia, which borders the
   province of Teruel to the south-east, or in the city of Valencia, where they experienced numerous con-
   flicts with the local population. D. Alegre Lorenz, La batalla d0e Teruel: guerra total en Espa~na, Madrid,
   La Esfera de los Libros, 2018, 125–129, 332–336.
30 Serrallonga, Refugiats i desplaçats dins la Catalunya en guerra, 150.
206      Javier Rodrigo and David Alegre Lorenz j Before the Convention

from places that had been subject to the violence carried out by insurgent troops as
part of their occupation policies in Catalonia.
    However, the problem was (and is) in fact far-reaching. In wartime, displacement
was provisional and constant. Displaced persons were generally in continuous move-
ment, escaping from everyday conflicts in the places they passed through, which
would explain the impulse to flee towards the border. Furthermore, the dynamics of
the war itself gradually reduced the capacity to absorb fluxes of refugees as the areas
still under Republican control continued to shrink, forced people to flee newly occu-




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pied territories, and generated new waves of displacement, such as the people who
left other parts of Catalonia for Barcelona. This flight increased the strain on the sys-
tems in place to receive, provision, and maintain refugees, which were already com-
promised. There were evacuated persons, with and without legal refugee status,
living in confiscated flats and buildings, cinemas, theatres, hotels, churches, bullfight-
ing rings, and railway stations. People also slept in the metro or outdoors in public
spaces, including large squares and parks, in building entryways and in shanty dwell-
ings. Communities far from the front lines were required to provide accommodation
to refugees under one of two systems, the first with institutional backing and the se-
cond being taken in by direct relatives. The latter system was used whenever pos-
sible. However, the reality was infinitely more complex.
    Feeding the refugee population was a serious problem in the areas behind the
front lines.31 As is well known, civilian evacuees were aided by international organisa-
tions that set up soup kitchens, hospitals, and children’s colonies using limited
resources. However, how the problem was handled is not a settled topic. As we have
already mentioned, the situation led to conflicts among some local populations. It is
estimated that no more than 12–15 per cent of the refugee population was suitable
for work – only a small portion of displaced adult women. In mid-1938, the Catalan
agriculturists’ union Unió de Rabassaires requested that, given the shortage of workers
and the intensification of production imposed by authorities, women and refugees
who had not been assigned other jobs be employed working the fields. The
Republic’s Foreign Minister, Julio Álvarez de Vayo, himself spoke of “three million
refugees, in round numbers” in the areas behind the front lines. It is evident that the
magnitude of the phenomenon was far greater than had been prepared for, particu-
larly at a time, in 1938, when economic blockades, the duration of the war, and a
dwindling capacity to secure provisions made hunger an increasingly common ex-
perience in Republican territory. In the Madrid embassies, rumours were exchanged
among refugees as to the privileges enjoyed by some and the scarcity faced by others.
In Barcelona, the imposed moral duty to offer refuge, and therefore food, shelter,
and medical care, to helpless and vulnerable civilians was also the source of tensions
between communities. After all, more than half of the total refugee population was in


31 A. Calzado, “Los abastecimientos como eje central de la moral de guerra y de la simbologıa de los nuevos
   poderes en la retaguardia republicana durante la Guerra Civil”, in S. Valero & M. Garcıa Carrión (eds.),
   Desde la capital de la República. Nuevas perspectivas y estudios sobre la Guerra Civil Espa~nola, Valencia,
   PUV, 2018, 295–314. Some of the tensions surrounding resource distribution and feeding the refugee
   population are discussed in M. Seidman, Republic of Egos: A Social History of the Spanish Civil War,
   Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, 143.
                                                                       Refugee Survey Quarterly          207


the same city, which was being bombed by the German Condor Legion and the
Italian Aviazionare Legionaria and facing news of the eminent arrival of Franco’s
troops.

           3 . C RO SS -B OR D E R E X IL E, F OR C ED R EP A TRI A TI ON S
                            A ND TH E E ND OF TH E WA R
All these factors, as well as the exile’s essentially political dimension, set the stage for




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the final humanitarian disaster, the Retirada of 1939, which began with a sort of
“great terror” that came over people as news arrived of the killings and other violence
carried out by advancing insurgent forces. This explains why hundreds of thousands
of people headed for the border at the same time. To a large extent, it amounted to a
continuation of the dynamics of forced migration seen in 1936-38, but with specific
and noteworthy characteristics, the most significant being the departure en masse of a
large number of people as a result of the final push by Franco’s victorious armies.32
The form that this mass exodus took was also a consequence of the collapse of the
forces loyal to the Republic, which left civilians with hardly any protection during
their chaotic and terror-stricken flight.33 Half a million people took to the road in a
matter of days, weeks at most, from Tarragona and western Catalonia to Barcelona,
and from the Catalan capital to Girona and Figueres. They fled on lorries, on wag-
ons, or on foot, with the few belongings they had managed to gather or with only
the clothes on their backs, while under fire from the air by the Italians and the
Germans. Women, children, and elderly people accompanied soldiers. Without any
actual military orders to retreat, beyond the instructions given by Vicente Rojo (or
Negrın’s order to evacuate goods such as culturally significant works of art), and
without any arrangements for receiving non-combatants along the way and at the
border, the magnitude of this northward flight made the voluntary/forced population
displacement which occurred over a few weeks in January and February 1939 the
largest in European history up until that point, and in the shortest period of time.


32 One case that is of interest due to its similarities to Spain occurred in the second half of May 1945, at
   what is now the border between Slovenia and Austria, when Germany’s surrender and the resulting mili-
   tary collapse of the Axis led to the formation of a column of refugees stretching fifty kilometres, probably
   more than 250,000 people in total. Two thirds of them were collaborationist Croatian, Slovenian, and
   Serbian authorities, soldiers, and militiamen, while the rest were civilians. They had to force their way
   through attacks by Yugoslavian forces. Some 60,000 people managed to reach Austria and were interned
   in improvised camps set up by occupying British forces. Nearly 200,000 were trapped on the other side
   of the border. Up to 70,000 people, 50,000 of whom were of Croatian origin, were killed in the ensuing
   massacres. Today, these massacres amount to one of the most controversial historical episodes in
   European collective memory due to their place in the martyrology and narratives of Croatian nationalism.
   V. Pavlakovic, “Deyfing the Defeated: Commemorating Bleiburg since 1990”, L’Europe en Formation,
   3(357), 2010, 125–147. For Yugoslavian authorities, as for those of Franco’s Spain in 1939, the return of
   these people was a matter of vital importance because their very sovereignty within the country was at
   stake. J. Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration, San
   Francisco, Stanford University Press, 2001, 758–765, and M. Portmann, “Communist Retaliation and
   Persecution on Yugoslav Territory During and After the World War II (1943-1950)”, Tokovi istorije,
   1(2), 2004, 45–74.
33 J. M. Reverte & M. Martınez Zauner, De Madrid al Ebro. Las grandes batallas de la guerra civil espa~nola,
   Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2016, 335, 337; J. Gaitx, Itineraris de la retirada de 1939, Barcelona,
   Generalitat de Catalunya, 2020.
208      Javier Rodrigo and David Alegre Lorenz j Before the Convention

   The figures are well known because they come from official estimates made by
French authorities: 440,000 people, 170,000 of them women, elderly people, and
children; 40,000 non-mobilised civilians; 10,000 wounded men; and 220,000 com-
batants. The laws passed after Édouard Daladier became prime minister in April
1938 allowed the administrative detention of foreigners considered “undesirable”.34
This measure was justified by citing the desire to guarantee “national security” and
“the preservation of public order”. French authorities – who were more concerned
with public order than humanitarian duties – had a variety of plans for those who




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arrived from Spain. These included moving soldiers and the wounded to military
facilities, pending the readying of internment camps where the former could be
housed in good conditions and so that the latter would not overburden the hospitals
of southern France.
   However, any existing plans proved thoroughly insufficient to respond to the
Retirada of 1939. The vast numbers of people departing Spain for France drastically
surpassed the expectations of the Daladier Government and Interior Minister Albert
Saurraut, who had attempted to contain this influx by closing borders. This policy,
which other Western European countries also applied to Jews fleeing Germany,
proved futile in the face of the continuous arrival of desperate people who almost
never had legal documents for entering and staying in destination countries.35 Thus,
on 5 February, responding to faits accomplis, France’s new authorities (concretely,
Édouard Daladier) gave the order to open the border to unarmed soldiers, days after
authorising the entry of civilians.36 Military units soon began to gather at the border.
Their retreat was covered by the 26th Division and what was left of the Army of the
Ebro, complicating the task of separating civilians from combatants. On 9 February,
the Republic’s 26th Division crossed the border at Llıvia (a Spanish enclave located
in French half of the divided Cerdanya valley), while the rest of what remained of
the Republican army used the last available crossing points along an approximately
150-kilometre stretch of the border.37 Shortly thereafter, the insurgent general Juan
Bautista Sánchez reached the border at Le Perthus. Puigcerdà, in the Spanish part of
the Cerdanya valley, fell the following day. The entire border with France was in
Franco’s hands.
   Some 50,000 members of the French Gendarmerie, Police, and Mobile
Republican Guard ruled this gigantesque space of selection and incentivised return, a
militarised border that was literally in a state of siege.38 Border crossing points were

34 G. Dreyfus-Armand, El exilio de los republicanos espa~noles en Francia. De la guerra civil a la muerte de
   Franco, Barcelona, Crıtica, 2000 [1999], 58–59.
35 V. Caron, “Unwilling Refuge: France and the Dilemma of Illegal Immigration, 1933-1939”, in F.
   Caestecker & B. Moore (eds.), Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States, New York &
   Oxford Berghahn, 2010, 57–81.
36 Dreyfus-Armand, El exilio de los republicanos espa~noles en Francia, 44. For an exhaustive study of policies,
   treatment in the press, and social attitudes in France regarding the Spanish Republican exodus, M. Martın
   Gijón, Dos repúblicas contra el fascismo. Espa~noles y franceses desde la Guerra Civil hasta la Segunda Guerra
   Mundial, Granada, Comares, 2019.
37 Alted, La voz de los vencidos, 66–67.
38 E. Forcada & G. Tuban, “Topografia dels camps de concentració de la Catalunya del Nord”, in E. Pujol
   (ed.), L’exili català del 1936-1939. Un balanç, Girona, Cercle d’Estudis Històrics i Socials, 2003, 57; M.-C.
   Rafaneau-Boj, Los campos de concentración de los refugiados espa~noles en Francia (1939-1945), Barcelona,
                                                                          Refugee Survey Quarterly            209


the site of the first phase of separating men of military age from other arrivals
(women, the elderly, and children). Non-combatants who were not returning to
Spain were sent to departments in the French interior (but not to Paris), generally
by train. Camps such as those at Argèles-sur-Mer, Saint-Cyprien and, soon after,
Barcarès, Bram (Aude), Agde (Herault), and Rivesaltes (which at least had barracks)
became the scene of the Republican defeat for combatants, “defenceless bodies
among the shacks and holes dug in the sand to escape the cold”.39 Two thirds of all
internees spent the first weeks in Argèles-sur-Mer or Saint-Cyprien, despite the com-




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plete lack of suitable facilities in these improvised camps. The Gurs camp, for people
who had fled from the Basque Country, and the Vernet d’Ariège disciplinary camp
were subsequently added.
    From a comparative perspective, it is important to note that this situation, while
not completely unprecedented, was still relatively novel in the history of the regime
for managing refugee populations.40 What today is commonplace (according to the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 40 per cent of refugees
live in camps) emerged progressively. It did so, in the first place, at the initiative of
the belligerent countries of the Great War as a way of dealing with naturalised for-
eign populations and people displaced by the revolutionary civil wars that broke out
after 1917. Later, in October 1938, the Belgian Government set up a camp at
Merksplas in northern Belgium, at the behest of Belgian Jewish civic organisations,
to house a thousand of the 25,000 Jews who would arrive in the country over the
course of those months, and the French Government responded to the respective
Jewish and Spanish refugee crises by opening camps.
    Despite French authorities’ humanitarian declarations, from the very beginning
they tried to bring about the rapid repatriation of arrivals from Spain using policies
which amounted to a de facto disregard for the right to asylum, using words and
deeds (such as poor living conditions and emotional blackmail using family mem-
bers) to pressure civilians and soldiers into returning.41 France’s right-wing press
called them “fugitives, deserters, and murderers”, while the Government viewed
them as “human hordes [that] have crossed all barriers [. . ..], sowing panic”, in the
words of the Minister of Public Works, Anatole de Monzie.42 Repatriation was a
truly complex process, quick in some cases, but desperately slow in others. Many dis-
placed persons along the western part of the Pyrenean border quickly re-entered
Spain at Irun, as the Prisoner Concentration Camps Inspectorate (Inspección de
Campos de Concentración de Prisioneros, ICCP) noted: as many as 67,709 from 1 to



     Omega, 1995; G. Tuban, Camps d’etrangers. Le contrôle des refugies venus d’Espagne (1939-1944), Paris,
     Nouveau Monde, 2018.
39   A. Vilanova, Los olvidados. Los exiliados espa~noles en la segunda guerra mundial, Paris, Ruedo Iberico, 1969,
     10. On the nature and re-use of French concentration camps, see A. González Ruibal, Volver a las trinche-
     ras. Una arqueologıa de la guerra civil espa~nola, Madrid, Alianza, 2016, 224–225.
40   A. J. Kaminsky, I campi di concentramento dal 1896 a oggi. Storia, funzioni, tipologia, Turin, Bollati
     Boringhieri, 1997 [1982]; A. Kramer and B. Greiner (eds.), Die Welt der Lager. Zur »Erfolgsgeschichte«
     einer Institution, Hamburg, Hamburger Edition, 2013.
41   Martınez, Las refugiadas del exilio republicano espa~nol en Francia.
42   Martın Gijón, Dos repúblicas contra el fascismo, 49.
210      Javier Rodrigo and David Alegre Lorenz j Before the Convention

19 February, while more than 80,000 had requested to return.43 Forced repatriations
of civilians were also carried out at the border. In the space of a few days, 190,000
people, most of them civilians, were evacuated to other parts of France, but some
275,000 remained interned in camps in the South. Such was the situation when, on
27 February, the Berard-Jordana agreement, in which France recognised the Burgos
Government as the legitimate Government of Spain, was made public. France was in-
creasingly motivated to incentivise refugee contingents to return to Spain, particular-
ly given the cost to the public purse of maintaining them – more than six million




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francs per day, according to authorities – not to mention the deployment of crucial
military and police personnel – as France’s new ambassador to Spain, Philippe
Petain, would note – months before the outbreak of a European war that was already
on the horizon.44
    By the summer of 1939, more than 250,000 refugees had returned to Spain under
France’s policy of incentivised return, including those who entered the by then well-
oiled system of reception, classification, and internment or evacuation run by the
ICCP. The undecided were subject to a variety of measures, such as forced conscrip-
tion in the French army (some 7,000 joined the Foreign Legion, where they made
up a quarter of all troops and faced humiliating treatment at the hands of prejudiced
officers) or in the Companies of Foreign Workers (between 50,000 and 60,000 peo-
ple). Thus, many experiences of flight ended with refugees returning to their places
of origin, with the hope of being able to return to a normal home life, despite the
risk of being subject to the new regime’s policies of political persecution. By
December, only 162,000 of the initial half a million people remained in exile, accord-
ing to Javier Rubio’s calculations, while Dreyfus-Armand gives the figure of
180,000.45 The vast majority of those who had lost the war remained in Spain or
soon returned.
    However, some did not: up to 15,000 managed to join the French Resistance dur-
ing the German occupation, while the majority of those who remained in France
spent the years of the European war moving from camp to camp, at least until 1942,
as labourers with the Groups of Foreign Workers or the German Organisation
Todt.46 Others, including children, were unable to return; the defeat of the Republic
caused Spain to lose some 17,200 of the nearly 37,500 children who had been sent
abroad during the conflict as part of rescue operations. Lastly, there was a permanent
exile made up of a minority of “a few thousand privileged [people]”, according to the
famous Catalan poster illustrator Carles Fontserè (who was, in his own words, a
“third-rate exile”), whereas the majority of those who had lost the war were “defeated

43 P. Barruso, “El difıcil regreso. La polıtica del Nuevo Estado ante el exilio guipuzcoano en Francia (1936-
   1939)”, Sancho el Sabio, 11, 1999, 101–140. J. Rodrigo, Cautivos. Campos de concentración en la Espa~na
   franquista, 1936-1947, Barcelona, Crıtica, 2005.
44 P. Barruso, “Los acuerdos Jordana-Berard y el regreso de los exiliados espa~      noles (abril-septiembre de
   1939)”, in F. Gil & J. C. Ara (eds.), La Espa~na exiliada de 1939, Huesca, Institución Fernando el
   Católico, 2001, 141–160. On the subsequent period, see A. Martınez, “La miseria de la emigración clan-
   destina. Refugiados polıticos y económicos en Francia, 1945-1950”, in M. A. del Arco (ed.), Los a~nos del
   hambre. Historia y memoria de la posguerra franquista, Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2020, 317–344.
45 Dreyfus-Armand, El exilio de los republicanos espa~noles en Francia, 44.
46 D. Gaspar, La guerra continúa: voluntarios espa~noles al servicio de la Francia Libre, Madrid, Marcial Pons,
   2015.
                                                                          Refugee Survey Quarterly           211


people lacking the ability, the determination, the will, or the opportunity to leave
Spain, whether using their own means or the means of the exile [community]”.47
Mexico (home to half of all permanent Spanish exiles in the Americas, around
30,000), Russia, and, to a lesser extent, the United States and Uruguay benefited
from the arrival of exiled artists, scientists, and intellectuals under the refugee status
granted in 1945.48 In this regard, as Alba Martınez has indicated, because Spanish
political organisations in exile played a key role in obtaining refugee status, patriarch-
al norms among communities of exiles limited women’s access to refugee status and




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have subsequently conditioned scholarly work on the phenomenon of exile as a
whole. The Spanish Republican exile has been portrayed as being limited to a com-
munity of men, or even of particularly prominent men, thus excluding women exiles.
As in other comparable situations worldwide, the experience of forced displacement
and exile varied according to age and gender.49
    As Peter Gatrell has underscored, Republican exiles did not present themselves as
victims expelled from their country, but rather as active subjects in the fight against
fascism, unlike other European refugee groups at the time, such as Jews fleeing Nazi
Germany.50 This argument was reinforced by exiles’ membership in the Spanish
Refugee Evacuation Service (Servicio de Evacuación de los Refugiados Espa~noles) and
the Council for Aid to Spanish Republicans (Junta de Ayuda a los Republicanos
Espa~noles).51 There may be a certain degree of idealisation behind this affirmation,
and it is undoubtedly difficult to situate those who returned to Spain within a defin-
ition based on anti-fascist activism, but it does acknowledge one of the defining
aspects that differentiates the Spanish exile from other population movements that
defined the era: a proactive decision to leave.52
    When all had been lost, the last major population movements occurred during
the victors’ final offensive. With no plans for evacuating or protecting civilians, the

47 J. Gracia, A la intemperie: exilio y cultura en Espa~na, Madrid, Anagrama, 2010, 40, 35.
48 Among the extensive bibliography on this subject, a recent and original addition is M. Eiroa’s book on
   Spanish exiles behind the Iron Curtain, Espa~noles tras el Telón de Acero. El exilio republicano y comunista en
   la Europa socialista, Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2018.
49 J. Freedman, Gendering the International Asylum and Refugee Debate, New York, Palgrave Macmillan,
   2007. A. Martınez, “Motherhood, Labor, and Anti-Fascism: The Construction of Refugee Identity by
   Spanish Women Exiled in France, 1939–1976”, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 27/1, 2021,
   7-26.
50 Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 116.
51 A. Mateos, La batalla de Mexico. Final de la Guerra Civil y ayuda a los refugiados, 1939-1945, Madrid,
   Alianza, 2009.
52 Strong political identity has been also underlined in the case of exiles from the Greek Civil War, which
   can be separated into identifiable waves – as in Spain – such as that which occurred in 1945 in response
   to the “white terror” but also, most importantly, the flight of the Communist army across the border to
   Albania and Yugoslavia in 1949, which caused those who left to lose their Greek citizenship and be recog-
   nised as refugees by Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and Soviet Bloc countries (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
   Poland, and Albania), after a period of preventative detention in concentration camps such as those
   located at Rúbic (Albania), Berkovitsa (Bulgaria), and Bulkes (Yugoslavia). D. H. Close (ed.), The Greek
   Civil War, 1943-1950. Studies on polarization, London, Routledge, 1993; R. Van Boeschoten, “Enemies of
   the Nation. A Nation of Enemies: The Long Greek Civil War”, in B. Kissane (ed.), After Civil War:
   Division, Reconstruction, and Reconciliation in Contemporary Europe, Philadelphia, University of
   Pennsylvania Press, 2015, 93–120; K. Karpozilos, “The Defeated of the Greek Civil War: From Fighters
   to Political Refugees in the Cold War”, Journal of Cold War Studies, 16(3), 2014, 62–87.
212      Javier Rodrigo and David Alegre Lorenz j Before the Convention

retreat of March 1939 was, once again, chaotic, though it did not involve as many
people as in January. Insurgent authorities did not consider themselves bound by
any supranational legal framework, nor by any law other than that which emanated
from the War Edicts (Bandos de Guerra) of 1936. Franco’s troops faced no resistance
whatsoever in capturing nearly all the soldiers of the remaining Republican units and
occupying what was left of Republican territory. Madrid, Jaen, and Ciudad Real fell,
while the last defenders of the Republic headed for Alicante, which was occupied on
30 March by the Italian troops of the Corpo di Truppe Volontarie (CTV). The follow-




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ing day, Almerıa, Murcia, and Cartagena were taken, and all of Spain was under
Franco’s control. The ports of these cities were the setting for the final attempts to
leave Spain at the end of war. Between 10,000 and 20,000 people managed to escape
from Cartagena, Valencia, Alicante, and Almerıa, some reaching southern France and
others Algeria.53 What occurred in Alicante is well known because it has been
described in memoirs and works of fiction: only some 10 per cent of those who
attempted to flee managed to embark from the port, while the majority entered the
Franco regime’s system of concentration camps. This same fate awaited those who
returned from France. Having been evacuees, refugees, exiles, and finally returnees,
displaced persons and forced migrants were seen by the victors as fugitives.

                                4. CONCLUSIONS
The Spanish case shows the specificities of the intersection between the phenom-
enon of total war, civil war and asylum and refuge, but it also clearly shows the
changes that occurred in the (heterogeneous) history of mass flight in the 20th cen-
tury, which would be addressed in political terms in the 1951 Convention, and in
academia starting in the 1980s. The Spanish experience demonstrates that forced
mixed migration, a situation typical of our time, already existed in the context of
interwar Europe. The refuge-exile-return process of Spanish Republicans included in-
ternally displaced persons, recognised refugees, and returnees. However, the two
remaining categories of “mixed migration” were not present in this case: asylum
seekers, because no legal refugee status yet existed, and stateless persons, because at
no point did the Franco administration take away Republicans’ national legal
status.54
    The evacuations and exile of 1936–1939, which occurred alongside the arrival of
Jews from Central Europe fleeing the persecution driven by Nazi Germany, laid bare
the gross inadequacy of existing mechanisms for dealing with humanitarian crises in
Europe. This was the case with regard to both humanitarian agencies and the recog-
nition of the right to asylum and non-refoulement. The migration policies of each in-
dividual country and the desire to appease both local public opinion and the fascist
powers carried far greater weight than any humanitarian consideration for refugee
populations. The case of the Spanish Republicans who fled to France stands out,
though it does include one exception: they were recognised by Mexico in 1939-1940.

53 J. Martınez Leal, “Vencidos, evacuados y desterrados: la emigración a Argelia de los últimos resistentes
   republicanos”, Actas del Seminario Memoria del exilio espa~nol en Argelia, Orán, Archivo de la Frontera,
   2019, 137–152.
54 Mixed Migration categories, in T. Christiansen, “Refugiados y migrantes: situación actual y perspectivas
   históricas y futuras”, Ayer, 121, 2021, 335–351.
                                                                        Refugee Survey Quarterly           213


This created judicial and administrative complications regarding the situation of a
group of refugees (in reality recognised individually as “political asylees”) whose sta-
tus was guaranteed by a third country (Mexico) on foreign soil (in France).55
    Many of those who joined the mass exile of 1939 promptly returned to Spain –
which must be considered as a distinct historical experience – and their stories must
be examined as part of a dynamic of flight, refuge, exile, and return. There was also a
long-term “cultural” exile, which is probably the best-known and has received the
most attention from historians.56 The dominant narrative focuses primarily on the




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long duration of the Republican exile, yet most migrants (displaced and evacuated
persons) spent more time as refugees than as exiles. Displacement was often internal:
they were refugees within Republican Spain and, once they had left the country, they
were neither recognised as refugees nor aided by supranational agencies. Refugee sta-
tus in fact existed only in relative terms, because it was applied by Republican
Government to its own citizens as a measure offering protection and shelter, but
without any international recognition. Lastly, it should be emphasised that the lack
of non-refoulment guarantees and internment in camps contributed to the concen-
tration camp increasingly becoming the reality of the refugee experience. For both
the masses of refugees and the minority who went into long-term exile, the central
cause of the situation in which they found themselves and of their decisions was es-
sentially the same: violence, terror, and the totalisation of the war. 57
    While the Franco regime did not go to the extreme of stripping them of citizen-
ship (that is to say, they were not treated as stateless persons), they were subject to a
system that questioned their belonging to the national community, investigated
them, and made them pay for their “responsibilities” on the Republican side.
Civilians who became refugees and, in many cases, later exiles had their lives and fu-
ture prospects as individuals and families upended, even as they lost their right to ref-
uge and protection. This did not happen in Spanish territory, where the overall
situation was chaotic, due to both the characteristics of mass flight and the scarcity of
resources in receiving communities, not to mention the principal cause of flight in
the first place: the violence carried out by the enemy by land, air, and sea. In Madrid,
Valencia, and Catalonia refugees barely got by and went hungry, but their rights as
citizens remained intact. In addition, they may have had access to aid provided by
international humanitarian agencies, refuge, and shelter, as in the case of children. It
was on the other side of the border that this situation changed. The French
Government’s xenophobic policies in 1938 and response to the Spanish Retirada in
1939 added another kind of forced migration to the historical experience of forced
displacement and refuge/non-refuge: forced return to the country of departure, with

55 C. Dávila, “El tratamiento jurıdico-administrativo a los refugiados de la guerra civil espa~
                                                                                                nola en Francia y
   Mexico: un estudio comparativo”, Secuencia, 69, 2007, 115–136.
56 Most of the texts included in the catalogue of the major exhibit 1939. Exilio republicano espa~nol (Madrid:
   Ministerio de Justicia, 2019) focus on literary, artistic, and scientific figures. Conversely, Exilio (Madrid:
   Fundación Pablo Iglesias, 2002), provides a strongly political interpretation of the phenomenon of exile.
57 M. Alonso, “Civil War, Total War, Fascist War: Rebel Violence and Occupation Policies in the Spanish
   Civil War (1936-1939)”, in M. Alonso, A. Kramer & J. Rodrigo (eds.), Fascist Warfare, 1922-1945:
   Aggression, Occupation, Annihilation (London: Palgrave, 2019), 75-79. J. Marco, “Rethinking the postwar
   period in Spain: Violence and irregular civil war, 1939-1952”, Journal of Contemporary History, 55(3),
   2020, 492-513.
214      Javier Rodrigo and David Alegre Lorenz j Before the Convention

all the consequences this entailed. 58 These circumstances helped shape a relative but
important conceptual nuance that must be taken into account when describing the
experience being discussed here: forced migration was mostly temporary, rather than
permanent.
    It should therefore be noted that these displaced persons came up against a
scarcely binding international legislative framework.59 The Convention relating to
the International Status of Refugees of 1933 (followed by the 1936 and 1938
Conventions) recognised the right to stay in another country and the principle of




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non-refoulement for people forced to leave their home countries due to war or eth-
nic conflict, but the League of Nations failed to give this recognition much practical
impact, leaving the application of these provisions up to each individual country.
Those who left Spain fleeing the violence of war and the effects of the regime of pol-
itical persecution, punishment, and re-education imposed by the insurgents did not
benefit from any protection from international agencies as refugees, nor did any insti-
tution other than the Government of the Spanish Republic recognise them as such.
Refugee status under the Convention of 1933 would not be extended to Spanish
exiles until 1945, and they would subsequently be included in the 1946 “Agreement
relating to the issue of a travel document to refugees who are the concern of the
intergovernmental committee on refugees”, along with Germans and Austrians.60
    However, none of this was exceptional. In Europe alone, it is calculated that the
number of displaced persons and refugees reached 60 million at the end of the
Second World War. This figure was to grow and quickly become associated with pla-
ces outside Europe. Before the creation of the United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration in 1943, the International Refugee Organization in
1946, and the UNHCR in 1950, it is impossible to speak of a supranational agency
in charge of decisions on the issue of refugees. The war in Spain was not considered
a precedent for the adoption of the measures included in the 1951 Convention. In
our view, this is paradoxical. Since 1945, civil wars (in most cases also involving inter-
national intervention), rather than international wars or negotiated population
exchanges, have been the primary context in which situations of mass flight and


58 A. Martınez, “Pour quelles raisons avez vous quitte l’Espagne? De represaliadas a refugiadas polıticas en la
   Francia de los a~nos 40 y 50”, Historia Contemporánea, 59, 2019, 269–305.
59 On interwar legislation, the Nansen Passport and other measures to protect refugees (which had limited
   success) G. Coudry, “Notes sur le passeport Nansen”, Materiaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, 44, 1996,
   19–21; O. Hieronymi, “The Nansen Passport: A Tool of Freedom of Movement and of Protection”,
   Refugee Survey Quarterly, 22(1), 2003, 36–47. For a contemporary analysis, L. W. Holborn, “The Legal
   Status of Political Refugees, 1920-1938”, American Journal of International Law, 4, 1938, 680–703;
   Holborn, “The League of Nation and the Refugee Problem”, Annals of the American Academy of Political
   and Social Science, 1, 1939, 124–135. See also P. Ther, The Outsiders, 109; W. I. Brustein & R. D. King,
   “Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust”, International Political Science Review, 25(1), 2004, 35–
   36; S. Heim, “International Refugee Policy and Jewish Immigration under the Shadow of National
   Socialism”, in Frank Caestecker and Bob Moore (eds.), Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Liberal
   European States, New York & Oxford, Berghahn, 2010, 17–47; W. Laqueur, Generation Exodus: The Fate
   of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany, Hanover, NH, Brandeis University Press, 2001.
60 Final Act of the Intergovernmental Conference on the adoption of a travel document for Refugees and
   Agreement relating to the issue of a travel document to refugees who are the concern of the
   Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, 11 UNTS 150 (15 Oct. 1946).
                                                                   Refugee Survey Quarterly         215


refugee populations have emerged.61 While the Spanish Civil War did not lead to the
adoption of any concrete legal measures, it was – de facto, albeit not de jure – a major
historical experience that included all the factors that continue to set off humanitar-
ian crises today: gradual flight (from one place to the next over a more or less
lengthy period of time), mass flight, exile, internment, border problems, return, and
forced return.
   Spain was one of the first cases of forced mixed migration of the 20th century,
and possibly the most important of those that occurred in Europe due to a civil




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war.62 Nevertheless, the Spanish conflict’s place within the study of refugees in
Europe has been marginal, almost inexistent. This is the great paradox of the Spanish
case, particularly considering how the “refugee question” has unfolded since. As in
other civil wars, the refugee phenomenon was one of the most complex processes to
manage. Possibly more so than in an international war. In fact, civil wars in countries
such as Russia and Spain, and also Greece and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, have led
to the highest rates of refugees and exiles in Europe. But this tendency is not limited
to Europe: in Korea, Rwanda, and Colombia, civil wars have generated massive num-
bers of refugees. The conflict of the 1990s in Yugoslavia alone caused an estimated 4
million people to become refugees. In recent years, fighting in Upper Karabakh,
Abkhazia, and South Ossetia and (starting in 2014) the Ukrainian war have left thou-
sands – perhaps 50,000 – dead and caused more than one and a half million people
to become refugees, according to figures from the UN. It is estimated that the cur-
rent civil war in Syria has already generated around five million refugees, most of
whom are living in Turkish territory, with significant numbers found in Jordan, Iraq,
and Lebanon, as well as in Europe. According to the UN Refugee Agency, half a mil-
lion refugees are living in camps that lack minimally adequate living conditions.
Since the era of major international conflicts ended in the middle of the last century,
civil wars have been the most recurrent type of armed confrontation in the world.
Given that civil wars have caused more than 20 million deaths and generated 65 mil-
lion refugees since 1945, it is difficult to dispute their primacy. The Spanish Civil
War was one of the experiences that marked a milestone along this path of terror.
   As Tony Kushner has pointed out, historians have shown some “resistance” to-
wards refugee studies, often seeing them as limited by policy-determined queries and
labels that tend to standardise different cases and strip them of their peculiarities.
For their part, non-historians have overlooked the importance of looking to past to

61 J. Rodrigo & David Alegre, Comunidades rotas. Una historia global de las guerras civiles, 1917-2017,
   Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2019, but also the forthcoming Civil Wars: A Global History, Cambridge,
   Polity, 2023.
62 During the Second World War, part of the Belgian population, around two million people, fled in May
   1940 in the face of the advance of German troops. Joining them in flight were a large number of French
   civilians, as many as 12 million people. N. Dombrowski Riser, France Under Fire: German Invasion,
   Civilian Flight, and Family Survival during World War II, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
   Millions of people fled from Eastern Europe and the Balkans in terror before the advance of the Red
   Army. G. D. Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order, Oxford, Oxford
   University Press, 2011. The pioneering work of L. W. Holborn is essential reading: The International
   Refugee Organisation: A Specialized Agency of the United Nations. Its History and Work, London, Oxford
   University Press, 1956; and L. Holborn et al., Refugees: a problem of our time. The work of the United
   Nation High Commissioner for Refugees. 1951-1972. Vol. 1–2, Metuchen, NJ, Scarecrow Press, 1975.
216      Javier Rodrigo and David Alegre Lorenz j Before the Convention

better comprehend the contemporary refugee phenomenon, as they have proven un-
able to “see history and refugees as linked or relevant”.63 This does not imply that
historians are not interested in forcibly displaced people. Numerous historical studies
on this topic do exist, but they have long been associated with research on interwar
Europe, genocide, and the Cold War, as well as with transnational and global history,
rather than with refugee studies specifically.
    A multidisciplinary approach has proved fundamental for research on the refugee
phenomenon. However, the main limitation of existing works lies in their use of a




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predominantly top-down perspective, which tends to flatten and homogenise the
varied realities of flight. Analysing the phenomena of flight and refuge in their com-
plexities and contingencies, as we have done for the Spanish case, serves to redress
State-centric perspectives and reorient research towards the study of individual
agency. Furthermore, it allows an examination of how the concepts and categories
that we use in the present have been reformulated over time, thus demonstrating
that their mutability and historical evolution. Future research on the past and present
of forced migrations can only advance by addressing the human experience of
uprooting and emphasising the heterogeneity and agency of forcibly displaced per-
sons using a bottom-up analytical approach. In most cases, displaced people continue
to be portrayed as passive subjects and helpless victims of state violence. Their active
role in influencing the choice of protective measures and political decisions at the
state and global levels is often overlooked, which is why more careful reflection on
the agency of involuntary migrants is needed.
    As Gatrell suggests, social history research proves crucial to this task. By adopting
an emic perspective, it can shed light on the reasons behind and the experience of
flight through the analysis of refugees’ accounts, and in doing so complement socio-
logical and anthropological research.64 In this regard, however, a methodological
problem linked to the scarcity of sources emerges. As shown by the Spanish case,
State archives are of little use as they provide governmental information suited only
to a top-down approach which neglects a bottom-up perspective. Diaries and auto-
biographies do exist. Nonetheless, as Kleist points out, they usually fail to include ne-
cessary accounts by the most vulnerable groups – such as women and children – and
by illiterate displaced people, thus covering just a fraction of the broad spectrum of
experiences of flight.65 In order to overcome this problem, bolstering oral history re-
search is crucial, as it helps uncover and dignify what Elie calls the “life histories” of
refugee and to stimulate a “forced migration history from below”.66 In the Spanish
case, the major task at hand is the need for intergenerational analysis on the effects

63 T. Kushner, Remembering Refugees: Then and Now, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006, 40; P.
   Gatrell, “Population Displacement in the Baltic Region in the Twentieth Century: From ‘Refugee
   Studies’ to Refugee History”, Journal of Baltic Studies, 1, 2007, 43–60.
64 P. Gatrell, “Refugees. What’s Wrong with History?”, Journal of Refugee Studies, 2, 2017, 171. Cf. K.
   Jacobsen and L.B. Landau, “The Dual Imperative in Refugee Research: Some Methodological and Ethical
   Considerations in Social Science Research on Forced Migration”, Disasters, 3, 2003, 185–206.
65 J.O. Kleist, “The History of Refugee Protection: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges”, Journal of
   Refugee Studies, 2, 2017, 166.
66 J. Elie, “Histories of Refugees and Forced Migration Studies”, p. 30. An example of the use of oral history
   applied to refugee studies is U. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India.
   Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2000.
                                                                Refugee Survey Quarterly       217


of experiences of flight and refuge, but the same can be said today of the major exiles
and forced migrations of the 20th century. Perhaps the same will be said of those of
the 21st century in a few decades.
    Although much remains to be investigated, in recent years the academic debate
has become increasingly aware of the extent to which contemporary refugee move-
ments are related to those of the past. Herein lies the importance of history, which
looks at the evolution of forced displacements across space and time. How institu-
tional actors dealt with refugees during previous migration crises, the actions taken




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by policymakers to address prior humanitarian emergencies, how refugees helped
shape host countries, and how the debate on displaced people in individual countries
and in supranational institutions affected asylum policies in earlier periods can tell us
much about forced migration today. History does matter in refugee studies. A long-
term approach is essential to understanding current crises because it helps to
contextualise what Gatrell has defined as “refugeedom”, a “matrix involving adminis-
trative practices, legal norms, social relations, and refugees’ experiences, and how
these have been represented in cultural terms”.67 Moreover, history is central because
it “moulds” refugees. Given that the memory of past migrations often influences the
behaviour of forcibly displaced people today, historical research is essential to better
understanding the choices of these individuals in the present, thereby helping to shift
the attention of scholars and policymakers from the refugee problem towards an ef-
fective and comprehensive refugee solution.




67 P. Gatrell, “Refugees. What’s Wrong with History?”, 170. Cf. P. Gatrell, The Making of the Modern
   Refugee, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 7–41.