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{{Short description|Assassinations during the Spanish Civil War}}

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, {{ISBN>978-0-521-82178-0}} The image was originally published in the London Daily Mail with a caption noting the "Spanish Reds' war on religion".Shots of War: Photojournalism During the Spanish Civil WarSacred Heart of Jesus>Sacred Heart by a Republican firing squad is an example of "an assault on the public presence of Catholicism".Ealham, Chris and Michael Richards, The Splintering of Spain, p. 80, 168, Cambridge University Press, 2005, {{ISBN978-0-521-82178-0}} The image was originally published in the London Daily Mail with a caption noting the "Spanish Reds' war on religion".Shots of War: Photojournalism During the Spanish Civil War| location = Second Spanish Republic| target = | date = 1936–1939| time = | timezone = Anti-clericalism#Red_Terror>Anticlerical violence, Political_cleansing_of_population#Politicide, Antireligion>Antireligious violence, Political repression, Political violenceThe Battle for Spain; The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. Penguin Books. 2006. London. p. 87 to ~72,344 lives.HTTPS://OPINIE.WP.PL/FRANCISCO-FRANCO-JEDYNY-PRZYWODCA-KTORY-POKONAL-STALINA-6126039183566977A LAST=ZYCHOWICZ DATE=2015-03-20 QUOTE=KOMUNIśCI I ICH LEWACCY SOJUSZNICY WYMORDOWALI 72 344 LUDZI I ZAGłODZILI PONAD 100 TYS., Republican faction (Spanish Civil War)>Republican faction| motive = }}{{Modern persecutions of the Catholic Church}}Red Terror ()Unearthing Franco's Legacy, Julian Casanova, pp. 105-106, University of Notre Dame Press, 2010 {{ISBN|0-268-03268-8}} is the name given by historians to various acts of violence committed from 1936 until the end of the Spanish Civil War by sections of nearly all the leftist groups involved.Beevor, Antony (2006), The Battle For Spain; The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939, p. 81 Weidenfeld & Nicolson News of the rightist military coup in July 1936 unleashed a politicidal response, and no Republican controlled region escaped systematic and anticlerical violence, although it was minimal in the Basque Country.Mary Vincent, The Splintering of Spain, pp. 70-71 The violence consisted of the killing of tens of thousands of people (including 6,832 Catholic priests, the vast majority in the summer of 1936 in the wake of the coup), attacks on the Spanish nobility, small business owners, industrialists, and politicians and supporters of the conservative parties or the anti-Stalinist Left, as well as the desecration and arson attacks against monasteries, convents, Catholic schools, and churches.{{Harvnb|Cueva|1998|p=355}}A process of political polarisation had already characterized the Second Spanish Republic; party divisions became increasingly embittered and whether an individual continued practising Catholicism was seen as a sign of partisan loyalty. Electorally, the Church had identified itself with the Conservative and far-right parties, which had set themselves against the far-left.Hilari Raguer, Gunpowder and Incense, p. 115The failed coup of July 1936 let loose a violent onslaught on those that revolutionaries in the Republican zone identified as enemies; "where the rebellion failed, for several months afterwards merely to be identified as a priest, a religious, or simply a militant Christian or member of some apostolic or pious organization, was enough for a person to be executed without trial".Raguer, p. 126 Some estimates of the Red Terror range from 38,000Beevor, Antony. The Battle for Spain; The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. Penguin Books. 2006. London. p. 87 to ~72,344 lives.NEWS,weblink Francisco Franco - jedyny przywódca, który pokonał Stalina, Zychowicz, Piotr, 2015-03-20, Wp.Opinie/ Historia do Rzeczy, Komuniści i ich lewaccy sojusznicy wymordowali 72 344 ludzi i zagłodzili ponad 100 tys., Historian Julio de la Cueva wrote that "despite the fact that the Church... suffer[ed] appalling persecution", the events have so far met not only with "the embarrassing partiality of ecclesiastical scholars, but also with the embarrassed silence or attempts at justification of a large number of historians and memoirists". Analysts such as Helen Graham have linked the Red and White Terrors, alleging that it was the failed coup that allowed the culture of brutal violence to flourish: "its original act of violence was that it killed off the possibility of other forms of peaceful political evolution".Unearthing Franco's Legacy, University of Notre Dame Press, {{ISBN|0-268-03268-8}} p. 7 Other historians who support the Francoist side in the Civil War claim to have found evidence of systematic persecution and violence preceding the military uprising and have found what they term a "radical and antidemocratic" anti-clericalism among supporters of the Second Spanish Republic and even within its constitution.Redzioch, Wlodzimierz (interviewing historian Vicente Carcel Orti) The Martyrs of Spain's Civil War, Catholic Culture In recent years, the Catholic Church has beatified hundreds of the victims (498 in one 2007 ceremony, the largest single number of beatifications in its history).WEB,weblink 498 Spanish Civil War martyrs beatified at Vatican City - Catholic Online, 2016-09-23, dead,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20071117094230weblink">weblink 2007-11-17, There was infighting between the Republican factions, as the communists following Stalinism under the Communist Party of Spain declared POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (an anti-Stalinist communist party), to be an illegal organization, alongside anarchists. The Stalinists betrayed and committed mass atrocities on the other Republican factions, such as torture and mass executions. George Orwell would record this in his Homage to Catalonia as well as write Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm to criticize Stalinism.WEB, 1984: George Orwell's road to dystopia,weblink BBC News, 27 July 2021, 8 February 2013, BOOK, Orwell in Spain, 2001, Penguin Books, 6,

Background

According to historian Ronald Radosh, "The Spanish Civil War was the culmination of long-standing tensions and social strife that no government had been able to address satisfactorily. The divide between rich and poor in Spain was immense, and the powerful Catholic hierarchy did little to ameliorate conditions. The result was that destitute peasants and dissatisfied workers supported either radical anarchism or socialism, buttressed by a bitter anticlericalism, while Liberalism in Spain tended to be more extreme than in most of Europe. Yet the wealthy landowners and certain areas of the country, especially the North, maintained a staunchly conservative outlook that precluded any serious reconsideration of the nation's social ills. Many Spaniards in fact had monarchist leanings and believed that their country's salvation lay in native Spanish traditions and a strong centralized government. Meanwhile, nationalist movements in the Basque provinces and Catalonia encouraged these people to think of themselves as distinct from the Castilians who ruled in Madrid, and as deserving of more autonomy or even outright independence from the central government... As a result, political instability prevailed throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This period was characterized by numerous military coups, a short-lived Republic, and monarchies with varying amounts of political power." Ronald Radosh (2001), Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, Yale University Press. Pages xxvii-xxviii.To add to past instability, the revolution of 14 April 1931 that overthrew King Alfonso XIII and established both the Second Spanish Republic and the Spanish Constitution of 1931 also brought to power an anticlerical and authoritarian socialist coalition government.Anticlericalism Britannica Online Encyclopedia The relationship between the new, secular Republic and the Catholic Church was fraught from the start. Between 10 and 13 May 1931, in retaliation for a Left Wing demonstrators allegedly hearing a vinyl recording of the former Royalist national anthem being played through the windows of a nearby flat, more than 100 religious buildings were deliberately burned down in an epidemic of Church arson that began in Madrid and then spread to cities and towns throughout the Second Spanish Republic.De la Cueva Merino, Julio (1998). «El anticlericalismo en la Segunda República y la Guerra Civil». Emilio La Parra López y Manuel Suárez Cortina, ed. El anticlericalismo español contemporáneo. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. {{ISBN|84-7030-532-8}}. While some cabinet ministers in the Provisional Government of the Second Spanish Republic wanted to intervene and restore order, others opposed the idea. According to the canonical narrative, Prime Minister Manuel Azaña overruled those who wished to intervene by stating, "All the convents of Spain are not worth the life of a single Republican".JOURNAL,weblink La ira anticlerical de mayo de 1931. Religión, política y propaganda, Mirta, Núñez Díaz-Balart, 2017, Cahiers de civilisation espagnole contemporaine, 18, 18, 10.4000/ccec.6666, 1957-7761, free, Among the many priceless works of Spain's cultural heritage that were lost during the 1931 arson attacks was the copy of Marko Marulić's De institutione bene vivendi per exempla sanctorum ("Instruction on How to Lead a Virtuous Life Based on the Examples of Saints") that once belonged to St Francis Xavier. It was the only book, aside from the Roman Breviary, that the early Jesuit carried with him and constantly re-read during his missionary work in Portuguese India and was long treasured in Madrid as a second class relic by the Society of Jesus. Writing in 1961, however, Marulic scholar Ante Kadič announced that recent inquiries about the volume had come up empty and that the Saint's book must have been destroyed during the burning of the Jesuit monastery in Madrid. Ante Kadič, St Francis Xavier and Marko Marulić, "The Slavic and Eastern European Journal", Spring 1961, pp. 12-18.In response to this and other similar attacks by the Government, Cardinal Pedro Segura y Sáenz, the primate of Spain, urged Catholics to vote in future elections against the ruling Leftist political parties, whom the Cardinal alleged wanted to completely destroy religion.A. Beevor, Battle for Spain p.23 Those who sought to lead the 'ordinary faithful' had insisted that Catholics had only one political choice, the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA): "Voting for the CEDA was presented as a simple duty; good Catholics would go to Mass on Sunday and support the political right".Mary Vincent, Catholicism in the Spanish Second Republic, p. 1The constitution respected civil liberties and representation, but in articles 26 and 27 placed restrictions on the church's use of its own property and banned religious orders from running schools or engaging in education.Payne, Stanley G. A History of Spain and Portugal, Vol. 2, Ch. 25, p. 632 (Print Edition: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973) (LIBRARY OF IBERIAN RESOURCES ONLINE Accessed May 30, 2007)Smith, Angel, Historical Dictionary of Spain, p. 195, Rowman & Littlefield 2008 Even advocates of the separation of church and state had serious problems with the Constitution; one such advocate, José Ortega y Gasset, stated, "the article in which the Constitution legislates the actions of the Church seems highly improper to me".Paz, Jose Antonio Souto Perspectives on religious freedom in Spain Brigham Young University Law Review June 1, 2001 In a speech delivered on 28 November 1932, at the Madrid Ateneo, the poet Miguel de Unamuno, one of the founding fathers of the Second Spanish Republic, angrily denounced the increasingly repressive and illegal domestic policies of Prime Minister Manuel Azaña: "Even the Inquisition was limited by certain legal guarantees. But now we have something worse: a police force which is grounded only on a general sense of panic and on the invention of non-existent dangers to cover up this over-stepping of the law."BOOK, Hayes, Carlton, Carlton J. H. Hayes, 1951, The United States and Spain. An Interpretation, Sheed & Ward; 1ST edition, B0014JCVS0, In 1933, Pope Pius XI also condemned the Spanish Republican Government's refusal to grant religious toleration to Catholics in the encyclical Dilectissima Nobis.Dilectissima Nobis, 2Since the left considered reform of the anti-clerical passages of the constitution impossible, Historian Stanley G. Payne believes, "the Republic as a democratic constitutional regime was doomed from the outset", and it has been posited that such a "hostile" approach to the issues of church and state was a substantial cause of the breakdown of democracy and in the onset of the civil war.Stepan, Alfred, Arguing Comparative Politics, p. 221, Oxford University Press One legal commentator has stated plainly "the gravest mistake of the Constitution of 1931—Spain's last democratic Constitution prior to 1978—was its hostile attitude towards the Catholic Church".Martinez-Torron, Javier Freedom of religion in the case law of the Spanish Constitutional court Brigham Young University Law Review 2001Following the general election of February 16, 1936, political bitterness grew in Spain. Violence between the coalition government and its supporters, the Popular Front, whose leadership was clearly moving towards the far left (abandoning constitutional Republicanism for violent revolutionPayne p. 646–647), and the opposition accelerated, culminating in the coup of right-wing generals in July. As the year progressed Nationalist and Republican persecution grew, and Republicans began attacking churches, occupying land for redistribution and attacking nationalist politicians in a process of (wikt:tit for tat|tit-for-tat) violence.

1933 election and aftermath

Leading up to the Civil War, the state of the political establishment had been brutal and violent for some time. In the 1933 elections to the Cortes Generales, the CEDA won a plurality of seats, but President Niceto Alcalá-Zamora declined to invite the leader of the CEDA to form a government. Instead, he invited the Radical Republican Party and its leader, Alejandro Lerroux, to do so. CEDA supported the Lerroux government in exchange for three ministerial positions. Hostility between the left and the right increased after the formation of the government. Spain experienced general strikes and street conflicts. Noted among the strikes was the miners' revolt in northern Spain and riots in Madrid. Nearly all rebellions were crushed by the government, and political arrests followed.Lerroux's alliance with the right, his harsh suppression of the revolt in 1934 and the Straperlo and Nombela scandals combined to leave him and his party with little support going into the 1936 election. (Lerroux himself lost his seat in parliament.)

1934 murder of priests and religious in Asturias

The murder of 37 priests, brothers and seminarians by leftists in Asturias marks what some see as the beginning of the Red Terror. In October 1934, the Asturian Revolution was strongly anticlerical and involved violence against priests and religious and the destruction of 58 churches, which had been rare until then.Coverdale, John F., Uncommon faith: the early years of Opus Dei, 1928-1943, p. 148, Scepter 2002Turón, one of the locales of anticlerical violence, a coal-mining town in the Asturias Province, was a hub of anti-government and anticlerical agitation.Martyrs of Turon{{dead link|date=April 2018 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} The De La Salle Brothers ran an illegal Catholic school there. This enraged the far-left politicians who ran Turón, because of the brothers' refusal to cease religious practice and their civil disobedience of the Constitution's ban on religious education. On October 5, 1934, the agents of the local rebel government invaded the brothers' residence on the pretext of a search for concealed weapons. A Passionist priest, Padre Innocencio, had arrived the previous evening and was about to say Mass for the brothers. He and the brothers were arrested, held without trial, and summarily executed in the middle of the night by a firing squad in the cemetery.

1936 Popular Front victory and aftermath

In the 1936 elections, a new coalition of socialists (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, PSOE), liberals (Republican Left and the Republican Union Party), Communists, and various regional nationalist groups won the extremely tight election. The results gave 34 percent of the popular vote to the Popular Front and 33 percent to the incumbent government of the CEDA. This result, when coupled with the Socialists' refusal to participate in the new government, led to a general fear of revolution. The fear was worsened when Largo Caballero, hailed as "the Spanish Lenin" by Pravda, announced that the country was on the cusp of revolution.

Early outbreak of violence

Following the outbreak of full-scale civil war there was an explosion of atrocities in both the Nationalist and Republican zones.The greatest anticlerical bloodletting was at the beginning of the civil war when large areas of the country fell under the control of local loyalists and militias.{{Harvnb|Beevor|2006|pp=83–86}} A large part of the terror consisted of a perceived revenge against bosses and clergy, as they lost their powerful position in the social revolution, and the move towards extremism that took place in the first months of the civil war.{{Harvnb|Beevor|2006|p=83}} According to historian Antony Beevor, "In republican territory the worst of the violence was mainly a sudden and quickly spent reaction of suppressed fear, exacerbated by desires of revenge for the past" in contrast with"the relentless purging of 'reds and atheists' in nationalist territory".Beevor, p. 91 After the coup, the remaining days in July saw 861 priests and religious murdered, 95 of them on 25 July, feast day of St James, patron saint of Spain. August saw a further 2,077 clerical victims. After just two months of civil war, 3,400 priests, monks and nuns had been murdered.The Splintering of Spain, p. 68 The same day of the fatal injury of Buenaventura Durruti 52 prisoners were executed by anarchists militiamen as reprisals.Julius Rutiz The 'Red Terror' and the Spanish Civil War: Revolutionary Violence In Madrid, Publisher: Cambridge University Presslink line publication date: June 2014 page 284According to recent research, some of the Republican death squads were heavily staffed by members of the Soviet Union's secret police, the NKVD. According to historian Ronald Radosh, "The price the Republicans paid for Soviet aid was the very factor that led to the Republic's eventual demise. In exchange for military aid, Stalin demanded the transformation of the Republic into a prototype for the so-called People's Democracies of Post-War Eastern and Central Europe. In addition to generals and supplies, Stalin sent the Soviet secret police (the NKVD) and the military intelligence unit (the GRU) to Spain. There the GRU established secret prisons, carried out assassinations and kidnappings, and functioned under its own laws and guidelines, independent of the Republican Government." Ronald Radosh (2001), Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, Yale University Press. Pages xvii-xviii. The most infamous NKVD agent who served in the Republican death squads was Erich Mielke, who later became the widely detested head of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, from 1957 through 1989.John Koehler, "The Stasi", p. 48. In a 1991 interview with intelligence historian John. O. Koehler,Koehler (1999), pages 416–417. International Brigades veteran Walter Janka recalled, "While I was fighting at the front, shooting at the Fascists, Mielke served in the rear, shooting Trotskyites and Anarchists."According to Payne, "During the first months of the fighting most of the deaths did not come from combat on the battlefield but from political executions in the rear—the 'Red' and 'White' terrors. The terror consisted of semi-organised actions perpetrated by almost all of the leftist groups, Basque nationalists, largely Catholic but still mostly aligned with the Republicans, being an exception".Payne, Stanley G. A History of Spain and Portugal, Vol. 2, Ch. 26, p. 650 (Print Edition: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973) (Library of Iberian Resources Online, Accessed May 15, 2007) Payne also contends that unlike the repression by the right, which "was concentrated against the most dangerous opposition elements", the Republican attacks were more irrational, "murdering innocent people and letting some of the more dangerous go free. Moreover, one of the main targets of the Red terror was the clergy, most of whom were not engaged in overt opposition".Payne p. 650 Describing specifically the Red Terror, Payne states that it "began with the murder of some of the rebels as they attempted to surrender after their revolt had failed in several of the key cities. From there it broadened out to wholesale arrests, and sometimes wholesale executions, of landowners and industrialists, people associated with right-wing groups or the Catholic Church".Payne p. 649File:Paracuellos Lapidas en Fosa II Ruiz Casaux.JPG|thumb|Martyrs Cemetery of Paracuellos in Madrid]]The Red Terror was "not an irrepressible outpouring of hatred by the man in the street for his 'oppressors,' but a semi-organised activity carried out by sections of nearly all the leftist groups".Payne p. 649.By contrast, historians such as Helen Graham,Graham, Helen. The Spanish Civil War. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. 2005. p.30 Paul Preston,Preston, Paul. The Spanish Civil War. Reaction, revolution & revenge. Harper Perennial. 2006. London. p. 307 Antony Beevor,Beevor, Antony. The Battle for Spain, The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. Penguin Books. 2006. London. pp.86-87 Gabriel Jackson,Jackson, Gabriel. The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931-1939 Princeton University Press. 1967. Princeton. p.305 Hugh Thomas, and Ian GibsonGibson, Ian. The Assassination of Federico García Lorca. Penguin Books. London. 1983. p.168 have stated that the mass executions behind the Nationalist lines were organised and approved by the Nationalist authorities, and the executions behind the Republican lines were the result of the breakdown of the Republican state and the anarchy. That is given backing by Francisco Partaloa, prosecutor of the Madrid High Court of Justice (Tribunal Supremo de Madrid) and Queipo de Llano's friend, who observed repression in both zones.JOURNAL,weblink Cuadernos de historia (Santiago) - LA REPRESIÓN: EL ADN DEL FRANQUISMO ESPAÑOL, Cuadernos de Historia (Santiago), December 2013, 39, 33–59, 10.4067/S0719-12432013000200002, 8 May 2015, es, Arnabat Mata, Ramón, free, I had the opportunity of being a witness to the repression in both areas. In the Nationalist side it was planned, methodical, cold. As they did not trust the people the authorities imposed their will by means of terror, committing atrocities in order to achieve their aim. Atrocities also took place in the Popular Front zone; that was something which both areas had in common. But the main difference was that in the Republican zone the crimes were carried out by the populace in moments of passion, not by the authorities. The latter always tried to stop them. The assistance that I received from the Spanish Republican authorities in order to flee to safety, is only one of the many examples. But this was not the case in the Nationalist zone"Julius Ruiz argues that Republican killings were partially rooted in the left's political culture:Ruiz, Julius. "2 Fighting the Fifth Column: The Terror in Republican Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.", pp56-57These anti-fascists acted on the assumption that terror was integral to the anti-fascist war effort. The fear of a dehumanised and homicidal 'fifth column' was rooted in the exclusionist political culture of the left. After the proclamation of the Second Republic on 14 April 1931, Socialists and centre-left bourgeois Republicans conflated the new democracy with the heterogeneous political coalition that brought it into being after the departure of King Alonso XIII: the Republic's future rested on the right being permanently excluded from power. The victory of the centre-right in the November 1933 elections, the failed Socialist-led insurrection of October 1934 and its subsequent repression promoted a common antifascist discourse based on the dichotomy of the virtuous productive 'people' ('pueblo') (i.e. the left) and a parasitical inhuman 'fascist' enemy (i.e. the right). While the Popular Front's narrow electoral victory in February 1936 was interpreted as the definitive triumph of the antifascist 'pueblo', the struggle against the Republic's right-wing enemies had to continue.However, Ruiz also notes that the idea of a homicidal, dehumanised enemy within was further reinforced by news of Nationalist atrocities; it convinced Republicans of the need for total victory. When Mola's army appeared in the mountains north of Madrid, this heightened the sense of urgency within the city of the necessity of dealing with alleged fifth columns, which had been blamed for prior Republican defeats. Infrequent Nationalist bombing raids also created further fear, as Republicans became convinced fascists within the society were directing rebel aircraft to their targets. In reality, during the terror of 1936 there was no fifth column in place as Nationalist sympathisers within the city were convinced Mola's northern armies and Franco's southern ones, led by professional officers, would easily crush the militia defending the city, negating any need for risky subversive activity. It was only after the failure of Franco's onslaught in the winter of 1936–37, when it became clear the war would last longer and the front lines had stabilised, that a fifth column did emerge, though it was never as powerful or extensive as the Republicans feared; it largely focused on mutual assistance, espionage and undermining Republican morale, eschewing terrorist activities such as bombings and assassinations. While fifth columnists did contribute to the Nationalist war effort, the fall of Madrid was not caused by internal subversion but defeat in battle.Ruiz, Julius. "2 Fighting the Fifth Column: The Terror in Republican Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.", pp57-58 The largest and most efficient of these groups was about 6000 strong and was a Falangist women's welfare network known as Hermanidad Auxilio Azul María Paz.Ruiz, Julius. "Seventy years on: Historians and Repression during and after the Spanish Civil War." Journal of Contemporary History 44, no. 3 (2009): 449-472, p.464As early as 11 May 1931, when mob violence against the Republic's perceived enemies had led to the burning of churches, convents, and religious schools, the Church had sometimes been seen as the ally of the authoritarian right. The academic Mary Vincent has written: "There was no doubt that the Church would line up with the rebels against the Republic. The Jesuit priests of the city of Salamanca were among the first volunteers to present themselves to the military authorities.... The tragedy of the Second Republic was that it abetted its own destruction; the tragedy of the Church was that it became so closely allied with its self-styled defenders".Mary Vincent, Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic, pp. 248, 258 During the war, the Nationalists claimed that 20,000 priests had been killed; the figure is now put at 4,184 priests, 2,365 members of other religious institutes and 283 nuns, the vast majority during the summer of 1936.Callahan, La Iglesia catolica en Espana, p. 282Payne has called the terror the "most extensive and violent persecution of Catholicism in Western History, in some way even more intense than that of the French Revolution", leaving Catholics with little alternative, and driving them to the Nationalists even more than it would have been expected.Payne, Stanley Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World, p. 13, 2008 Yale University Press

Death toll

{{Undue weight section|date=August 2020}}Figures for the Red Terror range from 38,000 to 72,344. Historian Beevor "reckons Franco's ensuing 'white terror' claimed 200,000 lives. The 'red terror' had already killed 38,000.""Men of La Mancha". Rev. of Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain. The Economist (June 22, 2006). According to Julio de la Cueva, the toll of the Red Terror was 72,344 lives.Cueva, Julio de la, "Religious Persecution", Journal of Contemporary History, 3, 198, pp. 355-369. {{JSTOR|261121}} Hugh Thomas and Paul Preston said that the death toll was 55,000,Thomas, Hugh. The Spanish Civil War. Penguin Books. 2001. London. p. 900Preston, Paul. The Spanish Civil War. Reaction, revolution & revenge. Harper Perennial. 2006. London. p.233 and Spanish historian Julian Casanova said that the death toll was fewer than 60,000.Casanova, Julian. The Spanish republic and civil war. Cambridge University Press. 2010. New York. p. 181Previously, Payne had suggested, "The toll taken by the respective terrors may never be known exactly. The left slaughtered more in the first months, but the Nationalist repression probably reached its height only after the war had ended, when punishment was exacted and vengeance wreaked on the vanquished left. The White Terror could have slain 50,000, perhaps fewer, during the war. The Franco government now gives the names of 61,000 victims of the Red Terror, but this is not subject to objective verification. The number of victims of the Nationalist repression, during and after the war, was undoubtedly greater than that".Payne p. 650. In Checas de Madrid ({{ISBN|84-9793-168-8}}), journalist and historian César Vidal comes to a nationwide total of 110,965 victims of Republican repression; 11,705 people being killed in Madrid alone.International justice begins at home {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200116115234weblink |date=2020-01-16 }} by Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami Herald, August 4, 2003 Historian Santos Juliá, in the work Víctimas de la guerra civil provides approximate figures: about 50,000 victims of the Republican repression; about 100,000 victims of the Francoist repression during the war with some 40,000 after the war.{{Citation | language = es | title = Víctimas de la guerra civil (Victims of the civil war) | chapter = Apéndice. Las cifras. Estado de la cuestión (Appendix. The figures. State-of-the-art) | pages=411 | location = Barcelona | year = 2005 | isbn = 84-8460-333-4| last1 = Juliá | first1 = Santos | last2 = Casanova | first2 = Julián }}{| class="wikitable"!Estimate!Sources|38,000|Antony Beevor|50,000|Stanley PayneSantos Juliá|55,000|Hugh ThomasPaul Preston|