Researchers in Catalonia have identified 522 members of the International Brigades, including 286 American and 86 British volunteers, who died or disappeared in the region during the Spanish civil war, raising hopes their remains could be found and buried with dignity nine decades after they perished.
About 35,000 people from 50 countries travelled to Spain between 1936 and 1938 to join the brigades to help defend Spain’s democratically elected government against Gen Francisco Franco’s military coup.
Almost 10,000 foreign volunteers died in Spain and many still lie in unmarked mass graves.
Since 2022, the Catalan regional government’s Democratic Memory department, which is tasked with identifying and exhuming the victims of the civil war and the subsequent Franco dictatorship, has been working to narrow down the places where foreign volunteers disappeared and to seek out their living relatives.
After two years of trawling civil registries, International Brigade databases and the Russian state archive for political and social history, the department has confirmed the identities of 286 American brigade members, 96 Canadian members, 86 British members, six Irish members and 48 members from other countries.
By tracking troop movements and poring over hospital records, the historian leading the project, Jordi Martí, established that most of the brigade members died or disappeared on the Ebro front in 1938, which was the scene of the longest and largest battle of the war.
“We weren’t trying to find new people,” Martí said. “What we were trying to do was find exactly where the people we knew had come to fight disappeared in Catalonia.
“We wanted to narrow down the areas where they disappeared because some of the information we had wasn’t very precise.”
Although the department has exhumed the remains of 900 people since 2017, only 30 people – none of them a brigade member – have been identified.
Martí hopes the new research will help lead to the recovery and exhumation of some of the brigade members who died in north-eastern Spain.
“If we can determine the area in which these people disappeared, then when we come to exhume a mass grave in that area, we can hypothesise about who could be in that grave,” he said.
“It will allow us to pass that information on to families. And if we have DNA from relatives, then we have a greater possibility of identifying them.”
Martí and his colleagues are appealing for people whose relatives died fighting in the International Brigades to get in touch and provide them with the DNA samples that could help identify some of the foreign fighters.
“We must have exhumed the remains of some brigade members but we don’t know who they are because we don’t have the DNA for comparisons,” he said.
“We know that some of them were buried in cemeteries near the hospitals where they died but in other cases, if we know what part of the Ebro front they disappeared in and if we have family DNA, then when we open a mass grave in that area, we’ve got more options.”
Alfons Aragoneses, the director general of the Catalan Democratic Memory department, said his priority was affording some belated dignity to the dead.
“The important thing is to get these remains out of the mass graves because the graves could be damaged by a flood or a fire, and rebury them in a cemetery,” he said.
“It’s not right that remains are still turning up in mass graves and we urgently need to exhume them and bury them with dignity in cemeteries.”
The research has been welcome by International Brigade experts.
“When combined with up-to-date DNA analysis, it should lead to the identification of many presently lying in unmarked graves,” said Richard Baxell, a historian of the Spanish civil war.
“While it clearly has enormous value for historians, its real value is to the descendants of those killed in Catalonia, some of whom may finally be able to discover – and visit – their relative’s final resting place.”
Jim Jump, the chair of the UK’s International Brigade Memorial Trust, said it was “an impressive, groundbreaking piece of research” and echoed the hope that it could help find those still lying in unmarked graves.
He also contrasted the Catalan regional government’s support for democratic memory projects with the revisionist attitude displayed by the authorities in neighbouring Aragón, which is governed by a coalition of the conservative People’s party (PP) and the far-right Vox party.
The governments of Aragón, Valencia and Castilla y León, all of which are run by the PP and Vox, have been criticised by UN experts, historical memory associations and the Spanish government, who have accused them of seeking to introduce legislation that would “whitewash” the crimes and human rights abuses of the civil war and the dictatorship.
Martí said the search for the missing was a simple service to the dead, to their descendants, and to Spain’s history.
“Even if 85 years have passed, the disappearance of a family member often leaves a hole in that family,” he said. “Knowing what happened, even three or four generations later, can really mean a lot to the families … Then there’s the matter of properly explaining what happened.
“We need to understand history – and, at the end of the day, looking for the people who disappeared is also a way of explaining what happened.”
