International Brigades

• 1. Introduction

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  In October 1938, Spanish Prime Minister Juan Negrín stood before the League of Nations and announced that the International Brigades would be disbanded. He had helped build them. He had watched them bleed across the battlefields of Madrid, Jarama, Guadalajara, and the Ebro. Now he was dissolving them in a last, desperate bid to win diplomatic support that never came. Who were these men and women? Where did they come from, and what drew them to a war in a country most of them had never seen? How did a network of volunteers, organized through communist parties and clandestine recruiters, become the most mythologized fighting force of the twentieth century's first great ideological war?

• 2. Building the Brigade

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  The idea of recruiting foreign volunteers for Spain was first proposed in August 1936 by British writer and military theorist Tom Wintringham, who had already traveled to Spain. The proposal was not formally raised with the Comintern until September 1936, apparently at the suggestion of Maurice Thorez, and it was Willi Münzenberg, chief of Comintern propaganda for Western Europe, who carried it forward. The trigger was precise: one week after the London meeting of the Non-Intervention Committee confirmed that none of the Western democracies would provide military aid to the Republic, the Comintern agreed to start recruiting. The main recruitment center was established in Paris, under Soviet colonel Karol 'Walter' Świerczewski. Francisco Largo Caballero initially opposed the plan, but after early setbacks in the war he changed his mind and agreed to the operation on the 22nd of October 1936. A group of 500 volunteers, mainly French with some exiled Poles and Germans, arrived in Albacete on the 14th of October 1936. They were met by fighters who had already been in Spain: Germans from the Thälmann Battalion, Italians from the Centuria Gastone Sozzi, and French grouped with Belgians under the Commune de Paris Battalion. Among that first cohort was the poet John Cornford, who had traveled down through France and Spain with a group of fellow intellectuals and artists including Wintringham, John Sommerfield, Bernard Knox, Ralph Bates, and Jan Kurzke. Josip Broz, who would later become known to the world as Marshal Tito, was in Paris during this period, providing assistance, money, and passports for volunteers from Eastern Europe. The volunteers were under no contract and no defined engagement period, a gap that would later prove a serious problem.

• 3. The People Who Came

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  About 32,000 foreigners eventually volunteered to defend the Spanish Republic. At no single moment, however, were more than 18,000 actually deployed. The largest national contingent came from France, with estimates ranging from roughly 8,962 to 9,000 volunteers. Germany and Italy each contributed several thousand, though many of these were recruited in Western Europe rather than from their home countries. Among the most striking demographic facts is that about 22 percent of Brigadiers were Jewish. Within the Polish contingent, Jewish volunteers may have accounted for as many as 45 percent of the total. Among American volunteers, 38 percent were Jewish; among Poles, 45 percent. A Jewish company was formed within the Polish battalion, named after Naftali Botwin, a young Jewish communist killed in Poland in 1925. The volunteers were mainly socialists, communists, or others willing to accept communist authority, though many were simply unemployed workers, especially from France, or adventurers. Some 500 communists who had been exiled to Russia were sent to Spain among them experienced military leaders from the First World War, including figures who fought under the aliases Kléber, Gomez, Lukacs, and Gal. On the 30th of May 1937, the Spanish liner Ciudad de Barcelona, carrying 200-250 volunteers from Marseille to Spain, was torpedoed by a Nationalist submarine off the coast of Malgrat de Mar. The ship sank and up to 65 volunteers are estimated to have drowned.

• 4. Madrid and Its Battles

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  On the 9th of November 1936, the XI International Brigade, comprising 1,900 men drawn from the Edgar André Battalion, the Commune de Paris Battalion, and the Dabrowski Battalion, along with a British machine-gun company, took up position at the Casa de Campo on the edge of Madrid. That evening its commander, General Kléber, launched a night assault on Nationalist positions. By the end of the fight the Nationalists had been forced back from their planned direct approach on Madrid, but the XIth Brigade had lost a third of its personnel. Four days later, on the 13th of November, the 1,550-man strong XII International Brigade deployed to assault the high ground of Cerro de Los Angeles. Language and communication problems, command issues, lack of rest, poor coordination with armored units, and insufficient artillery support caused the attack to fail. On the 19th of November, Nationalist troops, Moroccans and Spanish Foreign Legionnaires covered by the Nazi Condor Legion, captured a foothold in the University City. Anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti was shot there on the 19th of November 1936 and died the next day. The fighting in the university went on until three-quarters of the complex was under Nationalist control. By December the front had hardened into a siege. Of the 40,000 Republican troops defending the city, the foreign troops numbered fewer than 3,000, a fact the Comintern's propaganda apparatus deliberately obscured. The British Ambassador, Sir Henry Chilton, was convinced by that propaganda to declare publicly that there were no Spaniards in the army that had defended Madrid.

• 5. Jarama and Guadalajara

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  On the 6th of February 1937, following the fall of Málaga, Nationalist forces launched a drive on the Madrid-Andalusia road south of the city, quickly advancing on the town of Ciempozuelos, held by the XV International Brigade. On the 12th of February the British Battalion took the brunt of an assault, remaining under heavy fire for seven hours. The position became known as Suicide Hill. By the end of the day, only 225 of the 600 members of the British Battalion remained. One company was captured by a ruse when Nationalist troops advanced among their ranks singing The Internationale. The Lincoln Battalion later suffered 120 killed and 175 wounded. Among the dead were the Irish poet Charles Donnelly and Leo Greene. The battle ended in stalemate, with both sides digging in. On the 22nd of February 1937, the League of Nations Non-Intervention Committee ban on foreign volunteers went into effect, even as the fighting continued. The battle for Guadalajara opened shortly after. Benito Mussolini committed the whole Italian expeditionary corps, 35,000 men with 80 battle tanks and 200 field artillery pieces, wanting the victory credited to Italy. On the 10th of March, the Garibaldi Battalion counterattacked. A peculiar confusion arose when scouts from both sides exchanged information without realizing they were enemies, both forces having Italian-speaking troops. On the 12th of March, the Thälmann Battalion attacked Trijuete in a bayonet charge and retook the town, capturing numerous prisoners.

• 6. The Cost in Lives

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  Primary sources give deeply conflicting figures for the number of Brigadiers killed. A report from the Albacete staff dated late March 1938 claimed 4,575 dead in action. An internal Soviet communication to Moscow by NKVD major Semyon Gendin from late July 1938 put the figure at 3,615. In his farewell address in Barcelona on the 28th of October 1938, Prime Minister Juan Negrín cited 5,000 fallen. Scholarly estimates diverge even more widely: the highest identified figure is 15,000 killed; many scholars prefer 10,000; one precise calculation from the mid-1970s arrived at 9,934; the popular Osprey series claims at least 7,800. These figures include volunteers killed in action, those who died of wounds, those executed as prisoners of war, and several hundred who perished before even reaching Spain. They also include those executed by their own side, a figure some estimates put as high as 500. The total casualty count, including killed, missing, and wounded, is given variously as 48,909, 55,162, or 59,380, though these totals likely contain duplicated cases of individuals wounded more than once. The ratio of killed to all combatants varies enormously by national contingent. For Canadians, estimates range from 43 to 57 percent killed. For Poles, the range runs from 30 to 62 percent. For Yugoslavs, between 35 and 50 percent. Those numbers make the abstract scale of the sacrifice concrete: the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, the Canadian contingent, may have lost more than half its men.

• 7. After the War

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  When the Nationalists won the war in March 1939, the veterans found themselves on what felt like the wrong side of history, most of their home countries now governed by right-wing administrations. Within a few years, however, those same right-wing powers were at war with the very nations, Germany and Italy, that had supported Franco. In East Germany the veterans occupied a singular position. The state officially acknowledged that the German-speaking units of the International Brigades represented the nucleus of the armed forces of the future GDR. Heinz Hoffmann became commander of the Nationale Volksarmee, Erich Mielke headed the Ministry for Security, and Friedrich Dickel served as Minister of Interior. Ten former interbrigadistas entered the Political Bureau of the ruling party. Books by Ludwig Renn became standard and at times obligatory reading. Monuments, streets, schools, bridges, and factories were named after the Spanienkämpfer. In the United States, returned volunteers were labeled premature anti-fascists by the FBI, denied promotion during World War II military service, and pursued by Congressional committees during the Red Scare of 1947-1957. Swiss volunteers faced criminal prosecution upon returning home; the courts pronounced 420 sentences ranging from roughly two weeks to four years in prison, and often stripped convicts of their political rights for up to five years. Not until March 2009 did the Swiss parliament retroactively rehabilitate the brigaders, by which time only a handful remained alive. The last surviving British member of the International Brigades, Geoffrey Servante, died in April 2019 aged 99. Josep Almudéver, believed to be the last surviving veteran of the International Brigades overall, died on the 23rd of May 2021 at the age of 101.