Historiography on number of victims of the Spanish Civil War repressions is a scientific debate, which has been taking place among historians, and which concerns the question how many people were killed in wartime terror of both sides, the Nationalists and the Republicans, during the Spanish Civil War.
Apart from clearly propagandistic claims, from the onset there was no agreement in the academia, with discrepancies ranging (first Nationalist killings, then Republican ones, in thousands) from 40:60 to 200:20. In the mid-1970s the figures of 35:72 became particularly popular, either endorsed or contested. Since the late 1990s the ratio of 150:50 emerged as dominant, though it compared Francoist repression of 1936-1975 and Republican terror of 1936–1939. In the 21st century university scholars tend to approach wartime-only estimates as 100:50, yet beyond academia there might be widely different figures in circulation.
Apart from numbers, general historiographic debate on Spanish Civil War repression focuses also on many other threads, especially related to mechanisms of terror, its origins, its role and objectives, its nature, perpetrators, victims, institutional arrangements and other. Most of these threads are inter-related.
1940s and 1950s: Causa General and around
Already during the war there were various numbers quantifying terror of both sides in circulation. However, they had little to do with historiography and fall rather into the propaganda rubric, as most were coined either by the warring parties or their supporters. Some inflated the figures beyond reason, e.g. on April 19, 1937, Francisco Franco declared that 470,000 people had already been murdered in the Republican zone.Francisco Franco Bahamonde, Palabras del Caudillo. 19 abril 1937 – 7 diciembre 1942, Madrid 1943, pp. 312, 445 On the other hand, in 1940 the periodical issued by the Communist Party of the USA claimed that already 800,000 people had perished in the Francoist repression.see The Communist 19 (1940), p. 662 Some of these figures, e.g. the claim of Ramón Sender that 750,000 left-wingers had been executed by mid-1938, were repeated even in the 1970s.J. S. Vidarte, Todos fuimos culpables, Barcelona 1978, , p. 418 Following the final Nationalist triumph the Madrid government set up a massive investigation program, which came to be known as Causa General; its purpose was to document Republican atrocities. The work grew to enormous scale.details in Pablo Gil Vico, Ideología y represión. La causa general: Evolución histórica de un mecanismo jurídico-político del régimen franquista, [in:] Revista de estudios políticos 101 (1998), pp. 159-189 Eventually when in 1942 presenting their findings to the Minister of Justice, formally responsible for the investigation, the authors of this collective work arrived at the figure of 85,940 wartime Republican rearguard killings.Francisco Espinosa Maestre, Agosto de 1936. Terror y propaganda. Los orígenes de la Causa General, [in:] Pasado y Memoria. Revista de Historia Contemporánea 4 (2005), p. 16 However, in huge résumé publications based on Causa General, issued every some time in Spain since 1943,e.g. Causa general: la dominación roja en España (1943) or a larger version, Datos complementarios para la Historia de España. Guerra de Liberación, 1936-1939 (1945), Espinosa Maestre 2005, p. 15 this figure has been omitted; present-day historians speculate that Franco was disappointed and considered the figure to be too low.Espinosa Maestre 2005, p. 16 One scholar maintains that it remained so "for over a quarter of a century",Paul Preston, Sneak Preview: Paul Preston on the Spanish Holocaust, [in:] The Volunteer 18.09.2011 yet the first identified publication of the 85,940 figure - though referred as a well-documented minimum, perhaps subject to revisions upwards following further research - appeared in another version of the Causa General résumé, published in 1961.literally "En definitiva, los crímenes cometidos por el Frente Popular en la zona de España que estuvo sometida a su dominio revisten tal magnitud, que solamente los asesinatos debidamente investigados alcanzan la cifra de 85.940, sin incluir, como es consiguiente, las bajas y víctimas de guerra", La dominación roja en España. Causa General, Madrid 1961, p. 611. The first identified press reference to this figure is from 1962, Declaraciones del ministro de justicia, [in:] Diario de Burgos 13.12.1962 At times there were even lower figures advanced, not necessarily official yet at least allowed to be floated in public space, e.g. 54,594 as stated in the newly refurbished national sanctuary in Valladolid.Francois Godicheau, La represión y la guerra civil española. Memoria y tratemiento histórico, [in:] Prohistoria 5 (2001), p. 106 However, in the press the figure was rather revised upwards, e.g. to 415,000 (1946);Defendiendo a Espana en el extranjero, [in:] El Diario de Avila 23.01.1946 also historians declared higher figures, e.g. José Díaz de Villegas claimed 140,000 victims of terror rojo.José Díaz de Villegas, ¿Un millón de muertos?, [in:] Diario de Burgos 02.04.1961
1960s: between Thomas and Jackson
Until the 1960s no independent scholarly estimates as to the Nationalist repression have been offered; in Francoist Spain it was a somewhat inconvenient topic, while émigré or foreign scholars did not have access to sources. Things changed following publication of first academic synthetic accounts of the Spanish Civil War, published by Hugh Thomas (1961) and Gabriel Jackson (1965). Both advanced their estimates and none of them provided any references as to basis of their calculation; Thomas noted merely "my considered belief"Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, London 1961, p. 631 while Jackson trusted "my first four fingers" and embarked on some historiographic comparisons.Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Civil War, Princeton 1961, p. 539 Both scholars offered vastly different numbers. Thomas at one point explicitly declared 40,000 as a maximum for Nationalist repression and at another one estimated the total number of rearguard atrocities as 100,000, which implicitly left 60,000 for Republican killings."it is my considered belief that the total number of Nationalist 'atrocities' - by which I understand any shooting outside the battle line - is unlikely to have been greater that 40,000" p. 631, and "about 100,000 may be supposed to have died by murder or summary execution", Thomas 1961, p. 606 Jackson explicitly stated the number for "wartime Nationalist paseos and political reprisals" as 200,000, and this for "Republican zone paseos and political reprisals" as 20,000.Jackson 1965, p. 539 Another major synthesis of the war, by Pierre Broué and Émile Témime (1961), did not offer any estimates; neither Herbert Southworth, in his well-known book intended to counter the Francoist propaganda (1963), advanced any figures, except a reference to 192,684 fatal victims of post-war repression.Herbert Southworth, El mito de la cruzada de Franco, Paris 1963, p. 310 Hence, until the mid-1970s scholars had to find their own way between figures advanced by Causa General, Thomas and Jackson; e.g. Stanley G. Payne initially (1967) pointed to Jackson and assumed that "number of Nationalist executions exceeded those carried out by the left";"the bulk of evidence seems to support Jackson's contention that even during the wartine period the number of Nationalist executions exceeded those carried out by the left", Stanley G. Payne, Politics and the Military in Moden Spain, Stanford/London 1967, p. 415 5 years later he was more specific and estimated that "the White terror may have slain 50,000, perhaps fewer, during the war", and that the number of victims of the Nationalist repression was "undoubtedly greater" than the number of those killed by the Republicans (not specified, with the Madrid-advanced figure of 61,000 "not subject to objective verification").Stanley G. Payne, A History of Spain and Portugal, Madison 1973, , quoted after the online version Raymond Carr in his synthesis (1973) merely referred (incorrectly) vastly different estimates of Thomas and Jackson, without opting for any."The total number of Nationalist executions is still a matter of controversy and guess-work ... Thomas estimates the number of executions at 50,000 on each side; Jackson estimates that 200,000 people were executed during the war itself and 200,000 more died in prison or were shot between 1939 and 1943", Raymond Carr, The Spanish Tragedy, Weidenfeld/London 1973, p. 124. Carr kept repeating the same numbers in subsequent editions until the late 1980s
1970s and 1980s: Salas Larrazábal, pro and contra