On this day April 26, 1937, a deadly air raid was carried out on the Basque town of Guernica by German and Italian volunteer airmen who were collaborating with General Franco’s nationalists during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).
The bombing went down in history mainly thanks to the painting of the great Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, who uniquely captured the horrors of war.
In the spring of 1937, Franco’s nationalists, having under their control most of Spain, wanted to ensure their sovereignty in the north as well, by occupying Bilbao, the largest city of the unruly Basques, who were cooperating with the democratic government of Madrid. The biggest obstacle was Guernica (Guernica the correct pronunciation in Spanish), strategically located on the road to Bilbao. Guernica, in which 5,000 people lived, but also thousands of Democratic refugees, was an important city for the Basques, because under an oak tree in the center of the city, their Parliament used to meet.
The order for the bombardment of Guernica was given by the Frankists to Lieutenant General Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen, who was in charge of the German volunteers, who had formed the “Legion Condor”. Typically, Nazi Germany was neutral in the Spanish Civil War. But he actually took part in the operations with a group of volunteers, all of whom were experienced Lutwaffe pilots and piloted the latest type of aircraft. As the arch-Nazi Hermann Göring later admitted at the Nuremberg Trials, the young pilots had been sent by order of the Reich to prevent the spread of Communism, but also to be tested in combat conditions.
The operation planned by Richthofen would take part in 20 German fighters and 3 Italian, which were part of the Italian volunteer corps, which Mussolini had sent to support Franco’s like-minded. The planes would attempt five waves of attacks, first on the outskirts and then inside Guernica, with 250 and 50 kg bombs and 1 kg incendiaries.
Operation Rugen, as it was code-named, took place from 4.30pm to 7pm on 26 April 1937. It was literally a walk for the pilots as the city was unfortified. The bombardment was stormy and relentless, with the result that the city was almost leveled and by the great fires that followed. The victims of the bombings amounted to 1654 dead and 889 wounded, according to the data provided by the authorities. Recent investigations reduce the death toll to 300 at most.
This does not diminish the horror of the attack, which was a classic war crime, a blind strike and an act of terrorism, since the attack was not against a military target.
According to later speculation, the Germans must have exceeded Spanish instructions and staged the attack with excessive intensity in retaliation for the lynching by Democrats of a German pilot whose plane had crashed near Bilbao a few days earlier. earlier.
The Nationalists, while not denying the bombing of Guernica, blamed the large fires and widespread destruction on the retreating Democrats and their “scorched earth” tactics. First-hand journalistic accounts partially justify them.
As in similar cases in Greece, the German Democratic Republic apologized for the atrocities committed by the Nazis in Spain. On the 60th anniversary of the Guernica bombing in 1997, German President Roman Herzog, in a letter to the survivors, “extended a hand of friendship and reconciliation, on behalf of the German people.” In 1998 the German Parliament by its decision removed all the names of the members of the Condor Legion, which had been given in German camps.
Picasso’s Guernica
At the time of the Guernica bombing, the great Spanish painter Pablo Picasso was preparing a painting, commissioned by the Democratic Government of Madrid, to adorn the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition. As soon as he was informed of the great massacre, he named the painting Guernica, wanting to express his distaste for the military “who plunged Spain into the ocean of suffering and death”.
Picasso’s work is a huge oil painting (3.49 x 7.77 m), depicting the inhumanity, brutality and despair of war. It shows a scene of death, with dismembered animals and people, women crying, holding dead babies and destroyed buildings. At first, Picasso experimented with color, but eventually settled on white, black, and gray, as he felt it gave more intensity to the subject.
The painting was exhibited in July 1937 at the International Exhibition of Paris and gathered general interest. He then toured major capitals of the world in order to raise money for the defense of the Republic in Spain. After Franco came to power in 1939, Guernica found temporary shelter in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).
In 1968 Franco expressed a desire to exhibit the painting in Spain. Picasso refused and authorized MOMA to return the painting to Spain once the Republic was restored. This was in 1975, when Franco died and Picasso had passed away two years earlier. In 1981 “Guernica” returned to its homeland and became one of the most important exhibits of the “Prado” Museum in Madrid. Since 1992, it has graced the Queen Sofia Museum of Modern Art in Madrid.
