90 Years Since the Spanish Civil War: From the Battlefield to Nazi Concentration Camps
Three lives shaped by resistance and Nazi persecution
Ninety years ago, on July 17, 1936, a group of Spanish army officers staged a coup against their democratically elected government. This marked the beginning of a bloody civil war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives over the next three years. In the end, Franco’s rebels won, forcing the defenders of the Spanish Republic to flee the country. Many ended up in German concentration camps. The lives of Antonio García Rodríguez, Eugen Seidt, and Anna Peczenik show how the Spanish Civil War became intertwined with Nazi persecution.
On July 17, 1936, elite military units occupied all the government buildings in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco. One day later, the rebels attacked the Spanish mainland and later, under the leadership of General Francisco Franco, they gained control over large parts of the country. In large cities, they met with opposition from organized workers and Basque and Catalan nationalists. The civil war was a fight over Spain’s political future, with democracy, the Republic, and social reforms on one side and authoritarian, nationalist, and anti-communist ideologies on the other.
In late July 1936, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy rushed to the aid of Franco’s troops, providing both military and financial support. The defenders of the Republic were abandoned by the Western democracies, but received money and arms from the governments of Mexico and the Soviet Union. In the fall, the Spanish government also began receiving support from the International Brigades – organized by the Communist International to fight the spread of fascism. An international ideological struggle had begun.
From exile in France to persecution by the Nazis
Many of those who fled Spain were held in camps by the French government or compelled to perform forced labor. Then, in June 1940, the German Wehrmacht occupied France. As opponents of fascism, even people who had fought in Spain but had not been interned were now subjected to systematic persecution along with their families. The Gestapo deported them to concentration camps in Germany. Among them were Antonio García Rodríguez, Eugen Seidt, and Anna Peczenik.
Antonio García Rodríguez: A volunteer for the Republic
Antonio García Rodríguez was 20 years old when Nationalist army officers staged a coup against Spain’s left-wing government in Madrid in the summer of 1936. Antonio was born on June 13, 1916, in Fuenlabrada de los Montes, a small village in the southeast of the Spanish province of Badajoz. He came from a poor family, and as a child he had to work in the fields. “I’ve taken more beatings in my life than a drum,” he would later say to his son Jean Paul. He also told his son how his 16-year-old girlfriend was shot by Franco’s rebels in the early days of the civil war. He then joined the pro-government Spanish People’s Army to defend the young democracy against Franco’s troops.
Eugen Seidt: A German volunteer fighting for Spain’s Republican government
In the fall of 1936, Eugen Seidt – a mechanic, a union member, and a communist from Karlsruhe –arrived in Spain too. Fearing persecution by the Gestapo, he had fled Germany in 1935 and had been living in France ever since. The 28-year-old is believed to have begun participating in the defense of Madrid as a member of the International Brigades in November 1936. For him, fighting on the side of the Republic also meant fighting against the Nazis. “The fight against the Condor Legion, sent to Spain by the Nazi government, was at the same time a fight against the consolidation of Nazi tyranny in Germany,” he later wrote in his application for compensation.
Anna Peczenik: Jewish medic with the International Brigades
Anna Peczenik was 26 years old when she left Prague and joined the International Brigades in January 1937. Born Anna Gadol into a Jewish family in Bulgaria, she grew up in Vienna. She was a committed socialist and had to flee to the Czech Republic along with her husband and daughter to escape Nazi persecution. However, her training as a kindergarten teacher would be of little use in Spain, so she completed a nursing course in Paris before joining the medical service of the International Brigades on the Spanish front in April 1937.
Flight and internment after the defeat of the Republicans
By late 1938, a Nationalist victory had become increasingly inevitable. The Republicans and the volunteers from the International Brigades fled into exile in France. Antonio, Eugen, and Anna were among the nearly 500,000 people who fled Spain, crossing the border to enter France in what amounted to an exodus. But they were not welcome there either: in 1938, the French government issued a decree establishing the legal basis for the internment of “undesirable foreigners.” At first, France held the refugees in makeshift receiving camps, some of which were set up on beaches along the southern coast.
Eugen Seidt was among the fighters detained by the French on the beach at Saint-Cyprien. The internees had to sleep on the ground at first before rudimentary barracks were gradually built. Later, the French government transferred him to the internment camp in Gurs in the northern Pyrenees and then to a penal camp in Le Vernet.
Forced labor and underground resistance
In April 1939, another decree issued by the French government required all foreign men between the ages of 18 and 40 to provide “services” in return for asylum. In effect, this amounted to forced labor. Foreign labor units and labor camps were established as a result. When the German Wehrmacht invaded France, the French government collaborated with the German occupiers, and Antonio García Rodríguez had to perform forced labor in Bordeaux, where he helped build a German submarine bunker.
Eugen Seidt, who was still interned in Le Vernet at the time, was handed over to the Gestapo and deported to Germany. The Higher Regional Court in Stuttgart sentenced him to two years in prison. After he had served his sentence, the Nazis deported him to Dachau concentration camp. Anna Peczenikwas probably still in southern France at this time. In 1943, she traveled to Austria, disguised as a French foreign laborer, risking her life to work as a courier for her comrades in order to maintain contact with the French Resistance.
Arrest and deportation to concentration camps in Germany
Antonio García Rodríguez is believed to have escaped from forced labor in early 1944 to join the French Resistance. He was arrested in April 1944 and handed over to the Gestapo. In May 1944, he was deported from the Compiègne transit camp to the Neuengamme concentration camp – like many other Spaniards.
A few months later, in the summer of 1944, the Gestapo arrested Anna Peczenikin Paris and deported her to Germany. She was imprisoned at Ravensbrück concentration camp at first, transferred to Buchenwald in October, and then forced to perform hard labor at the Polte munitions factory in Magdeburg.
Unable to return home after the war
Antonio Garcia Rodriguez was also forced to work for the Nazi war effort. He had to forge artillery shells at Salzgitter-Drütte, a sub-camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp. It was hard physical labor, and Antonio saw many of his fellow prisoners die of exhaustion. Arbitrary executions for alleged production errors were a routine occurrence. The sub-camp was evacuated shortly before the end of the war. The SS crammed Antonio and some 3,400 other people into railroad cars and transported them towards the north. At the train station in Celle, the train came under fire from U.S. troops, and hundreds of people died inside the cars.
Antonio survived and was deported to a sub-camp of Ravensbrück concentration camp, where he was liberated by Soviet troops on May 2, 1945. He was sent back to France on May 22. However, because he had fought for the Spanish Republic, he could not return to his homeland, since Franco remained in power until his death in 1975. Instead, Antonio settled in Bordeaux, where he married and started a family. He died in 1996 at the age of 80.
The long road to compensation
Eugen Seidt was liberated by Allied troops at Dachau concentration camp. He returned to his hometown of Karlsruhe, and he too started a family. He spent the rest of his life trying to obtain compensation for his internment, including the time he had spent in French camps. But West Germany’s Federal Compensation Act excluded communists. In the end, however, the German authorities recognized the time he had spent in German prisons, penitentiaries, and concentration camps.
While Wehrmacht soldiers who had fought alongside Franco received war victim benefits, veterans of the Spanish Civil War who had defended the Republic continued to be treated as criminals for decades. It was not until 1998, when all unjust Nazi-era convictions were annulled, that they were officially rehabilitated. Eugen Seidt did not live to see it – he died in 1977 at the age of 69.
Anna Peczenik never returned from the war. After December 1944, all trace of her is lost. Documents suggest that she was transferred back to Buchenwald concentration camp on December 10. She died there under unexplained circumstances.