This book deals with one of most controversial issues of the Spanish Civil War (1936 1939): the Red Terror. Approximately 50,000 Spaniards were extrajudically executed in Republican Spain following the failure of the military rebellion in July 1936. This mass killing of fascists seriously undermined attempts by the legally constituted Republican government to present itself in foreign quarters as fighting a war for democracy. This study, based on a wealth of scholarship and archival sources, challenges the common view that executions were the work of criminal or anarchist uncontrollables. Its...