Condor Legion

The support of the Condor Legion was decisive for the victory of General Franco in the Spanish Civil war. One of the objectives of this German military unit under the command of General Hugo Sperrle and whose Chief Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, was to experiment with new methods and strategies of combat on what was already called in 1936 ‘The next war’, the Second World War.

On 26 April 1937, Gernika was used as a testing ground by the Condor Legion in a bombing raid that lasted more than three hours, with a level of destruction of more than 85% and an as yet undetermined number of victims, which according to the most recent investigations is more than the 1,654 recorded by the Basque Government, as the bodies of those trapped under the ruins were never counted.

A selection of books on this military unit are exposed in this bibliographical exhibition. All these exposed books are kept at the Documentation Centre on the Bombing of Gernika and are available for consultation.