Foreign involvement in the Spanish Civil War

The support of the German Condor Legion and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria was decisive for General Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War. One of the objectives of the German Condor Legion under the command of General Hugo Sperrle, whose Chief of Staff was Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, was to experiment with new combat methods and strategies with a view to what was already in 1936 called ‘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.

All the documents on display are kept in the documentation centre and will be available for anyone.