The battalions of workers. Forced labor, reconstruction and military repression in Catalonia 1938-1942 | Secció Història Contemporànea Món actual

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Despite the fact that in the last years, the Civil War, the postwar period and the repression, both pro-Franco and Republican, have progressed in a prominent way, even today there are different aspects of the Civil War. that dramatic period of our history that, in my opinion, has not received the treatment they deserve.

One of these issues related to the war and post-war period that our historiography has put aside has been the study of Republican prisoners of war and its framing in forced labor units. These units, which were named after workers’ battalions, were one of the first forms of repression that organized Franco’s regime more accurately and that affected a larger number of people. In spite of this, even today there has been no detailed monograph that has analyzed in a precise way everything related to the operation and actions of those units of forced labor.

The battalions of workers were units of forced labor that were created during the Civil War, from integrating prisoners of war in the Republican army, with the aim of performing different jobs and especially retaliating the enemy. Its good operation caused that the Francoist authorities, once the war ended, would keep them in operation in order to continue punishing the losers of the war and that they themselves were in charge of rebuilding the country.

Precisely in these last two points, the repressive and the reconstruction of the country have been the two main axes of this work, as they were, in my opinion, the fundamental aspects that defined those battles of forced labor.

The work presented here could be divided into four perfectly defined sections. The first section presents the problems that the Francoist army had with the prisoners of war and the solution that occurred to that situation. These solutions highlighted the separation, from the classification of prisoners, between recoverable for their cause and the unrecoverable ones. The latter were those intended for concentration camps and subsequently, seeking to resolve the issue of the high economic cost of maintaining a high number of prisoners, forced to carry out forced labor. In this way, the first battalions of workers began and began to work.

The second part of the work has already focused on the arrival of the Francoist troops in Catalonia, the end of March and the beginning of April 1938, and the stabilization of their progress in the Segre and Ebro rivers for a few months. The arrest of the Francoist troops caused the rebels to control a part of the Principality. It was precisely in these territories where battalions of workers began their actions in the Catalan territory. His arrival was jointly with the Army of the North and the different Corps of the Army that integrated it, since those battalions were under the orders of those units.

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Thirdly, from the existing bibliography on the subject, the final occupation of Catalonia by rebel troops was described – December 23, 1938 to February 10, 1939 – and then began to speak of a very careful way of deploying throughout the entire Catalan territory the workers’ battalions, the number of units that existed, the number of prisoners they held there, their constant mobility, the internal organization of those units and the different jobs they performed. In order to be able to complete this explanation, a totally unpublished fund has been used, as is the one found in the Intermediate Archive of the 3rd General Surveillance Office (Pirenaica) of the Army of the Earth, located in the Bruc quarter of Barcelona, the which within the section of the Military Government has an outstanding number of information on these units. Thanks to this documentation we have been able to provide new data such as knowing the number of battalions that acted in Catalonia between March 1939 and July 1940, the number of prisoners they received, the way in which those units were composed, what problems they had and the jobs they did.

Finally, in the fourth point of this work, the closure of the workers’ battalions in July 1940 was first exposed and the whole process that led to the formation of the so-called disciplinary battalions, which carried out the same tasks as the His predecessors, with the only difference that they were integrated by another type of staff. On the one hand, there were the disciplinary battalions of working soldiers (BDST), which were composed of soldiers from the 1936 to 1941 quarters, classified as disaffected, and that they had to perform military service. Based on the documentation found in the General Military Archive of Guadalajara, in the Archive of the General Surveillance (Pirenaica) of the Land Army and the Recruitment Order approved by the Franco regime in December 1939, He has been explaining in detail how the members of the military service were classified and, once classed, how the BDSTs were created. These units were put into operation in July 1940 and did not disappear until December 1942.