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.
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 In order to be able to complete this explanation, a totally unpublished fund has been used, as is the one found in the Intermediate Archive of the 3rd General Surveillance Office (Pirenaica) of the Army of the Earth, located in the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.