This important work focuses on the experience of the large Spanish contingent within the Mauthausen concentration camp, one of the least known but most terrible camps in Nazi Germany. Refugees from the repercussions of the Civil War, 7,000 Spanish Republicans were arrested in France by the invading Nazis in the collapse of 1940. A microcosm of the experience of national prisoner communities, their story possesses a unique historical value. No other national group succeeded in placing its members in all the key clerical positions in the SS administration, and no other group managed to hide and save all its basic records.
Vilified by Franco and condemned by Hitler, their story makes an outstanding contribution to the literature of the holocaust.