Julián Grimau

Julián Grimau García (18 February 1911 – 20 April 1963) was a Spanish politician, member of the Communist Party of Spain, executed during Francisco Franco's Francoist State.

No convincing explanation has yet been identified, but former PCE leaders such as Jorge Semprún have suggested that General Secretary Santiago Carrillo wanted to have Grimau removed from party leadership and deliberately facilitated his arrest in November.

He was taken to the Puerta del Sol headquarters of the General Security Directorate (DGS, nowadays the seat of the Comunidad de Madrid administration).

Minister of the Interior Manuel Fraga Iribarne claimed that Grimau was treated properly and threw himself out the window for an "unexplainable" reason, presumably attempted suicide.

[3] Grimau was not placed under arrest for his activities in the clandestine movement (which would have been punished with imprisonment), but rather for his role in the Civil War, accusing him of the more serious crimes of torturing and killing prisoners, along with "armed rebellion."

This charge was backed by anarchists - who accused Grimau of being a prominent member of the Republic's political police, the Servicio de Información Militar (SIM), and of having tortured and murdered anti-Stalinist soldiers in the International Brigade.

One day, while Fernando Claudín and I were working on the draft of the aforementioned book, he, quite disconcerted and with obvious unease and displeasure, showed me a testimony, just received from Latin America, about Grimau.

I can only can swear that Grimau's involvement in the repression against the POUM was clearly established by that testimony, which was later trimmed of its most problematic aspects before being published, in a much shorter version, in the book.

An international protest organized by the global Left ensued: the press campaigned in his favor, and numerous rallies took place in European and Latin American capitals.

The government met on 19 April, in a session that lasted ten hours: although Fernando Castiella, the minister of foreign affairs, declared himself in favor of the pardon (bearing in mind the consequences on Spain's image), his opposition was timid.

However, these attempts only took place after the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, somewhat closer in the ideological spectrum to Izquierda Unida, had lost the general elections against the PP, both in 1996 and 2000.

Grimau's daughter Dolores married the writer and professor Gonzalo Santonja, a former communist who was later named in the Junta of Castile and León by Vox.