The Junta assumed for a period of time and in a collegiate manner "all the powers of the State"[3] in the territory controlled by the coup plotters, and self-styled as the national zone.

As a result, on September 30, 1936, Decree 138 was published in the Official Bulletin of the Spanish National Defense Junta, naming General Franco generalissimo of the armies and head of the State government.

He was therefore content to create a more technical than political body —the Junta Técnica del Estado— and to rely on his brother Nicolas, whom he appointed general secretary to the head of state.

The preamble of the law reveals its nature: The structuring of the new Spanish State, within the nationalist principles, calls for the establishment of those administrative bodies which, dispensing with unnecessary bureaucratic development, respond to the characteristics of authority, unity, speed and austerity.The temporality of the new organization was evident from the addition: without taking as definitive the one currently in place, even if it is an announcement of the permanent one to be established once the entire national territory has been dominated.Both the terminology and the provisional nature of the institution are typical of military language, which seeks the creation of a kind of rearguard quartermaster to solve the most immediate problems, but subordinated to the fundamental objective of obtaining military victory.

[9] Although its composition in commissions was reminiscent of an incipient cabinet, it was made up of second-rate personalities who were mainly in charge of routine administrative functions.

[12] Consequently, three months after the coup d'état, rebel Spain showed the appearance of being a new State in which all parties collaborated in a process of centralization, unity and efficiency, as opposed to the division and waste of resources present on the Republican side.

[18] Even smaller in stature than Franco, he was, according to Admiral Cervera, "pure, austere and Spanish" and maintained a monarchist Catholicism similar to that of Mola.

[17] It was mainly composed of members of the military, although it was chaired by Andrés Amado, an Alfonsist monarchist whose experience gave the body a somewhat more political character.

[7] Its presidency was entrusted to Joaquín Bau, a traditionalist monarchist[19] who had also been a collaborator of Calvo Sotelo when the latter had headed the Ministry of Finance during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.

He played an important role in the promulgation of the Decree of October 9, 1937, which abolished the mining concessions made earlier and imposed a maximum of 25% foreign capital in the owning companies.

[25] The Act stated that it was: responsible for all matters related to the current bases and labor agreements and the study of new guidelines for the welfare of the workers and their collaboration with the other elements of production.Its headquarters were in Burgos.

[22] According to the Act: its mission shall be to ensure the continuation of public works in progress, to undertake new projects where indispensable, to re-establish transportation lines of all kinds, to organize a perfect postal and telegraphic communications service throughout the occupied region, as well as the necessary personnel for these services.Chaired by Mauro Serret, it was composed of civil servant engineers, so it did not have a political profile either.

It was presided over by José María Pemán, but his lack of interest in bureaucratic work meant that the weight of management was carried by the vice-president Enrique Suñer.

[29] To do so, they relied on reports from parish priests, mayors, the Civil Guard, solvent parents, military organizations and, after the Unification, from the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS.

[30] On November 19, 1936, a regulation of the Junta was published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado, which created a secretariat for the president and a major officer's bureau.

[34]No member of the Falange Española de las JONS held any position in the Junta,[7] while there was a very significant percentage of monarchists, both Alfonsists and traditionalists.

[19] Therefore, the Junta Técnica was not at any time a body that helped to create a fascist or parafascist state, but an institution of Catholic or traditional significance.

A decree-law of early 1937 sought to solve the problem of unemployment, ordering the civil governors to prevent a single Spaniard from being in such a situation or "not receiving in some way relief proportional to his family needs".

The determination of those in charge of the Junta to solve pressing problems made them uncomfortable with certain formalities imposed by pre-existing legislative precepts, such as the existence of contentious-administrative appeals or the obligation to request a report from the Council of State.

[40] As a result of the plane crash that took the life of General Mola on June 3, 1937, Franco decided that his replacement in command of the Army of the North would be Dávila.

Like his predecessor, he had fought in Cuba and Morocco, where he became Chief of Staff of the Army of Africa, played a decisive role in the negotiations with France and was High Commissioner.

[41] It seems that Jordana was reluctant to take up the post, and realized from the outset the difficulties of his performance, acknowledging in his diary that he was "truly disheartened by the impossibility of arranging this tangle".

Furthermore, he believed that Franco himself was not in a fit state of mind to deal with political matters; that Nicolás Franco, secretary general of the head of State, was "a brilliant and extraordinary man, but unbalanced" and that he acted without any coordination with the Junta;[42] that the functioning of the Junta was very defective; that it did not have control of the press; that foreign affairs were in the hands of José Antonio Sangróniz; that Queipo de Llano acted with total autonomy and without obeying anyone; and that there was a clear political divergence between a Junta in which the military, Catholics and primorriveristas predominated and a Movement controlled by Serrano Súñer and the Falangists.

[41] There was a Secretariat of Foreign Relations headed by the diplomat Francisco Serrat,[11] but it was Sangroniz who really acted as minister in the shadow together with Nicolás Franco.

[45] In June 1937, the debt to Germany already amounted to 150 million marks and Hitler openly expressed his intention to obtain the Spanish iron ore.

The Junta Técnica explained to them that the objective was to stop the concessions made by the Valencia government, but the Germans were suspicious of Spanish-British commercial relations.

[47] Germany was seeking the recognition of property titles in seventy-three mining concessions thanks to the debt money managed by the Montana consortium, something that the October decree-law had prevented.

[48] On December 15 and 16, 1937, Von Stohrer met with Sangróniz and Nicolás Franco, from whom he demanded the 73 mining concessions on which HISMA had an option to purchase.

[51] General Martínez Anido, famous for his persecution of anarchists in the early 1920s, was appointed director of Internal Security on October 31, 1937, but was in charge of such matters as censorship of spectacles and control of market abuses.

[53] After the transfer of Franco's headquarters to Burgos, Serrano Suñer drafted the Ley de Administración Central del Estado, a true "institutional charter" of the Government approved on January 30, 1938.