[8]: 89–94  In the 1936–1945 period, Francoist Spain had many officially designated enemies: supporters of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939), liberals, socialists of different stripes, Protestants, intellectuals, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jews, immigrants as well as Basque, Catalan, Andalusian, and Galician nationalists.

[16] After a trio of crises in 1917, the spiral of violence in Morocco and the lead-up to the installment of the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera through a 1923 military coup d'état won the acquiescence from Alfonso XIII.

Upon the political failure of the dictatorship, Alfonso XIII removed support from Primo de Rivera (who was thereby forced to resign in 1930) and favoured (during the so-called dictablanda) a return to the pre-1923 state of affairs.

[8]: 223  President Alcalá-Zamora's reforms to Spanish society were continually blocked by the right-wing parties and rejected by the far-left-wing National Confederation of Labour (CNT, Confederación Nacional del Trabajo).

And here is the work – weight and glory – entrusted by chance of destiny to military justice.According to historian Francisco Espinosa, Felipe Acedo proposed an exemplary model of repression to create the new fascist state "on the site of the race."

Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera y Munro, a public affairs officer for the Nationalist forces, told the American reporter John Thompson Whitaker:[24]: 37 You know what's wrong with Spain?

[7]: 233  Most of the men and women taken out from the prisons and jails were killed by death squads, from the trade unions, and by the paramilitary militias of the political parties (the Republican CNT, UGT, and PCE; the Nationalist Falange and Carlist).

[6]: 264–265  Nevertheless, the significant differences between White political terrorism and Red political terrorism was indicated by Francisco Partaloa, prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Madrid (Tribunal Supremo de Madrid) and a friend of the aristocrat General Queipo de Llano, who witnessed the assassinations, first in the Republican camp and then in the Nationalist camp of the Spanish Civil War: I had the opportunity of being a witness to the repression in both areas.

In republican Spain, most of the killing was the consequence of anarchy, the outcome of a national breakdown, and not the work of the state; even though some political parties in some cities abetted the enormities, and even though some of those responsible ultimately rose to positions of authority.

[32]The White Terror commenced on 17 July 1936, the day of the Nationalist coup d'état, with hundreds of assassinations effected in the area controlled by the right-wing rebels, but it had been planned before earlier.

[36]: 343–349 In The Spanish Labyrinth (1943),[37] Gerald Brenan said that: ... thanks to the failure of the coup d'état and to the eruption of the Falangist and Carlist militias, with their previously prepared lists of victims, the scale on which these executions took place exceeded all precedent.

[50] Features such as the institutional processes, policies and practices put in motion by the victors, the indiscriminate massacres, the re-catholisation of the defeated, the forced exile and the exclusion from the benefits of full citizenship or the application of retroactive repressive rulings crystallised in the definition of the Republicans as anti-Spanish, a terminology that intermingles the perception of the enemies as "non-citizens", as "inferior beings" and as alien to the values that defined the self-imagined (confessional) nation.

The most elementary human rights were unknown and people were killed as easily as rabbits...Because of this mass terror in many areas controlled by the Nationalists, thousands of Republicans left their homes and tried to hide in nearby forests or mountains.

Advancing Nationalist troops scrawled "Your children will give birth to fascists" on the walls of captured buildings, and many women taken prisoner were force fed castor oil, then paraded in public naked, while the powerful laxative did its work.

[24]: 38–39 Estimates of executions behind the Nationalist lines during the Spanish Civil War range from fewer than 50,000[28] to 200,000[29]: 539  (Hugh Thomas: 75,000,[6]: 900  Secundino Serrano: 90,000;[48]: 32  Josep Fontana: 150,000;[5]: 23  and Julián Casanova: 100,000.

[7]: 194 Even towns of rural areas were not spared the terror, such as Lora del Rio in the province of Seville, where the Nationalists killed 300 peasants as a reprisal for the assassination of a local landowner.

A close friend of Franco, Victor Ruiz Albéniz, published an article in which he demanded that Catalonia receive "a Biblical punishment (Sodom and Gomarrah) to purify the red city, the headquarters of anarchism and separatism as the only remedy to remove these two cancers by relentless cauterisation" ("un castigo bíblico (Sodoma y Gomorra) para purificar la ciudad roja, la sede del anarquismo y separatismo como único remedio para extirpar esos dos cánceres por termocauterio implacable"), while for Serrano Suñer, brother-in-law of Franco and Minister of the Interior, Catalan nationalism was "an illness" ("una enfermedad.")

The man appointed as civil governor of Barcelona, Wenceslao González Oliveros, said that "Spain was raised, with as much or more force against the dismembered statutes as against Communism and that any tolerance of regionalism would again lead to the same processes of putrefaction that we have just surgically removed."

In short, the most diverse forms of repression: political, social, labor, ideological, and in the case of Catalonia, in an attempt of cultural genocide that sought to do away with its specific national personality...The confluence between Spanish regenerationism and the degenerationist theories originated in France and Great Britain must also be considered.

The Catalan industrial wealth cannot be tolerated either, and Catalonia is accused of having a favorable treatment, impoverishing the rest of the Spaniards, in a behavior that is described as Semitic (according to the National-Socialist ideology to use work as a means to exploit and subjugate nations).

Franco i els artifex de l'odi",[69] a number of characters theorized about "anti-Spain", pointing to enemies, and in this sense accused politicians and republican intellectuals of being of Jewish race or servants of the same as masons.

In this regard, rebel spokesman Gonzalo de Aguilera, in 1937, told a journalist: "Now I hope you understand what we mean by the regeneration of Spain ... Our program consists of exterminating a third of the Spanish male population ...", and an interview can also be mentioned in an Italian newspaper where Franco describes that the war was aimed at "to save the Homeland that was sinking in the sea of dissociation and racial degeneration".

[2]: 110  Recent searches conducted with parallel excavations of mass graves in Spain (in particular by the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, ARMH) estimate that the total of people executed after the war arrive at a number between 15,000 and 35,000.

Stanley Payne observes that Franco's repression did not undergo "cumulative radicalisation" like that of Hitler; in fact, the opposite occurred, with major persecution being slowly reduced.

[77] Furthermore, hundreds of thousands were forced into exile (470,000 in 1939),[36]: 283  with many intellectuals and artists who had supported the Republic[78] such as Antonio Machado, Ramon J. Sender, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Pedro Salinas, Manuel Altolaguirre, Emilio Prados, Max Aub, Francisco Ayala, Jorge Guillén, León Felipe, Arturo Barea, Pablo Casals, Jesús Bal y Gay, Rodolfo Halffter, Julián Bautista, Salvador Bacarisse, Josep Lluís Sert, Margarita Xirgu, Maruja Mallo, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, Américo Castro, Clara Campoamor, Victoria Kent, Pablo Picasso, Maria Luisa Algarra, Alejandro Casona, Rosa Chacel, Maria Zambrano, Josep Carner, Manuel de Falla, Paulino Masip, María Teresa León, Alfonso Castelao, Jose Gaos and Luis Buñuel.

[8]: 419  Other Spanish Republicans were detained by the Gestapo, handed over to Spain and executed, among them Julián Zugazagoitia, Juan Peiró, Francisco Cruz Salido and Lluis Companys (president of the Generalitat of Catalonia)[8]: 412  and another 15,000 were forced to work building the Atlantic Wall.

The Code of Military Justice that regulated the entire trial process effectively created a denouncer's charter and allowed prosecutions to begin through 'any denunciation worthy of consideration'.

Following the occupation of a village or town the new authorities set up special denunciation centres and placed announcements in newspapers and government publications exhorting people to denounce Republicans.

The 1960s saw the start of the labour strikes led by the illegal union trade Workers' Commissions (Comisiones Obreras) linked to the Communist Party, and the protest in the universities continued to grow.

Nevertheless, in October 2008 a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, of the National Court of Spain authorized, for the first time, an investigation into the disappearance and assassination of 114,000 victims of the Francoist State between 1936 and 1952.