International Brigades

Formation and organization

The Comintern Executive Committee decided to create the International Brigades on 18 September 1936, nine days after the first meeting of the Non-Intervention Committee. The communist parties recruited volunteers by national quota; they travelled through France and reached the base at Albacete on 13 October, and the Republican government formally incorporated the Brigades into its armed forces on 22 October. The base was run by a troika: the French communist André Marty as commander, Luigi Longo as Inspector-General, and Giuseppe Di Vittorio as chief political commissar. The XI Brigade was formed first, followed by the XII, XIII, XIV and XV, and as battalions were organized by nationality or language group, few were made up of a single nationality. Hundreds of foreigners were already fighting in the workers' militias when the Brigades were created, while foreign volunteers of the revolutionary left fought in separate units.

Who fought, and where

Some 30,000 people passed through the Brigades over the course of the war, and no more than 20,000 were ever present at one time. The French contingent was the largest at about 9,000, followed by up to 5,000 Germans and Austrians, 3,000 Poles, 3,000 Italians, 2,800 Americans and 1,800 Britons. Many volunteers came from French-speaking countries, and Jews were particularly numerous: about half of the Polish volunteers and 30 to 40 percent of the American ones, with a separate Jewish company formed inside a Polish battalion. Most were communists, but socialists, liberals and people with no party also enlisted. The Brigades went into action at the defence of Madrid and went on to fight at Jarama, Guadalajara, Brunete, Belchite, Teruel and the Ebro; until the spring of 1937 they were a key force superior to other units of the Popular Army, and the news of their formation raised morale among Republican supporters. They were also thrown into the most vulnerable sectors as shock troops, so their losses were heavier than those of most units, and many volunteers had never received military training. The number killed remains unsettled: the Albacete staff reported 4,575, an NKVD report to Moscow gave 3,615, and Negrín mentioned 5,000 in his farewell address, while scholarly estimates range from about 6,500 to 10,000 and as high as 15,000.

Discipline and repression inside the ranks

Control of the Brigades lay with the communist parties and the Comintern, and military cadres sent from the Soviet Union staffed the command. Severe discipline and the hunt for 'Trotskyists' shaped the units and their rear areas. Marty admitted, when the French communist leadership demanded an explanation, that he had ordered the execution of 500 Brigaders, a figure that remains contested. The Brigades as such did not lead the suppression, but the security apparatus of the German Communist Party and NKVD agents operated inside and around them and took part in the arrest of foreign radicals and dissidents during the Barcelona street fighting of May 1937.

Disbandment and after

By July 1938 only 14,175 of the Brigades' 40,149 troops were foreigners, the rest being Spanish conscripts; one record puts the Spanish share as high as 90 percent. From 1937 the Republican government deliberately played down the Brigades to win support from the Western democracies, since a force of volunteers from many countries sat awkwardly with propaganda that stressed a war of national independence. On 21 September 1938 the Negrín government announced the withdrawal of the volunteers at the League of Nations, and at the farewell parade in Barcelona on 28 October Ibárruri sent the Brigades off with the words 'You are history. You are legend.' Exiles who had no country to return to were given Spanish citizenship, while Belgium and the Netherlands stripped their volunteers of citizenship for serving in a foreign army. After the war the veterans were commemorated as symbols of anti-fascism and promoted to leading posts in the Soviet Union and much of Eastern Europe, but the political purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s cost almost all of them their positions and brought interrogations, and in Czechoslovakia Otto Šling was executed in 1952. Veterans who returned to countries such as West Germany and France faced police surveillance and were denied employment.