The Spanish Civil War in Film – A summary from a 1974 retrospective seminar in Berlin

A 1974 publication of the Friends of the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin was published as a guide to a three day seminar about the films of the Spanish Civil War. Some of these films were to be shown during the seminar.

The guide lists films made as early as 1932 (Les Herdes, Dir. Luis Buneul, Spain) and as recent as 1974 (Les deux Memoires, Dir. Jorge Semprun, France.)

As the two motion picture production centres in Spain were located in Madrid and Barcelona –– both occupied by Popular Front forces of the Republicans and their Soviet ally – they could put out propaganda film shorts and features throughout the war years until defeat. The Popular Front/Red forces also could rely on Hollywood, Soviet Russia, Britain, France, and other friendly film countries to churn out anti-Franco propaganda during these years as well.

The Franco forces, on the other hand, had no major motion picture studios or labs available in their Spanish zone and had to rely on foreign countries such as Germany and Italy for film assistance. Even getting weekly newsreel footage processed outside of the country and distributed required long delays.

It is telling that the 1974 publication lists, all up, the following tally of films about the War:

Popular Front/Republicans & Communists:

15 feature films (including Luis Buneul, Alain Resnais, Andre Malraux, and Hemingway’s pro–Red  For Whom the Bell Tolls),  

9 short documentary films, 

20 (Soviet) newsreels

Pro-Franco:

3 feature films (those Directed by Edgar Neville, Augusto Genina, Harald Riehn respectively.)

2 documentary films (Helden in Spanien, Im Kampf gegen den Weltfeind.) 

 9 (German) newsreels. 

1 feature film (Dir. Karl Ritter, Legion Condor, unfinished.)

There were also two German feature films with the Spanish Civil War being treated positively within a much larger story-line: Wunschkonzert and Kameraden auf See.

The 1974 Deutsche Kinemathek guide is not complete. It for instance does not include feature films produced by Franco Spain such as  ¡A mi la Legion!, Esquadrilla, Rojo y Negro, or Boda en el Infierno.  Nor does it mention the Italian Fascist feature film from 1943, Inviati  Speciali  (Corrispondenti di Guerra) / Special Entries (War Correspondents) directed by Marcellini. But it mirrors the abundance of pro–Red films available and the virtual absence of pro–Franco films.

Edgar Neville's  Frente de Madrid/In der Rotem Hölle was only re–discovered in 2008 and released in 2018 on DVD, and Ritter's In Battle Against the World Enemy /Im Kampf gegen den Weltfeind was finally also released on DVD two years earlier, in 2016. Both available from International Historic Films in Chicago, USA with English subtitles, and the latter film also with optional Spanish subtitles.  The Carlos Arevalo film Rojo y Negro  is also ignored. The Augusto Genina film and the Harald Riehn films have been available on commercial DVDs in Italian and German soundtrack versions respectively, for some years now, as well. The "Filmclub Edition" has the Genina Alcazar film listed in their forthcoming catalogue as the German synchronised DIFU version, but as at mid–2021 there is no sign of it.

Also missing from the Kinemathek publication is the September 1936 short (313 meter) film Weltfeind Nr. 1 / World Enemy Nr. 1 produced by Ufa film studio. We reproduce  from our Collection the first page cover of the film's censorship card as well as the page in which the Spanish Civil War  footage is described:

This ideological bias towards Republican/Red feature films is still being practiced in 2021. IMDb, for example lists 73 Spanish Civil War films for visitors of that very popular website. Just two are pro-Franco (Alcazar and Raza) and the other 71 films are pro-Red, anti-Franco and that's that.

The important role that Karl Ritter's two Spanish films played ---  the full–length documentary film In Battle Against the World Enemy /Im Kampf gegen den Weltfeind and his planned feature film Legion Condor ––  should be seen in the context of the very few pro–Franco films made.

A more recent study by a Spanish film historian noted the current day inventory of Spanish Civil War films found in the Spanish National Film Archives thusly:

In Spain, the Civil War has been one of the events that has generated the most ink and audiovisual materials. However, a paradoxical phenomenon has occurred. Of the more than 600 titles preserved in the Spanish Film Archive, 460 correspond to the Republican side and only 126 to the one that won the war.

The world media depicted the battle between the “Republican” government and the Franco forces as one of a legitimately elected Popular Front government of Socialists, Anarchists and Communists fighting against a failed military coup of fascists. Tens of thousands of International Brigade foreign volunteers from many countries, as well as massive military and secret police support from Stalin, made a civil war inevitable.  

Ninety years on, there is more and more evidence that the “Republican” government was elected because of fraud in 1936.  The vast majority of the 37 assassinations of politicians running for office were committed by Reds, as per Wikipedia.  

Historian Stanley Payne argues that the leftist victory may not have been legitimate; Payne says that in the evening of the day of the elections leftist mobs started to interfere in the balloting and in the registration of votes distorting the results; Payne also argues that President Zamora appointed Manuel Azaña Díaz as head of the new government following the Popular Front's early victory even though the election process was incomplete. As a result, the Popular Front was able to register its own victory at the polls and Payne alleges it manipulated its victory to gain extra seats it should not have won. According to Payne, this augmented the Popular Front's victory into one that gave them control of over two-thirds of the seats, allowing it to amend the constitution as it desired. Payne thus argues that the democratic process had ceased to exist.

Payne writes of the 1936 election stolen by the Left:

" Thus the Popular Front was permitted unilaterally to register its own victory at the polls, contrary to the spirit and practice of Republican elections. This took place in nearly all provinces on February 20, but was carried out by new leftist officials, who ratified the results produced by major irregularities in at least six provinces, handing victory to the Popular Front. There were runoff elections in several provinces on March 1, but in the face of mounting violence the right withdrew, adding more seats to the leftist majority. Late in March, when the new parliamentary electoral commission convened, the leftist majority arbitrarily reassigned thirty-two seats from the right to the left, augmenting that majority further. Elections in the provinces of Cuenca and Granada, which customarily voted for the right and had done so again in February, were declared invalid, and a new contest was scheduled for May 5. When that took place, systematic pressure was applied to make it impossible for the right to campaign, and these new elections in conservative provinces were swept by the Popular Front. In a four-step process, electoral results originally almost evenly divided between left and right were rigged and manipulated over a period of three months until the Popular Front commanded a majority of two-thirds of the seats, which would soon give it the power to amend the constitution as it pleased.
In the process, democratic elections ceased to exist." 

[See: Payne, S.G. and Palacios, J., 2014. Franco: A personal and political biography. University of Wisconsin Press. p. 104–105]

Thus the democracies of the USA, Canada, the UK, and France all were duped into thinking that they were supported a legitimate "socialist" government, as the "Popular Front"  (a term invented by the Soviet Comintern) slid into a brutal marxist dictatorship, with 80% of all military leaders being stooges of the Soviet Union within two years; the setting up of hideous torture "Cheka" prisons and concentration camps run by Soviet GPU/NKVD officers,  tens of thousands of  foreign International Brigade men and women fighting to impose Communism on Catholic Spain, with all of Spain's gold reserves shipped to the USSR to pay for weapons, and over 50,000 civilians murdered by that "government" before famine, disease, and even documented cannibalism spread in the hold-out Red centre Madrid before Franco's victory in April 1939. Ironically, most Spanish Reds who fled after the war to the USSR,  including almost the entire former leadership of the Spanish Communist Party; and tens of thousands of Leftist war orphans were quietly murdered by Stalin during WWII as per The Black Book of Communism, Harvard Univ. Press. 

Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  on Bolshevism :

“You must understand. The leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. The October Revolution was not what you call in America the “Russian Revolution.” It was an invasion and conquest over the Russian people. More of my countrymen suffered horrific crimes at their bloodstained hands than any people or nation ever suffered in the entirety of human history. It cannot be understated. Bolshevism was the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant of this reality is proof that the global media itself is in the hands of the perpetrators.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Nobel-Prize-winning novelist and historian.