During the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of people were executed by supporters of the Franco regime and buried in mass graves. In Almagro, Spain, archaeologists and forensic anthropologists are now working to recover the dead from one of the largest mass graves in the province of Ciudad Real and to identify them using DNA samples. Because to this day, many families of these victims do not know where their relatives who were killed at the time went to.
In 1936 there was a coup in Spain in which the military and nationalist groups under General Francisco Franco tried to overthrow the democratically elected government. In the following years a civil war broke out in the course of which hundreds of thousands of people were killed. In addition to the armed conflicts, it was above all the nationalists under Franco who carried out targeted mass killings of supporters of the Republicans. The victims, some of whom had previously been held in camps, were often buried in mass graves without their relatives knowing what had become of them or where the remains were.
Find the victims and their families
For more than 20 years, various teams of scientists have been working as part of the “Mapas de Memoria” project – maps of memory – to track down the graves of those murdered at the time, to recover the dead and to clarify their identity. As a first step, the researchers look for evidence of executions and graves from the time of the Franco regime in historical records and archive material. At the same time, other teams are trying to track down the relatives of victims of these events on the basis of eyewitness reports, current reports and also social media.
“While the archaeologists search for the human remains, the social anthropologists try to track down the families, their history and stories,” explains Jorge Moreno, head of the Mapas de Memoria project. The researchers are currently concentrating on mass graves in the province of Ciudad Real, an area around 200 kilometers south of Madrid around the city of the same name. 53 mass graves with victims of the Franco regime have been located here over the past ten years, and 3,457 dead have been identified.
Rescue of the dead from Almagro
A mass grave is currently being excavated in Almagro, in which people murdered between 1939 and 1940 were buried. The area now forms part of the local cemetery, which makes it difficult to identify the victims of the civil war. “This excavation is particularly complicated because there were still many normal burials in this area after the war,” explains forensic anthropologist Nicholas Márquez-Grant. “We therefore have to carefully uncover and rescue the dead, layer by layer, so as not to violate their dignity.” So far, the researchers have identified eleven graves of civil war victims, some of which contain several dead.
Some of the dead are clearly recognizable as murder victims through bullet holes in the skull. The scientists are now looking for relatives for an initial 26 of these dead, based on what was found in the graves and DNA samples. “Originally we only tracked four families of these dead, but in the last ten days we have managed to find 21 families and record their histories,” says Moreno. One of the relatives still alive today is José Barios, whose great-uncle was executed and buried in Almagro. “When the excavations began, it didn’t do much for me. But when they found the first dead man and I saw the skull and foot of this person, I thought: ‘Now we are finally here and find you’. “
The scientists expect that the excavations in this mass grave of Almagro will continue into June. The recovered remains are then examined in more detail by anthropologists and DNA samples are taken to identify the dead and the circumstances of their death. After comparison with the DNA samples of the relatives tracked down at the same time, the families get their dead back and can put their remains to rest in their homeland. If the researchers can no longer find any relatives, the dead are buried again in Almagro. “We are helping to restore the dignity of the dead and we are helping families to find a degree and peace,” says Maria Benito Sanchez from the Complutense University of Madrid
Source: Cranfield University