Abstract
The motivations of the tens of thousands of foreign volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War, on both sides, have been debated since the 1930s.1 Ideological considerations have received particular attention from both historians and literary writers. The protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan, ‘fought now in this war because it had started in a country that he loved and he believed in the Republic and that if it were destroyed life would be unbearable for all those people who believed in it’.2 Most volunteers, however, had never been to Spain before the war. They saw the conflict in broader European terms, rather than in Spanish terms, and placed it within the political frameworks of their own home contexts.3 Richard Baxell found that many British volunteers who joined the International Brigades had bitter experiences of fighting against Oswald Mosley’s fascists. He argues that they had realized that ‘direct action’ against Mosley and his supporters was an effective strategy which could and should be emulated to stop Franco.4 Many of the German volunteers had formerly been imprisoned by the Nazi regime and were expelled or fled from their country prior to going to Spain. The war was an opportunity to fight back, as it were, with guns in their hands. In the words of Josie McLellan, ‘The civil war was both a displaced fight against Hitler and a chance to strike a blow against international fascism.’5
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Notes
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (London, 2004), p. 170.
This holds true not only for members of the International Brigades but also for the foreign volunteers who joined the Nationalist side: Judith Keene, ‘Fighting for God, for Franco and (most of all) for Themselves: Right-Wing Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War’, in Christine G. Krüger and Sonja Levsen, War Volunteering in Modern Times: From the French Revolution to the Second World War (Basingstoke, 2011), p. 218.
Richard Baxell, British Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (London and New York, 2004), pp. 31–3.
Josie McLellan, ‘“I Wanted To Be a Little Lenin”: Ideology and the German International Brigade Volunteers’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41, no. 2 (2006), p. 291.
See, for example: McLellan, ‘I Wanted To Be’, p. 292; Baxell, British Volunteers, p. 14; Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Stanford, 1994), p. 16;
Vjeran Pavlaković, ‘Twilight of the Revolutionaries: “Naši Španci” and the End of Yugoslavia’, Europe-Asia Studies, 62, no. 7 (2010), p. 1178.
Esmond Romilly, Boadilla (London, 1971), p. 22.
Michael W. Jackson, Fallen Sparrows: The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (Philadelphia, 1994), p. 47.
Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘The Men of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion’, The Journal of American History, 54, no. 2. (1967), p. 337;
Vincent Brome, The International Brigades — Spain 1936–1939 (London, 1965), p. 34. See also: McLellan, ‘I Wanted To Be’, p. 295.
Aleksander Szurek, The Shattered Dream (New York, 1989), p. 85.
Phyllis Auty, ‘Popular Front in the Balkans: 1. Yugoslavia’, Journal of Contemporary History, 5, no. 3 (1970), p. 59.
See also: Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution 1919–1953 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), pp. 89–92.
Vlajko Begović, ‘KPJ i rat španiji 1936–1939’, in Čedo Kapor (ed), Španija 1936– 1939 (Belgrade, 1971), pp. 21–2.
Nir Arielli, ‘Induced to Volunteer? The Predicament of Jewish Communists in Palestine and the Spanish Civil War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46, no. 4 (2011), pp. 854–70.
Stanislao G. Pugliese, ‘Death in Exile: The Assassination of Carlo Rosselli’, Journal of Contemporary History, 32, no. 3 (1997), pp. 307–8.
Víctor Alba and Stephen Schwartz, Spanish Marxism vs. Soviet Communism (New Brunswick, 1988), pp. 124, 296–7;
Michael Alpert, A New International History of the Spanish Civil War (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 51.
Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times (London: 2002), p. 341.
Daniel Kowalsky, ‘The Soviet Union and the International Brigades, 1936–1939’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 19 (2006), pp. 681–704;
Niccolò Capponi, I legionari rossi (Rome, 2000), pp. 52, 63;
Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 380; Alpert, A New International History, pp. 51–2.
Rémi Skoutelsky, ‘L’engagement des volontaires français en Espagne républicaine’, Le Mouvement Social, 181 (1997), p. 8.
Reinhard Nachtigal, ‘The Repatriation and Reception of Returning Prisoners of War, 1918–22’, Immigrants & Minorities, 26, no. 1 (2008), p. 167;
Josh Erickson, ‘The Origins of the Red Army’, in Richard Pipes (ed), Revolutionary Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1968), pp. 229, 251–53.
Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck and G. Sevostianov (eds), Spain Betrayed (New Haven and London, 2001), p. 104;
Stanley Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New Haven and London, 2004), p. 165;
R. Dan Richardson, ‘The Defense of Madrid: Mysterious Generals, Red Front Fighters, and the International Brigades’, Military Affairs, 43, no. 4 (1979), p. 181. Kléber was later executed as part of Stalin’s purges.
Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Tito: Yugoslavia’s Great Dictator — a Reassessment (London, 2006), pp. 13, 22.
Len Crome, ‘Walter (1897–1947): A Soldier in Spain’, History Workshop, 9 (1980), pp. 116–28.
R. Dan Richardson, Comintern Army (Lexington, 1982), pp. 32–4.
See, for example: Imperial War Museum (IWM), interview with Harold Fraser, oral history recording no. 795, recorded in 1982; interview with Patrick Carry, reel 1, oral history recording no. 799, recorded in 1976; S. P. Mackenzie, ‘The Foreign Enlistment Act and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939’, Twentieth Century British History, 10, no. 1 (1999), pp. 59–62.
Milovan Djilas, Memoir of a Revolutionary (New York, 1973), p. 266.
Charlotte Haldane, Truth Will Out (London, 1949), pp. 110–22.
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London, 1989), p. vi.
See, for instance: Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia, 2008), pp. 8, 40.
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Arielli, N. (2013). Getting There: Enlistment Considerations and the Recruitment Networks of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. In: Arielli, N., Collins, B. (eds) Transnational Soldiers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137296634_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137296634_13
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