Rotspanier. Debate with Regard to the Classification of the Spanish Prisoners Deported to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp

Abstract

Spanish prisoners deported to the Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp were treated and classified in an anomalous and problematic fashion that did not correspond to the real reasons for their detention. Thus, despite being prosecuted as Rotspaniers – ‘red Spaniards’ – a category initially employed to designate those Germans who had fought in the Spanish Civil War in support of the republican government, they were systematically forced to wear a blue badge that, according to the codes usually implemented in camps, classified them as ‘emigrants’, an equally strange category that was applied to all those Jews or political exiles who had fled Germany following the rise of Nazism but had been arrested upon their return to the country. This reality, however, was not shared by the other Spaniards distributed across the other camps in the system or by the other Rotspaniers present in Mauthausen, who were given the red badge that indicated they were political prisoners. This is the anomaly addressed by this article, which, based on study of the administrative sources at Mauthausen and thorough analysis of ‘protective custody’ as a legal instrument employed by the Nazi authorities to neutralize their enemies, enables us to revisit the debate and propose a new interpretative framework through which to re-evaluate the Spanish experience in the network of German camps.