Spain to recover civil war files

As Spain rouses from its collective amnesia about its civil war, the government is attempting to recover millions of documents on the conflict and the Republican exile that followed, dispersed throughout 12 countries including Britain, France, Mexico and the United States.

The archives, many of them private, contain everything from letters from prisoners and diplomatic correspondence to an odd Russian documentary apparently showing Pablo Picasso and the Communist party secretary general digging a trench in a Madrid park, according to an article in yesterday's El Pais.

The ministry of culture plans to unify these fragments of history at a future Centre of Historic Memory in Salamanca, potentially prompting a new wave of Spanish research. "It's going to complete part of the puzzle and allow us to know what really happened here," said Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory.

Until recently, silence about the military uprising that led to Franco's 40-year dictatorship has been part of a "pact of for getting", considered essential to Spain's peaceful transition to democracy. But a new generation is demanding official recognition for victims of the Franco regime, compensation for exiled Republicans and the overturning of sentences by Franco's military tribunals. Mr Silva's association has led a drive to identify the victims of Franco's death squads buried in unmarked graves.

Bringing foreign archives to Spain will make it easier for family members to discover the fate of relatives in exile, Mr Silva told the Guardian.

Last month the ministry of culture signed an agreement with the Red Cross to acquire copies of 80,000 documents held in Geneva, including letters from wounded soldiers and lists of prisoners in Franco's jails, accumulated during the agency's work on both sides of the war. The transfer of many other documents held by associations of Republican exiles has already been agreed, El Pais said.

Historians are especially interested in documents from Russia, which include files on the International Brigades and a plan for Soviet aid to the Second Spanish Republic that could shed light on the extent of Soviet involvement in the war.