Destroyed Diversity - Josep San Martín Boncompte, Spanish Amical de Mauthausen, CIM Spanish member

Many people suffered the consequences of an inexplicable insanity to human comprehension, a calculated hate that intended to destroy everyone who was different.

The Spanish republicans -who faced fascism during the Spanish War, were expelled from their country, and continued to fight against nazism in French lands- were victims of nazi discrimination and terror that tried to annihilate them forever.

Betrayed by Petain's France and repudiated by Franco's Spain, they were captured by Hitler's nationalsocialist regime, what treated them as stateless, deporting them to the most terrible camp of that time, the Mauthausen camp.

There, about 8,000 Spanish republicans - categorized as stateless by the nazi regime- formed the only national group that wore the blue triangle on its clothes, so that they would carry the contempt of denying their origin. But they put the S over the blue triangle to remind them that they were the object of the most ruthless hate to the Reich's enemies, those who had fought with arms against nazi-fascism in Spain and France.

Only a third of them survived the inhuman cruelty of the Mauthausen camp.

The Spanish prisoners continued fighting without fainting against barbarism and Francesc Boix thought of stealing the photographic negatives from the camp's photographic laboratory, before the nazis destroyed them. With the complicity of the resistance network of the Spanish Republicans, the negatives were taken out of the camp and given to Mrs. Anna Pointner, the Mauthausen’heroine who, at the risk of her life, hid the negatives in her house until the camp was liberated. These photographs constitute today the largest graphic documentary collection of a nazi camp.

Today we continue to remember the Spanish republicans’ commitment of Mauthausen in the tireless fight for a world of free men, without discrimination or differences.

Hope their sacrifice not have been useless!

Long live freedom!