Aftermath
The following day, April 27th, news of Guernica’s destruction appeared in the international press, triggering widespread condemnations of the atrocity. Franco’s fascists labeled it fake news, and claimed that the town had been destroyed by its defenders as they withdrew, who then falsely pinned it on the heroic fascist air force. The Spanish Catholic Church, a mainstay of the Spanish fascist camp, backed Franco’s claims completely, and its professor of theology in Rome went so far as to claim that there was not a single German in Spain, because the local fascists needed only Spanish soldiers, who were second to none in the world.
It was too ludicrous even for Franco’s supporters abroad to sustain, especially after Condor Legion personnel acknowledged that they had bombed Guernica, claiming to have been aiming at a stone bridge just outside the town, only for strong winds to blow their bombs into Guernica. The bridge was never hit, there was virtually no wind, and anti-personnel bombs, incendiaries, and machine gun strafing are useless weapons against stone bridges. According to Richthofen’s diary, the attack had been planned with the Spanish fascists, with the aim of disrupting the Republican withdrawal through Guernica.
It is quite possible that one of the goals of bombing Guernica had been to block the roads leading through the town, but everything else points to the raid having been conducted as a live experiment on the effects of aerial terror bombing. A few years later, many European cities would share Guernica’s fate beneath German bombers, including Warsaw in 1939, Rotterdam and Coventry in 1940, Belgrade in 1941, and Stalingrad in 1942 – the last one a raid so devastating that it claimed the lives of more than 40,000 civilians in a single day.
Among those greatly moved by the fate of Guernica was Pablo Picasso. Feverishly working in his Paris apartment, the Spanish painter completed a mural sized oil painting on canvas in June of 1937, depicting the horrors that had taken place a few weeks earlier. Twenty five and a half feet wide by eleven and a half feet tall, Guernica, whose composition prominently features a gored bull, a horse, and people amidst the flames, captures the fear and agony of innocents caught up in the chaos and devastation of war.
The painting, which was exhibited at the 1937 Paris World Fair and other venues around the world, became an immediate sensation, and is perhaps Picasso’s most widely recognized work. It is considered by many art critics to be one of the most moving and powerful antiwar paintings in history. Unsurprisingly, the Germans were less than thrilled with the masterpiece. After France fell to the Germans in 1940, a Gestapo officer reportedly barged into Picasso’s apartment in Paris, and pointing at a photo of Guernica, asked: “Did you do that?!” The painter coolly replied: “No. You did“.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
Beevor, Antony – The Battle For Spain: The Spanish Civil War, 1936-39 (2006)
Guardian, The, March 26th, 2009 – In Praise of… Guernica
History Net – Spanish Civil War: German Condor Legion’s Tactical Air Power