Getting There: Enlistment Considerations and the Recruitment Networks of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War

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