 Good afternoon, I'm Ramon Romero and I shall talk to you about the importance of primary sources in order to fund or base future research and as we're ready to conclude I would like to see that the international brigades nowadays are still a topic that is really studied and analyzed in the scholarship. 80 years after the retirement actually today every year we see a great deal of publications which furthermore many of them actually deal with less known aspects or they even open new lines of research. Also it has been proven that a great deal of society is still interested on by this topic because we have numerous group of institutions and associations that are devoted to the study and analysis and rendering homage also of the brigades. Also young scholars like myself have decided that whenever we finish our studies we want to devote our research on the international brigades and personally the reasons that let me study this topic is first of all it's history because I believe it's amazing you know volunteers wear a clear example of solidarity and compromise with their own values because they were both men and women from more than 50 countries and different social and political origins who left their homes and risked their lives to fight fascism defending their ideals. Again personally the topic that I believe most interesting is the control and purges because I realize that many people were actually denouncing these facts and there's a huge lack of information on this specific topic if we compare it with other different issues being well known. Why has it have we shed some silence because there's a huge lack of documentation which allows us to work in a secure way or in a safe way but again it's a less kind aspect of the brigades. There are some researchers who have proven that yes it is possible to do so thanks to the use of primary sources. There have been there's a few researchers who have used the opportunity taken sorry the opportunity to use these newly opened archives and use this material and carry on on this research that seemed to be to have stopped so they have received a great reconnaissance and welcome in the academic world from Sidrim again primary sources are used primarily the Moscow archives and we have information on many volunteers and we believe there's no more information we can gather on them and even we have no notion or no idea of their existence but thanks to Radazki we can make this database even more comprehensive so thanks to both this researcher and the anonymous sorry the primary sources we can gather more information on anonymous volunteers I'll give you a few examples that prove that using archives allows us to advance a great deal before Sidrim we only had two volunteers from Albania and now we have 44 and another nice example is the fact that we discovered an Albanian sorry volunteer who came on a boat and near Malgrad Damar just a beach town near Barcelona it was interesting to tell them that we had found about this volunteer figure they didn't have information so the Sid the boat responsible actually the company could include his name on the list of passengers another example a German volunteer not long ago his grandson asked Lordes if we could help him find his granddad because he was a volunteer who died during the war in theory but they have never found his remains so he asked us whether we could help him to at least gather more information the family gave us a few information the fact that he came from Germany he went to Albacete he enrolled the Brigades specifically number 13th in artillery in Albacete he met a Spanish woman they ended up getting married and having a son and during the war they settled in Barcelona when they were here this German volunteer went to Paris and what happens is that they tell his woman while he's in theory in Paris that because he's been killed by a bombing while he was in Barcelona so this was really untrue because he was in Madrid so they didn't know he was in Barcelona so having this contradictory information we started digging and digging for information and it's not necessarily to say that their family was searching and searching for a long time on the lists of bombing victims or hospital victims and in order to find his remains in any cemetery so thanks to primary sources we looked in a book on German volunteers and we found this little bibliography on his figure and it's a little bit confusing because that might complement the information that the family had so far it says that he died in Barcelona on the 30th of April 1938 and not much more really this is the very few information we had really almost nothing so we see the need of investigating furthermore now primary sources set this bot the Moscow archives and the lists on information on German volunteers then we identify this person who as you will see given the fact it's a family petition I will not show his name because of respect towards the family so what we find in the Moscow archives makes us doubt on the official version because in this fragment which has been translated it is dated in 1940 was surprising us here well first of all it has been recognized that he was indeed in Paris and he made the the factors circles people who had been considered suspicious himself actually was considered a suspicious agent because it was thought that he worked for the enemy also it's very surprising the fact that when he came back to Barcelona to Spain sorry he was arrested and in theory he were he died in 1938 but in 1940 in this document it's stated that we don't know where he is so again this puzzle puzzle pieces don't match don't fit so in the many lists of suspicious or people who were considered to be suspicious we do find him in this document which I have not translated it because basically the text the information given is basically the same and here what I would like to say or highlight is what type of people it's spoken about in this list we have Trotsky's spies, poems, members in parenthesis near his near his name there is a possible accusation of being a spy so these accusations are really serious it's not the first time we have found him in the list of suspicious individuals but I would like to highlight that given the great number of lists and reports done on the Moscow archives we have identified that the control within the brigade was not an isolated phenomenon there was indeed a sort of great mechanism behind it and the last time we find this volunteer this German in the volunteers sorry in the suspects list it's this document and here he's being accused uh it's not it doesn't really clarify but he's accused here of working for the enemy being a spy for the Gestapo in Belgium this is dated of 1940 it doesn't say he died in a bombing in Barcelona or any other information he had uh the family had before so the information the family gave us and also secondary sources and also the information we have gathered uh afterwards from the archives we realize that even though nothing is 100 percent clarified this makes us doubt that he actually died in a bombing in Barcelona his family didn't find them in any of these listings even though they searched for many years and being on the suspicion we cannot really see he was a victim of the purges what's interesting in this exercise in order to finish is that after primary sources we can complement in a great deal all information we had available so far so archives really allow us to follow much closely what happened to these brigaders and as many research fellows say we could advance in some research that was stagnant or that wasn't advancing so thanks to digitalization now it is possible to check for archives from your pc and this really helps the research uh research's task even though the partial publication of some archives has allowed us to advance in or at least gives us new perspectives on some research issues in the future with the publication of many more documents maybe it will be possible to even further advance and we can maybe stay soon that in the archives we can find hidden responses hidden answers thank you very much