 Hello, good morning. We shall begin today again with the sessions of this conference. And we shall begin with Professor Ramon Arnavath. Ramon Arnavath is a PhD in history by the Pompil Fabre University. He's a researcher at the ISACAC, the History Society Politics and Culture Research Group from Catalonia to the world. He has conducted several archaeological and historical researches on Franco bombings in Catalonia and active and passive defense in the public and cities during the Spanish Civil War. And as a result of these pieces of research, he's published several papers and books, Attack and Defense in the Real World, the Parades under the Bombs, Chronicle of an Air Siege, 1937, 1939. Another one is Research Strategies and Archaeological Historic Knowledge Transfer the Case of the Republican Aviation. And another one is Air Raid Shelters, History, Archaeology, and Heritage. He's also creator and director of the Interpretation Center for Republican Aviation and the World in Santa Margarita dos Monjos. And he's also president of the Institute for Panadies Studies, Ramon Arlamatangines Puente, who's also a historian at Robiré Vigil University, who unfortunately wasn't able to make it here today, have conducted thorough historical research in the Spanish and Italian funds on the bombings of the Italian aviation on Barcelona during the Civil War, which was the foundation of the legal basis for the cause in court. And we've invited him here to give us the results of this research. So you have the floor. Thank you very much for inviting me here. If we talk about shelters, we have to talk about air raids, about bombings. Otherwise, why build shelters? We've talked a lot about air raids in the past, not so much about shelters. This is why it's logical for the sessions to revolve around that. And yesterday, we already talked about this a bit. But I think we should always remember it. And we oftentimes forget it. We forget the fact that the Spanish Civil War was also an international conflict due to its implications. And this is related to the specific aspect that we are interested in here today, which is bombings. We also talked about the concept of total warfare, which was developed at the end of the First World War. In that case, Ludenfor, the German general, theorized that future wars would become total wars. The entire country would be involved in the war, and there would be no difference between the front line and the rear guard. And the other element is that in order to make total warfare possible, a weapon was needed because artillery reaches as much as it can reach, infantry, and the weapon that was needed was military aviation. And the Italians in the 20s, when Mussolini was in power, they were the ones who developed these military aeronautics. And when the Spanish Civil War started, they were the ones who were best prepared for this concept of aerial war, strategic war, that was discussed yesterday as well. So aviation becomes the decisive weapon when it came to winning or losing wars. This happened in Spain and in China and Japan around the same years, 1937, 1938, 1939, with one of its utmost expressions during the Second World War. And from here on out, whoever controlled the airspace controlled the war mostly. So as I said, in order to understand bombings, we need to understand how a city defends itself. And in order to understand how cities defend themselves, we need to understand and study the bombings to understand these relationships between one factor and the other. In the case of Barcelona and Catalonia and the Mediterranean coast, the key aspect until the very end of the war was the fact that Franco troops wanted to dominate the island of Majorca, which became actually an aircraft carrier as such. And the Condor Legion was based there. The Spanish aviation was based there. In the Colera Harbor, they flew directly to Almería and to Catalonia and Barcelona, which is the topic at hand today. And we were saying that it's an international conflict, and we must bear that in mind. When the war started, the little aviation that was available was on the side of the Republicans. At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, there were no weapons for aircraft. There was no airborne military. The few aircraft that were available were linked to the vessels. And the aircrafts were then transferred to the Spana Brigade, which were the forces that supported Franco. The aviation weapon, per se, was created by the Republicans at the beginning. But the Spanish aviation still carries this St. Andrew's cross, which was the cross of the fascists, of Franco's troops, which is a contradiction of history. So when the war started, the Republicans received the help of the Soviet Union, a bunch of pilots and planes. But as the war evolved, Italian and German support meant that they were overpowered. And the Italian and German aviation contributed 1,552 planes to Franco, whereas the Soviet Union contributed 657 to the other side. Of course, planes were built in Spain around 250. With the aid of the Soviets, they were built in Spain, not brought from abroad. And Franco's aviation had in total around 1,600 planes at the end of the war, or had had a total of 1,600, whereas the Republican aviation had had 1,100. So there is an important significant differential, which is one more factor that helps us to understand Franco's victory. The main planes that had played a part in Catalan and Barcelona bombings were the ones that flew from Puglianza, the Hankel HE-59. It was quite rudimentary, but quite a lot of damage. And also Saboya S-81 and Saboya S-79, the former being the most mother military aircraft back in that time in the world. Towards the end of the war, the Condor Legion also intervened in these bombings with the 111 Hankel, the ones you can see in the pictures that was practically January 1939. These Hankel 111 planes were the ones that bombed mainly the port and port area in January before Franco's troops entered the city. And we said it yesterday as well, but we must remind you that in 1937, Barcelona was a political capital for three governments, as we said, but it was also the financial and the social capital. It was the main reserve from the military, economic, political point of view of the Republic. So it was logical for Barcelona, within this dynamic of Total Warfare, to become a target of Franco's aviation. And when we talk about the air raids on Barcelona and other places, we oftentimes forget. And some even say mistakenly that they were an attack from Spain to Catalonia in the Spanish Civil War. This cannot be proven from any point of view, because a great deal of the blame of the efficacy of Franco's bombings was the espionage from Catalans who were pro-Franco. They bombed the active defense sites in Barcelona. And here you can see information about how Italian bombers bombed mostly all of Catalonia and the entire coast, having their base in Majorca. This is a map of the bombings that we created with the Barcelona History Museum. These were the areas where bombings focused, the center of Barcelona, the poblano area with industrial activity. And the main areas where the population lived. Back then, between locals or residents and migrants, refugees who had come to Barcelona, Barcelona had around 1 million inhabitants. So it was a very densely populated city during the bombings. And beyond the material effects and the human physical impacts and deaths injured and demolished houses, the main damage of regular bombing on a city is this feeling of anxiety. Even passive defense manual of the city of Barcelona and the Catalan government say this, this feeling of being constantly in danger, because bombings don't always take place at the same time of day, they don't always have the same characteristics. And there may be one, two, three, four rates. So when there are bombings, but especially when there are no bombings, when you are not under the bombs at that moment, you're always thinking about the possibility of a raid and where are your parents, your children, your relatives. And these psychological anxieties, an important element that helps explain a great deal of the reaction of the population. And in order to defend themselves from these bombings, citizens organized, or these anti-aircraft defense was organized. Active and passive, we sometimes study one or the other, but they are related. Active defense by the military trying to prevent the bombings and passive defense, which in the event of a bombing tries to defend the population as best it can. And they have to be linked for them to be effective. Barcelona was probably, well, not probably, was surely the Catalan city with the most powerful active defense. It does not mean it was enough, but it was the strongest out of the ones available due to the elements they had. And also the most active or the most powerful passive defense. We normally associate passive defense with air raid shelters. Air raid shelters are one element, but passive defense is a lot more. And for air raid shelters to be effective, you need organization. People need to know what shelter to go to, how to behave. You need medics. You need teams to raise the alarm when there is a raid, and also teams to remove the rubble. So you need an entire organization. It's not enough to build shelters in order to have an effective passive defense mechanism. You need a lot more going around that. There are two active defense systems, the cannons at Tur de la Ravira, which are now part of the museum. And for a long time, in Barcelona, you could only visit air raid shelters, and now you can also visit an active defense space. And if you visit both, you can have a more global idea of Barcelona's defense against the raids. There were no raiders. This is a phono locator. Well, I will not take the time now to explain how it worked, but it was the president of the raider. The aviation, of course. We've debated a lot about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of anti-aircraft defenses. This is an S-81 shot down by the Tur de la Ravira defenses. And why were there just a few planes shot down? Well, because they knew where the active defense, the anti-aircraft batteries were, and they did not approach them. They went straight into the city and out. And the studies of more developed anti-aircraft batteries in the UK, for example, versus the German planes demonstrate that you needed a lot of projectiles to actually hit a plane. Passive defense is the element of interest in this conference. And we should say that both the Barcelona tank council and the Catalan government started working on passive defense before any bombings started. But the planning of these passive defense was done following the criteria of the First World War. So the likelihood that gas would be used in the bombings, which is what had happened in the First World War. So once the maritime bombings started and then the air raids started, they had to adapt their entire strategy. This is one of the maps, not as modern as the ones the archeology service created. But this is a map that was created in the past about the listed shelters in Barcelona. Yesterday, someone asked about women. Where are the women? Well, here we have quite a few in Gabba, a few women in a factory building the air raid shelters and women in Raus as well, building an air raid shelter. Yes, there were women. And in some cases, we have proof in the pictures. Not many pictures, but we do have some. And as I said, passive defense is more than air raid shelters. Here we have the rescue services and the services that removed the rubble, which were essential in order to save lives after the raid was over. And our colleague said that we had been commissioned an expert report on the Barcelona bombings. We had already been researching about this, but we did so more thoroughly in 2017. Because basically what the town council was interested on, since it was a criminal cause, we needed to have the names of the pilots who had bombed the city. We more or less had a record of the bombings, but we needed the names. And there was a difficulty there. Most reports use nicknames, not real names. So we were able to find about 176 pilots who were mostly, all of them were dead, so there was no criminal cause against them. And this is the information we collected based on those studies and previous studies. We based our research on the Rome Registry, which is very thorough. Some information in the German records, some information also in the Navy archive in Spain, in Abiso de Marques, the historic archive of the air forces and the Barcelona board. So by crossing all of this information, the data that we have at the moment there were 256 bombings on Barcelona during the war, eight of them maritime, 248 were air raids. And these started on March 16, 1937. Out of the 248 air raids, most of them until 1939 came from Majorca, 157 were perpetrated by 874 planes of the Italian Legion, 85 by 317 planes of the Condor Legion from Germany, and six were identified because there is information, but not enough. And as to the official data of the Passive Defense Board of Barcelona, which is different from the data that we have, but the official data from the Passive Defense Board said 196 bombings, 192 warnings without air raid. And these bombings happened until January 5, 1939, 20 days before the war ended in Barcelona, 1,816 dead and 2,719 injured. The data are quite similar. And here you have the Italian Aviation Legion, which acted on Barcelona, the Condor Legion, and data on destruction, victims, which was one of the things that were sought after in this expert report of the Town Council of Barcelona. The first bombing in the city of Barcelona had a very significant impact. We should bear in mind that during the first bombings, not only in Barcelona, but in other cities as well, many people would go up to the rooftop to see what was happening. So they were not even aware of the danger yet. But this first bombing, perpetrated with three planes in one raid, left a very harsh trace in Barcelona. From that day onwards, everyone in Barcelona was aware of what bombings meant. And also the pilots who bombed that day in their report, they talked about the huge moral effect achieved on the population. For those of you who can read Italian, you have it on the screen. So even the pilots who perpetrated the bombings reported on the huge effect they perceived. And they were up in the air. And even from up there, they were able to see the impact. They were 4,000 meters up in the air. These are pictures of Barcelona at the end of the war. There was a report of buildings that had been affected in different categories and the bombings became regular. But there were a few which were specifically deadly, 29th March, 1937, 64 deaths. 1st October, 1937. And January, 1938, in San Felinmeri, 210 deaths. Of course, the three days of March or 31st December 1938, when the war was quite on the way. I wanted to show this picture here because the victims, we normally talk a lot about victims when we talk about the war. But behind the victims, there are trajectories. And victims, well, we say a child of that age, a woman of that age, yes, that is interesting. And I've catalogued them like that, too. But it's interesting to understand why they are victims. They were victims because they were living in a city that defended the Republic and that the fascist aviation wanted to destroy. These are not, they were not people who were just walking around without an ideology and a bomb was dropped on them. I think we need to remember these stories of the victims and the ones who did not end up being victims because they used the shelters and they protected them. And while San Felinmeri is a milestone, remember that for many years, the fascist for many years said that the bullet marks on the walls were because Republicans shot down right-wing prisoners there, which is not the case. And this is an example of saturation bombing that doesn't let you breathe, doesn't let you look up. And the goal of this saturation bombing is to demoralize the population. But if we put it into context, we must bear two things in mind. First, that Franco himself, due to international pressure, asked Mussolini to stop. That's an interesting thing. What is this saying? It's saying that the Italian Legion and the Condor Legion acted as independent weapons. Many of their strategies did not depend on what Franco decided. They were the ones making the decisions. Sometimes they coordinated, especially as the war lapsed, as the war progressed. But the Italians and the Germans brought the pilot, the planes, the gas, everything. And they were independent. Five minutes. Oh, wow. OK. And here we have a report of the North American ambassador who wrote that what he was seeing in Barcelona was unheard of. And these bombings over Barcelona in the end, why did they bomb Barcelona? There are many reasons. The Italians lost in Guadalajara, so they wanted to revenge. And Hitler just announced that he would occupy Austria. And Mussolini thought that Hitler was neglecting him. And he said, OK, we will show our strength to show that we're powerful too, so that they decided on bombing Barcelona. So the international context, as I said before, is essential. Testimonials of the people who experienced the bombings. We have a document that we will somebody published in the form of a book with testimonials of the pilots doing the bombings and the people receiving the bombs. Cardinal Segura with his statements when the pope was asking them to let down. And Cardinal Segura said, we will let down once we have wiped them out. Interesting statements. These are the Italian aviation units that took part. The victims, out of the victims what interests me is that most of them were civil population. The military don't amount to up to 10% of the victims. And this graph is the number of attacks and the number of deaths. And here you can see very well how until the beginnings of 1938 there were few attacks causing many deaths. But once active and passive defense starts to be effective, the number of bombings increases, but the number of deaths drops. So this active and passive defense was successful. For me, this graph is key in order to understand all of that process. They had to drop many more bombs. They needed to organize many more rates to cause far less victims. So I think that's interesting. It's a data, data. That's all right. What I'm interested in is this. This is a list of 176 pilots that we contributed to the legal cause, who bombed Barcelona, listing if they had bombed Barcelona once, 17 times, 24 times. And all the most relevant contributions that we made was that one of the few pilots who was still alive, he was 101. He's dead now, Tenuchi, who was conducted by the Italian government. And when this cause was ongoing, he was in the papers. He always said that he had never bombed Barcelona. And we proved that he participated with a BR-20 in a bombing in January 1939. But now they're all dead. So there's nothing we can do about that now. And the fact that Germany and Italy use the Spanish Civil War as a test bed, this is where they, for example, tested these two, because they were so important during the Second World War. The Italians, as they occupied Catalonia, they drafted reports of the bombings and the effects, the impact of the bombs in order to improve their efficacy. This is another statement. This statement by Galliazzo was after the January 30, 1939 bombing on San Felipe Neri Square, who said that with nine planes and two raids, we've destroyed Barcelona. And this is another important element that I'm almost done, which is that Ilaris Salvador, mayor of Barcelona, who was invited to go to the UK. And there were UK delegations that came here as well. And he tried to explain to them. And the English did not understand how bombings were at that time. He said it wasn't difficult to make them understand their mistake. This topic was of extraordinary interest for official parties and the Parliament Committee, which in London dealt with structuring the anti-aircraft defense of the city. So he used Barcelona as an example. Barcelona was used as an example for anti-aircraft defense. And there were barriers and military technicians in London. They built Churchill's shelter. But Churchill, who was a conservative right-wing man, a classist, said that, and there no circumstance would the English run like rats to hide during an air raid. And Londoners, and I guess Gabriel Muschenska may talk about this later, they used the metro station, the metro tunnels. But they did not build many shelters. They gave these metallic elements so that people could build their own shelters in their backyard. And I'll finish. Normally, we talk about Barcelona, Catalonia. There is even a film, Barcelona, Martyr. And my question is, and I have the answer, is Barcelona, Martyr, victim or resistant? And I think with these sessions, we must prove that Barcelona resisted. So what's important for us to remember for collective memory and democratic memory beyond the bombings is this capacity to resist. That will be all. Thank you very much. Perfect. Thank you. Let's open the Q&A session if there are questions from the audience. Good morning. My name is Joseph Giordà. I belong to the Amical of Matausen and Triangla Blau. What were the differences between the bombings here in Catalonia, Barcelona, Catalonia, and other cities? What are the differences with the bombings in Andalucía or the condor legion bombing of Guernica and Durango? The condor legion decided not to bomb the industrial centers in the Basque country region, because that can be useful for Franco. And in other cities, the idea was to bomb everything to undermine the morale of the population. We could hear witness from Italy that a sort of reconciliation seemed to be something that we were seeking. But what I'm saying is that we don't forget, because the last bomb that was dropped in Barcelona was just where I left. So we don't forget, and we don't forgive. I've talked about Barcelona because they asked me to talk about Barcelona. The bombings at the rear guard, they all follow the same tactics, which is to scare the population and to destroy industrial centers. Why in Guernica or in the Basque country, these industrial centers were preserved? Because they knew that they were going to occupy these areas. But they didn't know where, when Barcelona would surrender. So the idea was to destroy Barcelona. And that depended on the interest of the war, depending on the moment. There were specific attacks that were aimed at destroying the morale of the population. Other attacks are more targeted aims like the port of Barcelona. And that's different from the desbandada, because there, they don't bomb the population. They are using a different kind of planes. It's the same that the Germans did on January 15, 1939, with some refugees that were going from Tarragona to Barcelona. And they were going through Panades, and they were all killed. But if we talk about bombings and the rear guard, there is no difference. The difference here depends on the characteristics, on the features of the city. And it was important here to damage Barcelona. It was more important to bomb Barcelona than other cities, because Barcelona was better known internationally. And Tarragona, Reus, were also bombed. And concerning what you mentioned, I've talked about the judicial case. Everyone that took part has died. And the Italian government, while there were people alive, have been trying to prevent this legal cause to move on. So I think that what we need to seek is a political case. I think that the Italian government should apologize, as the German government did for Guernica. First of all, because the democratic government, Italian democratic government, after the Second World War, received money from Franco, because they had intervened during the Spanish Civil War. And that happened until the 60s. So the Italian government cannot say that this has nothing to do with them, because they had been receiving money for the bombings. Other questions? I would like to ask you, if you can tell us, what's the memory of the bombings in Italy? Because you have been studying the Italian archives. Do you know what's the memory of the Barcelona bombings in Italy? To tell you the truth, officially, there is the intention of covering this intervention. However, there are very active groups, particularly in the north of Italy, which try to talk about that. Working group has been set. The Rome is participating in this group. The Museum for Peace in Guernica participates in this group. We participate as well. And we are meeting with Italian historians, Catalan Spanish historians, to jointly reflect on that. Think about that. However, we have to think that we cannot talk in general. Italians bomb us, but there were also many Italians that help us, that were part of the international brigade. So when we say Italians, German, well, it was a state. It was a government. It was a strategy and people. But they were not all like that. I've always thought that, instead, maybe of trying to bring to justice pilots, we should go after the state. Good morning. I would like to answer the person who asked the first question. I'm the author of the poster for the shelters in Bilbao. And in Bilbao, at the university, we did a thorough study about the bombings. And it's a thorough study because it's day by day. And we cover all areas affected. And we prove how industrial areas were bombed and factories were bombed. Not the big ones, but many industrial areas were bombed. And weapon factories were also bombed. Couple of things, a remark concerning your presentation that I found very interesting. There is a key issue. When you show the number of victims and bombings, I had similar graphs. The Catalan government made some charters like that. The design was very nice, showing figures. But with what you have shown us, and there was an idea that I also share, which was that at the end of the conflict, people didn't go that much into the shelters because of what you said. Barcelona had been in favor of fighting the war because the people in Barcelona considered it was worth fighting for the republic. But at a certain moment, and maybe when the battle in the Evra happened, well, the morale started to go down and that people stopped going into the shelter or building shelters. But showing your data or seeing your data, we saw that the shelters were very useful till the end of the war. The second thing is that the Italian anti-fascist memory, when we think about that, there is the idea that the fascists obviously were fascists, but that the Italian fascism was different from the German fascism, and that the real bad guys were the Nazis. There was a film that explained that very well, the Captain Correlli's mandolin. It seems that the Italians practically went there to Greece and gave flowers to the people instead of killing them. And that myth may be allowed to reconcile the population because it was a war of national liberation against the Germans. But Mussolini was a fascist, so I agree with you. We cannot generalize the war in Guadalajara. For instance, there were many Italians, fascist Italians, but there were also Italians that were with the international brigade. And they would say, well, they are also Italians, but we're different. We are the Italians from Garibaldi. So there is this myth that was built after the war, saying that the Italian fascism was as bad as the German fascism. And the Austrians presented themselves as the first victims of the Nazis, and the ones that could excuse themselves were the Nazis that recognized their fall. So when we're talking about the Barcelona bombings, here, well, we have to say fascism was something terrible. And Italians sometimes have problems to come to terms with this, and they have two problems, the Spanish Civil War and Ethiopia, because Italians made terrible things in Ethiopia. And I think they have problems in recognizing that the state of Italy and the official narrative, well, it's difficult for them to come to terms with this. The bombings in January 1939 were against the port and then the bombs dropped where they dropped, because bombing from 4,000 meters high, it's difficult. But the bombs were aimed at the port area. When the Battle of Ebro was lost, well, what people wanted is the word to end because they knew who the winner was. It was a matter of time. And it's very clear when we read the witnesses to add something to what Xavier has said and you, Ramon. And I'm going to say that this afternoon during my presentation, in the Gracia neighborhood, people went less to the shelters towards the end of the war and less shelters were built. The war was very long. People didn't see an end during the last days. There was people who wanted to fortify Barcelona, but not enough people gathered to do so. And someone was telling me that at the beginning of the war, many people went to the shelters, but towards the end, many people stayed at home instead of going to the shelter. When the siren went off at 2 in the morning, if a woman had to take the kids, there is no light. She has to exit the building, go to the shelter at the same time that she hears a bomb dropping. Well, people stayed at home. And this is something that happened frequently. And here I'm talking about Gracia, the neighborhood I have studied. And this idea that the war lasted for a long time. Barcelona shelters, the ones in Gracia, for instance, the Republicans went there if someone had to leave for the war. And I can give an example of a friend of my father that some people that were supporting Franco, some of them went to the shelters, because even if they were Franco supporters, these people didn't know exactly when the bombings would take place, because as you have said, well, the Italians were quite independent from Franco, and they bombed it when they wanted it. I want to confirm what's been said, these terrible Italian attacks. And as Contel was saying now, this information system, the Sifne, and there were spies also. And I would like to talk about the bombing of factories and industrial areas. And Michel Mateu, who was later mayor of Barcelona, and he owned Motoriberica Factory, he said, because we are going to win, don't bomb my factories.