Hitler and Mussolini’s decision to help General Franco with war materiel and troops brought war to the Basque Country and Catalonia. Between 1936 and 1939, the German Condor Legion and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria carried out a brutal campaign of terror bombings that resulted in thousands of air strikes against open cities. This caused innumerable casualties among the civilian population.

Franco’s victory in 1939 caused the exile of hundreds of thousands of Basque and Catalan civilians, but the beginning
of World War Two and the subsequent occupation of the Northern Basque Country and Northern Catalonia by German troops gave rise to new forms of repression: concentration camps, forced labour, executions and imprisonment. As a consequence, the period from 1936 to 1945 is one of the bloodiest episodes in the contemporary history of Catalonia and the Basque Country.

In total, at least 32,000 children under the age of sixteen had to be evacuated between early May and mid-August 1937, in the face of the infant mortality that the terror bombing campaign was generating in the Basque Country. It was the largest evacuation of children in European history. They were called the children of Gernika and most of them would never return home.