After the Republic's surrender in April 1939 the Franco regime kept in place the network of concentration camps built during the civil war and combined it with a greatly expanded prison system and with labour battalions. Classification commissions sorted prisoners into those released, those sent to workers' battalions and those handed to military courts under the Law of Political Responsibilities; the parallel scheme of 'redemption of sentences through work' let prisoners cut their terms by labouring for the state and for private construction, public-works and mining firms, and prisoner labour was used, among many projects, on the Valle de los Caidos monument begun in 1940. Alongside this, children of imprisoned, executed or exiled Republicans were placed in state and church institutions: by 1943 official records show 12,043 such children in state custody, and figures compiled by Judge Baltasar Garzon in 2008 from historical sources put more than 30,000 children under regime 'tutelage' between 1944 and 1954, a practice that victims' associations say later merged into decades of irregular adoptions known in Spain as the ninos robados. The last camp, Miranda de Ebro, closed in 1947. The subject was left largely untouched during the transition under what is commonly called the pacto del olvido; the 2007 Historical Memory Law and the 2022 Democratic Memory Law reopened it, while the 1977 Amnesty Law has continued to block criminal prosecutions.
The Franco dictatorship interned, imprisoned and conscripted into labour battalions Spaniards classified as disloyal after the Republic's defeat
The 1940 Spanish census (INE) recorded 26,014,278 inhabitants. Estimates of the numbers held in Francoist concentration camps, prisons and labour battalions after the Republic's defeat vary with what is counted; Javier Rodrigo's work on the camp system and prison-administration returns support an order of several hundred thousand passing through between 1939 and the mid-1940s.
The range covers executions carried out after the war ended in April 1939: Paul Preston and others put post-war executions at roughly 20,000, while Spanish memory associations and some regional studies reach substantially higher totals; disagreement turns on incomplete civil registers, unrecorded burials and where to draw the line between wartime and postwar killing. Deaths from hunger, typhus and untreated illness inside the prisons and camps are counted separately and are usually estimated in the tens of thousands.
These forms are documented by historians of the Francoist repression including Javier Rodrigo, Carlos Hernandez de Miguel and Paul Preston, and, for the removal of children, in the 2008 judicial investigation opened by Judge Baltasar Garzon and in the case files compiled by victims' associations.
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