The atlas already records the Retirada, the flight of Republicans into France in 1939; the larger movement, however, happened inside Spain. Each Nationalist advance pushed civilians ahead of it into the shrinking Republican zone, and the Republic created refugee committees and a national evacuation apparatus that resettled people in Catalonia, the Levante and Madrid. The best-known single episode is the flight from Malaga on 8 February 1937, when between 15,000 and 50,000 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, walked the coast road toward Almeria while Nationalist warships and Italian and German aircraft attacked the column; deaths on the road are usually put around 3,000, though the Spanish state has said the true number is unknown and several modern historians argue for lower figures. From 1937 the Basque and Republican authorities also evacuated about 34,000 children abroad, to Britain, France, Belgium, the Soviet Union and Mexico; those sent to the USSR were largely unable to return until after 1956. Most internal refugees returned or were returned home after 1939, often into the classification and punishment system of the new regime.
Republican and Nationalist advances, aerial and naval bombardment and organised evacuations moved civilians within Spain and sent children abroad
The Spanish censuses of 1930 and 1940 counted 23.6 million and 26.0 million respectively, implying about 24.5 million in 1936. Displacement estimates rest on Republican refugee-service records and provincial relief registers; some 440,000 crossed into France in the Retirada of early 1939 and about 30,000 children were evacuated abroad.
The range refers to civilians killed while fleeing Malaga in February 1937, the largest single documented killing of refugees in transit during the war; the higher end comes from contemporary accounts and Spanish memory associations, the lower from recent local studies working from burial and civil-register evidence. It does not attempt to count deaths from bombing, hunger and disease among displaced people across the whole war, for which no defensible figure exists.
The strafing and shelling of the Malaga refugee column is documented by contemporary eyewitnesses including the Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune and by later Spanish local-history research.
Spain, United Kingdom