Francisco Franco

(male narrator) August 2017.

In Valladolid, Spain.

A mass grave is revealed.

It is just one of more than 2000 mass burial sites across the nation.

(Guy Hedgecoe) According to Amnesty International, Spain has the highest number of mass graves in the world after Cambodia.

(narrator) This is the legacy of General Francisco Franco, victor of the Spanish Civil War.

After taking control of the country in 1939, he secures his hold on the nation by unleashing a wave of violence against his countrymen.

(Paul Preston) There were probably 20,000 people executed after the civil war, after the end of hostilities.

It's a regime of terror.

(narrator) Within 6 years, Adolf Hitler will take his own life.

Benito Mussolini will be swinging from his heels.

But Franco will rule Spain with ruthless efficiency for almost 40 years.

(Paul Preston) Franco was someone who never lost a minute's sleep over the crimes that were committed in his name.

(narrator) What drove this general to wage war on his people, destroy his country's new democracy, and establish Europe's longest dictatorship?

[loud cheering] (woman) Dictatorships have had an incredible impact in the past century.

These dictators ended up learning from one another.

(man) They're all different, but many use the same tactics.

(woman) The use of terror.

(man) Propaganda.

(woman) Control the elites.

Create an enemy.

Cult of personality.

(man) Use violence-- These are tools that dictators use to stay in power.

[loud cheering] (narrator) The roots of Francisco Franco's dictatorship lie within deep divisions in the Spanish nation and within his own family.

Born in 1892, Franco is the 7th generation of a naval dynasty.

For almost 2 centuries, his family has sailed for the legendary Spanish fleet.

Francisco dreams of joining them.

But it's not to be.

In 1898, when Franco is 6, Spain goes to war with the United States over control of Cuba.

Spain's navy is devastated.

When the Spanish-American war ends, the country has lost Cuba, Puerto Rico, and almost all of its empire.

It is a wrenching and humiliating amputation.

There was an identity crisis if you didn't have an empire.

it was a cultural political trauma for families related to the military, for the military and the political elites, for the government.

(narrator) As Spain's empire falls to pieces, so does Franco's homelife.

His father, Nicolas Franco is a naval officer, and a notorious man about town, known for his womanizing and drinking.

(Paul Preston) I think a lot of Franco's problems derived, of course, from the family dynamic.

His father despised him, he had two brothers, and his father massively preferred the other two.

Franco's mother was a very strict Catholic.

Franco was the mommy's boy.

These two things I think created a sense of vulnerability, but also a sense that he had to prove himself.

(narrator) Franco will adopt his mother's deeply conservative vision of Spain and devote his life to making it a reality.

Yet he also wants to please his father, and that means a career in the military.

(Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez) The problem with Franco was that he really wanted to be in the navy.

The Naval Academy was closed because Spain has lost most of its fleet in the war so he has to settle for infantry, which was far less prestigious.

(narrator) 1907... Franco enters the Toledo military academy determined to be an officer.

Small for his age and conspicuous for a high-pitched voice, he endures severe bullying.

(Paul Preston) Well, Franco was a very small person and one of the ways in which he coped with being in the army was by creating a series of myths, and throughout his whole life, Franco was a bit like the Wizard of Oz, he was somebody who hid behind a series of masks.

(narrator) When Franco graduates in 1910 his ambitions define him as much as his uniform.

Spain's military class is obsessed with restoring the nation's prestige.

For a young officer, the best place to start is in one of Spain's remaining colonial outposts, Morocco.

in Spain, in the peninsula, if you were an army officer, promotion was incredibly slow.

It was dead man's shoes.

Franco chose to go to Africa because it was the best place to get quick promotion.

[machine-gun fire] (narrator) 1912... Moroccan rebels have launched a violent campaign to force the Spanish out.

Lieutenant Franco is assigned to Spain's Army of Africa, a battalion of native Moroccans used for the fiercest fighting.

(Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez) Going to Africa, he was lucky.

If he didn't get killed, meant the possibility of rapid promotion.

This is what Franco and many other officers did-- they became high-ranking officers within a few years... if they survived.

(narrator) The Army of Africa has a name for young officers like Franco... "the Betrothed of Death."

Of the first 42 officers assigned to the unit in 1912, only 7 are alive in 1915.

And one of them is Franco.

While fighting with the Army of Africa, he employs a tactic that will come to define his dictatorship.

Terror is the indiscriminate and arbitrary use of force that can incite fear in the hearts of people.

These acts of terror are public.

They're meant to be public; they're meant to seen.

The experience in Morocco, the experience of colonial war, which is war without limits, completely wild war against civilians where torture and mass killings are allowed, these definitely shaped his character.

(narrator) His unit becomes infamous for its bloodthirsty tactics.

They cut the ears and the noses of the Moroccan rebels, and they take pictures of themselves with these trophies.

This is a brutal war, and this is where this man is finding his personality, who he is.

(Paul Preston) Obviously it would be impossible to know that Franco arrived as a young soldier in Africa determined that one day he would be the dictator of Spain.

It wasn't like that.

But very soon we can see lots and lots of pieces of evidence of just how calculating he was.

(narrator) Franco learns that fear can be useful with subordinates as well as enemies.

(Guy Hedgecoe) One of his soldiers refused to eat his lunch one day and threw it back in the face of one of the officers.

Franco had that soldier shot, and he forced the rest of the battalion to parade past the corpse of this dead soldier to remind them of the need for discipline.

(narrator) Terror is his tactic, and the Army of Africa is his tool.

One day he will use both to seize ultimate power in Spain.

But in 1916, he is a young officer testing his limits and building a reputation for bravery.

To be courageous, you need to know fear.

You need to have the imagination to know what you're letting yourself in for, and Franco, in my view, was empty inside.

He had, seems to have had little or no emotion, so when it's said, "Franco is a man who knew no fear," I believe that, I believe he knew no fear, and that to me, for what it's worth, is not courage.

(narrator) In June, Franco's unit makes a frontal assault on insurgents trenches.

(Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez) This is very dangerous.

And the sharpshooters, of the rebels target officers.

(narrator) Leading from the front, Franco takes a bullet.

His unit loses 56 of its 133 men.

And Franco is very nearly one of them.

At the time, an abdominal wound is often a death sentence.

Against all odds, he makes a full recovery and is promoted to major.

To his Moroccan troops, Franco's survival is a sign.

(Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez) They started to say that he had "baraca"-- like a sort of blessing, good luck.

So they follow him blindly.

(narrator) For Franco, it's confirmation that his life has a purpose.

(Guy Hedgecoe) That adulation persuaded him that he was someone special, that he'd been chosen perhaps by providence, perhaps by God, to help Spain.

(Paul Preston) In a very famous interview he said, "Without Africa, I do not know how to understand myself."

(narrator) Franco's African experience is also an opportunity to enhance his reputation.

In Morocco you have this group of embedded journalists who are quite pro war, who are there to promote, to make popular the cause of the war among the Spanish public.

They have been sent by the newspapers from Madrid, from Barcelona, from the provinces, and they are looking for heroes.

(Paul Preston) Very early on, he began to cultivate journalists, say from about 1916 onwards, there are more and more articles about him.

(Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez) He became very political as well.

Because there is, one thing is the officer in combat and then the officer who tells the story of the combat.

And something that Franco learned very early is how to please the press with the right stories.

(Paul Preston) The national right-wing newspaper starts to refer to him as "el ace de la legion," the ace of the legion.

(narrator) In 1926, Franco is promoted to brigadier general.

At 33, he is the youngest general in all of Europe.

The bullied little cadet is a certified war hero.

Africa has given him the respect he craves, and the tactics that will mark his rise to power.

But now, at the peak of his career, a tide of political change could destroy his dreams for Spain.

[loud explosions] The convulsions of the First World War and the Russian revolution of 1917 have transformed European society.

By contrast with its enduring monarchy, Spain seems tradition bound.

The population is largely rural, and the Catholic church a powerful force, but even here, change is brewing.

(Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez) The country was industrializing.

The country was becoming more urban.

There were huge pockets of poverty.

Very strong social inequalities, and the political system was problematic.

(narrator) The gap between rich and poor is a faultline that divides Spanish society.

Those who have knew what they had, and they knew how to go about keeping it, whereas all those who wanted to change things all had very different ideas.

(narrator) Inspired by Russia's Communist Revolution, many turn to socialism, which is sweeping countries like France and Germany.

Others look to the Fascism of Benito Mussolini's Italy.

Some blame the Catholic Church for complicity in maintaining an oppressive status quo.

(Paul Preston) You go into Spanish churches, and they have, you know, gold altars and so on.

In places where the people were starving, this created huge hatred.

(narrator) Anarchists want to tear down the existing power structure.

So all of this is happening and for people like Franco and traditionalists, those kind of related to the military, this is really absolutely beyond the pale, this is not what they want, they are looking back to an imperial Spain of centuries gone where there was hierarchy, where people knew their place.

(narrator) April 1931.

Support for the monarchy is plummeting.

Facing a possible insurrection, the Spanish King agrees to step down.

(Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez) King Alfonso XIII steps down in 1931 because the country rejects him.

(Helen Graham) He didn't have the support of sufficient numbers of old Spain.

There was an awful lot of animus against Alfonso the 13th not against the monarchy so much but against him personally.

So there's a sense of new constituencies knocking on the door of an old system and wanting some kind of representation.

(narrator) Within months a new republic is formed and a left-leaning government established.

A new constitution guarantees a free press and regular elections.

Every Spanish adult, man or woman, can vote.

But not everyone is celebrating this tide of change (Paul Preston) Franco has an idea of the authentic Spain.

It's Catholic, it protected property, it protected the sanctity of marriage, all of these things were challenged by the left.

(narrator) The left threatens his vision of Spain.

Soon he'll have the opportunity to strike back.

November, 1933.

Spain swings to the right as a coalition of conservative parties wins the next election.

Franco, the hero of Africa, is promoted to major general.

But almost a year later, socialists and anarchists stage a massive strike in the coal-rich region of Asturias in the Northwest.

The right-wing government turns to Franco, who welcomes the chance to restore order.

(Guy Hedgecoe) Communists and socialists offended him in a way, automatically.

He was very religious, very Catholic.

He saw people on the left as atheists, who did not believe in God.

(narrator) To warn the left against further acts of rebellion, he turns to a tactic used by other would-be strongmen.

(Dan Slater) So for Franco, terror is a form of communication.

You don't have to attack every single person who belongs to these organizations-- if you used terror against some of them, it sends the signal that anyone whose loyalty goes to these leftist movements is going to be in trouble.

[loud gunshot] (Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez) He ordered troops from the Army of Africa to go to Asturias.

By doing that, he knows that it's going to take there troops that are ruthless, very violent.

(narrator) Franco's troops round up more than 3000 Spaniards and gun them down.

(Paul Preston) That was a symbol of his ruthlessness.

He had the coast bombarded by the Spanish Navy, he had the mining villages bombed by the Spanish Air Force.

(narrator) 30,000 prisoners are transported to colonial territories outside Spain to serve their sentences.

He did what he had been doing in Africa.

It was mass repression.

It was colonial war basically.

But for the first time it was colonial war that was applied in the metropolis.

It was not longer war against the Moroccans, it was war against the Spaniards.

(Guy Hedgecoe) It was not just an opportunity to prove himself militarily, there was also an element of politics in that.

So it was kind of his first taste of politics-- a chance for him to prove himself in a sphere that was beyond the purely military.

(Paul Preston) It also gave him the conviction that he was the man that could save Spain from all these challenges from the left.

(narrator) Franco suppresses the uprising.

But his tactics trigger a political explosion.

Left-wing parties are appalled by his brutality.

They band together into a coalition called the Popular Front.

On February 16, 1936, Spaniards go to the polls once again.

The pendulum swings, and the right-wing government is ejected.

The Popular Front emerges with a majority in parliament.

It's a disaster for Franco, but the worst is yet to come.

Worried about a military coup, the Popular Front sidelines key right-wing generals.

Franco himself is banished to one of Spain's last colonial possessions-- the Canary Islands, 100 kilometers off the coast of Africa, and 2000 kilometers from Madrid.

The minister of war decides that to keep these guys out of trouble, they will be posted far away where they can do the least damage.

(narrator) In exile, the generals watch as Spain's new leaders steer the nation to the left.

Even worse, they learn that left-wing extremists have been torching churches and executing priests.

To save Spain, the exiled generals plot a coup and they ask Franco to take a leading role.

But a military coup is the ultimate gamble.

(Guy Hedgecoe) He was cautious about getting involved in this uprising.

He'd seen other similar attempts at military rebellions fail.

He was worried that that would happen again.

(narrator) If the coup fails, Franco will be executed as a traitor.

For days, he deliberates.

He has a wife, he has a child.

He has a career.

But circumstances will force his hand.

On July 13, 1936, José Calvo Sotelo, a leading right-wing politician, is assassinated in Madrid.

(Paul Preston) What clinched it for Franco, what made the difference was the murder of José Calvo Sotelo.

(Helen Graham) He is murdered whilst in the custody of republican police.

The funeral for Calvo Sotelo is turned into a kind of show of strength; in a sense, it is the trigger.

(narrator) For Spaniards on the right, the assassination is an outrage.

For Franco and the generals, it's the final straw.

July 18, 1936.

Wearing civilian clothes, Franco secretly boards a plane that will carry him to Africa.

The coup is on.

Franco was given the responsibility for Morocco because of his track record as a major player in the colonial history of Spain.

(narrator) His mission-- lead the Army of Africa into Spain.

it's the beginning of a bloody struggle between bitter enemies-- the right-wing nationalists against the left-wing republicans.

Franco gets the Army of Africa to support the coup.

Now he has to get them to Spain.

But transporting thousands of men and their equipment across the Strait of Gibraltar would be a massive undertaking... even in peacetime.

And for Franco, there's an added complication.

The Spanish Navy has refused to join the coup, and its ships are patrolling the strait.

(Helen Graham) The army of Africa is basically trapped in North African territory.

So the Strait's very effectively blocked; speed is of the essence.

(narrator) Franco needs planes to jump the Strait and join the fight.

Audaciously, he turns to a pair of strongmen-- Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

They leap at the chance to use Spain as a testing ground for new weapons and tactics.

Making some 800 flights, German and Italian air force planes take 14,000 men across the Mediterranean into Spain.

(Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez) So without the help of the fascist powers, the army of Africa would have had a very tough time.

(Helen Graham) This is seen as the first major airlift in modern history, and absolutely crucial to the coup on mainland Spain.

(narrator) Franco's airlift astonishes his Republican enemies and advances his status among his coconspirators.

While other generals fight across Spain, he begins a merciless advance north towards Madrid.

(Helen Graham) The Army of Africa's a killing machine, and it's up against a civilian population in the south of Spain.

There is no army.

It was basically meeting peasants with farm implements.

Every time they arrive at a destination, or indeed just en route, they just massacre people.

Franco's forces soon reach the city of Badajoz, near the Portuguese border.

(Guy Hedgecoe) He encouraged his officers to be extremely brutal, often savage, when they were waging their campaigns.

When they took a town in the Civil War, a few hours after the taking of that town there would be absolute carnage.

(Paul Preston) Basically the left wingers who were captured were rounded up and then they were machine-gunned.

(narrator) In the Badajoz Massacre some 4000 suspected leftists are murdered.

And it's not an isolated event.

In retaliation, some republican extremists turn on the church.

Priests and other clergy are executed for siding with the nationalists.

There is this kind of mass attack on anyone who is symbolically representative of the church.

Because the ecclesiastical hierarchy backs the coup.

(narrator) Spain is split.

The coup has ignited a battle for the soul of the nation.

Franco believed that he should do whatever was possible, whatever was at his disposal, to eliminate the left and their ideology.

(narrator) His ruthlessness is not limited to his enemies.

Officers who failed to support the coup are executed, including his own cousin and childhood playmate.

To show mercy is to show weakness.

The future dictator is preparing his path to power.

(Paul Preston) At the very beginning while the other generals were mainly concerned with how they went about winning the war, Franco would set up a press office whose main purpose was to project Franco in the world's press as the leader of the military coup, which at that stage he wasn't.

[speaking Spanish] (narrator) To claim the leadership, he calls for a meeting of the top brass.

September 21, 1936.

Franco's fellow generals fly in from every sector of Nationalist Spain to a temporary airstrip near Salamanca.

(Paul Preston) The really big thing on Franco's side, in the quest for power, was the fact that he was the commander of the African Army.

Franco had been instrumental in securing the help of Hitler and Mussolini.

(Helen Graham) So they basically saw him as somebody who could unite them all and keep them together for the duration of the war.

(narrator) The other generals vote to make Franco the commander in chief of the armed forces.

Although he is ranked 23rd in seniority, no one else has the combination of combat experience, political savvy, and connections.

Franco is now the generalissimo, the first among generals, a major step on his road to power.

The cunning with which he got to be dictator, the cunning with which he rose to the top is very evident.

(narrator) But for now Franco only controls parts of Spain.

To rule it all he will need the support of the pillars of Spanish society.

And to earn it, he will use a key tactic from the dictator's playbook.

The Achilles heel of any dictatorship is the elites and whether or not they support them.

And that's why dictators, so early on, want to get control over their elites.

They want to ensure that they're completely loyal to them.

(Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal) There were 2 or 3 sectors whose consent was crucial for his survival.

This was the church, it was the military, and it was the higher classes: the aristocracy and the industrialists.

(narrator) With the support of the military assured, Franco sets his sights on the pillar of traditional Spanish society... the Catholic Church.

[loud explosion] September, 1936.

Rather than advance on the republican stronghold of Madrid, Franco pivots to Toledo.

[loud explosions] There, a small group of nationalist soldiers is besieged in the city's ancient fortress, the Alcázar.

Although Toledo has no strategic value, it has something more important.

It is the historic center of Spanish Catholicism.

Franco decides to detour to relieve the siege of the military fortress.

It is particularly seen as a symbol of imperial Christian Spain.

(narrator) Franco's forces crush the Republican Army in Toledo and take the town.

Franco personally wasn't there when Toledo was relieved, however, he was there the next day.

The newsreel cameras were there to see Franco arrive in order to be able to project to the world this view that Franco was the hero who had saved Toledo.

[male newsreel announcer] Franco greeted as the savior of 1900 men, women, and children who held out in this shattered fortress and in caverns underneath.

(Paul Preston) He projected himself as a major world figure.

(Helen Graham) He has an ambition and is clearly looking beyond the war to a political phase, to a phase of being in control of Spain beyond the war.

(narrator) When the coup began, Franco was just one of many generals.

Now, he has established his reputation as a military mastermind and the savior of Spanish Catholicism.

Just imagine, mid-July 1936, you are a general semi-isolated from your colleagues.

Two months afterwards, you are the head of the main army of the rebels with no rival for powers and about to take Madrid.

He cannot believe his luck.

Must be God!

What other explanation?

(narrator) October 1936 Nationalist forces control the western half of Spain.

But much of the nation remains under the control of the Republican Popular Front.

To rule the country, Franco must take its political, financial, and administrative center.

To convince all Spaniards, and to convince the rest of the world that he had won, he needed to take Madrid.

(narrator) For weeks, Franco throws everything at the capitol-- artillery... aerial bombardment... frontal attacks.

[machine-gun fire] The city won't fall.

The republic basically concentrates its forces in Madrid, and as long as it can prevent Madrid being encircled, it can survive.

(narrator) Soon Franco's drive to take Madrid gets even harder, as his enemies gain a powerful new ally.

The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin has agreed to arm the republic and its left-wing government.

(Helen Graham) When it's clear that Franco began to be able to take Madrid, the Soviet Union offers to support the republic.

(narrator) What was meant to be a quick coup d'etat is now a full-blown civil war.

[speaking Spanish] (narrator) He has conquered large swaths of Spanish territory but Franco's domination is far from complete.

In many of the regions he now controls, half of his fellow citizens are against him.

He is determined to vanquish them all.

While the Nationalist Army continues its battles, Franco sets out to eliminate civilian opposition in the land he has seized.

To do this, he employs another tactic of dictatorship.

(Guy Hedgecoe) Franco wanted to defeat the Left, but he also wanted to eliminate them.

He wanted to make sure that there was no vestige left of that ideology.

(narrator) Franco creates the Supreme Court of Military Justice-- a vast bureaucracy dedicated to prosecuting those who oppose him.

And you were open to prosecution if you had any connections with republican politics or sympathies.

So people can be brought before military courts for activities that go back to 1934.

They apply the military code to their enemies by accusing those who defended the republic of the crime of rebellion which is what the Francoists have committed.

(Helen Graham) There must be a social cleansing of all the elements in society who have allowed the republic to exist and who are now our enemies.

Silvia Navarro's grandfather was one of those enemies.

[speaking Spanish] (narrator) Jose Antonio Marco Viedma was a prominent businessman in the city of Calatayud... and a republican.

(Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal) All dictators use violence against their people.

In the case of Spain the scale of intersocial violence is unique.

Most victims, like 99%, were Spaniards, and this is interesting because Franco was actually perceiving at least half of Spain as not properly Spanish.

So you can inflict this terrible violence to your own people, if you consider they are not actually your own people, that they are, in a way, foreigners.

(narrator) City by city, town by town, Franco's forces arrest not just Popular Front leaders and party faithful, but anyone with republican sympathies.

(Helen Graham) it's not just a tactic for a military campaign, it's a form of political readjustment, removing the kind of people that made the republic possible, this would be never possible again.

It's a form of social engineering, (narrator) As the war progresses, Franco intensifies his attacks on civilians.

His allies in the German and Italian air forces begin to obliterate towns and villages.

Guernica, Durango, Barcelona, Madrid.

(Helen Graham) The idea was that you would terrorize and demoralize a civilian population and this would be a crucial instrument of war.

It's the war against civilians, waged with the new technology.

(narrator) 1939.

As Spain tears itself apart, Europe braces for war.

[crowd cheering] Conserving its resources for the coming conflict, the Soviet Union withdraws its support of the Republic.

By February, what's left of the Popular Front's army collapses.

[loud cheering] (narrator) March 27.

Franco's forces parade through Madrid.

After the loss of half a million lives, the civil war is over.

Three years after crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, Francisco Franco is the dictator of all Spain.

In the nationalist regions, victory celebrations echo into the dawn.

In what were once republican regions, people are fleeing for their lives.

(Paul Preston) Large numbers of people had fled Madrid.

I mean, thousands upon thousands of people fled to the coast hoping to be able to get away.

Victory gives Franco the opportunity to complete his transformation of Spanish society.

(Helen Graham) The war is not really ending with the end of the battlefield phase, but becoming basically a war against the defeated.

(narrator) He launches another wave of targeted arrests and killings of anyone with connections to the old government.

(Dan Slater) It's very much to send a signal to anyone who opposed the church, anyone who was a socialist, anyone who joined the organizations of the political left.

(narrator) Beyond Spain's borders, the Second World War burns across Europe.

To the outside world, Spain is officially neutral.

But within, the dictator's war against his people is just getting started.

In the course of 3 years, nearly one quarter of a million people are imprisoned... 28,000 are executed.

(Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal) This was essential in Franco's strategy because he had to completely exterminate all opposition to his regime so that he could rule for the next 40 years.

As he transforms Spanish society, he turns to another tactic of dictatorships.

Indoctrination is largely a process of preventing people from hearing alternative narratives.

It's a way of giving substance to fear and reminding people of the risks of life without the regime that is currently in power.

People were obliged to think what the regime wanted them to think.

There was total control of the education system, there was total control of the media.

(Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal) Indoctrination in the Franco regime is quite unique in that it systematically used the procedures of Catholic indoctrination.

So there was even a catechism that was used to tell very young children about Franco, about the regime, about how good this was.

(narrator) For Franco, indoctrination cannot begin soon enough.

In prison, if a republican woman is pregnant, she is allowed to carry her baby to term.

Then the child is taken and placed in a properly Spanish family.

(Emilio Silva) They went to the prisons and they kidnapped the babies from the republican woman, because they say the woman can provoke the transmission of the democracy for the children.

And then take the children and put the children in Catholic institutions or Catholic families.

(Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez) They say that Franco is the man chosen by God, and that he's there doing God's will.

The children at the time in religious and lay schools are being taught that Franco's life is like the life of Christ.

Catholicism was key to the entire ideology of the regime.

The idea was, we are going to torture you, we are going to kill you, but we are doing that because you are evil, and we are doing this because we need to redeem you, that it is for your own good, because we want you to go to heaven, and for that you have to be punished, you have to suffer.

So there were these ideas of sin and redemption that was so Catholic, and that were so Spanish.

(narrator) 1945.

Hitler commits suicide.

Mussolini is executed.

The Second World War is over.

But Spain's dictator remains.

Franco's fortunes are helped by a shift in the political winds.

As the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union begins, Franco's extreme anti-communism makes him an ally of the West.

(Helen Graham) By the 1950s, Eisenhower visits Spain, and Franco presents himself as the kind of sentinel of the west, this anti-communist warrior who can keep the continent safe.

Franco has free rein to continue his state of terror.

There were hundreds of thousands of Republicans that were in jail.

(narrator) But there are pockets of resistance.

University student Nicolas Sanchez is one of the resistors.

After taking part in a peaceful demonstration, he is arrested and sentenced to 6 years in prison.

To deal with prisoners like Nicolas Sanchez, Franco uses a classic dictator's tool.

(Fathali Moghaddam) Well, there's 2 functions of gulags.

One is creating fear.

A second function of these gulags is that they want certain people out of the way and they want to use them as examples of what could happen to you if you step out of line.

(Nicolas Sanchez) There were also concentration camps that were used to build fortifications, railroads, dams-- that was heavy work.

(narrator) Franco uses slave labor to build a massive monument to the victory of his regime.

He calls it the Valley of the Fallen.

(Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal) Most of the people who worked in the Valley of the Fallen were political prisoners.

For each year they worked in the Valley of the Fallen, they did not have to spend 5 years in prison.

They were given the choice, but it is not that they liked to be there, it is that the other option was much worse.

(narrator) In 1959, after almost 20 years of hard labor, the dictator's tribute to himself is finished.

The monumental scale is an indication of their overweening desire to control the societies that they rule.

But it is a reflection of an aspiration to some kind of eternal influence in the future of their own countries.

(narrator) Not only is the monument complete, so is Franco's domination of Spanish politics and society.

To hold a political opinion is to commit a crime.

(Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal) That prevented people from entering politics, because politics were associated with conflict and with war.

The main success of this strategy was associating politics with danger, and it was very successful until at least the late 1960s.

(narrator) Franco has achieved what he set out to do.

He has frozen Spain in time.

His regime secure, he cultivates the image of a benign international statesman and paternal sovereign.

(Paul Preston) In later life, this dictator, this mass murderer, was projected as the kind of grandfather of his people.

(narrator) After almost 30 years in power, the patriarch faces one last challenge: who will rule Spain when he dies?

1969.

Franco announces that Juan Carlos, the grandson of King Alfonso XIII, will be his successor.

The dying dictator hopes the new king will keep Spain locked in the past.

But when Franco dies on November 20, 1975, his regime dies with him.

Now king, Juan Carlos defies Franco's final wish.

He moves to dismantle the dictatorship and restore Spain to democracy.

Less than 2 years later, Spaniards hold their first democratic election in more than 40 years.

The results mirror the election of 1936.

The left wing wins by a narrow margin.

Franco's attempt to obliterate socialism has failed.

But the consequences of his dictatorship haunt Spain to this day.

Over the past 10 years, Spaniards have confronted Franco's crimes against humanity.

(Guy Hedgecoe) According to Amnesty International, Spain has the highest number of mass graves in the world after Cambodia.

So there are all these unmarked graves around the country, and this issue has not been resolved.

(Emilio Silva) In Spain we have the names and the orders of names of 114,000 civilians missing in mass graves.

For example, in Malaga, in the south of Spain, in the cemetery, there is a group of graves with 4,300 people.

(Paul Preston) There is considerable disquiet, discomfort, resentment about the fact that there's never been any real process of seeking justice for those who were murdered during the civil war.

(Emilio Silva) And I think our history is part of the black box of Europe.

And we have to recover the black box.

And we have to show the sounds, sort of, in this black box.

(Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez) The legacy is the emptiness that he caused in the Spanish society, all the wealth, the human wealth and the material wealth that the Spanish Civil War and the brutal dictatorship cost on the Spanish society.

So how do you evaluate that?

How do you fix that?

I don't have an answer.

(narrator) Next time on "The Dictator's Playbook."

(Lain Grahame) Idi Amin made a mark for himself.

(Mahmood Mamdani) He tapped into something big.

(Alicia Decker) He represented a fresh start.

(Mahmood Mamdani) A future for Uganda.

(Alicia Decker) Critics have written Amin off as a buffoon, but he was far more cunning.

A soldier, charismatic.

Distracting people from their repression.

(Mariam Mufti) In the 8 years he was in power, almost 300,000 people were massacred He was ruthless, which good soldiers are.

[orchestra plays in minor tones] (man) To order "The Dictator's Playbook" on DVD, visit shopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

This program is also available on Amazon Prime Video.

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