The Book Prize Index

The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain

Paul Preston

Selected as the Sunday Times History Book of the Year for 2012, this is a meticulous work of scholarship from the foremost historian of 20th-century Spain.The culmination of more than a decade of research, æThe Spanish Holocaust' seeks to reflect the intense horrors visited upon Spain during its ferocious civil war, the consequences of which still reverberate bitterly today.The brutal, murderous persecution of Spaniards between 1936 and 1945 is a truth that should have been told long ago. Paul Preston here offers the first comprehensive picture of what he terms "the Spanish Holocaust": mass extra-judicial murder of some 200,000 victims, cursory military trials, torture, the systematic abuse of women and children, sweeping imprisonment, the horrors of exile. Those culpable for crimes committed on both sides of the Civil War are named; their victims identified.æThe Spanish Holocaust' illuminates one of the darkest, least-known eras of modern European history.

HistoryHistory · medium confidenceHistory81 signalsLlm Classifier: History -> HistoryOpen Library: Spanish Civil War -> War & MilitaryOpen Library: Spain, history, civil war, 1936-1939 -> War & MilitaryReligious BiographyHolocaustLGBTQ History & Life

Award History

0 wins · 1 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-FictionMajor2012FinalistSecondary source
View all award history (1)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

  2. 02 Central places

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • Twentieth-Century Spain45%

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    The book presents the mass persecution and extra-judicial murder of Spaniards (1936–1945) as a truth long overlooked, identifying perpetrators and victims as part of what Preston terms "the Spanish Holocaust."

    Model confidence 60%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    70 / 100 academic

    Academic

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 62%.