The Age of Mass Child Removal in Spain: Taking, Losing, and Fighting for Children, 1926-1945

The phenomenon of the ‘stolen children’ during Franco’s dictatorship has attracted national and international media and academic attention in recent years. Documentaries on television, news in the press, along with books and academic articles, have addressed one of Franco’s most devastating policies: the separation of thousands of children from their families and their delivery to religious institutions or foster families loyal to the Franco regime. So far, the interpretation by the media and scholars of this phenomenon has been limited: it was a specifically Francoist policy whose aim was to subdue and re-educate the defeated enemies in the Spanish Civil War.
Peter Anderson’s book masterfully discusses and challenges this interpretation through two analytical strategies: comparative and long-term study of this phenomenon. From the outset, Anderson demonstrates that the policy of mass child removal adopted in Spain after the war was not specifically Francoist. On the contrary, this policy responded to a kaleidoscope of international child protection and eugenic thought and movements that transcended geographical and ideological borders. The idea and practice of removing children from their families to save them from ‘immoral’ and ‘corrupt’ environments had spread throughout the Western world since the late eighteenth century and had permeated the wide ideological spectrum of the time, from liberals and socialists to communists and fascists.