Spanish Maquis

The Maquis (ˈmaki(s); Maki; also spelled maqui) were Spanish guerrillas who waged an irregular warfare against the Francoist dictatorship within Spain following the Republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War until the early 1960s, carrying out sabotage, robberies (to help fund guerrilla activity) and assassinations of Francoists as well as contributing to the fight against Nazi Germany and the Vichy regime in France during World War II. They also took part in occupations of the Spanish embassy in France. The Maquis activity in Spain had its heyday towards 1946, after which the resistance fighters were heavily repressed during the Trienio del Terror (1947–1949), with instances of White Terror such as paseos, and applications of the Ley de fugas (extralegal executions based on the simulation of the escape of detainees) taking a heavy toll among the combatants and their supporters. Following its decline, it fully disappeared in the 1960s. Referring to the contribution of the Spanish Maquis to the French resistance movement, Martha Gellhorn wrote in The Undefeated (1945): During the German occupation of France, the Spanish Maquis engineered more than four hundred railway sabotages, destroyed fifty-eight locomotives, dynamited thirty-five railway bridges, cut one hundred and fifty telephone lines, attacked twenty factories, destroying some factories totally, and sabotaged fifteen coal mines. They took several thousand German prisoners and - most miraculous considering their arms - they captured three tanks. In the south-west part of France where no Allied armies have ever fought, they liberated more than seventeen towns. Also during World War II, Spaniards were involved in the assassination of Julius Ritter, an SS Colonel in charge of recruiting forced labor, as well as in the planned assassination of General Ernst Schaumburg. In October 1944 a group of 6,000 maquis including Antonio Téllez Solà invaded Spain via the Aran Valley but were driven back after ten days.