"Brigadas Especiales": Communist Assasination Squads in the Spanish Civil War

[x359594]

From a recent exchange with Paul Preston: "There is some material in my forthcoming book The Spanish Holocaust about Communist and Socialist squads which undertook the elimination of fifth columnists and occasionally foreign Trotskyists. They were known as brigadas especiales and there were three of them, one of which was responsible for the arrest of [Andreu] Nin. His assassination was carried out by a small group of NKVD assassination specialists. The elimination of suspected spies within the I[nternational] B[rigades] (and the Third Reich had Germans infiltrated into the IB and the OVRA also had Italians) and of foreign Trotskyists was undertaken by units of the IB, made up more often than not by German Communists. There is a splendid account of this in the forthcoming book by Boris Volodarsky on the Soviet security services in the Spanish Civil War."

[TheGodlessUtopian]

This sounds interesting...I will have to pick up a copy sometime in the future.

[Kléber]

I wonder what new information there will be.

Katia Landau, who lost her husband Kurt Landau (an IB volunteer) to the Stalinist assassins while she survived a secret NKVD prison in Spain, wrote about her experiences and the betrayal of the Spanish revolution in 1938: Part 1 (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/spain/spain08.htm), Part 2 (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/spain/spain09.htm)