Geschichtsaufarbeitung
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Once the Spanish Civil War was over, the victors refined their methods of humiliation and punishment against Republican and anti-fascist prisoners. One of the most violent and least documented strategies was the use of prisoners as slave labor. Throughout the early post-war years – under the excuse of the need to rebuild the country – the State managed the use of up to 400,000 political prisoners by a long list of public and private companies, and even religious orders.

Many of these companies still exist; some are part of complex multinational structures and are even listed on the stock exchange. But their business success conceals a debt to the past that they have not paid. Most of them made their fortune in the period referred to by using prisoners as free labor, managed by the body created for this purpose in the spring of 1937: the National Board for the Redemption of Sentences through Labor (PNRPT), created, according to the Minister of Justice Esteban Bilbao Eguía, to “free them [the prisoners] from their moral misery by cleansing them of the satanic propaganda that had brutalized them” [sic].

The Geschichtsaufarbeitung artwork consists of sending a letter to the CEO or president of each of these companies that still operate today, in which the artist Alán Carrasco asks for explanations about the company’s past, and in which he urges them to participate in a process similar to what happened in Germany with some of the large companies that profited from slave labor. They were not prosecuted, but almost sixty years after the end of World War II they reached a judicial agreement with the surviving victims and participated in their compensation.

In the case of Spain, we are talking about companies as important as Renfe, MZA, Duro Felguera, Huarte, San Román or Ybarra, among others. Each letter is exhibited together with the proof of receipt.