Welcome to
Brigadistas from Belgium and Luxembourg
In 1975, the year dictator Francisco Franco died, Ghent historian Rudi Van Doorslaer was the first Belgian to gain access to the Spanish files of the Belgian members of the International Brigades. They were stored in the former secret police archives in Salamanca. In the decades that followed these data were subsequently and systematically supplemented with information from other archival sources, gathered in Belgium and abroad.
Recently, François Van Pelt, who studied political science at the Université Catholique de Louvain, completed this data collection with valuable information from the original files of the International Brigades. These archives were evacuated to the Soviet Union from the base of the Brigades in Albacete in 1938 and kept in the Moscow state archives. In recent years these files have been digitized and can be consulted on the internet. François Van Pelt also elaborated an Access database which constitutes the plinth of this website. For the first time, we now have a fairly comprehensive list of the volunteers who parted from Belgium and Luxembourg to engage in the Spanish conflict.
This website presents a database of over 2000 people going from Belgium and Luxembourg into the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, so-called Brigadistas, volunteers for the Republican side, joining their ranks in what became known as the International Brigades.
(Amsab-ISH fo007932)
The database contains relatively exhaustive files of Belgians, or foreigners coming from Belgium, who enrolled in the Spanish Civil War to fight on the republican side. Information for each volunteer has been compiled for scientific purposes.
The database is organized as follows:
- The first fields identify the volunteer: first and last name, date and place of birth, place of residence, nationality. The next indicators can shed light on commitment factors such as professional situation, political and union commitment, marital situation.
- Additional data fields identify the volunteer's role and actions in Spain: engagement units (can sometimes be subject to interpretation), rank, and possible death.
- Finally, sources are provided to help the user to evaluate the information.
Brigadistas from Belgium covers not just Belgian and Luxembourgian volunteers, but includes people not having the Belgian or Luxembourgian nationality but leaving for the Spanish Civil War from Belgium and Luxembourg. It also extends to not just the fighters ("brigadistas") but also to people going to support the Spanish Civil War in various ways (civil, medical, administrative and so on), including (a few) people holding a membership card of the Friends of the Spanish volunteers.
The following information was recorded in the database, whenever it was available: the last name and first name, date and place of birth, gender, address, profession, arrival in Spain, whether they were killed in action (yes/no) and date of death (if applicable), date of departure, marital status, membership in a political party, nationality, region (Brussels, Flanders, Wallonia, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg), rank in the International Brigades, and the sources from which the information was obtained.
We also thought it would be useful to encapsulate this database in a website with more information about the background of the Spanish conflict between 1936 and 1939 and how Belgium and Belgians became involved. In particular, the focus is on the volunteers who joined the International Brigades and other militias. Importantly, the numerous foreigners who travelled from Belgium to Spain were not forgotten.