Bombing of Gernika: 70 years after

Today 70 years ago, on the 26th of april 1937, the basque town of Guernica, a town living its own life away from the civil war at that moment and got  bombed by italian fascists and german nazi troops resulting in hundred deaths.

Farmers got to town to sell their products, as a market day it was, the streets where full of people.

All of the sudden the noise from the planes arrived. It was the German Luftwaffe "Condor Legion" and subordinate Italian Fascist "Corpo Truppe Volontarie".

Guernica, Basque Gernika, and officially Gernika-Lumo since 1983, was a centre of great significance to the Basque people both before, during and after the air raid which made it notorious. Traditionally, the important administrative body, the Biscayne assembly, had met in the town under an oak tree, the Gernikako Arbola, and in more recent years the assembly has continued to meet in Guernica at the Casa de Juntas— house of the historical archive of the Basque Country.

Advances by National troops led by Generalísimo Francisco Franco had eaten into the territory controlled by the Republican Government. The Basque Government, an autonomous regional administrative body formed by Basque nationalists and leftists, sought to defend Biscay and parts of Guipuzcoa with its own Basque army.

Guernica had a nominal population of around five thousand and the town is thought to have housed numerous refugees fleeing into Republican controlled territory. The raid also took place on a Monday, ordinarily a market day in Guernica. Generally speaking a market day would have attracted people from the surrounding areas to Guernica wishing to conduct business.

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