“We will suffer again, we will fight again, and we will win again!”
Catalan President Lluis Companys. The only Democratic President in Europe that has been killed after torture (by fascists). Gestapo sent him to #Franco from Paris. Remains guilty for Spanish justice.
Today October 15th 2013, we conmemorate that, 73 years later, we are still fighting and remembering his ideals and hard work for Catalonia.
HISTORY
Lluís Companys i Jover (June 21, 1882 – October 15, 1940) was the 123rd President of Catalonia, from 1934 and during the Spanish Civil War.
He was a lawyer and leader of the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) political party. Exiled after the war, he was captured and handed over by the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, to the Spanish dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who had him executed by firing squad in 1940. Companys is the only incumbent president in Europe to have been executed, and seventy-two years later the council of war which sentenced him is still in force.
Exiled to France in 1939 after the Civil War, Companys had passed up various chances to leave France because his son Lluis was seriously ill in a clinic inParis. He was arrested in La Baule-les-Pins near Nantes on 13 August 1940, and detained in La Santé Prison. He was then extradited by Nazi Germanauthorities to the Spanish government in Madrid in early September 1940 and imprisoned in the cellars of the headquarters of the Dirección General de Seguridad(State Security) at the Real Casa de Correos in Puerta del Sol. He was held there for five weeks, kept in solitary confinement, tortured and beaten, while senior figures of the Franco regime visited his cell, insulted him and threw coins or crusts of bread at him. After a military trial which lasted less than one hour, lacking legal guarantees where he was accused of ‘military rebellion’, Companys was executed at Montjuïc Castle in Barcelona at 6:30 a.m. on October 15, 1940. Refusing to wear a blindfold, he was taken before a firing squad of Civil Guards and, as they fired, he cried ‘Per Catalunya!’ (For Catalonia!). He is buried at the Montjuïc Cemetery, near the castle. The cause of death was given as ‘traumatic internal haemorrhage’.
The main stadium used for the 1992 Summer Olympics, located on Montjuïc, is officially named in his memory. In 1998 a monument to Companys was installed near Arc de Triomf, on Passeig de Lluís Companys in Barcelona. A friend of Companys, Conxita Julià, is portrayed next to Companys’ image in the monument.
Learn more here.
Americans For Catalonia 