The Spanish Civil War had begun in July 1936 with a Nationalist military rising against the elected Republican government. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy supported the Nationalists with troops and equipment from late 1936. The German contribution was the Condor Legion — approximately 16,000 personnel and 200 aircraft.
By spring 1937 the Nationalist northern offensive under General Emilio Mola was advancing through the Basque Country toward the Republican-held port of Bilbao. Guernica was a small town of approximately 7,000 inhabitants approximately 30 km east of Bilbao. It had no military garrison and was not on the main approach to Bilbao. It was, however, a Basque cultural and political symbol — the historic site of the Tree of Gernika under which Basque elected officials had taken their oaths of office for centuries.
26 April 1937
The attack began at approximately 4:30 p.m. on Monday 26 April 1937 — a market day, with the town’s weekly market crowd of approximately 10,000 people in the streets. The first wave of three Heinkel He 111 bombers dropped 250-kg bombs on the central market square.
The subsequent waves across the next three hours included:
— Heinkel He 51 fighters strafing civilians in the streets — Junkers Ju 52 bombers dropping incendiary bombs — Additional Heinkel He 111 dropping high-explosive bombs to break the rubble and expose fuel for the incendiaries
The attack was coordinated by the Condor Legion chief of staff Wolfram von Richthofen — a cousin of the First World War “Red Baron.” The documented operational orders specify the objectives: the bridge over the Oka river, the Renteria small-arms factory, and the railway station. Each of these was intact after the three-hour raid. The actual damage was concentrated in the residential centre — which was not the nominal target.
The death toll has been disputed since 1937. The original Republican estimates of 1,654 dead were almost certainly inflated for propaganda purposes. The Nationalist estimates of approximately 12 dead were deliberately understated. The post-war academic consensus settles at approximately 250-300 dead — about 4 percent of the population of the town. Approximately 75 percent of the buildings were destroyed.
Picasso
The Spanish painter Pablo Picasso had been commissioned by the Spanish Republic in January 1937 to produce a mural for the Republican pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. He had not chosen a subject by April. The newspaper accounts of the Guernica bombing — particularly the dispatches by George Steer of The Times on 28 April 1937 — reached Picasso in Paris within hours.
He began the painting on 1 May 1937 and completed it on 4 June 1937 — 35 days. The finished work measures 3.49 metres by 7.77 metres, painted in oil on canvas with a palette restricted to black, white, and shades of grey.
The central elements include:
— A screaming horse at the centre, body pierced by a spear — A bull standing in the upper left, impassive — A woman holding a dead child, screaming upward — A dismembered soldier across the lower foreground, holding a broken sword — A woman fleeing with outstretched arms — A woman trapped in a burning building at the right
Picasso refused to offer a single interpretation. He declined to explain the individual symbols when pressed by journalists. The painting is considered one of the most important 20th-century European paintings.