What Actually Happened at Guernica?

The real bombing behind the famous Picasso painting

In the painting, we see body parts of people dying, screaming for help. There’s a woman carrying her dead child. There’s a horse that looks like it has just been stabbed.

All around, the painting deals with atrocity at a seemingly unprecedented level.

That’s what Guernica symbolized to Picasso, but that’s also what Guernica symbolized to the world — a reshaping of the rules of warfare, a declaration in Europe that all of a sudden, civilians were fair game.

It was one of the first bombings of civilians by an enemy air force, and after Picasso’s painting, the bombing at Guernica captured significant international attention.

On April 36, 1937, German allies of the fascists in the Spanish Civil War bombed Guernica, with some believing it killed or injured almost a third of the population of the town. It was a test for the German Luftwaffe and their new test of warfare that would years later, terrorize Europe like it terrorized Spain.

Blitzkrieg.

The bombing of Guernica was a message to the rest of the world: German re-armament after World War II was complete. Nazi commanders described the town as “razed to the ground” with bomb craters all over the street.

So what actually happened at Guernica? And why was it so important?

To understand Spain in the 1930s, you have to understand all of Europe was experiencing major economic downturns.

Spain particularly was in turmoil. King Alfonso XIII was the monarch during the early part of…

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