Catalog of censor marks used in the Republican prisons and labor camps during the Spanish civil war

By Carles Prats.

Note of the author: an article describing this kind of censor marks was already published on a paper Araña (Spring 2017), but as this is my main specialty and I make continuous research on this field, from time to time new marks are discovered and thus, the catalog must be updated. A digital edition of it is the easiest way to make the updates. For this reason, each time a new mark is discovered, this article will be updated.

This is the record of updates and versions:

V.1- August 22, 2018, main body of marks published
V.2- January 25, 2019, two additions
V.3- April 16, 2019, one addition
V.4- April 27, 2019, three additions

INTRODUCTION

The republican penitentiary system was based, from the beginning of the civil war, on four types of detention centers:

1- Chekas.
Of Soviet inspiration, they were improvised jails, managed by political parties and trade union organizations, totally irregular, without any judicial control and in which the most basic rights of the detainees were not respected, since torture was practiced in them and there were carried out extrajudiciary executions. Because of its clandestine nature, very few marks are known used on correspondence coming from this type of detention facilities (see number 40 in this catalog for the only example we have seen).

2- Prisons of the regular penitentiary system.
The prisons and jails already available to the Directorate General of Prisons of the Ministry of Justice were used to house prisoners accused of political crimes, either preventively or to comply with the sentence. In some cases, common criminals were released to house people accused of cooperating or sympathizing with the military uprising. Censorship marks were used.

3- Prison ships.
Before the saturation of the regular penitentiary establishments, anchored ships in the ports of the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay were enabled to house the prisoners that no longer fit in the regular prisons. They also depended on the General Directorate of Prisons of the Ministry of Justice, since they were nothing more than temporary accommodation to support the prisons. Own marks of these steamships were used to mark the correspondence directed to or sent from these vessels.

4- Labor Camps.
Created in December 1936 for the execution of sentences of convicted criminals supporting the military uprising. There were two types of camps:

A) Those dependent on the Ministry of Justice.

B) Those dependent on the Ministry of War, Military Information Service (SIM) .

The second type of camps (B) were all located in Catalonia and were undoubtedly those with toughest living conditions. Both types of camps used their own censor marks, being the SIM marks of generic design for each labor camp, only varying the number of the establishment.

As the republican penal system was only operative for just over two and a half years and in most cases the volume of correspondence that inmates could send was limited monthly, few postal history pieces of this type have survived. Undoubtedly, the most rare are those belonging to the labor camps of the SIM, with less than 60 examples known to exist, as they only were operative from mid 1938 to early 1939. And the most commonly found are the marks belonging to the prisons of Madrid and Valencia, which, due to having a greater number of inmates, also generated a greater volume of correspondence, but this doesn’t mean that these marks can be considered common.

The rarity ranking of the cataloged marks is as follows:

E- Scarce
R- Rare
RR – Very Rare
RRR – More than very rare
RRRR – Extremely rare, possibly unique.

The marks belonging to SIM’s forced labor camps are marked with * in the catalog.

CATALOG

ALACUÁS / ALAQUÀS
Alacuás Prisoners Cam