How to find lost family members: Spanish Civil War and World War II

A list of resources to track down people whose fate is unknown

(Leer en español)

I grew up knowing that I had a grand uncle who died very young, at the age of 27, because of the World War II. And that this was the reason I never got the chance to meet him. It was my mom who had told me about him. She was trying to keep his memory alive in the family. She and her brothers and sister often remembered their uncle’s unfortunate death as part of family conversations. However, my oldest uncle was the only one who got to meet him when he was very little, before my grand uncle’s death.

For many years, all we knew about my grand uncle was that he made it back to Barcelona, his city of birth, after spending five years in a Prisoners of War (PoW) camp in Nazi Germany. He died short after due to the impact that war and forced labour had on his health. He was one of the lucky few who got to reunite with his family, albeit briefly, after his release and before his early death -compared to the thousands of people who lost their lives while under captivity-. How he got to a PoW camp or even made it to France in the first place and in the midst of Spain’s Civil War was a big unknown to us. My grandma (his sister) never mentioned many details about what had happened to him. It was too painful for her to talk about it. And to this date we are never fully sure how much she knew herself about the ordeal my grand uncle had gone through.

Sadly, my grandparents passed away quite a few years ago, before the advent of the Internet age as we know it today. We do know my grandma had tried to find out if her brother had been in Mauthausen. Many Spanish refugees in France were sent to Mauthausen the year he was made captive. However, among my Grandma’s possessions there was an official letter confirming they had no records of him. The letter was written in the early 70s and we assumed she possibly gave her search up due to the constrains she found with the limited means she had at hand at the time. Maybe she thought that her brother was possibly one of the many prisoners whose records had been lost.

Recently, I took on the commitment to find out as much information as I could about my grand uncle and try to reproduce his life during the Spanish Civil War and the World War II with as much detail as possible. Nowadays, Internet is full of resources for families like mine who don’t know what happened to their brave relatives who fought for freedom to preserve the Spanish Republic against dictator Franco and against the advancement of Nazi Germany in Europe. Likewise, in Spain, there are a lot of families who lost family members during the Civil War and who never saw justice because of Spain’s deliberate reluctance to face the atrocities perpetrated by dictator Franco.

With this blog post, I want to contribute to the quest for social justice with sharing some of the main resources that I have been using to track my grand uncle down. With the hope that this will help more people like my family to increase their chances to find some degree of peace. And to keep the memory of their loved ones alive.

"World War II group photo" by gbaku is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

During the early stages of my search, I had read a few blog posts in which they mentioned the most difficult thing to track down was the name of the camp they had been sent to, their prisoner number or even which army unit they were fighting in before being captured. They all agreed on the fact that once you have any of these crucial pieces of information, the routes to explore become endless. I can confirm that, in our case, this is exactly how it happened. Once we had some basic information, one discovery led to another, and with Internet it’s possible to knock to many different doors at the same time.

This is how we found out we had been following the wrong assumption since the beginning. My grand uncle had never been sent to Mauthausen. He was made captive by the Nazis while he was voluntarily fighting as part of the French Foreign Legion, at the battle of Somme. Right before Hitler captured France. My Grand uncle was then sent to one of the 44000 internment camps in Nazi Germany, until his release in 1945.

We now know many more details about his life, including official evidence of the name of a German factory in which he was sent to work to for a period of three months as a forced labourer. Our search keeps growing exponentially. And it gives us hope.

At the end of this post, I share the main sources I have been using as part of my research. Not all of them came back with successful results, but I still think it is worth sharing them here in case they are helpful to others. Some other sources, do not apply to my grand uncle’s search specifically. I found them while I spent hours browsing on the Internet, and they might be relevant to family members from other nationalities.

Now that I managed to find out a few more things about my grand uncle, I think he would also have liked me to share these resources and tips to help as many families as possible.

Every single name counts!

A few tips to support you while you search for your relatives:

Keep track of everything you find in a way that is organized and works for you. If your search becomes successful to some degree, soon you’ll have a lot of information to handle and it might get confusing sometimes. Use a notebook and an excel document -or similar- to keep track of every query you make and the outcome that it gets. For instance, I use a notebook where I keep notes to help organise my thoughts and findings, but I support this with an excel file with different tabs, such as: Potential tracking organisations or websites, Potential leads, historical information relevant to my relative’s journey, actual findings about my relative and how they relate to each other, a chronology of events of my relative’s life, etc.
Looking for a lost family member is a very long process. Take breaks when you need them and be careful with letting the information you come across with overwhelm you. Sometimes, one potential lead may take you to many more potential findings and without realising you’ll have many doors to knock to at once. Organise your findings and give yourself as much time as you need. Also, prioritise and start by reaching out to the sources that are more likely to come back with some sort of positive results.
Share your findings with your family members. Firstly, you’ll need their emotional support. But most importantly, if you are trying to figure out what happened to your relatives, any input from your family will help you figure things out and fill in the gaps. They might remember things you are not aware of that might lead to potential new findings.
If you have any old photos or letters from your relatives, keep going back to them. Some of the things they shared that did not seem relevant to you at first might take a new dimension the more you now about their life and fate.
Unfortunately, a lot of information and official data from those years has not been digitised yet. Some organisations will check the files for you manually upon request. In some cases, it might take up to 7 months for them to write back with an answer. Other sources might require you to travel to the archive in person and conduct the search yourself.
During your search, you’ll come across names, photos and life events of people you’ve never met and whose fate is revealed to you in lists and archives where your relative may or may not be part of. Be mindful and respect the privacy and the memory of these strangers who were also victims of crimes of war and genocide. Having access to their names is also a reminder of the thousands of innocent people who suffered terrible abuse of their most basic human rights and the impunity of their perpetrators. Find emotional support on your friends and family if you need to.