Richard Baxell Lecture on the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War

Richard Baxell gave a lecture on the British Battalion of the International Brigades (IB) during the Spanish Civil War. I posed some searching questions about desertions and executions carried out by the communist leadership of the IBs. Marty, the French Communist leader of the IBs whose epithet was "the butcher of Albacete", claimed 500 executions of members of the International Brigades. Baxell tended to evade the questions and gave rather ambiguous replies. He did, however, acknowledge the existence of Camp Lukacs run by the communist commissars and euphemistically described it as a re-education camp for deserters. The sordid history of the role of the communist leadership of the IBs has been exposed in R Dan Richardson's "Comintern Army", Radosh et al's "Spain Betrayed" and James Hopkins' "Into the Heart of the Fire".