Calle de Julián Zugazagoitia

Behind the sign is Julián Zugazagoitia Mendieta, born in Bilbao in 1899, son of a Socialist councillor of the city. He joined the Socialist Youth at fifteen and soon traded the podium for the printing press: he edited Madrid’s El Socialista during the tensest years of the Republic and was a deputy for Badajoz and for Bilbao. In May 1937 Juan Negrín named him Minister of the Interior, in the middle of the war. From that post, and earlier from his column, he wrote against the checas and executions without trial; when he learned of the abduction and murder of Andreu Nin, he dismissed his own director-general of security. When the war ended he crossed into France, where he published Historia de la guerra en España. The Gestapo arrested him in 1940 and handed him to Franco’s authorities. After a court-martial, he was shot in Madrid on November 9, 1940. In 1936 he had written down a line that sums up his idea of war: the life of an enemy who surrenders is untouchable. He died with no one applying that principle to him, and the street in Bellas Vistas keeps his Basque surname as a plaque of memory.