Metadata: Special Section
Collection
- Country:
- Spain
- Holding institution:
- Historical Memory Documentary Centre
- Holding institution (official language):
- Centro documental de la memoria historica
- Postal address:
- Calle Gibraltar 2. 37008 - Salamanca
- Phone number:
- +34 923 212 845
- Email:
- cdmh@cultura.gob.es
- Reference number:
- ES.37274.CDMH/8.7.6
- Title:
- Special Section
- Title (official language):
- Seccion Especial
- Creator/accumulator:
- National Delegation of Documentary Services (Delegacion Nacional de Servicios Documentales)
- Date(s):
- 1937/1978
- Language:
- Spanish; Castilian
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Physical condition:
- Good
- Scope and content:
- Extraordinary attention was paid to the documentation of the Freemasons, for the purpose of identifying their members and uncovering their activities. The purpose of the Special Section was to preserve this type of material. The collected archives were not only described, but also brought together in order to extract the information the regime was looking for. With this purpose in mind, five types of records were created: personal, institutional, issues, activities, and recovery (seizure of documents from the Republican armed forces by the Francoist army). In addition to that, other records contain information concerning the political background of some individuals suspected of being Freemasons. Together with this are documents related to other groups in conflict with the Catholic Church: Rotarians, Freethinkers, Naturism practitioners, Protestants, and Jews. It created an archive containing around 180,000 files, whose main aim was to collect all the information regarding Freemasons and Freemasonry.
- Archival history:
- The Special Section collection was kept in Salamanca, at the Seminary, until 1968. Then it was transferred to the San Ambrosio School, where it remained until April 1998, when it was moved to a new, adjacent building belonging to the Spanish Culture Ministry.
- Administrative/biographical history:
- This collection began in 1944 with the creation of the State Delegation for Documentation Recovery, whose regulation stated that the institution would be composed of two sections. One of them was the Socio-Political Section, which would keep all the Communist and Marxist documents recovered. The other was the Special Section, which would keep documents regarding Freemasonry
- Subject terms:
- Freemasons
- Jewish political activity
- Personal records
- Access, restrictions:
- Free access regulated by the current legal environment on access to Spanish historical archives (law 16/1985 of Spanish Historical Patrimony).
- Finding aids:
- Inventories and catalogs of the documentary groups are available in the archive. Data on the collection also are available at the website of the Spanish National Archives (PARES).
- Links to finding aids:
- https://pares.culturaydeporte.gob.es/inicio.html
- Yerusha Network member:
- Spanish National Research Council
- Author of the description:
- Marina Girona Berenguer; ILC, CSIC; August 2019
