Carlos Rodríguez del Risco and the First Spanish Testimony from the Holocaust

Carlos Rodríguez del Risco survived the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen and published a series of articles recounting his experience in the Spanish Falangist newspaper Arriba in 1946. Part conversion narrative and part serialized adventure novel, “Yo he estado en Mauthausen” (I was in Mauthausen) presents the idiosyncratic vantage point of a pro-Franco concentration camp survivor who is also the first Spanish witness of the Holocaust to publish an account inside dictatorship Spain. This article examines the contradictions and complications inherent in Rodríguez del Risco’s testimonial text as a work of political propaganda and a groundbreaking historiographic account.