Execution of Carmen Tronchoni

A telephone operator, she was accused of planning the escape to Nationalist territory of two army officers and a young ‘falangista’ who had taken refuge at the Panama Consulate in Valencia. After her execution, Carmen would be remembered as a myth of Falange’s Sección Femenina y del Socorro Blanco (Female Section and White Relief), a civil organisation that helped those who had been targeted by the Republic authorities during the war. 

ARXIU NACIONAL DE CATALUNYA (ANC), Generalitat de Catalunya (Segona República), Preventori Judicial de Barcelona, “Oficis entre el Correccional de Dones, la Direcció General de Serveis Correccionals i l’Audiéncia Territorial...”, 1-1-T-7263, 230.

Carmen had entered Les Corts on 3 December 1937, 5 days after her arrest in Barcelona following a set-up by SIM agents (Military Information Service) with the cooperation of the young informer Inés Jiménez Lumbreras, who would be executed as well in 1940.

On 15 February 1938 she was sentenced to death and was told on the 28^th that her execution would take place the following day. That night she received the customary religious assistance by the priest Martín Torrent, and, in the early hours, she was taken to Montjuïc’s Castle barracks for her execution.

Those last moments of her life are thoroughly attested in her cartas de capilla (last letters of farewell) and the accounts of her fellow inmates. 

Throughout the following months 7 other women were put to death. María Mira Calderón was executed by firing squad on 26 April and 6 more women shared her fate on 11 August: Lluïssa Gil Calvero; Rosa Fortuny Ramos; Joaquina Sot Delclós and her cousin Sara Jordà Guanter; Caterina Viader Fors; and Carme Vidal Rovira.

Les Corts reached its highest number in terms of occupation for the whole war period during that summer: 798 inmates (on 31 August) in a space with a capacity of 100 people. New women kept coming in by order of the Courts of Justice or the SIM itself: on the 15th of March alone 77 women got in.