Eighty years ago, Franco's fakers field fifth columnists, felines and food

The last bastion of Republican Spain, the historic capital Madrid, fell to Franco’s forces with minimal resistance after a siege of two years. In a neat exercise in transforming propaganda into history, the credit was given to the Nationalist “Fifth Column” in the city. Two years previously General Mola had advanced on Madrid in four columns and boasted that he had a fifth within the city already. It did not exist then and it did not exist in 1939. Naturally existing Franco supporters and opportunistic adherents to his cause came out to fill the vacuum left by the Republic’s total military exhaustion, exacerbated by internal political collapse. They claimed that they had overthrown the Republic but in reality the end of the siege was purely a military victory. The phrase "fifth column" became even more useful as a short-hand for the enemy within. The collapse of democracy across Europe in the face of Fascism in the eighteen months that followed seemed to many to be cle