The Civil Guard maintains on its networks a publication about the Blue Division that the Government said had withdrawn

The Civil Guard maintains a publication on its YouTube channel about the Blue Division despite the fact that the Government assured Sumar 18 days ago, in a parliamentary response, that said content "is no longer available" and that "it should not have been disseminated."

It was in mid-June when on the YouTube channel of the Armed Institute, in the section corresponding to publications, a photograph of two smiling agents in a boat was broadcast with the following legend: "Two civil guards of the Blue Division in front of the ruins of the Trakai castle, in Lithuania, during 1942-1943."

Shortly after, on June 24, Sumar registered a question in Congress for a written response in which, reproducing said publication, he recalled that the Blue Division "was a military unit created by the Franco regime to send Spaniards to fight alongside the Nazi army during the Second World War", adding that this participation occurred "within the framework of the collaboration of the Franco regime with Nazi Germany, contributing to Hitler's imperialist delusions."

For this reason, he criticized that the dissemination of this type of content from official institutional channels "raises serious doubts from the point of view of compliance with the Democratic Memory Law", stressing that this "establishes the obligation of public administrations to avoid any form of exaltation, praise or justification of the Franco dictatorship, as well as its structures, organizations or associated elements."

Likewise, it insisted that "the use of official channels of State institutions" for the dissemination of "content related to military units linked to totalitarian regimes can generate institutional confusion and affect the neutrality required of the State Security Forces and Bodies in the treatment of historical memory."

Questions

That is why I asked the Executive if it was aware of said dissemination, if it had been supervised or authorized by any body of the Ministry of the Interior or the criteria that the Civil Guard applies for the publication of its contents on its social media channels.

In addition to whether the Government considered that this reference to the Blue Division "from institutional channels" could be interpreted as "a form of normalization or whitening of a unit linked to the Franco regime and Nazism" and whether it was going to "adopt measures" so that the official annals of the State Security Forces and Corps "strictly conform to the principles of the Democratic Memory Law in the dissemination of historical content."

Three months later, on September 23, the Executive responded to Sumar that the material disseminated by the Armed Institute on its YouTube channel comes from the Historical Photography Center of the Civil Guard, created in March 2023, to "constitute a documentary and graphic fund of the Institution and make it available to researchers, specialists and citizens in general."

At the same time, he explained that the center "collects, classifies and digitizes" material found in "photographic collections of publications, public registries, Civil Guard units, private collections and private individuals." In this sense, he stressed that the publication of content on its official channels is carried out "with total respect for current legislation, without any intention or intention beyond showing the activity of the Corps, whose origin dates back to 1844."

And he settled the matter by pointing out that this "specific content" to which Sumar referred in his question "is no longer available on the aforementioned channel nor should it have been broadcast in the terms in which it was done."