After a brutal siege and the collapse of Republican resistance, Nationalist troops marched into Madrid with little fighting. The city had endured nearly three years of bombardment and starvation. Franco's victory installed a dictatorship that would rule Spain for the next thirty-six years, and the war's estimated 500,000 deaths left deep scars across Spanish society.
By the last week of March 1939, the Spanish Republic was collapsing from within. Its own factions had turned on each other in Madrid, and the government that had promised to fight to the last was instead negotiating surrender terms that never fully materialized. When Nationalist columns finally entered the capital on March 28, they met no resistance at all—just exhausted, hungry residents who had survived on lentils and rumor for months.
Franco declared the war over three days later, on April 1, with his famous communiqué: "the war has ended." But the peace he imposed was punitive. Hundreds of thousands of Republicans fled across the Pyrenees into France, many ending up in internment camps. Tens of thousands more who stayed were imprisoned or executed in the repression that followed.
The fall of Madrid also closed a chapter in the ideological battles of the 1930s—foreign volunteers of the International Brigades, writers like George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway who had chronicled the war, and the fascist and communist powers who had used Spain as a testing ground for the war to come, all watched the Republic die in the city it had defended so long.
Key people: Francisco Franco