Contribución al estudio de la salida delictiva de obras de arte al extranjero durante la Guerra Civil

The illegal trafficking of works of art abroad during the Spanish Civil War has not yet been studied systematically due in part to the evident difficulties for research given the scarce, dispersed and, in many cases, unreliable documentation in archives. The purpose of this article is to establish research parameters in order to confront these difficulties, based mainly on unpublished primary sources. The first task lies in clearly differentiating between official shipments of artworks to save them from the dangers of war, and other illegal shipments, taking into account that for the Franco regime everything was the product of the “theft of the reds”. The second task is to establish who were those mainly responsible for this illegal trafficking, their means and procedures. The final purpose is to analyze the actions taken by both governments to fight the illegal export of artworks