Civil War Franco rose to power during the Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936 when he led a coup against the country's left-wing Republican government. A three-year battle ensued, pitting Franco's Nationalist rebels, backed by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, against the Soviet-backed Republicans. The Nationalists won the conflict, which ended in 1939 with hundreds of thousands of dead. Among the killing sites was the Basque town of Guernica, which was bombed by German warplanes -- an atrocity immortalised in a haunting painting of the same name by Spanish master Pablo Picasso. In his book "The Spanish Holocaust", historian...