Geneva, late May 1937. A representative of The Times of London, just back from Bilbao, spread a large collection of photographs in front of the American consul.

They were photographs of documents about German participation in the Bilbao campaign, above all the bombing of Guernica. Among them was a map annotated with directions in German for the aerial bombardment of Guernica.

The actual bombardment, he said, had followed those directions. He had sent the material to his paper. The paper had not published it.

A month earlier Guernica had burned all night. For the month after that, people argued over who had set the fire.

I. Market day

The Times correspondent George Steer called Guernica the most ancient town of the Basques. By tradition the kings of Spain had sworn beneath its old oak to respect the rights of Vizcaya.

April 26, 1937, was a Monday, the customary market day for the country round.

According to Steer's dispatch, sent from Bilbao the next day, at 4.30 p.m., with the market full and peasants still coming in, the church bell rang the alarm for approaching aeroplanes. People went down into cellars and into dugouts prepared after the bombing of Durango a month before. A Catholic priest took charge and kept order.

Five minutes later a single German bomber circled low over the town and dropped six heavy bombs, apparently aiming for the station. Five minutes after that a second plane threw the same number into the middle of the town. About a quarter of an hour later three Junkers arrived. From then on the bombing grew in intensity and went on until dusk, at 7.45.

Steer described the rhythm he saw: heavy bombs and hand grenades to drive people out of the dugouts; fighters swooping low to machine-gun those running in the fields and drive them underground again; then as many as twelve bombers at a time dropping heavy and incendiary bombs on the ruins.

By his calculation more than 3,000 aluminium incendiaries fell. The town had 7,000 inhabitants and 3,000 refugees.

II. Two in the morning

Steer reached Guernica that night.

It was 2 a.m. on April 27. The town was flaming from end to end; the reflection could be seen in the smoke above the mountains ten miles away. Houses fell all night until the streets were long heaps of red débris. Survivors trekked toward Bilbao in antique solid-wheeled ox carts piled with what they had saved.

On a street leading downhill he saw a refuge where about fifty people, nearly all women and children, were said to be trapped under burning wreckage. The hospital of the Josefinas, one of the first places hit, was said to have lost all forty-two wounded militiamen it sheltered.

The Casa de Juntas and the old oak were untouched. So were a war-material factory outside the town and two barracks some distance away.

When Steer returned that afternoon most of the town was still burning, and new fires had broken out. About thirty dead lay in a ruined hospital.

How many had died? It was impossible to say yet, he wrote. The Bilbao press that morning had called the victims "fortunately small"; he suspected an understatement, so as not to alarm the city's many refugees. His own estimate: the deaths might run into hundreds.

III. London's first question

The report appeared on April 28. That same day, in the House of Commons, Attlee asked by private notice whether the Government would join other Powers in a collective protest to General Franco and Herr Hitler against bombing the civilian populations of open towns.

Foreign Secretary Eden replied that the Government deeply deplored the bombardment of civilians in the Spanish civil war, "wherever it may occur and whoever may be responsible."

Asked whether the planes and pilots were foreign, Eden said he had seen press reports that they were, but that there was material of foreign origin on both sides.

Sir Archibald Sinclair said the civilians of Guernica had been deliberately pursued by aircraft with machine guns, which was no ordinary bombardment. Arthur Henderson began, "these massacres were committed by German machines apparently driven by German pilots—" and the Speaker cut him off: the honourable Member was speaking without confirmation.

Another member pointed out that Government planes had bombed open towns too. Eden noted that the same morning's Times, on the same page, carried a report of Government aircraft bombing the open town of Motril.

A single eyewitness report, once it reached Parliament, ran first into three questions. Whose planes? Whose pilots? Had the other side done the same?

IV. "Red hordes"

The other side answered quickly.

On April 29 and 30, the press bureau of Franco's Nationalist Government issued two dispatches on the burning of Guernica and handed them to foreign correspondents as well. The German ambassador in Salamanca, Faupel, later sent Berlin a translation of the key passages of the first:

"Guernica was destroyed with fire and gasoline. It was set afire and reduced to ruins by the Red hordes in the criminal service of Aguirre, the President of the Basque Republic."

Aguirre, it went on, had planned the destruction in order to lay the blame at the enemy's door and stir up indignation among the Basques.

On this account Guernica had not been bombed at all. Its own side had burned it.

On April 30, the American ambassador to Spain, Claude Bowers, cabled Washington from Saint-Jean-de-Luz, just over the French border. Guernica, "holy city of the Basques," an open country town with an unarmed population, had been totally destroyed by huge bombs from insurgent planes "of German origin and pilotage." People fleeing to the country were attacked with grenades and machine guns. The Times correspondent had himself been machine-gunned by a German plane and had handled unexploded aluminium incendiary bombs on the site.

His verdict on the denials by the insurgents and Germany after the world's reaction was one word: "incredible."

He added that, by reliable report, the Basques had had eight planes when they were attacked by seventy.

V. Berlin wants an unequivocal denial

In London the denial was not working.

On May 4 the German Foreign Ministry cabled its embassy in Spain. In yesterday's Commons debate on Guernica, Germany had again been accused. The ambassador in London reported that, despite German denials, the embassy kept hearing from various quarters that German fliers were responsible; and in private conversation Franco's denial was being read as an indirect admission that German fliers had done it.

So Berlin asked: induce Franco to issue an immediate and energetic denial that could not be equivocally construed.

Salamanca replied the next day. The denial agreed upon with Franco had not been issued. Faupel explained that the Nationalist press dispatches had already rejected, in the sharpest terms, the Basque report of destruction by German fliers as lies and slander; the reading that they indirectly admitted a German air attack was malicious and unsupported by the text.

The same day Berlin sent London a "very urgent" telegram. Britain proposed that the Non-Intervention Committee appeal to both sides not to bomb open towns. Germany would join on purely humanitarian grounds, on conditions: no precedent was to be created, and the appeal must omit "even indirect reference to the Guernica incidents."

In public, Germany said Guernica had nothing to do with it. In its own telegrams it was working to keep the name out of an international document.

VI. An inquiry

On May 5 the German ambassador in London, Ribbentrop, saw Eden and "stoutly defended the familiar German viewpoint." When he asked what reports Eden actually had of German fliers taking part, he told Berlin, Eden could only point to British newspaper reports.

Eden asked casually whether Germany would agree to an international investigation.

Ribbentrop said he would ask his Government, and asked Berlin to send material on "Red atrocities" at once, so that any inquiry could be widened to the other side. He also reported that a note from the Spanish Republic demanding an international inquiry had reached the Foreign Office that day.

On May 6 Eden told the Commons that, since the facts were disputed, the only satisfactory course was an inquiry to establish them. The best people for it would not be any of the Great Powers, but nationals of small neutral states. It would be done "not in an effort to pillory the past, but in an attempt to better the future."

Germany's answer was written in an internal memorandum.

On May 15, State Secretary Mackensen recorded a phone call. Hitler, responding to Ribbentrop's telegram, expected the instruction to London to stress that an investigation of a single military action was "entirely outside the bounds of possibility" and had to be "flatly rejected." If there was to be any investigation, it would have to cover all incidents.

Mackensen replied that the instructions already matched the Führer's ideas: in agreement with the War Ministry, the Foreign Ministry's position was that an investigation of the Guernica case "was to be rejected under all circumstances."

VII. The map

Which brings us back to the map.

On May 29, the American consul in Geneva, Gilbert, cabled the State Department about how the League Council had handled Spain. Eden had worked to steer the question away from Geneva and back to the Non-Intervention Committee in London; the Republic's delegate, Del Vayo, wanted the League to affirm the fact of foreign aggression.

Gilbert learned that the Spanish delegation held documents on German intervention issued by the Basque Government. Pierce, the Times representative just back from Bilbao, showed him the photographs and the German map. Part of the material, Pierce said, was in the Basque document. What he had sent his paper, it had not published.

In the end Del Vayo agreed not to present the documents on Germany. A member of the delegation explained to Gilbert that they had been persuaded Berlin really wanted to withdraw its nationals from Spain, and that it would be bad tactics to irritate Berlin unduly just then.

Three times the map stopped at the door: the paper did not print it, it never went before the Council, and the inquiry it might have served was refused in Berlin.

VIII. After June

The bombing did not stop with Guernica.

On June 14 the Spanish chargé in Washington, Enrique Carlos de la Casa, passed on his Government's report: in recent days more than a hundred German planes serving the rebels had dropped tons of shrapnel on Basque fronts and villages, continuing "the terroristic methods" used at Durango and Guernica; more than fifty bombs had fallen on Bilbao cemetery, destroying hundreds of graves. Government forces had brought down three planes. One, a twin-engined Heinkel 111, fell inside their lines; its crew were killed, and they were Germans, as had been all the airmen previously captured on that front.

This was a protest note from one side, not a neutral inquiry. But it named what Berlin least wanted named: who was sitting in the planes.

By September the Basque army had surrendered. Through Bowers, President José Aguirre sent President Roosevelt a letter asking him to appeal to the Italians to honour the terms of capitulation and spare the Basque civilian population. In it he recalled the great sufferings of a people who had seen "entire villages destroyed such as Durango, Guernica."

IX. Epilogue

In 1950, an edition of German Foreign Ministry documents prepared by American, British and French editors was published in Washington, with a volume on Germany and the Spanish Civil War. The telegrams of May 1937 were printed there: the request for an "energetic" denial from Franco, the demand that the international appeal not mention Guernica, Hitler's insistence that an inquiry be "flatly rejected."

None of these documents says "we bombed it." What they record is something else: how hard the accused side worked to make sure no one would look.

The photograph of that German map was seen by an American consul in Geneva in May 1937. We know it existed because Gilbert, in passing, wrote one sentence: the paper had not published it.

Sources and editorial boundaries

1. Eyewitness report: George L. Steer, "The Tragedy of Guernica: Town Destroyed in Air Attack. Eye-Witness's Account," The Times (London), April 28, 1937, datelined Bilbao, April 27. The original newspaper page was not examined for this story; two independent transcriptions were read and agree on the key numbers, times and names: the Vancouver Island University history course page (web.viu.ca/davies/H101/Guernica.report.1937.htm) and the retyped text published by EITB (STEERing.pdf). Steer's times, aircraft numbers, bomb counts, death estimate ("may run into hundreds") and accounts of the dead in the hospital and the refuge are the observations, calculations and hearsay of a correspondent sympathetic to the Basques; the text marks them as his and they have not been independently verified. 2. British parliamentary record: HC Deb 28 April 1937 vol 323 cc312-9 (Attlee's private-notice question, Eden, Sinclair, Henderson and the Speaker, the Motril report); HC Deb 05 May 1937 vol 323 cc1131-7; HC Deb 06 May 1937 vol 323 cc1332-61 and around cc1377-80 (Eden on Guernica and an inquiry by small neutral states). Read in the Historic Hansard at api.parliament.uk. The May 3 debate is mentioned only as described in the German telegram; that day's record was not read. 3. German Foreign Ministry records: Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945, Series D, vol. III, Germany and the Spanish Civil War (Washington: GPO, 1950), docs. 249 (Mackensen to the embassy in Spain, May 4), 250 (to the embassy in Britain, May 5), 251 (Faupel, Salamanca, May 5, with a translation of key passages of the Nationalist denial of April 29), 253 (Ribbentrop, London, May 6), 258 (Mackensen memorandum, May 15). Read in the full OCR text of the volume at archive.org, checked against running heads and page numbers. This is the postwar Allied editors' English translation; the German originals were not consulted, and the Nationalist denial reached this edition through German and then English translation. 4. U.S. diplomatic records: FRUS 1937, vol. I, docs. 185 (Bowers, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, April 30), 208 (Gilbert, Geneva, May 29), 235 (De la Casa to the Secretary of State, June 14, translation), 300 (Bowers, September 7, enclosing Aguirre's letter to Roosevelt in translation). https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1937v01 5. Boundaries: no operational records or flight logs of the Condor Legion or the Italian Aviazione Legionaria were read for this story, nor the German map itself; the map is described only as Gilbert reports Pierce's words, and the claim that the raid followed its directions is Pierce's. Bowers's "of German origin and pilotage" was his judgment on April 30 from reports and information; De la Casa's statement that the crew were German is a protest by the Spanish Government. No exact death toll for Guernica is given; no weather, dialogue or inner thoughts are supplied; later studies, memoirs and photo captions not checked for this story are not used. Basque and Nationalist statements are both statements by parties to the conflict. 6. Rights: British and U.S. parliamentary and diplomatic records and the Allied edition of German diplomatic documents are public records; the 1937 newspaper report is paraphrased with very short quotation. The narrative is original and reproduces no protected modern account.