The worldwide surge of an ethics of memory in the last quarter of the twentieth century was kindled by that century's crimes against sizable human groups. Raphael Lemkin named this sort of crime “genocide” in his 1944 treatise Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Shortly after, on 11 December 1946, the General Assembly of the United Nations condemned genocide in its resolution 96. Although the Spanish Civil War has often been considered the preamble to the Second World War, Spain has escaped the moral blemish associated with ethnic persecution in a way that other European countries have not. On the contrary, Franco profited from the legend of his protection of Jews (Avni 179–99; Rother) to ease his acceptance by the Western powers. Certainly, the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War pale next to the magnitude of the destruction in the Second World War and the enormity of the violence against Jews and other groups. There was a difference of scale, but also something else. For the first time in modern European history, a state organized the physical annihilation of an ethnic group. In Spain no such outright extermination took place, and despite the commission of human rights abuses, by 1946, Franco had begun to de-Nazify his regime and initiated a rapprochement to the West, resuming full diplomatic relations with the United States in 1951 and gaining admission to the United Nations in December 1955.

With Spain's membership in the European Union and in NATO in the 1980s, the Civil War seemed remote and the dictatorship anecdotal to the point that some historians disputed its fascist nature. In part, this milder view of the Franco dictatorship is the result of his timely maneuver to disengage from the Axis before the end of the Second World War while shedding the fascist rhetoric and ceremonial; but it is also influenced by the general assimilation of the regime's self-representation as a stern but on the whole lawful and orderly government. Dressing up its crimes in the semblance of legality was the regime's principal strategy to falsify the historical truth.