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"Somebody remind me - who are the good guys in this struggle?”

The fascists were supported by Hitler, the loyalists by Stalin, so who were the “good guys”?

We tend to forget, if we ever really knew, because we look at 1938 through the telescope of 1939 - 1945.
And we see Hitler's conquest of Europe coming, and we see the Holocaust coming, and we see the future deaths of around 35 million Europeans, who didn't necessarily have to die in agony.

And so we consider Hitler to be the Great Satan personified, while Stalin still today is sometimes old “Uncle Joe.”

But the reality of 1938 was vastly, vastly different.

In 1938, Hitler had five concentration camps, with maybe 30,000 prisoners, who were treated roughly, but not mass murdered.

In 1938, Stalin had nearly 500 Gulags, with millions of prisoners, of whom about a million per year perished.

In 1938, Hitler had invaded no one except the German Rhineland and German Austria, both of which apparently welcomed Hitler's troops.

In 1938, Stalin had already conquered all of the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union, and had even already invaded Poland (in 1923 if I remember right. The Poles kicked his *ss out).

So, in 1938, most serious observers (i.e., Churchill) were only beginning to understand that Hitler represented the more dangerous IMMEDIATE threat to western civilization.

Many, understandably, saw Hitler as the antidote to Stalin's horrors.

No one then, and few even today fully understood that Stalin was the Old Master and Hitler his precocious young pupil.

Imho, of course...

BTW, I need to learn this, so I don't mistake it again:

It's not “Gulags.”

It's GULag, and there was only one. GULag stands for, in Russian: State Board of Concentration Camps.

According to Norman Davies 2006 book “No Simple Victory, World War II in Europe” (page 328) by the end of the 1930s, there were

“...36 administrative divisions of the GULag and 476 principle camps...”

About a dozen of these camps had over 50,000 prisoners each. The death rate is estimated at around a million per year out of a total prisoner population of several million.

By contrast, in 1938, Hitler had just five concentration camps with around 30,000 total prisoners.

By the end of the war, Hitler's concentration camp system briefly rivaled Stalin's, but never exceeded it in size.

However:
“A more recent estimate puts the death rate in the Nazi camps at 40%, compared with 14 percent (of a much higher number) in the GULag.” (p. 334)

“Somebody remind me - who are the good guys in this struggle?”

None of the above.

Then Franco's troops invaded and began to systematically execute all mayors, town councilmen, union leaders, anybody who was denounced by anybody who owned a blue shirt (Spanish blood feuds can go back a long time) and oh yes, almost of anybody they captured who had a bruise on their right shoulder.

The penalty for having a political post in the Republican side -as mayor- was four years in prison. It is true that this sometimes meant death, because the lack of food and fuels in post-war Spain made life in jail very hard.

In Catalonia, the death toll of the red side during the two and a half years of revolutionary government was far higher that anything Franco could do at the end of the war.

When the red side collapsed, most of the leaders and inductors of massacres fled to France and Mexico, leaving in Spain their henchmen to carry the can, which were the ones on whom Franco retaliated.

It is true Franco retaliated on masons. Unlike countries like America, the UK and France, were freemasons formed some kind of patriotic society; in Spain their objectives were disruptive with the past and with the public interest at such a level that constituted a danger for the mere existence of the Nation.

Unfortunately, recent developments, as 3/11 (a copy of the 1980 Bologna massacre), seem to confirm such diagnosis.