Lluís Companys

Who was Lluís Companys?

Lluís Companys i Jover was the 123rd President of Catalonia, from 1934 and during the Spanish Civil War.

He was a lawyer and leader of the Republican Left of Catalonia political party. Exiled after the war, he was captured and handed over by the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, to the Spanish dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who had him executed by firing squad in 1940. Companys is the only incumbent democratically elected president in European history to have been executed, and seventy-two years later the council of war which sentenced him is still in force.