Marcelino Massana
Spanish military personnel and trade unionist (1918-1981)
Marcel·lí Massana i Bancells (3 October 1918 – 21 May 1981), also known as Marcelino Massana or by his nom de guerre Panxo, was a Catalan anarchist guerrilla who fought with the maquis against the Francoist dictatorship in Catalonia. He was widely known in Berguedà for his mischievous personality, as he often dressed as a Catholic priest and played pranks on the Civil Guard.
Biography
Marcel·lí Massana i Bancells was born Berga, Catalonia, on 3 October 1918. Massana's uncle was a priest and he was educated in a Catholic school. In 1933, he joined the National Confederation of Labour (CNT), an anarcho-syndicalist trade union confederation.
During the Spanish Civil War, he became a lieutenant in the Spanish Republican Army. After the Nationalist victory, he was captured and imprisoned by the Francoist dictatorship. In 1942, he escaped to Vichy France, but returned to Catalonia in 1944 to prosecute guerrilla warfare against the dictatorship, as part of the Spanish Maquis. There he led a rural group of Catalan anarchist guerrillas. As leader of his guerrilla group, Massana trained and gave orders to his troops, and became the face of their movement.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q9028566. VIAF identifies the subject as 6217185. The Library of Congress control number is n79115112. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1918, 1981, 1933 and 1942.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marcelino Massana” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.