A wig used to disguise a communist leader, censored poems written by the current culture minister and a list of prisoners facing the firing squad are just a few of the treasures within 157,000 boxes of archives highlighting both the dark and ridiculous sides of the Spanish civil war and Franco's dictatorship. Now the documents, which stretch 109 miles back to back, are to be sent from an archive in Madrid to a new Centre for Historical Memory in Salamanca, the wartime headquarters of Franco, to go on view when the centre opens in two years after refurbishment. Among the artefacts will be the wig used by Santiago Carrillo when he secretly returned to Spain after Franco's death in 1975. Visitors will also be able to pore over lists of dates of the executions by firing squad of enemies of Franco's regime. The proceedings of kangaroo courts, which condemned opponents on trumped-up charges, also form part of this testament to one of Spain's darkest chapters. The archives reveal that about a million people were imprisoned between the end of the civil war in 1939 and the latter days of the Franco regime in 1973. Crosses next to prisoners' names meant they were executed. The archive was saved by civil servants who ignored orders to destroy them, putting themselves at risk.