Spanish Maquis  The Spanish Maquis were Spanish guerrillas exiled in France after the Spanish Civil War who continued to fight against Francoist Spain until the early 1960s, carrying out sabotage, robberies (to help fund guerrilla activity), occupations of the Spanish embassy in France and assassinations of Francoists, as well as contributing to the fight against Nazi Germany and the Vichy regime in France during World War II. Referring to the contribution of the Spanish Maquis to the French resistance movement, Martha Gellhorn wrote in "The Undefeated" (1945):  Also during World War II, Spaniards assassinated the German generals von Schaumberg (commandant of the region around Paris) and von Ritter (a recruiter of forced labor). In October 1944 a group of 6,000 maquis including Antonio Téllez Solà invaded Spain via the Aran Valley but were driven back after ten days. Few details of the maquis' actions in Spain have been made public because of the secrecy of the Franco government, but guerrillas, including Francesc Sabaté Llopart, Jose Castro Veiga, and Ramon Vila Capdevila were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Guardia Civil (Civil Guard) officers, and uncountable acts of industrial sabotage. Between 1943 and 1952, 2,166 maquis were reported arrested by the Civil Guard, nearly wiping out the movement. The term "maquis" comes from the French term "maquis", which in turn comes from the Corsican term "macchia", the maquis shrubland, a type of biome found in the Mediterranean basin, mostly associated with Corsica. In France, the term was first used to refer to a group of guerrillas of the French resistance against the German occupation of France during World War II. The resistance fighters in these encampments were referred to as "maquisards". The anti-Franco guerrilla resistance in Spain began before the 1939 end of the Spanish Civil War. The outbreak of World War II so soon after the civil war surprised a large part of the Spanish Republican exiles in France; many of them joined the French Resistance. By 1944, with the German forces in retreat, many of the guerrillas refocused their fight towards Spain. Despite the failure of the invasion of the Val d'Arán that year, some columns continued to progress into the Spanish interior and to connect with the groups that had remained in the mountains since 1939.