seized all the Spanish territory. Exile and death Unlike President Azaña, Negrín remained in Spain until the final collapse of the Republican front and his fall from office in March 1939. Negrín decided to openly support the Franco-British war effort against Germany and Italy, remaining in Paris until the fall of France (June 1940) and then going to London. He resided there throughout the Second World War, repeatedly refusing to leave Europe and seek safe haven in Mexico, as did a large number of the Republican leadership. He organized the S.E.R.E. () to help Republican exiles. He remained prime minister of the Spanish Republican government in Exile between 1939 and 1945 (although ignored by most of the exiled political forces). The Francoist dictatorship stripped Negrín of his academic position and confiscated his estate. In July 1941 he was sentenced to the exorbitant fine of 100 million pesetas by the Special Court of the Law of Political Responsibilities, while in September 1941, the Special Court for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism sentenced him to 30 years in prison (the maximum penalty, even though Negrin was neither a Mason nor a Communist). His father was imprisoned in Las Palmas for the mere fact of being his father, leaving prison in 1941 to die shortly thereafter in poverty after having been illegally expropriated of all his property. Disagreements with exile community In August 1945, at the end of the war with the defeat of the Axis powers, Negrin tried to gather the unanimous support of all the political forces in exile in order to offer a unitary republican front that could gather the support of the allied governments against Franco's dictatorship, taking advantage of his international discredit and the strong rejection that his recent behaviour of sympathy and support for the Italian-German war effort had provoked. In Negrin's opinion, only such a united front would serve as a guarantee before Washington and London of the presence of a replacement alternative to the Franco regime that did not run the risk of resuming the horrors of civil war. However, in view of the impossibility of gaining the support of all the political forces in exile, Negrín resigned from his position as head of the government of the Republic in exile before the plenary session of the Cortes in exile meeting in Mexico in August 1945. The PSOE expelled Negrín and a number of