bloody bombardments or after the press reported the nationalist treatment of republican prisoners. The most notable of such massacres happened after the air raid on Alcalá de Henares air base in December 1936. Protesters, some of whom were armed, arrived at one of Madrid's prisons, stormed the gates, and demanded that the cells be opened and the nationalist prisoners be handed to the crowd. Rodríguez appeared at the prison, ordered the crowd to disperse, and announced that he would rather give arms to the prisoners than hand them over to the mob. Among the prisoners Rodríguez saved were notable football player Ricardo Zamora and political leaders of the Falange Española, such as Rafael Sánchez Mazas, Ramón Serrano Súñer, Valentín Galarza Morante, and Raimundo Fernández-Cuesta. During his term in office, Melchor Rodríguez García revealed that José Cazorla Maure, a counsellor of state security of the Council of Defence of Madrid, had organized a net of private, illegal prisons that the Communist Party of Spain ran. Rodríguez was appointed councilor of Madrid. He represented the Iberian Anarchist Federation. Segismundo Casado appointed him Mayor of Madrid in the last days of the war, and he was in charge of handing over power to the Francoists when Madrid fell on March 28, 1939. Trial and imprisonment After the war, Rodríguez did not escape the repression that the defeated suffered. He was arrested and tried twice by court martial. After an acquittal in the first trial, the prosecutor appealed. Rodríguez received a sentence of twenty years and one day, of which he served four years. It is worth highlighting, at this second Council of War, the attitude of General Agustín Muñoz Grandes, whom Rodríguez had saved, with other military prisoners, during the war. At the end of the Council of War, during which the prosecutor requested the death penalty for Rodríguez, the prosecutor asked if anyone present had anything to allege. Muñoz stood, introduced himself as a Lieutenant General in the Army, and with his testimony presented thousands of signatures of people whom Rodríguez had saved, in some cases at Rodríguez's personal risk. Rodríguez was in the Porlier prison and in the El Puerto de Santa María prison, from which he was provisionally released in 1944. Death He died on 14 February 1972, in Madrid, Spain. He was buried at the San Justo cemetery. At the funeral, hundreds of people gathered, including figures from the