Chapter 1: Social War Begins
"The passing of political power to the Socialist Party (PSOE – Partido Socialista Obrero Español) and its urban middle-class allies, the lawyers and intellectuals of the various Republican parties, sent shivers of horror through right-wing Spain. The Republican–Socialist coalition intended to use its suddenly acquired share of state power to implement a far-reaching programme to create a modern Spain by destroying the reactionary influence of the Church, eradicating militarism and improving the immediate conditions of the wretched day-labourers with agrarian reform.
This huge agenda inevitably raised the expectations of the urban and rural proletariats while provoking the fear and the determined enmity of the Church, the armed forces and the landowning and industrial oligarchies. The passage from the hatreds of 1917 –23 to the widespread violence that engulfed Spain after 1936 was long and complex but it began to speed up dramatically in the spring of 1931. The fears and hatreds of the rich found, as always, their first line of defence in the Civil Guard. However, as landowners blocked attempts at reform, the frustrated expectations of hungry day-labourers could be contained only by increasing brutality.
Many on the right took the establishment of the Republic as proof that Spain was the second front in the war against world revolution – a notion fed by numerous clashes between the forces of order and workers of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the anarchist union. Resolute action against the extreme left by the Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura, did not deter the Carlist newspaper El Siglo Futuro from attacking the government and claiming that progressive Republican legislation was ordered from abroad. It declared in June 1931 that three of the most conservative ministers, the premier, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, Miguel Maura and the Minister of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos Urruti, were Jews and that the Republic itself had been brought about as a result of a Jewish conspiracy. The more moderate Catholic mass-circulation daily El Debate referred to de los Ríos as ‘the rabbi’. The Editorial Católica, which owned an influential chain of newspapers including El Debate, soon began to publish the virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic magazines Gracia y Justicia and Los Hijos del Pueblo. The editor of the scurrilously satirical Gracia y Justicia was Manuel Delgado Barreto, a one-time collaborator of the dictator General Primo de Rivera, a friend of his son José Antonio and an early sponsor of the Falange. It would reach a weekly circulation of 200,000 copies
The Republic would face violent resistance not only from the extreme right but also from the extreme left. The anarcho-syndicalist CNT recognized that many of its militants had voted for the Republican–Socialist coalition in the municipal elections of 12 April and that its arrival had raised the people’s hopes. As one leading anarchist put it, they were ‘like children with new shoes’. The CNT leadership, however, expecting the Republic to change nothing, aspired merely to propagate its revolutionary objectives and to pursue its fierce rivalry with the Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), which it regarded as a scab union because of its collaboration with the Primo de Rivera regime. In a period of mass unemployment, with large numbers of migrant workers returning from overseas and unskilled construction workers left without work by the ending of the great public works projects of the dictatorship, the labour market was potentially explosive. This was a situation that would be exploited by the hard-line anarchists of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) who argued that the Republic, like the monarchy, was just an instrument of the bourgeoisie. The brief honeymoon period came to an end when CNT–FAI demonstrations on 1 May were repressed violently by the forces of order.7"
"In late May, a group of nearly one thousand strikers from the port of Pasajes descended on San Sebastián with the apparent intention of looting the wealthy shopping districts. Having been warned in advance, the Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura, deployed the Civil Guard at the entrance to the city. They repelled the attack at the cost of eight dead and many wounded. Then, in early July, the CNT launched a nationwide strike in the telephone system, largely as a challenge to the government. It was defeated by harsh police measures and strike-breaking by workers of the Socialist UGT who refused to join the CNT in what they saw as a sterile struggle. The Director General of Security, the sleek and portly Ángel Galarza of the Radical-Socialist Party, ordered that anyone seen trying to damage the installations of the telephone company should be shot. Maura and Galarza were understandably trying to maintain the confidence of the middle classes. Inevitably, their stance consolidated the violent hostility of the CNT towards both the Republic and the UGT.8
For the Republican–Socialist cabinet, the subversive activities of the CNT constituted rebellion. For the CNT, legitimate strikes and demonstrations were being crushed by dictatorial methods indistinguishable from those used by the monarchy. On 21 July 1931, the cabinet agreed on the need for ‘an urgent and severe remedy’. Maura outlined a proposal for ‘a legal instrument of repression’ and the Socialist Minister of Labour, Francisco Largo Caballero, proposed a decree to make strikes illegal. The two decrees would eventually be combined on 22 October into the Law for the Defence of the Republic, a measure enthusiastically supported by the Socialist members of the government not least because it was perceived as directed against their CNT rivals.9 It made little difference to the right, which perceived the violent social disorder of the anarchists as characteristic of the entire left, including the Socialists who denounced it and the Republican authorities who crushed it."
"While most of Spain remained peaceful, from the earliest days of the Republic an atmosphere of undeclared civil war festered in the latifundio zones of the south and in other areas dominated by the CNT. Miguel Maura claimed that, in the five months from mid-May 1931 until his resignation in October, he had to deal with 508 revolutionary strikes. The CNT accused him of causing 108 deaths with his repressive measures.27...At the cabinet meeting of 21 July, the Socialist Minister of Labour, Francisco Largo Caballero, demanded that Miguel Maura take firm action to end the disorders which were damaging the Republic’s image. When the Prime Minister, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, asked if everyone was agreed that energetic measures against the CNT were called for, the cabinet assented unanimously. Maura told Azaña that he would order artillery to demolish a house from which anarchists had fired against the forces of order.28
Meanwhile, on the night of 22–23 July 1931, extreme rightists were permitted to take part in the repression of the strikes in Seville. Believing that the forces of order were inadequate to deal with the problem, José Bastos Ansart, the Civil Governor, invited the landowners’ clubs, the Círculo de Labradores and the Unión Comercial, to form a paramilitary group to be known as the ‘Guardia Cívica’. This invitation was eagerly accepted by the most prominent rightists of the city"
"The events in Seville and the telephone strike were symptomatic of clashes between the forces of order and the CNT throughout urban Spain. In Barcelona, in addition to the telephone conflict, a strike in the metallurgical industry saw 40,000 workers down tools in August. The activist FAI increasingly advocated insurrection to replace the bourgeois Republic with libertarian communism. Paramilitary street action directed against the police and the Civil Guard was to be at the heart of what the prominent FAI leader Juan García Oliver defined as ‘revolutionary gymnastics’. This inevitably led to bloody clashes with the forces of order and with the more moderate Socialist UGT. The consequent violence in Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, Zaragoza and Madrid, although directed against the government, was blamed by the right on the Republic.31"
"Unfortunately for the Republican–Socialist coalition, for an increasing number of middle-class Spaniards the excesses of the army and the Civil Guard were justified by the excesses of the CNT. On 18 January 1932, there was an insurrection by miners who took over the town of Fígols in the most northerly part of the province of Barcelona. The movement spread to the entire region of northern Catalonia. The CNT immediately declared a solidarity strike. The only place outside Catalonia where there was any significant response was Seville. There, the CNT, with the backing of the Communist Party, called a general strike on 25 and 26 January. The strike was total for the two days and public services were maintained by the Civil Guard. The accompanying violence convinced the Socialists that there were agents provocateurs in the anarchist movement working to show that the government was incapable of maintaining order. On 21 January, Azaña also declared in the Cortes that the extreme right was manipulating the anarchists. He stated that those who occupied factories, assaulted town halls, uprooted railway tracks, cut telephone lines or attacked the forces of order would be treated as rebels. His response was to send in the army, apply the Law for the Defence of the Republic, suspend the anarchist press and deport the strike leaders from both Catalonia and Seville. Inevitably, CNT hostility against the Republic and the UGT intensified to a virtual war.63"
"The immediate reaction of the rightist press was favourable, echoing its customary applause for the Civil Guard’s repression of the rural proletariat.78 However, when they realized that political capital could be made, rightist groups cried crocodile tears and echoed anarchist indignation. Before the full details of the massacre were known, all three Socialist ministers, especially the moderate Indalecio Prieto, had given Azaña their support for the anarchist rising to be suppressed.79 However, despite their hostility to the anarchists, the Socialists could not approve of the gratuitous brutality displayed by the forces of order. To make matters worse, the officers responsible claimed falsely that they had been acting under orders. They were backed up to devastating effect by the future leader of the Unión Militar Española. Captain Barba Hernández was on duty the night of 8 January 1933. When the scandal broke out, he defended his friend Captain Rojas Feijespan by claiming that Azaña had personally given the order ‘shoot them in the belly’. Seized upon by the right-wing press, the fabrication did immense damage to the Republican–Socialist coalition.80 Casas Viejas and its repercussions brought home to the Socialist leadership the cost of participation in the government. They saw that the defence of the bourgeois Republic against the anarchists was sacrificing their credibility with the Socialist masses."
"Workers – especially in the countryside – were being forced into increasing militancy by the employers’ refusal to comply with social legislation. As long as the Socialists had a presence in the government and could offer the prospect of reform, the unions would still respond to calls for discipline and patience. However, for some time, Alcalá Zamora had been seeking an opportunity to get the Republican–Socialist coalition out of power. This was partly because of discomfort with the Socialists and personal incompatibility with Manuel Azaña. In early September, despite a parliamentary vote of confidence for Azaña, the President invited the corrupt leader of the Radical Party, Alejandro Lerroux, to form a government. Unable to face parliament without certain defeat, he governed with the Cortes closed. Landowners were quickly delighted by the forbearing stance of the new Ministers of Agriculture, Ramón Feced Gresa (a property registrar by profession) and of Labour, Ricardo Samper (a Radical from Valencia). The new Minister of the Interior, Manuel Rico Avello, named several reactionary civil governors who permitted most of the Republic’s social legislation to be more or less ignored. To the detriment of local workers, cheap labourers were brought into the southern provinces from Galicia. Infractions of the law were not punished.86 Inevitably, the dwindling Socialist faith in bourgeois democracy was further undermined."
"During the first two years of the Republic, the left had been appalled by the vehemence of opposition to what they regarded as basic humanitarian legislation. After the elections of November 1933, however, the flimsy foundations of a socially progressive Republic laid down in that period were to be ruthlessly torn up as the right used its victory to re-establish the repressive social relations obtaining before 1931. That the right should have the opportunity to do so was a cause of great bitterness within the Socialist movement. In large part, it was their own fault for having made the elemental mistake of rejecting an electoral alliance with the Left Republican forces and thus failing to take advantage of the electoral system. They now believed that the elections had no real validity. The Socialists had won 1,627,472 votes, almost certainly more than any other party running alone could have obtained. With these votes, they had returned fifty-eight deputies, while the Radical Party, with only 806,340 votes, had obtained 104 seats. According to calculations made by the secretariat of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the united right had gained a total of 212 seats with 3,345,504 votes, while the disunited left had won ninety-nine seats with 3,375,432 votes.88 That the right gained a parliamentary seat for fewer than 16,000 votes while left-wing seats ‘cost’ more than 34,000 was certainly galling, although that did not alter the fact that the main factor in determining the results was the party’s own tactical error in failing to take advantage of a system which favoured coalitions.
However, the Socialists had other, more substantial reasons for rejecting the validity of the elections. They were convinced that in the south they had been swindled out of parliamentary seats by electoral malpractice. In villages where one or two men were the sole source of employment, it was relatively easy to get votes by the promise of a job or the threat of dismissal. For many workers on the verge of starvation, a vote could be bought for food or a blanket. In Almendralejo (Badajoz), a local aristocrat bought votes with bread, olive oil and chorizo. In many villages of Granada and Badajoz, those who attended left-wing meetings were beaten by the landowners’ estate guards while the Civil Guard stood by. The new Civil Governors named by the Radicals were permitting ‘public order’ to be controlled by armed thugs in the service of the landowners. Sometimes with the active assistance of the Civil Guard, at other times simply with its benevolent neutrality, they were able to intimidate the left. In the province of Granada, Fernando de los Ríos and other candidates faced violent disruption of their campaign. In Huéscar, De los Ríos was met with a volley of rifle-fire and, in Moclín, his car was stoned by rightists. At Jérez del Marquesado, the local caciques (bosses) hired thugs whom they armed and filled with drink. De los Ríos was forced to abandon his planned meeting when he was warned that they planned an attempt on his life. At the remote village of Castril, near Huéscar, a meeting being addressed by María Lejárraga and De los Ríos was disrupted by the simple device of driving into the crowd some donkeys laden with logs. In Guadix, their words were drowned out by the persistent ringing of the nearby church bells. In the province of Córdoba, in Bujalance, the Civil Guard tore down left-wing election propaganda. In Montemayor, Encinas Reales, Puente Genil and Villanueva del Rey, Socialist and Communist candidates were prevented by the Civil Guard from giving election speeches. On the eve of the elections, there was an attempt on the life of the moderate Socialist leader Manuel Cordero. In Quintanilla de Abajo (Valladolid), local workers demonstrated against a fascist meeting. The Civil Guard searched them and, when one said that his only weapons were his hands, they broke his arms with rifle butts.89"
"In the consequent atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety, there was a ready middle-class audience for the notion long since disseminated by extreme right-wing Catholics that a secret alliance of Jews, Freemasons and the Communist Third International was conspiring to destroy Christian Europe, with Spain as a principal target. In Catholic Spain, the idea that there was an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity had emerged in the early Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century, the Spanish extreme right resurrected it to discredit the liberals whom they viewed as responsible for social changes that were damaging their interests. In this paranoid fantasy, Freemasons were smeared as tools of the Jews (of whom there were virtually none) in a sinister plot to establish Jewish tyranny over the Christian world."
"In 1912, the National Anti-Masonic and Anti-Semitic League had been founded by José Ignacio de Urbina with the support of twenty-two Spanish bishops. The Bishop of Almería wrote that ‘everything is ready for the decisive battle that must be unleashed between the children of light and the children of darkness, between Catholicism and Judaism, between Christ and the Devil’.2 That there was never any hard evidence was put down to the cleverness and colossal power of the enemy, evil itself."
"Spain’s middle and upper classes were chilled, and outraged, by the various revolutionary upheavals that threatened them between 1917 and 1923. The fears of the elite were somewhat calmed in September 1923, when the army intervened again and a dictatorship was established by General Miguel Primo de Rivera"
"These ideas essentially delegitimized the entire spectrum of the left, from middle-class liberal democrats, via Socialists and regional nationalists, to anarchists and Communists. This was done by blurring distinctions between them and by denying their right to be considered Spanish. The denunciations of this ‘anti-Spain’ were publicized through the right-wing press and the regime’s single party, the Unión Patriótica, as well as through civic organizations and the education system. These notions served to generate satisfaction with the dictatorship as a bulwark against the perceived Bolshevik threat. Starting from the premise that the world was divided into ‘national alliances and Soviet alliances’, the influential right-wing poet José María Pemán declared that ‘the time has come for Spanish society to choose between Jesus and Barabbas’. He claimed that the masses were ‘either Christian or anarchic and destructive’ and the nation was divided between an anti-Spain made up of everything that was heterodox and foreign and the real Spain of traditional religious and monarchical values.3"
"On 13 October 1931, the Minister of War, and later Prime Minister and President, Manuel Azaña, stated that ‘Spain has ceased to be Catholic.’10 Even if this was true, Spain remained a country with many pious and sincere Catholics. Now, the Republic’s anti-clerical legislation would provide an apparent justification for the virulent enmity of those who already had ample motive to see it destroyed. The bilious rhetoric of the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy was immediately pressed into service. Moreover, the gratuitous nature of some anti-clerical measures would help recruit many ordinary Catholics to the cause of the rich.
The religious issue would nourish a second crucial factor in fostering right-wing violence. This was the immensely successful propagation of theories that left-wingers and liberals were neither really Spanish nor even really human and that, as a threat to the nation’s existence, they should be exterminated. In books that sold by the tens of thousands, in daily newspapers and weekly magazines, the idea was hammered home that the Second Republic was foreign and sinister and must be destroyed. This notion, which found fertile ground in right-wing fear, was based on the contention that the Republic was the product of a conspiracy masterminded by Jews, and carried out by Freemasons through left-wing lackeys. The idea of this powerful international conspiracy – or contubernio (filthy cohabitation), one of Franco’s favourite words – justified any means necessary for what was presented as national survival. The intellectuals and priests who developed such ideas were able to connect with the latifundistas’ hatred for the landless day-labourers or jornaleros and the urban bourgeoisie’s fear of the unemployed. The Salamanca landowner Gonzalo de Aguilera y Munro, like many army officers and priests, was a voracious reader of such literature.11"
"Both at the time and later, the right-wing determination to annihilate the Republic was justified as a response to its anti-clericalism. However, as had been amply demonstrated by its enthusiastic support for the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the right hated the Republic for being democratic long before it was able to denounce it for being anti-clerical. Moreover, those who opposed the Republic on religious grounds also cited social, economic and political grounds, especially in opposition to regional autonomy.24
Nevertheless, the religious issue was the occasion of intense conflict, both verbal and physical. On Sunday 10 May 1931, the inaugural meeting of the Circulo Monarquico Independiente in the Calle Alcalá ended with loudspeakers provocatively blaring out the Royal Anthem. Republican crowds returning from an afternoon concert in Madrid’s Parque del Buen Retiro were outraged. There was a riot; cars were burned and the offices of the monarchist newspaper ABC in neighbouring Calle Serrano were assaulted. The fierce popular reaction spilled over into the notorious church burnings which took place in Madrid, Málaga, Seville, Cádiz and Alicante from 10 to 12 May. This suggested how strongly ordinary people identified the Church with the monarchy and right-wing politics. The Republican press claimed that the fires were the work of provocateurs drawn from the scab union, the Sindicatos Libres. Indeed, it was claimed that, to discredit the new regime, young monarchists had distributed leaflets inciting the masses to attack religious buildings.25
Even if there were agents provocateurs involved, many on the left were convinced that the Church was integral to reactionary politics in Spain and physical attacks were carried out in some places by the more hotheaded among them. In many villages in the south, priests had stones thrown at them. For those on the right, the identity of the true culprits mattered little. The church burnings confirmed and justified their prior hostility to the Republic. Nevertheless, Miguel Maura, the Minister of the Interior, commented bitterly: ‘Madrid’s Catholics did not think for a second that it was appropriate or their duty to make an appearance in the street in defence of what should have been sacred to them.’ There were serious clashes in many small towns (pueblos) where the faithful protected their churches from elements intent on profaning them. Later in May, when the provisional government decreed an end to obligatory religious education, there were many petitions in protest."
"The unease thereby fomented among the middle classes was consolidated among Catholics by the anti-clericalism of the Republic. Little distinction was made between the ferocious iconoclasm of the anarchists and the Republican–Socialist coalition’s ambition to limit the Church’s influence to the strictly religious sphere. Right-wing hostility to the Republic was mobilized fully, with clerical support, in the wake of the parliamentary debate over the proposed Republican Constitution. The text separated Church and state and introduced civil marriage and divorce. It curtailed state support for the clergy and ended, on paper at least, the religious monopoly of education. The proposed reforms were denounced by the Catholic press and from pulpits as a Godless, tyrannical and atheistic attempt to destroy the family.32 The reaction of a priest from Castellón de la Plana was not uncommon. In a sermon he told his parishioners, ‘Republicans should be spat on and never spoken to. We should be prepared to fight a civil war before we tolerate the separation of Church and State. Non-religious schools do not educate men, they create savages.’33
The Republic’s anti-clerical legislation was at best incautious and at worst irresponsible, perceived on the right as the fruit of Masonic-inspired hatred. Republicans felt that to create an egalitarian society, the power of the Church education system had to be replaced with nondenominational schools. Many measures were easily sidestepped. Schools run by religious personnel continued as before – the names of schools were changed, clerics adopted lay dress. Many such schools, especially those of the Jesuits, tended to be accessible only to the children of the rich. There was no middle ground. The Church’s defence of property and its indifference to social hardship inevitably aligned it with the extreme right.34
Substantial popular hostility to the Republic’s plans for changes in the social, economic and religious landscape was garnered during the so-called revisionist campaign against the Constitution. Bitter right-wing opposition to the Constitution passed on 13 October was provoked by plans to advance regional autonomy for Catalonia and to introduce agrarian reform.35 Nevertheless, it was the legalization of divorce and the dissolution of religious orders – seen as evil Masonic machinations – that raised Catholic ire.36 During the debate on 13 October 1931, the parliamentary leader of Acción Popular, José María Gil Robles, declared to the Republican–Socialist majority in the parliament, the Cortes, ‘Today, in opposition to the Constitution, Catholic Spain takes its stand. You will bear responsibility for the spiritual war that is going to be unleashed in Spain.’ Five days later, in the Plaza de Toros de Ledesma, Gil Robles called for a crusade against the Republic.37"
"The idea that leftists and liberals were not true Spaniards and therefore had to be destroyed quickly took root on the right. In early November 1931, the monarchist leader Antonio Goicoechea declared to a cheering audience in Madrid that there was to be a battle to the death between socialism and the nation.40 On 8 November, the Carlist Joaquín Beunza thundered to an audience of 22,000 people in Palencia: ‘Are we men or not? Those not prepared to give their all in these moments of shameless persecution do not deserve the name Catholic. We must be ready to defend ourselves by all means, and I don’t say legal means, because all means are good for self-defence.’ Declaring the Cortes a zoo, he went on: ‘We are governed by a gang of Freemasons. And I say that against them all methods are legitimate, both legal and illegal ones.’ At the same meeting, Gil Robles declared that the government’s persecution of the Church was decided ‘in the Masonic lodges’.41"
"In the eyes of the right, ‘communism’ included the Socialist Party and Freemasonry signified the various Republican liberal parties and their regional variants known as Left Republicans.4"
"Justification for hostility to the Republic could easily be found in its efforts to secularize society. Distress had been caused by the fact that municipal authorities were forbidden to make financial contributions to the Church or its festivals. In January 1932, Church cemeteries came under municipal jurisdiction. The state now recognized only civil marriage, so those who had a Church wedding also had to visit a registry office. Burial ceremonies were to have no religious character unless the deceased, being over the age of twenty, had left specific instructions to the contrary, something involving complicated bureaucracy for relatives.44"
"In May 1932, during the feast of San Pedro Mártir in Burbáguena (Teruel), a brass band played in the town square, thereby deliberately clashing with the religious music being sung in the church in honour of the saint. In Libros (Teruel), a dance was organized outside the parish church while a mass was being said in honour of the Virgen del Pilar.45 In Seville, fear of attack led to more than forty of the traditional fraternities (cofradías) withdrawing from the Holy Week procession. Their members were predominantly militants of Acción Popular and of the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista and their gesture popularized among right-wing Catholics the phrase ‘Seville the martyr’, despite the fact that every effort was made by Republican authorities to see the processions go ahead. Vociferous complaints came from the same men who were also prominent in employers’ and landowners’ organizations. In the event, only one cofradía marched and was the target of insults and stones. Some days later, on 7 April 1932, the Church of San Julián was burned down.46
Some local municipalities removed crucifixes from schools and religious statues from public hospitals as well as prohibiting the ringing of bells. Such measures went beyond official government policy, which was that municipal permission was required for public ceremonies. Perceived as persecution, they caused ordinary Catholics to see the Republic as their enemy. In many villages in the province of Salamanca, there were street protests and children were kept away from school until the crucifixes were returned. Ordinary Catholics were upset when, in late September 1932, the ringing of church bells was prohibited in Béjar for mass, weddings or funerals. Elsewhere, many left-wing alcaldes (mayors) levied a local tax on bell-ringing.47 In Talavera de la Reina (Toledo), the Mayor imposed fines on women wearing crucifixes. In the socially conflictive province of Badajoz, numerous incidents, such as the prohibition of funeral processions, incited hatred. In Fuente de Cantos, the Mayor imposed a tax on bell-ringing of 10 pesetas for the first five minutes and 2 pesetas for every minute thereafter. In Fregenal de la Sierra, bell-ringing was forbidden altogether and a tax levied on Catholic burials. There were church burnings in several villages. In Villafranca de los Barros, the Socialist majority of the town council voted in April 1932 for the removal of the statue of the Sacred Heart from the main square.48
Religious frictions were quickly exploited by the right. Processions became demonstrations, pilgrimages became protest marches, and Sunday sermons became meetings which often provoked anti-clerical reactions, sometimes violent.49 It was but a short step from the rhetoric of persecution and suffering to the advocacy of violence against Republican reforms portrayed as the work of a sinister foreign Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik plot.50 In later years, Gil Robles would admit that he had deliberately set out to push his audiences towards conflict with the authorities. In April 1937, when Acción Popular was being dissolved and incorporated by Franco into his new one-party state, Gil Robles claimed proudly that the reserves of mass rightist belligerence which he had built up during the Republic made possible the victory of the right in the Civil War. He saw this ‘splendid harvest’ as the fruit of his own propaganda efforts. He was still taking pride in this achievement when he published his memoirs in 1968.51"
"This prejudice was echoed in the national and local press by journalists who never actually visited Castilblanco. The monarchist daily ABC remarked that ‘the least civilized Rif tribesmen were no worse’.55 Right-wing journalists described the landless labourers of Extremadura as ‘these Rif tribesmen with no Rif’ and as ‘Berbers, savages, bloodthirsty savages and Marxist hordes’. In general terms, the local newspaper reports of Castilblanco reflected the belligerently racist attitudes of the rural elite. The inhabitants of Castilblanco, and by extension the rural proletariat as a whole, were presented as an inferior race, horrible examples of racial degeneration. It was common for them to be described as sub-human and abnormal. Colourfully exaggerated descriptions pandered to the ancestral fears of the respectable classes: the allegation that a woman had danced on the corpses recalled the witches’ Sabbath.56 The often explicit conclusion was that the rural proletariat should be disciplined in the same way as the colonial enemy in Morocco, and there were calls for the Civil Guard to be reinforced with crack motorized units.57"
"Azaña observed in his diary that Spanish public opinion was now divided between those who hated the Civil Guard and those who revered it as the last-ditch defender of the social order.60 After Arnedo, Sanjurjo declared that the Civil Guard stood between Spain and the imposition of Soviet communism and that the victims were part of an uncultured rabble that had been deceived by malicious agitators.61 His words after Castilblanco and the Civil Guard’s revenge reflected the way in which the cruelty and savagery of the Moroccan wars was imported into Spain and used against the working class. Sanjurjo, however, was not the first person to note the link. The Asturian miners’ leader, Manuel Llaneza, wrote after the repression of the revolutionary general strike of 1917 of ‘the African hatred’ with which the military columns had killed and beaten workers and wrecked and looted their homes.62"
"The agrarian oligarchy, in an unequal partnership with the industrial and financial bourgeoisie, was traditionally the dominant force in Spanish capitalism. Its monopoly of power began to be challenged on two sides in the course of the painful and uneven process of industrialization. The prosperity enjoyed by neutral Spain during the First World War emboldened industrialists and bankers to jostle with the great landowners for political position. However, with both menaced by a militant industrial proletariat, they soon rebuilt a defensive alliance. In August 1917, the left’s feeble revolutionary threat was bloodily smothered by the army. Thereafter, until 1923, when the army intervened again, social ferment occasionally bordered on undeclared civil war. In the south, there were the rural uprisings of the ‘three Bolshevik years’. In the north, the industrialists of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Asturias, having tried to ride the immediate post-war recession with wage-cuts and layoffs, faced violent strikes and, in Barcelona, a terrorist spiral of provocations and reprisals.
"Another factor which fomented violence was the reaction of the landowners to the Second Republic’s various attempts at agrarian reform. In the province of Salamanca, the leaders of the local Bloque Agrario, the landowners’ party, Ernesto Castaño and José Lamamié de Clairac, incited their members not to pay taxes nor to plant crops. Such intransigence radicalized the landless labourers.12 Across the areas of great estates (latifundios) in southern Spain, Republican legislation governing labour issues in the countryside was systematically flouted. Despite the decree of 7 May 1931 of obligatory cultivation, unionized labour was ‘locked out’ either by land being left uncultivated or by simply being refused work and told to comed República (literally ‘eat the Republic’, which was a way of saying ‘let the Republic feed you’). Despite the decree of 1 July 1931 imposing the eight-hour day in agriculture, sixteen-hour working days from sun-up to sun-down prevailed with no extra hours being paid. Indeed, starvation wages were paid to those who were hired. Although there were tens of thousands of unemployed landless labourers in the south, landowners proclaimed that unemployment was an invention of the Republic.13 In Jaén, the gathering of acorns, normally kept for pigs, or of windfall olives, the watering of beasts and even the gathering of firewood were denounced as ‘collective kleptomania’.14 Hungry peasants caught doing such things were savagely beaten by the Civil Guard or by armed estate guards."
"In fact, what the landowners were doing was merely one element of unequivocal right-wing hostility to the new regime. They occupied the front line of defence against the reforming ambitions of the Republic. There were equally vehement responses to the religious and military legislation of the new regime. Indeed, all three issues were often linked, with many army officers emanating from Catholic landholding families. All these elements found a political voice in several newly emerged political groups. Most extreme among them, and openly committed to the earliest possible destruction of the Republic, were two monarchist organizations, the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista and Acción Española, founded by supporters of the recently departed King Alfonso XIII as a ‘school of modern counter-revolutionary thought’. Within hours of the Republic being declared, monarchist plotters had begun collecting money to create a journal to propagate the legitimacy of a rising against the Republic, to inject a spirit of rebellion in the army and to found a party of ostensible legality as a front for meetings, fund-raising and conspiracy against the Republic. The journal Acción Española would also peddle the idea of the sinister alliance of Jews, Freemasons and leftists. Within a month, its founders had collected substantial funds for the projected uprising. Their first effort would be the military coup of 10 August 1932. And its failure would lead to a determination to ensure that the next attempt would be better financed and entirely successful.19"
"Somewhat more moderate was the legalist Acción Nacional, later renamed Acción Popular, which was prepared to try to defend right-wing interests within Republican legality. Extremists or ‘catastrophists’ and ‘moderates’ shared many of the same ideas. However, after the failed military coup of August 1932, they would split over the efficacy of armed conspiracy against the Republic. Acción Española formed its own political party, Renovación Española, and Acción Popular did the same, gathering a number of like-minded groups into the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas.20 Within a year, the ranks of the ‘catastrophists’ had been swelled by the creation of various fascist organizations. What all had in common was that they completely denied the democratic legitimacy of the Republic. Despite the legalist façade of Acción Popular and the CEDA, its leaders would frequently and unrestrainedly proclaim that violence against the Republic was perfectly justifiable."
"Gil Robles’s rhetoric during the Republic reflected the feelings and the fears of his most powerful backers, the big landowners or latifundistas. Their outrage at the sheer effrontery of landless labourers in daring to take part in the revolutionary upheavals of 1918–21 reflected their sense of social, cultural and indeed near-racist superiority over those who worked their estates. That the Republican–Socialist coalition should declare its intention to improve the daily lot of the wretched day-labourers implied a sweeping challenge to the very structures of rural power. The hostility of the landowners towards the new regime was first manifested in a determination to block Republican reforms by any means, including unrestrained violence. The hatred of the latifundistas for their braceros would find its most complete expression in the early months of the Civil War when they would collaborate enthusiastically with Franco’s African columns as they spread a wave of terror through south-western Spain."
"Throughout the spring and summer of 1933, evidence mounted that the Republic’s social laws were simply being ignored. Official labour exchanges and the arbitration committees known as mixed juries were bypassed and work offered only to men who would tear up their union cards. Land was withdrawn from cultivation. There were ever more cases of landowners shooting at workers. A meeting of the national committee of the UGT was held in mid-June to consider the drift to anarchist and Communist organizations of members frustrated by Socialist efforts to maintain worker discipline in the face of provocation.85"
"Among the civilian participants in the coup were many of those who had been involved in the Guardia Cívica responsible for the events in the Parque de María Luisa in July 1931. There is no sign that they were deterred by their failure in 1932. Indeed, several of them, along with the officers involved, would be prominent in the events of the summer of 1936.66 Sanjurjo was tried for treason on 25 August in the Military Section of the Supreme Court. The acting president of the court, Mariano Gómez González, had no choice but to issue the death sentence, but he recommended a pardon with the sentence reduced to expulsion from the army.67 Plutarco Elías Calles, the Mexican President, sent a message to Azaña: ‘If you wish to avoid widespread bloodshed and make the Republic live, shoot Sanjurjo.’ In cabinet, Azaña successfully argued in favour of Mariano Gómez’s recommendation. No one was shot, and Sanjurjo and others were imprisoned and eventually released.68"
"Despite loud protests about the allegedly excessive prison sentences meted out, the right was sufficiently emboldened by the relatively feeble punishments to intensify preparations for a successful venture next time.69"
"Unfortunately, the left became over-confident, seeing the Sanjurjada as the equivalent of the Kapp putsch of March 1920 in Berlin. Since Sanjurjo, like Kapp, had been defeated by a general strike, many believed that the defeat of the Sanjurjada had strengthened the Republic as Kapp’s failure had strengthened Weimar. Nothing was done to restructure guilty units. In contrast, the right learned much from Sanjurjo’s fiasco, especially that a coup could not succeed without the collaboration of the Civil Guard and that the Republican municipal authorities and trade union leaders had to be silenced immediately."
"Above all, the conspiratorial right, both civilian and military, concluded that they must never again make the mistake of inadequate preparation. In late September 1932, a conspiratorial committee was set up by Eugenio Vegas Latapie and the Marqués de Eliseda of the extreme rightist group Acción Española and Captain Jorge Vigón of the General Staff to begin preparations for future success. The theological, moral and political legitimacy of a rising against the Republic was argued in the monarchist journal Acción Española. The group operated from the Biarritz home of the monarchist aviator and playboy Juan Antonio Ansaldo. Considerable sums of money were collected from rightist sympathizers to buy arms and to finance political destabilization for which unnamed elements of the CNT–FAI were put on the payroll. A substantial amount was also spent each month on the services of a police inspector, Santiago Martín Báguenas. He had been a close collaborator of General Emilio Mola, who had headed the Dirección General de Seguridad (the General Directorate of Security) in the last months of the monarchy. Martín Báguenas was now hired to provide an intelligence service for the conspirators and he in turn employed another of Mola’s cronies, the even more corrupt policeman Julián Mauricio Carlavilla. Another of the principal objectives of the new committee was the creation of subversive cells within the army itself, a task entrusted to Lieutenant Colonel Valentín Galarza Morante of the General Staff.71"
"On the day after the election, Margarita Nelken sent a telegram to the Ministry of Labour protesting that a group of thugs led by the Radical Mayor of Aljucén in Badajoz had opened fire on groups of workers, killing one, seriously wounding two and wounding several more.91 Margarita was herself manhandled at gunpoint after a speech in the Casa de Pueblo of Aljucén. At voting stations, Civil Guards obliged workers to exchange their voting slips for ones already marked in favour of right-wing candidates. There was significant falsification by the right – votes bought with food and/or blankets, intimidation of voters, repeat voting by truckloads of right-wing sympathizers and the ‘misplacing’ of boxes of votes from places with known left-wing majorities. The consequence was that the PSOE won only the three seats allotted to the minority block for the province – Margarita Nelken, along with fellow Socialists Pedro Rubio Heredia and Juan-Simeón Vidarte.92
Throughout the south, glass voting urns and the louring presence of the caciques’ thugs made the secret ballot irrelevant. In some provinces (particularly Badajoz, Málaga and Córdoba), the margin of rightist victory was sufficiently small for electoral malpractice to have affected the results. In Granada, there were nine towns where the rightist majority was an implausible 100 per cent, two where it was 99 per cent and a further twenty-one where it was between 84 and 97 per cent. After the elections, the Minister of Justice resigned, in protest at the level of electoral falsification.93 Across the south, the landowners returned to the semi-feudal relations of dependence that had been the norm before 1931."
"Africanista officers and Civil Guards were the most violent exponents of right-wing hostility towards the Second Republic and its working-class supporters. They received encouragement and justification in the murderous hostility to the left peddled by numerous politicians, journals and newspapers. In particular, several influential individuals spewed out a rhetoric which urged the extermination of the left as a patriotic duty. They insinuated the racial inferiority of their left-wing and liberal enemies through the clichés of the theory of the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy. The presentation at the beginning of 1933 of the draft law prohibiting schools run by religious orders was a useful trigger. On 30 January, at a mass meeting in the Monumental Cinema in Madrid, the Carlist landowner José María Lamamié de Clairac, a parliamentary deputy for Salamanca, denounced the law as a satanic plot by the Freemasons to destroy the Catholic Church.1 The Law was approved on 18 May. On 4 June, Cándido Casanueva, Lamamié’s fellow deputy for Salamanca, responded by telling the Women’s Association for Civic Education: ‘You are duty bound to pour into the hearts of your children a drop of hatred every day against the Law on Religious Orders and its authors. Woe betide you if you don’t!’2 The following day, Gil Robles declared that ‘the Freemasonry that has brought the Law on Religious Orders to Spain is the work of foreigners, just like the sects and the Internationals’.3
The idea of an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Christian world was given a modern spin in Spain by the dissemination from 1932 onwards of one the most influential works of anti-Semitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Published in Russia in 1903 and based on German and French novels of the 1860s, this fantastical concoction purveyed the idea that a secret Jewish government, the Elders of Zion, was plotting the destruction of Christianity and Jewish world domination.4 The first Spanish translation of The Protocols had been published in Leipzig in 1930. Another translation was made available in Barcelona in 1932 by a Jesuit publishing house which then serialized it in one of its magazines. Awareness and approval of The Protocols was extended through the enormously popular work of the Catalan priest Juan Tusquets Terrats (1901–98), author of the best-seller Orígenes de la revolución española. Tusquets was born into a wealthy banking family in Barcelona on 31 March 1901. His father was a descendant of Jewish bankers, a committed Catalan nationalist and a friend of the plutocrat Francesc Cambó. His mother was a member of the fabulously wealthy Milà family, the patrons of Gaudí. His secondary education took place in a Jesuit school, then he studied at the University of Louvain and the Pontifical University in Tarragona, where he wrote his doctorate. He was ordained in 1926 and was soon regarded as one of the brightest hopes of Catalan philosophy. Renowned for his piety and his enormous culture, he became a teacher in the seminary of the Catalan capital, where he was commissioned to write a book on the theosophical movement of the controversial spiritualist Madame Helena Blavatsky. In the wake of its success, he developed an obsessive interest in secret societies.5"
"Tusquets used The Protocols as ‘documentary’ evidence of his essential thesis that the Jews were bent on the destruction of Christian civilization. Their instruments were Freemasons and Socialists who did their dirty work by means of revolution, economic catastrophes, unholy and pornographic propaganda and unlimited liberalism. He condemned the Second Republic as the child of Freemasonry and denounced the President, the piously Catholic Niceto Alcalá Zamora, as both a Jew and a Freemason.8 The message was clear – Spain and the Catholic Church could be saved only by the destruction of Jews, Freemasons and Socialists – in other words, of the entire left of the political spectrum. Orígenes de la revolución española sold massively and also provoked a noisy polemic which gave even greater currency to his ideas. His notion that the Republic was a dictatorship in the hands of ‘Judaic Freemasonry’ was further disseminated through his many articles in El Correo Catalán and a highly successful series of fifteen books (Las Sectas) attacking Freemasonry, communism and Judaism."
"The second volume of Las Sectas included a complete translation of The Protocols and also repeated his slurs on Macià. The section entitled ‘their application to Spain’ asserted that the Jewish assault on Spain was visible both in the Republic’s persecution of religion and in the movement for agrarian reform via the redistribution of the great estates.9 Made famous by his writings, in late 1933 Tusquets was invited by the International Anti-Masonic Association to visit the recently established concentration camp at Dachau. He remarked that ‘they did it to show what we had to do in Spain’. Dachau was established as a camp for various groups that the Nazis wished to quarantine: political prisoners (Freemasons, Communists, Socialists and liberal, Catholic and monarchist opponents of the regime) and those that they defined as asocials or deviants (homosexuals, Gypsies, vagrants). Despite his favourable comments at the time, Tusquets would claim more than fifty years later that he had been shocked by what he saw. Certainly the visit did nothing to stem the flow and the intensity of his anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic publications.10"
"Mola over-estimated the menace of the minuscule Spanish Communist Party, which he viewed as the tool of sinister Jewish–Masonic machinations. This reflected the credence that he gave to the fevered reports of his agents, in particular those of Santiago Martín Báguenas and of the sleazy and obsessive Julián Mauricio Carlavilla del Barrio. Mola’s views on Jews, Communists and Freemasons were also coloured by information received from the organization of the White Russian forces in exile, the Russkii Obshche-Voinskii Soiuz (ROVS, Russian All-Military Union) based in Paris. Thereafter, even when he was no longer Director General of Security, he remained in close contact with the ROVS leader Lieutenant General Evgenii Karlovitch Miller. Miller was, like the Nazi racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German. Their hatred of communism reflected the fact that the Bolshevik revolution saw them lose their families, property, livelihood and homeland. Believing that the Jews had masterminded the revolution, they were determined to prevent them doing the same in western Europe.25"
"Awaiting trial for his use of excessive force against a student demonstration on 25 March, Mola was imprisoned in a ‘damp and foul-smelling cell’ in a military jail.27 Azaña arranged on 5 August for this to be changed to house arrest, but, unsurprisingly, seeing his recent targets now in positions of power, Mola nurtured a rancorous hostility to the Republic and a personal hatred of Azaña. The paranoid reports sent him by Carlavilla and the dossiers supplied by the ROVS convinced him that the triumph of the democratic regime had been engineered by Jews and Freemasons. In late 1931, in the first volume of his memoirs, he wrote of the threat of Freemasonry: ‘When, in fulfilling my duties, I investigated the intervention of the Masonic lodges in the political life of Spain, I became aware of the enormous strength at their disposal, not through the lodges themselves but because of the powerful elements that manipulated them from abroad – the Jews.’ Acción Española celebrated the appearance of the book with a rapturous nine-page review by Eugenio Vegas Latapié, one of the journal’s founders and a fierce advocate of violence against the Republic.28
By the time that Mola came to write the second volume of his memoirs, he was more explicit in his attacks on Freemasons and Jews. He himself implied that this was because, in addition to the reports of General Miller, he had read both the work of Father Tusquets and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Thus Mola wrote that the coming of the Republic was a reflection of the hatred for Spain of the Jews and Freemasonry:
What rational motives exist to explain why we Spaniards excite the hatred of the descendants of Israel? Fundamentally three: the envy produced in them by any race that has a fatherland of its own; our religion for which they feel unquenchable revulsion because they blame it for their dispersion throughout the world; the memory of their expulsion, which came about not, as is often claimed, because of a King’s whim but because the people demanded it. These are the three points of the Masonic triangle of the Spanish lodges.29
In December 1933, Mola wrote the conclusion to his bitterly polemical book El pasado, Azaña y el porvenir (The Past, Azaña and the Future), in which he gave voice to the widespread military animosity towards the Republic in general and towards Azaña in particular. Mortified by what he perceived as the unpatriotic anti-militarism of the left, he attributed it to various causes, mainly to the fact that:
decadent nations are the favourite victims of parasitical international organizations, used in their turn by the Great Powers, taking advantage of the situation in weak nations, which is where such organizations have most success, just as unhealthy organisms are the most fertile breeding ground of the virulent spread of pathological germs. It is significant that all such organizations are manipulated if not actually directed by the Jews … The Jews don’t care about the destruction of a nation, or of ten, or of the entire world, because they, having the exceptional ability to derive benefit from the greatest catastrophes, are merely completing their programme. What has happened in Russia is a relevant example and one that is very much on Hitler’s mind. The German Chancellor – a fanatical nationalist – is convinced that his people cannot rise again as long as the Jews and the parasitical organizations that they control or influence remain embedded in the nation. That is why he persecutes them without quarter.30"
"The Entente had been founded by the Swiss rightist Théodore Aubert and a White Russian émigré, Georges Lodygensky. Its publications were given a vehemently anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik turn by Lodygensky and praised the achievements of fascism and military dictatorships as bulwarks against communism. Enjoying close contacts with Antikomintern, an organization run from Josef Goebbels’s Ministry of Information, the Entente skilfully targeted influential people and supplied them with reports which purported to expose plans for forthcoming Communist offensives. The material from the Entente devoured by Franco, Mola and other officers portrayed the Second Republic as a Trojan horse for Communists and Freemasons determined to unleash the Godless hordes of Moscow against Spain and all its great traditions.32 For the Spanish extreme right and for many of their allies abroad, the Second Republic was an outpost of the Elders of Zion.33"
"The ultra-right-wing press in general regarded The Protocols as a serious sociological study. Since there were few Jews in Spain, there was hardly a ‘Jewish problem’. However, Spanish ‘anti-Semitism without Jews’ was not about real Jews but was an abstract construction of a perceived international threat. Anti-Semitism was central to integrist Catholicism and harked back to Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus Christ and to medieval myths and fears about Jewish ritual killings of children. Now, it was given a burning contemporary relevance by fears of revolution. The notion that all those belonging to left-wing parties were the stooges of the Jews was supported by references to the left-wingers and Jews fleeing from Nazism who found refuge in the Second Republic. As far as the Carlist press was concerned, the few incoming Jews were the advance guard of world revolution and intended to poison Spanish society with pornography and prostitution.35 Opposed to urbanism and industrialism, to liberalism and capitalism, all ideologies associated with Jews and Freemasons, the Carlists aspired to destroy the Republic by armed insurrection and to impose a kind of rural Arcadian theocracy.36"
"Conservative intellectuals argued that through various subversive devices the Jews had enslaved the Spanish working class. One alleged consequence of this subjugation was that the Spanish workers themselves came to possess oriental qualities. The Spanish radical right began to see the working class as imbued with Jewish and Muslim treachery and barbarism. The most extreme proponent of this view was the late nineteenth-century Carlist ideologue Juan Vázquez de Mella. He argued that Jewish capital had financed the liberal revolutions and was now behind the Communist revolution in order, in union with the Muslim hordes, to destroy Christian civilization and impose Jewish tyranny on the world. Even King Alfonso XIII believed that the rebellion of tribesmen in the Rif was ‘the beginning of a general uprising of the entire Muslim world instigated by Moscow and international Jewry’.37 Carlist ideologues took these ideas seriously, arguing that ‘the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, Judaism, Communism, Freemasonry and Death’, already controlled Britain, France and Australia and soon Spain would fall under their dominion.38"
"Carlists, theologians and Africanista officers were among those who through their writings and speeches fomented an atmosphere of social and racial hatred. Another was Onésimo Redondo. Although hardly a national figure, he merits attention both as one of the founders of Spanish fascism and because it was largely due to his ideas that his home town, Valladolid, experienced greater political violence than other Castilian provincial capitals. As a young lawyer, Onésimo Redondo had been involved in Acción Nacional (as Acción Popular was originally called), the Catholic political group founded on 26 April 1931 by Ángel Herrera Oria and principally supported by Castilian farmers. In early May, he set up its local branch in Valladolid and headed its propaganda campaign for the forthcoming parliamentary elections. On 13 June, Onésimo launched the first number of the fortnightly, and later weekly, anti-Republican newspaper Libertad. After the Republican–Socialist coalition won a huge majority on 28 June, Onésimo rejected democracy, broke with Acción Nacional and, in August, founded a fascist party, the Juntas Castellanas de Actuación Hispánica (the Castilian Hispanic Action Groups).40
On 10 August, he published a fiery proclamation in Libertad expressing his commitment to the traditional rural values of Old Castile, to social justice and to violence. He wrote: ‘The historic moment, my young countrymen, obliges us to take up weapons. May we know how to use them to defend what is ours and not to serve politicians.’ For him ‘nationalism is a movement of struggle, it must include warlike, violent activities in the service of Spain against the traitors within’.41 Certainly, Onésimo Redondo and the Juntas brought a tone of brutal confrontation to a city previously notable for the tranquillity of its labour relations.42 Onésimo called for ‘a few hundred young warriors in each province, disciplined idealists, to smash to smithereens this dirty phantom of the red menace’. His recruits armed themselves for street fights with the predominantly Socialist working class of Valladolid. He wrote of the need to ‘cultivate the spirit of violence, of military conflict’. The meetings of the Juntas were held in virtual clandestinity. Over the next few years, his enthusiasm for violence grew progressively more strident.43"
"Although Redondo translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf, his anti-Semitism drew more on the fifteenth-century Castilian Queen Isabel la Católica than on Nazism. Anti-Semitism was a recurring theme in his writings. In late 1931, for instance, he described the co-educational schools introduced by the Second Republic as an example of ‘Jewish action against free nations: a crime against the health of the people for which the traitors responsible must pay with their heads’.47"
"By linking Marxism as a Jewish invention and its alleged threat of a ‘re-Africanization’ of Spain, Redondo was identifying Spain’s two archetypal ‘others’, the Jew and the Moor, with the Republic. His conclusion, shared by many on the right, was that a new Reconquista was needed to prevent Spain from falling into the hands of the modern foes. His views on the legitimacy of violence were similar to those of the Catholic extreme right exemplified by the writings of Castro Albarrán.52
Anti-Semitism could be found across most of the Spanish right. In some cases, it was a vague sentiment born of traditional Catholic resentment about the fate of Jesus Christ, but in others it was a murderous justification of violence against the left. Curiously, the virulence of Onésimo Redondo constituted something of an exception within Spain’s nascent fascist movement. Ledesma Ramos regarded anti-Semitism as having relevance only in Germany.53 The Falangist leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, had little or no interest in the ‘Jewish problem’ except when it came to the Jewish–Marxist influence over the working class. Nevertheless, the Falangist daily Arriba claimed that ‘the Judaic–Masonic International is the creator of the two great evils that have afflicted humanity: capitalism and Marxism’. José Antonio Primo de Rivera shared with other rightists a belief that violence was legitimate against a Republic that he perceived as influenced by Jews and Freemasons.54 He approved of attacks by Falangists on the Jewish-owned SEPU department stores in the spring of 1935.55
The identification of the working class with foreign enemies was based on a convoluted logic whereby Bolshevism was a Jewish invention and the Jews were indistinguishable from Muslims and thus leftists were bent on subjecting Spain to domination by African elements. Thus hostility to the Spanish working class was presented as a legitimate act of Spanish patriotism. According to another of the Acción Española group, the one-time liberal turned ultra-rightist Ramiro de Maeztú, the Spanish nation had been forged in its struggles against the Jews (arrogant usurers) and the Moors (savages without civilization).56 In one of his articles, the monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo neatly encapsulated the racist dimension of the anti-leftist discourse when he referred to the Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero as ‘a Moroccan Lenin’.57 José Antonio Primo de Rivera also shared this association of the left with the Moors. In his reflections in prison in 1936, he interpreted all of Spanish history as an endless struggle between Goths and Berbers. The spirit of the former lived on in monarchical, aristocratic, religious and military values while that of the latter was to be found in the rural proletariat. He denounced the Second Republic as a ‘new Berber invasion’ signifying the demolition of European Spain.58"
"One hundred thousand copies of the third of his books, Asesinos de España, were distributed free to army officers. It ended with a provocative challenge to them. Describing Jews, left-wingers and Freemasons as vultures hovering over the corpse of Spain, he wrote: ‘The Enemy howls with laughter while the nations that serve Zion play diplomatic dice for the cadaver’s land. Thus the Spain once feared by a hundred nations faces such a fate because her sons no longer know how to die or how to kill.’69 Carlavilla was expelled from the police in September 1935 as a result, according to his official record, ‘of serious offences’. He would later claim that his dismissal was persecution for his anti-Masonic revelations.70"
"Collectively, the ideas of Tusquets, Francisco de Luis, Enrique Herrera Oria, Onésimo Redondo, Mola, Carlavilla, the Carlist press and all those who alleged the existence of a Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik plot justified the extermination of the left. The reforms of the Republic and the violent anarchist attacks on the Republic were taken equally as evidence that the left was the ungodly anti-Spain. Accordingly, the brutality of the Civil Guard in crushing strikes and demonstrations, military conspiracy and the terrorist activities of fascist groups were all deemed to be legitimate efforts to defend the true Spain."
Chapter 3: The Right Goes on the Offensive, 1933–1934
"In the wake of their electoral victory in November 1933, the right went on to the offensive just as the unemployment crisis reached its peak. That December there were 619,000 out of work across Spain, 12 per cent of the total workforce. Given Spain’s lack of social welfare schemes, these figures, although much lower than those in Germany and Italy, signified widespread and immense physical hardship. With the Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero no longer at the Ministry of Labour, there was no protection even for those in work. In Jaén, for instance, the new Radical Civil Governor set aside existing agreements on working conditions. In the case of the turno riguroso (the strict rotation of work among unemployed labourers), during the olive harvest, the owners were left free to give work only to the cheapest, non-union labour. The consequence was large numbers of families on the verge of starvation.1 Worsening conditions saw rank-and-file pressure on union officials for militant action particularly in agriculture, metal industries and construction, all of which were represented by substantial groups within the UGT. In the agrarian south, the number of unemployed was dramatically higher than in industrial areas. The worst-hit provinces were Jaén, Badajoz and Córdoba, where the number of unemployed was 50 per cent above the national average. Once landowners began to ignore social legislation entirely and take reprisals for the discomforts of the previous two years, unemployment rose even further. By April 1934 it would reach 703,000.2
In opposition, Largo Caballero responded to rank-and-file distress with empty revolutionary slogans. However, the fact that he had no concrete plans for an insurrection did not diminish middle-class fears provoked both by his statements and by the anarchist commitment to revolutionary violence. In fact, when, on 8 December 1933, the CNT naively called for another nationwide uprising, the Socialists ostentatiously stood aside. In the event, only a few traditionally anarchist areas responded to the call. Despite CNT supporters in Asturias and most of Andalusia standing aside, there was a sporadic wave of violent strikes, some trains were derailed and Civil Guard posts assaulted. In Galicia, the Rioja, Catalonia and Alicante, the insurrectionists were easily suppressed and several hundred prisoners were taken. Throughout Spain, 125 people were killed, sixteen from the forces of order, sixty-five anarchists and forty-four innocent bystanders.3
On 9 December at Bujalance in the highly conflictive province of Córdoba, there was an echo of Casas Viejas. Tempers were running high because the landowners were flouting agreements on wages and conditions. Anarchist peasants took over parts of the town and tried to seize the town hall. The Civil Guard replied by attacking any houses whose doors were not left open. In thirty-six hours of fighting, a Civil Guard, two anarchists, four innocent civilians, including a woman, an eight-year-old child and an elderly landowner, were killed. Two alleged ringleaders were captured in nearby Porcuna and shot by the Civil Guard ‘while trying to escape’. Two hundred prisoners were taken, many of whom were badly beaten by the Civil Guard. The Civil Governor, Mariano Jiménez Díaz, blamed the events in Bujalance on the landowners for ignoring the work agreements and amassing firearms.4
The scale of social hatred in Córdoba can be deduced from the testimony of a union leader from Baena:
The same owners who would spend 400,000 pesetas on a shawl for the statue of the Virgin or on a crucifix for the Church stinted the olive oil for the workers’ meals and would rather pay a lawyer 25,000 pesetas than an extra 25 cents to the day-labourers lest it create a precedent and let the workers get their way. In Baena, there was a señorito [master] who put cattle in the planted fields rather than pay the agreed wages to the reapers. A priest who had a farm, when the lad came down to get olive oil, had made dents in the tin jug so that it would hold less oil.
The union official from Baena went on to comment on the intransigence of the employer class when it came to getting any improvement in the awful situation of the farm labourers:
They had power, influence and money; we only had two or three thousand day-labourers behind us and we constantly had to hold them back since the desperation of being unable to feed their children turns men into wild animals. We knew that the employers, well protected by the forces of order, were not bothered if there were victims, because they just bribed the officials to change the paperwork and make black white. In fact, they were happy to see violence because it was a welcome warning to any rebels of the danger of leaving the straight and narrow.
His own experience as a young man was revealing:
The few times (two or three) that I went with a committee to discuss conditions with the employers, the only issue on the table was wages; there was no question of negotiating food or working hours, since everything was considered to be included in the clause ‘Usage and customs of the locality’, which simply meant to work until your back broke, from sun-up to sun-down, or for hours expanded by the arse-licking foremen from when you could just about see until it was too dark to see a thing. I remember in one heated discussion a caci que called me a ‘snot-nosed kid recently out of the shell’ and said that if my father knew how stupid I was, he wouldn’t throw down fodder for me. This exhausted my patience and I got up and said to him as seriously as I could: ‘It is true, Señor, that on many occasions I have had to eat, not cattle feed, but the remnants of fried bread that you throw out for your dogs, a very Christian deed in a town where the workers’ children are dying of hunger.’5"
"These violent incidents involving the CNT diverted attention from the growing problem of malnutrition. This was not only because landowners were slashing wages and refusing work to union members but also because of price rises in basic necessities. After the new Radical government removed price control on bread, the cost had risen by between 25 and 70 per cent. Demonstrations of starving women, children and old people calling for bread became a frequent sight.8 At the end of 1933, then, the Socialist leaders faced a rising tide of mass militancy, fed by the employers’ offensive and bitterness at the perceived unfairness of electoral defeat. Dismayed by the right’s determination to destroy what they regarded as basic humanitarian legislation, ever more members of the trade union movement and the Socialist Youth (Federación de Juventudes Socialistas) had come to believe that bourgeois democracy would never allow the introduction of even a minimal social justice, let alone full-blown socialism. Fearful of losing support, Largo Caballero reacted by heightening his revolutionary tone still further. In mid-January 1934, he declared that to transform society it was necessary to arm the people and disarm the forces of capitalism – the army, the Civil Guard, the Assault Guards, the police and the courts: ‘Power cannot be taken from the hands of the bourgeoisie simply by cheering for Socialism.’9
This strident rhetoric was not backed by any serious revolutionary intentions, but, replayed via the right-wing press, it could only provoke middle-class fears. Largo Caballero’s verbal extremism pandered to rank-and-file dissatisfactions but aimed also to pressure President Alcalá Zamora into calling new elections. It was dangerously irresponsible. If the President did not respond to pressure, the Socialists would be forced either to fulfil Largo Caballero’s threats or back down and lose face with their own militants. Since there was little possibility of implementing his threats, the consequence could benefit only the right.
Largo Caballero’s ill-considered rhetoric reflected both the aggressive assault on social legislation that had followed the right-wing electoral victory and fears of fascism. He felt that he had to respond to workers’ delegations from the provinces that came to Madrid to beg the Socialist Party (PSOE) leadership to organize a counter-offensive.10 At the same time, he and others suspected that not only the Republic’s legislation but also their own persons were in danger from a possible fascist coup. On 22 November, the outgoing Minister of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos, informed the PSOE executive committee of plans being prepared for a rightist coup involving the arrest of the Socialist leadership.11 Throughout November and December, the Socialist press frequently published material indicating that Gil Robles and the CEDA had fascist ambitions. Reprinted documents included the CEDA’s plans for a citizen militia to combat revolutionary activity on the part of the working class. Others showed that, with the connivance of the police, the CEDA was assembling files on workers in every village, with full details of their ‘subversiveness’, which meant their membership of a union. The appearance of the uniformed militias of the CEDA’s youth movement (the Juventud de Acción Popular) was taken as proof that preparations were afoot to establish fascism in Spain.12"
"Inevitably, within the Socialist Youth and among the younger, unskilled union members there was a great surge of enthusiasm for revolution. Largo Caballero was happy to go along with their demands lest they drift towards the more determinedly revolutionary CNT. Although, at a joint meeting of the union (UGT) and party (PSOE) executives on 25 November, revolutionary proposals were defeated, the moderate Indalecio Prieto reluctantly agreed on the need for ‘defensive action’. The two executives compromised with a declaration urging workers to be ready to rise up and oppose ‘reactionary elements in the event that they went beyond the bounds of the Constitution in their public determination to annul the work of the Republic’. A joint PSOE–UGT committee was set up to prepare this ‘defensive action’.13 The lack of Socialist participation in the CNT insurrection two weeks later showed that reformist habits prevailed over the new revolutionary rhetoric. The CEDA’s support for the assault on unionized labour together with its declared determination to smash socialism and to establish a corporativist state made it, for most Spanish leftists, indistinguishable from the Italian Fascist Party or the early Nazi Party. The Socialist leadership wanted to avoid the errors made by their German and Italian comrades, but they had no real intention of actually organizing a revolution. Instead, they hoped that threats of revolution would calm rank-and-file frustration and restrain right-wing aggression.
No Socialist organizations had participated in the CNT action, although a few individual militants had done so, believing it to be the ‘defensive action’ agreed on 26 November.14 In the Cortes, Prieto condemned ‘this damaging movement’. Yet, when both Gil Robles and the monarchist leader Antonio Goicoechea enthusiastically offered to help the government crush subversion, Prieto reacted angrily. It disturbed him that the ‘enemies of the Republic’ supported the regime only when the proposal was for the repression of the working class. By their determination to silence the workers’ organizations, Prieto perceptively told the deputies of the right, ‘you are closing all exits to us and inviting us to a bloody conflict’.15
On 16 December, Lerroux formed a government with the parliamentary support of the CEDA. Three days later, Gil Robles made a policy statement in the Cortes which explained that, in return for CEDA votes, he expected an amnesty for those imprisoned for Sanjurjo’s coup of August 1932 and a thorough revision of the religious legislation of the Constituent Cortes (so called because it was the parliament that elaborated and approved the Republican Constitution). Most alarming for the left were his demands for the repeal of the reforms which had most benefited the landless peasantry – the laws of municipal boundaries and of obligatory cultivation, and the introduction of the eight-hour day and of mixed juries (arbitration committees). He also demanded a reduction of the area of land subject to expropriation under the agrarian reform bill and denounced the socializing concept of settling peasants on the land. Most alarming for the left was his statement that his ambition was to lead a government and change the Constitution: ‘We are in no hurry, we want other proposals to fail so that experience will show the Spanish people that there can only be one solution, an unequivocally right-wing solution.’ Behind the measured tone, there lay a dramatic threat that, if events showed that a right-wing evolution was not possible, the Republic would pay the consequences. Not surprisingly, the Socialists regarded this as a fascist speech.16 In reply, Indalecio Prieto made it clear that, for the Socialists, the legislation that Gil Robles aimed to repeal was what made the Republic worth defending. He threatened that the Socialists would defend the Republic against Gil Robles’s dictatorial ambitions by unleashing the revolution.17 In the exchange could be seen the seeds of the violent events of October 1934."
"Azaña told De los Ríos categorically that it was the duty of the Socialist leadership, even at the risk of their own popularity, to make their followers see that an insurrection would be madness. His reason was that ‘there was no reason to expect the right to react calmly or even to limit their reaction to the re-establishment of law and order. In fact, they would abuse their victory and would go far beyond what was happening already and what they were announcing.’ Shortly afterwards, De los Ríos reported Azaña’s prophetic words to the PSOE executive committee. However, given the employers’ intransigence, it was impossible for them to tell their rank and file to be patient.18"
"Throughout January, long and often bitter discussions between the PSOE and the UGT leaderships about a possible revolutionary action in defence of the Republic culminated in the defeat of the cautious line. The leadership of the UGT passed to Largo Caballero and the younger elements who supported his ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric. With the PSOE, its youth movement – the Federación de Juventudes Socialistas – and now the UGT all in the hands of those advocating a radical line, a joint committee was immediately established to make preparations for a revolutionary movement. PSOE, UGT and FJS organizations in each province were sent seventy-three naive instructions for the creation of militias, the acquisition of arms, the establishment of links with sympathetic members of the army and the Civil Guard and the organization of technicians to run basic services. The replies received made clear the absurdly optimistic nature of these goals and, apart from the flurry of communications generated by the committee, little or no practical action was taken.23"
"However, the various communications were anything but clandestine. Indeed, revolutionary rhetoric from the self-proclaimed ‘Bolshevizers’ was loudly indiscreet and provided ample evidence for right-wing exaggeration about the dangers of revolutionary socialism. The raucous radicalism of the younger Socialists would be used throughout the spring and summer of 1934 to justify harsh repression of strikes that were far from revolutionary in intent. The anything but secret plan was for the revolutionary movement to be launched in the event of the CEDA being invited to participate in government. There was no link between the vaguely discussed ‘revolutionary moment’ and the needs and activities of the workers’ movement. Indeed, no thought was given to ways of harnessing the energies of organized labour for the projected revolution. Rather, the trade unionist habits of a lifetime saw Largo Caballero persuade the new UGT executive on 3 February to do nothing to stop any conventional strike action which was then treated by the authorities as subversive.24"
"The new Radical government was impelled, both by the inclinations of its more conservative members and by its dependence on CEDA votes, to defend the interests of the landowners. Its arrival in power just as the strength of fascism was growing in Germany and Italy fostered the belief within the Socialist movement that only a revolutionary insurrection could prevent the establishment of a right-wing dictatorship. Within the FNTT, Zabalza began to advocate a general strike in order to put a stop to the employers’ offensive. Older heads within the UGT were opposed to what they saw as a rash initiative which might, moreover, weaken a future rising against a possible attempt to establish an authoritarian state. Suspicion of the right’s intentions had intensified with the appointment at the beginning of March of the thirty-nine-year-old Rafael Salazar Alonso as Minister of the Interior."
"The response of the FNTT was an illuminating example of how the newly revolutionized Socialists were reacting to increased aggression from the employers. The FNTT newspaper, El Obrero de la Tierra, had adopted a revolutionary line after the removal on 28 January 1934 of the union’s moderate executive. The paper asserted that the only solution to the misery of the rural working class was the socialization of the land. In the meantime, however, the new executive adopted practical policies every bit as conciliatory as those of their predecessors. The FNTT sent to the Ministers of Labour, Agriculture and the Interior a series of reasoned appeals for the application of the law regarding obligatory cultivation, work agreements, strict job rotation and labour exchanges, as well as protests at the systematic closures of the Casas del Pueblo. That was in the third week of March. When no response was received, and, indeed, the persecution of left-wing workers began to increase prior to the harvest, a respectful appeal was made to Alcalá Zamora – also to no avail. The FNTT declared that thousands were slowly dying of hunger and published long, detailed lists of villages where union members were being refused work and physically attacked. In the province of Badajoz, the FNTT calculated that there were 20,000 workers unemployed and that they and their families were dying of starvation. There were five hundred union members in prison.47"
"Finally, in a mood of acute exasperation, the FNTT reluctantly decided on a strike. The first announcement of a possible strike was accompanied by an appeal to the authorities to impose respect for the work agreements and for equitable work-sharing.48 The UGT executive committee advised the FNTT against calling a general strike of the peasantry for three reasons. In the first place, the harvest was ready at different times in each area, so any single date for the strike would lead to problems of co-ordination. Secondly, a general strike, as opposed to one limited to large estates, would cause hardship to leaseholders and sharecroppers who needed to hire one or two workers. Thirdly, there was concern that the provocative actions of the owners and the Civil Guard could push the peasants into violent confrontations which they could only lose. At a series of joint meetings throughout March and April, the UGT executive tried to persuade the FNTT leadership to move to a narrower strategy of staggered, partial strikes. The UGT pointed out that a nationwide peasant strike would be denounced by the government as revolutionary and risked a terrible repression, and Largo Caballero made it clear that there would be no solidarity strikes from industrial workers.49"
"In Fuente del Maestre, Fuente de Cantos, Carmonita and Alconchel (Badajoz), it was the Civil Guard which did the beating when hungry workers were caught collecting windfall olives and acorns. Elsewhere in Badajoz, to prevent labourers being able to alleviate their hunger in this way, the owners took pigs into the fields to eat the fallen crops. Some yunteros (ploughmen) who had started to plough an abandoned estate were imprisoned and the Civil Guard occupied the Casa del Pueblo in nearby Hornachos. In contrast, nothing had been done about the deaths in the same town nine months earlier. In many pueblos, especially in Badajoz, Jaén and Córdoba, landowners ignored regulations about rotating jobs among those registered at the local labour exchange. They would give work only to those who had voted for the right and systematically refused jobs to members of the FNTT. In Almendralejo, during the grape and olive harvests, despite massive local unemployment, two thousand outside labourers were brought in. In Orellana la Vieja and Olivenza, the owners employed only women and children, who were paid a fraction of the wage normally paid to men.20"
"Wages had dropped by 60 per cent. Hunger was breeding desperation and hatred was building up on both sides of the social divide. In Priego de Córdoba, a delegation of union members who had had no work for four months asked the Mayor to intervene. He replied that he could not oblige anyone to give them work and advised them to go on their knees to beg the landowners for jobs. And the problem was not confined to the south. A union official from Villanueva del Rebollar in the Castilian province of Palencia wrote, ‘The caciques should be careful about their foolhardiness. Our patience is wearing thin.’ The FNTT executive made several appeals to the new Minister of Labour, Ricardo Samper, for the implementation of existing social legislation but it was to no avail.21
In late December 1933, a draft law had already been presented to the Cortes for the expulsion of peasants who had occupied land in Extremadura the previous year. In January 1934, the law of municipal boundaries was provisionally repealed. The CEDA also presented projects for the emasculation of the 1932 agrarian reform, by reducing the amount of land subject to expropriation, and for the return of land confiscated from those involved in the August 1932 military rising. Clashes between the Civil Guard and the braceros increased daily.22"
"The right could hardly have been more pleased with Salazar Alonzo. On 7 March he declared a state of emergency and closed down the headquarters of the Socialist Youth, the Communist Party and the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. His energy was applauded by Gil Robles, who declared that, as long as the Minister of the Interior thus defended the social order and strengthened the principle of authority, the government was assured of CEDA support. A series of articles in El Debate stressed that this meant severe measures against what the paper called the ‘subversion’ of workers who protested against wage cuts. When the CEDA press demanded the abolition of the right to strike, Lerroux’s government responded by announcing that strikes with political implications would be ruthlessly suppressed. For both the right-wing press and Salazar Alonso, all strikes were deemed to be political. On 22 March El Debate denounced stoppages by waiters in Seville and by transport workers in Valencia as ‘strikes against Spain’, and called for anti-strike legislation as draconian as that of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Salazar’s Portugal. The government extended its repressive armoury by expanding the Civil Guard and the Assault Guard and by re-establishing the death penalty, which had been abolished in 1932.29"
"Coming just before the harvest was due to start, this allowed the owners to bring in Portuguese and Galician labour to undercut the wages of local workers who already faced starvation. The last vestige of protection that left-wing landless labourers had for their jobs and their wages was that provided by the Socialist majorities on many town and village councils. Socialist mayors were the only hope that rural workers had of landowners being obliged to observe social legislation or of municipal funds being used for public works to provide some employment. When the Radicals came into power in late 1933, Lerroux’s first Minister of the Interior, Manuel Rico Avello, removed thirty-five of them. Salazar Alonso began to remove many more, usually on flimsy pretexts such as ‘administrative irregularities’ – which often referred to debts inherited from their monarchist predecessors. As soon as he took up office, in response to petitions from local caciques, he ordered provincial civil governors to remove mayors who ‘did not inspire confidence in matters of public order’ – which usually meant Socialists. The legally elected mayor would then be replaced by a ‘government delegate’, usually a local conservative nominee."
"Some of Salazar Alonso’s most drastic interventions were in Extremadura, which was partly explained by his infatuation with the local aristocracy. In his memoirs, he admitted removing 193 southern town councils over the next six months. The procedure was that, after a denunciation of some irregularity, however small or implausible, a ‘delegate’ of the Civil Governor, accompanied by the Civil Guard and representatives of the local right, would expel the Socialist mayor and councillors. The majority of the ‘delegates’ were either caciques or their appointees. The idea was to put an end to a situation in which Socialist councils endeavoured to ensure the implementation of social legislation, particularly work-sharing. Once the change had taken place, the new mayors did nothing to protect workers, either from the capricious employment policies of the caciques or from the attacks of their retainers and the Civil Guard.42
Two significant cases of the removal of popular mayors in the province of Badajoz were those of José González Barrero of Zafra and Modesto José Lorenzana Macarro of Fuente de Cantos. González Barrero was a moderate Socialist, respected even by local conservatives because he owned a local hotel and served at Mass. He was widely regarded as an efficient and tolerant Mayor. However, Salazar Alonso, who well remembered their clash at Hornachos some months earlier, was determined to have him removed. Within ten days of his own appointment as Minister of the Interior, he had sent as inspector to Zafra one of his cronies, Regino Valencia, who predictably elaborated a series of charges to justify the suspension of González Barrero. The most serious was that improper methods had been used to raise funds for a road-building scheme to create work for the local unemployed. While in Zafra, Regino Valencia had admitted that the charges were flimsy and that he had been pressured by Salazar Alonso to come up with the required findings or else lose his job. The consequence was that, on 26 May 1934, the entire town council was removed and replaced by another, hand-picked and unelected. Its composition revealed the close links between the Radical Party and the landholding elite in the province. The new Mayor was an ex-member of Primo de Rivera’s Unión Patriótica and looked after the considerable interests in Zafra of the Duque de Medinaceli.43
In Fuente de Cantos, the Socialist Mayor, Modesto José Lorenzana Macarro, was known for his humanity and for the efforts that he made to improve the town, particularly in terms of water supplies. He had used municipal funds to buy food to alleviate the hunger of the families of the unemployed. In June 1934, he was removed on the grounds of misuse of these funds.44 As both cases showed, the intention was to diminish the protection afforded to the landless poor by Socialist town councils. The shameless illegality by which the democratic process was ignored, and the long-term consequences of giving the landowners free rein, massively intensified the festering social hatred in the southern countryside. José Lorenzana was to be murdered in September 1936. José González Barrero would be murdered in April 1939."
"With tension in the countryside growing by the day, the right in most provinces used every means possible to pressurize the Civil Governor. In the provincial capitals, right-wingers, well dressed and well spoken, were able to honour the governor with lunches and dinners and, with the press on their side, were able to muster considerable influence. When that influence was converted into official acquiescence in the slashing of wages and discrimination against union labour, hungry labourers were reduced to stealing olives and other crops. Landowners and their representatives then complained loudly about anarchy in the countryside to justify the intervention of the Civil Guard. Even El Debate commented on the harshness of many landlords while still demanding that jobs be given only to affiliates of the Catholic unions which had emerged in the wake of the elections. To meet the twin objectives of cheap labour and the demobilization of left-wing unions, Acción Popular created Acción Obrerista in many southern towns. It was a right-wing association backed by the local owners which was thus able to hand out jobs, at well below the wage levels agreed in the wage agreements, to those prepared to renounce membership of the Socialist FNTT.45"
"The result was an intensification of hardship and hatred. In Badajoz, starving labourers were begging in the streets of the towns. Rickets and tuberculosis were common. The monarchist expert on agrarian matters, the Vizconde de Eza, said that in May 1934 over 150,000 families lacked even the bare necessities of life. Workers who refused to rip up their union cards were denied work. The owners’ boycott of unionized labour was designed to reassert pre-1931 forms of social control and to ensure that the Republican–Socialist challenge to the system should never be repeated. In villages like Hornachos, this determination had been revealed by physical assaults on the Casa del Pueblo. A typical incident took place at Puebla de Don Fadrique, near Huéscar in the province of Granada. The Socialist Mayor was replaced by a retired army officer who was determined to put an end to what he saw as the workers’ indiscipline. He surrounded the Casa del Pueblo with a detachment of Civil Guard, and as the workers filed out they were beaten by the Guards and by retainers of the local owners.46"
"In the province of Toledo, FNTT affiliates found it almost impossible to get work. Those who did find a job had to accept the most grinding conditions. The agreement on wages and conditions had decreed 4.50 pesetas for an eight-hour day. The owners were in fact paying 2.50 pesetas for sun-up to sun-down working. In parts of Salamanca, wages of 75 céntimos were being paid.51"
Rightist infighting"Not everyone on the right was as contented as Gil Robles. The co-creator of the fascist JONS (Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista), Onésimo Redondo, found comfort neither in the right’s electoral success of November 1933 nor in the efforts of Salazar Alonso. In January 1934, he wrote: ‘Get your weapons ready. Learn to love the metallic clunk of the pistol. Caress your dagger. Never be parted from your vengeful cudgel!’ ‘The young should be trained in physical struggle, must love violence as a way of life, must arm themselves with whatever they can and finish off by any means the few dozen Marxist swindlers who don’t let us live.’30
The weakness of the JONS impelled Onésimo and Ramiro Ledesma Ramos to seek like-minded partners. This led, in mid-February 1934, to the fusion of the JONS with the Falange Española, the small fascist party led by the aristocratic José Antonio Primo de Rivera.31 Neither Redondo nor Ledesma Ramos was bothered that, two months before its official launch on Sunday 29 October 1933, Falange Española had accepted funding from the most conservative sectors of the old patrician right. The agreement known as the Pacto de El Escorial made by José Antonio Primo de Rivera with the monarchists of Renovación Española tied the Falange to the military conspiracy against the Republic.32 The monarchists’ were ready to finance the Falange because they saw its utility as an instrument of political destabilization."
Violent Rightist rhetoric and planning"Although violence was becoming a commonplace of the politics of Spain in the 1930s, no party exceeded the Falange in its rhetoric of ‘the music of pistols and the barbaric drumbeat of lead’. The representation of political assassination as a beautiful act and death in street-fighting as a glorious martyrdom was central to the funeral rituals which, in emulation of the practice of the Italian Fascist Squadristi, followed the participation of Falangists in street violence.35"
"Shortly after these events in Valladolid, a joint delegation of Alfonsine and Carlist monarchists would arrive in Rome on 31 March seeking financial help and weaponry for their attempts to overthrow the Republic. The delegation included Antonio Goicoechea, now head of the recently created party Renovación Española, which advocated the return of King Alfonso XIII, General Emilio Barrera, of the conspiratorial Unión Militar Española, and Antonio Lizarza Iribarren, the recruiter for the Carlist Requeté. Mussolini offered financial assistance to the tune of 1.5 million pesetas and 20,000 rifles, 20,000 hand grenades and 200 machine-guns which were delivered via Tripoli and Portugal. Arrangements were also made for several hundred Requetés (Carlist militiamen) to be trained by the Italian Army as instructors.37 Under its newly elected leader, Manuel Fal Conde, the Carlist movement (the Comunión Tradicionalista) was creating a full-scale citizen army. For the Carlist youth organization, ‘sick of legality’, violence was seen as a quintessential part of the Carlist way of life. The result of the efforts of Rada and Colonel José Enrique Varela was that, by the spring of 1936, the Comunión Tradicionalista could offer the military conspirators a well-trained, well-armed force of 30,000 ‘red berets’. With 8,000 men in Navarre and 22,000 in Andalusia and elsewhere, the Requeté constituted a crucial military contribution to the rising.38"
"In fact, the right, at this stage, had little need for a violent fascist party. The CEDA’s landed backers had achieved a great victory with the definitive repeal of the law of municipal boundaries. The position of the CEDA had been strengthened on 25 April 1934 when Lerroux offered to resign in protest at Alcalá Zamora’s delay in signing the amnesty for those imprisoned after the Sanjurjada. It had not occurred to Lerroux that the President might accept his offer. When he did, Lerroux felt obliged, to avoid the possibility of Alcalá Zamora calling new elections, to give permission to Ricardo Samper to form a government. He did so in the confidence that Samper’s indecisiveness would let him continue to govern from the shadows. Lerroux’s support for the amnesty and the general rightwards trend of the Radical Party saw its deputy leader, Diego Martínez Barrio, leave, taking with him nineteen of its most liberal parliamentary deputies. Thus the Radical Party shifted even further to the right and was left even more dependent on Gil Robles. This made possible the repeal of the law of municipal boundaries on 23 May.41"
Preparations for 1934 General strike"The desperation of the hungry workers in the face of what they saw as the stony-hearted arrogance of the landowners led to minor acts of vandalism. The throwing of stones at landowners’ clubs (casinos) in several villages was redolent of impotent frustration. It came as no surprise when the FNTT executive told the UGT that it could no longer resist their rank and file’s demand for action and could not just abandon them to hunger wages, political persecution and lock-out. As El Obrero de la Tierra declared, ‘All of Spain is becoming Casas Viejas.’ On 28 April, the FNTT had appealed to the Minister of Labour to remedy the situation simply by enforcing the existing laws. When nothing was done, the FNTT national committee decided on 12 May to call strike action from 5 June. The strike declaration was made in strict accordance with the law, ten days’ notice being given. The manifesto pointed out that ‘this extreme measure’ was the culmination of a series of useless negotiations to persuade the relevant ministries to apply the surviving social legislation. Hundreds of appeals for the payment of the previous year’s harvest wages lay unheard at the Ministry of Labour. All over Spain, the work conditions agreed by the mixed juries were simply being ignored and protests were repressed by the Civil Guard.52
The preparation of the strike had been legal and open and its ten objectives were hardly revolutionary. There were two basic aims: to secure an improvement of the brutal conditions being suffered by rural labourers and to protect unionized labour from the employers’ determination to destroy the rural unions. The ten demands were
(1) application of the work agreements;
(2) strict work rotation irrespective of political affiliation;
(3) limitation on the use of machinery and outside labour, to ensure forty days’ work for the labourers of each province;
(4) immediate measures against unemployment;
(5) temporary take-over of land scheduled for expropriation by the Institute of Agrarian Reform, the technical body responsible for the implementation of the 1932 agrarian reform bill, so that it could be rented to the unemployed;
(6) application of the law of collective leases;
(7) recognition of the right of workers under the law of obligatory cultivation to work abandoned land;
(8) the settlement before the autumn of those peasants for whom the Institute of Agrarian Reform had land available;
(9) the creation of a credit fund to help the collective leaseholdings; and
(10) the recovery of the common lands privatized by legal chicanery in the nineteenth century. The FNTT leader Ricardo Zabalza was hoping that the threat of strikes would be sufficient to oblige the government to do something to remedy the situation of mass hunger in the southern countryside. Certainly, the prospect of a strike led the Minister of Labour to make token gestures, calling on the mixed juries to elaborate work contracts and on government labour delegates to report the employers’ abuses of the law. Negotiations were also started with FNTT representatives.53
Salazar Alonso, however, was determined not to lose his chance to aim a deadly blow at the largest section of the UGT. In his meetings with the head of the Civil Guard General Cecilio Bedia and the Director General of Security Captain Valdivia, he had started to make specific plans for the repression of such a strike.54 Accordingly, just as Zabalza’s hopes of compromise negotiations between the FNTT and the Ministers of Agriculture and Labour were coming to fruition, Salazar Alonso issued a decree criminalizing the actions of the FNTT by declaring the harvest a national public service and the strike a ‘revolutionary conflict’. All meetings, demonstrations and propaganda connected with the strike were declared illegal. Draconian press censorship was imposed. El Obrero de la Tierra was closed down, not to reopen until 1936. In the Cortes debate on Salazar Alonso’s tough line, the CEDA votes, along with those of the Radicals and the monarchists, ensured a majority for the Minister of the Interior. Nevertheless, the points raised in the debate starkly illuminated the issues at stake."
"José Prat García, PSOE deputy for Albacete, in a reasoned speech to the Cortes, pointed out the anti-constitutional nature of Salazar Alonso’s measures. He reiterated that the FNTT had followed due legal process in declaring its strike. The application of existing legislation would have been sufficient to solve the conflict, claimed Prat, but Salazar Alfonso had rejected a peaceful solution and resorted to repression. The Minister replied aggressively that, because the FNTT’s objective was to force the government to take action, the strike was subversive. When he stated, falsely, that the government was taking steps against owners who imposed hunger wages, José Prat replied that, on the contrary, he had frustrated all attempts at conciliation, by overruling the negotiations between the FNTT and the Ministers of Labour and Agriculture. Prat concluded by stating that the strike aimed only to protect the rural labourers and to end situations such as that in Guadix (Granada) that had reduced workers to eating grass. José Antonio Trabal Sanz, of the Catalan Republican Left, declared that Salazar Alonso seemed to regard the wishes of the plutocracy and the national interest as synonymous. Cayetano Bolivar, Communist deputy for Málaga, claimed that the government’s provocation was closing the doors of legality and pushing the workers to revolution. When Bolivar mentioned the workers’ hunger, a right-wing deputy shouted that he and the rest of the majority were also hungry and the debate ended.55"
"As his early preparations made with Bedia and Valdivia revealed, conciliation had not been uppermost in Salazar Alonso’s mind. His measures were now swift and ruthless to weaken the left in advance of the conflict. Workers’ leaders were rounded up before the strike had started. Other liberal and left-wing individuals in the country districts were arrested wholesale. On 31 May, José González Barrero, the recently removed Mayor of Zafra, was arrested on trumped-up charges. The Mayors of Olivenza and Llerena, also in Badajoz, were likewise arrested, as were numerous union officials, schoolteachers and lawyers, some of whom were beaten or tortured. Salazar Alonso had effectively militarized the landworkers when he had declared the harvest a national public service. Strikers were thus mutineers and were arrested in their thousands. Even four Socialist deputies, including Cayetano Bolívar, visiting prisoners in Jaén, were detained – in violation of the Constitution.56
In the prison of Badajoz, with a normal capacity of eighty prisoners, six hundred were held in appalling conditions. There was similar overcrowding in the prisons of Almendralejo, Don Benito and other towns in the province. In addition to those arrested, several thousand peasants were simply loaded at gunpoint on to cattle trucks and deported hundreds of miles away from their homes and then left to make their own way back penniless and on foot. On 4 July, two hundred starving peasants from Badajoz who had been imprisoned in Burgos reached Madrid and congregated in the Puerta del Sol where they were violently dispersed by the police. The FNTT paid for them to return home, where many were rearrested.57"
"The Casas del Pueblo were not reopened and the FNTT was effectively crippled until 1936. In an uneven battle, the FNTT had suffered a terrible defeat. In several provinces, the remaining Socialist town councils were overturned and replaced by the caciques’ nominees. In Granada, the Civil Governor was removed at the behest of local landowners because he had made an effort to ensure that the remaining labour legislation was implemented after the strike.59 In the Spanish countryside, the clock had effectively been put back to the 1920s by Salazar Alonso. There were no longer any rural unions, social legislation or municipal authorities to challenge the dominance of the caciques. The CEDA was delighted.60
By choosing to regard a strike of limited material objectives as revolutionary, Salazar Alonso was able to justify his attack on Socialist councils. As has already been noted, he claimed that, by the end of the conflict, he had removed only 193 of them. However, the real figures were much higher. In Granada alone, during the period that the Radicals were in power, 127 were removed. In Badajoz, the figure was nearer 150.61 By his aggressively brutal action during the peasant strike, the Minister of the Interior had inflicted a terrible blow on the largest union within the UGT and left a festering legacy of hatred in the south. Local landowners were quick to reimpose more or less feudal conditions on workers whom they regarded as serfs. Wages were slashed and work given only to non-union workers regarded as ‘loyal’."
"Salazar Alonso referred to Amparo as his muse and to himself as the chieftain, using the word later adopted by Franco, ‘Caudillo’. He painted for her the self-portrait of a brilliant general about to go into battle against a powerful enemy. However, the nearest that Largo Caballero’s PSOE–UGT–FJS liaison committee had come to creating militias was to make a file-card index of the names of men who might be prepared to ‘take to the streets’. The lack of central co-ordination was demonstrated by Largo Caballero’s acquiescence in the erosion of the trade union movement’s strength in one disastrous strike after another. Young Socialists took part in Sunday excursions to practise military manoeuvres in the park outside Madrid, the Casa del Campo, armed with more enthusiasm than weapons, activities easily controlled by the police. Desultory forays into the arms market had seen the Socialists lose their scarce funds to unscrupulous arms-dealers and had produced only a few guns. The police were fully informed about the purchases, either by spies or by the arms-dealers themselves, and often arrived at Casas del Pueblo and Socialists’ homes with precise information about weapons hidden behind false walls, under floorboards or in wells. The one attempt at a major arms purchase, carried out by Indalecio Prieto, was a farcical failure. Only in the northern mining region of Asturias, where small arms were pilfered from local factories and dynamite from the mines, did the working class have significant weaponry.64"
"For Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso, the adventurism of the Falange was an irrelevance. The Socialists’ empty revolutionary threat had played neatly into their hands. Their readiness to take advantage of that rhetoric to alter the balance of power in favour of the right had been illustrated brutally during the printers’ and landworkers’ strikes. Gil Robles knew that the leadership of the Socialist movement, dominated by followers of Largo Caballero, had linked its threats of revolution specifically to the entry of the CEDA into the cabinet. He also knew that, thanks to Salazar Alonso, the left was in no position to succeed in a revolutionary attempt. Constant police activity throughout the summer dismantled most of the uncoordinated preparations made by the revolutionary committee and seized most of the weapons that the left had managed to acquire. Gil Robles admitted later that he was keen to enter the government because of, rather than in spite of, the reaction that could be expected from the Socialists: ‘Sooner or later, we would have to face a revolutionary coup. It would always be preferable to face it from a position of power before the enemy were better prepared.’68"
CEDA entering govt and Revolution of 1934"Salazar Alonso knew, as did Gil Robles, that the entry of the CEDA into the government was the detonator that would set off the Socialists’ revolutionary action and justify a definitive blow against them. On 11 September, at a deeply conflictive cabinet meeting, Salazar Alonso proposed a declaration of martial law precisely in order to provoke a premature outbreak of a revolutionary strike. Both the Prime Minister, Ricardo Samper, and the Minister of Agriculture, Cirilo del Río Rodríguez, protested at such irresponsible cynicism. The Minister of War, Diego Hidalgo, called for Salazar Alonso’s resignation."
"The Socialists had every reason to fear that the new cabinet would implement Salazar Alonso’s determination to impose reactionary rule. After all, on 222 of the 315 days of Radical government until the end of July, the country had been declared to be in a state of emergency, which meant the suspension of constitutional guarantees. Sixty of the ninety-three days on which there was constitutional normality had been during the electoral period of late 1933. Press censorship, fines and seizures of newspapers, limitation of the freedom of association, declaration of the illegality of almost all strikes, protection for fascist and monarchist activities, reduction of wages and the removal of freely elected Socialist town councils were seen as the establishment of a ‘regime of white terror’. These were the policies that Gil Robles, in his speech of 1 October, had denounced as weak. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that he intended to impose more repressive ones.83
In the last few days of September, still hoping to persuade the President to resolve the crisis by calling elections, the Socialist press had resorted to desperate – and empty – threats. El Socialista implied that preparation for the revolutionary action was well advanced: ‘We have our army waiting to be mobilized, and our international plans and our plans for socialism.’84 At the end of the month, the paper’s editorial asked rhetorically: ‘Will it be necessary for us to say now, stating the obvious, that any backward step, any attempt to return to outmoded policies will inevitably face the resistance of the Socialists?’85 Clearly, Julián Zugazagoitia, the thoughtful director of El Socialista, knew full well that the Socialist movement was utterly unprepared for a revolutionary confrontation with the state. If his editorials were not senseless irresponsibility – and Zugazagoitia, a faithful supporter of Prieto, was no extremist – they have to be seen as a last-ditch threat to the President.
Largo Caballero’s revolutionary committee made no preparations for the seizure of power and the ‘revolutionary militias’ had neither national leadership nor local organization. He placed his hopes on revolutionary bluster ensuring that Alcalá Zamora would not invite the CEDA into the government. Just before midnight on 3 October, when news reached the committee that a government was being formed with CEDA participation, Largo Caballero refused to believe it and ordered that no action be taken to start the movement. Even once the truth of the news could no longer be ignored, only with the greatest reluctance did he accept that there was no choice and the threatened revolution had to be launched.86
Throughout 1934, the leaders of the PSOE and the CEDA had engaged in a war of manoeuvre. Gil Robles, with the support of Salazar Alonso, had enjoyed the stronger position and he had exploited it with skill and patience. The Socialists were forced by their relative weakness to resort to vacuous threats of revolution and were finally manoeuvred into a position in which they had to implement them. The results were catastrophic.
After defeat in strike after strike in the first nine months of 1934, Socialist intentions in the events that began on the morning of 4 October 1934 were necessarily limited. The objective was to defend the concept of the Republic developed between 1931 and 1933 against the authoritarian ambitions of the CEDA. The entry of the CEDA into the cabinet was followed by the existence for ten hours of an independent Catalan Republic; a desultory general strike in Madrid; and the establishment of a workers’ commune in Asturias. With the exception of the Asturian revolt, which held out against the armed forces during two weeks of fierce fighting and owed its ‘success’ to the mountainous terrain and the special skills of the miners, the keynote of the Spanish October was its half-heartedness. There is nothing about the events of that month, even those in Asturias, to suggest that the left had thoroughly prepared a rising. In fact, throughout the crisis, Socialist leaders were to be found restraining the revolutionary zeal of their followers.87"
"To allow the President time to change his mind, on 4 October the UGT leadership gave the government twenty-four hours’ notice of a peaceful general strike in Madrid. Anarchist and Trotskyist offers of participation in a revolutionary bid were brusquely rebuffed. Accordingly, the new government was able with considerable ease to arrest workers’ leaders and detain suspect members of the police and the army. Without instructions to the contrary, Socialist and anarchist trade unionists in Madrid simply stayed away from work rather than mounting any show of force in the streets. The army took over basic services – conscripts were classified according to their peacetime occupations – and bakeries, right-wing newspapers and public transport were able to function with near normality. Those Socialist leaders who managed to avoid arrest either went into hiding, as did Largo Caballero, or went into exile, as did Prieto. Their followers were left standing on street corners awaiting instructions and within a week the strike had petered out. All the talk of a seizure of power by revolutionary militias came to nothing. Hopes of collaboration by sympathizers in the army did not materialize and the few militants with arms quickly abandoned them. In the capital, some scattered sniper fire and many arrests were the sum total of the revolutionary war unleashed.88"
"In Catalonia, where anarchists and other left-wing groups collaborated with the Socialists in the Workers’ Alliance, events were rather more dramatic. Many of the local committees took over their villages and then waited for instructions from Barcelona, which never came.89 In the Catalan capital, ill prepared and reluctant, Companys proclaimed an independent state of Catalonia ‘within the Federal Republic of Spain’ in protest against what was seen as the betrayal of the Republic. The motives behind his heroic gesture were complex and contradictory. He was certainly alarmed by developments in Madrid. He was also being pressured by extreme Catalan nationalists to meet popular demand for action against the central government. At the same time, he wanted to forestall revolution. Accordingly, he did not mobilize the Generalitat’s own forces against General Domingo Batet, the commander of military forces in Catalonia. The working class had also been denied arms. Accordingly, Batet, after trundling artillery through the narrow streets, was able to negotiate the surrender of the Generalitat after only ten hours of independence, in the early hours of 7 October.90 The right in general, and Franco in particular, never forgave Batet for failing to make a bloody example of the Catalans.91
Asturias was a different matter. Once the news of the CEDA entry into the government reached the mining valleys in the late afternoon of 4 October, the rank-and-file workers took the lead. There, the solidarity of the miners had overcome partisan differences and the UGT, the CNT and, to a much lesser degree, the Communist Party were united in the Workers’ Alliance. It is illustrative of the fact that Socialist leaders had never really contemplated revolutionary action that, even in Asturias, the movement did not start in the stronghold of the party bureaucracy, at Oviedo, but was imposed upon it by outlying areas – Mieres, Sama de Langreo and Pola de Lena. Similarly, in the Basque country, the workers seized power only in small towns like Eibar and Mondragón. Mondragón was an exception, but in Bilbao and the rest of the region rank-and-file militants waited in vain for instructions from their leaders. Throughout the insurrection, the president of the Asturian mineworkers’ union, Amador Fernández, remained in Madrid, and on 14 October, without the knowledge of the rank and file, tried to negotiate a peaceful surrender.92"
"The uncertainty demonstrated by the Socialist leadership was in dramatic contrast to the determination of Gil Robles. Indeed, his behaviour, both during and immediately after the October revolt, sustained his later admission that he had deliberately provoked the left. While Socialist hesitation on 5 October suggested a quest for compromise, the new Radical–CEDA government manifested no desire for conciliation and only a determination to crush the left. Gil Robles made it clear at a meeting with his three ministers that he had no faith in either the Chief of the General Staff, General Carlos Masquelet, whom he regarded as a dangerous liberal, or General Eduardo López Ochoa, who was put in charge of restoring order in Asturias. At the cabinet meeting on 6 October, however, their proposal to send Franco to take over operations in Asturias was overruled and the views of Alcalá Zamora, Lerroux and his more liberal cabinet colleagues prevailed.93 However, in the event Franco was able to play a role that ensured that the rebellion would be repressed with considerable savagery."
"Gil Robles demanded the harshest policy possible against the rebels. On 9 October, he rose in the Cortes to express his support for the government and to make the helpful suggestion that parliament be closed until the repression was over. Thus the anticipated crushing of the revolution would take place in silence. No questions could be asked in the Cortes and censorship was total for the left-wing press, although the right-wing newspapers were full of gruesome tales – never substantiated – of leftist barbarism. The new Minister of Agriculture, Manuel Giménez Fernández, one of the few sincere social Catholics within the CEDA, struck a dissident note when he told the staff of his Ministry on 12 October, ‘the disturbances which have taken place against the state have not started on the rebels’ side of the street but on ours, because the state itself has created many enemies by consistently neglecting its duties to all citizens’.94 The violence on both sides during the events of October and the brutal persecution unleashed in the wake of the left-wing defeat would deepen existing social hatreds beyond anything previously imagined."
"Franco’s approach to the events of Asturias was coloured by his conviction, fed by the regular bulletins he received from the Entente Anticommuniste of Geneva, that the workers’ uprising had been ‘carefully prepared by the agents of Moscow’ and that the Socialists, ‘with technical instructions from the Communists, thought they were going to be able to install a dictatorship’.96 That belief justified for Franco and for many on the extreme right the use of troops against Spanish civilians as if they were a foreign enemy.
With a small command unit set up in the telegraph room of the Ministry of War in Madrid, Franco controlled the movement of the troops, ships and trains to be used in the suppression of the revolution.97 Uninhibited by the humanitarian considerations which made some of the more liberal senior officers hesitate to use the full weight of the armed forces against civilians, Franco regarded the problem with the same icy ruthlessness that had underpinned his successes in the colonial wars. One of his first decisions was to order the bombing and artillery shelling of the working-class districts of the mining towns. Unmoved by the fact that the central symbol of rightist values was the reconquest of Spain from the Moors, he shipped Moroccan mercenaries to Asturias, the only part of Spain where the crescent had never flown. He saw no contradiction about using them because he regarded left-wing workers with the same racist contempt which had underlain his use of locally recruited mercenary troops, the Regulares Indígenas, against the Rif tribesmen. Visiting Oviedo after the rebellion had been defeated, he spoke to a journalist in terms that echoed the sentiments of Onésimo Redondo: ‘This war is a frontier war and its fronts are socialism, communism and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism.’98 Without apparent irony, despite Franco’s use in the north of colonial forces, the right-wing press portrayed the Asturian miners as puppets of a foreign, Jewish–Bolshevik conspiracy.99"
"In all of Spain, Civil Guard casualties in combating the insurrection of October 1934 were 111 killed and 182 wounded, the bulk of which were in Asturias.111 The memory of this would influence the part played by the Civil Guard in the Civil War. More immediately, it had a profound effect on the way in which the revolutionaries were punished. Once the Asturian miners had surrendered, the subsequent repression was overseen by the forty-four-year-old Civil Guard Major Lisardo Doval Bravo, who had a record of bitter hostility to the left in Asturias"
" In the same session of 9 October in which Gil Robles had proposed the closing of parliament, the CEDA voted an increase in the forces of order and the re-establishment of the death penalty. At total of 1,134 Socialist town councils were simply removed and replaced by unelected right-wing nominees."
"In contrast to Asturias, the October rebellion in Catalonia was put down without savagery, thanks to the moderation and professionalism of Domingo Batet Mestres, the general commanding the Catalan Military Region. The Catalan government, the Generalitat, had found itself caught between extreme nationalists pushing for a separate Catalonia and a right-wing government in Madrid determined to curtail regional autonomy. The President, Lluís Companys, rashly declared independence on 6 October, in an attempt to forestall revolution. General Batet responded with patience and good sense to restore the authority of the central government and thereby prevented a potential bloodbath. Specifically, he bypassed Franco, who was advising the Minister of War Diego Hidalgo on the repression in Catalonia as well as Asturias. To Franco’s fury, Batet would deal only with Hidalgo and the Prime Minister, Lerroux. As the senior officer, he ignored Franco’s recommendation that he use the Foreign Legion to impose punishment on Catalonia like that inflicted by Yagüe on Asturias. Instead, he used a small number of troops to secure the surrender of the Generalitat with a minimum of casualties. Batet also prevented the bombardment of Barcelona by warships sent by Franco.8
When Batet explained in a radio broadcast how he had conducted operations, he did so in a regretful and conciliatory tone that was far from the vengeful spirit of the right. In parliament, José Antonio Primo de Rivera fulminated that Batet was ‘a general that didn’t believe in Spain’ and that his broadcast had ‘made us blush with shame’.9 Two years later, Franco would take his revenge for Batet’s moderation. In June 1936, Batet was to be given command of the VI Military Region, whose headquarters were in Burgos, one of the nerve centres of the uprising of 18 July. Faced with the virtually unanimous decision of his officers to join the rising, Batet would bravely refuse to join them. His commitment to his oath of loyalty to the Republic would guarantee his trial and execution. Franco maliciously intervened in the judicial process to ensure that Batet would be executed.10"
"José Antonio Primo de Rivera committed the Falange to armed struggle to overthrow the democratic regime.12 In early 1935, he had several meetings with Bartolomé Barba Hernández of the Unión Militar Española and an agreement was reached which also established links with the Carlists through Colonel Ricardo de Rada, who was training the militias of both groups. There was a surge in UME membership among junior officers after October 1934.13"
"In mid-June 1935, at a meeting of the Falange executive committee, the Junta Política, at the Parador in the Sierra de Gredos north of Madrid, the ‘official and binding decision was taken to proceed to holy civil war to rescue the Fatherland’. José Antonio reported on his contacts with the UME. He then put forward a plan for an uprising to take place near the Portuguese frontier at Fuentes de Oñoro in the province of Salamanca. An unnamed general, possibly Sanjurjo, would acquire 10,000 rifles in Portugal which would then be handed over to Falangist militants who would proceed to a ‘march on Madrid’.14 With the left already cowed by the repression and the most right-wing elements of the military in positions of power, there was no backing from senior military figures. Probably to José Antonio’s relief, the idea was dropped.15 The only practical consequence of the decision to move to armed struggle was the bid by José Antonio to get weapons from Barba Hernández’s UME.16"
"In January 1935, Giménez Fernández’s Law on Access to Ownership offered tenants the chance to buy land they had worked for twelve years. Mild as it was, the project provoked a parliamentary coalition of ultra-rightist deputies, led by the Carlist José María Lamamié de Clairac (Salamanca) and four CEDA deputies, Mateo Azpeitia Esteban (Zaragoza province), Cándido Casanueva y Gorjón (Salamanca), Luis Alarcón de la Lastra (Seville province) and, most ferociously of all, Rodríguez Jurado. They were virulent in their hostility to the idea of peasants being given access to property.21"
"Now, in session after session in the Cortes, Alarcón, Lamamié and the CEDA ultras stripped away the progressive features of Giménez Fernández’s law on rural leases and added clauses that permitted a spate of evictions. Gil Robles stated that only concessions made in a Christian spirit could prevent the revolution, yet stood back and watched his Minister being called a ‘white bolshevik’ and ‘a Marxist in disguise’. Moreover, Gil Robles placed Giménez Fernández’s fiercest enemies on the parliamentary committee examining the drafts of his laws. Lamamié de Clairac showed just how far his Catholic faith went when he declared that ‘if the Minister of Agriculture goes on quoting Papal Encyclicals in support of his projects, I can assure him that we will end up becoming Greek orthodox’.23 When he next provoked a cabinet crisis, Gil Robles quietly dropped Giménez Fernández.
On 3 July 1935, Giménez Fernández’s successor, Nicasio Velayos Velayos, a conservative member of the Agrarian Party from Ávila, presented what came to be known as the ‘agrarian counter-reform’. It was so reactionary that it was denounced by José Antonio Primo de Rivera as well as by various Left Republicans and Radicals. Its most dramatic change was to drop the Inventory of Expropriable Property. This permitted landowners to avoid expropriation by putting their properties in other names. Henceforth, only those who wanted their property compulsorily purchased had to undergo expropriation. Moreover, compensation would be decided case by case by tribunals consisting of landowners, who would ensure that it would be at full market value.24 In Extremadura, the local landowners began to evict the yunteros. In the village of Fregenal de la Sierra in Badajoz, one landowner alone evicted twenty families.25"
"The Socialist Juan-Simeón Vidarte, acting for the victim’s family, proved to the satisfaction of the court that the attack had been unprovoked. Valencia was sentenced to twelve years and a day in prison. He then appealed to the Supreme Court, where he was defended by Rafael Salazar Alonso in person. Vidarte wrote later: ‘knowing as I and the entire province did, that he [Salazar Alonso] was behind the murder, this hard-faced cheek shocked and disgusted me’. At the unsuccessful appeal at the end of December 1935, there was uproar when Vidarte said that Salazar Alonso should have been wearing not lawyer’s robes but convict’s overalls.26"
"The post-October repression brought a semblance of social peace, but violence was not far from the surface. The south was badly hit by drought in 1935, unemployment rose to more than 40 per cent in some places and beggars thronged the streets of the towns. The hungry agricultural labourers and the well-to-do rural middle and upper classes regarded each other with fear and resentment. The right-wing campaign for the elections of February 1936 prophesied that a left-wing victory would mean ‘uncontrolled looting and the common ownership of women’. Even without such apocalyptic provocation, natural disaster intensified social tension. After the prolonged drought of 1935, early 1936 brought fierce rainstorms that ruined the olive harvest and damaged wheat and barley crops. Across Andalusia and Extremadura, during the election campaign, the owners offered food and jobs to those who would vote for the right. To refuse could mean a beating or loss of work. In both urban and rural areas of unemployment, the local branches of Acción Popular began to open soup-kitchens and to distribute blankets to the poor. In many places, the right set out to buy votes.29"
"In most southern provinces, the Casas del Pueblo were still closed sixteen months after the October revolution. In Granada, for example, the Republican newspapers mysteriously disappeared en route from Granada to outlying towns and villages, while the CEDA paper Ideal always got through. Ideal called on right-wingers to abandon their ‘suicidal inertia’, recommending a few beatings to keep the left quiet. In many provinces, caciques hired thugs who, often with the assistance of the Civil Guard, prevented the dissemination of left-wing propaganda. Republican posters were ripped down at gunpoint; Republican orators were turned away from villages by roadblocks or simply arrested. Rumours were spread that the peasants could not vote unless they had special documentation.30"
Left Wing victory: Forming a government"The narrowness of the left-wing electoral victory reflected the polarization of Spanish society. The working masses, especially in the countryside, were in no mood for compromise after the so-called ‘two black years’ of vindictive right-wing government from 1933 to 1935. Both the rural and urban working classes demanded reparation for the post-October repression and the swift implementation of the reform programme elaborated by the leaders of the Popular Front electoral coalition. Considerable alarm ran through the middle classes when crowds gathered at prisons in Asturias and elsewhere calling for the release of those imprisoned after October 1934 and when groups of labourers presented themselves for work at the large estates. In many rural towns, there were attacks on the casinos (landowners’ clubs). In others, churches were burned in reprisal for their priests having justified the repression and using their pulpits for right-wing propaganda during the electoral campaign.
The new Prime Minister Manuel Azaña was horrified by the violence of popular agitation and rapidly embarked on a programme of conciliation. On 20 February 1936, his first cabinet meeting approved the return of the elected town councils and decreed an amnesty for those imprisoned after October 1934. The following day, Azaña made a radio broadcast to the nation in which he undertook to ‘heal the wounds caused in recent times’ and promised that his government would not seek revenge for the injustices of the last two years. He was confident that the popular ferment was a temporary phenomenon, fruit of the euphoria that accompanied the electoral victory. With a view to calming the agitation, on 29 February his cabinet issued a decree obliging employers to readmit workers sacked because of their ideology or for participating in strikes after 1 January 1934 and to compensate them with their pay for a minimum of thirty-nine days or a maximum of six months. The immediate reaction of a huge group of employers’ organizations was to issue a statement that this constituted a ‘true economic catastrophe’. In the short term, it appeared that the right in general expected from Azaña, as the dramatist Ramón del Valle Inclán put it, ‘what the sick expect from cod-liver oil’.33
However, Azaña faced debilitating problems. Despite his broadcast, the rural agitation continued. He was deeply depressed by news of events in Yecla in the north of Murcia, where seven churches, six houses and the property registry had been set alight.34 His ability to control the situation was severely undermined by the refusal of Francisco Largo Caballero to permit Socialist participation in the cabinet. Distrustful of Republican moderation, he had been prepared to support the electoral coalition only to secure political amnesty for the victims of the repression. Embittered by right-wing obstruction of reform between 1931 and 1933, Largo Caballero believed that only an exclusively Socialist cabinet could transform Spanish society. His overconfident view was that the Left Republicans should pursue their own programme and effectively exhaust themselves in carrying out the bourgeois stage of the revolution. They would then either make way for a Socialist cabinet or be engulfed by a fascist uprising which would itself trigger a successful revolution.
On 3 April 1936, Largo Caballero was interviewed by the American journalist Louis Fischer and he told him complacently: ‘The reactionaries can come back into office only through a coup d’état.’35 He was just mouthing revolutionary platitudes, but unfortunately the counterfeit nature of his revolutionary rhetoric was not perceived as such among the middle and upper classes. While their fears of revolution were intensified by right-wing propaganda, Largo Caballero’s policy prevented both revolution and strong government. It eventually ensured instead that an ineffectual Republican government would be in power while the military conspiracy was prepared.
The tension was such that Azaña felt obliged to calm things down. He wrote to his brother-in-law: ‘every night the left feared a military coup aimed at preventing communism. The right feared that the Soviet was on the horizon. I’ve never seen such panic or such a stupid situation. The Socialists have organized an intelligence system based on concierges, cleaners and chauffeurs, and they get all the below-stairs gossip.’ With the stock market falling and the streets deserted, on 3 April, Azaña made the first of only two major speeches to the new Cortes. In it, he mentioned the agitations and disturbances that had taken place in the countryside, stating that his cabinet had to deal with what he called ‘a national ulcer’.
Referring to the excesses of the first six weeks of his government, he asked: ‘can the masses, provoked and ill treated, those forced to starve for two years, those coming out of prison, be asked to behave, as we try to do, without resentment for the injustices which we remember only too well? We had to expect, and the Government did expect … that the first explosion of popular anger would see excesses that would undermine political authority and damage the Government.’ While condemning violent abuses, he also denounced those who sought to make political capital from them. He recognized that the tendency of Spaniards to resolve problems by violence engendered ‘a presumption of catastrophe’. ‘Many people are going around depressed,’ he declared, ‘imagining that Spain is going to wake up having been turned into a Soviet.’ While understanding how apolitical individuals might harbour such fears, he found it intolerable that the politically aware should foment panic in such a way as to create the atmosphere necessary for a coup d’état.
Azaña put the disorder into its proper context and went on to declare that his government aimed to remedy the disequilibrium at the heart of Spanish society. He acknowledged that this could mean harming the interests of those who benefited from ‘this horrendous imbalance’, adding that ‘we come to break up any abusive concentration of wealth wherever it may be’. While he did not expect an entire social class to commit suicide, he called on the wealthy to make sacrifices rather than face the consequences of the desperation provoked by social injustice. He ended prophetically, more so than he knew at the time, declaring that this was the last chance for the Republic because, if the redistribution of wealth he was advocating was opposed as the reforms of 1931–3 had been, then there would be no legal way forward. Astonishingly, the reaction to this ultimatum was widespread relief from the Communists to the extreme right. The stock market began to rise again and Azaña was regarded as a national hero.36
Although lacking Socialist participation, Azaña’s new government was determined to proceed rapidly with meaningful agrarian change. The task was rendered all the more difficult because of a rise in unemployment by the end of February 1936 to 843,872, or 17 per cent of the working population.37 The new Minister of Agriculture, Mariano Ruiz-Funes, announced his commitment to rapid agrarian reform. The resurgent landworkers’ union intended to make him keep his word. After the harsh rural repression of the previous two years, in 1936 the FNTT began to expand at a vertiginous rate. Its militant leadership was in no mood to tolerate delays from the government or obstruction from the big landowners."
"Seriously alarmed by the quantity of weapons held by landowners and their retainers, and by the support that they enjoyed from the Civil Guard, the FNTT soon called upon members to form militias to prevent a repetition of the persecution of 1934 and 1935."
Right wing response and plans for coup"Anticipating the FNTT’s demands, CEDA propaganda had predicted that left-wing electoral success would be the prelude to the most hair-raising social disasters. Thus defeat on 16 February implied that landed and religious interests could not be defended legally and only violence would suffice. The Chief of the General Staff, Francisco Franco, believed that a left-wing election victory was the first stage of a Comintern plan to take over Spain. He had been convinced by the bulletins that he received from the Geneva Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale, bulletins which in turn drew on inflated reports from Mola’s crony, the corrupt policeman Mauricio Carlavilla. From the early hours of 17 February, Gil Robles had been working with Franco to have martial law declared to overthrow the results. They managed to get several garrisons to do so, but their efforts foundered when the Director General of the Civil Guard, Sebastián Pozas Perea, remained loyal to the Republic.
On 8 March, Franco and other senior generals met in Madrid to put in train the most extreme violence of all, a military coup. They agreed to make General Emilio Mola overall director of the conspiracy and Colonel Valentín Galarza Morante his liaison chief.39 This was hardly surprising. In May 1935, when Gil Robles had become Minister of War, he had appointed Franco Chief of the General Staff and they had quietly established Mola in a secluded office in the Ministry of War to prepare operational plans for the use of the colonial army against the left on mainland Spain.40 Mola was then made general in command of Melilla and shortly afterwards military commander of the entire Moroccan protectorate. Franco ensured that reliable reactionaries were posted to the command of many units in Morocco and in Spain itself. He boasted later that these officers were key pawns in the coup.41"
"The announcement of Azaña’s decrees of 20 February 1936 had been greeted cautiously, but their implementation provoked howls of outrage. The right-wing mayors imposed in 1934 by Salazar Alonso were unceremoniously expelled from the town councils of Badajoz and the deposed Socialists reinstated. Moreover, Salazar Alonso himself, the erstwhile champion of the Badajoz latifundistas, was a ruined man. In 1934, he had been heavily involved in the gambling fraud which eventually destroyed the Radical Party. He was one of several prominent Radicals who took bribes to help legalize the use of a rigged roulette wheel in Spanish casinos. The scandal that ensued in 1935 was called ‘Estraperlo’, from the names of the machine’s inventors, Strauss and Perlowitz. Salazar Alonso had been given a gold watch and 100,000 pesetas (about £35,000 in present-day values), and both his under-secretary at the Minister of the Interior, Eduardo Benzo, and the Director General of Security, José Valdivia, were paid 50,000 pesetas. Despite authorizing the use of the roulette wheel, Salazar Alonso, regarding the bribe as insufficient, arranged for a police raid when it was inaugurated at the San Sebastián casino. To get their revenge, the inventors leaked documents on the case to President Alcalá Zamora. In October 1935 in the subsequent parliamentary debate, Salazar Alonso was exonerated by 140 votes to 137, thanks to the support of the CEDA. When this was announced, José Antonio Primo de Rivera shouted, ‘¡Viva el Estraperlo!’43 Although he was still Mayor of Madrid, Salazar Alonso’s political career was over. During the February 1936 election campaign, his speeches in Badajoz were interrupted by shouted witticisms about roulette wheels and gold watches. He was defeated and immediately claimed that the results had been falsified. He told Lerroux that he had serious financial problems (despite receiving his full ministerial salary, as did all ex-ministers). He became president of the right-wing newspaper Informaciones in April 1936.44 In the early days of the Civil War, he went into hiding, was eventually arrested, summarily tried by a people’s tribunal and shot."
"Of the six victorious right-wing candidates in the February elections in Salamanca, Gil Robles, Cándido Casanueva, Ernesto Castaño and José Cimas Leal of the CEDA, and the Carlists José María Lamamié de Clairac and Ramón Olleros, three were implicated in soliciting the votes of the province’s wheat-growers by offering to buy up their surplus stocks. After scrutinizing the results, the committee on electoral validity, the Comisión de Actas, disqualified three, Castaño, Lamamié de Clairac and Olleros, and gave their parliamentary seats to the candidates with the next highest number of votes. Right-wing seats in Granada were also disqualified because of blatant electoral falsification. Claiming to be the target of persecution, the CEDA’s deputies withdrew en masse from the Cortes – although its value as a pulpit of propaganda saw them return quickly. The President of the Cortes, the conservative Republican Diego Martínez Barrio, believed that the right-wing reaction to the loss of the fraudulently gained seats heralded a turn to violence. Castaño, a prominent landowner, went to Valladolid, the headquarters of the VII Military Region to which Salamanca belonged, to advocate a military rising against the Republic.48 Gil Robles was in touch directly with General Mola while his faithful deputy, Cándido Casanueva, acted as the CEDA liaison with Generals Goded and Fanjul.49 Gonzalo de Aguilera may have been an extreme case, yet he was anything but an unrepresentative figure of the Salamanca landowning class."
"In the province of Toledo, violence was kept under control by the Civil Governor, who ordered the Civil Guard not to shoot unless under attack. He also ordered the confiscation of all firearms and 10,000 shotguns were collected. This well-intentioned measure was severely damaging to the peasantry, who relied on their shotguns for hunting. The guns that were kept in Civil Guard posts were either destroyed or distributed to rightists when the military coup took place.53 On 9 March, in Escalona in the north-west of Toledo, local Falangists shot four Socialist landworkers and wounded twelve more. On 5 March, in Quintanar de la Orden in the south of the province, thugs in the pay of the local cacique assaulted the house of the Socialist Mayor and pistol-whipped his wife and two small sons. They then tried to kill his elder daughter by throwing her down a well. In neither case were the perpetrators arrested.54"
"Faced with incontrovertible evidence that the agrarian reforms of the Republic would be combated with violence, the FNTT echoed Zabalza’s call for the creation of people’s militias, complaining that:
the government policy of disarming all citizens is a joke. In fact, this means handing us over helpless to our enemies. For the last two years, the Civil Guard has been disarming us while leaving untouched the arsenals of the fascist elements, and when we speak of fascists, we mean the CEDA as well as the Falange. We know only too well that it is the Cedistas and other landowners who pay the Falangist squads. Thus, we face, armed to the teeth, all the landowners, their lackeys, their paid thugs, the shotgun-toting clergy, and backing them up, the Civil Guard, the bourgeois judiciary and government agronomists.60"
"Violence was not confined to rural areas. Indeed, it is unlikely that the situation in the countryside would alone have secured sufficient support for a military coup. The plotters needed to mobilize urban popular opinion and that required the provocation of violence in the streets, especially those of Madrid. The capital, where diplomats and newspaper correspondents were stationed, would be used to convince international opinion that all of Spain was a victim of uncontrolled violence. Provocation was to be undertaken by the Falange, whose leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera had no inhibitions about violence against the left. Irked by the ebullience of Madrid workers celebrating the Popular Front victory in Madrid, he commented to his friend Dionisio Ridruejo: ‘With a couple of good marksmen, a demonstration like that can be dissolved in ten minutes.’ José Antonio resented the fact that it was taken for granted that the Falange would accept ‘the role of guerrillas or the light cavalry of other craftier parties’. As he said to Ridruejo, ‘Let’s hope that they finally wise up. We are ready to take the risks, no? Well, let them, at least, provide the money.’68
In fact, the undermining of government authority by street violence went hand in hand with the military conspiracy for which it provided the justification. Having gained only 0.4 per cent of the vote in the February elections (about 45,000 votes), it was obvious that the Falange had little popular support. José Antonio was already committed to a violent seizure of power and, as his comments to Ridruejo showed, he was ready to contribute a Falangist strategy of tension to the wider conspiracy.69 Within a month of the elections, there were armed attacks in Madrid on prominent left-wing and liberal politicians. Numerous incidents were provoked in which Falangists and left-wingers fought in the streets of the capital. On 11 March, a Falangist law student, Juan José Olano, was shot dead. The following day, in reprisal, a three-man Falangist hit squad, almost certainly acting with José Antonio’s knowledge, tried to kill the Socialist law professor Luis Jiménez Asúa. Jiménez Asúa survived but his police bodyguard was killed. On the day of his funeral, the left reacted by setting fire to two churches and the offices of the Renovación Española newspaper La Nación, which belonged to one of the Falange’s backers, Manuel Delgado Barreto. The consequence was that, on 14 March, the Director General of Security, José Alonso Mallol, ordered José Antonio and other members of the senior leadership of FE de las JONS to be arrested for illegal possession of weapons.70"
"Azaña was shocked that Largo Caballero had expressed no concern about Jiménez Asúa – a stark indication of Socialist divisions. Nevertheless, in reprisal for José Antonio’s arrest, on 16 March, Largo Caballero’s house was fired upon by a Falangist terror squad. This prompted a cunning display of hypocrisy from Gil Robles. On 17 March, he went to see the Minister of the Interior, Amós Salvador, to protest about the disorder, citing the attack on Largo Caballero’s home as a symptom. The CEDA also tabled a debate on the subject in the Cortes, blaming the government and the left.71 Knowing that the army was not yet ready to seize power and aware that full-scale obstruction of Azaña’s government could only lead to an all-Socialist government, Gil Robles devoted his energies to building up the atmosphere of fear. The objective was that the middle classes, terrified by the spectre of disorder, would eventually turn to the army as their only saviour."
"On 12 April, José Antonio called off a plan elaborated by the Falange action squads to murder Largo Caballero at the hospital where his wife was terminally ill. Since he visited her without his escort, it was regarded as simple for Falangists disguised as medical staff to kill him in the deserted corridor outside her room. José Antonio explained to a friend that his caution derived from the belief that the Falange would be destroyed by the consequent left-wing backlash. He was also uneasy about the public impact of the murder of a sixty-six-year-old man visiting his dying wife.73"
" None of the Popular Front parties had any need to provoke violence in order to take power. The creation of an atmosphere of turmoil and disorder could, on the other hand, justify the use of force to establish a dictatorship of the right. It is difficult to distinguish between provocation and reprisal in street fights between Communists or Socialists and Falangists or members of Gil Robles’s youth movement, the JAP. However, it is noteworthy that José Antonio’s close friend Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval boasted that, in the violence following Reyes’s funeral procession, ‘the mortuary welcomed, for every one of ours, ten of theirs’.78
Significantly, wealthy conservatives who had previously financed Gil Robles to defend their interests were now switching funds to the Falange and the scab union, the Sindicatos Libres. In March, ABC had opened a subscription for a hitherto unknown Federación Española de Trabajadores, behind which could be discerned Ramón Sales, the self-styled fascist agent provocateur who had become famous in the political gangsterism of 1919–23. By late April the fund had reached 350,000 pesetas, donated by aristocrats, landowners, industrialists and many anonymous ‘fascists’ and Falangists. Since the money was never used for trade union purposes and a substantial number of those arrested for acts of violence were members of the Sindicatos Libres, the left had no doubts that this was a fund to finance agents provocateurs. Professional gunmen were being hired by the right and their operations were designed to provoke the widest repercussions.79"
"Gil Robles was effectively threatening war if the Popular Front did not drop its commitment to thorough reform of the social and economic structure. Because parliamentary speeches could not be censored, Gil Robles and Calvo Sotelo larded theirs with exaggerations of disorder. They knew that, reported in full in the press, their predictions of doom would generate an atmosphere of terror among sectors of the middle and upper classes, who would look to the army for salvation. Gil Robles’s remarks in the Cortes of 15 April and his assiduous attendance at the funerals of Falangist gunmen projected the impression that political violence was the exclusive responsibility of the left. Behind his rhetoric of concern for public order, the CEDA was organizing motorized machine-gun assault groups and, as the spring wore on, ever more rightist youths arrested for acts of violence were members of the Juventud de Acción Popular.81
Gil Robles admitted in his memoirs that the principal function of the CEDA was to make propaganda in parliament and to act as a shield for more violent groups. He quoted approvingly a comment that the perpetrators of right-wing terrorism in the spring of 1936 were ‘of the highest nobility and spiritual quality’. In a newpaper interview, he expressed approval of those who left the CEDA ‘to take the path of violence, believing it to be the way to solve national problems’.82 Almost immediately after the elections, the majority of one of key sections of the CEDA, the Derecha Regional Valenciana, had rejected the moderation of their leader, Luis Lucia, in favour of direct action. Under the leadership of the party’s secretary general, José María Costa Serrano, the DRV was collecting arms and organizing a clandestine militia. Links were established with the local Falange, Renovación Española and the Unión Militar Española. The DRV’s youth section drilled and held shooting practice. Throughout the spring, at least 15,000 members of JAP joined the Falange. Nothing was done to dissuade them and no efforts were made to recruit replacements. Many of those remaining with the CEDA were in active contact with groups committed to violence. And, when the war broke out, thousands of CEDA members joined the Carlists.83"
"On 19 May, Casares Quiroga, Azaña’s successor as Prime Minister, presented his programme to the Cortes. Gil Robles responded with a virtuoso display of ambiguity. As on 15 April, an apparent appeal for moderation was in reality a justification of violence. Without mentioning names, he dwelled gloatingly on Azaña’s failure to get a broadly based Popular Front government under Prieto, stating that the Republican government was ‘reduced to the sad role, in relation to those groups [pointing to the Socialist benches], of being today the servant, tomorrow the victim’. Regarding Casares Quiroga’s declared hostility to fascism, he pointed out that disorder made fascist solutions relevant. While criticizing fascism in theory because of its foreign origins and its elements of state socialism, he justified the violence of those denounced as fascists, saying that there was no other way for them to defend their interests. He had nothing to say about how the present political disorder had been incited by the repressive and vindictive policies carried out by Radical–CEDA cabinets. Declaring that democracy was dead, he praised the trend to fascism as growing out of ‘a sense of patriotism, perhaps badly focused but profoundly hurt to see that the rhythm of politics is dictated not by great national interests but by you [turning to the Socialist deputies] with orders from Moscow’. It was an endorsement of the flight of the JAP masses into the Falange. Ending with a provocative challenge to Largo Caballero’s followers, he made a sarcastic reference to ‘you ferocious revolutionaries who do nothing but talk’.89"
"The fantasies of Maíz were merely an extreme version of a carefully prepared fiction intended to justify the military coup and the subsequent repression. ‘Secret documents’ were concocted to ‘prove’ that a Soviet take-over in Spain was imminent. A kind of Spanish equivalent to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, these ‘documents’ were intended to generate fear and indignation, not least because they contained blacklists of right-wingers intended to be murdered as soon as the alleged Communist take-over was completed.96 Such inventions presented a military coup as a patriotic act to save Spain from the assault masterminded by the dark hand of Judaism. With such a view of the enemy, it was but a short step to Mola’s first secret instructions to his fellow conspirators, issued in April. He wrote, ‘It has to be borne in mind that the action has to be violent in the extreme so as to subdue as soon as possible the enemy which is strong and well organized. It goes without saying that all leaders of political parties, societies and trade unions not part of the movement will be imprisoned and exemplary punishment carried out on them in order to choke off any rebellion or strikes.’97 Mola, as a hardened Africanista, placed a high value on the value of terror in paralysing opponents. However, it was not just a question of gaining power but also the first step to ‘purifying’ Spain of the noxious elements of the left."
"Disorder was frequent but sporadic and hardly universal. A picture of total anarchy was being painted in the press and the speeches of Gil Robles and others by simply grouping together as ‘social disorders’ all brawls, fights and strikes, however insignificant. Incidents were magnified and statistics inflated. In Madrid, the American Ambassador Claude Bowers was told tales of uncontrolled mobs butchering monarchists and feeding their bodies to pigs.110 Fear of violence and disorder was generated by what was read about other places. Some of those who expressed their disgust at the breakdown of law and order also spoke of their relief that, thankfully, it had not reached their own towns.111
The statistics are meaningless without their social context. For instance, in Torrevieja (Alicante) in early March, it was reported that ‘extremists’ had burned down a hermitage, a hotel, the club of the Radical Party and the municipal registry. What happened was that shots were fired from the hotel balcony on a peaceful demonstration complete with brass band that was passing and one of the demonstrators was wounded. This provoked the attack on the hotel and the other crimes. Among those arrested and accused of responsibility for the shooting were the owner of the hotel, the parish priest and two of his brothers and a teacher from the town’s Catholic school.112
As late as 1 July, Mola complained that ‘there have been efforts to provoke violence between right and left that we could use as an excuse to proceed but so far – despite the help of some political elements – it has not fully materialized because there are still idiots who believe in coexistence with representatives of the masses who dominate the Popular Front’.113 The perfect conditions for a coup may not have been achieved to Mola’s satisfaction, but the violence of right-wing gunmen, incendiary speeches by Calvo Sotelo and Gil Robles and the gloss put on events by the rightist media had gone a long way towards pushing the middle classes into the arms of the military conspirators."
"Throughout June and July, Gil Robles instructed provincial CEDA leaders that, on the outbreak of the rising, all party members were to join the military immediately, party organizations were to offer full collaboration, youth sections were to join the army and not form separate militias, party members were not to take part in reprisals against the left, power struggles with other rightist groups were to be avoided, and the maximum financial aid was to be given to the authorities. Only the instruction about reprisals was ignored, and CEDA members were prominent in the repression, especially in Granada and the cities of Old Castile. The first section of the CEDA to join the rising was the Derecha Regional Valenciana. Its moderate Christian Democrat leader Luis Lucia had been marginalized by the secretary general, José María Costa Serrano. When General Mola was finalizing civilian participation in June, Costa Serrano offered 1,250 men for the early moments of the rising and promised 10,000 after five hours and 50,000 after five days. Alongside local sections of the Falange, Renovación Española and the Carlists, the radical wing of the DRV was placed by Costa Serrano under the orders of the military junta. At the beginning of the war, Lucia issued a statement condemning the coup. As a right-wing politician, he went into hiding from the anarchists only to be caught and imprisoned in Barcelona. Nevertheless, in 1939 he was tried and sentenced to death by the Francoists for the alleged offence of military rebellion. His sentence was later commuted to thirty years in prison.117"
"After Faraudo’s murder, calls for reprisals had been silenced. However, when Castillo was also assassinated, fellow Assault Guards from the Pontejos barracks just behind the Dirección General de Seguridad in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol were determined on revenge. In the early hours of the following day, they set out to take revenge on a prominent right-wing politician. Failing to find Gil Robles who was holidaying in Biarritz, they kidnapped Calvo Sotelo and, shortly after he got into the truck, one of them shot him. His body was then taken to the municipal cemetery where it was discovered the next morning.129 Republican and Socialist leaders were appalled and the authorities immediately began a thorough investigation. For the right, it was the opportunity to launch the coup for which the lengthy preparations were on the point of fruition."
Anticlericalism"One of the factors that did most to increase social tension during the spring of 1936 was anti-clericalism. Religious hatred was most intense in the towns and villages where the clergy had been vocal in support of the CEDA and of the post-1934 repression. Revenge sometimes took the form of the newly reinstated mayors preventing Catholic burials, baptisms and weddings or charging for bells to be rung. In Rute in southern Córdoba, the Socialist Mayor fined the parish priest for carrying the viaticum through the streets without having applied for a licence to do so. In several places, religious statues and monumental crucifixes were destroyed."
" In most places, the Holy Week processions went ahead without incident and manifestations of anti-clericalism diminished after the end of May. Nevertheless, the religious clashes that did take place were an important factor in the political polarization and the incitement of violence. There were instances of trigger-happy clergy (curas trabucaires). In Cehegín (Murcia), when his residence was surrounded, the parish priest opened fire on demonstrators, killing one of them. In Piñeres (Santander), a priest shot at villagers and wounded one. The parish priest of Freijo (Orense) possessed a Winchester rifle, a Mauser pistol and a Remington revolver.61"
"Although there were some minor anti-clerical incidents, with fire-crackers placed at the door of the convent of the Carmelite Fathers, Holy Week celebrations in the first week of April went ahead in most churches in the provincial capital. Segovia’s right-wing newspaper, El Adelantado, even commented on the respect shown by non-Catholics to those taking part in the various ceremonies and religious services. In June, however, the ecclesiastical authorities suspended the traditional Corpus Christi procession, instead holding a solemn celebration within the Cathedral. The reason was simply outrage that the left should have the effrontery to put up its posters and organize demonstrations with flags flying and slogans shouted. Despite the relative calm, the tensions were later used to justify the repression.106 In fact, as early as April, the military plotters in Segovia had called upon the local Falangist leader, Dionisio Ridruejo, to have his men, few as they were, ready to take part in the coup.107"
Leftist response to the rights violence"An opportunity to strengthen the government arose in early May with the impeachment of Alcalá Zamora and his replacement as President by Manuel Azaña. It was widely hoped that a combination of a strong President and an equally strong Prime Minister could defend the Republic against military subversion. However, when Azaña asked him to form a government, Prieto made the tactical error of twice consulting the PSOE parliamentary group of which Largo Caballero was president. At meetings on 11 and 12 May, Largo Caballero and his followers opposed him and he capitulated quietly. Despite their opposition, Prieto could have formed a government with the support of the Republican parties and about a third of PSOE deputies. However, he was not prepared to split the PSOE.86
By blocking the plan for a Prieto-led government, Largo Caballero had effectively destroyed the last chance of avoiding civil war. A powerful argument in favour of a coup used within the officer corps was that Largo Caballero, once in power, would dissolve the army. Prieto realized, as his rival apparently did not, that attempts at full-scale revolutionary social change would drive the middle classes to fascism and armed counter-revolution. Instead, Prieto, ever the pragmatist, was convinced that the answer was to restore order and accelerate reform. He had plans to remove unreliable military commanders, to reduce the power of the Civil Guard, to appoint a trusted officer as Director General of Security and to disarm the fascist terror squads.87 Largo Caballero prevented this and ensured that the strongest party of the Popular Front could not participate actively in using the apparatus of the state to defend the Republic. Azaña turned to his fellow Left Republican Santiago Casares Quiroga, who lacked the stature to deal with the problems he was called upon to solve. Prieto wrote later, ‘My role was thus reduced to constantly issuing warnings about the danger, and trying to ensure that, within our camp, naive and blind obstinacy, typical of a lamentable revolutionary infantilism, did not go on creating an atmosphere favourable to fascism because that was all that absurd acts of disorder brought about.’88"
"Within the government apparatus, the man most concerned by the links between military conspiracy and Falangist violence was the Director General of Security, José Alonso Mallol. Since being appointed in February, Alonso Mallol had worked tirelessly to combat Falangist terrorism and to monitor the activities of hostile officers. One of his innovations was to place telephone taps on the houses and the barracks where the coup was being hatched. José Antonio’s correspondence with the conspirators was also intercepted. By May, Alonso Mallol was able to give President Azaña and the Prime Minister Casares Quiroga a list of more than five hundred conspirators whom he believed should be arrested immediately. Fearful of the possible reactions, Azaña and Casares failed to act and the coup went ahead.91"
Poverty"It was a short step from the exasperation of starving labourers to disorder. The scale of hunger in rural Spain in 1936 is almost unimaginable today. On 21 April, the Civil Governor of Madrid was informed that the only available protein for peasants in the province was lizards and that children were fainting from malnutrition in their schools. "
"The hatred between the landless peasants and the owners and their administrators was part of daily life in the south. One major landowner from Seville, Rafael de Medina, wrote of ‘the incomprehension of the haves and the envy of the have-nots’, of those who walked in rope sandals (alpargatas) and those who travelled by car. As he and his father drove past labourers walking along a country road, they noted their ‘grimfaced look, of such profound contempt and such outright bitterness, that it had the force of a thunderbolt’. Medina always carried a pistol at meetings to discuss working conditions with union leaders.123
The hatred was explained by the Civil Governor of Seville, José María Varela Rendueles. Many of the really big owners, dukes, counts and even very rich non-aristocratic owners, lived in Paris or Biarritz or Madrid. They visited their lands occasionally to hunt and to show them off to their friends. While there, their contempt for the labourers was manifest. They, like the less grand landowners who lived on their estates, would often laughingly take advantage of the wives, sisters and daughters of their labourers. Their administrators ran the estates, hiring and firing arbitrarily, ignoring the law. After the abuses of 1933–5, the return of left-wing town councils after the February 1936 elections saw a reversal of fortunes. The prevailing spirit was one not of conciliation but of outright hatred. As Varela Rendueles put it, the landless labourers wanted to follow the example of their ‘betters’: ‘all they wanted to do was to repeat the barbaric lessons that they had been taught’.124"
Chapter 5: Institutionalized Violence in the Rebel Zone
Early uprising and repression in Morocco and Cadiz"Having practised extraordinary brutality during the repression in Asturias in October 1934, Yagüe was bitterly hated on the left. He in turn had ample reason to resent the Republic, having been demoted in 1932 from lieutenant colonel to major by Azaña’s military reforms, which had reversed many of the rapid promotions enjoyed by the Africanistas. Humiliated by losing eighty-two places in the seniority list, he had had to wait a year before being restored to the rank of lieutenant colonel.3 Yagüe commanded the Second Legion in Ceuta on the southern side of the Straits of Gibraltar. Loudly indiscreet in his hostility to the government, he enjoyed the unquestioning loyalty of the tattooed mercenaries under his command.
Leading Socialists had repeatedly warned Casares Quiroga that it was dangerous to leave Yagüe in post. Yet, when he arrived on 12 June, he was offered a transfer either to a desirable post on the Spanish mainland or to a plum position as a military attaché in Rome. Yagüe replied curtly that he would burn his uniform rather than leave the Legion. To Mola’s relief, Casares weakly acquiesced and let him return to Morocco. After their meeting, Casares said to his adjutant, Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, ‘Yagüe is a gentleman, a perfect officer, and I am sure that he would never betray the Republic. He has given me his word of honour and his promise as an officer that he will always loyally serve the Republic. And men like Yagüe keep their word.’ It was a major political error.4"
"The Generalitat’s security services had uncovered the plans for the rising in Catalonia and a deeply pessimistic Ramón begged his brother to desist. Emilio replied that it was too late and ordered Ramón to return to Barcelona. It was a virtual death sentence. When the coup failed, as Ramón had predicted, he shot himself. This contributed to the further brutalization of Mola. In contrast, he would be unmoved by the fact that the President of the Generalitat, Lluís Companys, saved the life of his father, the eighty-three-year-old retired General of the Civil Guard Emilio Mola López.5"
"The first of Mola’s secret instructions, issued in April, echoed the practice of the Africanistas against the Rif tribesmen, calling for extreme violence to shock the left into paralysis. Throughout the army as a whole, commitment to the conspiracy was far from unanimous. If it had been, it is unlikely that there would have been a civil war. Thus, Mola’s third secret instruction ordered the immediate execution of officers who opposed, or refused to join, the coup. The fifth instruction, of 20 June, had declared that ‘the timid and the hesitant should be warned that he who is not with us is against us and will be treated as an enemy’.6 Thus the first victims executed by the military rebels would be fellow army officers."
"On 24 June, Mola sent specific instructions to Yagüe. He urged three main principles: extreme violence, tempo and high mobility: ‘Vacillations lead only to failure.’7 Six days later, Yagüe received a more detailed set of twenty-five instructions about the organization of the repression. They included the following: use Moorish forces; delegate control of public order and security in the cities to the Falange; arrest all suspect authorities; eliminate all leftist elements (Communists, anarchists, trade unionists, Masons and so on); shut down all public meeting places; prohibit all demonstrations, strikes and public and private meetings.8 These instructions were the blueprint for the repression unleashed on Spain’s Moroccan territories on the night of 17 July. By sheer force of personality, Yagüe entirely dominated the overall commander of forces in Morocco, General Agustín Gómez Morato. Between 5 and 12 July, in the Llano Amarillo in the Ketama Valley, manoeuvres involving 20,000 troops from the Legion and the Regulares saw Yagüe’s tent become the epicentre of the African end of the conspiracy as he briefed the principal rebel officers. The manoeuvres concluded with Falangist chants.9
On 17 July, at Melilla, headquarters of the Second Legion, the general in command, Manuel Romerales Quintero, having refused to join the plotters, was arrested and shot for his ‘extremist ideas’. The rebels, headed by Colonel Luis Solans-Labedán, very soon had nearly one thousand prisoners in a concentration camp. When the overall commander General Gómez Morato flew to Melilla, he was immediately arrested. In Tetuán, in the western half of the Protectorate, Colonel Eduardo Sáenz de Buruaga and Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Asensio Cabanillas detained the acting High Commissioner, Arturo Álvarez Buylla, who was shot some time later. On the night of 17–18 July, the rebels shot 225 soldiers and civilians in Morocco.10"
"Many other wives and daughters of Republicans were seized, raped and tortured by Falangists. This was central to the reign of terror initiated by Luis Solans. In late September, a gang of Falangists came to the prison with the intention of killing all the female detainees to celebrate the rebel capture of Toledo. The director of the prison reprimanded them, saying, ‘it’s outrageous to kill them all at once. When you want to kill women, by all means come and get them, but one at a time.’"
"One after another the following morning, the town hall, the Civil Governor’s offices, the telephone exchange, the main post office and the headquarters of left-wing parties and trades unions surrendered virtually without resistance. All those within were detained and numerous members of the town council murdered without even a semblance of a trial. The Mayor, Manuel de la Pinta Leal, was not in Cádiz at the time of the coup and thus in no position to oppose it. Nevertheless, he was arrested in Córdoba in September, taken to Cádiz and shot. Over the days following the capture of Cádiz, the Civil Governor, the President of the provincial assembly (Diputación) and numerous officers who had refused to join the rebellion were accused of military rebellion. While detained, they wrote statements pointing out the absurdity of the accusations, since they were obeying the orders of the legal government and had merely defended themselves. Before any trials could take place, they and several others, including a Socialist parliamentary deputy and the town-hall lawyer, were simply taken from prison and murdered on or about 16 August, on the orders of General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, rebel commander of the south.13"
"The annihilation of less prominent leftists took place as follows. The rebels first closed off the narrow tongue of land that connected Cádiz to the rest of Spain. Groups of Falangists, Civil Guards and Regulares then searched and looted houses. Liberals and leftists, Freemasons and trade unionists, were arrested en masse. Some were shot directly in the street. Others were taken to Falange headquarters in the Casino where they were subjected to sadistic torture. They were forced to ingest a litre of castor oil and industrial alcohol mixed with sawdust and breadcrumbs. In acute abdominal pain, they were savagely beaten. A so-called ‘Tribunal of Blood’ was established and each day would select twenty-five of the detainees for execution. Over six hundred of those arrested in Cádiz were executed in the next five months and more than one thousand in the course of the war. A further three hundred would be executed between the end of the war and 1945. These figures do not include those who died in prison as a result of torture.14"
The coup and repression cont. in other towns"Most of the other principal towns of the province fell quickly. On 19 July, Salvador Arizón Mejía sent troops from Jérez to seize the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda in the north. Supporters of the Popular Front held them off until, on 21 July, a force of Regulares entered the town, killing twelve citizens including nine in one house. Executions began immediately, although a few leftists escaped in small boats. Eighty people were shot over the next five months.18 In Rota, nothing happened on 18 July. The following day, having been deceived into believing that the Civil Guard and Carabineros were loyal, the town’s anarchists, Socialists and Communists joined in declaring a general strike and establishing an anti-fascist committee. Falangists and other rightists were detained and roads into the town barricaded. When the Civil Guard declared in favour of the rebels, the anti-fascist committee surrendered without a fight. Despite the absence of left-wing violence, the Falange and the Civil Guard set about the systematic annihilation of the town’s relatively few liberals and leftists. They were tortured and forced to drink castor oil, and over sixty were shot at night, their ears cut off as trophies.19"
"Despite the protests of the parish priest, men and women were tortured and shot without trial for reasons as capricious as having advocated improved working conditions or for having taken part in a carnival involving a spoof funeral of Gil Robles and songs ridiculing the right. One seventeen-year-old was shot because his father was a Socialist and a sixteen-year-old because his anarcho-syndicalist father had fled. Altogether four teenagers were murdered. A couple aged seventy-three and sixty-three were shot because their anarcho-syndicalist son had also escaped. Married couples were shot, their young children left to starve. In another case, Cristóbal Alza and his wife were arrested, their heads were shaved and they were given castor oil. Believing that they were now safe, they stayed in the town but were arrested again. Cristóbal’s brother Francisco pleaded for their lives with the Captain of the Civil Guard, who replied that he would spare only one and that Francisco must choose. He chose his brother. Between July 1936 and February 1937, a total of 102 men and nine women were executed in Villamartín.24 Three women were murdered in Bornos, two in Espera, one in Puerto Serrano, one in Arcos de la Frontera, at least ten in Ubrique and five in Olvera.25"
"The repression in Benamahoma was undertaken by a notorious gang known as the ‘Lions of Rota’, consisting of self-declared Falangists led by Fernando Zamacola, a man from Galicia with a record of assault and armed robbery. At a post-war investigation into Zamacola’s crimes, it was revealed that more than fifty people had been executed including several women. The town postman was shot along with his fifteen-year-old son. Members of the Lions testified that Juan Vadillo, the local commander of the Civil Guard, had ordered the shootings to cover up the appalling beatings inflicted on those arrested. As well as murders, there was also considerable theft of the property of those detained and sexual abuse of the wives of men who had fled or been shot. These women were forced to clean the Civil Guard barracks and the offices of the Falange and made to dance at parties organized by Zamacola’s men. As well as cases of head-shaving and the use of castor oil, several were raped by both Vadillo and Zamacola.31 Zamacola was awarded Spain’s highest military decoration, the Gran Cruz Laureada de San Fernando.32"
"Meanwhile, Mora-Figueroa’s column made daily expeditions to mop up after the troops who conquered the smaller towns to the north of the province, Ubrique, Alcalá del Valle and Setenil. Many local Republicans and trade unionists had fled to the sierra around Ubrique, fearing reprisals. However, when on 24 July a light aeroplane dropped leaflets announcing that anyone without blood on their hands had nothing to fear, many of them returned. Most of these trusting souls, including the Mayor, were shot in the course of the following weeks. A member of Izquierda Republicana, the Mayor owned a prosperous bakery and olive press. By providing cheap bread for the poor, he had earned the enmity of the local oligarchy. He was tortured and forced to hand over substantial sums of money before being shot. At least 149 people were executed in Ubrique.33"
"While the various paramilitary forces purged the province of Cádiz, a similar process was taking place in Seville. There the right-wing victory was attributed by Gonzalo Queipo de Llano to his personal daring and brilliance. Within a year of the events, he claimed that he had captured the city against overwhelming odds with the help of only 130 soldiers and fifteen civilians. In a radio broadcast on 1 February 1938, he made an even wilder exaggeration, declaring that he had taken the city with fourteen or fifteen men.35 He claimed that he been opposed by a force of over 100,000 well-armed ‘communists’. In fact, the defeated workers had had between them only eighty rifles and little ammunition and were armed, if at all, with hunting shotguns, ancient pistols and knives.36
Far from being an act of spontaneous heroism, the coup had been meticulously planned by a major of the General Staff stationed in Seville, José Cuesta Monereo, and was carried out by a force of four thousand men. The commander of the Seville Military Region, General José de Fernández Villa-Abrille, and his senior staff were aware of what was being hatched. They did nothing to impede the plot, despite the pleas of the Civil Governor, José María Varela Rendueles.37 Nevertheless, Queipo had them arrested and tried for military rebellion. The majority of the Seville garrison were involved in the coup, including units of artillery, cavalry, communications, transport and the Civil Guard. This is clear even from the lists included in the hymn of praise to Queipo composed by the journalist Enrique Vila.38 After artillery bombardment, this large force seized the telephone exchange, the town hall and the Civil Governor’s headquarters, blocked the main access routes into the centre and then applied indiscriminate terror.39"
"Despite artillery bombardment, the working-class districts resisted doggedly. Finally, Queipo’s forces, using women and children as human shields, were able to enter and begin the repression in earnest. Women and children, as well as their menfolk, were were put to the sword. After the subjugation of Triana, the new Mayor Carranza strode through the streets with a megaphone ordering that all pro-Republican and anti-fascist graffiti be cleaned from the walls. He set a ten-minute deadline, after which the residents of any house whose walls carried slogans would be shot. With fathers, husbands, brothers and sons dead or dying in the streets around them, the surviving men, women and children began frantically scrubbing at the walls while the victorious rebels gloated.43 For his final attack on La Macarena, on 22 July, Queipo used aircraft to bomb and strafe the district. He published a warning in the press demanding that weapons be thrown into the street and windows and doors be covered in white sheets to ‘avoid the damage that could be caused by air attacks and the forces of the Army’.44"
"On 16 August, the bodies of two Falangists were found in Triana. In reprisal, seventy men from the surrounding streets were arrested at random. They were shot in the cemetery without any form of trial two days later.45 When the actor Edmundo Barbero reached Seville in August, he would find the city (and many of its inhabitants) entirely plastered in Falangist symbols. Triana, La Macarena, San Julián and San Marcos were full of the rubble of houses destroyed by the artillery barrages. Barbero was appalled by the terror-stricken faces and the fact that all the women wore black, despite Queipo’s prohibition of public mourning, incessantly and threateningly repeated in the press and on the radio. Elsewhere, in the pueblos, Falangist patrols ensured that no houses carried emblems of mourning and that laments of grief could not be heard.46"
"When working-class leaders could not be found, members of their families were taken as hostages. The Communist leader of the Seville dockworkers, Saturnino Barneto Atienza, went into hiding and eventually reached the Republican zone. His sister, his wife, his infant daughter and his mother-in-law were detained in inhuman conditions for the duration of the war. His seventy-two-year-old mother, Isabel Atienza, a devout Catholic, was arrested and interrogated. On 8 October, she was forced to witness a shooting in the cemetery and then, seriously disturbed, was taken to a square near her home and shot. Her body was left in the street for a day.50 On the night of 10 August, a number of murders were committed to commemorate the anniversary of General Sanjurjo’s failed military coup in 1932. Among the victims were the Andalusian intellectual Blas Infante and the Republican Mayor José González Fernández de Labandera, who had helped foil the Sanjurjada."
"On one such occasion, a bored Díaz Criado decided to take those present to a dawn execution. To his irritation, they arrived just as the echoes of the shots were dying away. However, he was mollified when the commander of the firing squad offered the women of the party his gun for them to finish off the dying. A sergeant of the Regulares then proceeded to remove gold teeth from the dead by bashing their heads with a stone.54"
"Díaz Criado’s replacement by the Civil Guard Major Santiago Garrigós Bernabéu brought little relief to the terrorized population. Indeed, it was fatal for those who had been saved by the bribery of Doña Mariquita or by sexual submission to Díaz Criado himself. Francisco Gonzálbez Ruiz commented on the situation: ‘since some fortunate ones were saved by the opportune intervention of a female friend or by dint of paying a goodly sum, of course, when Díaz Criado was sacked, his successor felt the need to review the cases. Because the procedure followed had been corrupt, those who had been freed were now shot. Needless to say, nothing could help the thousands of innocents already dead.’58"
"On 27 July, Carranza’s column reached one such town, Rociana in Huelva, where the left had taken over in response to news of the military coup. There had been no casualties but a ritual destruction of the symbols of right-wing power, the premises of the landowners’ association and two clubs, one used by the local Falange. Twenty-five sheep belonging to a wealthy local landowner were stolen. The parish church and rectory had been set alight, but the parish priest, the sixty-year-old Eduardo Martínez Laorden, his niece and her daughter who lived with him had been saved by local Socialists and given refuge in the house of the Mayor. On 28 July, Father Martínez Laorden made a speech from the balcony of the town hall: ‘You all no doubt believe that, because I am a priest, I have come with words of forgiveness and repentance. Not at all! War against all of them until the last trace has been eliminated.’ A large number of men and women were arrested. The women had their heads shaved and one, known as La Maestra Herrera, was dragged around the town by a donkey, before being murdered. Over the next three months, sixty were shot. In January 1937, Father Martínez Laorden made an official complaint that the repression had been too lenient.64"
"When Gonzalo de Aguilera shot six labourers in Salamanca, he perceived himself to be taking retaliatory measures in advance. Many landowners did the same by joining or financing mixed columns like that of Carranza. They also played an active role in selecting victims to be executed in captured villages. In a report to Lisbon, in early August, the Portuguese Consul in Seville praised these columns. Like the Italian Consul, he had been given gory accounts of unspeakable outrages allegedly committed against women and children by armed leftist desperadoes. Accordingly, he reported with satisfaction that, ‘in punishing these monstrosities, a harsh summary military justice is applied. In these towns, not a single one of the Communist rebels is left alive, because they are all shot in the town square.’65 In fact, these shootings reflected no justice, military or otherwise, but rather the determination of the landowners to put the clock back. Thus, when labourers were shot, they were made to dig their own graves first, and Falangist señoritos shouted at them, ‘Didn’t you ask for land? Now you’re going to have some, and for ever!’66"
"The atrocities carried out by the various columns were regarded with relish by Queipo de Llano. In a broadcast on 23 July, he declared, ‘We are determined to apply the law without flinching. Morón, Utrera, Puente Genil, Castro del Río, start digging graves. I authorize you to kill like a dog anyone who dares oppose you and I say that, if you act in this way, you will be free of all blame.’ In part of the speech that the censorship felt was too explicit to be printed, Queipo de Llano said, ‘Our brave Legionarios and Regulares have shown the red cowards what it means to be a man. And incidentally the wives of the reds too. These Communist and anarchist women, after all, have made themselves fair game by their doctrine of free love. And now they have at least made the acquaintance of real men, not wimpish militiamen. Kicking their legs about and squealing won’t save them.’67"
"Queipo de Llano’s speeches were larded with sexual references. On 26 July, he declared: ‘Sevillanos! I don’t have to urge you on because I know your bravery. I tell you to kill like a dog any queer or pervert who criticizes this glorious national movement.’68 Arthur Koestler interviewed Queipo de Llano at the beginning of September 1936: ‘For some ten minutes he described in a steady flood of words, which now and then became extremely racy, how the Marxists slit open the stomachs of pregnant women and speared the foetuses; how they had tied two eight-year-old girls on to their father’s knees, violated them, poured petrol on them and set them on fire. This went on and on, unceasingly, one story following another – a perfect clinical demonstration in sexual psychopathology.’ Koestler commented on the broadcasts: ‘General Queipo de Llano describes scenes of rape with a coarse relish that is an indirect incitement to a repetition of such scenes.’69 Queipo’s comments can be contrasted with an incident in Castilleja del Campo when a truckload of prisoners was brought for execution from the mining town of Aznalcóllar, which had been occupied on 17 August by Carranza’s column. Among them were two women tied together, a mother and her daughter who was in the final stages of pregnancy and gave birth as she was shot. The executioners killed the baby with their rifle butts.70"
"To inflate his own heroism, and inadvertently revealing his own obsessions, Haro claimed that the orders from General Pozas passed on by Orts which had instigated the expedition were to ‘blow up Seville and fuck the wives of the fascists’. Unsurprisingly, the accused were found guilty and sentenced to death. Numerous conservatives and clerics whose lives had been saved by the Civil Governor, Diego Jiménez Castellano, sent telegrams to Seville on 4 August desperately pleading for clemency. Queipo de Llano replied: ‘I regret that I cannot respond to your petition for pardon for the criminals condemned to death, because the critical situation through which Spain is passing means that justice cannot be obstructed, for the guilty must be punished and an example made of them.’ Diego Jiménez Castellano, Julio Orts Flor and Alfonso López Vicencio were shot shortly after 6.00 p.m. on 4 August.72"
"The savagery increased as the columns entered Riotinto. The inhabitants had fled from the village of El Campillo. Finding it deserted, Redondo gave the order to burn it to the ground. Queipo de Llano broadcast the absurd lie that the local anarchists had burned twenty-two rightists alive and then set fire to their own homes. An air raid on Nerva on 20 August killed seven women, four men, a ten-year-old boy and six-month-old girl. One right-winger had been killed before the arrival of Redondo. The Communist Mayor ensured that twenty-five others who were in protective custody were unharmed, despite the popular outrage after the bombing raid. When the village was taken, Redondo’s men executed 288 people. In Aroche, ten right-wingers were killed and, when Redondo’s column arrived on 28 August, despite the fact that many leftists had fled north towards Badajoz, his men executed 133 men and ten women. The town’s female population was subjected to humiliation and sexual extortion. Reports of this terror ensured that resistance elsewhere would be dogged. The siege of El Cerro de Andévalo lasted over three weeks and required the contribution of three columns of Civil Guards, Falangists and Requetés. There the local CNT committee or Junta had protected the nuns in a local convent but were unable to prevent attacks on church property. The repression when the town fell on 22 September was ferocious. In nearby Silos de Calañas, women and children were shot along with the men. Large numbers of refugees now headed north towards the small area in Badajoz still not conquered by the rebels.76"
"Castejón himself explained how he took these towns: ‘I employed an encircling movement which enabled me to punish the reds harshly.’95 The rural proletariat was no match for the military experience of the battle-hardened Legionarios. However, as Castejón revealed, it was a question not simply of seizing control but of imposing a savage repression. In the case of the next town conquered, La Puebla de Cazalla east of Morón, refugees from there and Arahal had given bloodcurdling accounts of what had happened when Castejón’s column had arrived. Moreover, on 30 July, a rebel aircraft dropped leaflets threatening that the town would be bombed if it did not surrender immediately. Accordingly, no resistance was offered. Nevertheless, the repression that followed was unremitting. The crimes of the left had consisted of sacking the parish church and the headquarters of Acción Popular, requisitioning and distributing food and arresting forty-six local rebel sympathizers. No deaths occurred while the town was in the hands of the Popular Front Committee. Indeed, anarchists from Málaga had been prevented from killing the prisoners. Now, the occupying troops looted houses. Before cursory military trials started, over one hundred people were murdered. More than one thousand men, from a town of nine thousand inhabitants, were forcibly mobilized into the rebel army. To replace them, women and older men were used as slave labour.96"
"One week later, on 1 August, a substantial column of around 1,200 Legionarios, regular troops, Requetés and Falangists reached Puente Genil from Seville under the command of Castejón and Major Haro Lumbreras. Ramón de Carranza also arrived with his column. Enjoying artillery and air support, they quickly overcame the town’s fierce resistance. Messages had been sent to Puente Genil threatening that one hundred lives would be taken in reprisal for every right-wing victim of the ‘red domination’. When the scale of the attack was realized, many tried to flee towards Málaga. Troops were deployed, according to Castejón himself, ‘to prevent the flight of refugees and to increase the scale of the killing’. Regarding his own forces, he said: ‘Once inside the town, the repression started in earnest.’ The killing was indiscriminate and many of the victims were not at all political, merely people who had fled in terror."
"Numerous women were raped before being shot. Men were taken off the street or pulled from their houses to be tortured and shot. Five hundred and one people were killed on that first day. Castejón returned to Seville on the same evening and the ‘clean-up operation’ continued for months afterwards. It took the lives of many who were anything but leftists, including several lawyers and doctors. The president of the Red Cross was shot ‘for having given medicines to the reds’. In his broadcast that evening, Queipo de Llano praised Castejón, saying that ‘the repression has been harsh but not nearly as harsh as it should have been and indeed will be’. At least another thousand people were executed over the following months, many as acts of petty vengeance against workers who had stood up to the owners in the previous years.98"
"Sometimes, however, the intensity of the repression was not sufficient for Queipo de Llano. Córdoba had fallen within a matter of hours to the city’s military commander, the Artillery Colonel Ciriaco Cascajo Ruiz, with help from the Civil Guard.109 With the city of Córdoba isolated within a province that remained loyal to the Republic, a group of Falangists went to Seville to get arms. Their leader was asked by Queipo how many they had shot in Córdoba. When he replied, ‘None,’ Queipo was outraged and thundered: ‘Well, until you shoot a couple of hundred there’ll be no more arms for you!’ Queipo was dissatisfied because Cascajo was ordering ‘only’ five executions per day. The municipal authorities and leading Republicans who had taken refuge in the building of the Civil Governor were murdered. Among other victims were four parliamentary deputies for Andalusia and Manuel Azaña’s nephew, Gregorio Azaña Cuevas, a state lawyer, who had gone to attend a meeting about the proposed autonomy statute for Andalusia along with another of those arrested, Joaquín García Hidalgo Villanueva, a Freemason and journalist who had been Socialist deputy for the city between 1931 and 1933. García Hidalgo, a diabetic, was taken to prison. There he was tortured and force-fed sugar. He died in a diabetic coma on 28 July."
"After an inspection by Queipo on 5 August, the rate of executions speeded up. Bruno Ibáñez, a brutal major of the Civil Guard, was put in charge of the terror. In the first week, he arrested 109 people from lists given him by landowners and priests. They were shot out on the roads and in the olive groves. The Socialist Mayor Manuel Sánchez Badajoz, a number of town councillors and a much loved parliamentary deputy, Dr Vicente Martín Romera, were taken to the cemetery at dawn on 7 August and, by the light of car headlights, shot with seven others. Within a few days, with the midsummer heat at its height, the numbers of shootings and the corpses left in the streets caused a minor typhoid epidemic. It has been calculated that more than 11,500 people were killed in the province of Córdoba between 1936 and 1945.110"
"A note issued by Bruno Ibáñez on 1 October 1936 stated that ‘Those who flee are effectively confessing their guilt.’112"
"Virtually every town and village of Cádiz had been conquered by 18 September. Despite exhaustive efforts to inflate the figures, the Francoist authorities could claim that, in the areas in Republican hands since the military coup of 18 July, only ninety-eight people had been killed, the majority in response to news of the rightist violence in other pueblos.123 This contrasts with the 3,071 people executed by the rebels within the province. There were executions in every pueblo of Cádiz, whether or not there had been any deaths at the hands of Republicans. The principal victims were those who had played any role in Republican institutions, political parties or trade unions. Anyone known to have taken part in any strike action over the previous ten years or known to sympathize with Republican ideas such as schoolteachers or Freemasons was a likely target.124"
Repression of leftists who protected rightists"Gutiérrez Prieto was shot on 11 August. To silence opposition to his execution, thirty inhabitants of Palos, including his uncle, were shot, along with twelve people from other towns. In Moguer, the arrival of the rebels unleashed a sweeping and well-planned repression that saw the homes of Republicans looted and women raped and claimed the lives of 146 people, including women and twelve-year-old boys. More than 5 per cent of the adult male population was murdered.77
In the light of Haro Lumbreras’s declaration, it is worth recalling that the total number of right-wingers assassinated in the province from 18 July until it was totally in rebel control was forty-four, in nine locations. A further 101 died in armed clashes with the defenders of the Republic. The subsequent repression was of a different order of magnitude, not a vengeful response to prior left-wing violence but the implementation of a plan for extermination. In seventy-five of Huelva’s seventy-eight towns, a total of 6,019 were executed.78 In the days between the military coup and the fall of Huelva to the rebels, the Republican authorities had made every effort to protect those rightists arrested in the immediate wake of the military coup. There had been calls for serenity and respect for the law from the Civil Governor, the Mayor, Salvador Moreno Márquez, and Republican and Socialist parliamentary deputies for the province. One hundred and seventy-eight local extreme rightists, including Falangists and the most hated landowners and industrialists, were arrested. All were safe and well when the city was conquered. However, during the previous eleven days, six people were murdered. This was the only excuse that Haro Lumbreras needed to launch a bloody repression. There were nightly shootings without even the farce of a ‘trial’. Many of those of the right who had been saved by the Republican authorities protested. Haro was eventually removed on 6 February 1937 when it came to light that he had misappropriated donations of jewellery and money made to the rebel cause. Specifically, it appeared that he had used these funds to pay for the services of prostitutes. Evidence was produced showing that, over the previous fifteen years, he had frequently been guilty of theft and other abuses of his position. When he left Huelva, his luggage, carried in three trucks, consisted of ninety-three trunks and suitcases. After serving in Zaragoza, Teruel and Galicia, he became head of the Civil Guard in León. He was killed on 16 February 1941 by one of his junior officers. It was rumoured that the young man’s wife had been the unwilling object of Haro’s attentions.79"
"However, against the wishes of the Committee, the anarchist CNT–FAI organized a militia force. Two churches, a convent and seminary were set on fire and some religious images destroyed. Three private houses and three right-wing clubs had been searched and property thrown into the street – a situation eagerly exploited by criminal elements. Between 19 and 21 July, the Committee had detained thirty-eight right-wingers for their own protection. None was harmed and there were no more deaths after Alcalá y Henke. Anarchist efforts to burn the municipal jail were successfully repelled. When Castejón’s column reached Alcalá de Guadaira in the early evening of 21 July, it was joined by the local Civil Guard. The town fell after a successful artillery bombardment by Alarcón de la Lastra. In the words of his enthusiastic chronicler, ‘all the Communist leaders were killed while Castejón punished or rather liberated the town of Alcalá’. ‘Punishment’ was the Africanista euphemism for savage repression. The alleged ‘Communist leaders’ were actually four unconnected individuals. Three were shot by the advancing column: two of them young men who had come from Seville to buy bread and the third an agricultural labourer who ran in panic when he saw the Legionarios. The fourth was Miguel Ángel Troncoso, the head of the local police, who, according to his son, was shot in the town hall by Castejón himself. None could be remotely described as Communist leaders. Thirteen men captured in the town hall were taken to Seville, where at least six of them would be killed. Alcalá de Guadaira was then left in the hands of local rightists and a process of revenge began which saw the murders of a further 137 men. Another 350 were imprisoned and tortured, many of whom died. The belongings of the murdered and imprisoned were stolen by the new masters of the town.82"
"The victims were largely selected by the local caciques, because they were known to be Republicans or union members or had shown disrespect. One man was shot because he was the bill poster who had stuck up left-wing election posters in February 1936. As in virtually every conquered town in the south, women had their heads shaved, were given castor oil to make them soil themselves and, led by a brass band, were paraded around the streets to be mocked.85 The perpetrators of the murders and the other abuses included Civil Guards and estate employees who had swiftly joined the Falange. Their motives ranged from psychotic enjoyment to money, some boasting of being paid 15 pesetas for every killing. For others, involvement reflected gratitude for patronage received or shared religious views, as well as shared fears and anger. They all perceived savagery as ‘services for the Fatherland’. Men and women, and many teenagers, were arrested either by the Civil Guard or by the Falangists. Sometimes, victims were picked up at random, or because these thugs coveted their wife or their property, or simply because they were bored or drunk. Sometimes those arrested were shot immediately, sometimes taken to jail where they were beaten and tortured before being eventually murdered. After the shootings, the caciques, the recent Falangist converts and the younger landowners would meet in a bar and comment with satisfaction that there would be no more wage claims from those just despatched. On one occasion, unable to find a young man who in fact was hiding under the floor of his parents’ shack, they burned down the dwelling with all three inside.86
When the parish priest of Carmona protested at the murders, he was told that those executed had been found guilty by a tribunal consisting of the local landowners. When he pointed out that this did not constitute any kind of legal process, he was threatened. By 1938, those responsible experienced sufficient guilt to feel the need to falsify the circumstances of the murders committed in 1936. Witness statements to the ‘tribunal’ were fabricated, apparently ‘justifying’ the shootings. Many deaths were registered as having been caused by ‘military operations in the town’. Nevertheless, there were more executions when those who had fled came back at the end of the war.87"
"A substantial column of Legionarios, Falangists and Requetés sent by Queipo de Llano was gradually moving north-eastwards up the Valley of the Guadalquivir, taking town after town. They appeared in Cantillana at midday on 30 July. After the usual artillery bombardment, they entered the town unopposed. The defenders had only a few shotguns and soon the surrounding fields were thronged with people fleeing. Despite having been well treated, the local Civil Guard commander began the first of around two hundred executions without trial. Large numbers of townspeople were imprisoned and, over the next few months, more than sixty people including three women and the Mayor would be taken away and shot in Seville. After the Civil War, the parish priest of Cantillana was removed in punishment for a sermon in which he said: ‘If the church is damaged, it can be repaired; if statues have been burned, they can be replaced; but the husband or son who has been killed can never be replaced.’88"
Sexual violence"The censorship may well have been designed to limit awareness of Queipo’s incitement to the sexual abuse of left-wing women, but the extent to which the rebels considered it legitimate could be seen from what happened in Fuentes de Andalucía, a small town to the east of Seville. It had surrendered without resistance, on 19 July, to Civil Guards. With the help of Falangists and other right-wingers, a Guardia Cívica (a right-wing volunteer police force) was created which set about rounding up the town’s leftists. The houses of those arrested were looted as many of the Falangists stole sewing machines for their mothers and girlfriends. On 25 July, the Socialist Mayor and three Communist councillors were shot. It was the beginning of a massacre. In one case, that of a family called Medrano, the parents were arrested, and their three children, José aged twenty, Mercedes aged eighteen and Manuel aged sixteen, were shot. The family’s shack was burned down and the fourth child, Juan, aged eight, was abandoned to his fate. A truckload of women prisoners was taken to an estate outside the town of La Campana further north. Among them were four young girls, aged between eighteen and fourteen. The women were obliged to cook and serve a meal for their captors who then sexually assaulted them before shooting them and throwing their bodies down a well. When the Civil Guard returned to Fuentes de Andalucía, they marched through the town waving rifles adorned with the underwear of the murdered women.91"
"It will be recalled that on 23 July Queipo had made his most explicit incitement to rape. The following day, he commented with relish on the savagery inflicted by Castejón’s column when it captured Arahal, a small town of 12,500 inhabitants to the south of Carmona. When news of the military rebellion reached Arahal, thirty-six local right-wingers had been locked up in the town hall. On 22 July, when a Socialist town councillor went to release them, thirteen left but twenty-three preferred to remain, fearful that it was a ruse to shoot them. With the town being bombarded with artillery, some armed men from Seville then set fire to the building and twenty-two of the rightists were burned to death, only the priest escaping with his life. When Castejón’s column entered Arahal, they reacted to this atrocity with an orgy of indiscriminate violence. Accounts of the numbers of the town’s inhabitants killed vary wildly from 146 to 1,600. Young women considered to be of the left were repeatedly raped. The Socialist Mayor, a seventy-one-year-old cobbler, who had worked hard to prevent violence, was shot.92"
Speeches and propaganda by Queipo de Llano"In fact, what is known of such broadcasts by Queipo de Llano derives from the following day’s press reports, together with occasional snippets noted down by those who heard them. Comparisons, when possible, between the two suggest that the texts printed by the press were a pale reflection of the obscenity of the originals. Newspaper editors knew better than to print the more outrageous incitements to rape and murder. Indeed, there was concern that Queipo’s excesses might be damaging to the rebel cause abroad. Accordingly, the instinctive self-censorship of the press was reinforced on 7 September when Major José Cuesta Monereo issued detailed instructions regarding foreign sensibilities. Most of his fourteen points were routine, to prevent the publication of sensitive military information. However, they specifically ordered that the printed version of the radio broadcasts be expurgated: ‘In the broadcast chats by the General, any concept, phrase or insult, even though accurate, and doubtless the result of excessive zeal in the expression of his patriotism, whose publication is not appropriate or convenient, for reasons of discretion that will easily be appreciated by our intelligent journalists, shall be suppressed.’ Similarly, in the reporting of the repression, specific details of the slaughter were prohibited. Instead, journalists were obliged to use euphemisms like ‘justice was carried out’, ‘a deserved punishment was inflicted’, ‘the law was applied’.90"
Mola's friend executed"According to the usually reliable Bahamonde, ‘A friend of General Mola was shot, despite the fact that Mola himself had taken a great interest in his case, even telephoning Díaz Criado personally. Since he usually just signed the death sentences after barely flicking through the files, Díaz Criado failed to notice that on the day in question he had signed the death sentence of Mola’s friend.’56 Even so, Queipo tolerated Díaz Criado’s excesses; but, in mid-November 1936, Franco himself insisted on his removal. The immediate trigger had been that he had accused the Portuguese Vice-Consul in Seville, Alberto Magno Rodrigues, of espionage. Given the scale of Portuguese help to the rebel cause, and the efforts of Salazar’s government to secure international recognition for Franco, the accusation was acutely embarrassing. Moreover, it was absurd since Rodrigues was actually compiling information about German and Italian arms deliveries at the request of Franco’s brother, Nicolás. An enraged Queipo de Llano was forced to apologize to Rodrigues in front of Nicolás Franco. Now known as the ‘Caudillo’, Franco personally signed Díaz Criado’s posting to the Legion on the Madrid front, where he employed his brutal temperament against the soldiers under his command.57"
Leftist reprisals"Although the rebellion was defeated by 23 July, sporadic sniper fire saw further left-wing deaths. This intensified the hatred behind the brutal reprisals that were now taken by the left. While a revolutionary committee set about distributing food, the surviving Civil Guards were executed along with many of those who had supported the military coup – landowners, money-lenders, right-wingers and, inevitably, the clergy. Among the atrocities committed, a seventy-year-old man and his wife were burned alive. Although a rich landowner, Manuel Gómez Perales, paid a ransom of 100,000 pesetas for his liberty, he and his four sons were murdered. In justification of the even greater scale of subsequent revenge, the rebel newspaper La Unión stated that there had been seven hundred victims, although official Francoist sources eventually claimed 154. Exhaustive modern research has identified only 115. There were instances of victims being tortured and mutilated and of women dancing with corpses. Many houses were looted and forty-five burned down. Seven churches were destroyed. Ten clergymen were murdered, although three others, who had shown sympathy with the plight of the local working class, were saved. Two teams arrayed in ecclesiastical robes played football with the head of a statue of the Virgin Mary.97"
"However, there is no substance to the claim, first made by Queipo in a broadcast on 18 August and popularized by Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, that large numbers of prisoners were killed by being thrown into the tajo. The many rightist victims were shot in the cemetery."
Motivations for taking part in atrocities"Juan Manuel Lozano Nieto was the son of a man murdered by the rebels despite having taken no part in the left-wing atrocities. Seventy years after the events in Lora, Lozano Nieto, by now a Catholic priest, wrote a measured account of them. In his book, he explained why even those who were not seeking revenge for an executed relative took part in the murders of the left. Some were simply trying to save themselves. Others, of lower-middle-class origin, were desperate to differentiate themselves from the landless labourers. Others were interested in enriching themselves with the property of those they killed. There were cases of the simple theft of the shops or cattle of the wealthier executed Republicans and the clothes and household goods of the more humble. Then there were simple degenerates, who killed for money or for alcohol, while others were involved for sexual gratification.101 According to his dispassionate account, between six hundred and one thousand men young and old, women and children were slaughtered in the repression in Lora. Entire families were eliminated or left without means of support. Children were left without parents. Women were abused and humiliated, subjected to the standard rebel practice of their heads being shaved except for a tuft of hair to which was tied a ribbon with monarchist colours.102"
Landowner support for rightists"The relationship between the landowners and their military saviours was illustrated when Queipo de Llano asked Ramón de Carranza’s friend Rafael de Medina to raise money for the rebel cause. After years of anguished complaints that agriculture was in ruins as a result of Republican reforms, it might have been expected that Medina’s fund-raising efforts would meet with difficulty. On his first day, three olive exporters in Alcalá de Guadaira gave 1 million pesetas between them. Later the same day, in Dos Hermanas, one landowner asked what the money was for. When told that it was hoped to buy aircraft, he asked how much an aeroplane cost. When Medina replied, ‘About one million pesetas,’ without hesitating the latifundista wrote him a cheque for the full amount.107 Landowners often formed and financed their own units, such as those led by Carranza or the Mora-Figueroa brothers."
"Thereafter, several of the various volunteer forces were formalized as a kind of landowners’ cavalry usually known as the Volunteer Mounted Police. These units included both landowners and those of their employees specialized in horse-breeding and training. Polo ponies were used as well as working horses. As if taking part in a sport or hunting expeditions, they carried out a continuous campaign against the left in the south. Such groups were to be found throughout most of Andalusia and Extremadura. In Lucena in Córdoba, the local landowners funded a squad of expert horsemen to ‘defend property’ and pursue leftists who had fled into the countryside. The group was notorious for its cruelty, its pillaging and its many sexual crimes and was known locally as ‘the death squad’. In September 1936, for example, they crossed the iron bridge over the River Genil and entered Cuevas de San Marcos in Málaga. Many of the inhabitants who fled into the surrounding countryside, for no reason other than fear, were rounded up and shot. After such expeditions, the death squad would return to Lucena with lorries loaded with furniture, bedding, sewing machines, books, clocks and other household items.108"
Cordoba"The rural labourers of the local CNT advanced on the town armed only with axes, sickles, sticks and a few shotguns. After a clash on the outskirts of the town, in which one Civil Guard and eleven workers died, they were driven off by a force of Civil Guards and right-wing civilians. The next day, 20 July, the workers returned to find the centre of the town defended by well over two hundred Civil Guards, Falangists and landowners distributed among several strategically chosen buildings that dominated the town. They threatened to kill a number of hostages they were holding in the town hall, including a woman at an advanced stage of pregnancy. The workers cut off their water, electricity and food supplies. Effectively controlling the town, the anarchists declared libertarian communism, abolished money and requisitioned food and jewellery as a first step towards common ownership of property. Coupons were issued for food. The revolutionary committee detained prominent members of the middle class in a nearby old people’s residence and ordered that none be harmed. A church and a convent where the rebels had established themselves were seriously damaged in the fighting and the parish priest killed. Moreover, in acts of revenge for personal grudges, eleven right-wingers were murdered before the town was captured by the military rebels. Sánchez Ramírez rejected proposals for a truce, fearing that surrender would lead to his death and that of his men.114
...On 28 July, just as the besieged Civil Guards were about to give up, a large rebel relief column left Córdoba under the orders of Colonel Eduardo Sáenz de Buruaga. It consisted of Civil Guards, Legionarios and Moorish Regulares, equipped with artillery and machine-guns. The workers, with virtually no firearms, were unable to put up much resistance and the column suffered only four wounded in taking Baena street by street. The Regulares led the assault, killing indiscriminately and looting. Survivors found in the street or in houses along the way were rounded up and taken to the town-hall square. The official Civil Guard account of the events in Baena admitted that ‘the slightest denunciation would see the accused shot’. Sáenz de Buruaga took refreshment in a café with one of his men, Félix Moreno de la Cova, the son of a rich landowner from Palma del Río. Meanwhile, Sánchez Ramírez, blind with rage, organized a massacre that echoed his experience in Morocco. First he killed the five male hostages detained in the town hall. Then he had lines of prisoners – many of whom had nothing to do with the CNT union or the events of the previous week – lie face down in the square. Completely beside himself, he insisted on shooting most of them himself. The occupying forces aided by local rightists continued to bring in more prisoners to replace those being shot.
ABC referred to these extra-judicial killings as the application of ‘exemplary punishment’ to ‘all leading elements’ and of ‘the rigour of the law’ to anyone found with arms. The paper’s final comment was ‘it is certain that the town of Baena will never forget the scenes of horror created by so many murders committed there and the activities of the liberating forces’. Nevertheless, despite ABC’s comments, Sáenz de Buruaga’s forces captured neither union leaders nor individuals with arms. Nearly all of these had withdrawn to the old people’s residence where the right-wing prisoners were being kept. The ‘so many murders’ were largely the consequence of Sáenz de Buruaga’s irresponsibility in going for a drink while Sánchez Ramírez conducted the massacre.
The many leftists who fled and packed into the residence used the hostages as shields in the hope that this would restrain Sáenz de Buruaga’s pursuing forces. It did not and many were found dead by the windows, shot with munitions possessed only by the attackers. Most of the anarchists who had taken refuge there fled, but a few stayed until the last moment, murdering many of the remaining hostages in reprisal for the executions in the square. In total, eighty-one hostages were killed. Many local people were convinced that, but for the massacre organized by Sánchez Ramírez, the hostages would have survived. Nevertheless, the discovery of their corpses led to a further massacre in an orgy of revenge so indiscriminate that several right-wingers were also victims. Masses of left-wing prisoners were shot, including an eight-year-old boy.115 On 5 August, with Sáenz de Buruaga’s column having gone to Córdoba, Baena was attacked unsuccessfully by anarchist militia. This in turn intensified the rhythm of executions within the town.116
On the night of 31 July, Queipo de Llano felt the need to justify, in his nightly broadcast, the repression in Baena, by referring to ‘real horrors, monstrous crimes that cannot be mentioned lest they bring shame on our people, and that produced after the fall of Baena, the punishment that is natural when troops are possessed by the indignation provoked by such crimes’.117 Two months later, the middle classes of Baena hosted a ceremony at which Sáenz de Buruaga presented Sánchez Ramírez with the military medal in the still bloodstained square. Nearly seven hundred people were killed by, or on the orders of, Sánchez Ramírez, Sáenz de Buruaga and, over the next five months, the man named as military judge. This was the leading local landowner, Manuel Cubillo Jiménez, whose wife and three young sons were among those killed in the residence by gunfire from the forces of Sáenz de Buruaga. He was implacable in his desire for revenge. Many townspeople fled eastwards to the Republican-held province of Jaén. The women who remained were subjected to various forms of sexual abuse and humiliation, from rape to head-shaving and being forced to drink castor oil. Over six hundred children were left orphaned, including cases of toddlers left to fend for themselves.118"
Granada"Events in Granada were significantly different from those in Cádiz, Córdoba and Seville. The military commander, General Miguel Campins, had arrived in Granada only on 11 July and was not party to the conspiracy. Loyal to the Republic, he refused to obey Queipo’s order to declare martial law. However, Campins did send a telegram putting himself under the orders of his friend General Franco, whose deputy he had been at the Zaragoza Military Academy. Campins was arrested by rebel officers and it was alleged that his hesitation had led to the coup failing in Jaén, Málaga and Almería. Queipo declared on the radio that, if he had been less of a coward, he would have committed suicide.130 Campíns was tried in Seville for ‘rebellion’ on 14 August and shot two days later. Franco sent letters asking that mercy be shown to Campins, but Queipo tore them up.131"
"In the course of the war, more than five thousand civilians were shot in Granada, many at the cemetery. The cemetery’s caretaker went mad and, on 4 August, was committed to an asylum. Three weeks later, his replacement and his family moved from the lodge at the cemetery gates because the shots and the cries and screams of the dying had made it unbearable for them. Large numbers of people from all over the Alpujárras were buried in a common grave in a canyon near Órgiva.136"
"In Granada itself, he was closely connected with the moderate left. His views were well known and it had not escaped the notice of the town’s oligarchs that he thought that the Catholic conquest of Moorish Granada in 1492 had been a disaster. Flouting a central tenet of Spanish right-wing thinking, Lorca believed that the conquest had destroyed a unique civilization and created ‘a wasteland populated by the worst bourgeoisie in Spain today’. Recent research has also added another element which was resentment of the success of Lorca’s father, Federico García Rodríguez. He had become rich, buying and selling land in Asquerosa to the north-west of Granada (now renamed Valderrubio). To the annoyance of other landowners, he paid his employees well, lent his neighbours money when they were in danger of foreclosure and even built homes for his workers. His friendship with the Socialist Minister, Fernando de los Ríos, was another reason for resentment. Among his political and economic rivals were the lawyer and businessman Juan Luis Trescastro Medina and Horacio Roldán Quesada of Acción Popular. Roldán Quesada had hoped to marry the poet’s sister Concha, but she had married Manuel Fernández Montesinos, who became Mayor of the city.137"
"Trescastro later boasted that he personally had killed the poet and others, including the humanist Amelia Agustina González Blanco. ‘We were sick to the teeth of queers in Granada. We killed him for being a queer and her for being a whore.’ On the day after the poet’s death, Trescastro entered a bar and declared: ‘We just killed Federico García Lorca. I put two bullets in his arse for being a queer.’141 Murdered with Lorca were a disabled primary school teacher, Dióscoro Galindo, and two anarchists who had fought in the defence of the Albaicín.142 The cowardly murder of a great poet was, however, like that of the loyal General Campins, merely a drop in an ocean of political slaughter."
"A prominent figure in the right-wing support for the coup, the banker and lawyer José María Bérriz Madrigal, wrote to the head of his bank who had been on holiday in Portugal, on 18 August: ‘The way forward is to win or die killing rogues. The army wants to destroy by the roots the noxious plant that was consuming Spain. And I think they’re going to do it.’ On 22 August, he wrote approvingly: ‘Lots more shootings, union leaders, schoolteachers, small-town officials and doctors are going down by the dozen.’143 The following day, the American poet and novelist Baroness de Zglinitzki, a firm rebel supporter, commented with less enthusiasm that the executions were ‘increasing at a rate that alarmed and sickened all thinking people’.144"
"The outrages in Granada were seen by the local bourgeoisie as acceptable because they were perceived as less appalling than the atrocities that they were told were being committed by the Republicans elsewhere. Their perception of events elsewhere was fed by Queipo de Llano’s broadcasts. Thus they included the notion that people were flung from the cliff at Ronda, that men were impaled alive on stakes then forced to watch as their wives and daughters ‘were first raped before their eyes, then drenched with petrol and burned alive’, that nuns were exposed naked in the shop windows at Antequera, that priests had their stomachs cut open and filled with quicklime, that nuns were raped and priests tortured on the streets of Barcelona, that the sea around Málaga was full of the headless bodies of all those who were not anarchists, that in Madrid ‘famous doctors, lawyers, men of science and letters, actors and artists’ were being shot as fast as they could be caught. Baroness de Zglinitzki believed Queipo’s broadcasts to the extent of writing that the Republican government, ‘composed of anarchists, jailbirds and Russians, were determined to exterminate every man of brains and outstanding ability in Spain’.147"
Malaga"Thousands of arrests were made. As the prisons overflowed, concentration camps had to be opened at Torremolinos and Alhaurín el Grande. After the immediate slaughter, the repression was organized by the newly appointed Civil Governor, Captain Francisco García Alted, a Civil Guard and Falangist. It was implemented by Colonel Bohórquez, under the overall jurisdiction of General Felipe Acedo Colunga, chief prosecutor of the Army of Occupation, as the rebel forces now called themselves. Trials were no longer justified by the application of the edict of martial law but rather on the pseudo-legal basis of ‘urgent summary courts martial’. The scale of the repression carried out is revealed by a report by Bohórquez in April 1937. In the seven weeks following the capture of Málaga, 3,401 people had been tried of whom 1,574 had been executed. In order to try so many people in such a short time, a large team of prosecutors had been brought from Seville. The trials, often of several people at once, provided no facilities for the accused’s defence and rarely lasted for more than a few minutes.152"
"Even before the occupiers began the executions, tens of thousands of terrified refugees fled via the only possible escape route, the 109 miles along the coast road to Almería. Their flight was spontaneous and they had no military protection. They were shelled from the sea by the guns of the warships Cervera and Baleares, bombed from the air and then machine-gunned by the pursuing Italian units. The scale of the repression inside the fallen city explained why they were ready to run the gauntlet. Along the roughly surfaced road, littered with corpses and the wounded, terrified people trudged, without food or water. Dead mothers were seen, their babies still suckling at their breasts. There were children dead and others lost in the confusion as their many families frantically tried to find them.153
The reports of numerous eyewitnesses, including Lawrence Fernsworth, the correspondent of The Times, made it impossible for rebel supporters to deny one of the most horrendous atrocities perpetrated against Republican civilians. It has been calculated that there were more than 100,000 on the road, some with nothing, others carrying kitchen utensils and bedding. It is impossible to know accurately but the death toll seems to have been over three thousand. The Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, his assistant Hazen Size and his English driver, the future novelist T. C. Worsley, shuttled back and forth day and night for three days, carrying as many as they could. Bethune described old people giving up and lying down by the roadside to die and ‘children without shoes, their feet swollen to twice their size crying helplessly from pain, hunger and fatigue’. Worsley wrote harrowingly of what he saw:
The refugees still filled the road and the further we got the worse was their condition. A few of them were wearing rubber shoes, but most feet were bound round with rags, many were bare, nearly all were bleeding. There were seventy miles of people desperate with hunger and exhaustion and still the streams showed no signs of diminishing … We decided to fill the lorry with kids. Instantly we were the centre of a mob of raving shouting people, entreating and begging, at this sudden miraculous apparition. The scene was fantastic, of the shouting faces of the women holding up naked babies above their heads, pleading, crying and sobbing with gratitude or disappointment.154
Their arrival brought horror and confusion to Almería. It was also greeted by a major bombing raid which deliberately targeted the centre of the town where the exhausted refugees thronged the streets. The bombing of the refugees on the road and in the streets of Almería was a symbol of what ‘liberation’ by the rebels really meant."
"In his proclamation of martial law in Pamplona on 19 July 1936, Mola declared: ‘Re-establishing the principle of authority demands unavoidably that punishments be exemplary in terms of both their severity and the speed with which they will be carried out, without doubt or hesitation.’1 Shortly afterwards, he called a meeting of the mayors of the province of Navarre and told them: ‘It is necessary to spread terror. We have to create the impression of mastery, eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do. There can be no cowardice. If we vacillate one moment and fail to proceed with the greatest determination, we will not win. Anyone who helps or hides a communist or a supporter of the Popular Front will be shot.’2
Such instructions imply a degree of insecurity on the part of the conspirators desperate to impose control as soon as possible before mass resistance to the coup developed. Thus over half of the executions carried out by the rebels between 18 July 1936 and 1945 took place in the first three months after their seizure of power in each area. Both the short-and long-term objectives of the terror would be more easily accomplished in conservative smallholding areas such as Galicia, Old Castile and Navarre. Terror was the chosen method for the annihilation of everything that the Republic signified, whether specific challenges to the privileges of landowners, industrialists, the clerics and soldiers or a general rejection of subservience by rural and urban workers and, most irksome for the right, women. This was what Sanjurjo, Franco, Gil Robles, Onésimo Redondo and others meant when they railed against the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik threat of ‘Africanization’. The rhetoric of the need to eradicate such foreign poisons, which always had clerical advocates like Tusquets and Castro de Albarrán, would soon be taken up by the majority of the Church hierarchy. At the beginning of September, José Álvarez Miranda, the Bishop of León, called the Catholic faithful to join the war against ‘Soviet Jewish–Masonic laicism’.3"
"On 31 July, after being told that the French press had suggested that Prieto had been appointed to negotiate with the rebels, Mola exploded: ‘Negotiate? Never! This war can end only with the extermination of the enemies of Spain.’"
"In the areas of Spain where the military coup met little or no resistance, the war aims of the rebels were starkly revealed. The execution of trade unionists, members of left-wing parties, elected municipal officials, Republican functionaries, schoolteachers and Freemasons, who had committed no crimes, have been called ‘preventive assassinations’. Or, as the commander of the Civil Guard in Cáceres defined it: ‘the sweeping purge of undesirables’.5
In Navarre, Álava, the eight provinces of Old Castile, the three of León, the four of Galicia, two-thirds of Zaragoza and virtually all of Cáceres, the coup was successful within hours or days. In these predominantly right-wing, Catholic areas, the excuses used for the slaughter in Andalusia and Badajoz – alleged left-wing atrocities or a threatened Communist take-over – were not plausible. Essentially, the ‘crime’ of those executed was to have voted for the Popular Front, or to have challenged their own subordination as workers or as women.6"
"The first step towards establishing a military dictatorship was the establishment of a National Defence Junta. A thin legal veneer was provided by its first decree, on 24 July 1936, which claimed ‘full state powers’, something repeated in subsequent decrees. Decree no. 37 of 14 August declared that the Republic was guilty of armed rebellion against the legitimate government of the Junta. On 28 July, an edict of martial law placed military law above civil law across the entire territory in the hands of the rebels. It thereby unified the various edicts issued in different places which had seen the military arbitrarily assume the right to punish opposition to its actions with summary execution. All those who supported the legitimate Republic either morally or by taking up arms were declared guilty of military rebellion, liable to court martial and subject to the death penalty or long jail terms. This was justified by the sophistry that the rebels’ own military rebellion was carried out in the name of ‘the highest moral and spiritual values of religion and the Fatherland, threatened by the perversity of the pseudo-politicians in the pay of the triple Judaeo-Masonic lie: Liberalism, Marxism and Separatism. That is why the term military rebellion can be applied only to the red camp. Regarding our side, we must speak of Holy Rebellion.’8 Thus the rebels always referred to themselves as ‘nacionales’ (usually translated as ‘Nationalists’), implying that the Republicans were somehow not Spanish and therefore had to be annihilated as foreign invaders."
"In some cases, such as Segovia, the local military authorities went further, referring to ‘the Madrid government, which since 19 July has been in armed rebellion against the Army, which found itself obliged to assume the responsibility of power to prevent chaos taking hold of the country’.9 A decree of 31 August 1936 permitted any officer to be a judge, prosecutor or defender in a trial. Officers were thus obliged to fight the enemy on the battlefield and also in the courtroom, where the enemy had even less opportunity to fight back. So wide was the range of the offences deemed to be military rebellion that, in 1937, a handbook was issued to assist officers in the conduct of ‘trials’. The author, a military lawyer, recognized that ‘in view of the number of proceedings in progress, the consequence of the glorious deeds with which our army, valiantly supported by the true Spanish people, is astounding the world, those who have to act in such trials are facing many difficulties’.10"
"On 20 July, Mola was given the news that a lorry full of Republicans fleeing the Navarrese capital Pamplona had been captured on the road to Bilbao. Without hesitation, he barked into the telephone: ‘Shoot them immediately by the roadside!’ Aware of the deathly hush that this outburst had provoked, Mola had second thoughts and instructed his aide to rescind the order, saying to the rest of the room: ‘Just so you can see that even in such serious times, I am not as bloodthirsty as the left thinks.’ At that, one of the officers present said: ‘General, let us not regret being too soft.’ Three weeks later, on 14 August, Mola would be heard saying, ‘A year ago, I would have trembled at having to authorize a firing squad. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep for the sorrow of it. Now, I can sign three or four every day without batting an eyelid.’11"
"The repression in Navarre was especially ferocious in the area known as the Ribera, along the River Ebro. The Socialist landworkers’ union, the FNTT, had been strong there before the war and this was reflected in the scale of the killing. In the small town of Sartaguda, for example, with 1,242 inhabitants, there were eighty-four extra-judicial executions – 6.8 per cent of the population. In Peralta, eighty-nine of the 3,830 inhabitants (2.3 per cent of the population) were killed. Sartaguda was widely known in northern Spain as ‘the town of widows’. When the very young, the very old and almost all women are excluded, the scale of the terror can be imagined. The figures suggest that around 10 per cent of the male working class were murdered. Republican women were, of course, molested and humiliated in various ways. Family networks in the area were close, so these killings reverberated throughout the province and beyond.21"
Clergy involvement in fighting"Indeed, they urged their congregations to fight and some were among the first to join rebel columns. Cartridge belts slung over their cassocks, rifles in hand, they joyfully set off to kill reds. So many did so that the faithful were left without clergy to say Mass or hear confessions and the ecclesiastical authorities had to call some of them back.14 Peter Kemp, a British volunteer with the Requeté, spoke admiringly of Father Vicente, the company chaplain. ‘He was the most fearless and the most bloodthirsty man I ever met in Spain; he would, I think, have made a better soldier than priest. “Hola, Don Pedro!” he shouted to me. “So you’ve come to kill some Reds! Congratulations! Be sure you kill plenty!”’ When not occupied with spiritual duties, he would be in the thick of the action. The role of minister of Christ caused him dreadful frustrations. He would point out targets to Kemp, urging him to shoot them. ‘It seemed to me that he could barely restrain himself from snatching my rifle and loosing off … Whenever some wretched militiaman bolted from cover to run madly for safety, I would hear the good Father’s voice raised in a frenzy of excitement: “Don’t let him get away – Ah! Don’t let him get away! Shoot, man, shoot! A bit to the left! Ah! that’s got him,” as the miserable fellow fell and lay twitching.’15"
"Unlike those who went to the front, the tall, wild-eyed clerical outfitter Benito Santesteban stayed in Pamplona, like a rapacious carrion crow, devoting himself instead to purging the rearguard of leftists, liberals and Freemasons. He later boasted that he had killed 15,000 reds in Navarre, and more in San Sebastián, Bilbao and Santander. The province’s left-wing minority faced immediate extermination at the hands of the fanatical enthusiasts of the rising. In the first months in Pamplona, early-morning executions attracted large crowds and with them stalls selling hot chocolate and churros (fried dough fingers). Many were taken as hostages and shot in reprisal when the death of a Carlist was reported.16 Others were seized at night by the Falangist squad known as ‘Black Eagle’ and murdered on the outskirts of the city. Santesteban’s boast was a wild exaggeration and he was also known to have saved individuals.17 Nevertheless, many prisoners taken to the Requeté headquarters in the monastery of Los Escolapios were never seen again. In this ultra-conservative province, 2,822 men and thirty-five women were assassinated. A further 305 people died of mistreatment or malnutrition in prison. One of every ten who had voted for the Popular Front in Navarre was murdered.18"
"Father Eladio Celaya, the seventy-two-year-old parish priest of the village of Cáseda, was notable for his benevolent concern for his parishioners whose campaign for the return of common lands he had supported. On 8 August, he went to Pamplona to protest at the diocesan offices about the killings. He was told to go home because nothing could be done. Because of his efforts to prevent the violence, he was murdered on 14 August 1936 and his head cut off."
"In La Rioja there were cases of the clergy trying to restrain the perpetrators. There were eighty-three villages where, in part as a result of their priests’ action and, crucially, because of a pre-existing level of tolerance between right and left, there were no deaths. Unfortunately, there were another ninety-nine towns and villages where extra-judicial killings did take place. To intervene against the killing required great bravery. Father Antonio Bombín Hortelano, a Franciscan monk from Anguciana just outside Haro, was murdered by Falangists because, in his sermons, he had criticized the rich and spoken out about social injustice. Other priests who went to see the Civil Governor, Emilio Bellod, to plead for mercy on behalf of parishioners were thrown out of his office. Sadly, there is no evidence to sustain recent claims that the Bishop of Calahorra protested to Bellod about the arbitrary executions.33"
"The Bishop of Ávila issued instructions to his diocesan priests which suggest complicity in the execution of prisoners without trial: ‘When dealing with one of the frequent and deplorable cases of the unexpected discovery in the countryside of the corpse of a person apparently of revolutionary sympathies, but without official confirmation of them having been condemned to death by the legitimate authorities, then simply record that “the corpse appeared in the countryside … and was given ecclesiastical burial”. However, parish priests must make sure to avoid any suggestion that could reveal the author or the cause of this tragic death.’70 Certificates of good conduct issued by priests could save a life. The refusal by a priest to certify that someone was a practising Catholic was the equivalent of a denunciation. Those priests who did sign certificates to save a parishioner from death or imprisonment were chastised by their superiors. The Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela noted that scandal was provoked by such acts of Christian charity. He ordered the priests of his diocese not to sign certificates for anyone who belonged to ‘anti-Christian Marxist societies’. All others should be considered ‘without timidity or hesitations born of humane considerations’.71"
Logrono"A remarkably high number of the Falangists and Requetés who took part in the killing had, prior to the war, been members of the CNT or UGT, or of Republican parties. Several had taken part in the anarchist insurrection of December 1933. It is impossible to say who among them had been agents provocateurs or were simply trying to hide a left-wing past. Some of their victims were shot; others were flung from high bridges into rivers.28 There were also cases of Republicans thrown from bridges across the Ebro in Burgos and the Tagus as it passed through Cáceres. The corpses caused public health problems.29"
The experience of Republican prisoners in Logroño is known in large part thanks to the survival of one of them, Patricio Escobal, the municipal engineer in Logroño and a member of Azaña’s Izquierda Republicana party. Although most of his fellow party members were murdered, Escobal survived prison, despite appalling mistreatment, because he had been a famous footballer, a distinguished captain of Real Madrid and a member of Spain’s Olympic silver-medal team of 1920. The potential scandal if he was murdered restrained his persecutors. Thus he lived to write his memoirs.32"
Valladolid"Subsequently, as the first city in the mainland where the coup was successful, Valladolid came to be known as ‘the capital of the uprising’."
"Elsewhere, the rebels did not have it as easy as in Valladolid. Franco and the African Army were blockaded in Morocco by the Republican fleet. Anarchist forces from Barcelona were moving virtually unopposed towards Zaragoza. The overall leader of the coup, General Sanjurjo, had been killed when his plane crashed on take-off for Spain and command was assumed by Mola when he reached the neighbouring Castilian city of Burgos on 20 July. The hope of rebel forces that they would capture Madrid had come to nothing. Faced with an acute shortage of ammunition, they had been held at the sierras to the north of the capital. Mola himself was plunged into a depression by this accumulation of reverses. His spirits were somewhat revived by a visit to Zaragoza on 21 July to consult with General Miguel Cabanellas. At Cabanellas’s suggestion, they decided to create a provisional rebel government, the Junta de Defensa Nacional. Its formation was announced by Mola in Burgos on 23 July.39"
While awaiting trial, the prisoners in Valladolid, as in most other places, were kept in appalling conditions. Because the local prison had neither the space nor the resources to look after so many inmates, two repair sheds at the tram depot were used to house prisoners. The acute overcrowding, malnutrition and the lack of basic hygiene facilities led to many deaths from sickness. In the prison, more than six prisoners were squeezed into individual cells. They were forced into icy showers and then, while still wet and shivering, made to run a gauntlet of guards who beat them with truncheons or rifle butts. Responsibility for food, clothing and laundry fell upon their families, an acute hardship given that, by dint of the arrest and imprisonment, the families had already been deprived of their principal breadwinner.43
"Estimates of the scale of the repression in the province of Valladolid have varied wildly, as high as 15,000 but none lower than 1,303. Exact figures are impossible since many deaths were not recorded. The most recent local study places the figure at over three thousand.44 There were 1,300 men and women tried between July and December 1936, often in large groups. Such ‘trials’ consisted of little more than the reading of the names of the accused and the charges against them, followed by the passing of sentence. Although most of those accused of military rebellion were likely to face the death penalty or prison sentences of thirty years, they were given no chance to defend themselves and were not even permitted to speak. On most weekdays, several courts martial were held, rarely lasting more than one hour. All 448 men detained after the surrender of the Casa del Pueblo were tried together accused of the crime of military rebellion. Forty were sentenced to death, 362 to thirty years’ imprisonment, twenty-six to twenty years’ imprisonment, and nineteen were found not guilty. The selection of the forty to be executed was made on the basis of their having held some position of responsibility in the local Socialist organizations. The one woman condemned to death had her sentence commuted to thirty years’ imprisonment, although at least sixteen other women were executed in Valladolid. There were other cases in which fifty-three, seventy-seven and eighty-seven accused were ‘tried’ at once. In some cases, the ‘crime’ was simply to be a Socialist member of parliament, as was the case with Federico Landrove and also with José Maesto San José (deputy for Ciudad Real) and Juan Lozano Ruiz (Jaén) who were captured on the outskirts of Valladolid.45"
"At least, the 616 executions carried out in Valladolid as a result of summary wartime courts martial were registered.48 In contrast, the unofficial murders carried out by the so-called Falangist ‘dawn patrols’ are impossible to quantify. These killings were significantly more widespread if rather less public. Executions were often extremely inefficient. Having augmented their courage with brandy, the squads often wounded rather than killed prisoners, who were then left to a slow death agony. Corpses were sometimes just dumped by the roadside, at other times buried in shallow common graves. On occasion, wounded prisoners were buried alive. The murders of prisoners were often carried out quite arbitrarily by Falangists who would arrive at the tram sheds or the bullring just before dawn. Macabre humour might see a victim selected simply because it was his saint’s day. On the basis of data from those towns and villages in the province for which it is possible to reconstruct what happened, it has been calculated that at least 928 people were murdered by the patrols. The total number is likely to be significantly higher. The random killings caused public health scares for fear that rotting corpses might be affecting the water supply.49 Certainly, by any standards, the scale of the repression was totally disproportionate to the fighting in the city on 18 and 19 July. At the end of the war, there were still three thousand detainees in the provincial prison, of whom 107 died as a result of the appalling conditions.50"
Repression of leftists"Years later, Onésimo Redondo’s widow, Mercedes Sanz Bachiller, spoke of her conviction that her husband’s death had intensified the subsequent repression. In fact, the process of revenge against the left in Valladolid was already well under way and would gather momentum over the next few months. Large numbers of Socialist workers from the railway engineering works were herded into the tram company garages. Those who, having obeyed the union order to strike on Saturday 18 July, had not returned to work by Tuesday 21 July were shot, accused of ‘abetting rebellion’. Throughout the late summer and autumn, anyone who had held a position in a left-wing party, municipality or trade union was subject to arrest and the likehood of being paseado – that is to say, seized by Falangists, taken out and shot – or subjected to summary court martial. For many, their crime was simply to carry a membership card of a trade union or left or liberal organization. General Saliquet’s edict of martial law, published at dawn on 19 July, effectively passed a death sentence on all those who had not actively supported the uprising. ‘Crimes’ subject to summary trial and immediate execution included ‘rebellion’ (either action in defence of the Republic or failure to support the rebels) and extended to disobedience, disrespect, insult or calumny towards both the military and those who had been militarized (thus including Falangists). Men were arrested on suspicion of having their radio dials set to stations broadcasting from Madrid. Court martials were set up and firing squads began to function. In addition to the 448 men arrested on 18 July, one thousand more would be detained in August and September.42"
"Prisoners condemned by court martial were taken out in the early hours of the morning and driven in trucks to the Campo de San Isidro on the outskirts of the city. This became such a regular occurrence that coffee and churro stalls were set up for the spectators"
"The terror had become ‘normal’ and no one dared condemn it for fear of being denounced as a red.46 Similarly, in Segovia, middle-class ladies attended military trials, laughing and cheering when death sentences were passed. Executions in the provincial capital were praised as ‘a good bullfight’. In the tiny village of Matabuena, to the north-east of Segovia, the inhabitants were forced to watch executions.47"
"The philosopher Miguel de Unamuno was furious with himself for having initially supported the military uprising. On 1 December 1936, he wrote to his friend Quintín de Torre about life in Salamanca: ‘It is a stupid regime of terror. Here people are shot without trial and without any justification whatsoever. Some because it is said that they are Freemasons, and I have no idea what that means any more than do the animals who cite it as a reason to kill. There is nothing worse than the marriage of the dementality [sic] of the barracks with that of the sacristy. To which is added the spiritual leprosy of Spain, the resentment, the envy, the hatred of intelligence.’58"
"The Casa del Pueblo of each town was looted and often requisitioned but first scoured for membership lists of left-wing parties or unions. Discovery of a name could lead to murder. Equally, Falangist groups executed people simply on the basis of accusations that they were Republicans, Freemasons, Marxists or simply opposed to the military coup. No judicial procedures were carried out to ascertain the validity of the accusations. Once arrested in a village, allegedly to enable them to make a statement before judicial authorities, some men were simply murdered en route to the provincial capital. Others were first taken to the local Falange headquarters, tortured, forced to drink castor oil and beaten. Frequent use was made of the ley de fugas, known locally as ‘the greyhound or rabbit race’. Men supposedly being transferred from one prison to another were set down from the truck transporting them and told that they were free to go. When they ran, they were shot in the back. Some of the killings were carried out by very young adolescents. There were cases of entire families being executed, usually with the children shot first in order to intensify the suffering of the parents. Bodies were generally left where they fell as part of the terror. Subsequently, letters were delivered to the homes of men already shot, demanding information as to their whereabouts or requiring them to present themselves for military service.84"
"As the death toll mounted throughout rebel Spain, in September 1936 the monarchist poet José María Pemán coincided in Pamplona with General Cabanellas, who was still head of the Junta. Cabanellas requested his help in drafting a decree to forbid the wearing of mourning. His reasoning was twofold. In the case of the widows and bereaved mothers of rebels, the gesture of not wearing black would proclaim that ‘the death of someone fallen for the Fatherland is not a black episode but a white one, a joy that should overcome any sorrow’. For the mothers, widows and fiancées of executed Republicans, forbidding the wearing of mourning ‘would put an end to that sort of living protest and dramatic testimony that, when we conquer any town, we see in the squares and on the street corners – those black and silent figures that in reality represent protest as much as sorrow’.132 Cabanellas was right that Republican mourning implied a protest since it signified solidarity with the recently eliminated family member. However, a decree forbidding Spanish women in rural areas to wear mourning would have been impractical because most older or widowed women wore black dresses as a matter of course. Moreover, the Catholic womenfolk of the rebel dead could not be deprived of their right to mourn their heroic loved ones. The issue was how to deprive the mothers, sisters, wives and fiancées of liberal and left-wing men of the opportunity to mourn and express that solidarity. In the south, Queipo simply issued a decree prohibiting mourning. In the north, it had to be done through more informal social pressures and fear of further reprisals.
Sometimes, after a man had been taken away at night, family members would bring food for him to the jail only to be told brutally that ‘where he has gone, he won’t be needing it’. The agony would often never end. They would see, as did Mola’s secretary, José María Iribarren, while walking in Burgos, children playing at capturing a Republican then shooting the ‘prisoner’ who had refused, as the game required, to shout the rebel slogan ‘¡Viva España!’133 Women whose menfolk had ‘disappeared’ could never remarry since, without an official death certificate, they were not legally widows. They had no right to administer the property registered in the names of their husbands. It is doubtful that Mola cared about, or was even aware of, the wider consequences of the terror that he had initiated."
Family suffering of those persecuted"For the families of those executed or murdered, the suffering did not end with the loss of their menfolk. Gruesome details of the executions would reach them from members of the squads, who often boasted publicly of killing a particular individual. They would recount with relish how prisoners had begged for water or how fear had made them lose control of their bowels. Frequently, the surviving families of executed left-wingers were subjected to punitive fines. A notable case was that of Eduardo Aparicio Fernández, a bank manager in Ciudad Rodrigo and a man of broadly liberal views. He was arrested on 15 December 1936, along with seven others. In the early hours of the morning of the next day, all eight were taken from their cells, on the basis of an order for their release from the local military commander. They were brought to a nearby estate, shot and buried in a shallow grave. Eduardo Aparicio’s family was given permission for him to be buried in the cemetery in Béjar on 24 December. At the end of the war, twenty-eight months after his death, Eduardo Aparicio was called for trial on a charge of political responsibilities. The judge demanded that his widow reveal where he was since he had been ‘released’ from prison on 15 December 1936. The accusations against him were that he had worn a red tie, had announced the news of Calvo Sotelo’s murder in the Ciudad Rodrigo Casino and was a member of the Socialist Party. The third charge was demonstrably untrue. On the basis of the first two, the deceased was sentenced to a fine of 500 pesetas, which had to be paid by his widow.97"
"For all families, the death of a loved one without proper burial and ritual was traumatic. To be able to visit a grave, leave flowers or meditate permits some reconciliation with the fact of loss. This was denied to almost all the families of those killed in the repression. The theft of the dignity of the dead caused intense pain. In the deeply Catholic areas, like Castile and Navarre, the experience was especially painful. Those brought up there, Catholics practising or not, believed that, after death, the body would be buried and the soul pass on to heaven, purgatory or hell. Most Catholics would assume that their loved ones would go to purgatory, the halfway house, where they would purge their sins in order to continue on to heaven. Friends and relatives on earth could hasten this process by prayer, lighting candles in church, or paying for Masses to be said. In Castile, there even existed fraternities dedicated to praying for the dead. All such spiritual comfort was denied to the families of Catholics killed in the repression. For the families of all the victims, Catholic or not, mourning and the support of their community were replaced by insult, humiliation, threats and economic hardship."
Salamanca""In keeping with Mola’s instructions about the need for rapid, exemplary terror, the left was quickly crushed with notable brutality. The new Civil Governor ordered the removal of all Socialist town councils in the province and their replacement by ‘patriotic elements’. Since there had been virtually no violence in Salamanca in the months preceding the military coup, most liberals and leftists made no attempt to flee. Nevertheless, there was a witch-hunt of liberals, leftists and trade unionists""
"The first victims in Salamanca, as elsewhere, were those who opposed the military coup and prominent local left-wing politicians or union leaders. Schoolteachers and university lecturers were favoured targets. The repression soon embraced those who had helped the Popular Front, by distributing leaflets or by acting as stewards in meetings. In some cases, those who had supported centrist groups were put on trial, accused of taking votes away from the right. The victims, as in so many places, had been denounced by those who coveted their property or their womenfolk. This was especially the case with those who owned businesses. When trials became the norm, the victims who had money were frequently blackmailed by those named as their defenders. In fact, the ‘defenders’ rarely did more than act as court reporters. Nevertheless, there was a racket run by Lieutenant Marciano Díez Solís. The accused was told that a punitive sentence awaited him but that Díez Solís could get it reduced for a price. Díez Solís was finally stopped, not for extorting money, but because it was discovered that he was homosexual and had tried to blackmail some of his victims into having sex with him.73"
Castille and Leon"The vindictiveness of the military high command and the senior clergy took its toll throughout most of Castile and León. The weakness of the working class in most of the region facilitated the rapid annihilation of opposition. In Soria, a profoundly conservative province whose capital was a town of only 10,098 inhabitants, three hundred local people were executed along with others brought from Guadalajara. Soria had seen no violence during the years of the Republic and there was no resistance to the military coup. The arrival of Requetés on 22 July was the trigger for the killing. The wives of those murdered were forced to sign documents stating that their husbands had simply disappeared.78 In neighbouring Segovia, there was also no resistance yet there were 217 illegal executions during the war and a further 175 as a result of sentences passed by military tribunals. Another 195 men died in prison.79"
"The situation in the neighbouring province of León was almost identical. There was little resistance against the coup but considerable repression, especially in the mining districts in the north and in the three other principal towns, Ponferrada near the border with Ourense, and La Bañeza and Astorga towards the border with Zamora.87 Despite early enthusiasm for the coup, the Bishop of León, Monsignor José Álvarez Miranda, was so appalled by the scale of killing that he began to intercede with the local military on behalf of some of the prisoners, including Manuel Santamaría Andrés, Professor of Literature at the Instituto de León. Santamaría was imprisoned at the end of July, in the notorious San Marcos prison, simply because he was a prominent member of Azaña’s Izquierda Republicana party. On 4 September, along with the Civil Governor and twenty-nine other Republicans, he was sentenced to death. His wife and family went to Burgos and successfully interceded for his sentence to be commuted to imprisonment. The news of this concession reached León before they did and when they returned, they were met with a hail of bullets. The commutation was revoked in response to protests by the military authorities. All thirty-one were shot on 21 November 1936. The Bishop was fined the enormous sum of 10,000 pesetas for his temerity in questioning a military tribunal.88"
"In Zamora, the coup triumphed easily, although railway workers maintained a resistance movement which would continue until the late 1940s. In both the provincial capital and the other principal town, Toro, the prisons were soon overflowing. Beatings, torture and mutilation and the rape of female prisoners were frequent. As elsewhere, the targets were Socialists, trade unionists, Republican officials and schoolteachers. Local historians calculate that more than 1,330 people were murdered in the province. Between 31 July 1936 and 15 January 1937, a total of 875 bodies were buried in the cemetery of San Atilano, registered simply as ‘found dead’ or ‘executed after sentence’.89"
"Amparo was not alone in her suffering. Kept in below-zero temperatures, without bedding, other mothers saw their babies die because, themselves deprived of food and medicines, they had no milk to breast-feed them. One of the policemen who arrested Amparo told her that ‘red women have no rights’ and ‘you should have thought of this before having children’. Another prisoner, Pilar Fidalgo Carasa, had been arrested in Benavente because her husband, José Almoína, was secretary of the local branch of the PSOE. Only eight hours before her detention and transport to Zamora, she had given birth to a baby girl. In the prison, she was forced to climb a steep staircase many times each day in order to be interrogated. This provoked a life-threatening haemorrhage. The prison doctor, Pedro Almendral, was called. He refused to prescribe anything either for Pilar or for her baby and told her that the best cure for her was death. Numerous young women were raped before being murdered.90"
"Throughout most of Old Castile, the violence was carried out by groups of recently recruited Falangists and the younger members of other right-wing groups, students, the younger sons and permanent employees of landowners. There, as elsewhere, men joined for money, to curry favour with the powerful or to blur a left-wing past. Just as in the Republican zone, there were criminal elements that enjoyed the grisly opportunities for violence and rape.93 They were egged on and often financed by landowners and helped with denunciations and information by local villagers, either out of fear or because they had in some way felt threatened by Republican legislation. With vehicles and weapons provided by the military authorities, legitimized by the Church, these groups acted with impunity. In the minds of the local conservative establishment, which included poor small farmers as well as rich landowners, the enemies were those who had disturbed the traditional structure. That meant the trade unionists who had encouraged landless labourers to negotiate for better wages and working conditions, the left-wing municipal officials who had supported them or the schoolteachers who had disseminated subversive and secular ideas that persuaded the poor to question the established order. Those who, to a large extent, formed the social basis of Republicanism were among the first targets of the repression.94"
Segovia"All the local military forces in Segovia had long been committed to the coup. Unaware of this, the Civil Governor, Adolfo Chacón de la Mata, of the centrist Republican party Unión Republicana, informed representatives of the left-wing parties that he had full confidence in the local garrisons and refused to have arms distributed to the workers. At 10.00 a.m. on Sunday 19 July, Chacón de la Mata was arrested by army officers and Civil Guards. Half an hour later, martial law was declared. The main post, telephone and telegraph office, the town hall and the Casa del Pueblo were occupied by troops. The left, without leaders or weapons, and totally outnumbered, was unable to resist beyond some sporadic pacific strike action.80 Chacón de la Mata was tried in Valladolid on 13 October on charges of ‘military rebellion’, sentenced to death and shot on 5 December."
Burgos"Burgos, where there had been relatively little social conflict before the war, fell immediately to the rebels. In the provincial capital, the Republican authorities were detained immediately, among them the Civil Governor and the General in command of the military region, Domingo Batet Maestre. As a Catalan and for his moderation in repressing the rebellion of the Generalitat in October 1934, Batet was a marked man. The extreme centralist right despised him because he avoided the exemplary slaughter that they considered appropriate for use against the Catalans. When he refused to join the rising, he was arrested. Because of their long-standing friendship, Mola prevented his immediate execution. However, Franco intervened in Batet’s subsequent trial to ensure that he was sentenced to death and executed.91"
"Burgos saw around four hundred extra-judicial murders between August and October 1936 and a further one thousand in the wider province. Overall, in Burgos, there were more than 1,700 people either murdered by the rebels or who died of mistreatment in the massively overcrowded prisons. The old prison of Santa Águeda had been built for two hundred but held nearly one thousand; the central Penal de Burgos, built for nine hundred, held three thousand prisoners. Those awaiting execution were union leaders, Republican officials, schoolteachers and those who had voted for the Popular Front. These included children and women, some pregnant, shot on the bizarre grounds of ‘right of representation’ which meant that they were executed in substitution for their husbands who could not be found. Another 5,500 people suffered beatings, torture and/or imprisonment. By 2007, some 550 bodies had been exhumed from unmarked graves.92"
Galicia"Although Yagüe was not involved, an Africanista ferocity was unleashed on Galicia. Even in comparison with the provinces of Old Castile, the repression throughout Galicia was massively disproportionate to the limited scale of resistance.104 Indeed, the repression there was comparable to that in Navarre and La Rioja, where the presence of militant Carlism constituted something of an explanation. In Galicia, however, albeit a highly conservative region, the extreme right was not prominent before the military coup. In the course of 20 July, the rebels took over the region. The only places where there was any significant resistance were A Coruña, Vigo and Ferrol, but it was sporadic and had been crushed well before the end of the month. In Vigo, when the edict of martial law was read out, the crowd protested and twenty-seven people died when troops opened fire.105
The first few days after the coup saw relatively few deaths, just over one hundred. Thereafter the pace of executions increased with more than 2,500 in the five months from 1 August to the end of December. Recent research identified the total number of executions in Galicia as 4,560, including seventy-nine women. Of these 836 were the result of trials; the rest were extra-judicial murders. The worst of the repression was in A Coruña with nearly 1,600 executions and in Pontevedra with nearly 1,700. In these two Atlantic provinces, the Popular Front had won, albeit with a predominance of moderate left-of-centre Republican deputies. In Lugo, where the centre party had won, there were 418 deaths, of which two-thirds were the victims of extra-judicial murders. In Orense, where Renovación Española and the CEDA triumphed, there were 569.106 The experience of Galicia shows that, as in Castile, the rebels aimed not just to defeat the left but to eradicate an ideal and to terrorize the population into subservience."
"Accordingly, resistance was minimal and in inverse proportion to the ferocity of the repression. The establishment of martial law in A Coruña prompted resistance in the naval base at Ferrol. A mutiny by sailors on the warships España and Cervera was crushed. Both the town hall and the Casa del Pueblo surrendered after artillery bombardment and false promises that there would be no reprisals. On 26 July, the executions began of the sailors who had opposed the rising. On 3 August, the Admiral in charge of the base was tried and sentenced to death for the ‘offence of abandoning his post’. Captain Victoriano Suances of the Civil Guard, who was put in charge of public order, supervised a particularly savage repression, with Falangist squads given free rein to eliminate Republicans.108
Columns of troops and Civil Guards moved out from A Coruña and Ferrol to organize the ‘pacification’ of the towns and villages of the province. Although there were few examples of church-burnings in Galicia, in Betanzos retreating anarchists set fire to the Convento de San Francisco. In consequence, the repression was all the more intense. In Curtis, to the east of A Coruña, sporadic resistance was smashed with ferocity. Throughout the province, the Falange suddenly found itself overflowing with new recruits from among the unemployed and petty criminals.109"
"Those tried by court martial in A Coruña were usually executed by firing squad in the early hours of the morning. Nevertheless, it was common for there to be crowds of spectators. However, they did not compare with the spectacle mounted on 23 October 1936 when eight young conscripts were shot after being accused of plotting to rebel against their superior officers. They were paraded through the city in mid-afternoon and executed before a huge crowd. Their stentorian shouts of ‘¡Viva la República!’ as they stood before the firing squad undermined the effect being sought.114
The repression in Galicia was notable for the high level of denunciations by parish priests, the Falange or hostile neighbours. In country districts, this was perhaps a reflection of the resentments provoked by poverty. There were also cases of denunciations of professional rivals such as led to the arrest and subsequent murder in A Coruña of Dr Eugenio Arbones, a distinguished obstetrician who had been a Socialist deputy in 1931 but had been now retired from politics for some years. His ‘crime’ was to have treated men wounded by the military rebels.115"
"A more striking case was that of José Miñones Bernárdez, a popular lawyer, banker and businessman from A Coruña who was elected deputy for Unión Republicana in the February 1936 elections. In the immediate aftermath of the elections, when there were riots in response to right-wing voting fraud, he had been acting Civil Governor. With remarkable courage, he had prevented the burning of two convents and a Jesuit church and protected a number of right-wingers. In gratitude, the Compañía de María granted his children and descendants free education in perpetuity. In response to the assassination of Calvo Sotelo, he called upon his fellow deputies of Unión Republicana to renounce their participation in the Popular Front. He returned from Madrid to A Coruña on 18 July, convinced that he was in no danger, having always been fair in his treatment of both left and right. This was demonstrated by the fact that, on 19 July, he appealed for military protection for the local electricity generating company of which he was managing director and he also successfully persuaded a convoy of workers to refrain from going to A Coruña to oppose the coup. Nevertheless, he was arrested, accused of military rebellion, condemned to pay a fine of 1 million pesetas and shot on 2 December. The reasons behind his death lay in his home town of Corcubión, where his family had incurred the hatred of the local commander of the Civil Guard.116
Santiago was quickly taken, with military trials beginning as early as 26 July. Five men, tried for crimes such as using the clenched-fist salute or shouting ‘Long live Russia’, were sentenced to life imprisonment. Murders began on 14 August; many of those who had been sentenced to imprisonment were taken from the jail illegally and shot. One of the victims was Eduardo Puente Carracedo, well known in the town for his fierce anti-clericalism. This derived from the fact that a young cousin of his, made pregnant by a canon of the Cathedral, had died when she was obliged to have a (necessarily illegal) abortion. Thereafter, Eduardo Puente would interrupt religious processions (on one occasion with a donkey bearing a crucifix). If the canon in question was taking part, Puente would attempt to hit him. Detained in the early days of the war, Puente was seized from the local prison; on 28 June 1937 he was murdered, and his body dumped under a bridge. The registry recorded the deaths of those murdered as the consequence of ‘internal haemorrhage’, ‘cardiac arrest’ or ‘organic destruction of the brain’.117"
"On the Portuguese border, in Galicia’s coastal province of Pontevedra, the Civil Governor, like his counterparts elsewhere, refused to arm the workers. As in Ourense, there was a high level of collaboration in the repression in poor rural communities. Indeed, the military authorities issued a statement on 9 August that unsigned denunciations would not be pursued and eventually threatened to impose fines on those who made false accusations. Perhaps the most striking death in Pontevedra was that of Alexandre Bóveda Iglesias, founder of the Galician Nationalist Party, a conservative Catholic greatly admired by Calvo Sotelo. General Carlos Bosch y Bosch, the commander of the VIII Military Region, dismissed a plea for clemency, saying, ‘Bóveda is not a Communist but he is a Galician Nationalist which is worse.’122"
Canary and Balearic islands"While this rebel repression had proceeded in Spain’s north-western corner, similar horrors were taking place far to the south and the east outside the Spanish peninsula. In the Canary Islands where the rebellion had triumphed immediately, there were no deaths at the hands of Republicans. Nevertheless, in the course of the war, it has been estimated that as many as 2,500 people were killed by the rebels.125 It has been reckoned that more than two thousand people were executed in the Balearic Islands. In Mallorca alone, despite having an extremely weak workers’ movement, there were at least 1,200 and probably as many as two thousand executed. The initial coup provoked a general strike as a result of which large numbers of workers were arrested and imprisoned.126 The bulk of them were killed after Alberto Bayo’s ill-fated attempt to retake the island for the Republic in mid-August. Prisoners captured by the rebels were immediately executed. They included five nurses, all aged between seventeen and twenty, and a French journalist.127"
Chapter 7: Far from the Front: Repression behind the Republican Lines
Early breakdown in control and infighting between anarchists and the state"Once the military rebellion had provoked the collapse of many instruments of the state, in every city not conquered by the insurgents, power in the streets was assumed by the armed workers who had contributed to the defeat of the rising. Committees set up by working-class unions and parties created their own autonomous police forces and detention centres, known as checas (in a misuse of the name of the early Soviet security service). In the chaos created by the disappearance of most of the conventional structures of law and order, there was also an element of sheer criminality. This reflected long-standing resentments of years of social injustice, but it was also born of the unleashing of the worst instincts of those who took advantage of the removal of social restraints. The problem was exacerbated by the opening of the prisons and the release of thousands of common criminals.
In the first months, the application of justice was usurped by the committees and for a time ceased to be a function of the state. Moreover, there was a wave of killing which sprang from a variety of motives. The ‘justice’ of the committees against supporters of the coup, revenge by non-unionized workers for the brutality of labour relations and the activities of common criminals all combined in a tumultuous process that seemed to the rest of the world an orgy of violence. The targets included rebel army officers and the clergy, those prominent in the old establishment, landowners and businessmen, and those who had participated in the repression that followed the events of October 1934. Under the umbrella of ‘popular justice’ against those responsible for the coup, crimes with no political motive, of robbery, kidnapping, extortion, rape and murder, were also committed. As these were brought under control, there would be other acts of revenge for bombing raids and for the atrocities committed by the rebels transmitted in the bloodcurdling tales brought by refugees. Eventually too, there would be the legal violence carried out by the instruments of state organized to combat the ‘enemy within’, the supporters of the military rising who carried out acts of sabotage and espionage."
"A new overarching revolutionary power never replaced the Republican authorities. However, for the first months, the central government and the Catalan Generalitat, the autonomous regional government, could do no more than maintain a veneer of institutional continuity. Their orders were often ignored. Rather, the first priority had to be to persuade the more moderate elements of the left-wing parties and unions to collaborate in putting an end to uncontrolled violence – an especially difficult task in the case of the anarchist movement. At the same time, it was necessary to create a legal framework to encompass the spontaneous, and often mutually contradictory, actions of the committees and checas. Eventually, it would be recognized by many on the left, though by far from all of the anarchists, that the conduct of a modern war required a central state. There would be no end to the internal violence until the Republican state had been rebuilt, and that would take time. Meanwhile, the Republican authorities were deeply embarrassed by the situation which undermined their efforts to secure diplomatic and material support from Britain and France.
The most damaging element of the violence, exploited to the full by supporters of the rebels abroad, was constituted by attacks on the clergy. Anti-clericalism was explicitly advocated by both the anarchist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo and the anti-Stalinist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista. Andreu Nin, the POUM leader, told a meeting in Barcelona at the beginning of August that the working class had resolved the problem of religion by not leaving a single church standing.1 The anarchists were less confident and saw the Church as a powerful enemy still. At best, priests were suspected of persuading their female parishioners to vote for the right, at worst of using the confessional to seduce them. The hatred deriving from that perceived sexual power of the clergy was revealed in the statement that ‘the Church must disappear for ever. Churches will no longer be used for filthy pimping.’2 The loudly proclaimed Catholicism of the possessing classes was another trigger for anti-clericalism. There was little Christian charity about the attitude of industrialists to their workers or of landowners to their tenants and day-labourers. Inevitably, anarchists, Socialists and Communists were united in suspecting that the attraction of the Catholic Church for the wealthy was the fact that it preached patience and resignation to those struggling for better wages and working conditions. Thus the assassination of priests and the burning down of churches were given an idealistic veneer by anarchists as the prior purification necessary for the building of a new world, as if it was that easy to eliminate religion."
"On 24 July, the Canadian journalist Pierre van Paassen interviewed the anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti in the CNT metalworkers’ union headquarters in Barcelona. When Van Paassen remarked that ‘you will be sitting on top of a pile of ruins even if you are victorious’, Durruti replied, ‘We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall … We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here in our hearts.’3 The process of building a new world involved the liberation of common criminals perceived as victims of bourgeois society. Released into cities in which the instruments of public order had disappeared, these men, and others, committed crimes under the guise of revolutionary justice. A specific case which underlined the ambiguous relationship between anarchism and crime was that of the journalist Josep Maria Planes. He was murdered on 24 August by anarchists outraged by a series of articles that he had written under the title ‘Gangsters in Barcelona’, linking the activist wing of the anarchist movement, the Federación Anarquista Ibérica, with organized crime.4
In Barcelona, Lluís Companys, the President of the Generalitat, had refused to issue arms, but weapons depots were simply seized by workers. Over 50,000 guns were in the hands of anarchist militiamen. In the course of 19 July, the rebel troops were defeated by a curious alliance of predominantly anarchist workers and the local Civil Guard which, decisively, had stayed loyal. By the time General Manuel Goded had arrived by seaplane from the Balearic Islands to lead the rebellion, the coup was already defeated in Catalonia. He was arrested and obliged to broadcast an appeal to his followers to lay down their arms. The manner of the rebel defeat left a confused relationship between the institutions of the state and the power which had passed into the hands of the CNT–FAI. The immediate consequence was a breakdown of law and order. Barcelona was a port city with a large lumpenproletariat made up of dock labourers and many rootless immigrants subject to the insecurity of casual work. There is no doubt that theft, vandalism and common criminality found free rein behind a façade of revolutionary ideals, although the scale was exaggerated by both the foreign press and diplomats sympathetic to the rebels."
"Religious and military personnel were the principal targets of left-wing anger.6"
"Escofet wrote later that the appearance on the streets of thousands of armed people posed an insuperable public order problem.12 This underlines the difference between the repression in the two war zones – repression from below in the Republican zone and repression from above in the rebel zone. Escofet also commented on the fact that, in the raids on the homes of the wealthy and the property of the Church, theft was confined to a criminal minority, acknowledging the honesty and romanticism of many anarchists who handed in money and jewels.13"
"On 20 July, the principal rebel officers arrested in Barcelona had been taken by Civil Guards and CNT militants to the castle of Montjuich. Six days later they were transferred to the abandoned ocean liner Uruguay, a rust bucket converted into a prison ship. At first, they were treated well, allowed to sit on deck and read novels from the ship’s library. This easy treatment was curtailed because of their adolescent behaviour. They insisted on greeting passing Italian naval vessels by standing to attention and giving the fascist salute. To boats full of leftists who had come to gawp and threaten them, they responded by sticking out their tongues and other more expressive gestures. Although they were prevented from going on deck, they were allowed to receive food parcels from family and friends. On 11 August, the leaders, Generals Manuel Goded and Álvaro Fernández Burriel, were tried by court martial on board the ship. They had as defence counsel a retired officer who was also a lawyer. Both were found guilty and sentenced to death and were shot by a firing squad the next day, at Montjuich. Over the following days, other rebels were tried and executed. Nevertheless, many survived, including Goded’s son, Manuel.15"
"The spontaneous decision of Durruti, Sanz and García Oliver to join in creating the Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee was accepted after some discussion by the rest of the CNT leadership. They were ill prepared, both ideologically and temperamentally, to improvise state institutions capable of simultaneously organizing both a revolution and a war. Essentially, Companys had offered them a great face-saving device. For the moment, the workers seemed to be in control. At first, the Generalitat would give legal form to the wishes of the Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee, but the lack of political expertise within the CNT saw the CCMA gradually reduced to being a sub-committee of the Generalitat and then dissolved altogether. Companys had effectively ensured the continuity of state power and, in the long term, the eventual taming of the revolution by manoeuvring the CNT into accepting responsibility without long-term institutionalized power.16
In the short term, however, the CNT was set on clearing the ground for the building of the new world. Its mouthpiece, Solidaridad Obrera, justified violence against priests and capitalists. The wave of criminality that had engulfed Barcelona was acknowledged and rationalized:
there is nothing like the whiff of gunpowder to unleash all the instincts lurking inside man. At the same time, the upheaval reached a point where control was lost over those people interested only in the satisfaction of their selfish and vengeful instincts. They and they alone are responsible this week for the things (and not as many as has been claimed) that have been perpetrated in Barcelona that the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo and, alongside it, all the organizations which have participated in the revolution, would rather had not happened. Nevertheless, we cannot join the chorus of those shedding crocodile tears who, when all is said and done, bear the responsibility, not just for the fascist uprising but also for having kept the people for years on end in a condition of permanent destitution and an even more lasting ignorance. Inevitably, the outcome could hardly have been different. What has happened to the exploiting bourgeoisie, to the obscurantist clergy and to the greedy shopkeepers is that they have had to reap the consequences of the seeds they themselves sowed.17"
Journalists reports of left wing violence"In the first days after the military coup, the events in Catalonia saw newspapermen flocking from around the world. Some of their initial reports were gratuitously lurid. A Reuters despatch alleged that bodies were piled in the underground stations and that ‘The victorious Government civilian forces, composed of Anarchists, Communists and Socialists, have burned and sacked practically every church and convent in Barcelona.’ It went on: ‘The mob, drunk with victory, afterwards paraded the streets of the city attired in the robes of ecclesiastical authorities.’7 Over the next few days the stories became ever gorier. The reign of terror was described under the sub-heading ‘Priests Die Praying. The mob is uncontrollable and class hatred rules’. According to this account, ‘Priest are being dragged with a prayer on their lips from their monasteries to be shot – in the back – by firing squads. Some of them have had their heads and arms hacked off after death as a final vindictive act.’8
Journalists who knew Spain well wrote more sober accounts of what was happening. Lawrence Fernsworth, the experienced correspondent of both The Times of London and the New York Times, accepted the popular view that anti-clerical outrage had been provoked because some military rebels and their civilian sympathizers had been allowed to install machine-guns in church bell-towers to fire on the workers. This was denied by the Generalitat’s security chief, Federico Escofet Alsina, although it was widely believed by many on the streets of Barcelona. Certainly, Joan Pons Garlandí, a prominent member of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), claimed that there were isolated cases of snipers firing from church towers. On 23 and 24 July, La Humanitat, the newspaper of the ERC, claimed that machine-guns were firing from churches. However, Escofet’s contention is supported by the fact that no trial was ever held in Catalonia of any priest or monk accused of firing from church premises. In contrast, it has been alleged that anarchists would go into a church firing their guns in the air and then claim that the shots had been aimed at them, thereby seeking to justify the arrest of the priest and destruction of the church.9"
Anarchist violence"That anarchist violence would continue uncontrolled was ensured by the fact that, under the CCMA, the Departament d’Investigació which was responsible for public order was headed by the FAI extremist Aurelio Fernández Sánchez. He secured the removal of the efficient Federico Escofet as head of security because of his determination to control the FAI. In every town and village, there was created a defence or revolutionary anti-fascist committee the bulk of which were dominated by members of the CNT or the FAI. Fernández delegated power to ‘control and security teams’, known as Patrulles de Control, of which seven hundred were created within a week. Their composition reflected the fact that most committed anarchists were repelled by the idea of acting as policemen and preferred to fight at the battle front. Thus the armed members of the patrols were made up of a mixture of extremists committed to the elimination of the old bourgeois order and some recently released common criminals. In the main, they acted arbitrarily, searching and often looting houses, arresting people denounced as right-wing and often killing them. As a result, by early August, over five hundred civilians had been murdered in Barcelona. Aurelio Fernández authorized an assault on the prison ship Uruguay which saw many right-wing prisoners murdered.19
Sometimes, when the defence committees of given localities wanted some criminal act carried out, they would arrange for it to be done by patrols from other towns on a reciprocal basis. A so-called ‘ghost car’ would arrive from a neighbouring town or district equipped with blacklists that can only have been provided by local elements. This accounts for the impunity with which outsiders could arrive, burn a church and arrest or kill local people. There were many motorized squads or brigades whose vehicles reflected the FAI’s penchant for luxury saloons. They were often headed by men with criminal records, usually for armed robbery, appointed by Aurelio Fernández. Among the more notorious were the one-time bank robber Joaquim Aubí, alias ‘El Gordo’, who drove the ghost car of Badalona; Josep Recasens i Oliva, alias ‘El Sec de la Matinada’, whose group operated in Tarragona; Jaume Martí Mestres from Mora la Nova, whose group was active in the villages along the banks of the River Ebre; and Francesc Freixenet i Alborquers who dominated the area around Vic in the north of the province of Barcelona. Freixenet, with his accomplices Pere Agut Borrell and Vicenç Coma Cruells, known as ‘the cripple of the road to Gurb’, ran a fleet of six ghost cars, maintained by his family’s garage and paid for by the municipality. Their main targets were members of the clergy.20
One of the most feared of such itinerant groups was led by Pascual Fresquet Llopis and operated in the so-called ‘death’s-head car’. Fresquet was twenty-nine years old and known for his violent temper. He had been imprisoned in the early 1930s for armed robbery and intimidated or murdered recalcitrant industrialists on the instructions of the FAI.21 At the beginning of the war, he joined the anarchist column from Barcelona led by the charismatic ex-carpenter Antonio Ortiz of the FAI. Ortiz’s base was Caspe in the south of Zaragoza, a small town which had initially been taken for the rebels by Captain José Negrete at the head of forty Civil Guards. The fact that Negrete had used Republican women and children as human shields ensured that, after the town was occupied on 25 July by Ortiz’s column, the reprisals would be ferocious with fifty-five local rightists executed before the month was out. The prominent part played by Fresquet’s group led Ortiz to give them the title of ‘brigada de investigación’ with carte blanche to hunt down fascists. Their death’s-head car was actually a black, thirty-five-seat charabanc decorated with skulls. The brigade had a skull embroidered on their caps and a metal skull-badge pinned to their chests.22"
"Eventually, in late October 1936, the CNT would clamp down on the activities of Fresquet because they were bringing the organization into disrepute. By that time, Fresquet’s busload of killers had executed around three hundred people.25 As Josep Maria Planes had pointed out in the articles for which he was murdered, it was difficult to distinguish between idealistic revolutionary fervour and plain criminality. The Patrulles de Control all over Catalonia were also giving the CNT a bad name but little was done precisely because they were being administered by Aurelio Fernández, an extremely senior figure in the movement."
"On the night of 20 August, seventy-three priests and religious and several civilians were shot in the cemetery. By the end of October, more than 250 people had been murdered. This was over half of all of the deaths in Lleida during the entire war. The high incidence of terror was closely related to the fact that Lleida saw considerable traffic of anarchist columns en route to the Aragon front. Several of the civilian victims had been prominent in the repression after the events of October 1934.59 Elsewhere in the province, the POUM take-over saw harvests left to rot and factories abandoned. Those who pointed out that the economy had to be organized were denounced as reactionaries. This was particularly the case in Balaguer, to the north-east of the provincial capital, where, after murdering thirty-five people, seventeen of them on 5 August, the POUM committee seemed most concerned with leading the good life in the requisitioned homes of the wealthy.60"
"Nevertheless, even those who were neither hypocrites nor innocents denounced the violence and the destruction unconditionally. The influential anarchist thinker Joan Peiró made a distinction between legitimate revolutionary violence and what he called ‘inopportune bloodshed’. He wrote in late August 1936: ‘If the cruelly exploitative bourgeoisie fall exterminated by the holy anger of the people, the neutral spectator will find therein an explanation for the killing. And the same is true if those exterminated are caciques, clerics devoted to extremist political activities or reactionaries. The revolution is the revolution, and it is only logical that the revolution should involve bloodshed.’ Then, having justified the ‘holy anger of the people’, he went on to denounce those who wasted time and petrol by burning down and looting churches and the summer homes of the rich while ‘the fat cats who deserve to be strung up from the lamp-posts of the riverside’ get away.62"
"By November 1936, Peiró had hardened his line and could be found courageously denouncing the terrorism and theft which had plunged Catalonia into bestiality and brought the revolution into disrepute:
Here, for too long, there has been no law but that of the strongest. Men have killed for the sake of killing, because it was possible to kill with impunity. And men have been murdered not because they were fascists, nor enemies of the people, nor enemies of our revolution, nor anything remotely similar. They have been killed on a whim, and many have died as a result of the resentment or grudges of their killers. When the popular violence erupted, the killers and thieves took advantage and they continue stealing and killing and bring shame on those who risk their lives at the front."
"The extremist Jaume Balius wrote: ‘the revolution must purge the rearguard. We suffer from too much legalism. He who is not with the workers is a fascist and should be treated as such. Let us not forget the case of La Fatarella.’69"
"Anarchist violence was as likely to be directed against the Communists as against the clergy, the middle classes or the smallholding peasantry. The relatively ineffective efforts of the Generalitat to control the excesses of the CNT–FAI were reflected in the timidity shown by Josep Tarradellas, the first minister since the end of September. In mid-September, President Companys told Ilya Erhenburg that he was outraged by the terror inflicted by the anarchists on the Communists and expressed surprise that the PSUC did not respond in kind.70 However, Companys was significantly reinforced by the arrival, on 1 October, of the Russian Consul Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko. His first report to Moscow gave the measure of the problem. He complained that the CNT was recruiting so indiscriminately that it contained ever more right-wing provocateurs and criminal elements from the lumpenproletariat. He reported that, in late July, the CNT had taken advantage of the outbreak of the war to kill over eighty workers on the pretext that they were scabs. Certainly, among them was Ramón Sales, the head of the scab union, the Sindicatos Libres."
"Anarchist victims also included the president of the UGT in the port of Barcelona, Desiderio Trillas Mainé, who was shot dead on 31 July along with two others, all three members of the PSUC. The excuse used was that, being able to choose who got work on the docks, he had favoured UGT members. In fact, the motive was more to do with his opposition to a CNT port strike in January 1934.71 Subsequently, in a village near Barbastro in Huesca, twenty-five members of the UGT were murdered by anarchists in a surprise attack. In Molins de Rei near Barcelona, workers in a textile factory went on strike in protest against arbitrary dismissals by the FAI committee. A delegation trying to take the workers’ complaints to Barcelona was forced off the train. Those who did manage to get through were too frightened to return.72"
Anticlerical violence"While the Patrulles de Control ruled the streets in Barcelona, as elsewhere, to be identified as a priest, a religious, a militant Catholic or even a member of a pious society was to be in danger of death or prison – a consequence of the Church’s traditional identification with the right. During the events of October 1934, there had been isolated physical attacks on priests in Barcelona. Further south, in Vilanova i la Geltrú, the Church of the Immaculate Conception was looted and destroyed. All but two of the churches of Vilafranca del Penedès were set alight. During the spring of 1936, there were cases of stones being thrown at priests in the streets, parish residences being assaulted and religious ceremonies being violently disrupted.33 During the war, the FAI’s persecution of religious personnel in Catalonia intensified.
Churches were sacked and burned to the ground. Initially, priests in cassocks were murdered on the street. Later, priests and those who assisted in ecclesiastical functions, sacristans and parish administrators, as well as the most notably pious lay Catholics, were arrested, principally by the FAI. They were executed after interrogation in the checa to which they had been taken. Many priests fled or went into hiding. A post-war report compiled by the Diocese of Barcelona ascertained that many of the abuses against both clergy and churches, although organized by local extremists, were actually carried out by elements from outside. There were many places where the local faithful opposed the assaults on their churches but sometimes, in order to save the clergy, had to accept, or even collaborate in, setting fire to the church. Equally, there were many cases where the local Popular Front Committee prevented the murder of the clergy and facilitated their escape. In Valls, a small town in Tarragona, the altars of most churches were destroyed and the buildings used as garages and agricultural warehouses. One especially valuable seventeenth-century altar was saved by local FAI members who were descendants of the sculptor who had built it. Nevertheless, twelve priests were murdered in the town.34"
"In the entire course of the war, 65.8 per cent of the clergy of the dioceses of Lleida met violent deaths. The left-wing association of the Church with fascism was strengthened by papal declarations to the effect that fascism was the best weapon with which to defeat proletarian revolution and defend Christian civilization.35"
"Even without the recently freed prisoners, it would have been impossible to keep the groundswell of long-repressed anti-clerical feeling entirely in check once the restraints were off. Churches and convents were sacked and burned everywhere in the Republican zone except the Basque Country. Many were put to profane use as prisons, garages or warehouses. Acts of desecration – the shooting of statues of Jesus Christ and saints, the destruction of works of art, or the use of sacred vestments in satires of religious ceremonies – were usually symbolic and often theatrical. The most reliable study of religious persecution during the Civil War, by Monsignor Antonio Montero Moreno, calculated that 6,832 members of the clergy and religious orders were murdered or executed. Many others fled abroad. The popular hatred of the Church was the consequence both of its traditional association with the right and of the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s open legitimization of the military rebellion.
Despite the murder of clergy, including nearly three hundred female religious, the propaganda stories of naked nuns forced to dance in public and gang-raped by Republican militiamen were wild exaggerations. One celebrated post-war account, published under the name of Fray Justo Pérez de Urbel, the mitred Abbot of the monastery of the Valle de los Caídos, was entirely invented by his ghost writer, Carlos Luis Álvarez, a journalist who used the pseudonym ‘Cándido’.37 In 1936, Spain had just over 115,000 clergy, of whom about 45,000 were nuns, 15,000 monks and the remainder lay priests. The latest figure for the deaths of nuns in the war is 296, just over 1.3 per cent of the female clergy present in the Republican zone. This contrasts dramatically with the figures for male clergy killed, 2,365 monks and 4,184 secular priests – over 30 per cent of the monks and 18 per cent of the lay clergy in Republican territory.38"
"Although still shocking, the figures for confirmed sexual molestation are also extremely low, even taking into account the reluctance of victims to speak out. After exhaustive research, Montero Moreno concluded that, even if threatened, nuns were normally protected from sexual abuse, if not from death. Nuns belonging to orders devoted to social work such as the Little Sisters of the Poor were those most likely to escape any kind of persecution. The diocesan archivist of Barcelona, Father José Sanabre Sanromá, assembled details of all the female religious murdered. Almost all were killed in the first few days. Sanabre Sanromá made no mention of sexual crimes in the Barcelona dioceses. Those incidents that did take place, such as the sexual torture and murder of five nuns in the village of Riudarenes in Girona between 22 and 25 September, were the exception. The most frequently cited reason for this is the widespread male conviction that young women could have entered convents only as a result of coercion or deception. In contrast, male religious personnel were singled out for symbolic and often barbaric tortures which often involved sexual humiliation. This reflected burning resentment of the Church’s overwhelming privileges and its power to control everyday lives, especially those of women.39"
"Anti-clerical violence was firmly combated by key figures in the Generalitat, despite the enormous risks involved in doing so. Jaume Miravitlles, for instance, hid groups of priests and religious in the dressing rooms of Barcelona Football Club while they awaited passage out of Catalonia. Josep Maria Espanya, the Interior Minister, Joan Casanovas as both Prime Minister until late September and as President of the Catalan Parliament, and Ventura Gassol, the Conseller de Cultura, all made heroic efforts. Azaña commented in his notes: ‘Gassols has saved many priests. And the Archbishop.’40 This was a reference to Cardinal Francesc Vidal i Barraquer, the Archbishop of Tarragona. The Bishop of Girona was given an escort out of the city and sent to Italy and the Bishops of Tortosa, La Seu d’Urgell and Vic were also saved. In his report of 24 August, the Italian Consul, Carlo Bossi, noted the facilities granted by Josep Maria Espanya to ensure the evacuation of numerous religious communities including those of the Abbey of Montserrat. He noted that obstacles were placed on the issuing of passports by the head of the local police, who was from the PSUC. Nevertheless, he could report on 11 September that a further 996 religious personnel had been evacuated in Italian vessels.41"
"What happened to the clergy in Tarragona was representative of the entire region. In general terms, the greatest number of murders of religious personnel in Catalonia took place between 19 July and the end of September 1936. Thereafter, the functioning of people’s courts with some minimal judicial guarantees meant that the clergy were usually given prison sentences."
State clamping down on Anarchist violence"Escorza’s Investigation Committee, as it was called, was set up in August. The portrayal of revolutionary terrorism in the right-wing press throughout Europe, together with diplomatic protests, brought pressure from the Madrid government, from the Generalitat and from the Comité Central de Milicias Antifascistas for an end to the ‘disorder’. The CNT leadership was fearful that complaints about disorder could be a device to generate a desire for a return to the old state structures and initially set up Escorza’s committee to investigate the excesses."
"As early as 30 July, the CNT–FAI issued a statement that anyone undertaking unauthorized house searches and acts that compromised the new revolutionary order would be shot. Some days afterwards, on 3 August, Gardenyes and some members of his gang were detained and executed without trial. This caused outrage within certain sectors of the anarcho-syndicalist movement.28"
"Gardenyes’s execution was the response of the CNT–FAI leadership to demands for an end to the revolutionary terrorism. His execution was carried out by a group led by Manuel Escorza, and the body was dumped on the outskirts of Barcelona. It was rumoured that Gardenyes struggled to the last, some of his fingernails being left in the car that took him on his final journey.29 The Madrid-based anarchist Felipe Sandoval, a notorious and vicious killer in his own right, described Escorza to his own Francoist interrogators as ‘a twisted figure, physically and morally a monster, a man whose methods disgusted me’.30
The activities of Escorza did nothing to reassure the moderate elements alarmed by anarchist atrocities. The Generalitat’s efforts to save lives were more effective. Safe-conducts were issued to Catholics, businessmen, right-wingers, middle-class individuals and clergy. Passports were made available for well over 10,000 right-wingers to embark on foreign ships in the port of Barcelona. Passports with false names were issued for people whose real identities might have put them in danger. In 1939, the French government reported that in the course of the civil war, in collaboration with the Generalitat, its Consulate in Barcelona had evacuated 6,630 people, of whom 2,142 were priests, monks and nuns, and 868 children. On 24 August 1936, Mussolini’s Consul in Barcelona, Carlo Bossi, reported that 4,388 Spaniards had been evacuated in Italian warships.31"
"Few of the beneficiaries showed gratitude. One of them was the wealthy financier Miquel Mateu i Pla, who, on reaching the rebel zone, formed part of Franco’s staff. After Barcelona was occupied in 1939, on the recommendation of Father Juan Tusquets, Franco appointed Mateu as Mayor. Mateu’s policies suggested that he wished to take revenge on the entire population for his discomfort at the hands of the FAI.32"
Difference between leftists and rightist violence"A difference between the practice in Catalonia and that in the rebel zone was the way in which the corpses of the victims of extra-judicial violence were treated. In Barcelona, the relatives of the victims were able to ascertain the fate of their loved ones. The Red Cross, the municipal sanitation services or the staff of the judiciary took the corpses found in the streets to the hospital clinic where they were photographed and numbered. To avoid any such investigations, the FAI patrols established crematoriums in order to dispose of the bodies of their victims. Sometimes the bodies would be burned with gasoline, others dissolved in lime. At other times, bodies were concealed in wells or buried in remote spots."
Revolutionary justice"Thus, behind a rhetoric of revolutionary justice, acts of violence were being perpetrated and not just against the clergy. The violence reflected popular outrage at the military coup and its attempt to destroy the advances made by the Republic. Revenge was taken against the sections of society on whose behalf the military was acting. So hatred of an oppressive social system found expression in the murder or humiliation of parish priests who justified it, of Civil Guards and policemen who defended it, of the wealthy who enjoyed it and of their agents who implemented it. In some cases, the acts did have a revolutionary dimension – the burning of property records and land registries in the countryside or the occupation of the homes of the rich in the big cities. Although there were also criminal acts, murder, rape, theft and the settling of personal scores, for some the liquidation of the old ruling class was seen as a revolutionary act within a new morality, as it had been in France, Mexico and Russia. The targets of ‘revolutionary justice’ were ‘proven fascists’, which meant right-wingers of any kind who could be supposed to support the coup. Accordingly, landowners, bankers, factory owners, shopkeepers, senior personnel, engineers and technicians in factories and even workers thought to be too close to the bosses were likely to be condemned by any of the many tribunals that were set up by factory or neighbourhood committees in the towns or village committees in the countryside.
The initial rage against the military rebels and a desire to punish them for the bloodshed that they had caused soon combined with a determination to consolidate the revolution by eliminating all those supposed to be its enemies. Equally, news of military reverses and the arrival of the corpses of the fallen provoked outbursts of vengeful executions.46 A different kind of violence was sparked by the rivalries – sometimes ideological, sometimes personal – between the various political parties and militia groups. On the one hand, Companys’s Esquerra and the PSUC sought to rebuild a judicial system, thus offering captured political opponents constitutional guarantees, while the anarchists saw the immediate physical annihilation of the enemy, without any due process, as the basis of a new utopian revolutionary order."
"A priority for the anarchists was to secure reparation for the perceived injustice of sentences passed by monarchist and Republican courts before 18 July 1936. The first step had to be the destruction of judicial records. The anarchist leadership, including Diego Abad de Santillán, one of the leaders of the CCMA militias, believed that the people’s justice had no need of lawyers or judges. Accordingly, on 11 August, they sent an armed squad to take control of the Palace of Justice in Barcelona. Their excuse for entering the building was that they had come to search for arms. The radical anarchist lawyer and journalist Ángel Samblancat witnessed the consequent stand-off between the Civil Guards protecting the Palace and the patrol whose leader announced that they had come to arrest ‘the scoundrels who combat the revolution from behind their barricades of files and indictments’."
"At this point, Samblancat went to inform the CNT representatives on the CCMA. They explained that they had sent the first patrol because ‘that nest of vipers has to be fumigated whether the Generalitat likes it or not’. It was then suggested that he take over the Palace and they instructed him to get substantial reinforcements and return to the building to clear out ‘rogues’ still there. This he did and the professional jurists were evicted. The official announcement in the press at the time claimed that Samblancat had been sent to prevent uncontrolled elements destroying material archived there. Since this was far from the anarchists’ intention, it is reasonable to assume that it was the cover used to secure the approval of the other members of the CCMA for the operation.49 Several judges were murdered. The proceedings were legitimized on 17 August 1936, when the Generalitat dismissed all judicial personnel and set up a revolutionary body, known as the Oficina Jurídica, run initially and briefly by Samblancat.50
On 28 August, Samblancat resigned and was replaced by the anarchist lawyer Eduardo Barriobero. He declared that all crimes were social in origin and boasted of destroying hundreds of tons of judicial records from before 19 July 1936. Huge quantities of paper were burned on the sidewalk of the Passeig de Sant Joan. Barriobero claimed that he renounced a salary but was later accused of using his position to accumulate considerable wealth. He took on as assistants two members of the FAI prisoners’ aid committee, José Batllé i Salvat and Antonio Devesa i Bayona, who both had prison records, having been sentenced to twelve and fourteen years respectively for armed robbery. Large amounts of money held in escrow in relation to cases under consideration simply disappeared. Certificates of anti-fascist reliability were sold. Sixty anarchist militiamen were on the payroll of the Oficina. People that they arrested had money extorted from their families for their release. Huge fines were imposed for possession of religious artefacts, the money disappearing into the pockets of Barriobero’s men. According to Pons Garlandí, Barriobero worked in cahoots with Aurelio Fernández, Escorza and Eroles.51
During the period that Barriobero and his CNT cronies ran the justice system, the Generalitat was largely impotent in terms of public order. The only active step that it was able to take towards stopping spontaneous ‘justice’ was the creation, on 24 August, in each of the four Catalan provinces, of people’s courts composed of three magistrates and twelve jurors from workers’ unions and left-wing parties. This was partly a reaction to the central government’s introduction of popular tribunals by decrees of 23 and 25 August in response to the murder of prisoners at the Cárcel Modelo of Madrid. The Generalitat’s establishment of its own version, the jurats populars, was accepted by the CNT.52 Their mission was initially the repression of fascism, but it was quickly expanded to include crimes of rebellion and sedition. In general, the lack of juridical training of their members meant that proceedings were often shambolic. Much time was wasted as jurors, witnesses, the accused and even the public were given free rein to speak at length. Overall, there was a tendency towards leniency. Sentences were usually extreme, either absolution or the death penalty, with most of the latter generally commuted to imprisonment.53"
"By mid-September, in response to the ineffectiveness of the dual system of power, President Companys had decided that the Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee had to be dissolved. The fear and unpopularity generated by the Patrulles de Control made this slightly easier. Believing that the initiative should come from the CCMA itself, Companys first broached the idea with a CNT–FAI delegation consisting of Durruti, García Oliver and Aurelio Fernández. They agreed and, on 26 September, a new coalition government was formed, under Josep Tarradellas, including CNT ministers (consellers). This did not immediately put an end to the abuses of the patrols. In fact, because of the arrogance and sectarianism with which the CNT consellers behaved, they quickly provoked the enmity of other left-wing groups. In particular, the Conseller de Defensa ensured that the bulk of the arms purchased by the Generalitat ended up in anarchist hands. Similarly, the way Josep Joan i Domènech, the CNT Minister of Supply, organized the requisitioning of food provoked conflict in the Catalan countryside and the hostility of the PSUC. This would fester until it caused a mini-civil-war in Catalonia in May 1937.54"
"Nin’s achievement was to reinstate conventional justice and put an end to the arbitrary ‘justice’ of the CNT–FAI.56
State crackdown on anarchists after revolutionary justice squads and infighting, Continued anarchist violence"The Generalitat’s opposition to uncontrolled violence is further evidenced by the major investigation that was begun in April 1937 into the assassinations in the first months of the war and the clandestine cemeteries where the victims were buried. The president of the high court of Barcelona, Josep Andreu i Abellò, set up a special court and, as a result of its investigations throughout Catalonia, the corpses of many missing persons were located and their assassins identified. Among those arrested was Dionís Eroles, accused of involvement with a clandestine cemetery in Cerdanyola, although he was released on bail. Aurelio Fernández was also arrested, albeit for offences related to the extortion of individuals arrested by the patrols. There were numerous trials of those accused of murder and robbery. After the mini-civil-war in Barcelona in May 1937, witnessed by George Orwell, the CNT presented these trials as Communist revenge on the anarchists and the POUM, but they had started one month before. Moreover, on 2 August that year, FAI gunmen made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Andreu i Abellò. Subsequent investigation suggested that Eroles was behind the attempt, although nothing was proven. Nevertheless, it is the case that atrocities committed by members of the PSUC and the Esquerra were not pursued with the same vigour as those of the anarchists. When the denunciations had come from those whose houses or land had been confiscated, the accused were released. Nevertheless, those found guilty of murder and looting were punished.57"
"Not long after the creation of Tarradellas’s government, major problems quickly became apparent in the Ministry of Internal Security. The new Minister, Artemi Aiguader i Miró of the Esquerra, inherited much of the personnel of the old Departament d’Investigació of the CCMA, including Aurelio Fernández, Dionís Eroles, Manuel Escorza and Josep Asens. Inevitably, there was tension bordering on violence as Aiguader’s first chief of police, Andreu Revertés i Llopart of the ERC, tried to restrain the patrols. In late November 1936, he was falsely accused of plotting against the Generalitat by Aurelio Fernández and Eroles. He was imprisoned and later murdered. Aiguader then chose as his chief of police Eusebio Rodríguez Salas, ‘El Manco’, a PSUC member. Rodríguez Salas was as enthusiastic as his predecessor about controlling the FAI. Aurelio Fernández physically attacked him in Aiguader’s office and the Conseller himself had to intervene, pistol in hand, to prevent a serious crime. The freedom given by Eroles to the FAI patrols led to conflict with the Civil Guard.58
Outside Barcelona, uncontrolled terror was the norm for a brief period. The columns of anarchists who flooded from the city in requisitioned vehicles left a trail of slaughter in their wake. As they passed through towns and villages en route to Aragon, they executed anyone considered to be a fascist, which meant clergy and practising Catholics, landowners and merchants. In the province of Lleida, army officers, the Civil Guard and local right-wing groups had initially controlled the city. However, under pressure from a general strike and demoralized by news of the defeat of the rising in Barcelona, the rebels surrendered on 20 July."
"The bitter hostility between the CNT and the Communists fed off the fact that the anarchists hoarded substantial quantities of weaponry including machine-guns. In a report to the Comintern on 19 September, the secretary general of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, claimed that, in Barcelona, ‘the anarchists have seized virtually all the weapons in Catalonia and they keep them, not just for their columns, but for use against other working-class groups. Since the military insurrection, they have assassinated several Communist militants and trade unionists and committed atrocities in the name of what they call libertarian communism.’ Similarly, André Marty, the Comintern overseer of the volunteers of the International Brigades, commented that the anarchists’ superiority in weapons meant that, in the short term, compromise was necessary but ‘we will get even with them’.74"
"Some of the most violent clashes between Communists and anarchists took place in the Valencian region. This was in part a reflection of the repressive violence that had already occurred both in the city and in many towns and villages of its three provinces. Self-styled patrols and committees had eliminated those they considered to be fascists. Many Popular Front Committees would sanction land seizures, attacks on churches or the burning of the property registries but they could not always control individuals who, as happened in Catalonia, murdered priests, landowners and municipal and judicial functionaries. Not untypical was the case of Llíria, to the north-west of Valencia, where a moderate committee found itself under threat from FAI patrols from the capital. Others in danger included smallholders who did not want their farms collectivized. Again, as in Catalonia, the killing was often done by groups from elsewhere on a reciprocal basis by those ashamed to murder people from their own town. In Castellón, the killing was shared between ‘La Desesperada’, a group from Izquierda Republicana, and ‘Los Inseparables’ of the CNT–FAI.75
In the fertile Valencian countryside, there had been few problems when CNT and UGT members occupied land belonging to rebel supporters, many of whom had been assassinated in the first wave of disorder. However, when the anarchists tried to impose collectivization forcibly, they were resisted by smallholders old and new. The anarchists would arrive at a village, whether in Catalonia, Aragon or Valencia, and oblige the town crier to declare ‘libertarian communism’ and the abolition of money and property. Thus considerable violence was provoked by CNT columns trying to impose the collectivization of land wherever they passed. Many of the members of the columns were urban workers who propounded purist anarchist aspirations without any understanding of the specific conditions of each place."
"In the southernmost Aragonese province, Teruel, the repression was also set off by the arrival of anarchist columns. Having detained rightists and clergy identified by local militants, the leaders of the Ortiz Column would often organize a crude public trial. In communities like La Puebla de Híjar or Alcorisa, the population was obliged to assemble in the village square. Prisoners were brought out one by one on to the balcony of the town hall and the villagers asked to vote on whether they should live or die. The scale of the repression would depend on the will and determination of the local anti-fascist committee to prevent killings. In tiny villages like Azaila, Castel de Cabra and Vinaceite, the committee managed to ensure that there would be no executions. In other towns and villages such as Alcañiz, Calanda, Albalate del Arzobispo, Calaceite, Muniesa or Mora de Rubielos, the committee gave the names of those to be executed to the anarchist occupiers. In others, such as La Puebla de Valverde, the initiative came entirely from the anarchists of the notorious ‘Iron Column’ from Valencia (Columna de Hierro) who killed those who opposed their collectivization.79
Idealistically motivated collectivization was usually greeted enthusiastically by the landless labourers but met fierce resistance from smallholders. Some of the anarchist columns were accused of looting, abuse of women and large-scale theft of crops. In the villages of Valencia, growers were given worthless vouchers in exchange for requisitioned livestock. Their wheat and orange harvests were seized and taken to Valencia for export by the CNT. In late August, at Puebla de Valverde in Teruel, tens of thousands of cured hams were requisitioned ‘for the revolution’. The worst culprits in looting came from the self-styled Iron Column.80"
"The two columns joined together at Sagunto. Anarchist attacks on the town’s churches and the properties of local right-wingers severely undermined the commitment of the Civil Guards in the columns. According to one of their officers, they were merely biding their time until they could rebel, aware that to do so in a town like Sagunto would be suicidal. They moved off at dawn on 27 July. Some hours later, they reached Segorbe, where the force was joined by more Civil Guards from the local garrison and from Cuenca. The town was entirely in the hands of the CNT–FAI. The situation there, with evidence that members of the column were stealing, clinched the determination of the Civil Guard officers to change sides as soon as an opportunity arose. Setting off towards Teruel at dawn on 28 July, the force totalled approximately 410 Civil Guards, some Carabineros and an indeterminate number of militiamen, ranging from 180 to 600. The imprecision over numbers reflects the fact that new volunteers joined and others dropped out along the way. Whatever their number, all were recent volunteers, totally untrained, and many without weapons. Among them were several local politicians from Castellón.81
As they neared Teruel, the columns split up. Casas Sala led one group, the bulk of the militiamen and a small contingent of Civil Guards, to capture Mora de Rubielos further to the north. Fernández Bujanda headed directly for Teruel with the Carabineros and Civil Guards and about fifty militiamen. En route, they stopped to rest overnight at the tiny village of Puebla de Valverde, south-east of Teruel. Using the excuse of looting by some of the militiamen, the Civil Guards made their move. They surrounded the resting militiamen and, in a battle lasting barely twenty minutes, murdered most of them, the Carabineros and between fifty and sixty inhabitants of the town. When the news reached Mora de Rubielos, the other column hastened to Puebla de Valverde. Casas Sala halted the trucks outside the village, believing that he could negotiate a solution. When he and Major Sirera entered the village alone, they were quickly overpowered. The bulk of the militiamen abandoned them to their fate and fled back to Castellón. On 30 July, the Civil Guards took Casas Sala, Colonel Fernández Bujanda and about forty-five other prisoners to Teruel, where they were executed without trial the following day. Their deaths were inscribed in the town registry as caused by ‘internal haemorrhage’. The reinforcement of the tiny garrison at Teruel by the treacherous Civil Guards guaranteed its immediate survival for the rebels.82"
"In consequence, members of the Iron Column often just left the front to go to Valencia and other towns of the region where they were responsible for wreaking terror. The criminal records of the Civil Governor’s offices were burned. Policemen were murdered. The scale of robbery and vandalism committed in the Valencian rearguard by the Iron Column led both Communists and Socialists to deem it to be as much of an enemy as the fifth column. In clashes with its militants, there were numerous cases of prominent militants of the PCE and the UGT being assassinated. In late September, with the excuse of raising funds to buy arms for the front, members of the column left their posts and carried out robberies and other crimes in Castellón, Valencia and Gandía. "
"Moreover, by the end of August, even the CNT newspaper El Luchador felt obliged by the ‘monstrous’ occurrence of house searches for theft, arrests and murders based on personal grudges to adopt an ‘authoritarian and statist’ stance and to express a determination to put an end to such abuses. It was to little avail. The biggest massacre took place on 29 November 1936 when forty-nine right-wingers were shot against the walls of the cemetery in reprisal for a bombing raid.88"
Tribunales Populares"Thereafter, as will be seen below, the creation and operation of the so-called People’s Courts (Tribunales Populares) gradually reduced the scale of executions. During the worst month of the war, August 1936, nearly 70 per cent of the executions were of military personnel involved in the coup. Indeed, in the worst year, 1936, more than 40 per cent of the deaths were of army and naval officers. Over the entire war, military personnel constituted 31 per cent of the total rearguard executions in Murcia, although they constituted 66 per cent of those killed in Cartagena. The next most numerous group of victims were priests and religious, around 9 per cent of the total, followed by a similar number of property-owners, industrialists and rightists in general.91
Rebel bombing attacks frequently led to popular reprisals in the Republican zone. In Málaga, this was a frequent occurrence in response to bombs dropped by a rebel seaplane. The city was largely in the hands of the CNT–FAI-dominated Committee of Public Safety. Approximately five hundred right-wingers had been detained by various militia groups working on its orders and were held in the city’s Cárcel Nueva. These groups, which had names like ‘Death Patrol’, ‘Dawn Patrol’, ‘Lightning Patrol’ and ‘Pancho Villa’, were predominantly anarchist, and included common criminals released in the immediate wake of the uprising. On 22 August, a furious crowd gathered after thirty women, children and old people were killed and many more wounded in a bombing raid. To appease the mob, the Committee drew up a list of sixty-five prisoners, who were taken out and shot. On 30 August, after another visit from the seaplane, a further fifty-three prisoners were selected and shot; on 20 September another forty-three; the following day, a further seventeen; on 24 September ninety-seven. In fact, 25 per cent (275) of all the rightists killed in the city of Málaga (1,110) while it remained in Republican hands met their fates in reprisals for bombing raids.92 Similarly, the bulk of killings in both Guadalajara and Santander were in response to bombing attacks on both cities.93"
"The military uprising, ostensibly against a non-existent Communist take-over plot, provoked a collapse of the structures of law and order. To make matters worse, in an effort to convince the Great Powers to support the Republic, the cabinet formed on 19 July was made up exclusively of middle-class liberals and thus neither respected nor, initially, obeyed by the left-wing parties and unions that defeated the uprising. An outburst of revolutionary fervour and an orgy of killing would demonstrate once more that Spain’s harshly repressive society had produced a brutalized underclass. The key events that underlay the violence in Republican Madrid took place in the first two days. The opening of the prisons saw hundreds of common criminals released, among them sadists and psychopaths who were only too willing to use the political chaos as a shield for their activities. Moreover, they had ample motives to seek revenge against the magistrates and judges who had put them in jail. In fact, out of fear of reprisals or because of their sympathy with the coup, many judicial functionaries went into hiding. More than one hundred judges were murdered.1"
Checas"In the first few days, what was called ‘popular justice’ was meted out spontaneously and indiscriminately against anyone denounced as a rightist. However, in Madrid, as had happened in Barcelona and Valencia, virtually every left-wing political party and trade union soon established its own squads, the checas, to eliminate suspected fascists. At headquarters set up in requisitioned buildings, they often had private prisons where detainees were interrogated. Executions usually took place on the outskirts of the city. In Madrid, there were nearly two hundred of these squads, if those set up by recently freed common criminals are included. The principal checas run by left-wing parties and unions numbered about twenty-five.6 Considered to be warriors in the social war, criminals were often accepted into anarchist rearguard militias. Although far from having a monopoly of the worst excesses, the anarchists were the most prominent in the bloodshed in Madrid. Their checas often took the names given respectively to CNT and PCE neighbourhood headquarters and cells – the anarchists using ‘Libertarian Atheneum’ and the Communists using the name ‘Radio’."
"The targets of the self-appointed checas and militia groups were not only the active supporters of the military coup. Many totally innocent individuals were arrested and sometimes murdered, as one middle-class detainee wrote later, simply for owning a business, for having opposed a strike, for having expressed support for the suppression of the Asturian rising, for belonging to the clergy or ‘for being rude to the maid’s boyfriend or to the lout of a doorman’. Concierges would often tip off a checa on the basis of the arrival of an unknown visitor or an unusual package, or because an occupant of the building never left home. Suspicion was enough.9 Antonio Machado, the fervently pro-Republican poet, was arrested in the early days of the war in a café in the Glorieta de Chamberí because a militiaman mistook him for a priest.10"
"Some responsibility for the violence must fall on a significant part of the anarcho-syndicalist leadership. At the end of July, the principal anarchist daily in Madrid, CNT, carried the banner headline ‘Popular Justice. The Fascist Murderers Must Fall’. The passionate article went on to dismiss the Republican authorities as if they were as much the enemy as the rebels:
Faced with a judiciary and courts that stink of rot and whose spirit and whose laws are purely bourgeois, the people must take control of justice for itself … the Republic was and is bourgeois, strictly conservative and authoritarian. Having survived the events that we have just survived, and with the popular forces in the street, with the weapons of their free will in their hands, there is no other law and no other authority than that of the people. This is justice: what the people want, what the people order, what the people impose. The Spanish people must smash its enemies, both at the front and in the rearguard. We must destroy the thousand-year-old enemy who hides in the administration, in the laws of the State, in the banks and in the management of companies. The murderers of the people have to fall! They pululate in industry, in commerce, in politics, in the courts. That is where fascism hides … it is necessary to purify with fire. Exactly. We must burn much, MUCH, in order to purify everything.13"
"Some anarchists were appalled by the paseos (people ‘being taken for a ride’ that culminated in their murder), but many others favoured the elimination of enemy supporters both as an opportunity to build a new world and as a necessary part of the war effort. For most elements of the Popular Front, the annihilation of the enemy within was a central wartime imperative. Política, the daily newspaper of Azaña’s middle-class party Izquierda Republicana, expressed outrage that rightists had been released because some Republican had intervened on their behalf. Arguing that neither friendship nor family ties should hinder the purging of the rearguard, the paper threatened to publicize the names of those involved in future cases.16 The Communists and the anarchists were both ruthless in wanting to root out the enemy within. Eventually, however, the Communists would come to see the anarchists as damaging the war effort and would turn on them, somewhat later than in Barcelona, and thus open a new phase of the repression."
Infighting between state and revolutionaries on popular justice"Prieto was effectively prime minister in the shadows from 20 July to 4 September while apparently serving merely as adviser to the cabinet led by the liberal Republican Professor José Giral. From a large office in the Navy Ministry, he worked untiringly to give direction to the shambles that was Giral’s government. On 8 August, he declared:
Even if the terrible and tragic reports about what has happened and is still happening in areas dominated by our enemies are really to be believed, even if day after day we receive lists of the names of comrades, of beloved friends, whose commitment to an ideal ensured their death at the hands of traitors, do not, I beg you, I entreat you, do not imitate their behaviour. Meet their cruelty with your pity, meet their savagery with your mercy, meet the excesses of the enemy with your generous benevolence. Do not imitate them! Do not imitate them! Be better than them in your moral conduct! Be better than them in your generosity.17"
Prieto referred to this broadcast in a speech made in Chile near the end of the war: ‘I ask you to show me a single word of mercy pronounced by the rebels. I ask you to show me, if there are none from the military rebels, words of mercy from the civilian elements that supported the insurgency. And lastly, I ask, with even more justification, that you show me, because I don’t know of any, a single word, similar to mine, pronounced in public before the bloodthirsty crowds, by a representative of the Catholic Church in the Francoist zone.’18 Felix Schlayer later testified to Prieto’s efforts to stop the violence.19 One way in which the Republic tried to save lives was its tolerance of the questionable legality with which several embassies, including Schlayer’s, rented buildings in which refuge was given – sometimes at a price – to rebel supporters. Similarly, efforts to permit those under threat to leave Spain had no equivalent on the rebel side.20 After the war, the only embassy to offer asylum to defeated Republicans was that of Panama. It was raided by Falangists and those who had sought asylum therein were seized.
Prieto’s appeal on 8 August was supported by Socialists and Republicans of the centre-left who also expressed concern that round-ups by extremist militiamen were netting respectable citizens. However, it fell on deaf ears as far as most of the left was concerned.21 This was especially true of the Socialist youth who were drawing ever closer to the Communist Party. They had been attacking Prieto since 1934. Now, one of the most prominent adult followers of Largo Caballero, Carlos Baraibar, editor of the left-Socialist daily Claridad, published a firm editorial two days after Prieto’s speech, with the title ‘About a Speech. Neither brothers nor compatriots’. In it, while recognizing Prieto’s generosity and good faith, he argued that it was impossible to regard as brothers those who had taken up arms against the Republic and were murdering workers in order to enslave them in a dictatorship. He referred to ‘the feudal landowners, the warlike and anti-Christian clergy, the military barbarians who lead the campaign, the pseudo-intellectuals who justify them, and the bankers who finance them’.22
On the same day, in the Communist Party daily, Dolores Ibárruri replied to Prieto in similar terms:
We must exterminate them! We must put an end once and for all to the threat of a coup d’état, to military intervention! There has been too much blood spilt for us to forgive while the horrendous crimes, the multiple murders committed coldly, sadistically weigh on us like blocks of lead … We must not agree to a single one being pardoned; and if at any time we should feel weakness then let the memory of our comrades burned alive, of the children murdered, of the men mutilated, be the spur that strengthens us in the hard but necessary work of liquidating the enemies of democracy and the Republic.23
"Similar sentiments emanated from the Communists’ militia, the so-called Fifth Regiment. Under the headline ‘Pity? Mercy? No!’, its mouthpiece, Milicia Popular, declared: ‘The struggle against fascism is a battle of extermination. Pity would be an encouragement to the fascist bandits. Where they pass, they sow death, sorrow, misery. They rape our women. They burn our houses … Pity? Mercy? No; a thousand times no.’24
One of Prieto’s closest allies, Julián Zugazagoitia, the editor of El Socialista, decided not to print personal accusations of the kind that in the anarchist press often led to assassinations. ‘We worked’, he wrote later, ‘to build up popular confidence and to strengthen the authority of the government.’ Marcelino Domingo, the president of Azaña’s moderate Izquierda Republicana, was interviewed in Milicia Popular. Pointing out that the international standing of the Republic was in the hands of the militiamen, he said that they must establish a reputation ‘for their daring but also for their civic feelings; for their determination to annihilate the enemy on the field of battle but also for their religious respect for the rights of the adversary when he is no longer a combatant but a prisoner … It is important for each militiaman to have medals for heroism on his chest but it is even more important that he be able hold his head high and show that his hands are clean.’ The impact of his words was no doubt diluted by the details of rebel atrocities reported elsewhere in the paper.25"
"There were no such ambiguities in the rebel zone where the working class and the liberal bourgeoisie were either exterminated or terrified into near total passivity. In contrast, despite the crisis of state authority provoked by the military coup and the consequent extra-judicial abuses, the Republican authorities tried to curb extremist atrocities and to rebuild the state. The militias of the most left-wing parties and trade unions were determined to annihilate the representatives of the Church, the army, the upper class and the non-liberal bourgeoisie. In other words, they aimed to create a revolutionary society to combat the military/fascist state. However, the Republican establishment and the bulk of the Socialist and Communist parties stood out against it because they understood that the Republic needed the backing of the Western democracies and that required law and order. Accordingly, they tried to recreate the structures that would permit a multi-class democracy. However, the determination of the extremists rendered the task immensely difficult."
Clergy"There was widespread terrorism for a period of about five months which gradually diminished over the subsequent four months. Hatred of the clergy was fanned by evidence of the exorbitant wealth of the Church and also by examples of clergy seen fighting on the rebel side.26 There were frequent reports in the Republican press about the wealth found during searches of monasteries, convents and other ecclesiastical properties. In early August, it was claimed that, when the Bishop’s palace in Jaén was searched, 8 million pesetas in cash was found. When the Bishop’s sister, Teresa Basulto Jiménez, was arrested, she allegedly had 1 million pesetas concealed in her corsets. On 18 August, it was reported that in the offices of the Madrid diocese there had been found nearly 17 million pesetas’ worth of government bonds and a further million in cash and jewels. The following day, a search of the Madrid branch of Credit Lyonnais discovered two safe-deposit boxes belonging to the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul – sometimes known as the Little Sisters of the Poor. They contained 340,000 pesetas in cash, 60 million pesetas’ worth of shares, the deeds of ninety-three properties in Madrid worth another 100 million pesetas, a quantity of gold ingots and three kilos of gold coins, some of great numismatic value. One day later, it was reported that, in a Carmelite convent in the Calle de Góngora in Madrid, works of art worth 1 million pesetas had been found.27
Reports of exorbitant ecclesiastical wealth were based on claims from the militia groups carrying out the searches. They further intensified popular anti-clericalism by confirming age-old clichés. A similar boost came from the belief that, in the early days of the rising, Church premises were used by rebel supporters to store weapons and also as a refuge from which snipers could operate. A moderate Republican army officer, José Martín Blázquez, claimed that six monks fired on the crowd from the church tower in the Montaña barracks.28 The Civil Governor of Almería, Juan Ruiz Peinado Vallejo, recalled that, on 23 July, his offices were fired on from a nearby monastery by three priests.29 In general, however, outside of Navarre, there is only limited evidence of priests taking part in fighting.
Despite dogged international propaganda about nuns being molested, there is substantial anecdotal evidence of nuns being protected. The English nurse Mary Bingham recounted examples of nuns being looked after by Assault Guards. Many nuns had been arrested in the first days when militiamen had entered the convents. Jesús de Galíndez, of the Basque Nationalist Party’s delegation in Madrid, found little difficulty in securing their release and finding safe refuge for them. There were cases of convents and their cloistered nuns being ‘socialized’, by which they were left to function as before except that, alongside the mother superior, there was a supervisor named by the authorities and their work consisted of making uniforms and blankets.30
The official stance of the CNT was that nuns should not be molested in any way but that their communities were to be dissolved. The nuns thereby ‘liberated’ should work in collectivized workshops or as nurses in military hospitals. They could also choose protective detention in prison or return to live with family members. There were cases of ex-nuns marrying their ‘liberators’.31 When Cardinal Gomá returned to Toledo after the city fell to the rebels, he found his cellar drunk dry and his crucifixes damaged. However, the nuns who served in the episcopal palace assured him that they had been well treated during the two months that it had been occupied by thirsty militiamen.32"
Treatment of rebels"Prominent among those in danger of losing their lives in the Republican zone were army officers who had taken part in the failed coup. That was the usual punishment for mutiny. However, they were not the only ones at risk. The potential stance of all officers was being investigated by a rapidly created committee under the presidency of Captain Eleuterio Díaz-Tendero Merchán. A Socialist and a Freemason, and somewhat embittered by his being only a captain at the age of fifty-four, he was one of the founders of the Unión Militar Republicana Antifascista, of which he became president. In the spring of 1936, he had built up a file-card system on the officer corps which included the conspirators’ own lists of officers they could trust not to betray their plans. Now, on the basis of the file-cards and interviews, the committee classified officers by an A (anti-fascist), R (Republican), I (indifferent) or F (fascist). Those classified as ‘fascist’ or as ‘indifferent’ and refusing to fight for the Republic were arrested.34 In prison, they were given the opportunity to recant their rightist views, fulfil their oath of loyalty and fight against the rebels. Few accepted the chance and, guilty of mutiny, virtually guaranteed their own eventual execution.35"
"The government tried to have General López Ochoa transferred to somewhere safer but was prevented twice by anarchists surrounding the hospital. A third attempt, on 17 August, saw him being taken out in a coffin drugged with morphine to appear dead, when the ruse was discovered. He was later alleged to have been dragged from the coffin by an anarchist called Manuel Muñoz de Molino and shot in the gardens of the hospital. His head was severed and carried around the streets on a pole, with a card reading: ‘This is the butcher of Asturias’.40"
"When the guards withdrew, 193 of the prisoners were executed in groups of twenty-five. In the course of the carnage, the Bishop fell to his knees and began to pray. His sister, Teresa Basulto, shouted at one of the militiamen, ‘This is an outrage. I’m just a poor woman.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ he replied, ‘we’ll get a woman to shoot you,’ and she was shot by an anarchist named Josefa Coso"
"The right-wing prisoners would gather in the courtyard and the patios and rejoice openly at news of the advances of rebel troops. On various pretexts – to prevent them enjoying the sight of German aircraft bombing the city, when a prisoner was about to be executed or when militiamen arrived to take one away – they were often confined to their cells.82 Some of the younger Falangists would shout insults and fascist slogans through the windows at passing militiamen. Such provocative behaviour worried prisoners like Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law. Some Republican newspapers published indignant articles about the prisoners which drew the attention of the CPIP. One especially provocative piece referred to:
various priests and military chaplains, with few exceptions, sleek and fat as befits their profession. They are dressed haphazardly, many in pyjamas, some in militia overalls, shirts of every colour of the rainbow, cotton and khaki trousers, wrinkled, too long or too short. Unshaved, they are hardly distinguishable from ordinary prisoners. Their previously elegant air was provided by their uniforms or suits. They speak little, meditate a lot and sob a bit … Other galleries hold more fascists involved in the rising and others who were arrested before it took place, such as the Falangist leaders Ruiz de Alda and Sánchez Mazas."
Rebuilding state security apparatus"When Muñoz first went to the Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS – Security Headquarters), he found the building completely deserted. Attempting to rebuild the apparatus of law and order, Muñoz faced the unreliability of the police, the Civil Guard and the Assault Guards. Those that could be relied upon were needed at the front.49 An indication of the consequent impotence was his ineffectual announcement that porteros (concierges) would be held responsible for any searches and arrests carried out in their buildings by unauthorized personnel.50
Muñoz’s basic problem in trying to rebuild his department’s central role in public order was that every party and trade union had squads that autonomously carried out house searches, arrests and executions. The most numerous and the most disorganized were the anarchist ones. The one run by the Madrid branch of the Socialist Party was more efficient and was soon given official status. It was known as the CIEP because it used the file-card system built up by the party’s Electoral Information Committee (Comisión de Información Electoral Permanente). Its principal leaders, who went on to play important roles, were Julio de Mora Martínez and two professional policemen who were also Socialists, Anselmo Burgos Gil and David Vázquez Baldominos. Julio de Mora would later become head of the Departamento Especial de Información del Estado (DEDIDE – Special State Intelligence Department). Burgos Gil would lead the bodyguards of the Soviet Ambassador. In June 1937 Vázquez Baldominos would be made chief of police in Madrid.51"
"Aware of their own impotence and in a first desperate attempt to regain some vestige of control, General Pozas and Muñoz agreed that it was necessary to get the left-wing parties and unions involved in supporting the DGS."
"By creating the Comité Provincial de Investigación Pública (CPIP), Muñoz was placing law and order in the capital in the hands of a committee composed of thirty representatives of the left-wing parties and trade unions. It was dominated by the CNT–FAI, whose representatives were Benigno Mancebo Martín and Manuel Rascón Ramírez. They would later acquire notoriety for their role in the sacas – the removal and subsequent assassination of prisoners."
"The Committee designated six tribunals to function round the clock with two of them working eight-hour shifts each day. These tribunals, under the overall supervision of Benigno Mancebo and consisting of men without any legal training or experience, sometimes themselves criminals, undertook the arrest, trial and sentencing of suspects. The men responsible for arresting suspects were able, with credentials provided by the DGS, to enter any premises, seize any property they considered questionable and arrest anyone they thought suspicious. Mancebo made decisions on the basis of statements from the employees or domestic servants of those detained. He was merciful with those said to have treated their staff well. Those found guilty by these tribunals would be taken to prison. Often, militiamen from the Committee or some independent checa would go to the prisons with an order of liberation on DGS notepaper. As the man left the prison, usually between midnight and dawn, he would be picked up by militiamen, driven away and shot. Among those given DGS badges and identification papers were common criminals such as the notorious Felipe Emilio Sandoval Cabrerizo, a fifty-year-old anarchist who used the sobriquet ‘Dr Muñiz’.54
Not long after the creation of the CPIP, Muñoz was so concerned by the continuing wave of paseos that he turned to the CNT leadership for help. He was particularly appalled by the spectacle of large numbers of corpses being found each morning in the Pradera de San Isidro, the popular park to the south-west of the city. Muñoz knew that David Antona, the secretary of the Regional CNT, was hostile to the paseos. Through Antona, he was able to meet some young CNT leaders, including Gregorio Gallego, in the hope of securing their help in putting an end to the paseos. They told him it was impossible since that would involve them taking on their own comrades from the CPIP and the other checas. When Gallego discussed the meeting with Eduardo Val and Amor Nuño, who ran the anarchist checas, Val was critical of uncontrolled violence, but he may have been making a distinction between that and the violence that he did control. Nuño expressed approval of the paseos, saying ‘instant justice strengthens the revolutionary morale of the people and commits it to the life-and-death struggle in which we are involved’.55"
"Obviously, the overlap between police and parallel police organizations opened up considerable opportunities for corruption and abuse. The wages of those who worked in the CPIP were paid from money confiscated during house searches. Three weeks after its creation, the CPIP was obliged to issue a statement insisting that no unauthorized house searches were to be carried out, that only weapons, compromising documents and valuables of use to the war effort were to be confiscated and that everything taken was to be handed in to the CPIP.60 Accordingly, all the left-wing political parties and unions jointly announced that detentions or house searches could be carried out only by agents or militiamen carrying documentation from the DGS or the CPIP. Citizens were instructed to denounce to the authorities any attempts at either without such authorization.61"
"While it was certainly the case that there were criminal elements at work in the Republican rearguard, some of the robberies and other abuses were the work of right-wing agents provocateurs. In pursuit of its legitimate duties, the Atadell Brigade uncovered an organization that provided Republican uniforms so that its members could carry out night-time shootings with impunity. García Atadell himself felt obliged to issue a statement that only men carrying an identity card with his signature were authentic members of his unit.67 Given the mix of official functions and abuse, it is extremely difficult to estimate the scale of the crimes committed by the Atadell Brigade. When he fell into rebel hands in November 1936, he tried to ingratiate himself with his interrogators by exaggerating the number of robberies and murders and claiming that they were all approved by the Republican authorities."
"On 24 September 1936, Atadell made his most famous celebrity arrest – that of a forty-three-year-old widow, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano’s sister, Rosario. Virtually the entire Republican press carried the story that she had said, ‘Kill me but don’t make me suffer,’ to which it was alleged that Atadell replied, ‘Madame, we neither murder nor execute. We are more human than those who shoot workers en masse.’ Heraldo de Madrid accompanied a big piece on the arrest headlined ‘The Humanization of the War’ with a photo of Atadell and Rosario. The text compared ‘the decency, the nobility, the chivalry of the chief of the people’s investigation militias’ with ‘the ignoble and inhuman conduct, the sheer abjection of the way the war is carried out by the rebels’. Rosario allegedly thanked him for ‘his kindness and consideration’.70
The press version implied that Rosario had been located as a result of brilliant detective work – ‘with the diligence that is the hallmark of this brigade, Atadell personally carried out the investigation that unearthed this person’s hiding-place’. This was contradicted by Ángel Pedrero who, in his post-war interrogation, revealed that she had contacted the brigade through a friend, to ask for protection. This is confirmed by Rosario’s own post-war account that, weary of living in clandestinity and terrified that she might be caught by anarchist ‘uncontrollables’, she gave herself up to Atadell. She hoped, rightly, that she might thereby be looked after for a potential prisoner exchange.71 According to the press, she was handed over to the Dirección General de Seguridad and, after processing, sent to a women’s prison. However, García Atadell told his interrogators in Seville that he kept her in great comfort in the Rincón Palace until 20 October when Manuel Muñoz, three of whose sons were being held by General Queipo de Llano, requested that she be transferred to his custody.72 Rosario Queipo de Llano was not the only woman to give herself up to Atadell in the hope of avoiding a worse fate at the hands of the FAI.73"
"The wealth of the right in general and of the Catholic Church in particular was a significant factor in the repression. The need to finance the Republican war effort led to official sanction of confiscations. Most importantly, reports of its existence fuelled much class hatred. At the end of August, the Dawn Squad searched the home of the banker Manuel Muguiro and found bonds, cash and jewels to the value of 85 million pesetas. Felipe Sandoval’s checa from the Cine Europa took part in this operation. Muguiro claimed in his defence that the valuables had been given him for safe-keeping by various religious orders. A raid on the home of the treasurer of another order recovered a more modest haul of 1,800,000 pesetas.74"
"Despite the complaints of corpses being seen on the streets, most of those killed were identified quickly, carefully registered by the Republican authorities and their relatives informed. In addition, on most days, the Gaceta de Madrid carried lists of unidentified corpses, with a physical description of the deceased and the place where they had been found. Moreover, in the Dirección General de Seguridad, there was an office where boxes of photographs of the corpses were kept for relatives of the missing to check.79 This was part of the Republican authorities’ efforts, albeit with uneven results, to put an end to the atrocities. That the government was not ignoring the repression was clear from the frequent public condemnation thereof, a phenomenon that had no equivalent in the rebel zone."
"Among those who worked to limit the repression was the delegation of the Basque Nationalist Party (Partido Nacionalista Vasco – PNV) in Madrid. One of its most energetic members was Jesús de Galíndez, who wrote later that ‘only by condemning one’s own excesses can one condemn those of the enemy; only by exposing the crude reality does one have the right to accuse’. He was successful, with considerable official help, in rescuing large numbers of Basques and also non-Basque clergy. The intercessions of Galíndez and his colleagues and safe conducts issued by the PNV delegation saved numerous priests, nuns and right-wingers as well as legitimate Basque nationalists.80
The humanitarian efforts of Galíndez and others were a drop in the ocean. More than eight thousand supposed rebel supporters were killed in Madrid between 18 July and the end of December 1936. About 50,000 civilians were killed in the entire Republican zone in the course of the war. It is difficult to find a simple explanation. Some, such as those killed in the biggest massacre of prisoners, at Paracuellos del Jarama, during the siege of Madrid, were victims of decisions based on an assessment of their potential danger to the Republican cause. Some were executed as enemy supporters. Although concern about the enemy within existed from the earliest part of the war, anxiety grew more intense as Franco’s columns drew nearer to Madrid and refugees flooded into the city carrying bloodcurdling stories of the massacre that had followed the capture of Badajoz by Juan Yagüe’s African column, on 14 August. In many respects, what happened at Badajoz had been meant as a message to Madrid – just as Guernica would be a message to the people of Bilbao – ‘this is what will happen to you if you do not surrender’. The arrival of the terrified refugees provoked demands for revenge against the rebel supporters imprisoned in Madrid."
"The Republican government reacted in a way that was in stark contrast to the official encouragement of atrocities in the rebel zone. Indalecio Prieto visited the prison and, appalled by the Dantesque scenes that were reported to him, said that ‘the brutality of what has happened here means quite simply that we have lost the war’.96 Late on the night of 22 August, the government took steps to put a stop to irregular ‘justice’. At the suggestion of Vidarte, and with the backing of Prieto, Giral’s government set up ‘special courts against rebellion, sedition and crimes against State security’, known as Tribunales Populares, under the reluctant authority of the acting president of the Supreme Court, Mariano Gómez. With remarkable courage, Gómez had a tribunal set up and working in the prison by 9.00 a.m. on 23 August. It was hoped that the new tribunals would temper the revolutionary excesses, although they had only a limited effect in the first weeks of their existence.97"
"Two reporters from El Socialista, Fernando Vázquez Ocaña and Manuel Pastor, had managed to gain access to the interior of the prison on the evening of 22 August and what they found resembled an abattoir. One of the patios was strewn with corpses. They returned to the newspaper’s offices shaking with indignation. On the basis of what they recounted, the editor Julián Zugazagoitia and his senior staff composed a strongly worded condemnation which was published in a prominent position under the headline ‘An Unavoidable Moral Imperative’. Zugazagoitia was determined to help the government emerge from the position into which it had been placed by the extremists who had taken justice into their own hands, writing, ‘to judge those who have transgressed, we have the law. As long as we have it, we must respect it. With the law, everything is legitimate; without it, nothing is.’ On the same day, Izquierda Republicana also condemned violence in the rearguard.98"
"Among those most appalled was the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña. On the morning of 24 August, his brother-in-law, the playwright Cipriano Rivas Cherif, found him shocked and horrified by what he called ‘the hammer blow’, almost unable to speak. ‘They’ve murdered Melquíades!’ he said, and after a silence, ‘This cannot be, this cannot be! I am sickened by the blood. I have had as much as I can take; it will drown us all.’ He felt ‘despair’, ‘horror’, ‘dejection’, ‘shame’. ‘In mourning for the Republic’, he considered resigning.99 In his novel, La velada en Benicarló, drawing upon this experience, Azaña has one of his characters hear the screams of agony of political prisoners being shot at night in a cemetery.100"
"Throughout September and October, piecemeal measures to control the checas and centralize the militias would continue to be introduced but with relatively little effect. Only when the war was on the doorstep in early November and the militias had other priorities could a central control be imposed. The will to reimpose order had been there all along among the Republicans and moderate Socialists. However, the Communists would provide the singleminded ruthlessness that made a significant difference. Even then, a price would be paid in blood in terms of the fate of thousands of prisoners.
Meanwhile, the moderate Socialists and the Basque nationalists were in the forefront of efforts to put a stop to rearguard outrages. Along with Prieto and Zugazagoitia, Dr Juan Negrín opposed with equal fervour the repression on either side. His friend Marcelino Pascua recounted Negrín’s foolhardiness. Throughout the late summer of 1936 ‘he made every effort, at serious risk to himself but with considerable success, to save people in Madrid who for various reasons including personal vendettas were afraid for their lives. This involved rash acts of daring which came as no surprise to his friends who were fully aware of his personal bravery.’109 Having become Minister of Finance in the government of Largo Caballero on 4 September 1936, Dr Negrín showed no inclination to restrain his temerity in trying to put a stop to the repression. His efforts to prevent the nightly paseos outraged the anarchist checas. One group even went into the Finance Ministry in Madrid to threaten him. In the ensuing confrontation, they were prevented from killing him only by the intervention of the security staff of the Ministry.110"
"In response, in mid-September, the government took another halting step towards the taming of the checas. The new Minister of the Interior, Ángel Galarza, had been the state prosecutor who launched the ill-advised ‘responsibilities’ case against those who had served as ministers during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. In 1933, he had joined the Socialist Party and earned notoriety for the violence of his rhetoric in the Cortes. The majority of the PSOE executive regarded him as an opportunist who had little interest in controlling the abuses of the checas.113 However, on 16 September, he introduced a decree signed by President Azaña creating the Rearguard Security Militias (Milicias de Vigilancia de Retaguardia – MVR). The preamble implicitly recognized that the creation of the CPIP six weeks earlier had been a failure. It stated that the MVR were being established because of ‘the imperative need to regulate the services of law and order in the rearguard’. The proposed change was justified by the statement that ‘since the militia groups that had been collaborating with the police had no clearly defined function or a co-ordinated organization, it had been difficult to prevent their infiltration by the enemy to disrupt their work and bring the organizations into disrepute’. This was an accurate representation of the weaknesses of the CPIP, while sugaring the pill for the militia groups by throwing the blame for atrocities on the enemy within.
The decree proposed to fuse all of the militia groups run by parties and unions into a temporary police corps. It stated that any autonomous groups that continued to carry out the functions of security now attributed to the MVR would be regarded as ‘facciosos’, enemy agents. To encourage the militia groups to join the MRV, it was stated that those who served would be given preference for eventual incorporation into the regular police forces. Like the creation of the Comité Provincial de Investigación Pública only a month and a half earlier, the measure was another step towards the centralization of the parallel police constituted by the checas.114 In the short term, it changed little other than give a veneer of legitimacy to some left-wing groups and patrols from the CPIP, but there were still others operating outside the MVR."
"Republican leaders were expected to maintain civilized social relations within Madrid despite seething popular resentment of those who bombed their city and despite the activities of snipers and saboteurs. Thus Julián Zugazagoitia, the faithful ally of Prieto, continued to use his position as editor of the daily El Socialista to campaign for discipline in the rearguard and for respect on the battlefield for the lives of opponents. Typical of the ethical tone adopted by the paper was his editorial of 3 October 1936, headed ‘Moral Obligations in War’. He wrote: ‘The life of an adversary who surrenders is unassailable; no combatant can dispose of that life. But that is not how the rebels behave. No matter. It is how we should behave.’121"
Salazar Alonso's death sentence"Mariano Gómez, who presided over the Tribunal Popular operating in the Cárcel Modelo, was an experienced Republican magistrate. He was also personally opposed to the death penalty, on which he had been writing a book. Despite the extraordinary wartime circumstances, he made every effort to put a stop to judicial decisions being made on the basis of passion and hatred. Instead, he tried to impose due legal process.104 This ensured that the trial of Salazar Alonso, and of many others, would be significantly different from the procedures pertaining in the military trials within the rebel zone, where those accused were given no facilities for their defence. Initially, the moderate Republican Juan Botella Asensi, a distinguished lawyer who had been Minister of Justice in late 1933, had offered to defend Salazar Alonso but later withdrew the offer. The reasons for his change of heart are not known, but possibly derived from the fact that Salazar Alonso had broken his Masonic oaths.105 Nevertheless, Salazar Alonso was provided with the services of two lawyers and was also given the indictment to help him prepare his defence. Accused of implication in the military plot, his trial began on 19 September."
"Nevertheless, Salazar Alonso was found guilty and the prosecutor successfully requested the death sentence.106
The final decision was passed for approval to the government which had been formed barely three weeks earlier. Azaña, as President, regarded the death penalty for Salazar Alonso as ‘an outrage’, but the cabinet was deeply divided. The two extremes were explained by Indalecio Prieto, who said:
It is likely that there is no one among you who feels such unquenchable loathing towards Salazar Alonso as I do. After building his career on extreme demagoguery, he let himself be seduced by the blandishments of the right and went over to them, presenting as his qualifications the vicious persecution carried out against us when he was Minister of the Interior. However, in the records of the trial, there appears no proof of the indictment that he had participated in the military uprising. Therefore, I vote in favour of pardon.
Prieto’s intervention swayed the cabinet, which voted by seven votes to six in favour of the death sentence being commuted to life imprisonment.
Mariano Gómez was informed immediately. Shortly afterwards, while the cabinet was still in session, Gómez appeared and asked to speak to Prieto. He told him that, although he had received Salazar Alonso’s file with the cabinet’s decision:
I have informed no one because I am sure that as soon as it is made public, there will be a terrible riot in the prison which will start with the shooting of the prisoner. The Government, without sufficient means to impose its decision, will be unable to save his life and, defeated on this issue, its remaining authority will crumble. But this is not the worst. The Tribunal Popular, I am sure, will refuse to continue working and, after Salazar Alonso, perhaps this very night, all the political prisoners will die riddled with bullets.
Prieto explained why he had voted as he had done. Gómez was in complete agreement but repeated that the decision could cost over one hundred lives. Accordingly, Prieto went back into the cabinet, explained what Gómez had said and changed his vote. Salazar Alonso was executed on the morning of 23 September.107
Salazar Alonso was executed – despite not being guilty of the crime of which he had been accused – because of his part in the provocation of both the peasant strike of June 1934 and the Asturian uprising of October. His role as Minister of the Interior was believed to have caused untold suffering and many deaths and so brought civil war nearer. That he was not accused of this was clearly a legal error which exposed the contradictions between conventional justice and popular justice. The extraordinary episode of Prieto’s volte-face over Salazar Alonso illustrated the continuing weakness of the government in the face of the armed militias. As Manuel Muñoz had been with the anarchists who hijacked the trainload of prisoners from Jaén, the moderates were totally inhibited by fear of a confrontation between the forces of order and the revolutionary militias.
Nevertheless, despite what had happened in the case of Salazar Alonso, the newly instituted tribunals functioned relatively well and increasingly reconciled public opinion to the idea that the Republic could administer justice in the interests of the people"
Perception in the west of Republican violence"The difference in international perception of the repression in both zones was one of the most difficult problems faced by the Republic. There were plenty of diplomats and journalists in Republican cities to report what was happening. In contrast, so far, most of the atrocities were carried out by Franco’s columns in small country towns. Moreover, rebel commanders ensured that unsympathetic foreign newspaper correspondents were not present. Winston Churchill’s reaction to the situation in Republican Spain was representative of the perception of events in upper-class and official circles. When the new Spanish Ambassador, Pablo de Azcárate, arrived in London in early September 1936, he was introduced by his friend Lord David Cecil to Churchill. Although Azcárate arrived with a reputation as a highly respected functionary of the League of Nations, a red-faced Churchill angrily rejected his outstretched hand and stalked off muttering, ‘Blood, blood …’ In an article in the Evening Standard on 2 October 1936, entitled ‘Spain: Object Lesson for Radicals’, Churchill wrote:
The massacre of hostages falls to a definitely lower plane; and the systematic slaughter night after night of helpless and defenceless political opponents, dragged from their homes to execution for no other crime than that they belong to the classes opposed to Communism, and have enjoyed property and distinction under the Republican constitution, ranks with tortures and fiendish outrages in the lowest pit of human degradation. Although it seems to be the practice of the Nationalist [rebel] forces to shoot a proportion of their prisoners taken in arms, they cannot be accused of having fallen to the level of committing the atrocities which are the daily handiwork of the Communists, Anarchists, and the P.O.U.M., as the new and most extreme Trotskyist organization is called. It would be a mistake alike in truth and wisdom for British public opinion to rate both sides at the same level.120"
"The ultimate goal of these columns was Madrid. However, the use of three columns advancing on a wide front made it clear that an equally central objective was to destroy the left in towns and villages along the way.1"
"The number of casualties among the Republican volunteers far exceeded those among the African columns. No prisoners were taken. Militiamen captured along the way were simply shot."
"On 20 July, the Popular Front Committees of towns within the Republican zone received orders from the Madrid government that ‘there should be no breakdown of law and order for any reason whatsoever’ and that measures should be taken ‘to prevent anyone taking advantage of the understandable nervousness of the population to commit offences against law-abiding persons or to take justice into their own hands’. Strikes were forbidden, by agreement with the Unión General de Trabajadores. On 28 July, the Civil Governors of each province passed on even stricter instructions from Madrid to local Popular Front Committees requiring them to announce that ‘the death penalty will be applied against anyone, whether belonging to a political entity or not, who attacks the life or property of others, since such crimes will be considered as acts of rebellion in the service of the enemy’. On 29 July, mayors were ordered not to touch the bank accounts of right-wingers in their towns.4"
"No such restraint was imposed upon the rebel columns. Moving north into Badajoz, with relative ease, they took El Real de la Jara, Monesterio, Llerena, Fuente de Cantos, Zafra and Los Santos de Maimona. In addition to raping and looting, the men of the columns of Asensio, Castejón and Tella annihilated real or supposed Popular Front sympathizers that they found, leaving a trail of bloody slaughter as they went. It was no coincidence that Badajoz was the province where the spontaneous occupations of estates in the spring of 1936 had seemed to end the injustice of the landholding system. The Africanistas’ execution of captured peasant volunteers was jokingly referred to as ‘giving them agrarian reform’.5
In fact, everywhere in the rebel zone where the Republic had decreed expropriations or legalized land occupations, the columns helped the owners take back the land. Previously neglected land had usually been improved by the laborious removal of stones, stubble and bracken and the clearing of ponds and streams. Moreover, the harvest was awaiting collection. Those who had carried out the improvements received no compensation for their labour, nor for the crops, stores, seeds, animals and tools that were pillaged along with the land. In most cases, they had already fled or been killed or imprisoned by the rebel forces. The repression was especially brutal against the men and women who had benefited from land redistribution under the Republic. They would be between 70 and 80 per cent of the total executed in Badajoz.6"
"Despite considerable class tension in Zafra, during the five months between the elections of February and the arrival of Castejón’s column, the Mayor, José González Barrero, had worked hard to restrain left-wing reprisals for the social abuses of 1933–5. There were some assaults on right-wingers and he was obliged to evacuate several religious communities. However, at considerable risk to his own life, he managed to ensure that no blood was shed. After the military coup, González Barrero presided over the town’s Popular Front Committee which imprisoned twenty-eight known supporters of the uprising. He prevented two attempts by radical elements to kill these prisoners. Nevertheless, in Zafra, which fell on 6 August virtually without resistance, as in Los Santos de Maimona, the repression was every bit as ferocious as in Fuente de Cantos. Forty people were shot on the first day of the military occupation of Zafra, and two hundred in total over the next months. At the end of the war, González Barrero found himself in Madrid. After Franco had announced that those without blood on their hands had nothing to fear, believing himself totally innocent, he returned home, was arrested and interned in the concentration camp of Castuera and executed at the end of April 1939.12
In all these towns, the occupying troops raped working-class women and looted the houses of leftists. Francoist officers admitted that Moroccan mercenaries were recruited with promises of pillage and that, when a town was captured, they were given free rein for two hours.13 Moorish soldiers and Legionarios selling radios, clocks, watches, jewellery and even items of furniture became a common sight in the towns of the south. The Falangist elements that undertook the repression after the columns had moved on also looted at will.14 When the columns moved northwards from Zafra, the deputy parish priest of the Church of La Candelaria, Juan Galán Bermejo, decided to join them as a chaplain. Thereafter, this tall, wavy-haired priest, with a large pistol in his belt, distinguished himself by the bloodthirsty ruthlessness with which he participated in the repression. On one occasion, discovering four men and a wounded woman in a cave near the border of Badajoz with Córdoba, he forced them to dig their own graves before shooting them and burying them wounded but still alive. He later boasted of personally killing more than one hundred leftists.15"
"This deliberate savagery constituted what one scholar has called ‘education through terror’. The aim was literally to bury for once and for all the aspiration of the landless peasants to collectivize the great estates. Using the excuse of the ‘red terror’, irrespective of whether there had actually been any crimes against the local conservatives, a vengeful bloodbath was unleashed by the rebel columns. In places where rightists had been protected by the Popular Front Committee, it was claimed that the columns had arrived just in time to prevent atrocities. Members of the Popular Front Committee found in a village would be shot. A similar fate awaited members of left-wing trade unions and many totally apolitical individuals unfortunate enough to be in the way. The ‘crimes’ of those executed were often unrelated to atrocities. The local right was outraged that, since the elections of February 1936, left-wing councils, in agreement with the Casas del Pueblo, had obliged the principal landowners to give jobs to unionized labour, forced them to pay wages outstanding since 1934 and prohibited religious ceremonies.19 During the spring and summer of 1936, wealthy middle-and upper-class inhabitants of the towns and villages of the rural south faced insults and impertinence from those that they regarded as their inferiors. This intolerable challenge to their social and economic status lay behind the approval of many conservatives for the brutality of the African columns.20
The latifundio system of sprawling estates, the dominant mode of landholding in Andalusia, Extremadura and Salamanca, made it easier for the owners to think of the bracero (labourer hired by the day) as sub-human and a ‘thing’ to be punished or annihilated for daring to rebel. To the owners, the entire experience of the Second Republic constituted a ‘rebellion’. After the bloodshed at Almendralejo, Franco ordered the columns of Asensio and Castejón to join together and press on to attack Mérida and Badajoz. With the local right reluctant to see him go until the left had been definitively eliminated from the town, Castejón requested units of the Civil Guard and armed Falangists and Carlists to finish the ‘cleansing’.21"
"Thereafter, he rose to a point where he had a virtually free hand in the repression. He was promoted to major on 11 August. In Mérida, he supervised nightly executions of men held in the Casino, which had been turned into an improvised prison. One of his prisoners was a liberal Republican, Dr Temprano. Each day for a month, Gómez Cantos would walk around the town centre with the doctor, taking note of anyone who greeted him. The doctor’s friends were thus identified and then arrested. Gómez Cantos himself shot the doctor. In February 1938, Queipo de Llano would send Gómez Cantos as Delegate for Public Order for Badajoz. Despite the fact that the repression under his predecessors had virtually eliminated the left, he had the idea of having a stripe of red paint brushed on to the jacket of anyone suspected of left-wing sympathies.26"
"Franco was fully aware of the columns’ superiority over untrained and poorly armed militias and he and his chief of staff, Colonel Francisco Martín Moreno, planned their operations accordingly. Intimidation and terror, euphemistically described as ‘castigo’ (punishment), were specified in written orders.28 Martín Moreno summed up the situation in an order of 12 August, in which he observed:
The quality of the enemy that faces us, with neither discipline nor military training, lacking trained leaders, and short of arms, ammunition and support services, means that, in combat, resistance is generally feeble … Our superiority in weaponry and our skilful use thereof permits us to achieve our objectives with very few casualties. The psychological impact of mortars or the accurate use of machine-gun fire is enormous on those who don’t have such weapons or don’t know how to use them.29"
"The use of terror was neither spontaneous nor an inadvertent side-effect. The Legion as well as the Regulares mutilated casualties, cutting off ears, noses, sexual organs and even heads. Such practices, along with the massacres of prisoners and the systematic rape of working-class women, were permitted by the rebel officers in Spain as they had been in Morocco by Franco and others. As had been the case in Asturias in 1934, they were useful in several ways. They indulged the bloodlust of the African columns, they eliminated large numbers of potential opponents and, above all, they generated a paralysing terror among others.30 The rebels were sufficiently uneasy about what they were doing to feel the need to conceal it. On or around 13 August, General Queipo de Llano was interviewed in Seville by the immensely sympathetic correspondent of the London Daily Mail, Harold Cardozo. Queipo de Llano assured the British journalist that:
Except in the heat of battle or in the capture by assault of a position, no men are shot down without being given a hearing and a fair trial in strict accordance with the rule of procedure of our military courts. The trials are held in public and those only are condemned to death who have personally taken part in murders and other crimes punishable according to our military code by death, or who by their position of authority are responsible for having allowed such crimes to be committed. I have taken thousands of prisoners, and today more than half of them are at liberty.31
However, Harold Pemberton, the correspondent of the equally pro-rebel Daily Express, reported that, after the capture of Mérida, members of the Legion tried to sell him and his photographer ‘Communist ears as souvenirs’.32"
Franco preferring purge over military victory"After the occupation of Mérida, Yagüe’s troops turned south-west towards Badajoz, the principal town of Extremadura, on the banks of the River Guadiana near the Portuguese frontier. If the columns had hastened onwards to Madrid, the Badajoz garrison could not seriously have threatened them from the rear. Francoist military historians have implied that Yagüe turned to Badajoz on his own initiative. If this had been the case, he would have been in serious trouble with Franco, who made all the major daily decisions, which were then implemented by Yagüe. Franco personally supervised the operation against Mérida and, on the evening of 10 August, received Yagüe in his headquarters to discuss the capture of Badajoz and the next objectives. He wanted to knock out Badajoz to unify the two sections of the rebel zone and leave the left flank of the advancing columns covered by the Portuguese border. It was a strategic error, contributing to the delay which allowed the government to organize its defences. However, Franco, as he showed repeatedly during the war, was more concerned with a total purge of all conquered territory than with a quick victory.33"
"By diverting his troops to Toledo, Franco deliberately lost an unrepeatable chance to sweep on to the Spanish capital before its defences were ready. He was in no hurry to end the war before the captured territories had been purged and he was aware that an emotional victory and a great journalistic coup would strengthen his position within the rebel zone."
Denial of pensions to widows and children"On 2 September in nearby Torremayor where, it will be recalled, no violence had occurred, a group of Falangist thugs arrived. They burst into the houses of the president of the Popular Front Committee, of its secretary, a schoolteacher, and of the president of the Casa del Pueblo. After searching the houses and stealing money and jewellery, the Falangists took the three men away and murdered them. When she heard the news, the seriously ill wife of the schoolteacher died, leaving two daughters, one aged twenty-one months and the other four years. Her brother, a senior Falangist in Seville, endeavoured to get some sort of pension for the children. This was refused because their father was not officially dead. "
Badajoz"When Yagüe’s forces encircled the walled city, their reputation had preceded them. Badajoz had been flooded with refugees and, since the daily bombings had begun, the atmosphere in the city was of doom-laden anticipation. On 13 August, a rebel aircraft flew over the city and dropped thousands of leaflets carrying a dire warning signed by Franco. It read ‘Your resistance will be pointless and the punishment that you will receive will be proportionate. If you want to avoid useless bloodshed, capture the ringleaders and hand them over to our forces … Our triumph is guaranteed and, to save Spain, we will destroy any obstacles in our way. It is still time for you to mend your ways: tomorrow it will be too late.’ The leaflet clearly signalled the massacre to come.41"
"The Legionarios and Regulares, and the Falangists who had accompanied them, unleashed an orgy of looting in shops and houses, most of which belonged to the very rightists who were being ‘liberated’. ‘It is the war tax they pay for salvation,’ a rebel officer told the American journalist Jay Allen. Anything portable – jewellery and watches, radios and typewriters, clothing and bales of cloth – was carried off through streets strewn with corpses and running with blood. Hundreds of prisoners were rounded up and herded to the bullring. As night fell, drunken Moors and Falangists were still entering houses in the working-class districts, looting, raping women, dragging men out either to shoot them on the spot or to take them to the bullring. Many corpses were sexually mutilated. At the bullring, machine-guns were set up on the barriers around the ring and an indiscriminate slaughter began. On the first afternoon and evening, eight hundred were shot in batches of twenty. In the course of the night, another 1,200 were brought in. There were many innocent non-political civilians, men and women, Socialists, anarchists, Communists, middle-class Republicans, simple labourers and anyone with the bruise of a rifle recoil on their shoulders. No names were taken, no details checked. At 7.30 in the morning, the shootings began again. The screams of the dying could be heard many streets away. Accounts by survivors indicate that soon the firing squads were manned by Civil Guards.45
Over the next three days, as Yagüe’s columns prepared to move northwards, the Moors set up stalls to sell the watches, jewellery and furniture that they had looted. Yagüe himself stole a limousine belonging to the moderate Republican Luis Plá Alvarez. Together with his brother, Plá owned a thriving transport and automobile sales business. The two men had used their influence to save the lives of numerous right-wingers and had sheltered several religious in their homes, many of whom wrote appeals in their favour. They were taken out into the countryside by Civil Guards on 19 August, told that they were free to go and shot ‘while trying to escape’. Their businesses and goods were seized.46 Bishop Alcaraz Alenda had interceded on their behalf, but Yagüe told his messenger: ‘Tell the Bishop that they have already been shot this morning along with others so that the Bishop may live.’47 By the second day, cheering right-wing spectators were permitted to watch and to insult the prisoners. Even if there was not, as was later alleged in the Republican press, a simulacrum of a bullfight, men were certainly treated as if they were animals. With their amused officers looking on, Moorish troops and Falangists goaded the prisoners with bayonets. Franco’s General Staff and the Portuguese border police were working in close collaboration. Accordingly, hundreds of refugees attempting to flee into Portugal were turned back.48 The scenes in the bullring were witnessed by Portuguese landowners invited as a reward for handing over fleeing leftists.49"
"On Tuesday 18 August, four hundred men, women and children were taken by cavalry escorts from Caia in Portugal to Badajoz. Nearly three hundred of them were executed. Expeditions of Falangists were given free rein to enter Portugal in search of Spanish refugees. Jay Allen described the scene in Elvas:
This very day (August 23) a car flying the red and yellow banner of the Rebels arrived here. In it were three Phalanxists (Fascists). They were accompanied by a Portuguese lieutenant. They tore through the narrow streets to the hospital where Senor Granado [sic], Republican Civil Governor of Badajoz, was lying. The Fascists ran up the stairs, strode down a corridor with guns drawn, and into the governor’s room. The governor was out of his mind with the horror of the thing. The director of the hospital, Dr. Pabgeno, threw himself over his helpless patient and howled for help. So he saved a life.51"
"Among the many liberals, leftists, Freemasons and others brought back to be shot were the Mayor, Sinforiano Madroñero, and two Socialist deputies, Nicolás de Pablo and Anselmo Trejo. Dragged through the streets, their clothes ripped, their flesh bruised, they were executed as the culmination of an elaborate ceremony on 30 August, after a procession with a band and a field Mass. Colonel Cañizares informed Antonio Bahamonde, Queipo de Llano’s head of press and propaganda, that the later executions were accompanied by a military band playing the royal anthem and the Falangist hymn. Many spectators came from nearby Portugal and applauded frenetically as the executed fell. Nevertheless, many ordinary Portuguese families took in refugees from Badajoz and Huelva and several Portuguese army officers saved Spanish lives.52 In mid-October, 1,435 refugees were sent to Republican Spain in a boat from Lisbon to Tarragona.53"
"The historian Francisco Espinosa Maestre has demonstrated that the total number of casualties suffered by Yagüe’s men in the attack on Badajoz was 185, of whom 44 were killed and 141 wounded. The disproportion with the Republican casualties could hardly have been greater.54 Estimates of those killed in the subsequent repression vary from 9,000 to ‘between two and six hundred’. Many of those executed in the days following the initial massacre were either militiamen who had come to help defend the city, refugees who had fled there or prisoners brought there from other towns. Since they were shot without trial, their bodies disposed of in common graves or else incinerated, there is no record of them. Nevertheless, an exhaustive study by Dr Espinosa Maestre has shown that the number is at least 3,800. He has demonstrated that, even limiting the comparison to the small number of the known victims whose deaths were registered, there were more executions in Badajoz between August and December 1936 than in Huelva and Seville combined, despite the fact that Huelva’s population was 12.5 per cent larger than that of Badajoz and Seville’s more than 600 per cent. Moreover, in both Seville and Huelva, it was possible to compare the names in the city registries with the names of those buried in their respective cemeteries. In both cities, in addition to those inscribed in the registry, the cemeteries have records of unnamed corpses. In the case of Huelva, there were five times as many unknown as named dead; in the case of Seville, nearly six times as many. Extrapolating from this data for Badajoz, where there are no records of the unnamed dead buried in the cemetery, Espinosa Maestre calculates that the total number of killed in the city might have been around 5.5 times the number of the named dead.55"
"Another Portuguese journalist, Mario Pires of the Diário de Notícias, was so disturbed by the executions he had witnessed that he had to be interned in a mental institution in Lisbon. Castejón told Jorge Simões of the Diário da Manhã that 1,500 defenders had been killed, both in the fighting and afterwards. Simões wrote that 1,300 had been shot by the Legion in the first twenty-four hours after the conquest. Two days later, Felix Correia of the Diário de Lisboa, the journalist closest to Queipo de Llano, wrote that 1,600 had been executed. Yagüe himself commented on 15 August, ‘After the final clean-up tomorrow, everything will be ready for a more extended operation. Now, with the Muscovites liquidated, this is a Spanish city once more.’57"
"On 17 August, the cameraman René Brut of Pathé newsreels arrived and was able to film piles of bodies, for which act of courage he was later imprisoned and threatened with death by the insurgent authorities.58 Some days later, Franco sent a telegram to Queipo de Llano with instructions for the strict control of photographers, ‘even those from Nationalist newspapers’, although this was to conceal the delivery of German and Italian war material as much as to hide the atrocities committed by his columns.59 It was the beginning of a massive campaign by the rebel authorities and their foreign supporters to deny that the massacre at Badajoz had taken place. Their cause was not helped when Yagüe cheerfully boasted to the journalist John Whitaker, ‘Of course, we shot them. What do you expect? Was I supposed to take four thousand Reds with me as my column advanced racing against time? Was I expected to turn them loose in my rear and let them make Badajoz Red again?’ In a town of 40,000 people, the killings may have reached nearly 10 per cent of the population.60"
"According to Yagüe’s biographer, in ‘the paroxysm of war’ it was impossible to distinguish pacific citizens from leftist militiamen, the implication being that it was perfectly acceptable to shoot prisoners. Another semi-official military historian of the rebel war effort, Luis María de Lojendio, later mitred Abbot of the monastery of the Valle de los Caídos, not only claimed that the defending forces were greater but also managed to explain away the deaths among them with pious sophistry:
A really criminal war is that in which chemical or technological mechanisms destroy human life pointlessly. But this was not the case in Badajoz. The material advantage, the fortress and the barricades, lay with the Marxists. The men of Lieutenant Colonel Yagüe triumphed because of that indubitably spiritual superiority which maintains in combat the will to win, the virtues of sacrifice and discipline. The streets of Badajoz were sown with corpses. Well, war is a hard and cruel spectacle.61"
"In late August, as the Basque towns of Irún and Fuenterrabía were being shelled from the sea and bombed from the air, the rebels dropped pamphlets threatening to deal with the population as they had dealt with the people of Badajoz. In consequence, panic-stricken refugees headed for France.62 The events of Badajoz were also meant as a message to the inhabitants of the capital as to what would happen when the columns reached Madrid."
"In some villages, the rightist prisoners were beaten and, in others, murdered. The cases where this happened were greatly outnumbered by those where the local authorities prevented atrocities being committed by militiamen from other villages bent on revenge for the horrors committed by the African columns."
"The subsequent revenge was wildly disproportionate. Where there had been murders of right-wingers, those killed in reprisal were rarely the perpetrators, who had usually fled. The executions were justified on the specious grounds that the left had intended to kill all the prisoners but had not done so thanks to the arrival of the column. Similarly, although there were generalized allegations of sexual abuse of right-wing women prisoners, specific accusations tend to centre on intentions which had been thwarted by members of the Defence Committees. The leftist authorities did not have a programme of extermination like that of the military rebels."
"The repression continued throughout the province. One of the devices used to capture leftists was broadcasts of ‘edicts of pardon’ to the effect that those who gave themselves up voluntarily would face no reprisals. Those naive enough to do so rarely lived to tell the tale."
Queipos rhetoric"In the course of the advance, Queipo de Llano outdid even his own record in misogynist remarks on 29 August when he referred to the capture between Navalmoral de la Mata and Talavera de la Reina of Republican women. Gloating over the savagery of the repression, he fed widespread fears that women were given to Moroccan mercenaries for gang rape, remarking with relish, ‘Great quantities of munitions, ten trucks and many prisoners, including women, have fallen into our hands. The Regulares will be delighted and Pasionaria will be really jealous.’ The sexual comment appeared in ABC but was censored in the other Seville paper, La Unión.76 It was shortly after this broadcast that Queipo de Llano’s chief of staff, Major Cuesta Monereo, issued orders to the press not to publish the exact words of the broadcasts because ‘they are not appropriate and their publication is not convenient’. A journalist who read transcripts of the complete broadcasts observed later, ‘they were nauseating. The published versions were censored to eliminate their crudity.’77"
"Queipo’s verbal excesses were often excused as the result of his being drunk, although efforts were made to suggest that he was teetotal. The Bloomsbury Group exile Gerald Brenan, who lived near Málaga, referred to ‘his whisky voice’. Brenan’s wife, the writer Gamel Woolsey, wrote:
I am told that he does not drink at all, but he has the mellow loose voice and the cheerful wandering manner of the habitual drinker. He talks for hours always perfectly at ease, sometimes he stumbles over a word and corrects himself with a complete lack of embarrassment, speaks of ‘these villainous Fascistas’ and an agonized voice can be heard behind him correcting him, ‘No, no, mi General, Marxistas.’ ‘What difference does it make’ – says the general and sweeps grandly on.78
The actor Edmundo Barbero recalled this notorious occasion on which Queipo revealed his contempt for the Falange, referring to ‘the fascist scum’, only to be corrected nervously by the hushed whisper of one of his staff ‘Marxist scum’"
Journalists reports"The columns reached Talavera de la Reina on 3 September.80 The American journalist John T. Whitaker, who travelled with them, gained the confidence of Varela, Yagüe, Castejón and other officers. They helped him avoid the rigid controls imposed on the majority of correspondents from the democracies who were transported to the front only after a battle and escorted by Franco’s propaganda staff. Such limits were rarely imposed on the newsmen from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Whitaker took a room in Talavera as his base for visits to the front. There he established a relationship with José Sainz, the provincial head of the Falange in Toledo. Sainz showed him a neatly kept notebook, saying: ‘I jot them down. I have personally executed 127 red prisoners.’ Of his two months at Talavera de la Reina, Whitaker wrote:
I slept there on an average of two nights a week. I never passed a night there without being awakened at dawn by the volleys of the firing squads in the yard of the Cuartel. There seemed no end to the killing. They were shooting as many at the end of the second month as in my first days in Talavera. They averaged perhaps thirty a day. I watched the men they took into the Cuartel. They were simple peasants and workers, Spanish Milquetoasts. It was sufficient to have carried a trade-union card, to have been a Freemason, to have voted for the Republic. If you were picked up or denounced for any one of these charges you were given a summary, two-minute hearing and capital punishment was formally pronounced. Any man who had held any office under the Re public was, of course, shot out of hand. And there were mopping-up operations along the roads. You would find four old peasant women heaped in a ditch; thirty and forty militiamen at a time, their hands roped behind them, shot down at the crossroads. I remember a bundle in a town square. Two youthful members of the Republican assault guards had been tied back to back with wire, covered with gasoline and burned alive.
On 21 September, Yagüe’s forces captured the town of Santa Olalla. Whitaker was appalled by the shooting of captured militiamen in the main street:
I can never forget the first time I saw the mass execution of prisoners. I stood in the main street of Santa Olalla as seven trucks brought in the militiamen. They were unloaded and herded together. They had that listless, exhausted, beaten look of troops who can no longer stand against the steady pounding of the German bombs. Most of them had a soiled towel or a shirt in their hands – the white flags with which they had signalled their surrender. Two Franco officers passed out cigarettes among them and several Republicans laughed boyishly and self-consciously as they smoked their first cigarette in weeks. Suddenly an officer took me by the arm and said, ‘It’s time to get out of here.’ At the edge of this cluster of prisoners, six hundred-odd men, Moorish troopers were setting up two machine guns. The prisoners saw them as I saw them. The men seemed to tremble in one convulsion, as those in front, speechless with fright, rocked back on their heels, the color draining from their faces, their eyes opening with terror.81"
"As part of the operation to justify the massacre at Badajoz, Luis Bolín, the head of Franco’s propaganda apparatus, published photographs of the rebel killings at Talavera de la Reina, presenting them as left-wing atrocities encountered by the columns at Talavera la Real, between Mérida and Badajoz. In fact, Antonio Bahamonde, Queipo’s propaganda chief, recounted how the corpses of both battle casualties and executed men and women were frequently mutilated and then photographed to fabricate evidence of Republican atrocities.84"
"Noel Monks of the Daily Express wrote: ‘In Talavera, because not much was going on at the front, one was fed on a steady diet of atrocity propaganda; the things the Reds did as they fell back into Madrid. And the strange thing was that the Spanish troops I met – Legionaires, Requetés and Falangists – bragged openly to me of what they’d done when they took over from the Reds. But they weren’t atrocities. Oh no, señor. Not even the locking up of a captured militia girl in a room with twenty Moors. No, señor. That was fun.’85 According to Edmund Taylor of the Chicago Tribune, a militia girl captured near Santa Olalla was locked in a big room with fifty Moors.86 John T. Whitaker witnessed a scene on the road to Madrid similar to those related by Monks and Taylor. He knew that gang rape was a frequent occurrence:
These ‘regenerators’ of Spain rarely denied, too, that they deliberately gave white women to the Moors. On the contrary, they circulated over the whole front the warning that any woman found with Red troops would meet that fate. The wisdom of this policy was debated by Spanish officers in a half-dozen messes where I ate with them. No officer ever denied that it was a Franco policy. But some argued that even a Red woman was Spanish and a woman. This practice was not denied by El Mizzian, the only Moroccan officer in the Spanish Army. I stood at the cross-roads outside Navalcarnero with the Moorish major when two Spanish girls, not out of their teens, were brought before him. One had worked in a textile factory in Barcelona and they found a trade-union card in her leather jacket. The other came from Valencia and said she had no politics. After questioning them for military information, El Mizzian had them taken into a small schoolhouse where some forty Moorish soldiers were resting. As they reached the doorway an ululating cry rose from the Moors within, I stood horrified in helpless anger. El Mizzian smirked when I remonstrated with him. ‘Oh, they’ll not live more than four hours,’ he said.87"
Toledo"Luis Bolín ensured that no correspondents were permitted to enter Toledo for two days during the bloodbath that followed its occupation. Father Risco wrote with relish of ‘a second day of extermination and punishment’. It was hardly surprising that Bolín would not want newspapermen reporting the atrocities taking place while, in the words of Yagüe, ‘we made Toledo the whitest town in Spain’.98 What the journalists witnessed, when they were allowed in on 29 September, shocked them deeply. Webb Miller of the United Press saw pools of fresh blood which denoted a mass execution only just before the reporters arrived. At many other places, he saw pools of clotted blood, often with a militia cap lying next to them. John Whitaker reported that ‘The men who commanded them never denied that the Moors killed the wounded in the Republican hospital. They boasted of how grenades were thrown in among two hundred screaming and helpless men.’ Whitaker was referring to the Tavera Hospital, housed in the hospice of San Juan Bautista on the outskirts of Toledo. Webb Miller also reported on what happened there, claiming that two hundred militiamen were burned to death when the grenades were thrown in. As in Badajoz, most of the shops had been looted as a ‘war tax’. At the maternity hospital, more than twenty pregnant women were forced from their beds, loaded on to a truck and taken to the municipal cemetery where they were shot. The hostages in the Alcázar had already been shot. Webb Miller told Jay Allen that, after he saw what the rebels did to the wounded and to the nurses and the doctors in the hospital in Toledo, ‘he came close to going off his rocker’.99 Father Risco describes men and women committing suicide to avoid capture by the African columns. Those who were taken in the house-to-house searches, he commented, ‘had to die’. They were rounded up and conveyed to different town squares where they were shot in groups of twenty or thirty.100 More than eight hundred people were shot and then buried in a mass common grave in the municipal cemetery. Nothing more was known of the executed hostages.101"
Chaplain denied sainthood by Vatican"An insight into the behaviour of the columns during the march on Madrid is provided by the extraordinary experience of one of its chaplains, Father Fernando Huidobro Polanco. A thirty-four-year-old Jesuit from Santander, he had spent the last few years pursuing theological studies in Portugal, Germany, Holland and Belgium. He regarded the Republic as a pigsty and, while still in Belgium, he wrote in justification of the massacre of Badajoz that it was an isolated event provoked by the atrocities of the reds.102 In late August, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Father Wlodimiro Ledochowski, a keen sympathizer of the rebels, granted Huidobro’s request to return to Spain. On reaching Pamplona, he discovered that there was a surfeit of priests keen to join the rebels and so he went on to Valladolid, where he briefly served with the Falangist militia. From there, he went to Franco’s headquarters in Cáceres and was granted an audience. Franco said: ‘A warning, Father. You and your companions should do all you can for the good of Spanish soldiers, but, for various common-sense reasons, refrain from trying to convert the Moors.’ Huidobro wanted to join the Foreign Legion as a chaplain, so Franco sent him to see Yagüe at Talavera de la Reina. On 8 September, Yagüe agreed.103
The slight, bespectacled Huidobro, a one-time pupil of Heidegger, was initially received with ribaldry by the brutal Legionarios whose spiritual welfare he had come to tend. His bravery impressed some, but others were irritated by his efforts to persuade them to make confession, to stop gambling and to avoid prostitutes. During the advance on Madrid, and particularly in Toledo, Father Huidobro witnessed a number of atrocities. His efforts to prevent the shooting of prisoners or, as his biographer put it, ‘to save them from the just fury of his men’, did not endear him to the merciless Legionarios. He tried to justify what he saw: ‘our style is clean. Our procedures are different from theirs. They shoot, they torture, they exterminate. But they are criminals. We, because we are Christians and gentlemen, know how to fight.’ In this spirit, he gave prior absolution to the men of his unit before they went into action. However, he found their savagery disturbing since it damaged the image of the cause in which he fervently believed. He tried to protect the wounded and, when he could, attended to the spiritual needs of those about to be shot.104
Accordingly, in the lull that followed the fall of Toledo, he wrote down his reflections on the issue in two papers for ‘the military authorities’ and for the Military Legal Corps. Both papers were sent to the military authorities on 4 October. Under the heading, ‘On the Application of the Death Penalty in the Present Circumstances. Rules of Conscience’, he proposed that the ‘justice’ being exercised should not lead to excesses that besmirched the honour of the army. He argued against ‘the war of extermination advocated by some’ on the grounds that it would create lasting hatreds that would make the war last longer and impede reconciliation, deprive Spain of labour for its reconstruction and damage the country’s international reputation. He asserted that ‘Every wholesale condemnation, wherein no effort is made to ascertain if there are innocents among the crowd of prisoners, is to commit murder, not perform an act of justice … To kill those who have thrown down their arms or surrendered is always a criminal act.’
In the paper sent to the Military Legal Corps, he justified the death penalty for leftist murderers of women, priests and the innocent, and for Communists, or those ‘who, through the medium of a newspaper, a book or a pamphlet, have agitated the masses’. However, he suggested that membership of a left-wing trade union such as the CNT or UGT deserved not death but prison or a labour camp. He went on to denounce as murder the execution of those whose guilt had not been proven. His final words would not have endeared him to his readers: ‘the procedure being followed is deforming Spain and ensuring that instead of being a chivalrous and generous people, we are turning into a people of murderers and informers. The things that are happening make those of us who have always considered ourselves above all else to be Spaniards begin to be ashamed that we were born in this land of implacable cruelty and endless hatred.’105
It took great courage to stand up against the blanket savagery of the Legion. He sent both papers to many officers and to other chaplains and they were seen by both Castejón and Varela. Castejón was outraged. In front of other chaplains, he commented that Huidobro’s papers were ‘a kick in the teeth’.106 On 14 November 1936, when the army was on the outskirts of Madrid, Father Huidobro wrote to Varela to say that his glorious name should not be stained by the bloodletting that some junior officers were planning in order to teach the Madrileños a lesson. If a massacre were to take place, Huidobro feared that Varela’s name would go down in history ‘as monstrous and linked to the most cruel and barbaric deed of modern times’. After his forces had failed to take Madrid, Varela replied on 3 December from Yuncos in Toledo, congratulating Huidobro on his sentiments and claiming to share them.107
Father Huidobro had also written on 4 October to Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Díaz Varela, adjutant to General Franco, asking him to hand on to the Generalísimo copies of his two papers. Given Franco’s more pressing concerns, Díaz Varela passed Father Huidobro’s reflections to Yagüe, who commanded the division to which Huidobro’s unit belonged. Since the atrocities were part of a deliberate policy, Yagüe did nothing. Frustrated, Huidobro continued to make a nuisance of himself. He wrote a letter to Franco drawing his attention to:
the haste with which the execution takes place of people whose guilt is not only not proven but not even investigated. This is what is happening at the front, where every prisoner is shot, irrespective of whether he was deceived or forced to fight or even if he has sufficient capacity to understand the evil of the cause for which he was fighting. This is a war with neither wounded nor prisoners. Militiamen are shot for the mere fact of being militiamen without being given a chance to speak or to be questioned. Thus many are dying who do not deserve such a fate and who could mend their ways.
Since he was describing the usual practice of the Army of Africa, it was obvious that nothing would be done. Nevertheless, his letter, for all its naivety, constituted an astonishing act of courage.108
He wrote again to Díaz Varela on 10 November 1936 describing as ‘iniquitous and criminal’ the general order that anyone found with arms should be summarily shot. He called instead for them to be taken prisoner, interrogated and then, if ‘guilty’, sent to punishment camps. He asserted that ‘the limitless executions on a scale never before seen in history’ provoked the dogged resistance of the desperate Republicans who knew that there was no point in surrender. He went on to draw conclusions about the reaction in Madrid to the massacre that followed the fall of Toledo: ‘If they knew that in Toledo the wounded were murdered in the hospitals, would they need to know anything more about our harsh barbarity? Already some say that when we reach Madrid, we should shoot the wounded in the hospitals. We are falling back into barbarism and we are corrupting people’s morals with so much irresponsible killing. Previously, no one was killed until their guilt had been proved; now people are killed in order to hide their innocence.’ Huidobro begged Díaz Varela to raise the matter with Franco and had the temerity to suggest that he might go public: ‘Up to now, I have made my observations prudently and without raising my voice. Now the time has come to cry out. I do not fear either the right or the left but only God.’ He ended in dramatic terms: ‘I have witnessed murders, as we all have, and I do not want the new regime to be born with blood on its hands.’109
Díaz Varela finally replied on 25 November to say that Franco had been appalled to hear about the excesses that Huidobro had denounced and was determined to punish all those responsible. It goes without saying that nothing was done. Himself in hospital after being wounded, Huidobro knew that the shootings were continuing on the same scale but chose to believe that Franco was sincere. Over the next months, Huidobro became ever more vocal about the need for an eventual reconciliation of both sides. A number of officers told him that if he continued to preach his message ‘they’re going to shoot you’. On 11 April 1937, Huidobro was killed at Aravaca on the outskirts of Madrid, allegedly by shrapnel from an exploding Russian shell. This detail helped initially when, in 1947, the process was put in train by the Jesuits for his beatification and canonization. Huidobro had saved lives and lived a thoroughly Christian existence. However, in the course of the thorough investigation of the case instituted by the Vatican, it emerged that he had been shot in the back by one of the Legionarios of his own unit, tired perhaps of the preaching of his chaplain. When it was discovered that Huidobro had been killed by the Francoists and not by the reds, the Vatican shelved his case.110"
Chapter 10: A Terrified City Responds: The Massacres of Paracuellos
Right wing provocation"Franco once claimed that he would never bomb Madrid, but already in September 1936, there were major raids. He ensured, however, that the Barrio de Salamanca, the wealthiest neighbourhood, would be spared. Accordingly, its streets were crowded and, at night, people who could not get into Metro stations for shelter slept on the pavements of the Barrio’s great boulevards, Salamanca, Velázquez, Goya and Príncipe de Vergara. The raids on the rest of the city, far from undermining the morale of the Madrileños, did exactly the opposite and also provoked a deep loathing of the rebels, a loathing whose immediate targets were those assumed to be their supporters within the capital. This included both as yet undetected members of the fifth column and right-wingers already in prison. In the paranoia of the siege, they were indiscriminately regarded as ‘fifth columnists’."
"Hatred was intensified when a rebel aircraft inundated the city with leaflets announcing that ten Republicans would be shot for every prisoner killed in Madrid. The acrimony was whipped up by the Republican daily La Voz, which announced that ‘it is estimated that Madrid, if it falls, will be the terrifying theatre of one hundred thousand sacrificial victims’. On the basis of what had been done in the south by the African columns, it was believed that anyone who had been a member of any party or group linked to the Popular Front, had held a government post or was an affiliate of a trade union would be shot. ‘After a final orgy of blood, when the barbaric revenge of the enemies of freedom has been consummated, with the most significant men of the bourgeois left and the proletarian left murdered, twenty-two million Spaniards would suffer the most atrocious and humiliating slavery.’1 Another Republican daily, Informaciones, reported that Queipo de Llano had told a British journalist that half of Madrid’s population would be shot by the victorious rebels.2"
"On 16 November, the diplomats still in Madrid were shown the horribly mutilated corpse of a Republican pilot. On the previous day, he had crash-landed behind the Francoist lines near Segovia. He was beaten to death and his body dragged around the streets of the town. His captors had then taken the trouble to dismember him, place his body parts in a box, attach a parachute, load the box on to an aircraft, fly to Madrid and drop it over the aerodrome at Barajas. In the box was a paper which said, ‘this gift is for the head of the red air force so that he knows the fate that awaits him and all his bolsheviks’.3"
Leftist response to right wing provocation"In the claustrophobia generated by the siege, the daily terror had long since found expression in a popular rage which focused on the prison population"
"Neither ordinary citizens nor political leaders made any significant distinction between the active ‘fifth column’ and the nearly eight thousand imprisoned rightists. At this stage, the fifth column was far from being the organized network that it became in 1937 and the exploits of snipers, saboteurs and defeatists were relatively random. However, among those detained as rebel supporters were many, especially the army officers, who were considered potentially very dangerous."
"As Franco’s columns advanced ever nearer to the capital, to generalized hatred of rightists there was added a much more specific concern about the presence in Madrid’s prisons of so many experienced right-wing officers who had already categorically refused invitations, individual and collective, to honour their oath of loyalty to the Republic and fight in defence of the city. On a razor’s edge between survival and annihilation, the Republican military and political authorities were determined that these men should not be permitted to form the basis of new units for the rebel columns. This would be the most crucial factor in the eventual fate of prisoners throughout November 1936."
"When the question of the prisoners was raised on 1 November, Álvarez del Vayo left the meeting to go and seek advice from Largo Caballero. He returned to say that the Prime Minister had ordered the Minister of the Interior, Ángel Galarza, to arrange the evacuation of the prisoners; but little was done over the next five days.5
On 2 November, a group of anarchists had visited the Cárcel de San Antón, a converted convent, and picked out the file-cards of the four hundred army officers detained there. The youngest had been interrogated and offered the chance to fight for the Republic. They all refused, which constituted mutiny. On 4 November, Getafe to the south fell and, on the same day, between thirty and forty officers were ‘tried’ by a Tribunal Popular. Having reaffirmed that they abjured their oath of loyalty, at dawn on 5 November they were removed from the prison and shot. Another forty were taken later the same day and also shot on the outskirts of the capital. The following day, a further 173 were evacuated in three batches. The first and the third, each of fifty-nine prisoners, reached Alcalá de Henares safely. The fifty-five prisoners of the second convoy were executed at Paracuellos, halfway to Alcalá. These evacuations on 6 November, but not the murders, were authorized by the Director General of Security, Manuel Muñoz, who had also ordered others from the Cárcel de Ventas between 27 October and 2 November.6"
"As a result of the tribunals conducted by agents of the CPIP, from late October onward the rhythm of sacas accelerated. The illegality of this deeply distressed senior Republicans. Luis Zubillaga, the secretary general of the Bar Association, and Mariano Gómez, the acting president of the Supreme Court, took the extraordinary step of seeking the help of the anarchist Melchor Rodríguez, whose efforts to save many rightists had already earned him the suspicion of his comrades. The incorporation into the government, on 4 November, of four anarchist ministers, Juan López (Commerce), Federica Montseny (Health), Juan Peiró (Industry) and Juan García Oliver (Justice), led Zubillaga and Gómez to hope that some official support might be given to Melchor’s humanitarian efforts. In fact, García Oliver had been one of the founders of the FAI along with Durruti. His record of frequent imprisonment for terrorist acts made him a remarkable choice. The logic behind it was the hope that he might be able to persuade the anarchist rank and file that the implementation of justice could be left to the state. Zubillaga and Gómez wanted him to appoint Melchor Rodríguez to the post of Director General of Prisons, vacant since the resignation of Pedro Villar Gómez in late September. However, given the threat to Madrid posed by Franco’s columns, the protection of prisoners was not a priority for García Oliver."
"García Oliver refused to appoint Melchor Rodríguez as Director General of Prisons without first checking with the regional and national committees of the CNT, which were deeply implicated in the repression and thus highly suspicious of Melchor Rodríguez. Accordingly, García Oliver appointed two trusted CNT stalwarts who had accompanied him from Barcelona, Juan Antonio Carnero as Director General and Jaume Nebot as Inspector General of Prisons.7 Rather than to prevent atrocities, the task given by García Oliver to Nebot was to locate and destroy the criminal records of all members of the CNT or the FAI who had ever been jailed.8"
Politicians flee to Valencia"Not long after the fateful meeting finished, probably some time between 4.00 and 5.00 p.m., the Under-Secretary of War, General José Asensio Torrado, met Generals Sebastián Pozas, the Chief of Operations of the Army of the Centre, and José Miaja Menent, head of the 1st Military Division. After a lengthy discussion, he gave each a sealed envelope emblazoned with the words ‘Top Secret. Not to be opened until 6 a.m. tomorrow’. Given the urgency of the situation, as soon as Asensio left for Valencia, both generals ignored the instruction and opened the envelopes. They discovered that each contained the orders meant for the other. Pozas was ordered to set up a new headquarters for the Army of the Centre at Tarancón on the road to Valencia. Miaja was placed in charge of the defence of the capital and ordered to establish a body, to be known as the Junta de Defensa, which would have full governmental powers in Madrid and its environs. Had they complied with the instruction not to open the envelopes and gone back to their respective headquarters, they would have seen their orders when they were many miles apart, with catastrophic consequences for the defence of the city. Whoever sealed the envelopes was probably a rebel sympathizer.12"
"The view of the cabinet and the large numbers of functionaries who fled to Valencia was that the capital was doomed and that the Junta was there merely to administer the inevitable defeat. In the event, under intolerable pressure and against all odds, it was to preside over a near miraculous victory.13 Miaja’s awesome task was to organize Madrid’s military and civil defence at the same time as providing food and shelter for its citizens and the refugees who thronged its streets. In addition, he had to deal with the violence of the checas and the activities of the fifth column.14 The Junta de Defensa was thus a localized mini-government. Its ‘ministers’ were known as Councillors and their deputies would be chosen from all those parties that made up the central government. However, it was to the Communists that Miaja would turn first in search of help. And they were ready and waiting."
"The first official meeting of the hastily formed Junta de Defensa was not until the late afternoon of 7 November. However, there can be no doubt that, from late the previous evening, overall operational responsibility for the prisoners lay with three men: Santiago Carrillo Solares, his deputy José Cazorla Maure and Segundo Serrano Poncela, who was effectively Director General of Security for Madrid. Key decisions about the prisoners were clearly taken in the vacuum between the departure of the government for Valencia on the evening of 6 November and the formal constitution of the Junta de Defensa twenty-four hours later. However, it is inconceivable that those decisions were taken in isolation by three inexperienced young men aged respectively twenty-one (Carrillo), thirty (Cazorla) and twenty-four (Serrano Poncela). The authorization for their operational decisions, as will be seen, had to have come from far more senior elements. Certainly, it required the go-ahead from Checa and Mije who, in turn, needed the approval of Miaja and probably of the Russian advisers. In the terror-stricken city, the aid provided by the Russians in terms of tanks, aircraft, the International Brigades and technical experience ensured that their advice would be sought and gratefully received. The implementation of the operational decisions also required, and indeed would receive, assistance from the anarchist movement."
Santiago Carillo: Managing public order"Thus, the authorization, the organization and the implementation of what happened to the prisoners involved many people. However, Carrillo’s position as Public Order Councillor, together with his later prominence as secretary general of the Communist Party, saw him accused of sole responsibility for the deaths that followed. That is absurd, but it does not mean that he had no responsibility at all. The calibration of the degree of that responsibility must start with the question of why a twenty-one-year-old member of the Socialist Youth should have been given such a crucial and powerful position. In fact, Carrillo was not entirely who he seemed to be at the time. Late on the night of 6 November, after the meeting with Miaja, Carrillo, along with Serrano Poncela, Cazorla and others, was formally incorporated into the Communist Party. They were not subjected to stringent membership requirements. In what was hardly a formal ceremony, they simply informed José Díaz and Pedro Checa of their wishes and were incorporated into the party on the spot.20
The brevity of the proceedings indicates that Carrillo was already an important Communist ‘submarine’ within the Socialist Party. In prison after the miners’ uprising in Asturias in October 1934, as secretary general of the Socialist Youth Movement (Federación de Juventudes Socialistas), he began to advocate its merger with the numerically smaller Communist equivalent, the Unión de Juventudes Comunistas. This was noted by Comintern agents and Carrillo was identified as a candidate for recruitment. The most senior Comintern representative in Spain, the Argentinian Vittorio Codovila, arranged for him to be invited to Moscow to discuss the potential unification of the FJS with the UJC. On being released from prison after the elections of 16 February 1936, he had immediately applied for a passport to travel to Russia. It represented a dazzling prospect for him. After a year incarcerated with Largo Caballero, Carrillo, like other prominent members of the Socialist Youth, sensed that the PSOE was yesterday’s party. The Socialist leadership of middle-aged men rarely allowed young militants near powerful positions in its sclerotic structures. Carrillo now went to Moscow as the guest of the KIM, the Communist International of Youth, on 3 March. The KIM was closely watched by the Russian intelligence service, the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). Thus it is highly likely that Carrillo, who had already been identified for grooming as a potential Comintern star, was thoroughly vetted in Moscow and would have been obliged to convince his bosses of his loyalty to the Soviet Union.
On his return to Spain, Carrillo took part in a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee on 31 March, at which he suggested that the Socialist Youth seek membership of the KIM and that the PSOE unite with the PCE and join the Comintern. Attendance at Central Committee meetings was a privilege not normally extended to outsiders.21 In his memoirs, Carrillo made the even more startling admission that by early November 1936, although still formally a member of the Socialist Party, he was attending meetings of the PCE’s Politbureau, an indication of great seniority.22 With the help of Codovila, in April 1936, he secured an agreement to unite the Socialist and Communist youth movements (FJS and the UJC) as the United Socialist Youth (Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas). In some areas of Spain, although not all, unification took place immediately. In September, Carrillo would be named secretary general of the new youth movement, which was in some places a Communist organization. In general terms, the JSU constituted a massive advance of Communist influence at the expense of the Socialist Party. By this time, if Carrillo was not already a member of the PCE, he was very close to being so."
"Subsequently, Francoist propaganda built on the atrocity of Paracuellos to depict the Republic as a murderous Communist-dominated regime guilty of red barbarism. Francoists have even claimed that the number murdered was 12,000.111 Despite the fact that Santiago Carrillo was only one of the key participants in the entire process, the Franco regime, and the Spanish right thereafter, never missed any opportunity to use Paracuellos to denigrate him during the years that he was secretary general of the Communist Party (1960–82) and especially in 1977 as part of the effort to prevent the legalization of the Communist Party. Carrillo has himself inadvertently contributed to keeping himself in the spotlight by absurdly denying any knowledge of, let alone responsibility for, the killings. However, a weight of other evidence confirmed by some of his own partial revelations makes it clear that he was fully involved.112"
"For instance, in more than one interview in 1977 Carrillo claimed that, by the time he took over the Council for Public Order in the Junta de Defensa, the operation of transferring prisoners from Madrid to Valencia was ‘coming to an end and all I did, with General Miaja, was order the transfer of the last prisoners’. It is certainly true that there had been sacas before 7 November, but the bulk of the killings took place after that date while Carrillo was Councillor for Public Order. His admission that he ordered the transfers of prisoners after 7 November clearly puts him in the frame.113 Elsewhere, he claimed that, after an evacuation had been decided on, the vehicles were ambushed and the prisoners murdered by uncontrolled elements. He has frequently insinuated that the killers were anarchists and has stated, ‘I can take no responsibility other than having been unable to prevent it.’114 This would have been hardly credible under any circumstances, but especially so after the discovery that there had been a CNT–JSU meeting on the night of 7 November.
Moreover, Carrillo’s post-1974 denials of knowledge of the Paracuellos killings were contradicted by the congratulations heaped on him at the time. Between 6 and 8 March 1937 the PCE celebrated an amplified plenary meeting of its Central Committee in Valencia. Francisco Antón said: ‘It is difficult to say that the fifth column in Madrid has been annihilated but it certainly has suffered the hardest blows there. This, it must be proclaimed loudly, is thanks to the concern of the Party and the selfless, ceaseless effort of two new comrades, as beloved as if they were veteran militants of our Party, Comrade Carrillo when he was the Councillor for Public Order and Comrade Cazorla who holds the post now.’ When the applause died down, Carrillo rose and praised ‘the glory of those warriors of the JSU who can fight in the certain knowledge that the rearguard is safe, cleansed and free of traitors. It is no crime nor is it a manoeuvre [against the CNT] but a duty to demand such a purge.’115
Comments made at the time and later by Spanish Communists such as Pasionaria and Francisco Antón, by Comintern agents, by Gorev and by others show that prisoners were assumed to be fifth columnists and that Carrillo was to be praised for eliminating them. On 30 July 1937, in a report to the head of the Comintern Giorgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian Stoyan Minev, alias ‘Boris Stepanov’, from April 1937 the Comintern’s delegate in Spain, wrote indignantly of the ‘Jesuit and fascist’ Irujo that he had tried to arrest Carrillo because he had given ‘the order to shoot several arrested officers of the fascists’.116 In his final post-war report to Stalin, Stepanov referred to Mola’s statement about his five columns. Stepanov went on to write proudly that the Communists took note of the implications thereof and ‘in a couple of days carried out the operations necessary to cleansing Madrid of fifth columnists’. Stepanov explained in more detail his outrage against Irujo. In July 1937, shortly after becoming Minister of Justice, Manuel Irujo initiated investigations into what happened at Paracuellos, including a judicial inquiry into the role of Carrillo.117 Unfortunately, no trace of this inquiry has survived and it is a reasonable assumption that any evidence was among the papers burned by the Communist-dominated security services before the end of the war.118
What Carrillo himself said in his broadcast on Unión Radio and what Stepanov wrote in his report to Stalin were echoed years later in the Spanish Communist Party’s official history of its role in the Civil War. Published in Moscow when Carrillo was secretary general of the PCE, it declared proudly that ‘Santiago Carrillo and his deputy Cazorla took the measures necessary to maintain order in the rearguard, which was every bit as important as the fighting at the front. In two or three days, a serious blow was delivered against the snipers and fifth columnists.’119"
"Evacuations""In any case, evacuation orders were not the equivalent of specific instructions for murder – as was shown by the safe arrival of some evacuated prisoners at their destinations."
"Whoever signed the orders, in the midst of administrative collapse and widespread popular panic, the evacuation of eight thousand prisoners seemed impossible. Nevertheless, Carrillo’s Public Order Council would undertake the task.25 In the event, the evacuation became a massacre."
"Among those pushing for the evacuation – not necessarily the execution – of the prisoners were the Republican military authorities, General Miaja and his chief of staff, Vicente Rojo, the senior Russians present in Madrid and the Communist hierarchy. Given the crucial military assistance being provided by the Soviet personnel, and their own experience of the siege of St Petersburg in the Russian Civil War, it was natural that their advice should be sought. The most senior of the Soviet military personnel were Generals Ian Antonovich Berzin, the overall head of the Soviet military mission, and Vladimir Gorev. Berzin, along with Soviet diplomats, had gone to Valencia with the government, while Gorev, officially the military attaché but actually Madrid station chief of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), remained. Gorev would thus play a crucial role, alongside Rojo, in the defence of Madrid. Also present and involved was Mikhail Koltsov, the Pravda correspondent, perhaps the most powerful Russian journalist of the day. He was close to Stalin himself, although in Madrid, when not concentrating on his journalistic tasks, he seems to have been acting on Gorev’s instructions.26"
"Like their Spanish comrades, the Russian and Comintern officials were all alarmed to hear reports that the prisoners were already crowing about their imminent liberation and their incorporation into the rebel forces. Gorev, Berzin and other Russian advisers, including Vidali, insisted that it would be suicidal not to evacuate dangerous prisoners. Given the desperate situation of the siege, this was a view shared by Vicente Rojo and Miaja.27"
"Miaja quickly established a close relationship with one of the key players in the organization of the fate of the prisoners, José Cazorla.28 The taciturn Cazorla was equally determined to eliminate rebel supporters. For this task, as will be seen, he drew upon the advice of Russian security personnel. Every bit as concerned as Miaja about the prisoners was the forty-two-year-old and recently promoted Lieutenant Colonel Vicente Rojo. He regarded the fifth column as ‘an operational column with sufficient force and capacity to attack organized troops in the rear’. He was convinced that it was not made up only of spies, saboteurs and agitators but constituted a tightly woven network capable of influencing every aspect of the struggle, a network that had been organized long before the outbreak of war. At the beginning of November, he feared that it was capable of playing a decisive role in the fate of the capital. Accordingly, wrote Rojo, the military authorities had to take the decision to eliminate it.29 In November 1936, this was an over-pessimistic assessment of the operational capacity of the fifth column, which would not reach that level for many months yet. Nevertheless, Rojo’s view was an indication of the fear shaping Republican action and was quite reasonable, given the many times that accurate information about Republican movements had reached the rebels and the increase of sniping as the rebel forces were moving into the capital’s western approaches."
"There has been considerable speculation that Mikhail Koltsov played a key role in determining the fate of the prisoners. This is based on the entry in his diary for 7 November in which he described how, in the early hours of the morning, Pedro Checa took the decision to send militiamen to the prisons after pressure from ‘Miguel Martínez’, a supposedly Latin American Comintern agent with sufficient influence to give advice at the highest level. It has been widely assumed that ‘Miguel Martínez’ was none other than Koltsov himself because some of the activities attributed in his diary to ‘Miguel Martínez’ are known to have been carried out by Koltsov himself. Moreover, at a meeting in Moscow in April 1937, Stalin jokingly called Koltsov ‘Don Miguel’. However, it is probable that ‘Miguel Martínez’ was a composite personality invented by Koltsov in order to include material in his published diary that he could not attribute directly to his informants.
In his memoirs, Vicente Rojo refers to a foreign Communist, ‘Miguel Martínez’, who helped Contreras organize the Fifth Regiment. Rojo knew Koltsov and had no reason not to mention him by name. Accordingly, it is clear that, for Rojo, ‘Miguel Martínez’ was someone other than Koltsov, almost certainly a Spanish-speaker who worked with Vidali at the Fifth Regiment and went by the name of ‘Camarada Miguel’. The only man fitting this description was an NKVD operative named Josif Grigulevich.30 In the very small NKVD presence in Spain, of fewer than ten operatives, some were ‘legal’ – that is to say, declared to the Spanish Foreign Ministry and having diplomatic cover – and some (two or three) were ‘illegal’, that is to say, working undercover. An example of the first would be Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, the acting NKVD station chief in Madrid who went by the name Aleksandr Orlov, and of the second Josif Grigulevich. Nikolsky/Orlov was in Spain to advise on the creation of security services and to liquidate foreign Trotskyists."
"Thus, in Koltsov’s diary, ‘Miguel Martínez’ was sometimes Koltsov himself, sometimes Grigulevich, sometimes General Gorev and perhaps sometimes someone else.31"
"Another senior Communist, Enrique Castro Delgado, commander of the Fifth Regiment, had as his political commissar Vittorio Vidali, an NKVD agent. There can be no doubt, as will be seen, that they discussed the execution of prisoners. The journalist Herbert Matthews wrote later of the massacre of prisoners:
I believe, myself, that the orders came from the Comintern agents in Madrid because I know that the sinister Vittorio Vidali spent the night in a prison briefly interrogating prisoners brought before him and, when he decided, as he almost always did, that they were fifth columnists, he would shoot them in the back of their heads with his revolver. Ernest Hemingway told me that he heard that Vidali fired so often that the skin between thumb and index finger of his right hand was badly burned.36"
"In support of Matthews’s comment on Vidali/Contreras, there is a remarkable passage in the memoirs of Castro Delgado. Castro described how, on the night of 6 November, after talking to Contreras, he said to someone identified only as Tomás, the head of a special unit: ‘The massacre starts. No quarter to be given. Mola’s Fifth Column must be destroyed before it begins to move. Don’t worry about making a mistake! There are times when you find yourself in front of twenty people knowing that one of them is a traitor but not which one. So you have a problem of conscience and a problem concerning the Party. You understand?’ Tomás understood only too well that, to make sure of killing the traitor, some innocent people would have to die. Castro continued, ‘Bear in mind that a break-out by the Fifth Column would be a lot to cope with for you and for everyone.’ Tomás asked: ‘A completely free hand?’ Castro replied: ‘This is one of those free hands that the Party, at times like this, can deny to no one – least of all you.’ Tomás agreed and Castro then turned to Contreras, who had been present throughout, and said: ‘Let’s get a few hours’ sleep. Tomorrow is 7 November. The day of decision. That’s what it was for the Bolsheviks and what it will be for us. Are we thinking along the same lines or is there anything that you don’t agree about, Commissar?’ Contreras: ‘We’re in agreement.’38 Since Vidali was the senior partner, it is reasonable to assume that it was his instructions that Castro was giving to Tomás.
On 12 November, an article in the Fifth Regiment’s newspaper suggested that Castro Delgado’s instructions had been taken to heart:
In our city, there are still some of Mola’s accomplices. While the rebels’ evil birds drop their murderous bombs, killing defenceless women and children, the fascist elements of the fifth column throw hand grenades and fire their pistols … We know only too well what the hordes of Moors and the Legion will do if they get into Madrid. We can have no mercy for the accomplices of those savages. The fifth column must be exterminated! The committees of every apartment block must locate where the fascist, the traitor, the suspect is hiding and denounce them. In a matter of hours, let us exterminate them!39"
"In the published résumé of the Causa General proceedings, there is a statement that ‘Representatives of the [NKVD], calling themselves comrades Coto, Pancho and Leo, backed up by an individual who used the name José Ocampo and several female interpreters, all installed in the Hotel Gaylord, in Calle Alfonso XI … were directing the activities of the Marxist police of Madrid.’42"
"By following the advice of these experienced technicians, the Brigada achieved maximum efficacy in a new area of police activity made necessary by wartime circumstances. The report stated that ‘the collaboration of said technicians was ever more intense until a total mutual understanding between the Spanish and Russian security services was reached’.46 Grigulevich later described himself as ‘the right hand of Carrillo’ in the Public Order Council.47 According to the records of the NKVD’s successor organization, the KGB or Committee for State Security, their friendship was so close that years later Carrillo chose Grigulevich to be his son’s secular ‘godfather’.48
It is clear that Miaja, Rojo, Gorev and the senior leadership of the Communist Party were all anxious to see the prisoner question resolved with the greatest urgency. They certainly approved of prisoner evacuations but not necessarily of executions, although it is possible that they approved of them too. What is likely is that, in the meetings immediately following the creation of the Junta de Defensa, they delegated responsibility to the two-man leadership of the PCE. They, who certainly did approve of the execution of prisoners, passed organizational responsibility to Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela. To implement their instructions, the trio could draw on members of the JSU who were given posts in the Public Order Delegation headed by Serrano Poncela, which then ran the Dirección General de Seguridad for Madrid. They could also count on assistance from Contreras/Vidali and the Fifth Regiment and from Grigulevich and the Brigada Especial. However, they could do nothing against the will of the anarchist movement which controlled the roads out of Madrid. Given that the anarchists had already seized and murdered prisoners, it was not likely that they would offer insuperable opposition to the Communists. Indeed, the formal agreement of senior elements of the CNT militias was soon forthcoming."
"Before returning for that encounter, Schlayer and the Red Cross delegate went to the Cárcel Modelo, where they learned that several hundred prisoners had been taken away. On coming back to the Ministry of War, they were greeted amiably by Carrillo, who assured them of his determination to protect the prisoners and put a stop to the murders. When they told him what they had learned at the Cárcel Modelo, he denied knowledge of any evacuations. Schlayer reflected later that, even if this were true, it raises the question why Carrillo and Miaja, once having been informed by him of the evacuations, did nothing to prevent the others that continued that evening and on successive days.50"
"Nuño reported that the CNT and JSU representatives, on the evening of 7 November, had decided that the prisoners should be classified into three groups. The fate of the first, consisting of ‘fascists and dangerous elements’, was to be ‘Immediate execution’, ‘with responsibility to be hidden’ – the responsibility being of those who took the decision and of those who implemented it. The second group, of prisoners considered to be supporters of the military uprising but, because of age or profession, less dangerous, were to be evacuated to Chinchilla, near Albacete. The third, those least politically committed, were to be released ‘with all possible guarantees, as proof to the Embassies of our humanitarianism’. This last comment suggests that whoever represented the JSU at the meeting knew about and mentioned the earlier encounter between Carrillo and Schlayer.52
The first consignment of prisoners had already left Madrid early in the morning of 7 November, presumably in accordance with the instructions for evacuation issued by Pedro Checa in response to Koltsov/Miguel Martínez. Thus some prisoners were removed and killed before the formal agreement with the CNT made later that evening. There is no record of any difficulty of their getting through the anarchist militias on the roads out, and that is not surprising since there were CNT–FAI representatives on Serrano Poncela’s Public Order Delegation. Nevertheless, the agreement guaranteed that further convoys would face no problems at the anarchist checkpoints on the roads out of the capital and could also rely on substantial assistance in the gory business of executing the prisoners. The strongest CNT controls were posted on the roads out to Valencia and Aragon which the convoys would take. Large flotillas of double-decker buses and many smaller vehicles could not get out of Madrid without the approval, co-operation or connivance of the CNT patrols. Since Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela knew this only too well, it is not plausible that they would have ordered evacuation convoys without first securing the agreement of the CNT–FAI. This undermines Carrillo’s later assertions that the convoys were hijacked by anarchists. The grain of truth in those claims resides in the certainty that the anarchists took some part in the actual killing"
"Later in the afternoon, according to the detailed descriptions left by three prisoners, large numbers were led from their cells in the Cárcel Modelo. Two men (those sent by Pedro Checa?) with numerous yellowing file-cards from the prison registry were accompanied by militiamen. They called out names through a loud-hailer and ordered the men to take all their belongings and wait below. Those named were a mixture of army officers, priests and civilians, young and old, with no apparent pattern. They speculated anxiously whether they would be transferred to other prisons outside Madrid or be killed. They were tied together in groups and forced to leave all their bags and cases behind. Moreover, they were searched and any remaining watches, money or valuables taken from them.55 They were loaded on to double-decker buses. Convoys consisting of the buses escorted by cars and trucks carrying militiamen shuttled back and forth over the next two days.
Their official destinations were prisons well behind the lines, in Alcalá de Henares, Chinchilla and Valencia. However, only about three hundred arrived. Eleven miles from Madrid, on the road to Alcalá de Henares, at the small village of Paracuellos del Jarama, the first batch, from San Antón, were violently forced off the buses. At the base of the small hill on which the village stood, they were lined up by the militiamen, verbally abused and then shot. In the evening of the same day, the second batch, from the Cárcel Modelo, suffered the same fate. A further consignment of prisoners arrived on the morning of 8 November. The Mayor was forced to round up the able-bodied inhabitants of the village (there were only 1,600 in total) to dig huge ditches for the approximately eight hundred bodies which had been left to rot. When Paracuellos could cope with no more, subsequent convoys made for the nearby village of Torrejón de Ardoz, where a disused irrigation channel was used for the approximately four hundred victims.56 There have been numerous assertions that ditches had already been dug.57 On 8 November, there were more sacas from the Cárcel Modelo. By then, news had already reached the prisoners of the first murders in Paracuellos del Jarama and Torrejón de Ardoz.
It is certain that, from approximately 8.00 on the morning of Saturday 7 November onwards, 175 prisoners were taken from San Antón and, later in the afternoon of the same day, more than nine hundred from the Cárcel Modelo. A further 185 to 200 were brought from the Cárcel de Porlier in the Barrio de Salamanca. Another 190 to 200 were taken from the Cárcel de Ventas. On that day, 1,450–1,545 prisoners were removed from Madrid’s four jails. Thereafter, there were sacas, on 7, 8, 9, 18, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30 November and 1 and 3 December. The Cárcel Modelo was the prison with the highest number of victims – 970 – but suffered sacas only on the first three days. By 16 November, the Francoists were so close that the Carcel Model had to be evacuated and was used as headquarters for the Durruti Column and the International Brigades despite heavy bomb damage. The prisoners were taken to the other Madrid jails, Porlier, Ventas and San Antón, and to Alcalá de Henares. Porlier saw sacas on 7, 8, 9, 18, 24, 25 and 26 November and 1 and 3 December. Of these, a total of 405 were murdered in Paracuellos or Torrejón. Sacas from San Antón on 7, 22, 28, 29 and 30 November saw a total of four hundred prisoners murdered in Paracuellos or Torrejón. Five other expeditions of prisoners from San Antón, two on 7 November and three more on 27, 28 and 29 November, arrived safely in Alcalá de Henares. From the prison at Ventas, sacas on 27, 29, 30 November and 1 and 3 December ended with about two hundred murders at Paracuellos or Torrejón. The total numbers killed over the four weeks following the creation of the Junta de Defensa cannot be calculated with total precision, but there is little doubt that it was somewhere between 2,200 and 2,500.58"
"All these sacas were initiated with documentation on Dirección General de Seguridad notepaper indicating that the prisoners were either to be released or to be taken to Chinchilla. When the order was for them to go to Alcalá de Henares, they usually arrived safely. This indicates that ‘liberty’ and ‘Chinchilla’ were codewords for elimination.59 The specific orders for the evacuations of prisoners were not signed by Carrillo, nor by any member of the Junta de Defensa. Until 22 November, such orders were signed by Manuel Muñoz’s second-in-command in the Dirección General de Seguridad, the head of the police Vicente Girauta Linares. Until he followed Muñoz to Valencia, Girauta was under the orders of Serrano Poncela, Muñoz’s successor for Madrid. Thereafter, the orders were signed either by Serrano Poncela himself, or else by Girauta’s successor as head of the Madrid police, Bruno Carreras Villanueva.60 In the Causa General, there are several documents signed by Serrano Poncela. Its published version reproduces two. The one dated 26 November 1936 read, ‘I request that you release the individuals listed on the back of this page,’ of whom there were twenty-six named. The document dated 27 November read, ‘Please release the prisoners mentioned on the two attached sheets,’ which had 106 names. All those on these two lists were assassinated.61 No explicit orders for the execution have been found."
"Minister of the Interior, Ángel Galarza, on 6 November, to which Serrano Poncela added that those preparing the expedition knew that it was for ‘definitive evacuation’ of the prisoners, which presumably meant death. Accordingly, the categorization process was abandoned. Again, the prisoners had their wrists tied together with cord, usually in twos, and were dispossessed of everything of value. Between 9 and 10 the following morning, 8 November, seven to nine double-decker buses and two large single-deck charabancs arrived. The prisoners were loaded aboard and the expedition set off, escorted by armed militiamen and accompanied by the anarchist Manuel Rascón Ramírez and the three policemen, Sainz, Delgado and Urrésola.62 In the declarations made by those later interrogated by the Francoist police, there are no references to the convoys on this or any other occasion facing any difficulties from the anarchist militias guarding the roads out of Madrid. This suggests that the deal reached on the evening of 7 November between the CNT and JSU was being implemented. It is probable that Rascón Ramírez went along to ensure easy passage through anarchist checkpoints by confirming that the expedition had CNT–FAI approval.63"
"What happened that morning of 8 November at the Cárcel Modelo seems to have been the standard practice employed during the subsequent sacas. From that day, Carrillo had started to publish a series of decrees that would ensure Communist control of the security forces within the capital and put an end to the myriad parallel police forces. On 9 November, Carrillo issued two decrees that constituted a significant step towards the centralized control of the police and security forces. The first required the surrender of all arms not in authorized hands. The second stated that the internal security of the capital would be the exclusive responsibility of forces organized by the Council for Public Order. This signified the dissolution, on paper at least, of all checas.64 Under the conditions of the siege, Carrillo was thus able to impose by emergency decree measures that had been beyond the government. Nevertheless, there was a considerable delay between the announcement of the decree and its successful implementation. The anarchists resisted as long as they could and the Communists never relinquished some of their checas.
Shortly after taking up office, Carrillo had called a meeting with representatives of the Comité Provincial de Investigación Pública. He reminded them that, when the CPIP had been created, Manuel Muñoz had said it was a temporary structure while the Dirección General de Seguridad was being purged, after which some of its members would be incorporated into the police. Carrillo declared that the moment had arrived.65 Accordingly, by his decree of 9 November, he returned the services of security and investigation to the now reformed police and suppressed all those groups run by political parties or trade unions. This meant the end of the CPIP, known as the Checa de Fomento. In fact, several of its members, including Manuel Rascón Ramírez and Manuel Ramos Martínez, were already working with the Public Order Delegation. The treasurer of the Checa de Fomento handed over 1,750,000 pesetas in cash, gold to the value of 600,000 pesetas and 460 chests full of valuable household items, including silver, porcelain, clocks and radios, that had been taken in house searches and from those arrested. Other items of jewellery had been regularly delivered to the Dirección General de Seguridad.66"
"The Public Order Delegation took over the activities, and absorbed many of the personnel, of the CPIP. Control of roads in and out of the capital was to be in the hands of the police, the Assault Guards and Rearguard Security Militias (MVR) and co-ordinated by Serrano Poncela’s Delegation. The Delegation had a representative in each police station and in each of the principal prisons. According to Carrillo, the only opposition to his centralization measures came from the anarchists. Indeed, the closure of Felipe Sandoval’s checa in the Cine Europa was resisted and eventually required the intervention of the Assault Guards. Carrillo’s measures constituted the institutionalization of the repression under the Public Order Delegation in the DGS. Despite the presence of two CNT–FAI members and the fact that many ex-members of the component groups of the CPIP now became policemen, the Delegation was dominated by the Communists. They were thus able to push forward the reconstruction of the Republican state which had been a crucial necessity since the military coup had shattered the apparatus of government.69"
"That ‘release’ (execution) orders came from Serrano Poncela was confirmed by the declaration of another policeman, Álvaro Marasa Barasa. In fact, the tribunals established after the August events in the Cárcel Modelo had already drawn up lists of candidates to be shot, some of whom had been executed in the course of September and October. Now, agents would arrive at each prison late at night with a general order signed by Serrano Poncela for the ‘liberation’ of the prisoners listed on the back or on separate sheets. The director of the prison would hand them over and they would then be taken to wherever Serrano Poncela had indicated verbally to the agents. The subsequent phase of the process, the transportation and execution of the prisoners in the early hours of the following morning, was supervised by the Inspector General of the rearguard militias, Federico Manzano Govantes, or his deputy on the day. The actual tasks were carried out each day by different groups of militiamen, sometimes anarchists from the rearguard militias, sometimes Communists from the checa in the Calle Marqués de Riscal and sometimes from the Fifth Regiment. The prisoners were obliged to leave all their belongings, which were handed over to Santiago Álvarez Santiago. They were then tied together in pairs and loaded on to buses. Usually, Manuel Rascón or Arturo García de la Rosa went along and delivered the coup de grâce to prisoners not killed when the militiamen fired.72"
"If Galíndez knew what was happening, it is impossible that Carrillo did not. This is demonstrated by the minutes of the meeting of the Junta de Defensa on the night of 11 November. The Councillor for Evacuation, Francisco Caminero Rodríguez (of the anarchist youth), asked if the Cárcel Modelo had been evacuated. Carrillo responded by saying that the necessary measures had been taken to organize the evacuations of prisoners but that the operation had had to be suspended. At this, the Communist Isidoro Diéguez Dueñas, second-in-command to Antonio Mije at the War Council, declared that the evacuation must continue given the seriousness of the problem of the prisoners. Carrillo responded that the suspension had been necessary because of protests emanating from the diplomatic corps, presumably a reference to his meeting with Schlayer. Although the minutes are extremely brief, they make it indisputably clear that Carrillo knew what was happening to the prisoners, if only as a result of the complaints by Schlayer.74
In fact, after the mass executions of 7–8 November, there were no more sacas until 18 November, after which they continued on a lesser scale until 6 December. Jesús de Galíndez, who was in constant touch with both the DGS and the various prisons as he tried to secure the release of Basque prisoners and members of the clergy, described the procedure that was followed. His account broadly coincides with those of Torrecilla Guijarro and Marasa Barasa. The tribunals would examine the antecedents of the prisoners to decide if they were dangerous – anyone so deemed would be executed. Those who had someone to vouch for them were released. Others remained in prison. Mistakes were made, with evident enemies of the Republic surviving and entirely innocent individuals being executed. Among the survivors were Manuel Valdés Larrañaga, a Falangist who was later Franco’s Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Agustín Muñoz Grandes, who would become Franco’s Minister of War and Vice-President, and Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, one of the principal Falangist leaders and future minister under Franco.75"
"According to a prisoner held in Porlier, one of the tribunals there, known as the ‘tribunal de la muerte’, was headed by Felipe Sandoval. Since its members were usually drunk, its decisions were largely arbitrary. Elsewhere, the process of selection was more systematic and was facilitated by the exhaustive records held in the Technical Section of the DGS. This consisted of the files on all those arrested since the beginning of the war, with the reasons for the arrest together with details of their fate – release, imprisonment, trial, execution. The Section also held the records of right-wing groups that had been seized by various militia groups. These files had been consolidated into one large archive at the DGS. There was relatively little material on the Falange, which had managed to destroy its records, but the files of Acción Popular, the Carlists and the Unión Militar Española were virtually complete. When the Junta de Defensa was created, the Technical Section’s holdings were passed over to Serrano Poncela’s Public Order Delegation.76
The sacas and executions, known collectively as ‘Paracuellos’, constituted the greatest single atrocity in Republican territory during the war, its horror explained but not justified by the terrifying conditions in the besieged capital. Unlike previous sacas, triggered by popular outrage at bombing raids or news brought by refugees of rebel atrocities, these extra-judicial murders were carried out as a result of political-military decisions. They were organized by the Council for Public Order but they could not have been carried out without help from other elements in the rearguard militias."
"At the end of the war, Serrano Poncela gave Jesús de Galíndez an implausible account of why he had left the Public Order Delegation. He claimed that he had had no idea that the phrases ‘transfer to Chinchilla’ or ‘place in liberty’ on the orders that he signed were code meaning execution. The use of such code could have been the way in which those responsible covered their guilt, as agreed at the meeting on the evening of 7 November. Serrano Poncela told Galíndez that the orders were passed to him by Santiago Carrillo and that all he did was sign them. If this were true it would not mean that he was ignorant of what was happening, given his presence in the Cárcel Modelo to supervise the saca of 7–8 November. He told Galíndez that, as soon he realized what was happening, he resigned from his post and not long afterwards left the Communist Party.95 This was not entirely true since he held the important post of JSU propaganda secretary until well into 1938. In an extraordinary letter to the PCE Central Committee, written in March 1939, Serrano Poncela claimed that he had resigned from the Party only once he was in France in February 1939, implying that previously he had feared for his life. He referred to the disgust he felt about his past in the Communist Party. He also claimed that the PCE prevented his emigration to Mexico because he knew too much.96
Subsequently, and in reprisal for Serrano Poncela’s rejection of the Party, Carrillo denounced him. In an interview with Ian Gibson, Carrillo claimed that he had nothing to do with the activities of the Public Order Delegation and blamed everything on Serrano Poncela. He alleged that ‘my only involvement was, after about a fortnight, I got the impression that Serrano Poncela was doing bad things and so I sacked him’. Allegedly, Carrillo had discovered in late November that ‘outrages were being committed and this man was a thief’. He claimed that Serrano Poncela had in his possession jewels stolen from those arrested and that consideration had been given to having Serrano Poncela shot.97 Serrano Poncela’s continued pre-eminence in the JSU belies this.
The claim that he personally had nothing to do with the killings was repeated by Carrillo in his memoirs of 1993. He alleged that the classification and evacuation of prisoners was left entirely to the Public Order Delegation under Serrano Poncela. Carrillo went on to assert that the Delegation did not decide on death sentences but merely selected those who would be sent to Tribunales Populares and those who would be freed. His account is brief, vague and misleading, making no mention of executions and implying that the worst that happened to those judged to be dangerous was to be sent to work battalions building fortifications. The only unequivocal statement in Carrillo’s account is a declaration that he took part in none of the Public Order Delegation’s meetings.98 However, if Manuel Irujo and José Giral in Valencia knew about the killings and if, in Madrid, Melchor Rodríguez, the Chargé d’Affaires of Argentina, the Chargé d’Affaires of the United Kingdom and Felix Schlayer knew about them, it is inconceivable that Carrillo, as the principal authority in the area of public order, could not know. After all, despite these later claims, he received daily reports from Serrano Poncela.99"
"Cazorla’s assumption of the role of Director General of Security for Madrid raises the question of what he had been doing since 6 November 1936 when he was first named Carrillo’s deputy in the Council for Public Order. In the Causa General file on Cazorla, it is claimed that he had played both an operational and a supervisory role in the sacas from the various prisons. It is alleged that, along with Arturo García de la Rosa, he ran a checa in the Calle Zurbano. It is further claimed that he sent instructions to the Public Order Delegation’s representatives in each police station ordering the execution of suspect prisoners. Under interrogation, Cazorla admitted that he was fully aware of the sacas and the subsequent killings, ‘with fictitious orders for transfers or release being signed by Serrano Poncela or Bruno Carreras whose job it was’. As Serrano Poncela’s deputy, Carreras had chosen as his own assistant the anarchist Benigno Mancebo, who had previously run the Checa de Fomento.100"
"The more precise targeting of fifth columnists was apparent in Galíndez’s description of the functioning of the Tribunales Populares. They were presided over by a judge and the jury consisted of two members of each of the Popular Front parties. The accused were given a public defender and allowed to call witnesses on their own behalf. These people’s courts were principally for trying those accused not simply of being right-wingers but of active hostility to the Republic (desafección al regimen). The maximum sentence was five years in prison. Membership of the Falange got three years; members of Acción Popular were usually fined unless guilty of spreading defeatism or of black marketeering. Those involved in hard-core fifth-column activities like espionage or sabotage would be tried by the Tribunal for Treachery and Espionage or by military courts.102 On 22 December, the government created work camps for those found guilty of sedition, rebellion and disloyalty.103 This last was a category that would be used substantially by Cazorla."
"What has gone before, like everything written about Paracuellos, is inevitably distorted because of the imbalance of material about the three phases of authorization, organization and implementation. It is possible to know that meetings took place at which evacuation and elimination were almost certainly discussed and authorization almost certainly given. These are the meetings on 6 November of José Miaja with Pedro Checa and Antonio Mije, of Mikhail Koltsov with Checa, and of Mije with Vladimir Gorev and Vicente Rojo. However, there is little or nothing by way of records of those conversations. In contrast, there is a vast quantity of material in the Causa General on the administrative organization of the sacas and on what happened at the prisons when militiamen arrived to load the prisoners on to the buses. Nevertheless, there is little material on the actual murders, on the specific parts played in the killing by the anarchists, by the Fifth Regiment or by the Brigada Especial created with the help of Orlov and Grigulevich. Accordingly, there will always be an element of deduction if not speculation about the collective responsibility.
Astonishingly, despite all the other problems of defending the besieged and starving city, the Junta managed to make a priority of controlling the checas and centrally co-ordinating the forces of order and security in Madrid. Its efforts in terms of rebuilding the state apparatus went far beyond the ineffective measures of General Pozas and the slightly more energetic efforts to control the checas made by Ángel Galarza in October. Nevertheless, the greatest death toll of rebel supporters in the city would take place on the Junta’s watch between 7 November and 4 December. Thereafter, there would be little of the indiscriminate violence that marked the early months of the war as the reorganized security forces targeted more specifically those perceived to be undermining the war effort, and the numbers executed plummeted."
Double standards in reporting"Schlayer, accompanied by Henny and Pérez Quesada, had been to Torrejón where they found recently disturbed ground from which protruded arms and legs.81 An initial report on the first murders sent by Ogilvie-Forbes was minuted by Sir Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office: ‘This is a ghastly tale of ghastly gangsters in whose hands the so-called “government” … is a bad joke. I suppose the other side will do as horribly in their turn.’82 In fact, British diplomats rarely acknowledged atrocities on the rebel side and never saw the differences between what happened in each zone. While the rebel authorities actively sanctioned atrocities throughout the war and after, it was precisely the Republican government’s opposition to them that limited them to the first five months of the war. In this context, it is worth noting the comment of the New Zealand journalist Geoffrey Cox: ‘The spotlight of publicity which has been turned on these unauthorised executions is, ironically enough, itself a reflection of the antagonism of the Spanish Government towards such deeds. For much of the information has become available only because of the freedom with which the Government has discussed the problem with foreign authorities and with visiting delegations.’83"
Melchor Rodriguez: Ending the Sacas"After the mass sacas of 7 and 8 November, there was a brief interlude thanks to the anarchist Melchor Rodríguez and Mariano Sánchez Roca, the under-secretary at the Ministry of Justice. Those sacas had occurred in the absence of the Minister of Justice, García Oliver, and his Director General of Prisons, Juan Antonio Carnero, who had gone to Valencia with the rest of the government. Appalled by what was happening, the president of the Supreme Court, Mariano Gómez, and the secretary general of the Bar Association, Luis Zubillaga, sent a telegram requesting García Oliver once more to put Melchor Rodríguez in charge of the prisons in Madrid. Sánchez Roca, a labour lawyer who had represented various CNT militants including Melchor Rodríguez, managed to persuade García Oliver to name Melchor Special Inspector of Prisons. Surprisingly, García Oliver agreed. It is not known whether this had anything to do with the diplomatic protests although, as will be seen, other members of the government had heard about, and were appalled by, the sacas. On 9 November, before his appointment was officially announced, Melchor took up the post. By the time his appointment was made official five days later, he would already have resigned.84
When Melchor Rodríguez unofficially assumed the post of Inspector General of Prisons, his exact powers were imprecise, not to say debatable. Nevertheless, his first initiative on the night of 9 November was decisive. Melchor’s friend, Juan Batista, the administrator of the Cárcel Modelo, had told him that a saca of four hundred prisoners was planned. In response, he went to the prison at midnight and ordered that all sacas cease and that the militiamen who had been freely moving within the prison remain outside. He forbade the release of any prisoners between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m., to prevent them being shot. He also insisted on accompanying any prisoners being transferred to other prisons. In consequence there were no sacas between 10 and 17 November. His next objective was to get the militiamen out and the professional prison functionaries back.85 He explained his intentions to Schlayer and Henny. On behalf of the diplomatic corps, Schlayer wrote to Melchor Rodríguez to confirm what had been promised:
That you consider the detainees to be prisoners of war and that you are determined to prevent them being assassinated, except as a result of a judicial sentence; that you are going to implement the division of the prisoners into three categories, in the first those who are considered to be dangerous enemies and whom you intend to transfer to other prisons, such as Alcalá, Chinchilla and Valencia; in the second the doubtful ones, those who have been judged by the courts; and in the third, the remainder who should be released immediately.86
Melchor Rodríguez still had people hidden in the Palacio de Viana, where he had established his headquarters. This fact, plus Melchor’s decisive action in the prisons, was provoking tension with the Defence Committee of the CNT, which was heavily implicated in the murders of the prisoners. One of the more hostile anarchist leaders was Amor Nuño, who had made the deal with the Public Order Council for the evacuation and elimination of prisoners. García Oliver and Carnero appeared unexpectedly in Madrid on 13 November. In a discordant meeting, García Oliver informed Melchor that he had received reports from the Defence Committee and others about his activities. He made it clear that he did not approve of initiatives to stop the murder of prisoners. Far from being conciliatory, Melchor responded by demanding that those responsible for the killings be punished. When García Oliver told him to be reasonable, Melchor threw his appointment letter at him. Melchor’s nomination had been sent to the official Gaceta on 12 November but was not published until after the confrontation with García Oliver. After Melchor Rodríguez’s resignation, the sacas started again.87 Until he was re-appointed in early December, Melchor Rodríguez worked on his own in an effort to stop executions being carried out by the anarchist militias still operating out of the Checa del Cine Europa in defiance of Carrillo’s decree of 9 November.88"
"After the sacas began again on 18 November, Schlayer, Núñez Morgado and Henry Helfant (the Romanian commercial attaché) pressed the government to reappoint Melchor, as did Luis Zubillaga of the Bar Association and Mariano Gómez. Finally, on 25 November, García Oliver telephoned Melchor and asked him to come to Valencia. En route three days later, his car was ambushed by a group from the FAI. Nevertheless, he reached his appointment with García Oliver, who offered to make him Delegate for Prisons for Madrid and Alcalá de Henares. Melchor’s two conditions for accepting were that men on whom he could rely be made directors of prisons and that those guilty of atrocities be punished. Some days later, Melchor had an interview with the Minister of the Interior, Ángel Galarza, who agreed to support his nomination which was made public on 1 December. On his return to Madrid, Melchor again put a stop to the sacas, forced the militia groups out of the prisons and replaced them with Assault Guards. In some cases, he arrested men accused of murder, extortion and blackmail. He was fortunate in being able to count on the full support of the under-secretary at the Ministry of Justice, Mariano Sánchez Roca.93"
"On 6 December, the prison at Guadalajara had been attacked by a mob that had killed 282 prisoners.107 That mob had included nearly one hundred militiamen under the orders of Valentín González, ‘El Campesino’. Two days later, in Alcalá de Henares, a furious crowd including some of the same militiamen gathered to seek revenge for those killed and maimed in a bombing raid. Their target was the prisoners held there, many of them as a result of the evacuation from the Cárcel Modelo. Among the more famous prisoners were the Falangist leader, Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, the founder of the Assault Guards, Colonel Agustín Muñoz Grandes, the secretary of the CEDA, Javier Martín Artajo, and the radio personality Bobby Deglané. The recently arrived Melchor Rodríguez, showing greater courage than the prison functionaries who had fled, confronted the mob. Braving threats, insults and accusations of being a fascist, he argued that the prisoners were not responsible for the air raid and that the murder of defenceless men would bring shame on the Republic. His voice raw from making himself heard above the tumult, he said that they would have to kill him to get to the galleries. He also gave them pause by threatening to arm the prisoners. Campesino’s militiamen were led away by Major Coca, their commander, and the rest of the crowd drifted after them. Fearing that Coca planned to come back, Melchor went to his headquarters and, in a bitter confrontation with the Major, persuaded him to guarantee the safety of the prisoners. Melchor thereby saved over 1,500 lives.108"
"However, on his return to Madrid on the night of 8 December, Melchor was called before the CNT–FAI Defence Committee and severely criticized by its secretary, Eduardo Val. Melchor managed to calm his critics, but they were suspicious of his claim that he could stop the bombing of Madrid by negotiating with the rebels and offering to prevent any more assassinations of prisoners.109 Nevertheless, from 12 December, the situation was changing yet again. The Junta de Defensa had decreed that the militarization of all the militias and all their functions were under the control of the new Director General of Security, José Cazorla. In agreement with Cazorla, arrangements were made for young prisoners either to be forcibly conscripted into the Republican Army or, if they chose, to join work battalions building fortifications. It was later alleged that some of those ‘released’ or ‘transferred’ were taken to checas under the control of Cazorla. Certainly, Cazorla and Melchor Rodríguez did arrange for the release of those against whom there were no charges and of female prisoners over the age of sixty. Melchor Rodríguez also took measures to improve the food in prisons and created an information office where families could find out where prisoners were being held and their state of health. With the help of the Red Cross, he created a hospital service which ended up being used as a centre for fifth columnists. He also organized a party in the Romanian Embassy for recently released detainees.110 Despite suspicions of his links with the fifth column, Melchor Rodríguez’s success in stopping sacas raises questions about Santiago Carrillo’s inability to do the same."
"By the end of 1936, the spontaneous mass violence of the early months was no more, although in early February 1937 President Azaña could still note the disgust felt by the Minister of Finance, Juan Negrín, about the atrocities. He suggested that they made Negrín ashamed to be Spanish.1 Negrín’s commitment to ending the uncontrolled violence is corroborated by his friend Mariano Ansó, who recounted that, in Valencia on one occasion, he accosted armed militiamen who had detained a man and were clearly planning to shoot him as a fascist. At enormous risk, and by sheer force of personality, he obliged them to release the man.2"
Leftist infighting - Between PCE and CNT"From January 1937, repressive violence behind the Republican lines was not uncontrolled and hate-fuelled as it had been in the first weeks of the war. Henceforth, it was largely a question of the Republican state rebuilding itself and, of course, defending itself. Accordingly, it took two principal forms which occasionally overlapped. On the one hand, the security services focused their efforts on the enemy within, the saboteurs, snipers and spies of the fifth column. On the other, there were bitter rivalries over the nature of the war effort. The Communists, many of the Socialists and the Republicans perceived as subversives those on the libertarian and anti-Stalinist left who resisted the creation of a strong state capable of pursuing a centralized war effort. A substantial segment of the anarchist left was concerned with revolutionary goals and was actively hostile to the Republican state. A significant minority was simply involved in criminal activities. Clashes with the security forces were inevitable. This already fraught scenario was further complicated by the fact that, in the case of the Spanish and foreign anti-Stalinists, the Russian security advisers regarded them as Trotskyists who had to be eliminated."
"Ever since the Republican government in Valencia, the Madrid Junta and the Catalan Generalitat had all made a determined effort to centralize the police and security services and disarm the various rearguard militia groups, they had been on a collision course with the anarchists. Anarchist militiamen had violently resisted efforts to collect their weapons or to shut down their control posts on the roads in and out of the capital and on the Catalan–French border. There had been numerous incidents, including one in November 1936 when Antonio Mije, the War Councillor in the Junta, had been prevented from leaving the city on an official mission.3 There was a long-standing and fierce hostility between the PCE and the CNT. This was fuelled by the assassination by anarchists of prominent Communist union leaders such as Andrés Rodríguez González in Málaga in June and Desiderio Trillas Mainé in Barcelona on 31 July. Similarly, the foiled assassination attempts in Madrid by anarchists from the Checa del Cine Europa on both Vittorio Vidali and Enrique Líster in September had merely intensified the Communist determination to exact revenge.4"
"At the beginning of December 1936, when Serrano Poncela left the Dirección General de Seguridad, his executive responsibilities were taken over by José Cazorla, Carrillo’s deputy. Cazorla appointed David Vázquez Baldominos as his police chief. One of his tasks was to expand the Brigada Especial created by Carrillo and Grigulevich. Two more of these special squads were set up, led by two JSU militants, Santiago Álvarez Santiago and José Conesa Arteaga. From the beginning of 1937, all three brigades, under the operational command of Fernando Valentí Fernández, would concentrate on the detention, interrogation and, sometimes, elimination of suspicious elements. This meant not only Francoists but also members of the Madrid CNT, which Cazorla believed to be out of control and infiltrated by the fifth column.5"
"Cazorla was not the only one to believe that the anarchist movement was infested with fifth columnists. Largo Caballero told PSOE executive committee member Juan-Simeón Vidarte that ‘the FAI has been infiltrated by so many agents provocateurs and police informers that it is impossible to have dealings with them’.6 Neither was entirely wrong. The ease with which membership cards of the CNT could be acquired gave the fifth column access to information, an instrument for acts of provocation and relative ease of movement. With CNT accreditation, fifth columnists could also get identity cards for the Republican security services.7"
"At 3 p.m. in the afternoon of 23 December, the Councillor for Supply in the Junta, Pablo Yagüe Esteverá, had been stopped at an anarchist control point when he was leaving the city on official business. Since Carrillo’s decree of 9 November, control of roads in and out of the capital had been supervised by the police, the Assault Guards and the rearguard militias (MVR) under the overall co-ordination of the Public Order Council. The anarchists who stopped Yagüe thus had no authority to do so. After they had refused to recognize his credentials as a Councillor of the Junta, Yagüe continued past the roadblock and they shot and seriously wounded him. They then took refuge in the Ateneo Libertario of the Ventas district. Carrillo ordered their arrest, but the police who went to the Ateneo were told that they were under the protection of the CNT’s regional committee. Carrillo then sent in a company of Assault Guards to seize them. When this was discussed at the meeting of the Junta later that night, he called for them to be shot.11
The report in the Communist press denounced the perpetrators as incontrolables in the service of fascism, ‘real enemies of the people and of the revolution who, like cruel and heartless highwaymen, murder in cold blood the best defenders of the people’. The PCE called for exemplary punishment and, to avoid a repetition of the crime, for the militia groups outside Madrid to be disarmed. It was claimed that ‘certain organizations’ were heavily infiltrated by the fifth column, a clear reference to the CNT. The accusation was in fact entirely justified.12
The initial response of the anarcho-syndicalist leadership was emollient. It was stated that left-wing unity would be endangered by the accusation that those who shot Yagüe were fifth columnists. Then, on 25 December, three CNTistas were found dead with their union cards stuffed into their mouths. Those murders were avenged by Eduardo Val’s Defence Committee, which left three Communists dead with their party cards in their mouths. In reply, two more CNTistas were killed and the PCE press stepped up its campaign for a purge of the CNT. Outraged, the CNT published a list of militants killed by Communists in Málaga, Cabeza de Buey in La Serena (eastern Badajoz), Las Herencias (Ciudad Real), Miguel Estaban and La Guardia (Toledo) and Perales de Tajuña and other towns in Madrid.13
Carrillo failed in his demand for the Junta to condemn to death the militiamen responsible for the attack on Yagüe, something which was outside its jurisdiction. He was furious when the case was put in the hands of a state tribunal at which the prosecutor refused to ask for the death penalty when it was claimed that Yagüe had not shown his credentials at the CNT control point. With the Communist press baying for the militiamen’s blood, José García Pradas, the editor of the newspaper CNT, published a demand that they be released and threatened that, if this did not happen, CNT forces would be withdrawn from the front to release them by force. It was the sort of incendiary comment that convinced many others that the anarchists were irresponsible, if not downright subversive. CNT was the mouthpiece of the Defence Committee, run by Eduardo Val, Manuel Salgado Moreira and García Pradas, all three violently anti-Communist. Miaja ordered the suspension of CNT, but García Pradas refused to obey. He printed, and was about to distribute, the next issue when Miaja had the paper’s offices surrounded by Assault Guards and declared that it was absurd, after the sacrifices made to defend Madrid, for a squabble between anarchists and Communists to provoke its fall. Only Miaja’s intervention prevented serious bloodshed. In the event, to the chagrin of the PCE, the tribunal decided that the men who had shot Yagüe had acted in good faith. The immediate reaction of both organizations was an agreement not to let this hostility undermine anti-fascist unity. It was short lived.14 This war of organizations was symptomatic both of the continuing weakness of the state and of the CNT’s exiguous loyalty to the Republic.
Carrillo’s successor, José Cazorla, was determined to put an end to parallel police forces. He found it intolerable that many files on right-wingers seized by militia groups in July 1936 had not been handed over to the Dirección General de Seguridad. In consequence, the Tribunales Populares had released many fifth columnists because there was no record of their political affiliations. Cazorla started the job of centralizing files and organizations when he took over the DGS in the capital from Serrano Poncela in December. He saw this as the first step towards his principal goal which was the investigation and punishment of pro-rebel sabotage and subversion. His zeal in this led to a bitter conflict with the anarchists and anti-Stalinist dissident Communists. The Communists believed that opposition to a tightly centralized war effort constituted sabotage and subversion. Moreover, they had little doubt that some of the rearguard violence was the work of agents provocateurs embedded within the CNT working to discredit the Republic internationally and to spread demoralization.
Another factor poisoning relations between the CNT and the Communists was suspicion of Melchor Rodríguez, who was arranging for more than one hundred prisoners to be released each day. Suspicions that he might have links with the fifth column were intensified when several of those whose release he arranged went over to the rebels, including Colonel Agustín Muñoz Grandes and the Falangist radio personality Bobby Deglané. In a meeting of the Madrid Junta on 8 January 1937, Cazorla complained that Melchor Rodríguez gave prisoners permission to hold pro-rebel demonstrations and have private meetings with members of the diplomatic corps. He called him ‘protector of the prisoners’ because he treated right-wing detainees as if they were exactly the same as the CNT prisoners of old. On 19 February, Cazorla accused Melchor of opposing his public order policy. He further infuriated the CNT leadership when, in his campaign against sabotage and espionage, he began to investigate the infiltration by fifth columnists of the ineffective secret services run in the Ministry of War by the CNT’s Manuel Salgado.15"
"Complaints emanated both from diplomats on behalf of rightists and from the CNT on behalf of its militants that those arrested were being sent to punishment battalions in dangerous front-line positions to work on fortifications.18 Ironically, forced-labour camps were the brainchild of the Minister of Justice, the CNT’s Juan García Oliver."
"There was a genuine ideological struggle between anarchists committed to collectivization and the Communist policy of supporting the smallholders in order to improve agricultural production. Some of the clashes derived from local resistance against anarchists from Madrid who requisitioned food without payment.23"
"The enmity reached such heights in mid-April that it provoked the dissolution of the Junta de Defensa. On 14 April, Cazorla announced in Mundo Obrero that an important spy-ring in the Republican Army had been dismantled.](<There was a genuine ideological struggle between anarchists committed to collectivization and the Communist policy of supporting the smallholders in order to improve agricultural production. Some of the clashes derived from local resistance against anarchists from Madrid who requisitioned food without payment.23"
"There was no doubt of a connection between López de Letona and Verardini since they had collaborated in an operation mounted by the CNT to flush out fifth columnists. The December 1936 raid on the buildings under the protection of the Finnish Embassy had exposed how the right of asylum was being abused in favour of the fifth column. Accordingly, Eduardo Val and the CNT’s Defence Committee had established a fictitious Embassy of Siam, a country that had no diplomatic relations with Spain. With López de Letona as a ‘guarantee’ to his fifth-columnist contacts, the Embassy made offers of asylum that were eagerly accepted by several enemies of the Republic. Hidden listening devices picked up their conversations and thus gathered intelligence about their networks. When General Miaja learned that some of these rebel supporters had been murdered by Val’s men, in early January 1937, he ordered the operation closed down on the grounds that it was illegal and that the struggle against the fifth column should be conducted according to the law.26 In November 1939, López de Letona would be sentenced to death by the Francoists for his part in the Siam Embassy operation.27"
"On 25 April, Cazorla, on handing power over to the new national Director General of Security, Wenceslao Carrillo, said he welcomed any investigation that might be carried out. Wenceslao, father of Santiago, praised Cazorla’s work in making the streets of Madrid safe. In an article published the following day, Cazorla himself wrote that he had remained silent only while awaiting the conclusions of the investigation and now felt free to comment. He attacked what he called ‘the verbal terrorism of those who beg in private and attack in public’ – a clear reference to Melchor Rodríguez and the Pintado-Fe case. He went on to defend his record against ‘those who having recently infiltrated the CNT–FAI use a union card to hide their murky past and to enable them to work against the interests of the anti-fascist masses’.34 Two days later, the Communist press published news that a fifth-column network had been discovered using CNT membership cards.35"
"The clashes between Cazorla and the CNT in Madrid were merely a reflection of a much wider problem at the heart of Republican Spain. For the Communists, substantial sectors of the PSOE and the bourgeois Republican parties, the war effort was the central priority and that required the full reconstruction of the state. In contrast, the revolutionary elements of the left, the CNT–FAI and the POUM, were determined to collectivize industry and agriculture and opposed state control in economic and military issues even after the Republican debacle at Málaga in February 1937 had starkly revealed the shortcomings of the militia system. The anarchists, despite their occasional rhetoric, also opposed the reorganization of public order. In the eyes of the Republicans, Socialists and Communists, the activities of the CNT and the POUM were on the same spectrum of subversion as those of the fifth column."
"Already in the autumn of 1936, Louis Fischer had told Andrade’s wife, María Teresa García Banús, that the Kremlin was determined to exterminate the POUM and urged her to warn her comrades to take precautions.47 By late 1936 the Comintern delegate to the PSUC, the taciturn and enigmatic Ernö Gerö, codenamed ‘Pedro’, had already been directing a campaign to remove Andreu Nin from his post as Justice Councillor in the Generalitat.48 On 11 December, the executive committee of the Comintern sent the following telegram to ‘Luis’ (Victorio Codovilla, delegate to the PCE), ‘Pedro’ (Ernö Gerö) and ‘Pepe’ (José Díaz, the secretary general of the PCE): ‘It is necessary to focus on the political liquidation of the Trotskyists, as counter-revolutionaries, as agents of the Gestapo. After the political campaign, get them out of national and local government bodies, ban their press, expel all foreign elements. Try to do so in agreement with the anarchists.’49"
Leftist infighting - Barcelona"The POUM’s outspoken criticisms of the trial and execution of the old Bolsheviks Kamenev and Zinoviev had drawn the fire of the Soviet advisers. Encouraged by Antonov-Ovseenko, the PSUC denounced the POUM leadership as ‘fascist spies’ and ‘Trotskyist agents’ and called for the Party’s extermination.53 However, hostility to the anti-Stalinist leftists was not just about Russian paranoia. There was a growing conviction among Republicans, Socialists, Communists and numerous foreign observers that the Catalan anarchists were not fully committed to the war effort. The CNT was importing and hoarding weapons in Barcelona against the day when they could make their revolution.54 In mid-March 1937, several hundred of the more extreme members of the libertarian movement who had opposed the militarization of the militias abandoned the front at Gelsa (Zaragoza) and took their weapons to the Catalan capital. Inspired by the extremist Catalan separatist Jaume Balius Mir, they aimed to create a revolutionary vanguard and oppose the CNT leadership’s collaboration with the central government. Even García Oliver considered Balius to be a deranged bohemian. On 17 March, they formed the group known as ‘the Friends of Durruti’ and, within a matter of weeks, had recruited five thousand CNT members. The new organization was warmly welcomed by Andreu Nin.55"
"Part of the CNT leadership, having accepted participation in the Republican government, was more inclined to agree to the need for the prioritization of the war effort. However, at rank-and-file level, especially in Barcelona, there was intense resistance to the loss of revolutionary power. Many anarchists and POUM militants felt that the sacrifices demanded by the Communists, Socialists and Republicans in favour of bourgeois democracy were pointless since the Western powers saw Franco as a better bet for capitalism than the Republic could ever be. The belief of many in the CNT and POUM that the revolution should have priority was seen as treacherous and subversive by all those who were committed to the war effort."
"The tension generated by the Generalitat’s efforts to claw back its powers from the revolutionary unions was exacerbated by the economic and social dislocation imposed by the war. By December 1936, the population of Catalonia had been swelled by the arrival of 300,000 refugees. This constituted 10 per cent of the population of the entire region and probably nearer 40 per cent of the population of Barcelona itself. After the fall of Málaga, the numbers soared even more. The strain of housing and feeding the new arrivals had embittered existing conflicts. Until December 1936, during which time the CNT controlled the Supply Ministry, the anarchist solution had been to requisition food at artificially low prices. This provoked shortages and inflation as farmers resisted by hoarding stocks. After the mid-December cabinet crisis, the PSUC leader Joan Comorera had taken over the supply portfolio and introduced a more market-based approach. This infuriated the anarchists but did not solve the problem. Catalonia also needed to import food but lacked the foreign exchange to buy it. There were bread riots in Barcelona, as well as armed clashes for control of food stores between the CNT–FAI and the PSUC.56"
"In parallel with the conflict over food shortages and collectivization, other outbreaks of violence were generated as the forces of order tried to restrain the anarchist Patrulles de Control. In February 1937, more than thirty members of the National Republican Guard (ex-Civil Guard) were killed. At the beginning of March, the Generalitat dissolved the CNT-controlled Defence Committee and assumed the power to dissolve all local police and militia committees. The Assault Guards and National Republican Guards were merged into a single Catalan police corps whose officers were not permitted membership of any political party or trade union. These measures effectively placed the workers’ patrols beyond the law. Ten days later, the central Republican government ordered all worker organizations, committees, patrols and individual workers to hand over their weapons."
"The disputes over food supplies and the events in La Cerdanya showed how deep rooted was the conflict between the advocates of revolution and those who believed that priority should be given to the war effort. The notion that its culmination in the so-called ‘May events’ was a carefully laid Stalinist plot has no basis. The immediate spark that ignited the long-smouldering clashes in May was a twofold initiative of the Generalitat. A decree prohibiting the traditional 1 May rallies to prevent clashes between the CNT and the UGT was seen as a provocation by the CNT rank and file. Then, on 3 May, a raid on the CNT-controlled central telephone exchange in the Plaça de Catalunya was ordered by Artemi Aiguader and carried out by the belligerent police commissioner Rodríguez Salas. Aiguader was following the instructions of Companys, who had been humiliated to learn that a CNT operator had interrupted a telephone call by President Azaña. Clearly the state needed control of the main communication system, but Companys was warned by a CNT Councillor that the anarchist rank and file would resist.60"
"Although the origins of the crisis lay deep in the wartime circumstances of Catalonia, the Generalitat and the PSUC realized that they had to seize the chance to break the power of the CNT. The central government also saw the opportunity to limit the power of the Generalitat. García Oliver and Carlos Hernández Zancajo of the UGT were sent to Barcelona to discuss the situation with the CNT leadership. They were humiliated, kept waiting while the anarchists finished a lengthy dinner. When they requested food, two thin sandwiches were sent out to them. They returned to Valencia without achieving anything.63
Such cheap victories aside, the situation exposed the fundamental dilemma of the CNT. The anarchists could win in Catalonia only at the cost of all-out war against other Republican forces. The CNT’s Madrid newspaper Frente Libertario denounced the revolutionaries as the allies of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. García Oliver broadcast from the Generalitat on behalf of the CNT ministers in the central government and called on the incredulous militants to lay down their arms. The bulk of the Catalan anarchist leadership was unwilling to recall CNT militias from Aragon to fight the Generalitat and the central Republican government. On 7 May, the government in Valencia sent the police reinforcements which finally decided the outcome. It did so only in return for the Generalitat surrendering control of the Army of Catalonia and responsibility for public order in Catalonia. Several hundred members of the CNT and the POUM were arrested, although the need to get the war industries working as soon as possible limited the scale of the repression. The backdrop to these events was the Francoist advance into the Basque Country. As Manuel Domínguez Benavides, a prominent journalist, wrote, while Euskadi was being bombed, ‘the POUM and the FAI organized a bloody revolutionary carnival’.64"
"The events of 3 May took the Russians by surprise. Some of their senior guerrilla advisers were unexpectedly trapped in Barcelona by the fighting. The senior military adviser, General Grigory Shtern, wrote later that, far from being resented as having inspired the events, Russians ‘could pass serenely among the barricades of both sides and be greeted by the anarchists with a clenched-fist salute’.65 If the Russians and the PCE had not planned the entire affair, they certainly leaped at the opportunities presented by it. Having boasted of leading an insurrection which was really the work of elements of the CNT, the POUM would now be the sacrificial goat.66 Andreu Nin and the rest of the POUM leadership had far exceeded the CNT in the militancy of their revolutionary pronouncements during the crisis. Moreover, since the principal beneficiaries of the events were the military rebels and their Axis allies, there was a strong suspicion among Communists, Socialists and Republicans that there had been an element of fascist provocation behind the activities of the POUM and the CNT. It was a frequent complaint of Cazorla and others that the CNT was porous and easily infiltrated. The internationalist POUM was extremely welcoming to the recruitment of foreign volunteers. Specifically, in January 1937, an operative of the NKVD in Berlin had reported to Moscow that German agents had infiltrated the POUM.67 Franco boasted to the German Chargé d’Affaires, General Wilhelm Faupel, that ‘the street fighting had been started by his agents’, which was a reference to attacks on CNT members carried out by elements of the right-wing Catalan nationalist party Estat Català on the night of 2 May on instructions from Salamanca. Similarly, the Italian Foreign Minister Count Ciano boasted to the Francoist Ambassador in Rome that Italian agents had contributed to the disorder. Indeed, there was no shortage of Italians in the CNT, some of whom may well have been infiltrated agents of the Italian secret police, the OVRA.68"
Juan Negrin becomes Prime Minister - Efforts to end repression"Shortly after the fighting in Barcelona had ended, Largo Caballero was removed as Prime Minister and not simply because of his mistakes during the crisis. Certainly, President Azaña, who had been besieged in the Palau de les Corts Catalanes during the May events, would never forgive Largo for the delay in arranging his evacuation. The Minister without Portfolio, José Giral of Izquierda Republicana, informed Azaña that the Republicans, the Communists and the Socialists were united in wanting major change. They were frustrated not only by Largo Caballero’s ludicrous pretensions of being a great strategist but also by his practice of taking decisions without cabinet discussion. When ministers complained that they were not told what was happening, he would tell them to read the newspapers. All three groups were united in dissatisfaction with Largo Caballero’s sympathy with the CNT and his failure to confront the issue of public order. They were equally keen to see the removal of his incompetent Minister of the Interior, Ángel Galarza.
A stormy cabinet meeting on 14 May was provoked by the Communist ministers, with the prior agreement of the Socialists and Republicans. They demanded a change in military strategy and for the POUM to be declared illegal. When the Prime Minister refused, reluctant to punish the POUM when the FAI and the Friends of Durruti were being left unpunished, they left the meeting. Largo Caballero tried to carry on without them only to be astonished when the other ministers supported them.69 He was forced to resign, and the government was offered to Dr Juan Negrín, a victory for the political forces that had opposed the revolutionary factions. From this point on, the revolutionary achievements of the initial stages of the war would be steadily dismantled, leaving policy to follow the direction dictated by the Republicans and moderate Socialists who took over the key ministries.
The humanitarian concerns which underlay the new Prime Minister’s determination to put an end to the terror were closely linked to his perception that atrocities were being used to justify the refusal of the democratic powers to help the Republic. Between September 1936 and May 1937, as Treasury Minister, Negrín had done everything he could to keep the Republic afloat. He had worked hard to ensure that national resources were put at the service of the war effort, whether by sending the Republic’s gold reserves abroad to protect their availability for arms purchases or by strengthening the frontier guards (Carabineros) to re-establish state control over foreign exchange and to curb the activities of the many illegal CNT frontier posts on the French–Catalan border. His efforts to stop the illegal repression were put on a different plane by his elevation to the premiership
In his new cabinet, Negrín appointed as his Minister of the Interior the Basque Socialist Julián Zugazagoitia, who was equally committed to the re-establishment of law and order. Together with the choice of another Basque, Manuel Irujo, as Minister of Justice, this ensured that, despite the Soviet determination to destroy the POUM, there would be no Moscow trials in Spain. A series of other important appointments were made to bring public order under greater control. Another Socialist, Juan-Simeón Vidarte, was named as Zugazagoitia’s under-secretary, and his first actions were to disband a squad which had carried out extra-judicial executions on the orders of Ángel Galarza and to close down the notorious prison of Santa Úrsula in Valencia. Another Socialist, Paulino Gómez Saiz, was named Delegate for Public Order for Catalonia, in order to impose greater control over the region. The highly efficient Lieutenant Colonel Ricardo Burillo was made police chief in Barcelona and a professional policeman, Teodoro Illera Martín, was sent to the city as Delegate of the Dirección General de Seguridad. Burillo had been commander of the Assault Guard barracks in Calle Pontejos on 13 July 1936 when Calvo Sotelo was murdered – a crime in which he played no part but for which he would be executed in 1939. He was a Communist but also loyal to Negrín.70 The one disastrous appointment was that of Colonel Antonio Ortega Gutiérrez as Director General of Security on 27 May 1937. Negrín appointed Ortega believing him simply to be a professional soldier and a Socialist follower of the Minister of Defence, Indalecio Prieto. As he noted later in his draft memoirs, he would never have accepted the recommendation had he known that Ortega’s loyalty would be to the PCE rather than to the government.71"
"According to Diego Abad de Santillán, 60,000 weapons were in the hands of leftists in Barcelona, mainly members of the CNT–FAI. On arriving in Barcelona, Vidarte and Burillo began to close down the Patrulles de Control and to confiscate their arms. This process was resisted with considerable violence by the CNT–FAI in the course of which, on 4 June, a sergeant of Carabineros and four Assault Guards were killed. According to Vidarte, a significant role in this resistance was played by Manuel Escorza del Val, who had run the Investigation Committee of the Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee. Those responsible for the deaths were arrested, but Negrín insisted that there be no executions.72"
"Negrín was fully aware of Irujo’s efforts to stop violence in the Republican rearguard when he had been Minister without Portfolio.74 Now, on taking up the post of Minister of Justice, Irujo reflected Negrín’s attitude to the repression when he declared: ‘the paseos have finished … There were days when the government did not control the levers of power. It was unable to prevent social crimes. Those times have passed … We must not let the monstrous brutality of the enemy be used to excuse the repugnant crimes committed on our side.’75 Revolutionary justice was being replaced by conventional bourgeois justice. Trained judges were placed at the head of the Tribunales Populares. One of the first things that Irujo did was to professionalize the prison service to ensure no repetition of the atrocities of November 1936. The prison regime was relaxed in a way unimaginable in the rebel zone. Catholic clergy and religious were released. The Red Cross was allowed full access to prisons.76 Many civilian prisoners were allowed out on parole for the births, marriages, illnesses or deaths of family members. As a result of these measures, Irujo was for a time denounced by the anarchist press as a Vaticanist caveman and a bourgeois reactionary, but eventually he was congratulated for his work by an anarchist delegation. Similarly, in the Ministry of the Interior, Zugazagoitia would use his position to save the lives of prominent Falangists in Republican custody."
"Irujo had accepted the post of Minister of Justice on the condition that freedom of conscience would be respected and religious practice legalized. Safe-conducts and identity cards were provided for priests and religious and efforts were made to establish the right to practise the liturgy. He created the Office of Religious Orders and worked tirelessly until he succeeded in arranging for the first public Mass to be said in the Basque Delegation in Valencia, on 15 August 1937, and for the first chapel to be reopened in Barcelona. These achievements provoked strident CNT criticism. Jesús de Galíndez, who worked in the Office of Religious Orders, served as an altar boy at that first Mass. The fifth column tried to undermine the initiative by spreading the rumour that the chapel was deconsecrated and that anyone who attended Mass there would be excommunicated. They realized that, with the churches open, they had lost one of their principal propaganda weapons against the government.79"
NKVD operations - Scheme to eliminate Andreu Nin"The one thing that Irujo and Zugazagoitia could not do was to control the activities of Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, the NKVD station chief known as Aleksandr Orlov. Theoretically, Orlov had various tasks – counter-espionage, especially within the International Brigades, the organization of guerrilla and sabotage activities and the creation of a small, elite Republican secret police force to counter internal opposition to the government. This latter was his principal activity and the fruit of this was the Brigadas Especiales. Their initial purpose was to combat the fifth column, but they had soon been turned against those elements of the Spanish left perceived as subversive traitors. On 3 May 1937, Grigulevich led one of the Brigadas Especiales to Barcelona to eliminate, under the cover of the disorder, a number of prominent foreign Trotskyists linked to the POUM.80 It has been suggested that Grigulevich’s group may have been responsible for the murder, on the night of 5–6 May, of the Italian anarchists Camilo Berneri and Francesco Barbieri. Since Berneri constituted a far greater danger to Mussolini than to Stalin, it is possible that this was the work of the Italian OVRA. The CNT’s own investigation concluded that Berneri had been killed by members of Estat Català working for the OVRA.81
As far as a paranoid Stalin was concerned, Orlov’s principal task was the eradication of foreign dissident Communists in Spain. Indeed, Russian security personnel in Republican Spain were much more concerned with this task than with any action against the POUM, which was considered to be the job of the Spanish police. Many eastern Europeans were arrested and imprisoned by agents of a Catalan unit, similar to the Madrid-based Brigadas Especiales, known as the Grup d’Informació. It was part of the secret service of the Generalitat’s Defence Council with which Orlov had established links. The arrested Trotskyists were taken to the convent of Santa Úrsula in Valencia, where they were interrogated and tortured by Russians, Germans and east Europeans, all members of their respective Communist parties.82"
"One of Orlov’s victims was Mark Rein, the son of the Russian Menshevik leader Rafail Abramovich. Rein had come to Spain as correspondent for several anti-Stalinist publications including the New York Jewish daily, Forward. On 9 April 1937, he left the Hotel Continental in Barcelona and was never seen again. He had been abducted and murdered by agents of the Grup d’Informació.83 Another of Orlov’s targets was Andreu Nin, more as a one-time close collaborator of Trotsky than as leader of the POUM. Already, in a report to Moscow in late February 1937, Orlov had noted that the war effort was being undermined by ‘inter-party conflicts in which the energy of most people is devoted to winning authority and power for their own party and discrediting others rather than to the struggle against fascism’. After dismissive comments about both Gorev and Berzin, he went on to say:
the time has come when it is necessary to analyze the threatening situation … and forcefully present to the Spanish Government (and Party leaders) the full gravity of the situation and to propose the necessary measures – if the Spanish Government really wants help from us: (1) bringing the army and its command into a healthier state of discipline (shooting deserters, maintaining discipline, etc.) and (2) putting an end to the inter-party squabbles. If, in the face of immediate danger, we do not bring the Spanish Government to its senses, events will take a catastrophic turn.84
Now, after the May events, Orlov made the elimination of Nin his prime objective and the task was made easier because of the POUM’s role during those events. Nin became the object of what was known as a liter operation. A liter (letter) file was a letter-coded file opened on a person scheduled for assassination who was given a codename. In the case of Nin, this was ‘Assistant’, a reference perhaps to his one-time work with Trotsky. The file was designated with the letter ‘A’ for such operations where ‘A’ stood for an ‘active measure’ (aktivka or direct action, that is assassination). It was presumably no coincidence, if the Communist Minister Jesús Hernández is to be believed, that, on the day following the murder of Nin, a cable sent to Moscow read ‘A.N. business resolved by procedure A.’85
Orlov’s plan was based on two carefully choreographed ‘discoveries’. The first involved a bookshop in Girona belonging to a Falangist called José Roca Falgueras. Roca was part of a fifth-column network run out of a small hotel in the town by its owner, Cosme Dalmau Mora. The network had been discovered by the police but kept under observation rather than shut down. One day in May, an elegantly dressed man went into Roca’s shop, leaving some money and a message for Dalmau. He asked if he could leave a suitcase that he would pick up some days later. The next day, there was a police raid and the suitcase was found to contain an incriminating collection of technical documents about bomb-making together with plans to assassinate key Republican figures. All were apparently sealed with the stamp of the POUM Military Committee.86
The second discovery was initially genuine but was doctored by Orlov to ‘demonstrate’ the collaboration of the POUM with the Falange. The principal element was a detailed map of Madrid seized when the Brigadas Especiales, led by David Vázquez Baldominos and Fernando Valentí Fernández, broke up a large fifth-columnist network, with the help of Alberto Castilla Olavarría, a paid double agent. Castilla was a Basque of right-wing ideas. The fact that he had taken refuge in the Peruvian Embassy gave him the plausibility to infiltrate the fifth column. He became the liaison between the four Falangist groups that made up the substantial network known as the ‘Organización Golfin-Corujo’ run by the architect Francisco Javier Fernández Golfin. When the organization was dismantled thanks to Castilla’s information, Fernández Golfin had in his possession a street plan of Madrid on which his brother Manuel had drawn details and positions of military installations. This map was part of the group’s plans to facilitate the rebel entry into the capital.87
Well over one hundred Falangists were arrested by Vázquez Baldominos’s squad, although only twenty-seven were tried. Their confessions would play a key part in the complex plot being hatched by Orlov, although it is unlikely that Vázquez Baldominos was party to what Orlov did with the street map. Orlov’s elaborate scheme was outlined in a report sent to Moscow on 23 May 1937:
Taking into consideration that this case, in connection with which the overwhelming majority have pleaded guilty, has produced a great impression on military and government circles, and that it is firmly documented and based on the incontrovertible confessions of defendants, I have decided to use the significance and the indisputable facts of the case to implicate the POUM leadership (whose [possible] connections we are looking into while conducting investigations). We have, therefore, composed the enclosed document, which indicates the co-operation of the POUM leadership with the Spanish Falange organization – and, through it, with Franco and Germany. We will encipher the contents of the document using Franco’s cipher, which we have at our disposal, and will write it on the reverse side of the plan of the location of our weapons emplacements in Casa del Campo, which was taken from the Falangist organization. This document has passed through five people: all the five Fascists who have admitted passing the document to each other for dispatch to Franco. On another seized document we will write in invisible ink a few lines of some insignificant content. It will be from this document that, in cooperation with the Spaniards, we shall begin to scrutinize the document for cryptographic writing. We shall experiment with several processes for treating these papers. A special chemical will develop these few words or lines, then we will begin to test all the other documents with this developer and thus expose the letter we have composed compromising the POUM leadership. The Spanish chief of counter-intelligence department [Vázquez Baldominos] will leave immediately for Valencia where the cipher department of the War Ministry will decipher the letter. The cipher department, according to our information, has the necessary code at its disposal. But if the department cannot decipher the letter for some reason, then we will ‘spend a couple of days’ and decipher it ourselves. We expect this affair to be very effective in exposing the role POUM has played in the Barcelona uprising. The exposure of direct contact between one of its leaders and Franco must contribute to the government adopting a number of administrative measures against the Spanish Trotskyites to discredit POUM as a German–Francoist spy organization.88"
According to a police report of late October 1937, the captured document was first examined by the then Director General of Security, Wenceslao Carrillo, by General Miaja and by the recently promoted General Vicente Rojo. At this stage, the damning reverse side of the document had not been ‘discovered’ since it had not yet been added. Its later ‘discovery’ was attributed to its being in invisible ink.89 The police report spoke appreciatively of the invaluable technical help received from foreign (Russian) experts who were given free access to the captured documentation in the office of the Brigada Especial and then allowed to take it back to their own Embassy. Orlov reported to Moscow that the faking of the actual document was carried out by Grigulevich. Valentí told his post-war Francoist interrogators that Grigulevich had had the map for some time. On returning it to the Brigada Especial, he suggested to Vázquez Baldominos that it be chemically tested for messages in invisible ink.
The police report explained how the Russian technicians also supplied the necessary chemical reagents and the electrical plate to heat the document. When the map was heated, there appeared on the reverse a message in code. At this point, Vázquez Baldominos was sent for. Unable to decipher the message, he and Valentí, accompanied by two of the foreign technicians (Orlov and Grigulevich?), took the document to Valencia to the newly appointed Director General of Security, Colonel Ortega. They struggled for nearly eighteen hours in Ortega’s office in a vain attempt to decipher the message. Finally, military codebreakers, using a Francoist codebook, were able to interpret the message. All concerned then went to the Russian Embassy in Valencia to draw up a report.90
The definitive ‘text’ of the coded message stated that one of the members of the Fernández Golfín organization had met ‘N., the leader of the POUM, who had offered his forces which would constitute crucial support for the victory of the Nationalists’. There was also a letter to Franco outlining the services of the POUM in terms of espionage, sabotage and the provocation of anti-Republican disorder. The message in itself was as implausible as the idea that Nin would use ‘N’ as his codename. Six months later, in January 1938, an analysis of the message by two calligraphic experts reported that it could not have been written by any member of the network and was a forgery.91 Now, the report drawn up in the Russian Embassy presented the story of the Fernández Golfín network and the document at face value. It concluded with a recommendation that the POUM be ‘extirpated’. Dated 1 June 1937, copies were sent by the counter-espionage service of Vázquez Baldominos’s office of the Madrid police to Zugazagoitia and Ortega.92
Vázquez Baldominos, Valentí and the Brigada Especial returned to Madrid. Six days later, Ortega sent an order for Valentí and seven members of his Brigada Especial, including Jacinto Rosell Coloma and Andrés Urresola Ochoa, to report to him in Valencia. According to another of the JSU members in the Brigada Especial, Javier Jiménez Martín, the squad was led by ‘a Brazilian named José’: ‘José was someone who we thought was Russian. He spoke Russian and you could really see that he was the almighty power in the organization.’ There can be no doubt that the ‘Brazilian named José’ was Grigulevich.93 In Valencia, they were ordered by Ortega to go to Barcelona and arrest Andreu Nin. Ortega later admitted that, throughout, he had been following instructions from Orlov.94 Since Zugazagoitia had never trusted Ortega because he was a Communist and incompetent, he had appointed the Civil Governor of Almería, the Socialist Gabriel Morón Díaz, as Inspector and deputy Director General of Security to watch over Ortega. However, on the day of Nin’s arrest, Ortega had got Morón out of the way by sending him to Ciudad Real on a pretext. On 15 June, Valentí and his men, accompanied by Grigulevich, went to Barcelona. On 16 June, Nin, and later that day the other members of the POUM executive, were arrested by local police commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Burillo.95
The POUM newspaper, La Batalla, had been banned on 28 May. Now the POUM itself was declared illegal and the POUM militia disbanded. The procedure was justified by a communiqué stating that the DGS had seized from POUM HQ ‘cyphers, telegrams, codes, documents concerning money and arms purchases and smuggling, and with incriminating documents showing that the POUM leadership, namely Andrés Nin, was mixed up in espionage’. Orlov himself reported to Moscow that the Madrid police considered the falsified document ‘absolutely genuine in its double aspects’ – that is to say, both regarding the original Falangist plans for rebel occupation of Madrid and the additions in invisible ink.96 The Catalan President Lluís Companys and his head of propaganda, Jaume Miravitlles, in contrast, thought that the idea of Nin as a fascist spy was absurd and deeply damaging to the Republic. They wrote a letter to the Valencia government to this effect. When Ortega tried to convince Miravitlles by showing him the doctored street map, he burst out laughing saying that it was the first time in history that a spy had signed an incriminating document with his own name.97
Nin was taken first to Valencia and then transferred to Madrid.98 There then arose the problem of how to obey Ortega’s order that Nin be kept isolated during his interrogation and in a place suitable for a prisoner of his category. All possible places of confinement in the capital were already occupied by the fifth columnists arrested in the Golfín case. He was kept in the offices of the Brigada Especial until ‘one of the senior foreign technicians’, no doubt Orlov, offered to hold him in a house at Alcalá de Henares. Vázquez Baldominos accepted Orlov’s offer and proposed that several of his agents guard him. Orlov brushed aside the idea as likely to attract unwanted attention and offered to take responsibility for Nin’s safety. On 17 June, Vázquez Baldominos signed the order for Nin’s transfer to the house and for just two agents to be posted. Orlov undertook to supply their rations.99
Before being transferred to Alcalá de Henares, Nin was questioned in Madrid four times by Jacinto Rosell as secretary of the Brigada Especial on 18, 19 (twice) and 21 June. Nothing about Rosell’s questions or Nin’s answers in the transcript signed by Nin and published by the POUM itself suggests anything other than a legally conducted interrogation without torture. The often unreliable Jesús Hernández claimed that Nin was tortured and interrogated by Orlov and others for several days, in an effort to make him sign a ‘confession’ of his links with the fifth column. This is highly unlikely; a confession was needed as the basis for a trial and, for that, Nin would have to be seen to be in good physical shape and testify that he had not been tortured. On 21 June, on the orders of Ortega, Vázquez Baldominos sent Rosell and other members of the Brigada Especial to Valencia to collect other POUM prisoners, including Andrade, and escort them to Madrid. At that point, Nin was transferred to Alcalá de Henares.100 Because Nin had not confessed, there was little prospect of the desired show trial. Thus Orlov took the decision to eliminate him. A charade was choreographed at the house. On 22 June, between 9.30 and 10.00 p.m., in a heavy rainstorm, some men in military uniform arrived headed by a ‘captain’ and a ‘lieutenant’ who spoke Spanish with a heavy foreign accent. They presented orders for Nin’s hand-over with the forged signatures of Vázquez Baldominos and Miaja. Allegedly, Vázquez Baldominos’s agents resisted but were overpowered, tied up and gagged and, in the struggle, the intruders dropped incriminating ‘evidence’, including banknotes from rebel Spain and German documents. The agents later stated that the ‘captain’ spoke in a friendly way to Nin and called him ‘comrade’. When Vázquez Baldominos began to investigate these events, Orlov could not be contacted.101
It is impossible to say whether the struggle took place or was merely reported as having done so, since it may be that there were members of the Brigada Especial whose loyalty was to Orlov rather than to Vázquez Baldominos. What is certain is that a car containing Orlov, Grigulevich, an NKVD driver, a German NKVD agent and two Spaniards had arrived. Between them, they could have knocked out the two guards, seized Nin and left the incriminating documents. What is not in doubt is that Nin was taken away and shot near the main road halfway between Alcalá de Henares and Perales de Tajuña.102
The impulse for the elimination of Nin came from the Russians and not from the Republican authorities. On the basis simply of Orlov’s mendacious statements to the FBI after his defection, the American historian Stanley Payne has claimed that ‘Stalin issued a handwritten order, which remains in the KGB archives, that Nin be killed.’103 This is highly unlikely. Nevertheless, as has been seen, Nin had been made the target of a liter operation. Moreover, once Nin had refused to sign a false confession, Orlov was not about to have him simply released, even if he had not been tortured. Orlov made oblique reference to what happened in his report about ‘operation NIKOLAI’ sent to Moscow on 24 July 1937. This report describes, ‘in the characteristically cryptic terms he used for liter operations’, the seizing of Nin from the house and his murder. As well as revealing that Grigulevich forged the documents used to incriminate Nin, it underlines the participation in the operation of Orlov himself. Grigulevich’s police credentials, as a member of the Brigada Especial, facilitated the passage through controls on the roads.104
There is a relevant note in Orlov’s files allegedly written by Grigulevich. Transliterated into English, it refers to ‘N. from Alcala de Enares in the direction of Perane de Tahunia, half way, 100 metres from the road, in the field. [Present were] BOM, SCHWED, JUZIK, two Spaniards. Pierre’s driver VICTOR.’ This means that the scene of the crime and where Nin was buried was between Alcalá de Henares and Perales de Tajuña. The executioners were thus Orlov (Schwed), Grigulevich (Juzik), the German NKVD agent Erich Tacke (BOM), the two unidentified Spaniards and Victor Nezhinsky, an NKVD agent. ‘Pierre’ was Naum Eitingon, head of the NKVD sub-station in Barcelona, and not, as has been suggested, Ernö Gerö.105
Shortly after the disappearance of Nin, Negrín was visited by Orlov, who had been introduced to him many months before as ‘Blackstone’. Orlov claimed to have come to report on the success of his men in establishing what had happened to Nin. He based his version of Nin being kidnapped by Falangists disguised as International Brigaders on incriminating documents allegedly dropped by them and by Nin himself. Orlov asked Negrín if this was enough proof for him to drop the formal investigation. When Negrín said that it was up to the judicial authorities, Orlov asked him if he was convinced personally. Orlov was mortified to be told by the Premier that the story was so neat as to resemble a cheap detective story. Furiously, he shouted that Negrín had insulted the Soviet Union, at which point he was invited to leave. Some hours later, Negrín was visited by the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires, Sergei Marchenko, who said that he had heard of the disagreeable incident of that morning and had come to express his apologies. He offered to have Orlov punished and, when Negrín replied that the incident was closed, said that Orlov was no longer on the Embassy staff.106
When first questioned by Zugazagoitia about what had happened to Nin, Ortega rather gave the game away, saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll find him dead or alive.’ Zugazagoitia responded that he was not interested in the corpse of Nin and wanted him found alive. Later the same day, questioned further by the Minister, Ortega claimed that Nin was an agent of the Gestapo whose agents had taken him so that he could not be interrogated by the Republic’s security services. When Zugazagoitia asked how he knew this, Ortega said it was simply something that had crossed his mind. The Minister immediately told Negrín of his suspicions that Ortega was involved in foul play concerning Nin. Negrín told him to get reports about what exactly had happened. According to Fernando Valentí, Vidarte and Zugazagoitia himself, the latter demanded a report from Vázquez Baldominos, who produced two drafts. In the first ‘official’ document, he examined three possibilities – that Nin had been kidnapped by Falangists, by Gestapo agents or by the POUM. In the second, secret, report for Zugazagoitia only, he expressed his opinion that the disappearance of Nin was nothing to do with the Gestapo or the Falange but was rather the result of the conflict between the POUM and the PCE encouraged by the various Russians who were operating in the DGS. It is likely that Vázquez Baldominos reached this conclusion after he was unable to locate Grigulevich or Orlov to discuss the case with them. Grigulevich had already returned to Russia. At this point, Vázquez Baldominos thought that Nin was still alive.107
The forged documents were published in a book by the non-existent ‘Max Rieger’, with a preface by José Bergamín demanding the immediate execution without trial of the arrested men. ‘Max Rieger’ was the collective pseudonym of the French Communist journalist Georges Soria, the recently arrived Comintern delegate, the Bulgarian Stoyan Minev, alias Boris Stepanov, and the Spanish Communist intellectual Wenceslao Roces.108 This Comintern version was recited parrot-fashion by Ortega when he was questioned by Zugazagoitia’s under-secretary, Juan-Simeón Vidarte. The incredulous Vidarte responded: ‘Listen, Colonel, are you an idiot or do you think I am?’ Jesús Hernández also claimed to have laughed when Orlov had explained his scheme for framing Nin. When Negrín informed Azaña of Orlov’s version, the President responded that it was all too neat. In fact, on 29 June, Prieto had already told Azaña about the kidnapping of Nin and shared his conviction that Ortega was both an idiot and a Communist.109
At first, Negrín had interpreted Ortega’s behaviour as the incompetence of a non-commissioned Carabinero officer promoted beyond his ability. As soon as he was informed that Ortega was a Communist, Negrín and Zugazagoitia agreed that he must be replaced. To minimize friction with the Communist ministers over his removal, they concocted the fiction that he was urgently needed at the front. Morón, the Inspector and deputy Director General of Security, became acting Director General.110 In response to the international outcry provoked by Nin’s disappearance, Negrín authorized Irujo to set up a judicial investigation to investigate the case. Morón is alleged to have said to Zugazagoitia: ‘Given that the Prime Minister wants to know the truth, you can tell him that the truth is that the kidnapping of Andrés Nin was planned by the Italian Codovila, Comandante Carlos, [Palmiro] Togliatti and the leaders of the Communist Party, Pepe Díaz among them. The order to torture him was given by Orlov and they have all done their best to satisfy Stalin’s desire for the disappearance of the secretary and confidant of the creator of the Red Army. Tell Negrín and if he wants them arrested, I’ll have them all in prison tomorrow.’ Vidarte’s account suggests that Morón’s information came from David Vázquez Baldominos.111 There was an attempt on Vidarte’s life. The front axle on his car had been cut and he crashed into an elm tree.112
For his inquiry into the case, Irujo gave plenary powers to a state prosecutor, Gregorio Peces Barba del Brío, who had Vázquez Baldominos, Fernando Valentí, Jacinto Rosell Coloma and Andrés Urresola Ochoa arrested. Convinced that Vázquez Baldominos was not the guilty party, a furious Gabriel Morón denounced Irujo as a ‘poor lunatic’ and immediately had them released, and they were not rearrested. Although Negrín approved of Morón’s directness, he felt he had to be replaced.113 In mid-November he was succeeded by Paulino Gómez Sáiz, who had been highly successful as the government delegate in Catalonia since early June.114 Negrín, though he supported the sacking of Ortega and had far-reaching suspicions of Orlov, was not prepared to see further revelations undermine the unity of the cabinet. He took the difficult decision to suspend Irujo’s investigation because, just as he opposed the unofficial repression, he also believed that the reckless and indeed treasonous rebellion of the POUM could not be tolerated in wartime.
To consolidate the security of the Republican state, a major reorganization of counter-espionage services was made in the summer of 1937. On 12 June, the Special Services Bureau of the General Staff of the Army of the Centre, which had been commanded by the anarchist Manuel Salgado, was dissolved. In addition to concerns that prisoners had disappeared in suspicious circumstances, there were suspicions that Salgado’s staff had been infiltrated by Falangists. In fact, his secretary was the Falangist Antonio Bouthelier España. The functions of the Special Services Bureau were fused with those of the Brigadas Especiales and other groups that worked on internal security to create the Special State Intelligence Department (Departamento Especial de Información del Estado – DEDIDE). Initially led by David Vázquez Baldominos, the new body was entrusted with the eradication of espionage and sabotage in loyalist territory, under the direct orders of the Minister of the Interior, Julián Zugazagoitia.115 The DEDIDE targeted not only the supporters of Franco but also those on the left, like the POUM, who were considered to be treacherously subversive. There was considerable suspicion of foreigners – both the POUM and the International Brigades were regarded as potential havens for spies, whether of the Axis or, in the more paranoid vision of the NKVD, of Trotsky’s Fourth International. The Republic was, in fact, extremely vulnerable to enemy espionage, whether directed by the Gestapo, the OVRA or the ever more sophisticated fifth column.116 Bilbao fell on 19 June and constant defeat intensified anxiety and paranoia."
Commitment to democratic norms"An obvious conclusion to be drawn from the clashes between the Communists and the CNT is the extraordinary level of press freedom prevailing in a tense wartime situation. The denunciations in the CNT press of alleged abuses by the police and the prisons are remarkable indications of the maintenance of democratic norms. Even more so were some of the decisions of the popular tribunals. Noteworthy in this regard were the acquittals of the anarchist militiamen who shot Pablo Yagüe and of rebel supporters like Agustín Muñoz Grandes or Bobby Deglané. Even more striking were the condemnations by the tribunals of both anarchists and Communists found guilty of theft or murder. There was no equivalent in the rebel zone and even less was there anything like General Miaja’s closure of the Siam Embassy operation as illegal, the Madrid Junta’s creation of a committee to investigate anarchist allegations of police irregularities or the Republican government’s insistence that the struggle against the fifth column be conducted according to the law. For Cazorla, it was deeply frustrating, as he saw it, that so many were getting away with so much because security was so lax."
Fifth columnists example"The trial of Captain Ramón Robles Pazos, on 26 January 1937 at an emergency court, and the parallel fate of his elder brother José, accused of espionage on behalf of the fifth column, are illustrative of the workings of both the Republican judiciary and the security services and their Russian advisers.
The thirty-seven-year-old Captain Robles Pazos was a reactionary Africanista officer. At the beginning of the war, he was an instructor at the Infantry Academy housed in the Alcázar of Toledo.37 He had been in Madrid when his insurrectionary comrades fortified themselves in the Alcázar. On 21 July 1936, on his way to join them, he was arrested in Getafe in the south of the capital and taken to a checa in the Paseo de las Delicias. He swore that he was loyal to the Republic, and, after a few hours, was released and ordered to present himself at the Ministry of War. Despite not reporting for military service, he remained free until 16 October when he was arrested by agents from Madrid’s principal police station, the Comisaría de Buenavista. Charged with breaking his oath of loyalty to the Republic, he was imprisoned in the Cárcel Modelo. Astonishingly, he escaped the evacuation and subsequent massacre of prisoners on 7, 8 and 9 November. This suggests that someone of considerable influence was looking out for him. And it was scarcely coincidental that, from the end of August, his elder brother José was working in some capacity in the Soviet Embassy.
On 17 November, Ramón was transferred to the prison near the Ventas bullring, where he remained until, on 26 January 1937, he was tried for disloyalty. Again swearing that he was entirely loyal to the Republic, he was released provisionally on condition of appearing before the court on the 15th and 30th of each month. When he failed to do so, he was summoned to stand trial again on 27 February. He then sent an obsequious letter to the president of the court (‘that you preside over with such dignity’). In it, he asked the judge to inform ‘the comrades of the court’ that he would be unable to appear as ordered on the entirely mendacious grounds that he had received orders to join the Republican forces on the Teruel front on 24 February. The court decided on his absolution because of this fictitious service at the front.38
In fact, on 28 January, two days after his first trial, Ramón had taken refuge in the Chilean Embassy. Three weeks later, he moved to the French Embassy, from where he wrote his letter of 22 February claiming to be about to fight for the Republic at Teruel. It seems that he was provoked into going into hiding at the Chilean and French embassies because his pretence of loyalty to the Republic was in danger of being exposed. In late December the previous year, his brother José had been arrested and it is likely that Ramón feared what he might, under interrogation, reveal about their contacts. José claimed that he had tried to persuade Ramón to fulfil his military duties, but the security services suspected that he was handing him information from the Soviet Embassy for the fifth column. In January 1938, Ramón managed to get evacuated to France and, after some difficulties, reached the rebel zone in mid-May. He was not subjected to the rigorous investigation applied to most officers who crossed the lines. Indeed, within five weeks, he was incorporated into the rebel forces with the rank of major, a promotion backdated to 10 December 1936, and given command of a unit of Regulares. This was on the basis of favourable reports from fifth columnists of his complete commitment to the rebel cause. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel and decorated several times. In 1942, he fought in Russia as a volunteer with the Blue Division, the force sent by Franco in support of Hitler. Thereafter, he enjoyed a highly distinguished military career, being promoted to brigadier general in 1952, to major general in 1957 and to the highest rank in the Spanish army, lieutenant general, in 1961, and the highest possible postings as Captain-General of the VII (Valladolid) and IX (Granada) Military Regions.39 These subsequent career achievements suggest that Ramón’s links with José were damaging to the Republic."
SIM and Anarchist clampdown"Barely six weeks later, on 9 August, a military counter-espionage unit, the Servicio de Investigación Militar (SIM), was created by Prieto in the Ministry of Defence. As it assumed ever more responsibility for collecting political intelligence in – and therefore policing – the rearguard, in late March 1938 the SIM absorbed the DEDIDE.117 Initially, the SIM was directly responsible to Prieto, who suggested that it had been created on the advice of the Soviet ‘technicians’. However, he also claimed that, in the light of the Nin affair, he had hesitated to take the advice for fear of the police acting independently of the government, as had happened with the Communist Antonio Ortega. Keen to place all the Republican special services under his own command, to head the SIM Prieto appointed his friend Ángel Díaz Baza, who, according to Orlov, was a speculator with an interest in night clubs.118
The key role of chief of the SIM of the Army of the Centre (Madrid) was initially given to a brilliant young officer, Major Gustavo Durán, at the suggestion of Orlov, via Miaja. Prieto accepted, and later claimed that he knew that Durán was a Communist, but kept him under surveillance by naming Ángel Pedrero García as his deputy. After the dissolution of the García Atadell Brigade, Pedrero, its second-in-command, had served briefly as a police inspector at Chamberí in central Madrid before being transferred, in December, to Salgado’s Special Services Bureau in the Ministry of War. His growing importance in military counter-intelligence saw him become SIM chief for the Army of Central Spain in October 1937.119
In the decree creating the SIM, Prieto had stipulated that all agents be approved by the Minister himself and that their credentials carry his signature. However, Gustavo Durán proceeded independently and named about four hundred SIM agents. Claiming that they were all Communists, which Durán and Orlov denied, Prieto used the excuse that Durán was needed at the front to suspend him from the SIM after barely two weeks in the job. Orlov intervened on Durán’s behalf. Pedrero claimed that Durán also received support from Eitingon and Ivan Maximov, the adviser to the General Staff of the Army of the Centre, other Soviet military advisers and Miaja.120
The overall chief of the SIM, Ángel Díaz Baza, hated the role and had soon been replaced on an interim basis by his deputy, Prudencio Sayagués. Seeking a more appropriate long-term appointment, Prieto named Major, later Colonel, Manuel Uribarri Barrutell. On Prieto’s own admission, this was a disastrous choice. While at the Toledo front, Uribarri had allegedly been guilty of large-scale looting. Now, at first he followed Prieto’s instructions but became increasingly aligned with the Communists.121 Uribarri eventually defected in April 1938, with a substantial amount of money and jewellery. Negrín seized the opportunity to purge the SIM. On the advice of Zugazagoitia and Paulino Gómez, he appointed a Socialist, Santiago Garcés Arroyo, as head of the SIM to limit the influence of the Communists.122 By February 1938, only Socialists could get jobs in the SIM.123
The Republic, like other democratic societies faced with an existential threat, adopted undemocratic norms such as censorship, internment without trial, suspension of civil liberties, strike bans in essential industries and conscription. To root out fifth-column networks and to get confessions, from May 1938 the SIM carried out illegal arrests and its operatives sometimes used refined tortures, disorientating prisoners with bright lights, constant loud noises and freezing water. Beds and benches were placed at a sharp angle, making sleep or sitting difficult. Floors were scattered with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent prisoners from pacing up and down and leaving them to stare at the walls, which were curved and covered with dizzying patterns of cubes and spirals which, with special lighting, gave the impression that the walls were moving. These cells were created in Barcelona in the so-called Checa de Vallmajor or ‘Preventorio D’, a converted convent, and in the ‘Preventorio G’ in Carrer Saragossa, both run by the SIM. The psycho-technic designs were the work of a bizarre international adventurer called Alfonso Laurencic, who was part of the Grup d’Informació of the Generalitat’s secret intelligence service when it was absorbed by the SIM. A self-proclaimed music-hall pianist and architect, Laurencic was a Frenchman of Austrian parents and Yugoslav nationality, who had served in the Spanish Foreign Legion. He had belonged variously to the CNT, the UGT and the POUM, had made money selling false passports and eventually defrauded the SIM.124"
"Another element of the Republican clamp-down on the anarchist movement was the abolition of their autonomous Council of Aragon, which had been created in early October 1936 in Bujaraloz, under the presidency of Joaquín Ascaso, leader of the Zaragoza construction workers and representative of the Ortiz Column. It had had some success in limiting the excesses committed by the militias in Republican Aragon but its principal objective of co-ordinating ‘the needs of the war and the rearguard’ was never achieved because the leaders of the anarchist columns had been determined to maintain their autonomy. Republicans, Socialists and Communists regarded the Council as an anarchist dictatorship imposed by the militias. Its closure by the central government in August 1937 was achieved only at the cost of some violence. Land that had been collectivized was returned to its owners and a definitive end was made to the anarchist repression in the region.125
The clandestine war of the Russian security services against foreign Trotskyists, however, remained beyond the control of the Republican authorities."
"It has been alleged that Stanislav Vaupshasov, a guerrilla-warfare expert, had constructed a crematorium in the basement of a building in Barcelona. He ran it with a Spanish NKVD agent, José Castelo Pacheco. Those targeted for liquidation were lured into the building, killed and their bodies eradicated in a single operation.129 Whether this is what happened to Rein, Wolf, Landau and some of the other foreigners who disappeared is not known. Manuel Irujo ensured that Nin would be the last Spanish Trotskyist to be murdered, but he was unable to stop the persecution of foreign leftists by the Soviet security services."
"With the fifth column getting more confidently aggressive, the SIM became more ruthless and several notably brutal individuals came to the fore. Ramón Torrecilla was one. Another individual who brought immense disrepute to SIM was Loreto Apellaniz Oden, a former post office official, who became a police inspector in Valencia after running the notorious Checa de Sorní. The Brigada Apellaniz spread terror with its activities in the area around Játiva. He later became a much feared chief of the SIM in Valencia from August 1937 to the end of the war. Accused of robbery, torture and murder, he was alleged to have taken instructions directly from Orlov. He was captured by the Francoists in March 1939 and shot.137
From April 1938, the SIM ran six work camps in Catalonia where the conditions were reputed to be harsh and the discipline fierce. There were cases of prisoners shot for trying to escape. Nonetheless, in stark contrast with the rebel zone, literacy and other educational classes were provided and prisoners were freed at the end of their sentences.138 The largest prison camp in the Republican zone was at Albatera in the province of Alicante. With the mission of draining 40,000 hectares of saltmarshes and converting them to arable production, it had been opened in October 1937.139 As food shortages became ever more prevalent in the Republican zone, conditions in all the camps also became progressively worse, although they never reached the levels of overcrowding, malnutrition and abuse that characterized the rebel camps.140"
**Special Court for Espionage and High Treason"While these clandestine abuses were still being perpetrated by the Russians, Negrín and his ministers pressed on with their efforts to regularize the policing and justice functions of the state. In late June 1937, the Special Court for Espionage and High Treason had been created. It reflected Negrín’s view that the authority of the state should not be flouted. However, he was totally opposed to any arbitrary form of repression such as that practised in the Francoist zone.130 With Negrín’s approval, Irujo ensured that the Special Court was staffed by judges of impartiality and probity. Many rank-and-file POUM militants were in prison, infuriated at being held alongside fascists and saboteurs. Still not formally charged, they were awaiting trial by the new Special Court. Among them were several foreign anti-Stalinists. One of them, Kurt Landau’s wife, Katia, had been arrested by a Brigada Especial operating on Russian orders. Their intention was to flush her husband out of hiding.
When Kurt disappeared, Katia demanded a judicial inquiry. By then, Ortega had been dismissed and Negrín’s new Director General of Security, the Basque Socialist Paulino Gómez, tried unsuccessfully to ascertain Kurt’s whereabouts. When the authorities were unable to clarify the fate of her husband, Katia led a hunger strike of five hundred inmates in the women’s prison in Barcelona. In addition to the investigation by Gómez, an international commission of inquiry went to Catalonia in November 1937 to study conditions in Republican prisons and to look into the disappearance of Andreu Nin, Erwin Wolf, Mark Rein and Kurt Landau. Led by John McGovern (general secretary of the British Independent Labour Party – George Orwell’s radical left group which had separated from the Labour Party) and the French pacifist Professor Felicien Challaye, it was permitted to interview Katia in the General Hospital where she was a patient as a result of her hunger strike.131
Irujo visited her in hospital and convinced her that the trials would be fair. She was sufficiently impressed to call off the strike. When Irujo sent prosecutors and judges into each prison with the appropriate paperwork, they were applauded by the prisoners who saw them as guarantors against Stalinist illegalities.132 Everything about the role of the Spanish authorities in the Landau case, particularly the success of Katia’s demand for an inquiry and of the hunger strike, contrasted with procedures in the rebel zone. Women in a rebel prison in 1938 could not have gone on hunger strike as there would have been hardly any food for them to reject and, even if they did, no one would have cared, certainly not a minister.
Shortly after taking possession of his ministry, Irujo had commissioned Mariano Gómez, the president of the Supreme Court, to draw up a draft decree to be applied to crimes perpetrated in the Republican zone since the beginning of the war, including all cases of extra-judicial deaths. It also included a revision of the release of common criminals amnestied by García Oliver.133 On 30 July 1937, Boris Stepanov reported to Dimitrov that the ‘fascist Irujo’ had tried to arrest Carrillo because of Paracuellos and ‘is organizing a system of searches of Communists, Socialists and anarchists, who brutally treated imprisoned fascists. In the name of the law, this minister of justice freed hundreds upon hundreds of arrested fascist agents or disguised fascists. Together with Zugazagoitia, Irujo does everything possible and impossible to save the Trotskyists and to sabotage trials against them. And he will do everything possible to acquit them.’134 In fact, in the light of opposition from Communists and anarchists alike, Irujo’s decree was never fully applied.
Irujo’s approach was illustrated by the case of General José Asensio Torrado, who was arrested and charged with sabotage after the precipitate fall of Málaga in February 1937. He was brought to trial in October that year, just as the north was falling, and given a prison sentence. While in prison, Asensio was permitted to write and publish a book defending his position and to send autographed copies to members of the government. The book was openly sold in Barcelona bookshops. Largo Caballero claimed that the arrest and trial of Asensio was provoked by Communist pressure on Prieto. If so, it is testimony to Negrín’s independence not only that Asensio was able to publish his book but also that, after appeal, the case was dismissed in July 1938.135
As the trend of the war worsened, however, the work of the Special Court expanded beyond Irujo’s original intentions. Those found guilty of espionage or sabotage ran the risk of execution, yet far fewer death sentences were passed than were demanded by prosecutors and even fewer were implemented than actually passed. In Catalonia, whose courts were by far the most active, 166 such sentences were carried out between December 1937 and 11 August 1938, although only seven were shot thereafter. Unlike the military courts in the rebel zone, the Special Court often found the accused not guilty. Moreover, many who were found guilty had their sentences reduced or quashed on appeal. Those suspected of more minor fifth-column offences, of defeatist propaganda and black-market activities were interned either in prisons or in the work camps created by García Oliver. As the military situation got worse throughout 1938, deserters and draft-dodgers were imprisoned.136"
Prieto sacked"By March 1938, the Republic was in dire straits, demoralized and suffering badly from a drastic lack of food and armaments. Indeed, so bleak did the prospects seem that Negrín’s friend and ally Prieto had come to believe, as did Azaña, that all was lost. Prieto advocated a negotiated peace to avoid the senseless loss of more lives. At tense cabinet meetings on 16 and 29 March, Prieto supported Azaña in proposing a request to the French government to mediate an end to the war. Negrín had reasserted his conviction that the war should go on precisely because he was aware of what would befall the defeated Republic at the hands of the vengeful Francoists. Appalled by the demoralizing impact of Prieto’s words and determined that the Republic would continue to resist, Negrín removed Prieto from the Ministry of Defence on 5 April. Ten days later, the rebels reached the Mediterranean."
Execution scandal, negotiations for prisoner swaps, and collapse of the Republican government"Resistance meant combat not only at the battle front but also in the rearguard. The determination to follow judicial procedure did not stop the war on spies and saboteurs. A significant success of the SIM took place that April in Barcelona with the discovery and arrest of several fifth-column networks. The British and French diplomatic staff appealed for mercy, but the cabinet voted seven to five for the execution, at the end of June, of ten fifth columnists. The British Chargé d’Affaires, John Leche, commented, ‘I fear repercussions on the other side may be serious, and gave the government serious warning to this effect, but the president of the council and his supporters in the Cabinet are pitiless, and now seem to have as little consideration for their people in the hands of Franco as the latter has for his supporters here.’ The ten prisoners were shot on the morning of 25 June.141
As the battle of the Ebro raged, the militarization of society was intensified. Control of the rearguard became ever more implacable against those suspected of sabotage or espionage. This provoked the severe discomfort of those who felt that the democratic values of the Republic were being compromised by wartime necessities. Thus, on 9 August 1938, there was a cabinet crisis when Negrín forced through approval for the execution of a further sixty-two fifth columnists the following day. Now Minister without Portfolio, Irujo complained of irregularities in the investigation carried out by the SIM. Negrín lost his temper and accused him of ‘legalistic drivel’. In contrast to the rebel practice of rarely reporting executions, the full coverage by the Republican press of this decision led to a considerable scandal. President Azaña was mortified. The Francoists replied immediately by executing sixty-six people.142 The next day, when Irujo said that the SIM had used torture, Negrín undertook to ensure that it ceased forthwith. Irujo resigned, albeit not over this issue. He did so, obliged by an agreement between the Generalitat and the Basque government in exile, in support of Jaume Aiguader’s resignation in protest at further limits on the powers of the Generalitat.143
In the spring of 1938, the British had set up an exchange commission under Field Marshal Sir Philip Chetwode. Denys Cowan, a former vice-consul to Havana and both a Conservative and a Catholic, was the Commission’s liaison officer with the Republican authorities. He arrived in Barcelona on 20 August and immediately met Álvarez del Vayo, Giral, Negrín and Azaña. Two days later, he reported that the Republican government was prepared to go to ‘almost any lengths’ to exchange all prisoners ‘provided they could receive proper reciprocity from the other side’.144 Indeed, so willing were the Republican ministers that Leche felt the need to protect them from themselves and suggested to the Chetwode Commission that, in view of the Francoists’ ‘previous intransigence and bad faith it would be better that first proposals should come from them’.145
Cowan approached Álvarez del Vayo to seek a suspension of executions, telling him that it would create a better atmosphere for the Republic. Del Vayo passed the proposal to Negrín and the cabinet agreed to suspend executions until 30 September, as the basis for negotiation of a general amnesty on both sides. There was to be no reciprocity from Burgos, merely a radio communiqué stating that Franco’s system of justice was so pure that there was no reason to make a similar concession. Nevertheless, to facilitate Chetwode’s work, Negrín undertook to maintain the suspension of executions until 11 October. Although the Burgos authorities still refused to reciprocate, Negrín told Cowan just before the 11 October deadline that he would extend the suspension to the end of the month and would authorize no further executions without lengthy prior notice to the Chetwode Commission.
One problem was that there were fewer than three hundred persons under sentence of death in the Republican zone but many thousands in rebel territory. Negrín suggested that all death sentences on both sides be commuted, but Burgos refused. Throughout the period after the Republican suspension of executions, the Francoists continued to implement death sentences. Cowan was inevitably worried that this would provoke Republican reprisals. He reminded Negrín that he had declared that his policy was one of ‘clemency ad infinitum’. Negrín responded by undertaking to recommend to the cabinet that there be no reprisals.146 The moratorium on executions was extended until the end of December. On Christmas Eve 1938, Negrín made a broadcast in which, referring to ‘the norms of tolerance and civility that are the essence of our fundamental law’, he appealed to Franco to ‘stop unnecessary ferocity!’ Pointing out that the Republic had suspended executions four months previously, he called on Franco to reciprocate.147
In Burgos, Chetwode met the Conde de Jordana, Franco’s Foreign Minister, who claimed falsely that ‘only those persons were executed by his side who had committed abominable felonies and had been convicted after fair trial in a court of law’. To support this fiction, Jordana produced the chief of Franco’s military juridical corps, Lieutenant Colonel Lorenzo Martínez Fuset, who declared that the Burgos regime had executed nobody for their political opinions, or even for taking up arms, but ‘only because they had committed crimes which in common law would have been worthy of death’. Accordingly, he said, Franco could not interfere and was prepared to risk Republican reprisals.148 Chetwode wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, in mid-November:
I can hardly describe the horror that I have conceived of Spain since my interview with Franco three days ago. He is worse than the Reds and I could not stop him executing his unfortunate prisoners. And when I managed to get 140 out of the Cuban embassy in Madrid across the lines the other day, having got them across, Franco frankly refused to give anyone for them in spite of his promise. And when he did send people down nearly half of them were not the people he had promised to release but criminals who had been in jail, many of them, since before the war started.149
Yet again, Franco reneged on an exchange agreement after the Republican government had already made it possible for many of its prisoners to cross into insurgent territory.150 Meanwhile, as the war drew to a close, Franco refused to exchange forty or fifty senior officers in return for his supporters in the embassies. According to Chetwode, Franco was gambling, successfully as it turned out, on the Republicans being able to prevent any harm coming to them.151"
"After defeat on the Ebro, with Franco’s forces pouring into Catalonia, the bulk of prisoners held by the Republic were evacuated on 23 January 1939. Thousands crossed the border into France. At Pont de Molins, however, Negrín ordered the transfer of several of the more important ones to the central zone, where they could be used for prisoner exchanges. They included Bishop Anselmo Polanco, who had been captured when Republican forces took Teruel in January 1938. Polanco was first imprisoned in Valencia but was soon moved to Barcelona, where he remained for the rest of the war. He was kept in comfortable circumstances and permitted to carry out his spiritual exercises and to say Mass for his fellow prisoners. The government wanted to avoid the scandal of anything happening to Polanco, but Franco blocked Prieto’s efforts via the Red Cross to exchange him for General Rojo’s fourteen-year-old son."
"As the remnants of the defeated Republican Army headed for an uncertain exile, harassed by rebel supporters within the civilian population, Negrín’s orders for the safety of the prisoners were ignored. A truck containing thirty soldiers, under the command of Major Pedro Díaz, arrived at Pont de Molins and took charge of the prisoners, ostensibly in order to transfer them to the port of Roses. The convoy stopped near a ravine at a place called Can de Tretze and the prisoners were shot. Their corpses were soaked in petrol and ignited. The forty-two victims included most of the captured rebel top brass from Teruel: Bishop Polanco and his vicar general, the military commander Colonel Rey d’Harcourt, the head of the Civil Guard and the police chief. Twenty-one Italians and one German who had been taken prisoner at Guadalajara were among those killed. This senseless act of revenge became a symbol of red barbarism. Polanco was eventually beatified by the Vatican in 1995.156"
Negrin's offer of sacrifice, and evacuations of Republican civilians and troops"After the fall of Catalonia in January 1939 and an exodus of hundreds of thousands of civilians, at the last meeting of the Cortes at Figueras Negrín presented a plan to bring the war to an end in return for Franco observing certain conditions, above all no reprisals.157 The plan was put to British and French representatives, who replied that the Burgos government was not interested in humanitarian sentiments, peace-making or magnanimity and anyway declared that it punished only common crimes. The hypocrisy thereof was underlined by Negrín’s comment that ‘in a savage and pitiless civil war like ours, either everything is a common crime or nothing is’. Accordingly, Negrín offered himself as an expiatory victim, letting it be known that he would hand himself over if Franco would accept his symbolic execution in exchange for the lives of the mass of innocent Republican civilians. He did not reveal this offer to the majority of his own cabinet apart from Zugazagoitia.158
Negrín’s offer was ignored by Franco. The government remained in Spain at the Castle at Figueras until the last units of the Republican army had crossed the French frontier on 9 February. The night before, one of the few colleagues who remained with Negrín, his friend Dr Rafael Méndez, Director General of Carabineros, said to Julio Álvarez del Vayo: ‘I don’t know what we’re doing here. I fear that we will be woken up tonight by Carlist rifle-butts.’ Negrín called Méndez aside and said: ‘We are not leaving here until the last soldier has crossed the frontier.’ Determined to see these Republicans safe from the reprisals of Franco, he watched for eighteen hours until General Rojo arrived to announce that all the Republican troops had crossed into France. Only then did Negrín move on to Toulouse to take a plane back to Alicante. Some ministers thought that he was mad, but as he himself explained: ‘If I had not done that then, today I would die of shame.’159 Back in Spain, he tried to reorganize the military forces of the centre to mount resistance either until a European war started or at least until a massive evacuation could ensure the lowest number of Republican deaths possible. On 16 February, he held a meeting of the military high command in Albacete. Having ascertained that the morale of the ordinary soldier seemed high, he was surprised when senior officers insisted that it was necessary to end the war as soon as possible. Asked why he did not sue for peace, he replied: ‘because to beg for peace is to provoke a catastrophe’.160
As his friend the American journalist Louis Fischer wrote later, ‘Negrín and del Vayo hoped, by holding out a little while longer, to extract a promise of mercy and clemency from Franco and to win time for the flight of those with a price on their heads.’161 The idea that Franco might guarantee that there would be no reprisals against the defeated was a vain one given his Law of Political Responsibilities, announced on 9 February, by which supporters of the Republic were effectively guilty of the crime of military rebellion, which in Franco’s topsy-turvy moral world meant all those who had not supported the military coup of 1936. Negrín was convinced that a fight to the finish was possible and, as a result, had been accused by Prieto of having provoked ‘the gigantic hecatomb’. Prieto claimed that a negotiated peace had been possible and blamed the policy of resistance for Francoist vengeance. This revealed either culpable ignorance of what the rebels had been doing in captured territory or else a cynical desire to make political capital for use against Negrín in the coming Republican power struggle in exile. With some bitterness, Negrín reflected on those who just wanted the war to be over, ‘without thinking about the millions of unfortunates who could not save themselves’.162 In the event, his hopes of resistance to save more Republicans would be dashed as much by the coup of Colonel Segismundo Casado in March 1939 as by Franco himself. More in sadness than in anger, he told the Standing Committee of the Cortes that ‘We could still have resisted and held on and that was our obligation. It was our obligation to remain to save those who are now going to end up murdered or in concentration camps.’ As things had turned out, thanks to Casado, he said, the Republic ended ‘in terms of catastrophe and shame’.163"
Chapter 12: Franco’s Slow War of Annihilation
Basque Country"In Galicia, Castile, León and Navarre, the areas of the north where there had been virtually no resistance to the coup, the elimination of leftists, trade unionists and supposed supporters of the Republic was immediate and thorough. In the meantime, Franco’s African forces and the columns organized by army officers and landowners were bloodily purging the southern countryside. That still left the Basque Country, Santander, Asturias, much of Aragon and all the eastern seaboard in Republican hands. The military coup had failed in most of Guipúzcoa, and the Popular Front parties had created a Defence Junta in San Sebastián. It and the smaller juntas in other towns were largely dominated by the Socialists and Communists. Basque nationalists participated in the hope of maintaining public order. Their priority was to prevent executions of rightists being carried out by the Communists.1"
"While the rest of the Basque Country remained under Republican control, anti-clerical violence was relatively limited, significantly less than in many other provinces. Sixty-nine priests died at the hands of leftists, the majority in Vizcaya, while in Guipúzcoa, four clergy were killed. This was the consequence of the lesser influence of the CNT and the committed efforts of Basque nationalists, Republicans and moderate Socialists to prevent bloodshed. Churches were not attacked and religious practices continued without interruption. Nevertheless, right-wingers were in danger. In the industrial town of Rentería, near the provincial capital San Sebastián, the local Carlist leader was arrested and shot. The total number of deaths in Rentería was three. In Tolosa, in the south of the province, right-wingers involved in the military plot were shot and thirteen Carlists were taken to San Sebastián and executed. As in most places, revolutionary committees were established which arrested wealthy holidaymakers along with members of the local bourgeoisie. Moderate Socialists and Basque nationalists tried hard to ensure their safety. The starkest exception was the provincial capital, where 183 people were executed, more than half of the total of 343 people killed in Guipúzcoa while it was under Republican control.3"
"Already on 23 July, Carlist troops from Navarre had entered the southern part of Guipúzcoa. Although they encountered no resistance, in Cegama and Segura they sacked the headquarters of Republican parties and the Batzoki (centres) of the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party), whose militants were detained and mistreated. Some were shot and many more subjected to arbitrary fines.5 In early August, General Mola began a campaign to cut off the Basque Country from the French border. Thus under the Carlists Colonel José Solchaga Zala and Colonel Alfonso Beorleguí y Canet, commander of the Civil Guard in Navarre, large numbers of Requetés set off from Navarre towards Irún and San Sebastián. Beorleguí was a fearless but rather childlike giant. When his column was bombed, he simply opened his umbrella.6 Irún and Fuenterrabía were being shelled from the sea and attacked daily by German and Italian bombers. They dropped rebel pamphlets threatening to repeat what had been done in Badajoz. San Sebastián was also heavily shelled from the sea and eight civilian right-wingers and five army officers were executed in reprisal.7 Irún’s poorly armed and untrained militia defenders fought bravely but were overwhelmed on 3 September. Thousands of panic-stricken refugees fled across the international bridge from Irún across the River Bidasoa to France. The last defenders, largely anarchists enraged by their lack of ammunition, shot some rightist prisoners in Fuenterrabía and set parts of Irún on fire.8"
"In total, the rebels murdered sixteen priests in the entire Basque region and imprisoned and tortured many more. One of those killed, Celestino Onaindía Zuloaga, was selected because his younger brother Alberto, a canon of the Cathedral of Valladolid, was a friend of the Basque President José Antonio Aguirre, for whom he was a kind of roving ambassador. Another, Father Joaquín Iturricastillo, was shot on 8 November, after being denounced as a dangerous nationalist for criticizing cheek-to-cheek waltzing as contrary to Basque customs. In general, the names of those to be executed appeared in blacklists brought by the Carlists from Pamplona. Executions of priests led to protests to Franco by Cardinal Gomá, who nonetheless justified them to the Vatican as the result of priests engaging in political activity. When Father Alberto Onaindía heard the news of the murder of his brother, he said: ‘if this was how the army behaved with the Basque clergy, what would it be like for civilians!’12"
"While the attack on Madrid was the principal rebel preoccupation, the Basque front remained static until late March 1937. Even before the fall of San Sebastián, Mola had initiated secret negotiations with the Basque Nationalist Party. He hoped for a peaceful surrender of Vizcaya in return for a promise not to destroy Bilbao and a guarantee of no subsequent repression. Given what had happened after the captures of Irún and San Sebastián, the PNV leadership was not inclined to believe him. Alberto Onaindía was the principal PNV interlocutor with Mola’s representative. He appealed for Mola not to bomb Bilbao on the grounds that to do so would provoke reprisals against the 2,500 imprisoned rightists in the city.15 On 25 and 26 September 1936, major bombing raids on Bilbao caused dozens of deaths and mutilations of women and children."
"As had been predicted, this provoked an outburst of rage from the starving population. Despite the intervention of the local forces of order, anarchists assaulted two prison ships and murdered sixty rightist detainees, including two priests. Greater efforts to prevent similar atrocities were made in the wake of the formation of a Basque government on 7 October, after the Republic had granted regional autonomy the day before. Sporadic bombing raids continued, but nothing had prepared the city for the scale of a sustained attack on 4 January 1937. In response, there was an even more ferocious incursion into the city’s four prisons, when 224 right-wingers were killed, mostly Carlists, but also several priests and some Basque nationalists. The main culprits were anarchists, but UGT militiamen sent to put a stop to the killing joined in at one of the prisons. At considerable risk, members of the Basque government went to the prisons and managed to control the carnage before it reached all the prisoners.16 In contrast with the repression in Madrid and even more so with that throughout the rebel zone, the Basque government accepted responsibility for the atrocities and permitted the families of the victims to hold public funerals. Proceedings to bring the culprits to justice were initiated but had not been completed when Bilbao fell. The remaining prisoners were well treated and released safe and sound before the rebel occupation of Vizcaya. The Tribunal Popular in Bilbao, which had begun to function in October 1936, held 457 trials and issued 156 death sentences, of which nineteen were carried out.17"
"By the end of March 1937, Mola had gathered nearly 40,000 troops for a final assault on Vizcaya. He opened his campaign with a widely publicized threat broadcast on radio and printed in thousands of leaflets dropped on the main towns: ‘If your submission is not immediate, I will raze Vizcaya to the ground, beginning with the industries of war. I have ample means to do so.’18 On 31 March, he arrived in Vitoria to put the final touches to the offensive that was to be launched the following day. To crush enemy morale, he ordered the execution of sixteen prisoners, including several popular local figures, one of whom was the Mayor. This led to protests from the local right.19 This act of gratuitous violence was followed by a massive four-day artillery and aircraft bombardment of eastern Vizcaya, in which the small picturesque country town of Durango was destroyed: 127 civilians died during the bombing and a further 131 died shortly afterwards as a consequence of their wounds. Among the dead were fourteen nuns and two priests.20 Four days after the bombing of Durango, Franco met the Italian Ambassador, Roberto Cantalupo, and explained the reasons for such savagery: ‘Others might think that when my aircraft bomb red cities I am making a war like any other, but that is not so.’ He declared ominously that ‘in the cities and the countryside which I have already occupied but still not redeemed, we must carry out the necessarily slow task of redemption and pacification, without which the military occupation will be largely useless’. He went on: ‘I am interested not in territory but in inhabitants. The reconquest of the territory is the means, the redemption of the inhabitants the end.’21"
"Increasingly, Mola relied on the air support of the German Condor Legion, whose Chief of Staff and later leader was Lieutenant Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, who was to mastermind the German Blitzkrieg invasion of Poland. Durango saw the beginning of Richthofen’s experiments in terror bombing designed to break the morale of the civilian population and also to destroy road communications where they passed through population centres. On the night of 25 April, presumably on Mola’s instructions, the rebel radio at Salamanca broadcast the following warning to the Basque people: ‘Franco is about to deliver a mighty blow against which all resistance is useless. Basques! Surrender now and your lives will be spared.’22 The mighty blow was the obliteration of Guernica in one afternoon of relentless bomb attacks. On the day after the bombing, an eyewitness, Father Alberto Onaindía, wrote a passionate letter to Cardinal Gomá: ‘I have just arrived from Bilbao with my soul destroyed after having witnessed the horrific crime that has been perpetrated against the peaceful town of Guernica.’ He told the Cardinal of ‘Three hours of terror and Dantesque scenes. Children and mothers collapsed on the roadside, mothers screaming in prayer, a population of believers murdered by criminals who have not the slightest claim to humanity. Señor Cardinal, for dignity, for the honour of the gospel, for Christ’s infinite pity, such a horrendous, unprecedented, apocalyptic, Dantesque crime cannot be committed.’ Describing scenes of the sick burned alive, the wounded buried in mounds of ashes, Onaindía appealed to Gomá to intercede, reminding him of international law and ‘an eternal law, God’s law, that forbids the killing and murder of the innocent. This was trampled underfoot on Monday in Guernica. Which cruel personage coldly planned this horrific crime of burning and killing an entire peaceful town?
Onaindía’s letter ended with a plea to Gomá to prevent the implementation of the rebel threats that Bilbao would be next. Gomá’s dismissive reply with its repetition of Mola’s threat was a spine-chilling affirmation of the Church’s official support for Franco’s war of annihilation: ‘I regret, as anyone would, what is happening in Vizcaya. I have suffered for months, God is my witness. I particularly regret the destruction of your towns, where the purest faith and patriotism once dwelt. But it was not necessary to be a prophet to foresee what is now happening.’ In an angry reference to Basque loyalty to the Madrid government, Gomá fulminated, ‘Peoples pay for their pacts with evil and for their perverse wickedness in sticking to them.’ He then casually endorsed Mola’s threats: ‘I take the liberty of replying to your anguished letter with a simple piece of advice. Bilbao must surrender, it has no other choice. It can do so with honour, as it could have done two months ago. Whichever side is responsible for the destruction of Guernica, it is a terrible warning for the great city.’23’
When the insurgents reached the burned-out remnants of Guernica on 29 April, the Carlist Jaime del Burgo asked a lieutenant colonel of Mola’s staff: ‘was it necessary to do this?’ The officer barked: ‘This has to be done with all of Vizcaya and with all of Catalonia.’24 Although the Caudillo’s propaganda service went to great lengths to deny that Guernica had been bombed, there is no doubt that Mola and Franco shared the ultimate responsibility and were pleased with the outcome.25"
"The terror provoked by artillery and aerial bombardment and political divisions within the Republican ranks ensured the gradual collapse of Basque resistance. The death of Mola in an aircraft accident on 3 June made no difference. The Army of the North, under the command of General Fidel Dávila, continued its march on Bilbao. When the city fell on 19 June, 200,000 people were evacuated westwards into Santander, first on trawlers. Then, when the Francoists had taken the port of Bilbao, the refugees fled in cars, lorries, horse carts or on foot. They were bombed and strafed by the Condor Legion along the way.27 Fifteen women were shot, their deaths announced as suicides.28 Shops were looted and Falangists from Valladolid were given free rein. The subsequent repression was implemented on the pseudo-legal basis of the ‘emergency summary courts martial’ which had replaced the application of the edict of martial law since the conquest of Málaga in February. Nearly eight thousand were imprisoned in punishment for their nationalist ambitions, many of whom were forced into work battalions. When executions began, in December following the first trials, there would be several hundred victims of firing squads and at least thirty executed by garrotte vil.29 Nevertheless, the repression in the Basque Country was, according to the senior military prosecutor Felipe Acedo Colunga, of notably less severity than elsewhere. Two possible reasons for this were the rebels’ need for skilled labour to run Basque industries and the fact that the Catholic Church had less need to pursue a vengeful policy in a largely Catholic province.30 There have been wildly different claims of the number of executions in Vizcaya but the most reliable estimate to date is 916.31
Despite these deaths, the Carlist press in Navarre demanded the extermination of Basque nationalists. The newly imposed Falangist Mayor, José María de Areilza, himself a Basque, gloated in victory, declaring on 8 July: ‘The revolting, sinister, heinous nightmare called Euskadi has been smashed for ever … You have fallen for ever, self-seeking, wretched, twisted Basque nationalist toady Aguirre, you who pretended to be someone during eleven months of crime and robbery while the poor Basque soldiers were being hunted down in the villages with lassos like four-legged animals, leaving their pelts scattered over the mountains of Vizcaya.’32 Areilza was active in the repression, denouncing many individuals who were then imprisoned."
"In addition to the executions, a significant element of the repression in the Basque Country was constituted by fines and confiscations. Many doctors, lawyers, architects and engineers had their licences to practise withdrawn. As elsewhere, schoolteachers were a prime target. The Basque President or Lehendakari, José Antonio Aguirre, was fined 20 million pesetas and his property seized. Many businesses and properties were handed over to rebel supporters and bank deposits confiscated. In 1939, the rebels imposed a fine of 100 million pesetas on the shipping magnate Sir Ramón de la Sota, who had died three years earlier. His family was stripped of all of his businesses and his entire property, including forty ships that had been used in the evacuation of Bilbao. A typical case was that of the Abando family. The seventy-seven-year-old businessman Julián de Abando y Oxinaga was arrested, although seriously ill, and hit with a fine of over 1 million pesetas. Two of his sons were arrested with him and condemned to long prison sentences. One of them, the distinguished gynaecologist Dr Juan Blas de Abando y Urrexola, had his clinic confiscated.41
Another element of the repression was directed against the Basque language. In his notorious speech when he took over as Mayor of Bilbao, José María de Areilza declared: ‘the great shame of the separatist clergy is finished for ever’. The close relationship between the Basque clergy and the people was targeted by the prohibition of the use of Basque language Euskera in all religious activities, whether collective prayer, sermons or the teaching of the catechism. Instructions from the ecclesiastical authorities permitting the use of Euskera were overruled by General Severino Martínez Anido, Franco’s head of public order. Priests who spoke to their Euskera-speaking flocks in their native languages were given huge fines.42"
"Among the prisoners taken at Santoña were eighty-one priests from the Corps of Chaplains of the Basque Army, a unique body among the Republican forces, dedicated to providing Mass and the sacraments at the front. Three were condemned to death (although their sentences were later commuted). The others were given sentences ranging from six to thirty years in prison. One of these priests, Victoriano Gondra y Muruaga, was known as ‘Aita Patxi’ (Father Frank), having taken the name Francisco de la Pasión on joining the Passionist Order. Imprisoned, along with the other Gudaris (Basque soldiers), in the concentration camp at San Pedro de Cardeña near Burgos, he was sentenced with them to forced labour. Learning that an Asturian Communist sentenced to death for trying to escape was married with five children, Aita Patxi offered himself to be shot instead. He was told mendaciously that his request had been accepted and the Asturian pardoned, and subjected to a pretence of execution by firing squad. He learned the next day that the Asturian had been shot at dawn.43"
Santander"Tension was simmering in the city already when the arrival of almost 170,000 refugees caused massive social dislocation. Deep resentment was generated among the local population by dramatic food shortages and the sight of thousands of Basques, including wounded and mutilated soldiers, sleeping in the streets. A number of Basques were murdered by Neila’s own checa. Revenge attacks were carried out by Basque soldiers. A group of nearly forty Basque priests were rescued from being murdered by anarchists only after payment of a large ransom. The defence of the province was undermined not only by these divisions but also by the fact that neither the Basque nor the Asturian forces felt commitment to the task. Moreover, the second-in-command of these disparate forces, Colonel Adolfo Prada Vaquero, told Azaña that 85 per cent of those from Santander were conscripts of dubious loyalty. On 14 August 1937, an army of 60,000 troops, amply supplied with Italian arms and equipment and backed by the Condor Legion and the Corpo di Truppe Volontarie, began to encircle Santander. In brilliant sunshine, massive air and artillery support as well as numerical superiority ensured a virtual walk-over as they easily brushed aside the disorganized Republican forces and the remnants of the Basque Army. Prada claimed that the lack of resistance was manifested in the fact that the rebel forces advanced faster than on manoeuvres. Santander itself fell on 26 August. The commander of the northern forces, General Mariano Gámir Ulibarri, delayed ordering an evacuation, and so relatively few were able to escape. The Mayor, who remained to surrender the city, was immediately shot.37
The consequent repression was notably harsher than in the Basque Country. One of the most striking executions was that of Colonel José Pérez y García Argüelles. He had been Military Governor of Santander on 18 July 1936. Because of his involvement in the coup, he had been condemned to death by a Tribunal Popular, but his sentence had been commuted to imprisonment. When the rebels arrived, he was arrested because his indecision between 18 and 20 July was regarded as contributing to the failure of the coup. He was tried and sentenced to death on 25 October 1937 and executed on 18 November. More than 13,000 people were tried, of whom 1,267 were sentenced to death. A further 739 were murdered in extra-judicial paseos and at least 389 died of maltreatment in prison.38"
"In the meantime, the Basque forces, having dropped out of the fight altogether, had gathered at Santoña to the east of Santander. They believed that they would be evacuated to France on the basis of the so-called ‘Pact of Santoña’ negotiated with the Italians by the Basque Nationalist Party. This belief was based on an offer made on 23 July by Franco’s brother, Nicolás, of no reprisals and facilities for the evacuation of prominent figures if the Basques surrendered. After long delays, during which they might have been able to organize an earlier evacuation, the Basques finally agreed to surrender to the Italians at Santoña on 26 August. In accordance with the agreement made, 473 Basque political and military leaders embarked on two British ships, the SS Seven Seas Spray and the SS Bobie, under Italian protection. The next day, rebel warships blockaded the port on Franco’s orders and Dávila told the Italians to disembark the refugees. They refused and held the prisoners for four days until, on 31 August, Franco personally ordered the Italians to hand them over.39 After assurances that the surrender conditions would be respected, the Italians relinquished the captives on 4 September. To their horror, summary trials began at once and hundreds of death sentences were passed. Among the victims were the entire General Staff of the Basque Army. The prisoners tried in Santoña were taken to Bilbao for execution in December 1937.40"
Asturias"In Asturias, the legacy of the repression after October 1934 ensured that the struggle would be extremely bitter. On 18 July 1936, the coup had failed except for the two rebel outposts of the Simancas barracks in Gijón and the city of Oviedo which was taken as a result of the duplicity of Colonel Antonio Aranda. Declaring his loyalty to the Republic, he convinced the local authorities that he approved of arms being distributed to the workers. However, claiming not to have enough weapons and ammunition in Oviedo for them all, he assured the local left-wing forces that he had arranged for supplies in León. On Sunday 19 July, about 3,500 unarmed miners and steelworkers confidently left the city for León, some by train, others in a convoy of trucks. About three hundred were given obsolete weapons with inappropriate ammunition and the entire group continued south, reaching Benavente in Zamora. Meanwhile in Oviedo, Aranda declared for the rebels and other workers awaiting arms were massacred. In Benavente, on 20 July, news reached the militia expedition of Aranda’s treachery and they decided to return to Oviedo. Those who had come by train had to return via Ponferrada, a town already in the hands of the Civil Guard. The poorly armed militia fought bravely there but suffered many casualties and retreated back to Asturias, many on foot. By 21 July, the miners travelling by truck from Benavente had returned and besieged Oviedo. The Asturian Popular Front Committee established its headquarters in Sama de Langreo under the presidency of Belarmino Tomás.44"
"In Gijón, the coup had failed in large part because of the indecision of the commander of the Simancas barracks, Colonel Antonio Pinilla Barceló. Besieged by the anarchists who dominated the local committee, Pinilla had overseen by radio the fierce bombardment of the city by the rebel battlecruiser Almirante Cervera. On 14 August alone, air attacks and naval artillery made direct hits on the railway station and a hospital leaving fifty-four dead and seventy-eight seriously wounded. Under the umbrella of the consequent popular outrage, a group of FAI militants, accompanied by some Communists, headed to the Church of San José where two hundred right-wing prisoners were being held. They selected the most prominent and murdered them. A second group of militiamen arrived in the evening and took away another batch, including twenty-six priests and religious. Other individuals were shot in the course of the night. In total, 106 right-wing prisoners were killed.45 The barracks was stormed from 19 to 21 August by the local militia. Facing defeat, Pinilla rejected offers that the lives of the defenders would be respected if he surrendered and requested that the rebel warship fire on the building. Assuming the message to be a trick, the commander of the Almirante Cervera did not fire. The barracks was overrun and Pinilla and his men were executed in the ruins.46
The siege of Oviedo lasted another two months. Inside the city, Aranda waged war on what he considered to be the internal enemy. He himself claimed that Republican supporters made up half of the city and one of his supporters put the figure at 75 per cent of the population.47 Aranda also told Webb Miller of the United Press that seven hundred prisoners were held as hostages.48 Republican sources put the figure at more than one thousand, including the wives of working-class leaders and parliamentary deputies for Asturias. Of many, nothing was ever heard again. Shortly after Aranda had taken over the city, he launched an attack on the loyal Santa Clara barracks of the Assault Guards. In the aftermath, twenty-five militiamen and two Assault Guards were shot. It has been suggested that the repression was limited by the rebels’ fears of reprisals if the city fell to the besieging miners. Certainly, Aranda himself kept at some distance from the repression, but an atmosphere of terror was nevertheless maintained by his Delegate for Public Order, Mayor Gerardo Caballero, who had been prominent in the repression after October 1934. Under his orders, Falangist squads hunted down leftists at night. Corpses were often found in the streets and more than sixty unidentified bodies, including twelve women, were deposited in local cemeteries. During the siege, prisoners were used as human shields.49
There could be little doubt that the relative restraint of the repression would change if the relief column from Galicia were to liberate the city. The column had nearly 19,000 men, having been reinforced at the end of September with a bandera of the Legion (five hundred men) and eight tabores of Regulares (two thousand men). Along the way, any militiamen captured were shot. Moreover, as the column had taken small towns along the way, there were numerous executions without trial of schoolteachers, including women, and others assumed to be Republican supporters. After the columns had moved on, squads of Falangists began the bloody task of what was euphemistically called ‘cleansing’. One group which operated in small towns like Luarca, Boal, Castropol and Navia murdered many including several young women. The gang was notorious for the ‘cangrejo’ (crab), the green truck in which they transported their victims to the remote areas where they were murdered. In addition to many extra-judicial murders, many people were subjected to the briefest summary trials in which they were sentenced to death for ‘military rebellion’.50"
"After the arrival of the relief column, Republican forces tried to recapture Oviedo. Although remaining dominant in the south and east of the province, their efforts were in vain. Once Santander had fallen, Asturias was in Franco’s sights and, to delay his expected onslaught, General Vicente Rojo now launched a ferocious assault aimed at capturing Zaragoza. Republican forces attacked the small town of Belchite. This time Franco did not take the bait as he had at Brunete but began a great three-pronged assault on a now encircled Asturias on 2 September 1937. Under the overall command of General Dávila and led in the field by Generals Antonio Aranda and José Solchaga, troops quickly moved through the rain-swept mountains. Anxious to finish the campaign before the winter, Franco imbued his staff with a greater urgency than was normally the case. Their efforts were greatly facilitated by the fact that the Republicans had virtually no air cover. Although Asturias was geographically a strong defensive redoubt, it was tightly blockaded by sea and remorselessly bombarded from the air. The defenders’ morale was shattered as the Germans perfected their ground-attack techniques with forays along the mountain valleys, using a combination of incendiary bombs and gasoline to create an early form of napalm.53
After the fall of Santander, the Asturians set up an independent government, sacked the Republican commander, General Gamir, and made Colonel Prada commander of military forces. In Gijón, the repression of the local right had been profound and often gratuitously vindictive, with small businesses and shops confiscated and children and adolescents imprisoned because their parents had been denounced as fascists. Prisoners were transferred to a prison ship docked in the port of El Musel to the west of Gijón. As the war effort disintegrated, the sacas increased. Many prisoners were shot, notably near Oviedo and, as the rebels advanced from Santander, in the east of the region, at Cangas de Onís.54 In the course of the war in Asturias, around two thousand rightist prisoners were murdered. The rebels’ revenge when Asturias was occupied saw them kill nearly six thousand Republicans.55"
"Back in Gijón, Father Alejandro Martínez was deeply shocked by the ferocity of the repression, which he described as of an ‘inopportune rigour, as though a certain species of human being had to be liquidated … The troops sacked and looted Gijón as though it were a foreign city.’ The Regulares and Legionarios had the usual licence to pillage and rape and, given the lingering hatred from 1934, did so with especial vehemence. The fifth columnists who had been in hiding during the period of Republican dominance came out hungry for revenge. Colonel José Franco Mussió, a rebel sympathizer, had remained in Asturias in the hope of saving right-wing prisoners and had stayed behind in Gijón rather than flee to the Republican zone. He was tried immediately along with seven other Republican officers and shot on 14 November 1937. At least twenty schoolteachers were shot and many more were imprisoned. In the mining valleys, villagers were subjected to assassinations and beatings. Haystacks were burned at farms to force out those hiding. Paseos and the sexual abuse and even mutilation of women were frequent.57 Of the many atrocities committed, one of the most notorious took place at the Monastery of Valdediós near Villaviciosa. The building had been requisitioned when the Psychiatric Hospital of Oviedo was evacuated there in October 1936. On 27 October 1937, troops of the Brigadas de Navarra arrived. Without motive, they shot six men and eleven women of the staff. They were buried in a large unmarked grave, one of sixty fosas in Asturias.58"
"One guerrillero who was caught was Pascual López from Sobrado dos Monxes in A Coruña, whose wife and six children had had no news of him since he fled at the beginning of the war. In June 1939, a man who had served in Franco’s forces returned to the village and said that he had seen Pascual in a concentration camp near Oviedo. Pascual’s wife packed some food and clothes and sent her thirteen-year-old son Pascualín to find him. It took him two weeks to walk to Oviedo and another to locate the correct camp among those in the area. Although his father told him to go home, Pascualín stayed, stealing food during the day and sneaking into the camp at night to sleep, in the open air, alongside Pascual. In early October, a group of Falangists arrived and selected the Galician prisoners to take for execution in Gijón. The Falangists were on horse-back, the prisoners walking. Against his father’s orders, Pascualín followed for twelve days, keeping out of sight. Along the way, the oldest who were too weak to keep up were murdered. When they reached El Musel, the remaining prisoners were lined up and shot on a row of rocks used as a sea defence. The youngest of the Falangists, seeing that several were still alive, asked why they had been ordered to aim at the prisoners’ legs. Their veteran leader, calling him a novice, explained: ‘Because that way they take longer to bleed to death.’ Pascual was not dead and his son managed to pull him out of the water and get him into the hills where a bullet was prised out of his leg with a knife. When he had recovered, he sent Pascualín home to Galicia while he rejoined the guerrillas and was killed shortly afterwards.60"
North conquered"On 1 October 1937, after the conquest of the north, all over Spain there was a celebration of the anniversary of Franco’s elevation to the headship of state, now consecrated as ‘el Día del Caudillo’. In San Leonardo in Soria, Yagüe, dressed in the blue shirt of the Falange, made a speech that provoked wild applause when he spoke of the working class in the following terms: ‘They are not bad. The really evil ones are their leaders who deceive them with gilded promises. They are the ones that we must attack until we have entirely exterminated them.’ He then described the Falangist new order and prompted laughter and applause when he declared:
and for those of you who resist, you know what will happen, prison or the firing squad, either will do. We have decided to redeem you and we will redeem you whether you want to be redeemed or not. Do we need you for anything? No, there will never again be any elections, so why would we need your vote? The first thing to do is to redeem the enemy. We are going to impose our civilization on them and if they don’t accept it willingly, we will impose it by force, defeating them as we defeated the Moors when they didn’t want our roads, our doctors, and our vaccinations, in a word, our civilization.63"
"In many cases, the arrests and assassinations were carried out on the recommendation of the parish priest. In the case of a young woman of nineteen who was pregnant with twins, the village doctor argued that she should be spared, and the Civil Guard accepted his reasoning. With reluctance, the local Falange also agreed, but a priest who was present exclaimed, ‘with the animal dead, there is no more rabies’, and she was shot.67 The most prominent victim was the Mayor, Antonio Plano Aznárez. It will be recalled that he was hated by the landowners of the area for his success in improving the working conditions of the day-labourers. He was also held responsible, unjustly, for the revolutionary events of 5–6 October 1935. At first held in Zaragoza, at the beginning of October 1936, Antonio Plano was brought to Uncastillo and imprisoned with his wife Benita and his children Antonio and María in the Civil Guard barracks.
The plan was for him to be assassinated on the second anniversary of the events of October 1934. It was an act not only of revenge for the past but also a warning for the future. Plano represented in the area everything that the Republic offered in terms of social justice and education. He was not only killed but made the object of the most brutal humiliation both before and after his death. As a result of his beatings, he was brought out of the Civil Guard barracks covered in blood. The Civil Guard and Falangists obliged the remaining villagers to come to the square to watch. Plano had been forced to drink a bottle of castor oil. Bloodied and besmirched, he had to be carried on a wooden board. In front of the church, he was shot, to the delight and applause of the right-wingers present. His corpse was then kicked and abused before it was mutilated by one of the Falangists with an axe. A year after his death, he was fined the colossal sum of 25,000 pesetas and his wife a further 1,000. In order for these fines to be paid, the family home and contents were confiscated. There were many similar cases which provided an excuse for the theft of the property of those who had been assassinated. Altogether, 140 leftists were murdered in Uncastillo. Of the 110 who had been tried for the events of 1934, many had fled, but of those who remained, forty-four were executed.68"
Teruel"In Teruel in July 1936, the least populated of Spanish provinces, the western part fell immediately to a tiny rebel garrison. Despite the fact that there had been little social conflict in the area, detentions began immediately. The first victims were, as elsewhere, trade union and Republican political leaders and officials. A second wave of violence began in March 1938, with the entry of rebel troops into towns and villages that had been under Republican control. One of the worst incidents in this second wave took place in the small town of Calanda, where around fifty people were killed, including a pregnant woman beaten to death, and numerous others raped. At the end of the war, those who had fled from the province of Teruel when it had been taken by the Francoists faced the choice of either going into exile or returning home. Hoping that the fact that they were guilty of no crimes meant that they would face no problems, many returned home. In Calanda, as they descended from a bus, they were set upon. Tortures, beatings, murders and sexual attacks were organized by the local chief of the Falange and the secretary of the town council. So scandalous were these events that the Civil Governor of the province reported them to the military authorities. In consequence, the perpetrators were tried and imprisoned for eight years.69 In none of these explosions of repression were all the deaths formally registered. Nevertheless, the names are known of 1,030 people who were executed in Teruel, 889 in the course of the war and 141 afterwards. To these have to be added a further 258 who were taken to Zaragoza for execution. There were many more whose names were not recorded in the civil register or buried in cemeteries. It was not in the interests of their assassins for too much to be known and subsequently the Francoist authorities made a concerted effort to hide the magnitude of the violence in Teruel.70
The scale of the repression in Teruel reflects a combination of the basic exterminatory plan of the insurgents and consciousness that the province was vulnerable to Republican attack. Among the first to be arrested from 20 July 1936 were the Mayor, the secretary of the provincial branch of the Socialist Party and the directors of the local secondary school and of the teachers’ training college. The wives and families of men who had fled to the Republican zone were detained. For instance, the wife and seventeen-year-old daughter of a Socialist town councillor were arrested and eventually shot. All the detainees were herded into the local seminary where they were kept in appalling conditions of acute overcrowding before being killed. Until 13 August, when the executions began, men and women were used as forced labour, mending roads. They were taken out at dawn in a truck known variously as the ‘dawn truck’, the ‘death truck’ or the ‘one-way truck’.71"
"Whatever Polanco’s private feelings, they did not restrain his public enthusiasm for the rebel cause. Among the more than one thousand killings by the right in Teruel during the war, two of the most notorious incidents took place in the central square, the Plaza del Torico. The first was on 27 August 1936. Falangists drove two trucks into the square. From the first, a group of musicians descended and began to play. When a large crowd gathered to listen to the band, Falangists closed the exits to the square and took thirteen prisoners from the second lorry. They included a twenty-year-old girl and the director of the local teacher training college. They were paraded around the square, insulted and ridiculed and then shot. The corpses were removed and the musicians played while the spectators danced in pools of blood – a not uncommon combination of fiesta and horror.77 It seems that the Bishop was present since he protested to the authorities about the subsequent dance.78"
"When Polanco himself was captured after the fall of Teruel, the then Minister of Defence, Indalecio Prieto, intervened to prevent his being shot by militiamen. Prieto gave Father Alberto Onaindía an account of the Bishop’s interrogation. The principal charge against him was that he had signed the Episcopate’s Collective Letter of 1 July 1937 in support of Franco, which was deemed to constitute incitement to, and justification of, military rebellion. Asked if he was aware of the Collective Letter, Polanco replied that, having signed it, he could hardly deny that he was. Asked if he would change anything, he said: ‘Just the date. We should have written it earlier.’ At this, the officer brought the interrogation to a close, saying, ‘You, Bishop, are an exemplary Spaniard. Your words imply character and courage. We are all Spaniards here and the sad thing is that you are on one side and we are on the other.’ With permission from Prieto, Onaindía visited Polanco in prison, finding him in good spirits, treated with respect and generally well looked after. When Onaindía told him of the rebel repression in the Basque Country, including the execution of priests, Polanco listened coldly but clearly did not want to hear.83 After all, two parish priests in his own dioceses had been shot by the rebels, presumably with his permission. After some months, thanks to the intervention of both Julián Zugazagoitia and Manuel Irujo, he was given permission to celebrate daily Mass, although he chose to do so only on Sundays and feast days.84"
Huesca"In the provincial capital, arrests, the later sacas from the prison and the subsequent murders were carried out by the so-called ‘Death Squad’. The selection of victims had as much to do with personal resentments or envy as with politics. Perhaps the most celebrated victim was the artist and teacher Ramón Acín Aquilué, a member of the CNT renowned for his pacifist views. He was a friend of Federico García Lorca and of Luis Buñuel, whom he had helped make the film Tierra sin pan. He was shot on 6 August 1936, his death in Huesca being the local equivalent of the murder of Lorca. Acín’s wife, Concha Monrás, was shot on 23 August along with ninety-four other Republicans, including a pregnant woman. No thought was given to the young children of those executed. The best these orphans could expect was to be taken in by relatives or friends of their parents who, in doing so, ran the risk of themselves being denounced.86 The purging of the left in the smaller towns was carried out by groups of recently recruited Falangists whose victims were often selected by local landowners."
"The repression was particularly brutal in Jaca under the direction of Major Dionisio Pareja Arenilla, who received orders from Zaragoza ‘to purge once and for all the undesirable elements’. The portly Bishop of Jaca, Juan Villar Sanz, was a cipher who gave free rein to a small clique of reactionary priests. Blacklists were assembled with the help of local bosses both in Jaca itself and in surrounding pueblos like Sabiñánigo, Ansó, Canfranc and Biescas. There were no trials. Army columns aided by Falangists detained hundreds of people and the shootings began on 27 July and ran right through the autumn and the following months. One of the most notorious crimes took place on 6 August 1936. An army captain, two Falangists and a Capuchin monk, Father Hermenegildo de Fustiñana, seized two women from Jaca prison, took them out into the countryside and shot them. One, Pilar Vizcarra, aged twenty-eight and pregnant, was the wife of a man shot exactly one week previously; the other, Desideria Giménez of the Socialist Youth, was aged sixteen. The event was presided over by the tall and bony Father de Fustiñana. Chaplain to the local Requetés, he went about the streets ostentatiously carrying a gun. His visits to the prison were dreaded by the detainees, who regarded him as a ‘bird of ill omen’. He delighted in the executions and was present at most of them. He offered confession and the last rites to those about to be shot. Then, his shoes caked with blood, he would visit the families of the few that accepted. He kept a list of all those executed, with a note if they had made their confession. More than four hundred people from Jaca and the surrounding villages were shot.87"
Lleida"On 26 March, fifty people were killed in the small town of Fraga. The next day, it was the turn of Lleida, which was packed with refugees from Aragon. Lleida had already suffered numerous bombardments, of which the most terrible took place on 2 November 1937. On that day, nearly three hundred had been killed. The event is commemorated in one of the war’s most famous photographs, taken by Agustí Centelles, of the mother of the journalist Josep Pernau weeping over the corpse of her husband. When the Liceu Escolar was hit, of one class of sixty-three children, only two survived. Astonishingly, there were no reprisals, thanks to the swift intervention of the military authorities, including a radio broadcast by Major Sebastián Zamora Medina, one of whose daughters had been killed in the raid and another badly wounded. Throughout late March, the Condor Legion continued its campaign of Blitzkrieg attacks, aimed at provoking the flight of the civilian population and facilitating the advance of Yagüe’s columns. On Sunday 27 March, a two-hour bombardment by Heinkel 51s left four hundred people dead. Many bodies could not be recovered, given the dangerous state of the buildings. The consequent stench left the city centre uninhabitable for months.91
There were further bombing raids in the last three days of March and the first two of April. There were also artillery barrages directed by Luis Alarcón de la Lastra, who now commanded the artillery of the Moroccan Army Corps. Despite a courageous defence by the division led by Valentín González ‘El Campesino’, Lleida was occupied the following day. Franco’s forces found a ghost town. In a city normally of 40,000 inhabitants, barely two thousand were there to greet their conquerors. The Generalitat had organized a massive evacuation of refugees and the bulk of the local population. A Francoist newspaper crowed, ‘A few reds who could not flee have take refuge in some houses but they will soon be annihilated.’ Shops and houses were looted. One of the first acts of the occupying forces was to remove the records of the deaths from the bombing raids. In Lleida, Gandesa and the towns along the right bank of the Ebro, Corbera, Mora d’Ebre and many others, summary trials and executions began. In Lleida, one of those to be sentenced to death and executed was the director of one of the city’s hospitals. His crime was to have organized the evacuation of the hospital despite having been ordered by the fifth column to hand it over complete with all wounded soldiers to the rebels. The director of another hospital, who did obey such orders, was nevertheless dismissed simply because his post made him an employee of the Generalitat de Catalunya.92"
"The depth of anti-Catalan sentiment that had been generated in the rebel zone was inevitably reflected in the repression unleashed there. The entry of the occupiers into any town or village was immediately followed by the prohibition of the Catalan language, despite the fact that many of the inhabitants knew no other. The ban on use of the regional language was extended, as it had been in Euskadi, to all the public activities of the clergy.93 The extent of a near-racist hatred is illustrated by the fate of Manuel Carrasco i Formiguera, a deeply pious Catholic who was a senior member of the Christian Democrat party, Unió Democràtica de Catalunya. Denounced in Barcelona by the FAI for his conservative and Catholic views, Carrasco was forced to flee his beloved Catalonia because the Generalitat could not guarantee his safety. He went to work on behalf of the Generalitat in the Basque Country. After an initial visit to Bilbao, where he was received as if he were an ambassador, he returned to Barcelona to collect his family. On 2 March 1937, he set off with his wife and six of his eight children through France. The final part of the journey to Bilbao was from Bayonne by sea. The steamer Galdames on which they were travelling was captured by the rebel battlecruiser, Canarias. His wife and children were held in four separate prisons.
After five months in jail, Carrasco i Formiguera was tried on 28 August 1937 accused of military rebellion. Prominent Catalans in Franco’s circle, men whose lives and fortunes had been saved in Barcelona by Carrasco’s intervention, were too frightened by the prevailing anti-Catalanism to speak up on his behalf. In a vengeful atmosphere, charged with anti-Catalan prejudice, no account was taken of his humanitarian efforts or of the fact that Carrasco had defended the Church during the 1931 constitutional debates. The future Mayor of Barcelona, Mateu i Pla, whose fortune had been secured by Carrasco, did nothing to help his defence despite the fact that he was part of Franco’s secretariat in Burgos.
Given the military court’s insistence on speed, there was little time for Carrasco’s defence. In any case, his official advocate, a captain of the medical corps with no juridical training, had already been told that the death sentence had been decided upon before the trial started. Then, for nearly seven and a half months, suffering acute cardiac problems, Carrasco was kept in a freezing cell. Despite energetic efforts to secure a prisoner exchange by José Giral and Manuel Irujo and prominent clergymen, including the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, Franco was immovable. One of the Caudillo’s senior collaborators commented: ‘I know all about Carrasco being an exemplary Christian but his politics are criminal. He has to die!’ Carrasco i Formiguera was executed by firing squad on Easter Saturday, 9 April 1938 because he was a Republican and a Catalan nationalist. Franco had chosen the moment that his forces were occupying Catalonia to send a message to the population.94
In the days following the occupation of Lleida, the press in the rebel zone gave vent to an ecstatic imperialist rhetoric, rejoicing in the crushing of the ‘separatist hydra’ by Yagüe’s African troops. Republican prisoners who were identified as Catalans were shot without trial. Anyone overheard speaking Catalan was likely to be arrested. The arbitrary brutality of the anti-Catalan repression reached such a scale that Franco himself felt obliged to issue an order that errors must be avoided which might cause regret in the future.95 The many executions that followed immediately on the occupation of the eastern part of Lleida were not registered. Accordingly, the task for local historians of quantification of those who ‘disappeared’ between 5 April and 31 May 1938 has been rendered almost impossible. Those who have been identified include eighteen women, of whom two were pregnant and at least two were raped. Seventeen men and five women were shot in Almacelles, north-east of Lleida, on 20 April. In the tiny village of Santa Linya, halfway between Lleida and Tremp, all men of military age were arrested, twenty in all. They were interrogated with questions like: ‘How many priests have you murdered?’ Nine considered to be Catalan nationalists were taken away and never seen again. The rest were transported to a concentration camp in Valladolid, where three died almost immediately. A high proportion of the executions took place during ‘evacuations’ or when prisoners were ostensibly being transferred to prison in Barbastro.96"
"Although he had Catalonia at his mercy, Franco ordered Yagüe to dig in along the River Segre, much to the frustration and incomprehension of his staff. An offensive against Catalonia, where the Republic’s remaining war industry lay, would have brought the war to a speedier conclusion, but Franco had no interest in a quick victory that would still have left hundreds of thousands of armed Republicans in central and southern Spain. Nor did he want to turn to Madrid, since a swift debacle there would have left numerous Republican forces in Catalonia and in the south-east. Either option would have meant an armistice by which some consideration would have to be given to the defeated. As he had made clear to the Italians, Franco’s aim remained the gradual but total annihilation of the Republic and its supporters.100"
Negrin's final stand"As defeat became inevitable, the Republican Prime Minister Juan Negrín became ever more determined to fight on, believing that capitulation would simply open the floodgates to mass slaughter. When a senior Republican figure, almost certainly Azaña, suggested that an agreement with the rebels was an inevitable necessity, he responded: ‘Make a pact? And what about the poor soldier of Medellín?’ At the time, Medellín, near Don Benito, was the furthermost point on the Extremadura front. Since Franco demanded total surrender, Negrín knew that, at best, a mediated peace might secure the escape of several hundred, maybe some thousands, of political figures. However, the great majority of ordinary Republican soldiers and citizens would be at the mercy of the Francoists, who would be pitiless.102 On 25 July 1938, Medellín and the entire area of La Serena in the province of Badajoz fell to the insurgents. In the following weeks, large numbers of people from the surrounding villages were taken to Medellín and shot and many more transferred to the concentration camp at Castuera. Under the command of the notorious Major Ernesto Navarrete Alcal, it was ruled with his characteristic brutality. The prisoners experienced starvation, overcrowding, slave labour, beatings and frequent sacas.103
With the insurgents less than twenty-five miles away from Valencia, on the same day that La Serena fell, the Republic mounted a spectacular diversion. In an attempt to restore contact between Catalonia and the rest of Republican Spain, a huge army of 80,000 men crossed the River Ebro. The advance through an immense curve in the Ebro from Flix in the north to Miravet in the south surprised the thinly held rebel lines. Negrín hoped that, if the Republic could fight on for another year, it would find salvation in the general war which he believed to be inevitable. Within a week, the Republicans had advanced twenty-five miles and reached Gandesa, but there they were bogged down as Franco rushed in reinforcements. Knowing that Franco would not consider an armistice, Negrín refused to contemplate unconditional surrender. On 7 August, he said to his friend Juan-Simeón Vidarte: ‘I will not hand over hundreds of defenceless Spaniards who fight heroically for the Republic so that Franco can have the pleasure of shooting them like he did in his own Galicia, in Andalusia, in the Basque country and wherever the hooves of Attila’s horse have left their mark.’104
Franco could have contained the Republican advance across the Ebro and advanced on a near helpless Barcelona. Instead, he seized the opportunity to catch the Republicans in a trap, encircle and destroy them, turning the fertile Terra Alta into their graveyard. With nearly one million men now under arms, he could afford to be careless of their lives. As the battle was moving in his favour, on 7 November, he announced to the vice-president of the United Press, James Miller, ‘there will be no mediation because the criminals and their victims cannot live together’. He went on threateningly: ‘We have on file more than two million names along with proof of their crimes.’105 He was referring to the political files and documentation captured as each town had fallen. This information, archived in Salamanca, provided the basis for a massive card index of members of political parties, trade unions and Masonic lodges which in turn would be the database for a policy of institutionalized terror.106
By mid-November 1938, at a cost of nearly 15,000 dead and 110,000 wounded or mutilated, the Francoists had pushed the Republicans out of the territory captured in July. The Republic had lost its army. The Francoists would soon sweep further into Catalonia. The war had been prolonged in accordance with Negrín’s hope of seeing the democracies wake up to the Axis’s aggressive ambitions, but the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich turned the Ebro into a useless sacrifice. After a brief lull for his forces to rest and regroup, in late November Franco began to gather a massive army along a line surrounding the remainder of Republican Catalonia from the Mediterranean to the Ebro and to the Pyrenees. After delays caused by torrential rain, and despite the pleas of the Papal Nuncio for a Christmas truce, the final offensive was launched on 23 December.107 The Caudillo had new German equipment in abundance, total air superiority and sufficient Spanish and Italian reserves to be able to relieve his troops every two days. The attacking force consisted of five Spanish army corps together with four Italian divisions. A heavy artillery barrage preceded the attack. The shattered Republicans could put up only token resistance.108
In the course of the advance, many Republican prisoners were shot as soon as they were captured. There were also many atrocities committed against the civilian population. There were examples of peasants being murdered for no apparent reason other than the fact that they spoke Catalan. On Christmas Eve 1938, when Maials in the far south of Lleida was captured by Regulares, at least four women were raped. In one case, a woman was raped while her husband and seven-year-old son were forced at gunpoint to watch. In another, a woman’s father was shot for protesting at her violation. In an isolated country house, a young woman was raped and died when she was stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. Fifteen minutes later, her mother was raped then shot. In Vilella Baixa in the Priorat, a man was shot for trying to prevent a woman being raped. At another farm outside Callús, in the province of Barcelona, a man who lived with his wife, his daughter and her cousin was shot by some Regulares who raped the three women and then killed them at bayonet point. In the tiny nearby village of Marganell, two women were raped by Regulares who then killed them by placing hand grenades between their legs.109
As fear of the Moors saw the roads to Barcelona blocked with terrified refugees, Franco announced his plans for the defeated in an interview given to Manuel Aznar on 31 December 1938. He divided them into hardened criminals beyond redemption and those who had been deceived by their leaders and were capable of repentance. There would be no amnesty or reconciliation for the defeated Republicans, only punishment and repentance to open the way to their ‘redemption’. Prisons and labour camps were the necessary purgatory for those who had committed minor ‘crimes’. Others could expect no better fate than death or exile.110 A good example of what redemption by Franco really meant could be found in the experience of Catalonia after the occupation of Tarragona on 15 January 1939. The city was deserted and thousands of refugees were trudging north. An elaborate ceremony was held in the Cathedral involving a company of infantry. The officiating priest, a canon of the Cathedral of Salamanca, José Artero, got so carried away that, during his sermon, he shouted: ‘Catalan dogs! You are not worthy of the sun that shines on you!’111"
Evacuation of Barcelona"When news reached Barcelona, on 23 January 1939, that the Francoists were at the River Llobregat to the south of the city, a colossal exodus began. On the night of 25 January, the Republican government fled northwards to Girona. The President of the Generalitat, Lluís Companys, drove one last time through the centre of a deserted city, as leaflets calling for resistance blew through the streets along with ripped-up party and trade union membership cards.114 The next morning, the streets were full of smoke from the burning papers of ministries, parties and unions. The young Communist Teresa Pàmies witnessed, on 26 January, horrendous scenes of the fear provoked by the advancing rebels:
There is one thing I will never forget: the wounded who crawled out of the Vallcarca hospital, mutilated and bandaged, almost naked, despite the cold, they went down to the street, shrieking and pleading with us not to leave them behind to the mercies of the victors. All other details of that unforgettable day were wiped out by the sight of those defenceless soldiers … The certainty that we left them to their fate will shame us for ever. Those with no legs dragged themselves along the ground, those who had lost an arm raised the other with a clenched fist, the youngest cried in their fear, the older ones went mad with rage. They grabbed the sides of lorries loaded with furniture, with bird cages, with mattresses, with silent women, with indifferent old people, with terrified children. They screamed, they ululated, they blasphemed and cursed those who were fleeing and were abandoning them.
There were around 20,000 wounded Republican soldiers in Barcelona. Their wounds and missing limbs were proof that they had fought and would guarantee that they would be the victims of reprisals.115
Four hundred and fifty thousand terrified women, children, old men and defeated soldiers trekked towards France. In numbers and in human suffering, the exodus far exceeded even the horrors seen by Norman Bethune on the road from Málaga to Almería. Those who could squeezed into every kind of transport imaginable. Through bitterly cold sleet and snow, on roads bombed and strafed by rebel aircraft, many others walked, wrapped in blankets and clutching a few possessions, some carrying infants. Women gave birth at the roadsides. Babies died of the cold, children were trampled to death. A witness summed up the horror of that dreadful exodus: ‘At the side of the road, a man had hung himself from a tree. One foot had a rope sandal, the other was bare. At the foot of the tree was an open suitcase in which lay a small child that had died of cold during the night.’ It is not known how many people died on the roads to France.116"
"Those who fled faced the bleakest future, but it was one that they chose in preference to being ‘liberated’ by Franco’s forces. From 28 January, a reluctant French government allowed the first refugees across the border. At first, they had to sleep in the streets of Figueras, the last town on the Spanish side of the border. Many died in sustained rebel bombing raids.117 The defeated Republicans, many sick or wounded, were received by the French Garde Mobile as if they were criminals. The women, children and the old were shepherded into transit camps. The soldiers were disarmed and escorted to insanitary camps on the coast, rapidly improvised by marking out sections of beach with barbed wire. Under the empty gaze of Senegalese guards, the refugees improvised shelters by burrowing into the wet sand of the camp at Saint-Cyprien a few miles to the south-east of Perpignan.
Meanwhile, the formal parade into an eerily empty Barcelona was headed by the Army Corps of Navarre, led by General Andrés Solchaga. They were accorded this honour, according to a British officer attached to Franco’s headquarters, ‘not because they have fought better, but because they hate better – that is to say, when the object of this hate is Catalonia or a Catalan’.118 A close friend of Franco, Víctor Ruiz Albeniz (‘El Tebib Arrumi’), published an article asserting that Catalonia needed ‘a biblical punishment (Sodom, Gomorrah) to purify the red city, seat of anarchism and separatism as the only remedy to extirpate these two cancers by implacable thermo-cauterization’. None of the conquering generals or Falangists referred to the crushing of Marxism or anarchism. Their entire discourse was about the conquest of Catalonia by Spain. One officer told a Portuguese journalist that the only solution to the ‘Catalan problem’ was ‘kill the Catalans. It’s just a question of time.’119
One of the first acts of the occupying forces was to ban the use of Catalan in public. For Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law and Minister of the Interior, Catalan nationalism was a sickness that had to be eradicated. He told the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter that the Catalan population was ‘morally and politically sick’. The man he appointed as Civil Governor of Barcelona, Wenceslao González Oliveros, announced, in a reversal of Unamuno’s famous dictum that the rebels might win (vencer) but never convince (convencer), that Franco’s forces had come ‘to save the good Spaniards and to defeat, but not convince, the enemies of Spain’. For González Oliveros, that meant the Catalans. He stated that ‘Spain opposed the divisive autonomy statutes with greater ferocity than communism’ and that any toleration of any kind of regionalism would lead once more to ‘the putrefaction represented by Marxism and separatism that we have just surgically eradicated’.120
Within a week, the military secret police was functioning. Newspaper advertisements called for recruits, preference being given to ex-prisoners of the Republican SIM. Large queues of people with denunciations gathered outside the offices of the Occupation Services. In consequence, 22,700 people were arrested in the first eight months.121 Precisely because so many of those of political or military significance had fled, those killed by the rebels in Catalonia were perhaps fewer than might have been expected. Between those murdered by the occupying troops and those tried and executed, more than 1,700 were killed in Barcelona, 750 in Lleida, 703 in Tarragona and five hundred in Girona. Many more died from mistreatment in prison.122
In Catalonia, as in other parts of Spain occupied by the rebels, the repression took many forms and merely to stay alive was a major achievement for many Republicans. Those who had not been executed, imprisoned or exiled lived in an atmosphere of terror. Daily life for the defeated was a question of combating hunger, illness and fear of arrest or of denunciation by a neighbour or by a priest. Rural parish priests were particularly active in denouncing their parishioners. Their contribution to the exacerbation of social divisions suggested a quest for vengeance rather than a Christian commitment to forgiveness or reconciliation. The sheer misery of life for the defeated explains a notable rise in the suicide rate. Considerable cruelty was visited upon women under the rhetorical umbrella of ‘redemption’. As well as confiscation of goods and imprisonment as retribution for the behaviour of a son or husband, the widows and the wives of prisoners were raped. Many were forced to live in total poverty and often, out of desperation, to sell themselves on the streets. The increase in prostitution both benefited Francoist men who thereby slaked their lust and reassured them that ‘red’ women were a fount of dirt and corruption. Soldiers billeted on poor families often abused the unprotected women of the household. Many priests defended the honour of male parishioners and denounced their female victims as ‘reds’.123
After Catalonia fell, a huge area amounting to about 30 per cent of Spain remained in the hands of the Republic. Negrín still cherished hope of fighting on until a European war started and the democracies at last realized that the anti-fascist battle of the Republic had been theirs too. Franco was in no hurry to go into battle since the repression was a higher priority. In any case, he had reason to believe that the Republic was about to face major divisions that might save him the trouble of fighting in central Spain. His confidence was such that, on 9 February 1939, he published the Law of Political Responsibilities and dashed the hopes of non-Communist Republicans who were prepared to betray Negrín in the hope of a negotiated peace. Retroactive to October 1934, the law declared Republicans guilty of the crime of military rebellion, and was essentially a device to justify the expropriation of the defeated.124
On 4 March, Colonel Segismundo Casado, commander of the Republican Army of the Centre, formed an anti-Negrín National Defence Junta, in the hope of negotiating with Franco. He thereby sparked off what was effectively a second civil war within the Republican zone. Although he defeated pro-Communist forces, there was no prospect of a deal with Franco. Troops all along the line were surrendering or just going home. On 26 March, a gigantic and virtually unopposed advance was launched along a wide front. The next day, Franco’s forces simply occupied deserted positions and entered an eerily silent Madrid. Tens of thousands of Republicans headed for the Mediterranean coast in the vain hope of evacuation. The war was over, but there would be no reconciliation. Instead, in the areas that had just fallen under Franco’s control, Valencia, Alicante, Murcia and Albacete, Almería and eastern Andalusia, and the eastern part of New Castile, a massive wave of political arrests, trials, executions and imprisonment was about to begin."
"As Franco had demonstrated by the nature of his war effort and made explicit in interviews private and public, he was engaged in an investment in terror. With all of Spain in his hands at the beginning of April 1939, the war against the Republic would continue by other means, not on the battle fronts but in military courts, in the prisons, in the concentration camps, in the labour battalions and even in pursuit of the exiles. The immediate tasks were the classification and punishment of those who had gathered in the eastern seaboard, the cleansing of the provinces that had just fallen and the marshalling of the hundreds of thousands of prisoners into work battalions. The long-term institutionalization of Franco’s victory required the perfection of the machinery of state terror to protect and oversee the original investment. For that reason, the martial law declared in July 1936 was not rescinded until 1948.
That Franco had no inclination to magnanimity and saw the repression as a long-term undertaking was made clear by his speech on 19 May 1939, the day on which he presided over the spectacular Victory Parade in Madrid. ‘Let us not deceive ourselves: the Jewish spirit, which permitted the alliance of big capital with Marxism and which was behind so many pacts with the anti-Spanish revolution, cannot be extirpated in a day and still beats in the hearts of many.’1 The belief that the war had been against the Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy was reiterated in his end-of-year message on 31 December 1939. Franco praised German anti-Semitic legislation, declaring that the persecution of the Jews by the fifteenth-century Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel had shown the Nazis the way:
Now you will understand the reasons which have led other countries to persecute and isolate those races marked by the stigma of their greed and self-interest. The domination of such races within society is disturbing and dangerous for the destiny of the nation. We, who were freed of this heavy burden centuries ago by the grace of God and the clear vision of Ferdinand and Isabel, cannot remain indifferent before the modern flourishing of avaricious and selfish spirits who are so attached to their own earthly goods that they would sacrifice the lives of their children more readily than their own base interests.
In the same speech, he rejected any notion of reconciliation with the defeated:
It is necessary to put an end to the hatreds and passions of our recent war but not in the manner of liberals, with their monstrous and suicidal amnesties, which are more fraud than pardon, but rather with the redemption of sentences through work, with repentance and penance. Anyone who thinks otherwise is guilty of irresponsibility or treason. Such damage has been done to the Patria and such havoc has been wreaked on families and on morality, so many victims cry out for justice that no honourable Spaniard, no thinking being, could stand aside from the painful duty of punishment.2
The repressive judicial system applied after 1 April 1939 used both the administrative machinery and the pseudo-legal framework developed throughout the war. On 28 July 1936, the Burgos Junta’s declaration of martial law had proclaimed its determination to punish those who, ‘blinded by an incomprehensible sectarianism, commit actions or omissions that might prejudice this Movement of Redemption of the Fatherland’. Any such offence was deemed to be a crime of military rebellion and thus subject to summary court martial. The sophistry underlying this legal fiction was that the military had legitimately assumed power on 16 and 17 July (before the actual military uprising) and therefore that the defence of the Republic constituted rebellion. All political activities on behalf of parties of the left or trade unions from the beginning of October 1934 were deemed retrospectively to constitute ‘support for military rebellion’ on the grounds that they had contributed to the disorder which was said to have provoked the military take-over.3"
"The initial basis for the repression was formalized further with a decree issued on 13 September 1936 by the Burgos Junta which outlawed all political parties, trade unions and social organizations that supported the Popular Front and opposed the ‘National Movement’. The decree ordered the confiscation of all goods, effects and documents, as well as buildings and other properties of such entities. Also liable were left-wing and liberal parties and trade unions, Freemasons, Jews, the Rotary Club, feminist, vegetarian, nudist, Esperanto and homeopathic societies, Montessori schools and sports clubs. Furthermore, the decree ordered the purging of all public servants, functionaries and schoolteachers who had served the institutions of the Republic. Special tribunals were established to judge those deemed worthy of keeping their livelihood. The human cost was colossal. For instance, when Catalonia was occupied at the end of the war, out of 15,860 public servants, 15,107 lost their jobs.7 The paranoia that lay behind the blanket denunciation of anything and everything that fell outside right-wing Catholic values was in large part thanks to the anti-Republican campaigns of the right-wing press which had fed off the writings of Juan Tusquets, Mauricio Carlavilla and Onésimo Redondo. Father Tusquets in particular had linked all these peripheral organizations to the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy."
"The fiction that defence of the Republic was a crime of military rebellion was the basis of all the summary courts martial. Except in some cases of famous defendants, the accused were usually denied the possibility of defending themselves. The military would choose the judge, the prosecutor and the defence ‘lawyer’, this latter always being an officer junior to the judge and prosecutor. Given that the Army Legal Corps simply did not have sufficient personnel to cope with the demands made by the new situation, trials were usually conducted by officers with no legal training whatsoever. Groups of prisoners, unknown to one another and accused of notably different offences, would be tried together en masse. They would have no access to the ‘case’ against them, which consisted of accusations read out without evidence. Only rarely, after the prosecutor had finished making the ‘case’, were the accused permitted to confer with the defending officer and consider their defence. If lucky, they were given an hour to prepare their case but not allowed to call witnesses or present any evidence. They were often not permitted to hear the ‘case’ against them, either because they had already been shot or because, in ‘emergency summary trials’, the charges were not even read out. In no cases were appeals permitted.8
When Juan Caba Guijarro, a CNT member from Manzanares, was tried with nineteen others, the prosecutor stated:
I do not care, nor do I even want to know, if you are innocent or not of the charges made against you. Nor will I take cognizance of any excuses, alibis or mitigating circumstances that you might present. I must base my accusations, as in previous courts martial, on the files prepared by the investigators on the basis of the denunciations. As far as the accused are concerned, I represent justice. It is not me who condemns them but their own towns, their enemies, their neighbours. I merely give voice to the accusations that others have made discreetly. My attitude is cruel and pitiless and it may appear as if my job is just to feed the firing squads so that their work of social cleansing can continue. But no, here all of us who have won the war participate and it is our wish to eliminate all opposition in order to impose our own order. Considering that there are crimes of blood in all the accusations, I have reached the conclusion that I must demand the death penalty, and I do demand the firing squad for the first eighteen in the list and, for the other two, garrotte vil. Nothing more.
The defence lawyer represented all twenty defendants at the same time, without having had time or opportunity to prepare any kind of defence. He rose and said: ‘After hearing the serious charges that have been laid against all those I am here to defend, I can only plead for mercy. Nothing more.’ The judge then proceeded to sentence the accused.9"
"Some of those tried by the innumerable military courts were guilty of real crimes in the checas, although many such had escaped into hiding or exile. Most were men and women whose crime was simply their failure actively to support the coup. The majority were condemned on the basis of an assumption of guilt, without the need for evidence. In a typical case, that of a railwayman accused of involvement in crimes of blood, the guilty verdict was justified on the grounds that ‘although there is no evidence that he took a direct part in looting, theft, arrests or murders, his beliefs make it reasonable to suppose that he did’. Membership of a left-wing committee in a town or village where right-wingers were killed would usually guarantee a death sentence even if the accused knew nothing of the killing or had opposed it. Men and women were condemned to death for participation in crimes not on the basis of direct evidence but because the prosecutor extrapolated from their known Republican, Socialist, Communist or anarchist convictions that ‘they must have taken part’.10"
"The military instructions for the re-establishment of civilian life in ‘liberated areas’ invited the local population of occupied territory to present denunciations of criminal acts of which they had been victims during the period of left-wing control.12 When Catalonia was occupied, ‘all good Spaniards’ were urged to come forward with information about any crimes or injustices committed ‘in the Companys period’.13 In Los Pedroches in the north-east of Córdoba, 70 per cent of trials were triggered by denunciations from civilians.14 There and elsewhere, this suggested considerable social support for the Francoists, much more than would have been found in 1936. This was hardly surprising given the scale of both the terror and the anti-Republican propaganda carried out by the victors. Whether a denunciation would fail or prosper frequently depended on the stance of the local clergy.
Denunciations often came from the bereaved relatives of those who had died in the violence that followed the defeat of the military uprising. Their grief and their desire for revenge led to them denouncing people assumed to belong to the same group as the real killers. Any leftist could thus be incorporated into a collectivity presented as the barbaric and depraved ‘red horde’. Coincidentally, many of those denounced happened to belong to the unions and parties that had threatened the social, economic and political privileges of the denouncers. Businessmen and landowners keen to recoup the economic losses that their enterprises had suffered during the revolutionary period often denounced their competitors.15"
"From November 1936, increasing numbers of civilian lawyers, judges and even law students had been drafted into the military judicial corps. The main requirement was that they demonstrate right-wing sympathies. Entirely under the vigilance of the military authorities and often fearful for their own safety, even those who had qualms about what was happening had to be harsh in order to guarantee their own survival.16 At the beginning of 1938, Felipe Acedo Colunga, the senior military prosecutor, produced a report on the activities of the Auditoría de Guerra (War Court) created in November 1936 when the rebels had believed that they were about to capture Madrid. This report argued that the military courts must work pitilessly to clear the ground for the creation of a new state. Acedo Colunga insisted that there should be no equality between prosecution and defence and that the presumed intentions of defendants were every bit as reprehensible as their actual deeds.17
Acedo Colunga’s report revealed the industrial scale of the work of this one court up to the end of 1938. It had held 6,770 trials and, by trying multiple defendants together, it had been possible to prosecute 30,224 people, of whom 3,189 had been condemned to death.18 When the Republic finally fell, the military courts intensified their activity. They continued to function in regions long since occupied as well as in the recently conquered areas where they now had to deal with large numbers of captured soldiers and civilians. In Granada, where many who had fled from the rebel-held capital were captured when the eastern part of the province fell, there were 5,500 cases tried in 1939; four hundred defendants were sentenced to death and more than one thousand to life imprisonment. Between 1939 and 1959, a total of 1,001 people in Granada were executed after military trial. A decree of 8 November 1939 multiplied the number of courts martial by creating numerous provisional courts and increasing the size of the military juridical corps.19"
"The repression was facilitated by the betrayal of the Republic perpetrated by the military coup by Colonel Segismundo Casado on 4 March 1939. Casado, commander of the Republican Army of the Centre, hoping to stop further slaughter, formed an anti-Negrín National Defence Junta along with fiercely anti-Communist anarchist leaders such as Cipriano Mera, the Socialist intellectual Julián Besteiro and Miaja. Casado and Besteiro were culpably naive to believe assurances from the fifth column that Franco would contemplate an armistice and that those without blood on their hands had nothing to fear. Widespread hunger and demoralization saw Casado receive unexpectedly wide support. In the subsequent mini-civil war against the Communists, about two thousand people were killed. To the delight of Franco, troops were withdrawn from the front to fight the Communists.20"
"Meanwhile, in Guadalajara, a small province of 200,000 people, 822 were executed. There were six thousand prisoners, 3 per cent of the total population and nearer 10 per cent of the adult male population. One hundred and forty-three died in prison because of the appalling conditions, overcrowding, disease and non-existent hygiene. Torture and maltreatment provoked many suicides, some of them faked to conceal beatings that had gone too far. The levels of malnutrition were such that any prisoner without family to bring in food was condemned to die.22"
Almeria"When he visited recently conquered Almería on 11 April 1939, Queipo de Llano declared that ‘Almería must make an act of contrition.’ This provoked a Falangist assault on the provincial prison and the murder of at least three prisoners. Formal executions began two weeks later on 25 April; 1,507 people were tried in 1939, another 1,412 in 1940, and 1,717 in 1941 – a total of 6,269 between 1939 and 1945, but the number executed, 375, was the lowest in any Andalusian province. This is because many leftists had protected rightists from the repression and, unusually, the rightists now returned the favour. The squeezing of more than six thousand prisoners into a prison built for five hundred led inevitably to conditions of malnutrition and minimal hygiene. However, this accounts only in part for the notably high level of 227 deaths of prisoners, many of them young men, suspiciously registered as victims of cardiac failure.24"
Alicante"Much of the suffering undergone in the recently conquered areas was the direct consequence of the Casado coup. Cipriano Mera had made a worthless promise that if the self-styled National Defence Council did not secure an honourable peace his men would fight on. However, while the prisoners were being handed over to the Francoists and others fled to the eastern coast, all the members of Casado’s Junta who wished to escape were evacuated from Gandía on the British destroyer Galatea in the early hours of the morning of 30 March 1939.29 Betrayed by Casado’s coup, tens of thousands of desperate Republican men, women and children fled from Madrid on 28 March pursued by Falangists. They headed for Valencia and Alicante. They had been promised that there would be ships to take them into exile. In fact, there was no chance of that. The French company normally used by the Republic refused to undertake any evacuation on the grounds that it had had no dealings with Casado, only with Negrín. It also claimed to be owed money. Moreover, the Republican fleet had abandoned Spain and landed in Bizerta in Algeria. Therefore, there was no protection against the rebel fleet blockading the Spanish ports of the eastern Mediterranean, under orders from Franco to permit no refugees to escape."
"Back in Alicante, over the next few days, those who had arrived too late were joined by thousands more refugees from all over the remaining Republican territory. In despair, many committed suicide, some drowning themselves, others shooting themselves.32 Some ships came into view but, with their captains fearful of interception by the rebel navy, they either left empty or turned back before even reaching the dockside. Having already recognized Franco, neither London nor Paris was prepared to let its navies intervene against the rebel fleet. The refugees waited in vain for three and a half days without food or water. Children died of inanition. The Mexican government offered to take all the refugees, but Franco refused, declaring that they were all prisoners of war and must face the consequences. On Friday 31 March, the city was occupied by Italian forces. There was a repetition of what had happened to the Basque Army at Santoña. The Italians undertook to arrange evacuation if the thousands of Republicans gave up their weapons. After they had done so, the Italians were overruled once more by Franco. When two ships carrying Francoist troops arrived, the majority of the refugees were taken away and the remainder followed the next morning.33 Families were violently separated and those who protested were beaten or shot. The women and children were transferred to Alicante, where they were kept for a month packed into a cinema with little food and without facilities for washing or changing their babies. The men – including boys from the age of twelve – were taken either to the bullring in Alicante or to a large field outside the town, the Campo de los Almendros, so called because it was an orchard of almond trees.34"
"Food and fresh water were as scarce as they had been in the Campo de los Almendros or the bullring. The prisoners were fed on only four occasions between 11 and 27 April, when they were given approximately sixty-five grams of sardines and sixty grams of bread on 11, 15, 20 and 27 April. Only the youngest and strongest survived as spectres of their former selves, prematurely aged and skeletal. It rained solidly for the first two weeks. Forced to sleep in mud, in soaking-wet clothes, many caught fevers and died. In the open, in mud that got ever deeper as the rain drove in, they were afflicted with plagues of mosquitoes, fleas and other parasites. Since there was no sanitation, many died of malaria, typhus and dysentery. There were few latrines, and the holes over which they were placed were not emptied and soon overflowed. Although there were many doctors among the prisoners, they had no access to medicines. To add to the humiliations of diarrhoea and constipation, many prisoners, tormented by scurvy, mange, fleas and other parasites, could barely remain upright during the daily rituals during which they were kept standing for hours. Twice a day, they had to sing Francoist anthems. Any mistakes with the lyrics were punished with beatings. On a daily basis, when commissions came from towns and villages looking for their enemies, the prisoners were expected to stand often for as long as four hours, being insulted throughout. Those taken away were often shot near by by commissions too impatient to wait until they reached their towns of origin.39 Such conditions were replicated in camps all over Spain."
General prison conditions"The anarchist journalist Eduardo de Guzmán recounted how he was taken to Madrid from Albatera in mid-June 1939 in a group that included Ricardo Zabalza, José Rodriguez Vega, the secretary general of the UGT, and David Antona, who, as secretary of the Madrid CNT, had tried to restrain the sacas and was later Civil Governor of Ciudad Real. It will be recalled that, as Civil Governor of Valencia, Zabalza had played a key role in halting the excesses of the anarchist Iron Column. The group was split up, and individuals were detained in any police station that happened to have room. They were packed together with twenty to thirty men in cells meant for two. With non-existent hygiene, they were persecuted by fleas and scabies. They were barely fed, receiving in the morning a quantity of filthy water with some malt that was presented as coffee, and at midday and in the evening a bowl of equally filthy water in which floated the occasional bits of carrot or turnip that was presented as soup or stew. For their survival, they had to depend on food parcels sent in by their families. With their breadwinners dead, in exile, on the run or in jail, the families were impoverished. Excoriated as worthless red scum, their chances of work were minimal. They still sent in food parcels at the cost of going hungry themselves. Many had no family in Madrid, or in whichever town they were imprisoned, but a spirit of solidarity prevailed and the more fortunate shared their parcels with them.
The dreadful conditions were merely the background to the central experience for most prisoners. In the police station in the Calle Almagro, where Eduardo de Guzmán was detained, they were repeatedly subjected to savage beatings for days without actually being asked any questions. It was part of a softening-up process. The beatings were delivered not by professional policemen but by men who had worked in the checas but now claimed to have been fifth columnists acting as provocateurs. There were humiliating rituals such as attempts to force them to beat each other up or immersing them in toilets full of faecal matter. Sometimes, the beatings went too far and the prisoner would be killed. There were many cases of prisoners who found a way of committing suicide rather than take the pain. They thereby avoided the risk of breaking down and confessing to something they had or had not done or even worse of becoming an informer. Several did break. In the end, nearly all prisoners would be forced to sign ‘declarations’ and confessions without being allowed to read them. Thus anyone who happened to be from Vallecas was held responsible for the massacre of rightists on the trains from Jaén, and those from Carabanchel were assumed guilty of the murder of General López Ochoa, even if they had been fighting on a distant front at the time.42
In Madrid, Zabalza was tortured but wrote no confession. He was tried on 2 February 1940 and shot at dawn on the 24th. One of the principal charges against him was that he had organized the perfectly legal harvest strike of the summer of 1934. Shortly before he was led out to the firing squad, he wrote to his parents:
When you read these lines, I will be just a memory. Men who describe themselves as Christians have wished it so and I, who never knowingly did anyone harm, submit myself to this test with the same clear conscience that has ruled my entire life. You in the simplicity of your religious faith will never be able to understand how a man who committed no crime – even the prosecutor recognized that – and against whom there are no accusations of any shameful act should suffer the death that awaits him.43"
"One of the most notable cases of a confession extracted after torture was that of the FAI assassin Felipe Sandoval. Already suffering from advanced tuberculosis, he was beaten mercilessly for days on end. Bones broken in his chest, he would lie groaning in agony, coughing blood. He would be beaten again until he cleaned up the blood. Eventually, after repeated hours of being kicked and punched in the chest and stomach, he began to give up the names of comrades on the run, stating where they were to be found. Under threat of further beatings, and barely able to speak, he was forced to confront his fellow prisoners. He repeated, parrot-fashion, the accusations which his torturers had instructed him to make. Most of the prisoners already regarded Sandoval with disgust but, once they discovered his treachery, this turned into hatred. The general consensus was that his lack of moral fibre proved that, far from being a warrior in the social struggle, he was merely a thief and an assassin. They set about persuading him to commit suicide. Whether in response to their arguments or to his own suffering, finally on 4 July 1939 he threw himself from a window and died in the patio below. The anarchist Amor Nuño, who negotiated the agreement between the CNT and the JSU for the evacuation of prisoners from Madrid that led to the massacre of Paracuellos, was beaten to death in the Dirección General de Seguridad.44"
"When Guzmán and others had finally signed their ‘confessions’, they were transferred to prisons. In the truck carrying Guzmán, the driver visited nine prisons before he could find one which would admit the prisoners. Eventually, they were allowed into Yeserías in the southern outskirts of the city near Carabanchel. Food was scarce. After each meal, they were obliged to line up in the gallery for at least an hour and sing the Falangist, Carlist and monarchist anthems, ‘Cara al Sol’, ‘Oriamendi’ and the ‘Marcha Real’, with their right arms outstretched in the fascist salute. The ceremony would end with them having to shout ‘¡Viva Franco! ¡Viva la Falange!’ and the ritual chant of ‘¡España, una, España, grande, España, libre!’ Those considered to be singing with insufficient gusto would be taken out and punished by having their heads shaved, being beaten, sometimes even being shot. The most common punishment was for them to be obliged to stand singing, arm outstretched, for four or five hours. Most week nights, those sentenced to death there would be executed.45
Eduardo de Guzmán’s trial was similar to that of Juan Caba Guijarro. More than thirty prisoners, accused of various ‘crimes’, were tried at the same time. One defender was named for all of them and they had no chance to talk to him until the eve of the trial. The prior assumption of the court was that all were guilty as charged. It was up to the accused to prove their innocence, but they were not usually allowed to speak. Theoretically, if they were accused of killing a named victim on a specific date in a specific place, and if they had not been in that place at that time, there was the slight possibility that they might be able to be heard and thus prove their innocence. However, it was common for someone to be accused of numerous murders without the victims, the times or the places being specified.46
The accusations were based on the declarations that, after weeks of beatings and torture, they had signed but not been allowed to read. Accordingly, the prisoners had little prospect of being found innocent. One of the women recounted to Guzmán the torture that had obliged her to sign a false confession of having participated in murders in the Checa del Cine Europa. She showed him how her breasts had been horribly deformed as a result of being burned with lighters and matches until sections of flesh had burned away. Her nipples had been ripped off with staplers.47"
"On the day that Guzmán was tried, nearly two hundred men and sixteen women were tried in four trials which lasted little more than two hours. In Guzmán’s trial, the proceedings started with the reading by the clerk of the charges against the twenty-nine accused. This was done in a nearly inaudible, mechanical monotone. The fact that the charges were incomprehensible bothered only the accused and their families. The judges, the prosecutor and the defending lawyer gave no sign of being interested. The charges that could be deciphered were wildly disparate, ranging from membership of a checa to having set fire to a church, been a political commissar in the Republican army, been an officer or simply been a volunteer. One of Guzmán’s fellow defendants was the poet Miguel Hernández, who was accused both of having been a Communist commissar and of having written poems that were injurious to the Francoist cause. Guzmán himself was accused of being an editor of the newspaper La Tierra and of being the director of Castilla Libre, of insulting the rebel leaders and exaggerating Republican triumphs and of being responsible for the crimes committed by the readers of both newspapers. After the reading of the charges, there was cross-examination by the prosecutor. The prisoners were allowed to answer only yes or no. No witnesses were called. The members of the tribunal then took a recess. When they returned, the prosecutor gave a twenty-minute speech during which he accused the prisoners of being sub-human scum, cowards, criminals, illiterate savages, thieves and murderers.
All of the crimes of the bulk of the prisoners were then attributed to the inspiration of Hernández and Guzmán. The pages of La Tierra and Castilla Libre were alleged to have caused the electoral victory of the Popular Front in February 1936, the fire and subsequent massacre in the Cárcel Modelo in August that year and the resistance of Madrid in November. The prosecutor seemed unaware or unconcerned that La Tierra had closed down in May 1935 and that Castilla Libre was not created until February 1937. The defending lawyer, who had not been allowed to speak to any of the prisoners until the previous evening, had not received the files of all twenty-nine, nor those of others that he had to defend later, and had barely had time to skim over them. He basically asked for the accused to be given the sentence inferior to that demanded by the prosecutor – life imprisonment instead of the death penalty, thirty years instead of life imprisonment and so on. When the accused were allowed to speak, they were interrupted as soon as they opened their mouths. When Guzmán tried to point out the prosecutor’s error in accusing him of publishing in non-existent newspapers, he was ordered to sit down and told that the court already knew everything he could possibly say."
"The human cost of forced labour, the deaths and the suffering of the workers and their families were matched by the fortunes made by the private companies and the public enterprises that exploited them. The penal columns provided labour for mines, railway building and the reconstruction of the so-called ‘devastated regions’. Stone walls were erected around coal mines in Asturias, the Basque Country and León so that prisoners could be used to dig coal. Many would die from silicosis. More died in the mercury mines of Almadén because of the dangerous conditions. Before the war, no one was permitted to work for more than three hours on two days per week; now, they were forced to work for four and a half hours on three days. In the pyrites mines of Tharsis and Rio Tinto in Huelva, productivity was greater than before 1936 with several thousand fewer workers.102"
"The use of prisoners as slave labour was a way of making them pay the costs of their own incarceration and of rebuilding the Spain destroyed by the war. The conditions in the camps and prisons were unsustainable. During the terrible winter of 1940–1, many prisoners died of hunger and the intense cold. Many also died from tuberculosis and typhoid especially during the epidemic in the spring of 1941. Indeed, more died from disease in prison than from execution. In the prison of Córdoba alone, 502 died in 1941.106 In addition to the use of prisoners as slave labour, there was a variation, given a theological veneer by the Jesuit Father José Agustín Pérez del Pulgar, known as ‘the redemption of sentences through work’. This enabled prisoners to shorten their sentences and, at the same time, earn some money for their families. It raised substantial funds for the regime.107 In October 1938, the Board of Trustees for the Central Trust (Patronato) for the Redemption of Sentences through Work had been established. The work was regarded as reparation for war damage which was blamed on the prisoners, despite being largely caused by rebel artillery and air raids. Indeed, the National Service for the Reconstruction of Devastated Regions established by Serrano Suñer in March 1938 was represented on the Patronato and made full use of the labour pool.108
The scheme was also necessary because the prison system was on the verge of collapse. In response to an international commission, in 1954 the Francoist Ministry of Justice admitted that there had been more than 270,719 prisoners in 1940. In fact, these figures referred only to those prisoners who had already been sentenced and there were at least another 100,000 awaiting trial. Nor did they refer to those working in ‘militarized penal colonies’. It was hardly surprising that the prisons received constant visits from priests preaching the ideas of Pérez del Pulgar.109 Sometimes the jobs offered were in primitive workshops established in the prisons themselves, producing clothing, furniture and many other kinds of goods, but more often they were for dangerous jobs in mines, digging railway tunnels and other public works for which the wages were scandalously low. Many prisoners accepted the appalling conditions in order to contribute in some small way to the maintenance of their wives and children and in the hope of being transferred to somewhere nearer their families. When the average daily wage for manual labour was 10 pesetas per day, the prisoners were rented out to private companies for 5 or 6. The government took half and the rest theoretically was paid to the prisoners. However, they did not receive all the money that they were due. One peseta was deducted for the prisoner’s exiguous rations, one was placed in a savings account which the prisoner could collect when he was eventually freed and the third, theoretically, was sent to the family. In fact, this latter was distributed, if at all, via the town council where the family lived and often was never handed over. Those under a death sentence were not allowed to participate in the scheme.110"
"As the Second World progressed, conditions for all prisoners worsened. Already undernourished, they were forced to give blood transfusions for the German Army.138 Perhaps the most shocking example of the malice that underlay the Francoist treatment of the defeated Republicans was the fate of the Spanish exiles captured in France by the Germans. Some had been fighting in the French forces, others were still in French internment camps. Around 10,000 ended up in German camps, something made possible by the acquiescence of Franco’s government when the prisoners were offered by the Germans. Numerous letters were sent in July 1940 from the Spanish Embassy in Paris to the Foreign Ministry asking for instructions regarding the German offer to hand over the prisoners. When no reply came, the German Embassy in Paris wrote to Madrid in August asking for clarification of the Spanish government’s wishes regarding 100,000 Spanish refugees. The only reply that has been found was a list of specific individuals, which led to the extraditions discussed earlier in the chapter. In the absence of other documentation, this alone condemned Republicans to German camps. According to SS Standartenführer August Eigruber, Gauleiter of Oberdonau in Austria, the Germans were told ‘by Franco’ that, as they had fought for ‘a Soviet Spain’, the prisoners were not considered to be Spaniards. This is consistent with Franco’s public declarations about those Republicans regarded as unredeemable criminals. Accordingly, the Spanish prisoners were treated as stateless persons and transferred from the front-line prisoner-of-war camps (Stalags) to concentration camps. Ninety per cent of the ‘Fighters for Red Spain’ (Rotspanienkämpfer) were in Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria.139
On 20 August 1940, a cattle train left Angoulême. A total of 927 Spanish refugees, 490 of them men, the remainder women and children, were squeezed – forty to fifty per wagon – into twenty wagons each designed for eight horses. They believed that they were being taken to Vichy. They travelled for three days and nights, with room only to stand, without food or water. On 24 August, they reached Mauthausen. The males over the age of thirteen were separated from their families and taken to the extermination camp near by. They were told by the camp commander Franz Ziereis in his ‘welcome speech’, ‘you enter by the door and you will leave by the crematorium chimney’. Three hundred and fifty-seven of the 490 would die in the camp.140 The women and children were then sent to Spain – they had been put on the train because the Germans did not want French civilians seeing the families being separated. There can be no doubt that the French authorities knew all about Mauthausen. In Spain, the returned women were interrogated and those with no one to vouch for them were imprisoned. The children were put in state orphanages even when there were Republican families willing to look after them.141
It was just the beginning. Spanish Republicans ended up facing the whole gamut of horrors in many different Nazi camps, including Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen in Germany, and Auschwitz and Treblinka in Poland. In Ravensbrück, there were 101 Spanish women who had belonged to the French resistance.142 Mauthausen was an extermination camp where those not murdered on arrival were required to work until they died of exhaustion. From the quarry at Mauthausen, an endless chain of men carried stones weighing between 44 and 88 pounds in backpacks up 186 steep steps.143 About 60 per cent of the Spanish Republicans who died in German camps perished at Mauthausen.144"
Treatment of women and children"Rape was a frequent occurrence during interrogation in police stations. Transfer to prisons and concentration camps was no guarantee of safety. At night, Falangists took young women away and raped them. Sometimes their breasts were branded with the Falangist symbol of the yoke and arrows. Many were impregnated by their captors. The executions of women sentenced to death who were pregnant were sometimes delayed until they had given birth and their children taken for adoption.115 Nevertheless, in the prison in Zamora, numerous pregnant women and nursing mothers were shot. On 11 October 1936, Amparo Barayón, the wife of Ramón J. Sender, was told that ‘reds had no right to feed children’ and her eight-month-old baby daughter Andrea was ripped from her arms and placed in a Catholic orphanage. Utterly distraught, Amparo was shot the next day.116 From 1937 to 1941, the Franciscan Capuchin friar Gumersindo de Estella served as a chaplain at the prison of Torrero in Zaragoza. In September 1937, he recalled the execution of three young women whose crime had been an attempt to reach the Republican zone. He was appalled not least by their anguished cries when their one-year-old daughters had been dragged from them by the guards. On another occasion in May 1938, he appealed for the execution of a twenty-one-year-old to be halted on the grounds that she was pregnant. The judge replied indignantly: ‘Wait seven months for every woman who was to be executed? You know that is just not possible!’117"
"Another victim of the Casado coup was a woman who had just given birth when her husband, arrested and left in prison by Casado’s forces, was condemned to death. Evicted from her home, she lived on the streets with her baby daughter, sleeping in doorways and on the steps of the Metro. When a lawyer told her that her husband’s sentence could be commuted if she paid a bribe of 10,000 pesetas, she became a thief and ended up in prison with her baby daughter.121 An example of the brutality inflicted on women was the case of a mother who, when the police came to arrest her, called to her son who was crying. On hearing that his name was Lenin, they picked him up by the legs and killed him by smashing his head against a wall.122
Once in jail, the conditions for nursing mothers were horrendous. With no facilities to wash themselves or their children’s clothes, they were forced to live in filth and fight a daily battle against rats. In the prison of Ventas, the water to the bathrooms and toilets was cut off. For every two hundred women, there was only one toilet which had to be flushed with dirty water that had been used for cleaning the floors and was then collected in big tins. Paz Azati, a Communist from Valencia, recounted that ‘every day on the floor of the Ventas infirmary you would see the corpses of fifteen to twenty children dead from meningitis’. The Communist Julia Manzanal had just given birth to a daughter when she was arrested in Madrid in the spring of 1939. Manzanal’s death sentence was commuted to thirty years in prison. Ten months later, her baby died of meningitis.123 While some women suffered the agony of seeing their babies die, others had them torn from their arms.124
After the war, the sequestration of the children of Republican prisoners, not just of those executed, became systematic. Twelve thousand children were taken to religious or state institutions where they were brainwashed. After one woman’s husband was shot in front of her and her small daughter, she was arrested and the child taken to a Catholic orphanage. The mother wrote regularly until one day her daughter replied saying, ‘Don’t write to me any more about papa. I know he was a criminal. I am taking the veil.’ Many children were taken from their mothers, put into religious orphanages and brainwashed into denouncing their fathers as assassins. Amparo Barayón’s daughter Andrea became a nun. Pilar Fidalgo noted that orphans were obliged ‘to sing the songs of the murderers of their father; to wear the uniform of those who have executed him, and to curse the dead and to blaspheme his memory.’125 In the book signed by the chaplain of the prison in Barcelona, Father Martín Torrent (in reality ghost-written by a near-destitute Luis Lucia), great pride is expressed in the fact that seven thousand indigent children of prisoners found starving on the streets had been taken to religious orphanages. Father Torrent expressed even greater satisfaction that some of them had decided to join the priesthood.126
Children were stolen from their mothers in several prisons, most notoriously in Saturrarán in the Basque Country and in the prison for nursing mothers in Madrid. More than one hundred women and over fifty children died of illness in Saturrarán, which was run under the harsh direction of María Aranzazu, known to the prisoners as ‘the white panther’. In Madrid, the brutal regime in the improvised prison for nursing mothers was run by María Topete Fernández, a wealthy woman who had herself been imprisoned in the Republican zone. She assuaged her own resentments in the treatment of the mothers and their children. The principal food they received was a thin gruel containing bugs and maggots. If the children regurgitated it, María Topete made them eat their vomit. Separated from them for much of the daytime and at night, the women lived in constant terror of their children being taken from them. Once the children were three years old they could be removed and many were forcibly seized from their mothers. By 1943, more than 10,000 were in religious orphanages.127 The justification for this policy was provided by the head of the psychiatric services of the rebel army, Major Antonio Vallejo Nágera.
Obsessed with the need for racial cleanliness, Vallejo had written a book in 1934 arguing in favour of the castration of psychopaths.128 As a member of the army medical corps, he had served in Morocco and spent time in Germany during the First World War visiting prison camps. He also met the German psychiatrists Ernst Kretschmer, Julius Schwalbe and Hans Walter Gruhle, whose work influenced him profoundly. During the Civil War, he was made head of the Psychiatric Services of the rebel army. In August 1938, he requested permission from Franco to set up the Laboratory of Psychological Investigations. Two weeks later, he was authorized to do so. His purpose was to pathologize left-wing ideas. The results of his research gave the delighted military high command ‘scientific’ arguments to justify their views on the sub-human nature of their adversaries and he was promoted to colonel.129
Vallejo’s quest for the environmental factors that fostered ‘the red gene’ and the links between Marxism and mental deficiency took the form of psychological tests carried out on prisoners already physically exhausted and mentally anguished. His team consisted of two physicians, a criminologist and two German scientific advisers. His subjects were captured members of the International Brigades in San Pedro de Cardeña and fifty Republican women prisoners in Málaga, thirty of whom were awaiting execution. In the latter case, starting from the premise that they were degenerate and thus prone to Marxist criminality, he explained ‘female revolutionary criminality’ by reference to the animal nature of the female psyche and the ‘marked sadistic nature’ unleashed when political circumstances allowed females to ‘satisfy their latent sexual appetites’.130
Vallejo’s theories were used to justify the sequestration of Republican children and were gathered in a book entitled The Eugenics of Spanishness and the Regeneration of the Race’.131 More environmental than biological, his eugenic racism postulated that a race was constituted by a series of cultural values. In Spain, these values, the prerequisites of national health, were hierarchical, military and patriotic. Everything that the Republic and the left stood for was inimical to them and therefore had to be eradicated. Obsessed with what he called ‘the transcendent task of the cleansing of our race’, his model was the Inquisition, which had protected Spain from poisonous doctrines in the past. He advocated ‘a modernized Inquisition, with a different focus, other ends, means and organization but an Inquisition nonetheless’.132 The health of the race required that children be separated from their ‘red’ mothers.
Authorization for the application of his theories was facilitated by his links with both Franco (whose wife Carmen Polo was a friend of Vallejo’s wife) and the Falange.133 He dedicated his book on the psychopathology of war, which incorporated his work on the links between Marxism and mental deficiency, ‘in respectful and admiring homage to the undefeated imperial Caudillo’. Vallejo also had a direct link to the regime organization concerned with war orphans, Auxilio Social, through his friend the psychiatrist Dr Jesús Ercilla Ortega. A close friend of Onésimo Redondo, Ercilla had been one of the founders of the JONS.134 He was a member of the executive committee of Auxilio Social, its medical adviser and the liaison with other groups. After the war, Ercilla was made clinical director of the Psychiatric Clinic of San José in Ciempozuelos, a hospital officially headed by Vallejo Nágera.135 Franco himself was enthusiastic about Auxilio Social’s work with Republican orphans, seeing it as a major contribution to the long-term ‘redemption’ of Spaniards from their leftist errors.136 A key element in the process was the law of 14 December 1941 which legalized the changing of the names of Republican orphans, of the children of prisoners unable to look after them and of babies taken away (often by force) from their mothers immediately after birth in prison.137"
Francoist collaboration with Nazi's"A factor that facilitated Franco’s state terror was the ever-closer collaboration between his security services and those of the Third Reich. This had begun in November 1937, when the authorities in Burgos requested that the German government send a team of experts to instruct the Spanish police in the latest methods for the eradication of communism. A team was assembled under the command of SS Colonel Heinz Jost, head of the Sicherheitsdienst Foreign Intelligence Office, a man who would be sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials for atrocities committed in Russia. Jost’s team reached Valladolid in mid-January 1938 and was attached to Franco’s recently created Ministry of Public Order, headed by the seventy-five-year-old General Severiano Martínez Anido. Notorious as Civil Governor of Barcelona in the early 1920s when the infamous ley de fugas (the shooting of ‘escaping’ prisoners) was the norm, Martínez Anido had won Franco’s admiration for his implacable imposition of law and order during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. He wanted to step up the purge of leftists in captured territory and was delighted to have German help in creating the necessary instruments of repression. Jost returned to Germany in February 1938 but left behind a three-man SD team which helped reorganize the Francoist police administration, the political police and the criminal police force. One of its lasting legacies was the analysis and systematization of captured Republican documentation to create a vast repository of political information in Salamanca.49"
"In April 1938, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler had contacted the Minister of Public Order, General Martínez Anido, to suggest widening the Spanish–German agreement on police co-operation. The Gestapo was interested in repatriating German Jews, Communists and Socialists who had fought in the International Brigades and been captured by Franco’s forces. The agreement signed on 31 July permitted the swift exchange of leftists caught by the two security services. International Brigaders were handed over to Gestapo interrogators stationed in Spain, then despatched to Germany without even minimal judicial procedures. Individual cases for repatriation required only the approval of Franco, which was never refused. In return, a programme of training for Franco’s political police was headed by SS Sturmbannführer Paul Winzer, the Gestapo attaché at the German Embassy in Salamanca. Martínez Anido died shortly before the end of 1938 and the functions of his Ministry were absorbed by the Ministry of the Interior. As his Director General of Security, Serrano Suñer appointed his crony José Finat y Escrivá de Romaní, the Conde de Mayalde. On Mayalde’s suggestion, Himmler was awarded the regime’s highest decoration, the Grand Cross of the Imperial Order of the Yoke and Arrows in recognition of his role in the fight against the enemies of Franco’s Spain.59
Franco got his reward when, after the collapse of France, thousands of Spanish exiles fell into the hands of the Germans. On the very day, 22 June 1940, that the Franco-German armistice was signed in Compiègne, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed the French Embassy in Madrid that Azaña, Negrín and ‘other red leaders’ had requested visas to leave France for Mexico. Francoist efforts to extradite prominent Republicans from France would meet fewer problems in the German-occupied zone than in the territory of the newly established Vichy regime. Serrano Suñer requested that the French Ambassador, Le Comte Robert Renom de la Baume, inform the Vichy premier, Marshal Philippe Pétain, that Spain was impatiently waiting for France to ‘neutralize’ the Spanish red leaders currently in its territory. Then, on 24 July, the Spanish government asked the Comte de la Baume to prevent the departure for Mexico of the seventy-four-year-old ex-Prime Minister, the conservative Manuel Portela Valladares, and several members of the Basque government.60 The Franco government’s interest in Portela’s extradition derived from his prominence in the lists of Father Juan Tusquets.
These requests were followed on 27 August by a peremptory demand for the extradition without delay of 636 prominent Republicans believed by the Madrid government to be in Vichy France. Underlying these requests was the threat that, if they were not met, Spain would use its special relationship with Nazi Germany to push its territorial claims to French North Africa. In any case, Marshal Pétain loathed the Spanish Republicans since he considered most of them to be Communists, but he was reluctant to breach the right of asylum. Accordingly, to the intense annoyance of Madrid, Vichy insisted that requests for extradition had to pass through the courts, in accordance with the Franco-Spanish extradition treaty of 1877 and a law of 1927 that required each case to be judged individually. Nevertheless, the Vichy French police, using names and addresses supplied by José Félix de Lequerica, Franco’s Ambassador, began to round up prominent Republicans, or at least place them under close surveillance. The French knew that to hand over these men would be to send them to certain death. Serrano Suñer was outraged that several, including Prieto and Negrín, had managed, with the collusion of the French authorities, to escape.61
On 1 July 1940, the President of Mexico, Lázaro Cárdenas, informed his Minister Plenipotentiary in France, Luis Ignacio Rodríguez Taboada, that Mexico was prepared to accept all Spanish refugees currently in France. Moreover, he instructed him to inform the French government that, until their transport could be arranged, all Spanish Republicans in France were under the diplomatic protection of Mexico. On 8 July, Rodríguez Taboada was received by Pétain in Vichy. After warning him that the Spaniards were undesirables, Pétain agreed in principle. A joint committee was set up to work out the details and, on 23 August, an agreement was signed by the Mexican government and Vichy. Many Vichy officials viewed this arrangement with suspicion and they, and the Germans in the occupied zone, complied with Spanish requests for many Republicans to be prevented from leaving France. Nevertheless, the Mexican initiative helped thousands of Republicans until November 1942, when the German occupation of Vichy France severed diplomatic relations between the two.62
If the Francoist authorities were hindered by the judicial scruples of the Vichy French and the humanitarian efforts of the Mexicans, they had no such problems regarding the Spaniards who found themselves in German-occupied France. In the days following the capture of Paris, groups of Falangists sacked the buildings in which various Spanish Republican organizations had their offices. Their funds and archives were seized and taken to Spain. Lequerica quickly established cordial relations with the Germans, who facilitated the activities of Spanish policemen within the occupied zone. The consequence was that the exiled Republicans’ places of residence were searched, their goods, money and documents seized and their persons mistreated even when they had not been arrested or extradited.
In late August 1940, the Conde de Mayalde visited Berlin to discuss the fate of the captured Republican refugees. He was shown the latest police installations and techniques and met Himmler and other top brass of the various German police and security services, including Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Sicherheitsdienst. Himmler proposed that Spain and Germany exchange police liaison officers who would have diplomatic immunity and the right to arrest citizens of their respective countries. Himmler would thereby be able to increase the Gestapo network in Spain to maintain surveillance of German refugees and the Spaniards would get rapid access to Republican exiles. Mayalde said he would have to consult with his Minister but suggested that Himmler might like to visit Spain himself.
Even before that visit took place, as soon as France fell Franco and Serrano Suñer hastened to take advantage of Himmler’s earlier agreement with General Martínez Anido. Officers of the Dirección General de Seguridad were sent to Paris to arrange the extradition from occupied France of several recently arrested Republican leaders. The police attaché at the Paris Embassy, Pedro Urraca Rendueles, was in charge of securing their hand-over and taking them to the Spanish frontier. The Germans arrested prominent figures from lists provided by Lequerica including Lluís Companys Jover, the President of the Catalan Generalitat. On 10 July, in Pyla-sur-Mer, near Arcachon, German police, accompanied by a Spanish agent, had arrested Cipriano Rivas Cherif, Azaña’s brother-in-law, along with two close friends of the exiled President, Carlos Montilla Escudero and Miguel Salvador Carreras. The following day, two Socialists, Teodomiro Menéndez, one of the leaders of the Asturian miners’ insurrection of October 1934, and the journalist Francisco Cruz Salido, were arrested by the Germans in Bordeaux. On 27 July 1940, the Gestapo arrested in Paris the one-time editor of El Socialista and wartime Minister of the Interior Julián Zugazagoitia Mendieta. All were handed over to the Spanish police in France and taken to Madrid. There were no judicial procedures. According to Franco himself, the Germans delivered the prisoners ‘spontaneously’.63
Companys had passed up various chances to escape from France because his son Lluís was seriously ill in a clinic in Paris. He was arrested in La Baule-les-Pins near Nantes on 13 August 1940, taken to Paris and detained in La Santé prison. However, on 26 August, La Santé received an order from the Conde de Mayalde requiring that Companys be handed over to Pedro Urraca Rendueles. He was transferred to Madrid in early September and imprisoned in the cellars of the DGS. For five weeks, he was kept in solitary confinement and tortured and beaten. Senior figures of the regime visited his cell, insulted him and threw coins or crusts of dry bread at him. On 3 October, his clothing bloodstained, a heavily manacled Companys was transferred to the Castillo de Montjuich in Barcelona.
Accused of military rebellion, he was subjected to a summary court martial on 14 October. While the military prosecutor prepared his case, Companys was given no opportunity to talk to the officer appointed to ‘defend’ him nor was he permitted to call witnesses on his own behalf. The defence advocate, an artillery captain, Ramón de Colubrí, pointed out that Companys had saved hundreds of lives of right-wingers in Catalonia, among them several army officers, including himself. At a trial lasting less than one hour, Companys was sentenced to death. The sentence was quickly approved by the Captain General of the IV Military Region, Luis Orgaz. In the early hours of the following day, the deeply Catholic Companys heard Mass and took communion. Refusing to wear a blindfold, he was taken before a firing squad of Civil Guards and, as they fired, he cried ‘Per Catalunya!’ According to his death certificate, he died at 6.30 a.m. on 15 October 1940. The cause of death was cynically given as ‘traumatic internal haemorrhage’.64"
"Four days after the death of Companys, Heinrich Himmler arrived in Spain. The invitation issued by Mayalde had been confirmed by Serrano Suñer, now newly appointed Foreign Minister. In the view of the British Ambassador, Serrano Suñer wanted to seek ‘expert advice on the liquidation of opponents and the capture of political refugees’. Himmler was interested both in police collaboration and in preparing security for the forthcoming meeting between Hitler and Franco on the French border. Arriving on the morning of 19 October 1940, he was treated to a lavishly orchestrated welcome first in San Sebastián and then in Burgos. The streets of both cities were draped with swastika flags. On 20 October, he was greeted in Madrid by Serrano Suñer and senior officials of the Falange. He set up base at the Ritz Hotel, then had a meeting with Serrano Suñer at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before both moved on to El Pardo to see Franco. Serrano Suñer was particularly interested in the whereabouts of several prominent captured Republicans, just as Himmler was concerned about exiled Germans. They reached an agreement whereby the Gestapo would establish an office in the German Embassy in Madrid and the Sicherheitsdienst would have offices in the main German consulates throughout Spain. German agents would thus operate with full diplomatic immunity. The same privilege would be applied to Spanish agents in Germany and, more importantly, in the German occupied zone of France.66
The Conde de Mayalde, who was also Mayor of Madrid, arranged an out-of-season bullfight in Himmler’s honour in a swastika-emblazoned Plaza de Ventas and also invited him to a hunting party on his estate in Toledo. Over the next few days, Himmler was taken to the Prado and the Archaeological Museum in Madrid, the historical monuments of Toledo and El Escorial and the Monastery of Montserrat in Catalonia. His visits to the archaeological museum and to Montserrat were linked to his patronage of the SS Deutsches Ahnenerbe (German Ancestral Heritage). Himmler was always on the look-out for the talisman that would win the war. On the basis of Wagner’s Parsifal, he was convinced that Montserrat was Montsalvat, the mountain where, according to Wolfram von Eschenbach and later Wagner, the Holy Grail was kept. In the magnificent library of Montserrat, he demanded to see the archives on the location of the Holy Grail. When he was informed that he was mistaken, he rudely claimed a Germanic pagan origin for everything to do with Montserrat and declared that Jesus Christ was not Jewish but Aryan.67
Alongside these cultural activities, there were visits to prisons and concentration camps. According to one of Serrano Suñer’s closest aides, Ramón Garriga, Himmler was shocked by what he saw. He thought it absurd that hundreds of thousands of able-bodied Spaniards were detained in appalling conditions, many facing the death sentence, at a time when the country was in desperate need of labour for the reconstruction of roads, buildings and houses destroyed during the Civil War. Apparently, he had been impressed by the work carried out by Republican exiles in labour battalions in France. He told Franco and Serrano Suñer that they were wasting valuable resources and that it made more sense to incorporate working-class militants into the new order rather than annihilate them. In his view, the regime should have shot a small number of prominent Republicans, imprisoned some more and let the rest go free under close police vigilance. Himmler made an important distinction between ideological and racial enemies. Franco was not convinced.68"
"The procedure for extraditions from Vichy France saw Blas Pérez González, the senior prosecutor of the Supreme Court, prepare arrest warrants that were passed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which then made the corresponding request to Vichy. In November 1940, Lequerica had delivered a list of the names of nearly three thousand Republicans wanted for trial in Spain. The official response of Vichy was lukewarm and made it clear that an individual dossier for each case was required. The majority of extradition demands were unsuccessful since the requests were absurd."
DERD"With the prospect of the fall of Santander and Asturias following on that of the Basque Country, Ulibarri called for the collection of the documentation to be speeded up to permit the greatest efficiency in the subsequent repression. He stated that, in the wake of each victory, the police had to be supplied with ‘the documents that indicate the guilt of those persons who are to be tried immediately’. After the victory at Teruel and the subsequent drive through Aragon towards the Mediterranean, huge opportunities were opening up. The desired departmental merger was formalized on 26 April 1938 when, as Minister of the Interior, Serrano Suñer issued a decree creating the Delegación del Estado para la Recuperación de Documentos (DERD). Its purpose was to gather, store and classify all documents emanating from political parties, organizations and individuals ‘hostile to or even out of sympathy with the National Movement’ in order to facilitate their location and punishment.52"
"One of the most influential of Ulibarri’s staff was the policeman Eduardo Comín Colomer. In August 1938, all security services in the Francoist zone had been unified under the National Security Service headed by Lieutenant Colonel José Medina. One of its principal departments was the Investigation and Security Police, which in turn was divided into various sections. One of them, Anti-Marxism, consisted of three sub-sections, Freemasonry, Judaism and Publications. Comín Colomer was the head of both the Freemasonry and Judaism offices, as well as producing the Boletín de Información Antimarxista. In January 1939, he was seconded to the DERD to be Marcelino de Ulibarri’s assistant. There he would play a key role in the classification and sifting of the captured material in preparation for its use by the secret police.54 The material would become the basis for his own legendary library and also for a stream of books and pamphlets published over the following thirty-five years in which he denounced all elements of the Republican left. During this time, one of his assistants was Mauricio Carlavilla.55
DERD search teams followed Franco’s troops as they moved across Aragon and into Catalonia. Barcelona was occupied on 26 January 1939 and placed under martial law the following day. DERD operatives started to search the city on 28 January and, by 7 June, had filled fourteen buildings with paper. Two hundred tons of documents were taken by train and truck from Catalonia to Salamanca. Eight hundred tons in total were gathered from all over what had remained of the Republican zone. With the help of the German specialists, this material was converted into a massive index of 80,000 suspected Freemasons, despite the fact that there had been nearer five than ten thousand Freemasons in Spain in 1936 and that fewer than one thousand remained after 1939. These files would facilitate the purges carried out in the 1940s under the infamous Special Tribunal created to implement the Law for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism of February 1940.56 Ulibarri was named its first president on 1 September 1940 but was replaced soon afterwards by General Andrés Saliquet, who had presided over the repression in Valladolid.57"
Melchor Rodriguez trial"Another example of the vindictiveness of Francoist ‘justice’ even with those who had worked hard to stop the repression in the Republican zone was Melchor Rodríguez. His efforts to save right-wingers in Madrid had led some of his anarchist comrades to suspect him of being a traitor. Even his wife became convinced that, at best, he had naively let himself be used by the fifth column and, when he rejected her suspicions, she left him in early 1939. Having been named Mayor of Madrid by Casado’s Junta, he surrendered the capital to Franco’s troops. Thereafter, he was arrested on 13 April 1939 and tried by court martial in December that year. After an energetic defence by Ignacio Arenillas de Chaves, an extremely competent military lawyer, he was found not guilty. However, the Auditor General of the Military Region of the Centre rejected the verdict and insisted on a retrial.
Melchor Rodríguez was tried again on 11 May 1940 accused of a crime that took place in Madrid at a time when he was in Valencia. A young and inexperienced defender was appointed two days before the trial. He was not permitted to meet his client or given any prosecution documents until the trial had actually started. The prosecutor, Leopoldo Huidobro Pardo, was a Carlist who had suffered frightening experiences in Madrid during the war. This more than accounted for his bitterly hostile attitude towards prominent CNT members. Furthermore, Huidobro’s hatred of the left was compounded by his distress at the death of his cousin Father Fernando Huidobro Polanco. He was, of course, unaware that Father Fernando had been shot in the back by a Legionario. However, his life had been saved when he was enabled to take refuge in the Finnish Embassy, something facilitated by Melchor Rodríguez. Nevertheless, he accused Melchor of being a bloodthirsty gunman and demanded the death penalty. However, the pantomime of a trial rigged with false testimonies was ruined by the unscheduled appearance of General Agustín Muñoz Grandes, who spoke on Melchor’s behalf and presented a list of over two thousand rightists whose lives he had saved. Among them were many aristocrats and one of the founders of the Falange, Raimundo Fernández Cuesta. Unlike Peiró, Melchor had not been a minister of the Republic and the main witness on his behalf outranked everyone else in the room. The planned death sentence was commuted to twenty years and one day and he was sent on 1 March 1941 to the prison of El Puerto de Santa María in Cádiz. Then Muñoz Grandes, as Captain General of the I Military Region, commuted his sentence to twelve years and a day, which permitted him provisional liberty.77"
Besteiro trial"Melchor Rodríguez was one of the few senior elements of the Casado Junta who had remained in Madrid, naively believing that, since he had no blood on his hands, he had nothing to fear. The most senior of all was the Socialist Julián Besteiro, who had been Foreign Minister in the seven-man Junta. Besteiro had done nothing to oppose the military rising and had done more than most to put an end to Republican resistance. He was the only one of the Casado Junta’s members to stay in Madrid. The others, including the notorious organizer of the anarchist checas of Madrid, Eduardo Val Bescós, managed to escape with Casado to England. It was inevitable that Besteiro would face the full ferocity of the repression since he was a parliamentary deputy, had been president of both the Socialist Party and its trade union movement, the UGT, and been President of the Constituent Cortes in 1931.
Nevertheless, Besteiro chose wilfully to ignore the revenge being wreaked on captured Republican areas. Instead, he believed assurances from his contacts in the fifth column that Franco guaranteed the life and liberty of those innocent of common crimes. Moreover, although the Casado coup had already undermined the chances of a properly organized evacuation of those in danger, Besteiro refused to allow any government resources to be used for those who needed to flee. His logic was that the national wealth was required in Spain for post-war reconstruction and that Franco would treat those who stayed behind in Spain all the better for safeguarding resources. He facilitated the peaceful surrender of the Republic to the Francoists, in co-operation with the clandestine Falange and the fifth-column organization. He complacently believed that his contribution to shortening the war would incline Franco to use him in the process of post-war reconstruction.
Despite his hope that a shared anti-communism would permit him to be the instrument of reconciliation between the two sides, Besteiro, nearly sixty-nine years old, was arrested and, on 8 July 1939, faced a court martial charged with military rebellion. It was an indication of his importance that his case was in the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Felipe Acedo Colunga, head prosecutor of the court of the Army of Occupation. Acedo Colunga recognized that Besteiro was innocent of any crime of blood, yet demanded the death sentence.78 In the event, he was sentenced to life imprisonment which was commuted to thirty years of hard labour. At the end of August 1939, he was sent to the prison of Carmona. His health destroyed by lack of adequate food and medical attention, he was forced to undertake hard physical work, scrubbing floors, cleaning latrines. This latter activity led to an untreated septicaemia which caused his death on 27 September 1940.79 Besteiro was unfortunate that the Francoists, unable to try Azaña, Prieto, Negrín, Largo Caballero and the other major figures who had made it into exile, vented their hatred on him.80"
Francisco Largo Caballero"Another prominent Republican who fell foul of Francoist vindictiveness was the second wartime Prime Minister, Francisco Largo Caballero. He crossed the French frontier on 29 January 1939 and lived in Paris until two days before the German occupation. Thereafter, the Vichy authorities moved him around and kept him always under surveillance. Blas Pérez prepared the application for his extradition at the end of May 1941. It accused him of direct responsibility for assassinations, theft and looting. Four months passed before the Vichy authorities arrested him on 9 October 1941. Now seventy-one years old, Largo Caballero was imprisoned in harsh conditions in Limoges. The petition from Madrid was heard, on the same day as another for the extradition of Federica Montseny, and both were rejected. Although Montseny was released, Largo Caballero was kept confined in Nyons. Shortly after the German occupation of Vichy France, he was arrested again on 20 February 1943 by the Italian political police and two Gestapo agents. He was interrogated in Lyons before being held in Paris. On 8 July, he was sent to Berlin and then on 31 July imprisoned in the brutal labour camp of Sachsenhausen in Oranienburg. Had he been extradited to Spain, the pressure for him to be shot would have been immense but, in the wake of the fall of Mussolini, Franco did not want to risk an international scandal likely to be greater than that provoked by the execution of Companys. Largo Caballero believed that the Madrid authorities did not request his transfer to Spain because they preferred to see him die in a German camp. In fact, he survived to be liberated by the Soviet forces, but his health was broken and he died in March 1946.81"
Law of political responsibilities"The repression of Republicans was not limited to prison and death. They were also subject to a huge state-sponsored programme of extortion based on the Law of Political Responsibilities, announced in Burgos on 9 February 1939. Although the concept had been developed in the rebel zone since the start of the war, the timing left no doubt that a negotiated peace was out of the question. Its first article was as sweeping as it was awkwardly worded: ‘The political responsibility is declared of all those persons who, after 1 October 1934 and before 18 July 1936, contributed to the creation or aggravation of the subversion of any kind of which Spain was made a victim, and of those others, who from the second of said dates have opposed or might oppose the National Movement with concrete acts or serious passivity’.84
The concept of ‘serious passivity’ ensured that no Republican would go unpunished and justified the ‘legal’ persecution of any individual who had not actively fought in the insurgent ranks or else been a fifth columnist. It also permitted the trial and punishment of anyone who had exercised their political and trade union rights under Republican democracy from 1 October 1934 until the conquest of their area by the military rebels. The punishments involved massive fines and/or the confiscation of property ranging from businesses, factories, clinics and houses, via bank savings and shareholdings, to household furniture, crockery and cutlery. The Law was designed not just to punish the defeated but also to pay for the war that had been inflicted upon them. This ‘juridical monstrosity’ as it has been called was applied retroactively and criminalized activities, from membership of a political party to government service, that were perfectly legal when they were carried out.85
Many of the sentences imposed under the Law were applied against people who had long since been executed or gone into exile. In such cases, their fines were passed on to their widows or other relatives if they could be found. A case was brought against the exiled lawyer Eduardo Ragasol i Sarrà. The denunciation which provoked the case came from members of the town council of Caldes de Monbui, north of Barcelona. They wanted to evict his mother from the family property to get hold of it. The Tribunal of Political Responsibilities confiscated the family patrimony in December 1939, although, three years later, his mother managed to get part of the property returned.86
A more striking case was that of Josep Sunyol i Garriga, the president of Barcelona football club since 1934, who was executed in August 1936. Sunyol, the wealthy owner of sugar factories in La Rioja, Zaragoza, Málaga and Lleida, had represented Barcelona for Esquerra Republicana in all three Cortes. The dressing rooms of the football club’s stadium at Les Corts had been used to hide many religious personnel while the Generalitat made arrangements to evacuate them. At the beginning of the war, Sunyol had been sent to Madrid to liaise with the government of José Giral. On 6 August, he went to the Guadarrama front to the north-west of the capital to see the Alto del León, from which the Republican press had erroneously announced the expulsion of Mola’s troops. His car strayed into rebel territory and he and his companions were shot by the roadside. There was no trial. His properties located in the rebel zone were confiscated immediately. On 24 October 1939, the regional Tribunal of Political Responsibilities opened proceedings, charging him with being a Communist and a separatist. Since Josep Sunyol failed to appear to respond to these charges, his father was sentenced to a fine of 5 million pesetas and exclusion from any senior position in the industrial or banking world.87"
"The machinery of the Tribunal was soon clogged with a massive backlog of cases, not least since the process invited denunciations. The extent to which these were motivated by personal envy or resentment led to expressions of disgust by the military authorities who had to judge them.93 Unable to cope, Suñer was succeeded in December 1940 by the man who had been first Civil Governor of Barcelona after its capture. The pro-Nazi Wenceslao González Oliveros had immediately embarked on a fierce persecution of Catalan language and culture. He too had difficulty dealing with the huge backlog left by Suñer. In fact, this was inevitable given the extent of the application of the Law of Political Responsibilities as merely part of the ongoing repression. There was a shortage of legally trained personnel that could be hired by the Tribunal. Hundreds of thousands of cases were opened, including against Negrín, Azaña, Largo Caballero, Dolores Ibárruri and many more exiled Republicans. Fines imposed on dead or exiled Republicans were collected by the confiscation of their families’ goods. Eventually, the Tribunal collapsed under the weight of its own ambition. The regional Tribunal of Albacete had resolved only 9.25 per cent of its open cases. The Tribunal in Madrid had resolved only 15.51 per cent of the cases that had gone to trial. It had eleven times as many files still awaiting trial. The Law was modified in February 1942 to reduce the number of cases and, in April 1945, the regime declared that the Tribunal had done its job. No more new cases were opened, but 42,000 were still pending. Eventually, in 1966, a general pardon was announced for offences defined as coming under the jurisdiction of the Tribunal.94
Systematic persecution would continue in virtually every aspect of daily life well into the 1950s. The mass of the Republican population would suffer from grinding poverty, with families deprived of their menfolk, women forced into prostitution, labouring men forced to take work at miserable wages, schoolteachers deprived of their jobs and a rationing system which intensified social division. The worst hit was the prison population. As early as 15 August 1936, Mola had told his secretary, José María Iribarren, ‘prison must be a place of atonement’.95 Two and a half years later, the decision of the regime to ignore the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war ensured that the prisons and camps which held hundreds of thousands of Republicans would become what one of them called ‘cemeteries for the living’.96 In the north of Lugo, the provincial prison quickly became so full that is was necessary to improvise another. This provisional jail was set up in a decrepit and run-down old convent, known as the Prisión Habilitada de Alfoz. It held more than five hundred prisoners, the majority peasants. It would not have been difficult to escape, but they never tried. Weakened by hunger, their spirits broken, they would not have escaped, in the view of one of them, even if the gates had been left open. After all, outside the walls, all of Spain had been converted into a gigantic prison.97
Provincial prisons held between ten and fifteen times more inmates than they had been built for. Temporary prisons were established in converted colleges and schools, convents, hospitals and military barracks. Confusingly, some, such as the charity hospital in the Horta district of Barcelona, were denominated concentration camps. The regime used the term ‘concentration camp’ in a confused and chaotic manner when referring to detention or classification centres in improvised premises often in old buildings spread over a wide area.98 These additional premises barely reduced the problem of overcrowding, the scale of which can be deduced from the fact that many detainees were held for more than a year before their first interrogation. On 6 May 1940, Colonel Máximo Cuervo Radigales, the Director General of Prisons, sent a report to Franco complaining about the excessive number of prisoners. It stated that, in round numbers, in addition to those awaiting trial, 103,000 prisoners had already been tried and sentenced, and 40,000 of them had faced trial since 1 April 1939. He estimated that, at the current rate of trials and sentencing, it would take at least three years to deal with the backlog and that only if no new arrests were made. He went on to lament that there were not enough judges from the Military Legal Corps to cope and that the people recruited were not of the required quality.99"
"In mid-July 1939, Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and the Foreign Minister of Fascist Italy, made an official visit to Spain. When his guides proudly took him to see a work gang of Republican prisoners, he remarked to his own officials: ‘They are not prisoners of war, they are slaves of war.’ On his return to Rome, he described Franco to one of his cronies: ‘That queer fish of a Caudillo, sits there in his Ayete palace, in the midst of his Moorish Guard, surrounded by mountains of files of prisoners condemned to death. With his work schedule, he will see about three a day, because that fellow enjoys his siestas.’1
There is no evidence that Franco’s sleep was ever interrupted by concern for his victims. Indeed, his regime made considerable efforts to ensure that the same tranquillity was enjoyed by all of his collaborators. The consequence is that Spain today is still in the throes of a memory war. There are two sets of historical memory: the homogeneous Francoist one imposed on the country during four decades of dictatorship and the diverse Republican ones, repressed until recent years. The Francoist one was constructed in three stages before, during and after the Civil War. It was based on the need to justify the military coup against the democratically elected government and the planned slaughter that the coup was to entail. During the first stage, before 18 July 1936, the betrayal of the military oath of loyalty to the government was justified by the assertion that Spain had to be saved from the ‘Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy’ which was allegedly responsible for the greatly exaggerated breakdown of law and order. As the war progressed, the second stage saw the tightly controlled rebel media and the Catholic Church collaborate to publicize and exaggerate atrocities in the Republican zone. Thus was created a deep fear of ‘red barbarism’, an untrammelled violence allegedly masterminded by Moscow, with a view to destroying Spain and its Catholic traditions. At the same time, the atrocities committed by the rebels and their Falangist and Carlist allies were encouraged as part of the prior plan of extermination and also by way of sealing a covenant of blood among the perpetrators. Thus those guilty of the atrocities would never contemplate any reconciliation with the defeated for fear of the vengeance of their victims.
After the war came the third and most enduring stage. By dint of totalitarian control of the education system and of all the means of public communication, press, radio and the publishing industry, the Franco regime made a powerfully sustained attempt to brainwash its population. An entirely homogeneous and impermeable version of the long-and short-term origins of the Civil War was imposed upon the Spanish people. Through endless reiteration in the press, in schools, in children’s textbooks and from church pulpits, a single historical memory was created and disseminated over three and a half decades. The rewriting of history – and denial of the experiences and recollections of both victors and victims – absolved the military rebels of guilt and sanitized the regime abroad. The process inflicted great long-term damage on Spanish society. To this day, its powerful residual effects hamper the ability of mainstream contemporary society to look upon its recent violent past in an open and honest way that could facilitate the necessary social and political closure.
During the years of the dictatorship, the defeated in Spain had no public right to historical memory, living as they did in a kind of internal exile. Only after the death of Franco and the slow reconstruction of democracy did it become possible for there to be a process of recovery of their historical memory. Of course, there were many historical memories among the defeated Republicans and their descendants, differing according to whether their politics were liberal Republican, Socialist, Communist or anarchist but always with some with elements in common deriving from the suffering and loss imposed by the Francoist repression, whether through execution, imprisonment or exile
When the grandchildren of the victims of the Francoists finally initiated a nationwide movement for the recovery of historical memory in the year 2000, it provoked a near-hysterical rejection by those who denounced their quest as merely ‘raking up the ashes’. In the first instance, that was understandable because the coming of democracy, quite properly, had not silenced those who had either benefited from the dictatorship or merely been educated to accept its monolithic version of the nation’s historical memory. However, the ferocity of the denunciation of the quest for the recovery of memory reflected something else, something very profound. This is the principal consequence of the process of brainwashing, what in Spain is called sociological Francoism, and it lives on in the democratic Spain of today just as sociological communism exists in the countries of the old Soviet bloc. The venom of the denunciations of the quest for the truth about the repression derives from the fact that there were also many historical memories among the victors and their descendants that have had to be repressed by the need to safeguard a false memory. The recovery of memory is distressing because it challenges the integrity of the reassuringly unified but ultimately false memories upon which the regime was reliant for its survival."
Tortured memories"One of the most celebrated cases of remorse was that of the poet Dionisio Ridruejo, who was a friend both of Serrano Suñer and of José Antonio Primo de Rivera and one of the founders of the Falange. In the late 1940s, he became disenchanted with the corruption of the Franco regime and reneged on his past. In the 1960s, he began to write critically about what had happened in the Civil War. He then formed a political association in timid opposition to the regime. An erstwhile comrade, Eugenio Montes, said to Ridruejo: ‘When someone like you has led hundreds of compatriots to their deaths, and then reaches the conclusion that the struggle was a mistake, it is just not enough to found a political party. A believer should become a monk; an agnostic should shoot himself.’3"
"It is impossible to say whether some of the exiguous evidence that exists derives from popular fantasy. The construction of the popular memory/mythology of those who suffered the repression may well have been fuelled by a desire to see the later misfortunes of the perpetrators as their just deserts on the basis of ‘the punishment fits the crime’. For instance, regarding Fuente de Cantos in Badajoz, there is a persistent belief that two of the men who played a particularly vicious part in the repression died with their consciences tormented by what they had done and by the hatred felt towards them in the town. One was a man notorious for denunciations which led to executions. He lived happily, apparently, during the entire period of the Franco regime, but when it became clear that the dictator was on his deathbed, he began to fear that the left was going to seek revenge and he committed suicide. The other case concerns the local head of the Falange, Sixto Castillón, the man that detained the Mayor José Lorenzana who was shortly afterwards ritually murdered in the town square. The popular recollection of Castillón is of a bestial individual who had killed many people including a child. After the war, he died in Seville. According to the popular legend, he died in an agony of remorse, tortured by fears of reprisals and by visions of the ghosts of his victims, constantly calling out the name of Lorenzana and unable to sleep because of hearing the persistent crying of the child that he had murdered.11"
"Another case of repentance in Salamanca was inadvertently triggered by one of José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s friends, Francisco Bravo, who wrote an article in La Gaceta Regional of Salamanca in celebration of the coup of 18 July 1936. A couple of days later, an anonymous reply arrived at the newspaper’s offices. It came from one of Bravo’s collaborators in the repression:
You don’t remember me. I was one of your comrades who swallowed the bait of killing people for the sake of it. I killed only five and I couldn’t continue participating in all that horror. To this day, I have those five brothers on my mind. Yes, even though it might surprise you, I call them brothers; they were human beings, creatures of God that I killed and I still want to believe that I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t kill in that way for God or for Spain. I leave it to you, if you’re able, if you have a conscience, if you are a believer, to choose the correct adjective for those victims … You should have said more in your article about everything that happened just in the area where you were the head of a Falangist militia. Maybe you’ve forgotten all that. Your last breath might be peaceful, without regrets, just like someone who did only good and knew nothing about hatred or revenge. Can you tell me that you are such a person? Comrade, I want a quick death. I live as a wreck, followed by the spectre of those whose memory I have been unable to erase for twenty-seven years. Forgive? I doubt that our victims can forgive us.14"
"A faster change of heart than Ridruejo’s came about in the case of Father Juan Tusquets. In the autumn of 1938, on the eve of the great rebel offensive against Catalonia, Franco and Serrano Suñer asked Tusquets to suggest names to head the institutions to be set up by the occupying forces. His advice led to the selection of the future Mayor of Barcelona, Miquel Mateu, and other important appointees.4 Despite such influence, after the Civil War, Tusquets surprisingly turned his back on preferment, declining both Serrano Suñer’s offer of the post of Director General of Press and Propaganda and Franco’s invitation for him to become religious adviser to the Higher Council of Scientific Research.5 Since, in previous years, Tusquets had revelled in his closeness to the epicentres of power and had shamelessly sought to accumulate salaries, the refusal of two such important and well-paid posts is noteworthy.
There are reasons for suspecting that the brutality of the Francoist occupation of Catalonia provoked some remorse in Tusquets for his part in fomenting the hatred that drove it. He began to construct a highly sanitized account of his role in the war and claimed later that he had tried to get people he knew out of concentration camps. This may be true but no evidence has come to light. Moreover, he maintained that he prevented major Catalan treasures such as the Archive of the Crown of Aragon and the Library of Catalonia from suffering the fate of so many other Catalan institutions whose books, documents and papers were seized and taken to Salamanca, a process which he had encouraged.6 Most implausibly of all, he alleged that it was not himself but his side-kick, Joaquim Guiu, who had been obsessive about Freemasonry.7 He denied any participation in the repression, claiming mendaciously that he had refused to let his lists of names be used by the military authorities. He denounced his wartime collaborator Mauricio Carlavilla as ‘a passionate Nazi’ who invented his material.8 In the light of these untruths, is not unreasonable to speculate that he was ashamed and horrified by the practical consequences of his anti-Masonic and anti-Jewish campaigns. Instead of accepting official preferment, he returned to religious education.
There is some second-hand evidence of the perpetrators of atrocities suffering some sort of psychosomatic illness or other distress as a result of repressed guilt. One of the men involved in the murder of Lorca, for instance, suffered in a way that suggested an element of remorse. Juan Luis Trescastro Medina died as an alcoholic in 1954 having spent years tormented by the memory of the atrocities in which he had been involved.9 In Lora del Río, one of the town’s three most prominent assassins had to leave his home because of the collective hostility of neighbours. When a second died, no one from the town was willing to carry his coffin. The third used to recount with guffaws how those that he shot in the stomach would first jump and then be doubled over. He himself died, doubled over in pain, from stomach cancer. Many fellow citizens decided that this was a form of divine retribution. They saw the same in the case of a trigger-happy assassin who later lost his thumb and trigger-finger in an industrial accident. There were popular claims that other perpetrators, on their deathbeds, were to be heard screaming, ‘They’re coming to get me!’ In Uncastillo in Zaragoza, it was believed that the Falangist who mutilated the corpse of Antonio Plano, the Mayor, lived in similar torment, terrified that he would be murdered in his bed in revenge for what he had done.10
More dramatic was a case in Ubrique (Cádiz). Local legend recounts a particularly gruesome tale of apparently psychosomatic illness provoked by guilt. A few days after the military coup, a group of Falangist assassins shot a number of Republican prisoners on the outskirts of the town. Among the first was the twelve-year-old son of a Gypsy named Diego Flores. One of them mocked Flores’s distress at witnessing the murder of his son, saying: ‘What now? Are you going to put the Gypsy’s curse on us?’ To which Flores replied: ‘Yes, you bastard, I am. May your flesh fall from you in pieces and may you die in atrocious pain.’ This man, who became rich from the properties that he stole from his victims, died in the late 1970s from a hideously painful form of leprosy.12
In Cantalpino, a village twenty-five miles north-east of Salamanca, where there had been no incidents before the war, rightists murdered twenty-two men and a woman named Eladia Pérez, as well as raping a number of other young women. When they came to bury Eladia, the hole in the ground was not big enough and, rather than dig more, the man who had shot her simply cut off her head with a spade. According to villagers, he was Anastasio González, ‘El Cagalubias’, who, years later, died delirious, screaming for Eladia to be pulled off him.13
In the town of Pozoblanco in Córdoba, the repression was particularly virulent. Three of those who took part later committed suicide. Juan Félix, ‘El Pichón’, threw himself from a moving train. Another, a lawyer, Juan Calero Rubio, killed himself apparently overcome with guilt about his role in the terror. Acting as a military judge, Calero had been responsible for hundreds of death sentences carried out against prisoners from several towns. He had also ordered the torture of many prisoners and had often taken part in the brutal beatings. In 1940, when the death sentence imposed on the postmaster of Villanueva was commuted, he ordered his immediate execution and then claimed that the pardon had arrived too late. The relative of the condemned man, an army officer, who had arranged the pardon, made an official complaint and, while awaiting trial, Calero poisoned himself on 28 August 1940, aged fifty-three. Another man who had taken part in many executions, a lieutenant of the Civil Guard known as ‘Pepinillos’, shot himself in the head at a dance held in the nearby village of Espiel to celebrate the outbreak of the Civil War.15 Another example of a suicide allegedly motivated by guilt is that of a man called Ortiz who was one of those responsible for much of the repression in San Fernando in Cádiz. Ortiz hung himself.16
The brother of Fernando Zamacola, the leader of the notorious Falangist gang known as the ‘Lions of Rota’ responsible for numerous atrocities in the province of Cádiz, spoke in the 1950s to the psychiatrist Carlos Castilla del Pino. Referring to the social injustice that prevailed in Franco’s Spain, he said: ‘And it was for this that we had to kill. Because I have killed. I’ve left more than one corpse in the ditches at Puerto de Tierra, lots in fact, I don’t know exactly how many, but I have killed and I’ve watched them die, and now those children are driving me mad. I have nightmares about them.’17"
Gonzalo de Aguilera"Finally, there is the case of the Conde de Alba de Yeltes, Gonzalo de Aguilera, the landowner from Salamanca who boasted of shooting six of his workers. After the Civil War, he retired from the army as a lieutenant colonel and returned to his estates and his books. He had difficulty readjusting to civilian life, although he became a well-known ‘character’ in Salamanca. He was an assiduous member of a group (tertulia), consisting mainly of doctors, who used to meet at the Café Novelty in the Plaza Mayor. His conversation was considered fascinating even if his irritability did not encourage friendship or intimacy.19 As he got older, he became increasingly abrasive and bad tempered. He neglected his estates and his house, both of which were badly run down.
He developed persecution mania. His wife Magdalena Álvarez, aged seventy-two, became so afraid of his violent rages that, in late 1963, for her own protection, she asked her two sons to come and live at home at the estate near Matilla de los Caños in the province of Salamanca. The elder son, Gonzalo, aged forty-seven, was a retired cavalry captain who had been seriously wounded in the Civil War. While in hospital, he had fallen in love with Concepción Lodeiro López, a nurse at the military hospital in Lugo. Aguilera had reacted furiously to his son’s relationship with a social inferior and had forbidden them to marry. They did so regardless and settled in Lugo, where they had a daughter, Marianela. The younger son, Agustín, a thirty-nine-year-old farmer, also had a difficult relationship with his father. Leaving home, he had settled first in Zamora, where he had married Angelines Núñez. More recently, they had moved to Jérez de la Frontera with their two daughters and young son. Given the inconvenience for their own families and aware of the irascibility of their father, the two sons reluctantly agreed to spend as much time as possible at the estate watching over him.
After a year, things had not improved. The family reluctantly contemplated having Gonzalo declared mentally incapacitated and placing him in psychiatric care. For fear of scandal and with a natural horror of the head of the household being declared insane, they hesitated. Finally, they put the matter in the hands of a lawyer in Salamanca. Because Gonzalo now suffered bronchial problems and rarely attended the gatherings in the café in the Plaza Mayor, it was possible to fabricate the pretext of a visit of two medical friends in order to have him diagnosed. One, a psychiatrist, and another, a doctor, reached the conclusion that Gonzalo was paranoiac and the process began to have him committed. The legal procedure, however, was lengthy and tortuous.
Gonzalo became so difficult that his sons rearranged the house to provide him with a separate apartment with his own television and his books. They hid all the many guns and knives that, as an assiduous hunter, he possessed. He believed himself to have been kidnapped and imprisoned by his family, even writing a letter to this effect to the judicial authorities in Salamanca, at the beginning of August 1964. He had wild fits of rage, shouting threats and insults from his solitary apartment. He would occasionally find weapons and, in mid-August, his sons took a flick-knife away from him.
Before anything could be done, Gonzalo completely lost his mind. After lunch, at four o’clock on the sultry afternoon of Friday 28 August 1964, his younger son Agustín went into the Conde’s room to look for some papers. When his father complained of sore feet, Agustín knelt and started to massage them. Don Gonzalo began to abuse his son, pulled out a rusty Colt revolver that he had hidden and shot Agustín without warning. Badly wounded in the chest, Agustín staggered out of the room. His brother Gonzalo, alerted by the sound of gunfire, ran into the room and the Conde shot him full in the chest and in the arm. Stepping over his elder son’s corpse, he then set off in search of Agustín in order to finish him off. He found him lying dead at the door of the kitchen. His wife then came out of her room. When she saw him glaring at her while he calmly reloaded his pistol over the body of his son, she locked herself in another room. Since the farm labourers stood back, frightened by the sight of Gonzalo waving his revolver threateningly, she was obliged to escape through a window. The Civil Guard was called by the estate workers and they ordered Gonzalo to throw down his gun and come out with his hands in the air, which, his fury spent, he did.
After surrendering, he sat outside the house for more than three hours, still in his pyjamas, quietly awaiting the investigating judge from Salamanca. His wife, beside herself with grief and rage, screamed at him ‘Assassin! Murderer!’ Until calmed down by the farm workers, she shouted to the Civil Guards, ‘Kill him, he’s a savage!’ He was arrested and taken to Salamanca by the Civil Guard. They travelled in a car with reporters from the local newspaper, La Gaceta Regional. The journalists who interviewed him recounted that, en route, he chatted amiably to the driver. He spoke about various cars that he had had at different times, about the traffic system in France and about the poor state of the roads. He explained: ‘I’m talking to put what has happened out of my mind.’ When he was told that he was being taken to a psychiatric clinic, he said that psychiatrists are not usually in their right minds and added, ‘I called the ones that visited me village quacks and they got angry with me.’20 Detained in the provincial psychiatric hospital in Salamanca, he apparently entertained himself by loudly insulting the nuns who staffed it.21 His daughter-in-law, Concepción Lodeiro, and granddaughter, Marianela de Aguilera Lodeiro, escaped the carnage because they had gone to Lugo to make the arrangements for Marianela’s wedding. The wife and three children of Agustín were in southern Spain. Gonzalo never stood trial and died in the hospital nearly eight months later on 15 May 1965.22"