Chapter 2: Theorists of extermination
"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."