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"