Chapter 8: Revolutionary Terror in Madrid
"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"