Chapter 9: The Column of Death’s March on Madrid

"The ultimate goal of these columns was Madrid. However, the use of three columns advancing on a wide front made it clear that an equally central objective was to destroy the left in towns and villages along the way.1"

"The number of casualties among the Republican volunteers far exceeded those among the African columns. No prisoners were taken. Militiamen captured along the way were simply shot."

"On 20 July, the Popular Front Committees of towns within the Republican zone received orders from the Madrid government that ‘there should be no breakdown of law and order for any reason whatsoever’ and that measures should be taken ‘to prevent anyone taking advantage of the understandable nervousness of the population to commit offences against law-abiding persons or to take justice into their own hands’. Strikes were forbidden, by agreement with the Unión General de Trabajadores. On 28 July, the Civil Governors of each province passed on even stricter instructions from Madrid to local Popular Front Committees requiring them to announce that ‘the death penalty will be applied against anyone, whether belonging to a political entity or not, who attacks the life or property of others, since such crimes will be considered as acts of rebellion in the service of the enemy’. On 29 July, mayors were ordered not to touch the bank accounts of right-wingers in their towns.4"

"No such restraint was imposed upon the rebel columns. Moving north into Badajoz, with relative ease, they took El Real de la Jara, Monesterio, Llerena, Fuente de Cantos, Zafra and Los Santos de Maimona. In addition to raping and looting, the men of the columns of Asensio, Castejón and Tella annihilated real or supposed Popular Front sympathizers that they found, leaving a trail of bloody slaughter as they went. It was no coincidence that Badajoz was the province where the spontaneous occupations of estates in the spring of 1936 had seemed to end the injustice of the landholding system. The Africanistas’ execution of captured peasant volunteers was jokingly referred to as ‘giving them agrarian reform’.5

In fact, everywhere in the rebel zone where the Republic had decreed expropriations or legalized land occupations, the columns helped the owners take back the land. Previously neglected land had usually been improved by the laborious removal of stones, stubble and bracken and the clearing of ponds and streams. Moreover, the harvest was awaiting collection. Those who had carried out the improvements received no compensation for their labour, nor for the crops, stores, seeds, animals and tools that were pillaged along with the land. In most cases, they had already fled or been killed or imprisoned by the rebel forces. The repression was especially brutal against the men and women who had benefited from land redistribution under the Republic. They would be between 70 and 80 per cent of the total executed in Badajoz.6"

"Despite considerable class tension in Zafra, during the five months between the elections of February and the arrival of Castejón’s column, the Mayor, José González Barrero, had worked hard to restrain left-wing reprisals for the social abuses of 1933–5. There were some assaults on right-wingers and he was obliged to evacuate several religious communities. However, at considerable risk to his own life, he managed to ensure that no blood was shed. After the military coup, González Barrero presided over the town’s Popular Front Committee which imprisoned twenty-eight known supporters of the uprising. He prevented two attempts by radical elements to kill these prisoners. Nevertheless, in Zafra, which fell on 6 August virtually without resistance, as in Los Santos de Maimona, the repression was every bit as ferocious as in Fuente de Cantos. Forty people were shot on the first day of the military occupation of Zafra, and two hundred in total over the next months. At the end of the war, González Barrero found himself in Madrid. After Franco had announced that those without blood on their hands had nothing to fear, believing himself totally innocent, he returned home, was arrested and interned in the concentration camp of Castuera and executed at the end of April 1939.12

In all these towns, the occupying troops raped working-class women and looted the houses of leftists. Francoist officers admitted that Moroccan mercenaries were recruited with promises of pillage and that, when a town was captured, they were given free rein for two hours.13 Moorish soldiers and Legionarios selling radios, clocks, watches, jewellery and even items of furniture became a common sight in the towns of the south. The Falangist elements that undertook the repression after the columns had moved on also looted at will.14 When the columns moved northwards from Zafra, the deputy parish priest of the Church of La Candelaria, Juan Galán Bermejo, decided to join them as a chaplain. Thereafter, this tall, wavy-haired priest, with a large pistol in his belt, distinguished himself by the bloodthirsty ruthlessness with which he participated in the repression. On one occasion, discovering four men and a wounded woman in a cave near the border of Badajoz with Córdoba, he forced them to dig their own graves before shooting them and burying them wounded but still alive. He later boasted of personally killing more than one hundred leftists.15"

"This deliberate savagery constituted what one scholar has called ‘education through terror’. The aim was literally to bury for once and for all the aspiration of the landless peasants to collectivize the great estates. Using the excuse of the ‘red terror’, irrespective of whether there had actually been any crimes against the local conservatives, a vengeful bloodbath was unleashed by the rebel columns. In places where rightists had been protected by the Popular Front Committee, it was claimed that the columns had arrived just in time to prevent atrocities. Members of the Popular Front Committee found in a village would be shot. A similar fate awaited members of left-wing trade unions and many totally apolitical individuals unfortunate enough to be in the way. The ‘crimes’ of those executed were often unrelated to atrocities. The local right was outraged that, since the elections of February 1936, left-wing councils, in agreement with the Casas del Pueblo, had obliged the principal landowners to give jobs to unionized labour, forced them to pay wages outstanding since 1934 and prohibited religious ceremonies.19 During the spring and summer of 1936, wealthy middle-and upper-class inhabitants of the towns and villages of the rural south faced insults and impertinence from those that they regarded as their inferiors. This intolerable challenge to their social and economic status lay behind the approval of many conservatives for the brutality of the African columns.20

The latifundio system of sprawling estates, the dominant mode of landholding in Andalusia, Extremadura and Salamanca, made it easier for the owners to think of the bracero (labourer hired by the day) as sub-human and a ‘thing’ to be punished or annihilated for daring to rebel. To the owners, the entire experience of the Second Republic constituted a ‘rebellion’. After the bloodshed at Almendralejo, Franco ordered the columns of Asensio and Castejón to join together and press on to attack Mérida and Badajoz. With the local right reluctant to see him go until the left had been definitively eliminated from the town, Castejón requested units of the Civil Guard and armed Falangists and Carlists to finish the ‘cleansing’.21"

"Thereafter, he rose to a point where he had a virtually free hand in the repression. He was promoted to major on 11 August. In Mérida, he supervised nightly executions of men held in the Casino, which had been turned into an improvised prison. One of his prisoners was a liberal Republican, Dr Temprano. Each day for a month, Gómez Cantos would walk around the town centre with the doctor, taking note of anyone who greeted him. The doctor’s friends were thus identified and then arrested. Gómez Cantos himself shot the doctor. In February 1938, Queipo de Llano would send Gómez Cantos as Delegate for Public Order for Badajoz. Despite the fact that the repression under his predecessors had virtually eliminated the left, he had the idea of having a stripe of red paint brushed on to the jacket of anyone suspected of left-wing sympathies.26"

"Franco was fully aware of the columns’ superiority over untrained and poorly armed militias and he and his chief of staff, Colonel Francisco Martín Moreno, planned their operations accordingly. Intimidation and terror, euphemistically described as ‘castigo’ (punishment), were specified in written orders.28 Martín Moreno summed up the situation in an order of 12 August, in which he observed:

The quality of the enemy that faces us, with neither discipline nor military training, lacking trained leaders, and short of arms, ammunition and support services, means that, in combat, resistance is generally feeble … Our superiority in weaponry and our skilful use thereof permits us to achieve our objectives with very few casualties. The psychological impact of mortars or the accurate use of machine-gun fire is enormous on those who don’t have such weapons or don’t know how to use them.29"

"The use of terror was neither spontaneous nor an inadvertent side-effect. The Legion as well as the Regulares mutilated casualties, cutting off ears, noses, sexual organs and even heads. Such practices, along with the massacres of prisoners and the systematic rape of working-class women, were permitted by the rebel officers in Spain as they had been in Morocco by Franco and others. As had been the case in Asturias in 1934, they were useful in several ways. They indulged the bloodlust of the African columns, they eliminated large numbers of potential opponents and, above all, they generated a paralysing terror among others.30 The rebels were sufficiently uneasy about what they were doing to feel the need to conceal it. On or around 13 August, General Queipo de Llano was interviewed in Seville by the immensely sympathetic correspondent of the London Daily Mail, Harold Cardozo. Queipo de Llano assured the British journalist that:

Except in the heat of battle or in the capture by assault of a position, no men are shot down without being given a hearing and a fair trial in strict accordance with the rule of procedure of our military courts. The trials are held in public and those only are condemned to death who have personally taken part in murders and other crimes punishable according to our military code by death, or who by their position of authority are responsible for having allowed such crimes to be committed. I have taken thousands of prisoners, and today more than half of them are at liberty.31

However, Harold Pemberton, the correspondent of the equally pro-rebel Daily Express, reported that, after the capture of Mérida, members of the Legion tried to sell him and his photographer ‘Communist ears as souvenirs’.32"

Franco preferring purge over military victory

"After the occupation of Mérida, Yagüe’s troops turned south-west towards Badajoz, the principal town of Extremadura, on the banks of the River Guadiana near the Portuguese frontier. If the columns had hastened onwards to Madrid, the Badajoz garrison could not seriously have threatened them from the rear. Francoist military historians have implied that Yagüe turned to Badajoz on his own initiative. If this had been the case, he would have been in serious trouble with Franco, who made all the major daily decisions, which were then implemented by Yagüe. Franco personally supervised the operation against Mérida and, on the evening of 10 August, received Yagüe in his headquarters to discuss the capture of Badajoz and the next objectives. He wanted to knock out Badajoz to unify the two sections of the rebel zone and leave the left flank of the advancing columns covered by the Portuguese border. It was a strategic error, contributing to the delay which allowed the government to organize its defences. However, Franco, as he showed repeatedly during the war, was more concerned with a total purge of all conquered territory than with a quick victory.33"

"By diverting his troops to Toledo, Franco deliberately lost an unrepeatable chance to sweep on to the Spanish capital before its defences were ready. He was in no hurry to end the war before the captured territories had been purged and he was aware that an emotional victory and a great journalistic coup would strengthen his position within the rebel zone."

Denial of pensions to widows and children

"On 2 September in nearby Torremayor where, it will be recalled, no violence had occurred, a group of Falangist thugs arrived. They burst into the houses of the president of the Popular Front Committee, of its secretary, a schoolteacher, and of the president of the Casa del Pueblo. After searching the houses and stealing money and jewellery, the Falangists took the three men away and murdered them. When she heard the news, the seriously ill wife of the schoolteacher died, leaving two daughters, one aged twenty-one months and the other four years. Her brother, a senior Falangist in Seville, endeavoured to get some sort of pension for the children. This was refused because their father was not officially dead. "

Badajoz

"When Yagüe’s forces encircled the walled city, their reputation had preceded them. Badajoz had been flooded with refugees and, since the daily bombings had begun, the atmosphere in the city was of doom-laden anticipation. On 13 August, a rebel aircraft flew over the city and dropped thousands of leaflets carrying a dire warning signed by Franco. It read ‘Your resistance will be pointless and the punishment that you will receive will be proportionate. If you want to avoid useless bloodshed, capture the ringleaders and hand them over to our forces … Our triumph is guaranteed and, to save Spain, we will destroy any obstacles in our way. It is still time for you to mend your ways: tomorrow it will be too late.’ The leaflet clearly signalled the massacre to come.41"

"The Legionarios and Regulares, and the Falangists who had accompanied them, unleashed an orgy of looting in shops and houses, most of which belonged to the very rightists who were being ‘liberated’. ‘It is the war tax they pay for salvation,’ a rebel officer told the American journalist Jay Allen. Anything portable – jewellery and watches, radios and typewriters, clothing and bales of cloth – was carried off through streets strewn with corpses and running with blood. Hundreds of prisoners were rounded up and herded to the bullring. As night fell, drunken Moors and Falangists were still entering houses in the working-class districts, looting, raping women, dragging men out either to shoot them on the spot or to take them to the bullring. Many corpses were sexually mutilated. At the bullring, machine-guns were set up on the barriers around the ring and an indiscriminate slaughter began. On the first afternoon and evening, eight hundred were shot in batches of twenty. In the course of the night, another 1,200 were brought in. There were many innocent non-political civilians, men and women, Socialists, anarchists, Communists, middle-class Republicans, simple labourers and anyone with the bruise of a rifle recoil on their shoulders. No names were taken, no details checked. At 7.30 in the morning, the shootings began again. The screams of the dying could be heard many streets away. Accounts by survivors indicate that soon the firing squads were manned by Civil Guards.45

Over the next three days, as Yagüe’s columns prepared to move northwards, the Moors set up stalls to sell the watches, jewellery and furniture that they had looted. Yagüe himself stole a limousine belonging to the moderate Republican Luis Plá Alvarez. Together with his brother, Plá owned a thriving transport and automobile sales business. The two men had used their influence to save the lives of numerous right-wingers and had sheltered several religious in their homes, many of whom wrote appeals in their favour. They were taken out into the countryside by Civil Guards on 19 August, told that they were free to go and shot ‘while trying to escape’. Their businesses and goods were seized.46 Bishop Alcaraz Alenda had interceded on their behalf, but Yagüe told his messenger: ‘Tell the Bishop that they have already been shot this morning along with others so that the Bishop may live.’47 By the second day, cheering right-wing spectators were permitted to watch and to insult the prisoners. Even if there was not, as was later alleged in the Republican press, a simulacrum of a bullfight, men were certainly treated as if they were animals. With their amused officers looking on, Moorish troops and Falangists goaded the prisoners with bayonets. Franco’s General Staff and the Portuguese border police were working in close collaboration. Accordingly, hundreds of refugees attempting to flee into Portugal were turned back.48 The scenes in the bullring were witnessed by Portuguese landowners invited as a reward for handing over fleeing leftists.49"

"On Tuesday 18 August, four hundred men, women and children were taken by cavalry escorts from Caia in Portugal to Badajoz. Nearly three hundred of them were executed. Expeditions of Falangists were given free rein to enter Portugal in search of Spanish refugees. Jay Allen described the scene in Elvas:

This very day (August 23) a car flying the red and yellow banner of the Rebels arrived here. In it were three Phalanxists (Fascists). They were accompanied by a Portuguese lieutenant. They tore through the narrow streets to the hospital where Senor Granado [sic], Republican Civil Governor of Badajoz, was lying. The Fascists ran up the stairs, strode down a corridor with guns drawn, and into the governor’s room. The governor was out of his mind with the horror of the thing. The director of the hospital, Dr. Pabgeno, threw himself over his helpless patient and howled for help. So he saved a life.51"

"Among the many liberals, leftists, Freemasons and others brought back to be shot were the Mayor, Sinforiano Madroñero, and two Socialist deputies, Nicolás de Pablo and Anselmo Trejo. Dragged through the streets, their clothes ripped, their flesh bruised, they were executed as the culmination of an elaborate ceremony on 30 August, after a procession with a band and a field Mass. Colonel Cañizares informed Antonio Bahamonde, Queipo de Llano’s head of press and propaganda, that the later executions were accompanied by a military band playing the royal anthem and the Falangist hymn. Many spectators came from nearby Portugal and applauded frenetically as the executed fell. Nevertheless, many ordinary Portuguese families took in refugees from Badajoz and Huelva and several Portuguese army officers saved Spanish lives.52 In mid-October, 1,435 refugees were sent to Republican Spain in a boat from Lisbon to Tarragona.53"

"The historian Francisco Espinosa Maestre has demonstrated that the total number of casualties suffered by Yagüe’s men in the attack on Badajoz was 185, of whom 44 were killed and 141 wounded. The disproportion with the Republican casualties could hardly have been greater.54 Estimates of those killed in the subsequent repression vary from 9,000 to ‘between two and six hundred’. Many of those executed in the days following the initial massacre were either militiamen who had come to help defend the city, refugees who had fled there or prisoners brought there from other towns. Since they were shot without trial, their bodies disposed of in common graves or else incinerated, there is no record of them. Nevertheless, an exhaustive study by Dr Espinosa Maestre has shown that the number is at least 3,800. He has demonstrated that, even limiting the comparison to the small number of the known victims whose deaths were registered, there were more executions in Badajoz between August and December 1936 than in Huelva and Seville combined, despite the fact that Huelva’s population was 12.5 per cent larger than that of Badajoz and Seville’s more than 600 per cent. Moreover, in both Seville and Huelva, it was possible to compare the names in the city registries with the names of those buried in their respective cemeteries. In both cities, in addition to those inscribed in the registry, the cemeteries have records of unnamed corpses. In the case of Huelva, there were five times as many unknown as named dead; in the case of Seville, nearly six times as many. Extrapolating from this data for Badajoz, where there are no records of the unnamed dead buried in the cemetery, Espinosa Maestre calculates that the total number of killed in the city might have been around 5.5 times the number of the named dead.55"

"Another Portuguese journalist, Mario Pires of the Diário de Notícias, was so disturbed by the executions he had witnessed that he had to be interned in a mental institution in Lisbon. Castejón told Jorge Simões of the Diário da Manhã that 1,500 defenders had been killed, both in the fighting and afterwards. Simões wrote that 1,300 had been shot by the Legion in the first twenty-four hours after the conquest. Two days later, Felix Correia of the Diário de Lisboa, the journalist closest to Queipo de Llano, wrote that 1,600 had been executed. Yagüe himself commented on 15 August, ‘After the final clean-up tomorrow, everything will be ready for a more extended operation. Now, with the Muscovites liquidated, this is a Spanish city once more.’57"

"On 17 August, the cameraman René Brut of Pathé newsreels arrived and was able to film piles of bodies, for which act of courage he was later imprisoned and threatened with death by the insurgent authorities.58 Some days later, Franco sent a telegram to Queipo de Llano with instructions for the strict control of photographers, ‘even those from Nationalist newspapers’, although this was to conceal the delivery of German and Italian war material as much as to hide the atrocities committed by his columns.59 It was the beginning of a massive campaign by the rebel authorities and their foreign supporters to deny that the massacre at Badajoz had taken place. Their cause was not helped when Yagüe cheerfully boasted to the journalist John Whitaker, ‘Of course, we shot them. What do you expect? Was I supposed to take four thousand Reds with me as my column advanced racing against time? Was I expected to turn them loose in my rear and let them make Badajoz Red again?’ In a town of 40,000 people, the killings may have reached nearly 10 per cent of the population.60"

"According to Yagüe’s biographer, in ‘the paroxysm of war’ it was impossible to distinguish pacific citizens from leftist militiamen, the implication being that it was perfectly acceptable to shoot prisoners. Another semi-official military historian of the rebel war effort, Luis María de Lojendio, later mitred Abbot of the monastery of the Valle de los Caídos, not only claimed that the defending forces were greater but also managed to explain away the deaths among them with pious sophistry:

A really criminal war is that in which chemical or technological mechanisms destroy human life pointlessly. But this was not the case in Badajoz. The material advantage, the fortress and the barricades, lay with the Marxists. The men of Lieutenant Colonel Yagüe triumphed because of that indubitably spiritual superiority which maintains in combat the will to win, the virtues of sacrifice and discipline. The streets of Badajoz were sown with corpses. Well, war is a hard and cruel spectacle.61"

"In late August, as the Basque towns of Irún and Fuenterrabía were being shelled from the sea and bombed from the air, the rebels dropped pamphlets threatening to deal with the population as they had dealt with the people of Badajoz. In consequence, panic-stricken refugees headed for France.62 The events of Badajoz were also meant as a message to the inhabitants of the capital as to what would happen when the columns reached Madrid."

"In some villages, the rightist prisoners were beaten and, in others, murdered. The cases where this happened were greatly outnumbered by those where the local authorities prevented atrocities being committed by militiamen from other villages bent on revenge for the horrors committed by the African columns."

"The subsequent revenge was wildly disproportionate. Where there had been murders of right-wingers, those killed in reprisal were rarely the perpetrators, who had usually fled. The executions were justified on the specious grounds that the left had intended to kill all the prisoners but had not done so thanks to the arrival of the column. Similarly, although there were generalized allegations of sexual abuse of right-wing women prisoners, specific accusations tend to centre on intentions which had been thwarted by members of the Defence Committees. The leftist authorities did not have a programme of extermination like that of the military rebels."

"The repression continued throughout the province. One of the devices used to capture leftists was broadcasts of ‘edicts of pardon’ to the effect that those who gave themselves up voluntarily would face no reprisals. Those naive enough to do so rarely lived to tell the tale."

Queipos rhetoric

"In the course of the advance, Queipo de Llano outdid even his own record in misogynist remarks on 29 August when he referred to the capture between Navalmoral de la Mata and Talavera de la Reina of Republican women. Gloating over the savagery of the repression, he fed widespread fears that women were given to Moroccan mercenaries for gang rape, remarking with relish, ‘Great quantities of munitions, ten trucks and many prisoners, including women, have fallen into our hands. The Regulares will be delighted and Pasionaria will be really jealous.’ The sexual comment appeared in ABC but was censored in the other Seville paper, La Unión.76 It was shortly after this broadcast that Queipo de Llano’s chief of staff, Major Cuesta Monereo, issued orders to the press not to publish the exact words of the broadcasts because ‘they are not appropriate and their publication is not convenient’. A journalist who read transcripts of the complete broadcasts observed later, ‘they were nauseating. The published versions were censored to eliminate their crudity.’77"

"Queipo’s verbal excesses were often excused as the result of his being drunk, although efforts were made to suggest that he was teetotal. The Bloomsbury Group exile Gerald Brenan, who lived near Málaga, referred to ‘his whisky voice’. Brenan’s wife, the writer Gamel Woolsey, wrote:

I am told that he does not drink at all, but he has the mellow loose voice and the cheerful wandering manner of the habitual drinker. He talks for hours always perfectly at ease, sometimes he stumbles over a word and corrects himself with a complete lack of embarrassment, speaks of ‘these villainous Fascistas’ and an agonized voice can be heard behind him correcting him, ‘No, no, mi General, Marxistas.’ ‘What difference does it make’ – says the general and sweeps grandly on.78

The actor Edmundo Barbero recalled this notorious occasion on which Queipo revealed his contempt for the Falange, referring to ‘the fascist scum’, only to be corrected nervously by the hushed whisper of one of his staff ‘Marxist scum’"

Journalists reports

"The columns reached Talavera de la Reina on 3 September.80 The American journalist John T. Whitaker, who travelled with them, gained the confidence of Varela, Yagüe, Castejón and other officers. They helped him avoid the rigid controls imposed on the majority of correspondents from the democracies who were transported to the front only after a battle and escorted by Franco’s propaganda staff. Such limits were rarely imposed on the newsmen from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Whitaker took a room in Talavera as his base for visits to the front. There he established a relationship with José Sainz, the provincial head of the Falange in Toledo. Sainz showed him a neatly kept notebook, saying: ‘I jot them down. I have personally executed 127 red prisoners.’ Of his two months at Talavera de la Reina, Whitaker wrote:

I slept there on an average of two nights a week. I never passed a night there without being awakened at dawn by the volleys of the firing squads in the yard of the Cuartel. There seemed no end to the killing. They were shooting as many at the end of the second month as in my first days in Talavera. They averaged perhaps thirty a day. I watched the men they took into the Cuartel. They were simple peasants and workers, Spanish Milquetoasts. It was sufficient to have carried a trade-union card, to have been a Freemason, to have voted for the Republic. If you were picked up or denounced for any one of these charges you were given a summary, two-minute hearing and capital punishment was formally pronounced. Any man who had held any office under the Re public was, of course, shot out of hand. And there were mopping-up operations along the roads. You would find four old peasant women heaped in a ditch; thirty and forty militiamen at a time, their hands roped behind them, shot down at the crossroads. I remember a bundle in a town square. Two youthful members of the Republican assault guards had been tied back to back with wire, covered with gasoline and burned alive.

On 21 September, Yagüe’s forces captured the town of Santa Olalla. Whitaker was appalled by the shooting of captured militiamen in the main street:

I can never forget the first time I saw the mass execution of prisoners. I stood in the main street of Santa Olalla as seven trucks brought in the militiamen. They were unloaded and herded together. They had that listless, exhausted, beaten look of troops who can no longer stand against the steady pounding of the German bombs. Most of them had a soiled towel or a shirt in their hands – the white flags with which they had signalled their surrender. Two Franco officers passed out cigarettes among them and several Republicans laughed boyishly and self-consciously as they smoked their first cigarette in weeks. Suddenly an officer took me by the arm and said, ‘It’s time to get out of here.’ At the edge of this cluster of prisoners, six hundred-odd men, Moorish troopers were setting up two machine guns. The prisoners saw them as I saw them. The men seemed to tremble in one convulsion, as those in front, speechless with fright, rocked back on their heels, the color draining from their faces, their eyes opening with terror.81"

"As part of the operation to justify the massacre at Badajoz, Luis Bolín, the head of Franco’s propaganda apparatus, published photographs of the rebel killings at Talavera de la Reina, presenting them as left-wing atrocities encountered by the columns at Talavera la Real, between Mérida and Badajoz. In fact, Antonio Bahamonde, Queipo’s propaganda chief, recounted how the corpses of both battle casualties and executed men and women were frequently mutilated and then photographed to fabricate evidence of Republican atrocities.84"

"Noel Monks of the Daily Express wrote: ‘In Talavera, because not much was going on at the front, one was fed on a steady diet of atrocity propaganda; the things the Reds did as they fell back into Madrid. And the strange thing was that the Spanish troops I met – Legionaires, Requetés and Falangists – bragged openly to me of what they’d done when they took over from the Reds. But they weren’t atrocities. Oh no, señor. Not even the locking up of a captured militia girl in a room with twenty Moors. No, señor. That was fun.’85 According to Edmund Taylor of the Chicago Tribune, a militia girl captured near Santa Olalla was locked in a big room with fifty Moors.86 John T. Whitaker witnessed a scene on the road to Madrid similar to those related by Monks and Taylor. He knew that gang rape was a frequent occurrence:

These ‘regenerators’ of Spain rarely denied, too, that they deliberately gave white women to the Moors. On the contrary, they circulated over the whole front the warning that any woman found with Red troops would meet that fate. The wisdom of this policy was debated by Spanish officers in a half-dozen messes where I ate with them. No officer ever denied that it was a Franco policy. But some argued that even a Red woman was Spanish and a woman. This practice was not denied by El Mizzian, the only Moroccan officer in the Spanish Army. I stood at the cross-roads outside Navalcarnero with the Moorish major when two Spanish girls, not out of their teens, were brought before him. One had worked in a textile factory in Barcelona and they found a trade-union card in her leather jacket. The other came from Valencia and said she had no politics. After questioning them for military information, El Mizzian had them taken into a small schoolhouse where some forty Moorish soldiers were resting. As they reached the doorway an ululating cry rose from the Moors within, I stood horrified in helpless anger. El Mizzian smirked when I remonstrated with him. ‘Oh, they’ll not live more than four hours,’ he said.87"

Toledo

"Luis Bolín ensured that no correspondents were permitted to enter Toledo for two days during the bloodbath that followed its occupation. Father Risco wrote with relish of ‘a second day of extermination and punishment’. It was hardly surprising that Bolín would not want newspapermen reporting the atrocities taking place while, in the words of Yagüe, ‘we made Toledo the whitest town in Spain’.98 What the journalists witnessed, when they were allowed in on 29 September, shocked them deeply. Webb Miller of the United Press saw pools of fresh blood which denoted a mass execution only just before the reporters arrived. At many other places, he saw pools of clotted blood, often with a militia cap lying next to them. John Whitaker reported that ‘The men who commanded them never denied that the Moors killed the wounded in the Republican hospital. They boasted of how grenades were thrown in among two hundred screaming and helpless men.’ Whitaker was referring to the Tavera Hospital, housed in the hospice of San Juan Bautista on the outskirts of Toledo. Webb Miller also reported on what happened there, claiming that two hundred militiamen were burned to death when the grenades were thrown in. As in Badajoz, most of the shops had been looted as a ‘war tax’. At the maternity hospital, more than twenty pregnant women were forced from their beds, loaded on to a truck and taken to the municipal cemetery where they were shot. The hostages in the Alcázar had already been shot. Webb Miller told Jay Allen that, after he saw what the rebels did to the wounded and to the nurses and the doctors in the hospital in Toledo, ‘he came close to going off his rocker’.99 Father Risco describes men and women committing suicide to avoid capture by the African columns. Those who were taken in the house-to-house searches, he commented, ‘had to die’. They were rounded up and conveyed to different town squares where they were shot in groups of twenty or thirty.100 More than eight hundred people were shot and then buried in a mass common grave in the municipal cemetery. Nothing more was known of the executed hostages.101"

Chaplain denied sainthood by Vatican

"An insight into the behaviour of the columns during the march on Madrid is provided by the extraordinary experience of one of its chaplains, Father Fernando Huidobro Polanco. A thirty-four-year-old Jesuit from Santander, he had spent the last few years pursuing theological studies in Portugal, Germany, Holland and Belgium. He regarded the Republic as a pigsty and, while still in Belgium, he wrote in justification of the massacre of Badajoz that it was an isolated event provoked by the atrocities of the reds.102 In late August, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Father Wlodimiro Ledochowski, a keen sympathizer of the rebels, granted Huidobro’s request to return to Spain. On reaching Pamplona, he discovered that there was a surfeit of priests keen to join the rebels and so he went on to Valladolid, where he briefly served with the Falangist militia. From there, he went to Franco’s headquarters in Cáceres and was granted an audience. Franco said: ‘A warning, Father. You and your companions should do all you can for the good of Spanish soldiers, but, for various common-sense reasons, refrain from trying to convert the Moors.’ Huidobro wanted to join the Foreign Legion as a chaplain, so Franco sent him to see Yagüe at Talavera de la Reina. On 8 September, Yagüe agreed.103

The slight, bespectacled Huidobro, a one-time pupil of Heidegger, was initially received with ribaldry by the brutal Legionarios whose spiritual welfare he had come to tend. His bravery impressed some, but others were irritated by his efforts to persuade them to make confession, to stop gambling and to avoid prostitutes. During the advance on Madrid, and particularly in Toledo, Father Huidobro witnessed a number of atrocities. His efforts to prevent the shooting of prisoners or, as his biographer put it, ‘to save them from the just fury of his men’, did not endear him to the merciless Legionarios. He tried to justify what he saw: ‘our style is clean. Our procedures are different from theirs. They shoot, they torture, they exterminate. But they are criminals. We, because we are Christians and gentlemen, know how to fight.’ In this spirit, he gave prior absolution to the men of his unit before they went into action. However, he found their savagery disturbing since it damaged the image of the cause in which he fervently believed. He tried to protect the wounded and, when he could, attended to the spiritual needs of those about to be shot.104

Accordingly, in the lull that followed the fall of Toledo, he wrote down his reflections on the issue in two papers for ‘the military authorities’ and for the Military Legal Corps. Both papers were sent to the military authorities on 4 October. Under the heading, ‘On the Application of the Death Penalty in the Present Circumstances. Rules of Conscience’, he proposed that the ‘justice’ being exercised should not lead to excesses that besmirched the honour of the army. He argued against ‘the war of extermination advocated by some’ on the grounds that it would create lasting hatreds that would make the war last longer and impede reconciliation, deprive Spain of labour for its reconstruction and damage the country’s international reputation. He asserted that ‘Every wholesale condemnation, wherein no effort is made to ascertain if there are innocents among the crowd of prisoners, is to commit murder, not perform an act of justice … To kill those who have thrown down their arms or surrendered is always a criminal act.’

In the paper sent to the Military Legal Corps, he justified the death penalty for leftist murderers of women, priests and the innocent, and for Communists, or those ‘who, through the medium of a newspaper, a book or a pamphlet, have agitated the masses’. However, he suggested that membership of a left-wing trade union such as the CNT or UGT deserved not death but prison or a labour camp. He went on to denounce as murder the execution of those whose guilt had not been proven. His final words would not have endeared him to his readers: ‘the procedure being followed is deforming Spain and ensuring that instead of being a chivalrous and generous people, we are turning into a people of murderers and informers. The things that are happening make those of us who have always considered ourselves above all else to be Spaniards begin to be ashamed that we were born in this land of implacable cruelty and endless hatred.’105

It took great courage to stand up against the blanket savagery of the Legion. He sent both papers to many officers and to other chaplains and they were seen by both Castejón and Varela. Castejón was outraged. In front of other chaplains, he commented that Huidobro’s papers were ‘a kick in the teeth’.106 On 14 November 1936, when the army was on the outskirts of Madrid, Father Huidobro wrote to Varela to say that his glorious name should not be stained by the bloodletting that some junior officers were planning in order to teach the Madrileños a lesson. If a massacre were to take place, Huidobro feared that Varela’s name would go down in history ‘as monstrous and linked to the most cruel and barbaric deed of modern times’. After his forces had failed to take Madrid, Varela replied on 3 December from Yuncos in Toledo, congratulating Huidobro on his sentiments and claiming to share them.107

Father Huidobro had also written on 4 October to Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Díaz Varela, adjutant to General Franco, asking him to hand on to the Generalísimo copies of his two papers. Given Franco’s more pressing concerns, Díaz Varela passed Father Huidobro’s reflections to Yagüe, who commanded the division to which Huidobro’s unit belonged. Since the atrocities were part of a deliberate policy, Yagüe did nothing. Frustrated, Huidobro continued to make a nuisance of himself. He wrote a letter to Franco drawing his attention to:

the haste with which the execution takes place of people whose guilt is not only not proven but not even investigated. This is what is happening at the front, where every prisoner is shot, irrespective of whether he was deceived or forced to fight or even if he has sufficient capacity to understand the evil of the cause for which he was fighting. This is a war with neither wounded nor prisoners. Militiamen are shot for the mere fact of being militiamen without being given a chance to speak or to be questioned. Thus many are dying who do not deserve such a fate and who could mend their ways.

Since he was describing the usual practice of the Army of Africa, it was obvious that nothing would be done. Nevertheless, his letter, for all its naivety, constituted an astonishing act of courage.108

He wrote again to Díaz Varela on 10 November 1936 describing as ‘iniquitous and criminal’ the general order that anyone found with arms should be summarily shot. He called instead for them to be taken prisoner, interrogated and then, if ‘guilty’, sent to punishment camps. He asserted that ‘the limitless executions on a scale never before seen in history’ provoked the dogged resistance of the desperate Republicans who knew that there was no point in surrender. He went on to draw conclusions about the reaction in Madrid to the massacre that followed the fall of Toledo: ‘If they knew that in Toledo the wounded were murdered in the hospitals, would they need to know anything more about our harsh barbarity? Already some say that when we reach Madrid, we should shoot the wounded in the hospitals. We are falling back into barbarism and we are corrupting people’s morals with so much irresponsible killing. Previously, no one was killed until their guilt had been proved; now people are killed in order to hide their innocence.’ Huidobro begged Díaz Varela to raise the matter with Franco and had the temerity to suggest that he might go public: ‘Up to now, I have made my observations prudently and without raising my voice. Now the time has come to cry out. I do not fear either the right or the left but only God.’ He ended in dramatic terms: ‘I have witnessed murders, as we all have, and I do not want the new regime to be born with blood on its hands.’109

Díaz Varela finally replied on 25 November to say that Franco had been appalled to hear about the excesses that Huidobro had denounced and was determined to punish all those responsible. It goes without saying that nothing was done. Himself in hospital after being wounded, Huidobro knew that the shootings were continuing on the same scale but chose to believe that Franco was sincere. Over the next months, Huidobro became ever more vocal about the need for an eventual reconciliation of both sides. A number of officers told him that if he continued to preach his message ‘they’re going to shoot you’. On 11 April 1937, Huidobro was killed at Aravaca on the outskirts of Madrid, allegedly by shrapnel from an exploding Russian shell. This detail helped initially when, in 1947, the process was put in train by the Jesuits for his beatification and canonization. Huidobro had saved lives and lived a thoroughly Christian existence. However, in the course of the thorough investigation of the case instituted by the Vatican, it emerged that he had been shot in the back by one of the Legionarios of his own unit, tired perhaps of the preaching of his chaplain. When it was discovered that Huidobro had been killed by the Francoists and not by the reds, the Vatican shelved his case.110"

Chapter 10: A Terrified City Responds: The Massacres of Paracuellos