Chapter 13: No Reconciliation: Trials, Executions, Prisons
Almeria
"When he visited recently conquered Almería on 11 April 1939, Queipo de Llano declared that ‘Almería must make an act of contrition.’ This provoked a Falangist assault on the provincial prison and the murder of at least three prisoners. Formal executions began two weeks later on 25 April; 1,507 people were tried in 1939, another 1,412 in 1940, and 1,717 in 1941 – a total of 6,269 between 1939 and 1945, but the number executed, 375, was the lowest in any Andalusian province. This is because many leftists had protected rightists from the repression and, unusually, the rightists now returned the favour. The squeezing of more than six thousand prisoners into a prison built for five hundred led inevitably to conditions of malnutrition and minimal hygiene. However, this accounts only in part for the notably high level of 227 deaths of prisoners, many of them young men, suspiciously registered as victims of cardiac failure.24"
Alicante
"Much of the suffering undergone in the recently conquered areas was the direct consequence of the Casado coup. Cipriano Mera had made a worthless promise that if the self-styled National Defence Council did not secure an honourable peace his men would fight on. However, while the prisoners were being handed over to the Francoists and others fled to the eastern coast, all the members of Casado’s Junta who wished to escape were evacuated from Gandía on the British destroyer Galatea in the early hours of the morning of 30 March 1939.29 Betrayed by Casado’s coup, tens of thousands of desperate Republican men, women and children fled from Madrid on 28 March pursued by Falangists. They headed for Valencia and Alicante. They had been promised that there would be ships to take them into exile. In fact, there was no chance of that. The French company normally used by the Republic refused to undertake any evacuation on the grounds that it had had no dealings with Casado, only with Negrín. It also claimed to be owed money. Moreover, the Republican fleet had abandoned Spain and landed in Bizerta in Algeria. Therefore, there was no protection against the rebel fleet blockading the Spanish ports of the eastern Mediterranean, under orders from Franco to permit no refugees to escape."
"Back in Alicante, over the next few days, those who had arrived too late were joined by thousands more refugees from all over the remaining Republican territory. In despair, many committed suicide, some drowning themselves, others shooting themselves.32 Some ships came into view but, with their captains fearful of interception by the rebel navy, they either left empty or turned back before even reaching the dockside. Having already recognized Franco, neither London nor Paris was prepared to let its navies intervene against the rebel fleet. The refugees waited in vain for three and a half days without food or water. Children died of inanition. The Mexican government offered to take all the refugees, but Franco refused, declaring that they were all prisoners of war and must face the consequences. On Friday 31 March, the city was occupied by Italian forces. There was a repetition of what had happened to the Basque Army at Santoña. The Italians undertook to arrange evacuation if the thousands of Republicans gave up their weapons. After they had done so, the Italians were overruled once more by Franco. When two ships carrying Francoist troops arrived, the majority of the refugees were taken away and the remainder followed the next morning.33 Families were violently separated and those who protested were beaten or shot. The women and children were transferred to Alicante, where they were kept for a month packed into a cinema with little food and without facilities for washing or changing their babies. The men – including boys from the age of twelve – were taken either to the bullring in Alicante or to a large field outside the town, the Campo de los Almendros, so called because it was an orchard of almond trees.34"
"Food and fresh water were as scarce as they had been in the Campo de los Almendros or the bullring. The prisoners were fed on only four occasions between 11 and 27 April, when they were given approximately sixty-five grams of sardines and sixty grams of bread on 11, 15, 20 and 27 April. Only the youngest and strongest survived as spectres of their former selves, prematurely aged and skeletal. It rained solidly for the first two weeks. Forced to sleep in mud, in soaking-wet clothes, many caught fevers and died. In the open, in mud that got ever deeper as the rain drove in, they were afflicted with plagues of mosquitoes, fleas and other parasites. Since there was no sanitation, many died of malaria, typhus and dysentery. There were few latrines, and the holes over which they were placed were not emptied and soon overflowed. Although there were many doctors among the prisoners, they had no access to medicines. To add to the humiliations of diarrhoea and constipation, many prisoners, tormented by scurvy, mange, fleas and other parasites, could barely remain upright during the daily rituals during which they were kept standing for hours. Twice a day, they had to sing Francoist anthems. Any mistakes with the lyrics were punished with beatings. On a daily basis, when commissions came from towns and villages looking for their enemies, the prisoners were expected to stand often for as long as four hours, being insulted throughout. Those taken away were often shot near by by commissions too impatient to wait until they reached their towns of origin.39 Such conditions were replicated in camps all over Spain."
General prison conditions
"The anarchist journalist Eduardo de Guzmán recounted how he was taken to Madrid from Albatera in mid-June 1939 in a group that included Ricardo Zabalza, José Rodriguez Vega, the secretary general of the UGT, and David Antona, who, as secretary of the Madrid CNT, had tried to restrain the sacas and was later Civil Governor of Ciudad Real. It will be recalled that, as Civil Governor of Valencia, Zabalza had played a key role in halting the excesses of the anarchist Iron Column. The group was split up, and individuals were detained in any police station that happened to have room. They were packed together with twenty to thirty men in cells meant for two. With non-existent hygiene, they were persecuted by fleas and scabies. They were barely fed, receiving in the morning a quantity of filthy water with some malt that was presented as coffee, and at midday and in the evening a bowl of equally filthy water in which floated the occasional bits of carrot or turnip that was presented as soup or stew. For their survival, they had to depend on food parcels sent in by their families. With their breadwinners dead, in exile, on the run or in jail, the families were impoverished. Excoriated as worthless red scum, their chances of work were minimal. They still sent in food parcels at the cost of going hungry themselves. Many had no family in Madrid, or in whichever town they were imprisoned, but a spirit of solidarity prevailed and the more fortunate shared their parcels with them.
The dreadful conditions were merely the background to the central experience for most prisoners. In the police station in the Calle Almagro, where Eduardo de Guzmán was detained, they were repeatedly subjected to savage beatings for days without actually being asked any questions. It was part of a softening-up process. The beatings were delivered not by professional policemen but by men who had worked in the checas but now claimed to have been fifth columnists acting as provocateurs. There were humiliating rituals such as attempts to force them to beat each other up or immersing them in toilets full of faecal matter. Sometimes, the beatings went too far and the prisoner would be killed. There were many cases of prisoners who found a way of committing suicide rather than take the pain. They thereby avoided the risk of breaking down and confessing to something they had or had not done or even worse of becoming an informer. Several did break. In the end, nearly all prisoners would be forced to sign ‘declarations’ and confessions without being allowed to read them. Thus anyone who happened to be from Vallecas was held responsible for the massacre of rightists on the trains from Jaén, and those from Carabanchel were assumed guilty of the murder of General López Ochoa, even if they had been fighting on a distant front at the time.42
In Madrid, Zabalza was tortured but wrote no confession. He was tried on 2 February 1940 and shot at dawn on the 24th. One of the principal charges against him was that he had organized the perfectly legal harvest strike of the summer of 1934. Shortly before he was led out to the firing squad, he wrote to his parents:
When you read these lines, I will be just a memory. Men who describe themselves as Christians have wished it so and I, who never knowingly did anyone harm, submit myself to this test with the same clear conscience that has ruled my entire life. You in the simplicity of your religious faith will never be able to understand how a man who committed no crime – even the prosecutor recognized that – and against whom there are no accusations of any shameful act should suffer the death that awaits him.43"
"One of the most notable cases of a confession extracted after torture was that of the FAI assassin Felipe Sandoval. Already suffering from advanced tuberculosis, he was beaten mercilessly for days on end. Bones broken in his chest, he would lie groaning in agony, coughing blood. He would be beaten again until he cleaned up the blood. Eventually, after repeated hours of being kicked and punched in the chest and stomach, he began to give up the names of comrades on the run, stating where they were to be found. Under threat of further beatings, and barely able to speak, he was forced to confront his fellow prisoners. He repeated, parrot-fashion, the accusations which his torturers had instructed him to make. Most of the prisoners already regarded Sandoval with disgust but, once they discovered his treachery, this turned into hatred. The general consensus was that his lack of moral fibre proved that, far from being a warrior in the social struggle, he was merely a thief and an assassin. They set about persuading him to commit suicide. Whether in response to their arguments or to his own suffering, finally on 4 July 1939 he threw himself from a window and died in the patio below. The anarchist Amor Nuño, who negotiated the agreement between the CNT and the JSU for the evacuation of prisoners from Madrid that led to the massacre of Paracuellos, was beaten to death in the Dirección General de Seguridad.44"
"When Guzmán and others had finally signed their ‘confessions’, they were transferred to prisons. In the truck carrying Guzmán, the driver visited nine prisons before he could find one which would admit the prisoners. Eventually, they were allowed into Yeserías in the southern outskirts of the city near Carabanchel. Food was scarce. After each meal, they were obliged to line up in the gallery for at least an hour and sing the Falangist, Carlist and monarchist anthems, ‘Cara al Sol’, ‘Oriamendi’ and the ‘Marcha Real’, with their right arms outstretched in the fascist salute. The ceremony would end with them having to shout ‘¡Viva Franco! ¡Viva la Falange!’ and the ritual chant of ‘¡España, una, España, grande, España, libre!’ Those considered to be singing with insufficient gusto would be taken out and punished by having their heads shaved, being beaten, sometimes even being shot. The most common punishment was for them to be obliged to stand singing, arm outstretched, for four or five hours. Most week nights, those sentenced to death there would be executed.45
Eduardo de Guzmán’s trial was similar to that of Juan Caba Guijarro. More than thirty prisoners, accused of various ‘crimes’, were tried at the same time. One defender was named for all of them and they had no chance to talk to him until the eve of the trial. The prior assumption of the court was that all were guilty as charged. It was up to the accused to prove their innocence, but they were not usually allowed to speak. Theoretically, if they were accused of killing a named victim on a specific date in a specific place, and if they had not been in that place at that time, there was the slight possibility that they might be able to be heard and thus prove their innocence. However, it was common for someone to be accused of numerous murders without the victims, the times or the places being specified.46
The accusations were based on the declarations that, after weeks of beatings and torture, they had signed but not been allowed to read. Accordingly, the prisoners had little prospect of being found innocent. One of the women recounted to Guzmán the torture that had obliged her to sign a false confession of having participated in murders in the Checa del Cine Europa. She showed him how her breasts had been horribly deformed as a result of being burned with lighters and matches until sections of flesh had burned away. Her nipples had been ripped off with staplers.47"
"On the day that Guzmán was tried, nearly two hundred men and sixteen women were tried in four trials which lasted little more than two hours. In Guzmán’s trial, the proceedings started with the reading by the clerk of the charges against the twenty-nine accused. This was done in a nearly inaudible, mechanical monotone. The fact that the charges were incomprehensible bothered only the accused and their families. The judges, the prosecutor and the defending lawyer gave no sign of being interested. The charges that could be deciphered were wildly disparate, ranging from membership of a checa to having set fire to a church, been a political commissar in the Republican army, been an officer or simply been a volunteer. One of Guzmán’s fellow defendants was the poet Miguel Hernández, who was accused both of having been a Communist commissar and of having written poems that were injurious to the Francoist cause. Guzmán himself was accused of being an editor of the newspaper La Tierra and of being the director of Castilla Libre, of insulting the rebel leaders and exaggerating Republican triumphs and of being responsible for the crimes committed by the readers of both newspapers. After the reading of the charges, there was cross-examination by the prosecutor. The prisoners were allowed to answer only yes or no. No witnesses were called. The members of the tribunal then took a recess. When they returned, the prosecutor gave a twenty-minute speech during which he accused the prisoners of being sub-human scum, cowards, criminals, illiterate savages, thieves and murderers.
All of the crimes of the bulk of the prisoners were then attributed to the inspiration of Hernández and Guzmán. The pages of La Tierra and Castilla Libre were alleged to have caused the electoral victory of the Popular Front in February 1936, the fire and subsequent massacre in the Cárcel Modelo in August that year and the resistance of Madrid in November. The prosecutor seemed unaware or unconcerned that La Tierra had closed down in May 1935 and that Castilla Libre was not created until February 1937. The defending lawyer, who had not been allowed to speak to any of the prisoners until the previous evening, had not received the files of all twenty-nine, nor those of others that he had to defend later, and had barely had time to skim over them. He basically asked for the accused to be given the sentence inferior to that demanded by the prosecutor – life imprisonment instead of the death penalty, thirty years instead of life imprisonment and so on. When the accused were allowed to speak, they were interrupted as soon as they opened their mouths. When Guzmán tried to point out the prosecutor’s error in accusing him of publishing in non-existent newspapers, he was ordered to sit down and told that the court already knew everything he could possibly say."
"The human cost of forced labour, the deaths and the suffering of the workers and their families were matched by the fortunes made by the private companies and the public enterprises that exploited them. The penal columns provided labour for mines, railway building and the reconstruction of the so-called ‘devastated regions’. Stone walls were erected around coal mines in Asturias, the Basque Country and León so that prisoners could be used to dig coal. Many would die from silicosis. More died in the mercury mines of Almadén because of the dangerous conditions. Before the war, no one was permitted to work for more than three hours on two days per week; now, they were forced to work for four and a half hours on three days. In the pyrites mines of Tharsis and Rio Tinto in Huelva, productivity was greater than before 1936 with several thousand fewer workers.102"
"The use of prisoners as slave labour was a way of making them pay the costs of their own incarceration and of rebuilding the Spain destroyed by the war. The conditions in the camps and prisons were unsustainable. During the terrible winter of 1940–1, many prisoners died of hunger and the intense cold. Many also died from tuberculosis and typhoid especially during the epidemic in the spring of 1941. Indeed, more died from disease in prison than from execution. In the prison of Córdoba alone, 502 died in 1941.106 In addition to the use of prisoners as slave labour, there was a variation, given a theological veneer by the Jesuit Father José Agustín Pérez del Pulgar, known as ‘the redemption of sentences through work’. This enabled prisoners to shorten their sentences and, at the same time, earn some money for their families. It raised substantial funds for the regime.107 In October 1938, the Board of Trustees for the Central Trust (Patronato) for the Redemption of Sentences through Work had been established. The work was regarded as reparation for war damage which was blamed on the prisoners, despite being largely caused by rebel artillery and air raids. Indeed, the National Service for the Reconstruction of Devastated Regions established by Serrano Suñer in March 1938 was represented on the Patronato and made full use of the labour pool.108
The scheme was also necessary because the prison system was on the verge of collapse. In response to an international commission, in 1954 the Francoist Ministry of Justice admitted that there had been more than 270,719 prisoners in 1940. In fact, these figures referred only to those prisoners who had already been sentenced and there were at least another 100,000 awaiting trial. Nor did they refer to those working in ‘militarized penal colonies’. It was hardly surprising that the prisons received constant visits from priests preaching the ideas of Pérez del Pulgar.109 Sometimes the jobs offered were in primitive workshops established in the prisons themselves, producing clothing, furniture and many other kinds of goods, but more often they were for dangerous jobs in mines, digging railway tunnels and other public works for which the wages were scandalously low. Many prisoners accepted the appalling conditions in order to contribute in some small way to the maintenance of their wives and children and in the hope of being transferred to somewhere nearer their families. When the average daily wage for manual labour was 10 pesetas per day, the prisoners were rented out to private companies for 5 or 6. The government took half and the rest theoretically was paid to the prisoners. However, they did not receive all the money that they were due. One peseta was deducted for the prisoner’s exiguous rations, one was placed in a savings account which the prisoner could collect when he was eventually freed and the third, theoretically, was sent to the family. In fact, this latter was distributed, if at all, via the town council where the family lived and often was never handed over. Those under a death sentence were not allowed to participate in the scheme.110"
"As the Second World progressed, conditions for all prisoners worsened. Already undernourished, they were forced to give blood transfusions for the German Army.138 Perhaps the most shocking example of the malice that underlay the Francoist treatment of the defeated Republicans was the fate of the Spanish exiles captured in France by the Germans. Some had been fighting in the French forces, others were still in French internment camps. Around 10,000 ended up in German camps, something made possible by the acquiescence of Franco’s government when the prisoners were offered by the Germans. Numerous letters were sent in July 1940 from the Spanish Embassy in Paris to the Foreign Ministry asking for instructions regarding the German offer to hand over the prisoners. When no reply came, the German Embassy in Paris wrote to Madrid in August asking for clarification of the Spanish government’s wishes regarding 100,000 Spanish refugees. The only reply that has been found was a list of specific individuals, which led to the extraditions discussed earlier in the chapter. In the absence of other documentation, this alone condemned Republicans to German camps. According to SS Standartenführer August Eigruber, Gauleiter of Oberdonau in Austria, the Germans were told ‘by Franco’ that, as they had fought for ‘a Soviet Spain’, the prisoners were not considered to be Spaniards. This is consistent with Franco’s public declarations about those Republicans regarded as unredeemable criminals. Accordingly, the Spanish prisoners were treated as stateless persons and transferred from the front-line prisoner-of-war camps (Stalags) to concentration camps. Ninety per cent of the ‘Fighters for Red Spain’ (Rotspanienkämpfer) were in Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria.139
On 20 August 1940, a cattle train left Angoulême. A total of 927 Spanish refugees, 490 of them men, the remainder women and children, were squeezed – forty to fifty per wagon – into twenty wagons each designed for eight horses. They believed that they were being taken to Vichy. They travelled for three days and nights, with room only to stand, without food or water. On 24 August, they reached Mauthausen. The males over the age of thirteen were separated from their families and taken to the extermination camp near by. They were told by the camp commander Franz Ziereis in his ‘welcome speech’, ‘you enter by the door and you will leave by the crematorium chimney’. Three hundred and fifty-seven of the 490 would die in the camp.140 The women and children were then sent to Spain – they had been put on the train because the Germans did not want French civilians seeing the families being separated. There can be no doubt that the French authorities knew all about Mauthausen. In Spain, the returned women were interrogated and those with no one to vouch for them were imprisoned. The children were put in state orphanages even when there were Republican families willing to look after them.141
It was just the beginning. Spanish Republicans ended up facing the whole gamut of horrors in many different Nazi camps, including Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen in Germany, and Auschwitz and Treblinka in Poland. In Ravensbrück, there were 101 Spanish women who had belonged to the French resistance.142 Mauthausen was an extermination camp where those not murdered on arrival were required to work until they died of exhaustion. From the quarry at Mauthausen, an endless chain of men carried stones weighing between 44 and 88 pounds in backpacks up 186 steep steps.143 About 60 per cent of the Spanish Republicans who died in German camps perished at Mauthausen.144"
Treatment of women and children
"Rape was a frequent occurrence during interrogation in police stations. Transfer to prisons and concentration camps was no guarantee of safety. At night, Falangists took young women away and raped them. Sometimes their breasts were branded with the Falangist symbol of the yoke and arrows. Many were impregnated by their captors. The executions of women sentenced to death who were pregnant were sometimes delayed until they had given birth and their children taken for adoption.115 Nevertheless, in the prison in Zamora, numerous pregnant women and nursing mothers were shot. On 11 October 1936, Amparo Barayón, the wife of Ramón J. Sender, was told that ‘reds had no right to feed children’ and her eight-month-old baby daughter Andrea was ripped from her arms and placed in a Catholic orphanage. Utterly distraught, Amparo was shot the next day.116 From 1937 to 1941, the Franciscan Capuchin friar Gumersindo de Estella served as a chaplain at the prison of Torrero in Zaragoza. In September 1937, he recalled the execution of three young women whose crime had been an attempt to reach the Republican zone. He was appalled not least by their anguished cries when their one-year-old daughters had been dragged from them by the guards. On another occasion in May 1938, he appealed for the execution of a twenty-one-year-old to be halted on the grounds that she was pregnant. The judge replied indignantly: ‘Wait seven months for every woman who was to be executed? You know that is just not possible!’117"
"Another victim of the Casado coup was a woman who had just given birth when her husband, arrested and left in prison by Casado’s forces, was condemned to death. Evicted from her home, she lived on the streets with her baby daughter, sleeping in doorways and on the steps of the Metro. When a lawyer told her that her husband’s sentence could be commuted if she paid a bribe of 10,000 pesetas, she became a thief and ended up in prison with her baby daughter.121 An example of the brutality inflicted on women was the case of a mother who, when the police came to arrest her, called to her son who was crying. On hearing that his name was Lenin, they picked him up by the legs and killed him by smashing his head against a wall.122
Once in jail, the conditions for nursing mothers were horrendous. With no facilities to wash themselves or their children’s clothes, they were forced to live in filth and fight a daily battle against rats. In the prison of Ventas, the water to the bathrooms and toilets was cut off. For every two hundred women, there was only one toilet which had to be flushed with dirty water that had been used for cleaning the floors and was then collected in big tins. Paz Azati, a Communist from Valencia, recounted that ‘every day on the floor of the Ventas infirmary you would see the corpses of fifteen to twenty children dead from meningitis’. The Communist Julia Manzanal had just given birth to a daughter when she was arrested in Madrid in the spring of 1939. Manzanal’s death sentence was commuted to thirty years in prison. Ten months later, her baby died of meningitis.123 While some women suffered the agony of seeing their babies die, others had them torn from their arms.124
After the war, the sequestration of the children of Republican prisoners, not just of those executed, became systematic. Twelve thousand children were taken to religious or state institutions where they were brainwashed. After one woman’s husband was shot in front of her and her small daughter, she was arrested and the child taken to a Catholic orphanage. The mother wrote regularly until one day her daughter replied saying, ‘Don’t write to me any more about papa. I know he was a criminal. I am taking the veil.’ Many children were taken from their mothers, put into religious orphanages and brainwashed into denouncing their fathers as assassins. Amparo Barayón’s daughter Andrea became a nun. Pilar Fidalgo noted that orphans were obliged ‘to sing the songs of the murderers of their father; to wear the uniform of those who have executed him, and to curse the dead and to blaspheme his memory.’125 In the book signed by the chaplain of the prison in Barcelona, Father Martín Torrent (in reality ghost-written by a near-destitute Luis Lucia), great pride is expressed in the fact that seven thousand indigent children of prisoners found starving on the streets had been taken to religious orphanages. Father Torrent expressed even greater satisfaction that some of them had decided to join the priesthood.126
Children were stolen from their mothers in several prisons, most notoriously in Saturrarán in the Basque Country and in the prison for nursing mothers in Madrid. More than one hundred women and over fifty children died of illness in Saturrarán, which was run under the harsh direction of María Aranzazu, known to the prisoners as ‘the white panther’. In Madrid, the brutal regime in the improvised prison for nursing mothers was run by María Topete Fernández, a wealthy woman who had herself been imprisoned in the Republican zone. She assuaged her own resentments in the treatment of the mothers and their children. The principal food they received was a thin gruel containing bugs and maggots. If the children regurgitated it, María Topete made them eat their vomit. Separated from them for much of the daytime and at night, the women lived in constant terror of their children being taken from them. Once the children were three years old they could be removed and many were forcibly seized from their mothers. By 1943, more than 10,000 were in religious orphanages.127 The justification for this policy was provided by the head of the psychiatric services of the rebel army, Major Antonio Vallejo Nágera.
Obsessed with the need for racial cleanliness, Vallejo had written a book in 1934 arguing in favour of the castration of psychopaths.128 As a member of the army medical corps, he had served in Morocco and spent time in Germany during the First World War visiting prison camps. He also met the German psychiatrists Ernst Kretschmer, Julius Schwalbe and Hans Walter Gruhle, whose work influenced him profoundly. During the Civil War, he was made head of the Psychiatric Services of the rebel army. In August 1938, he requested permission from Franco to set up the Laboratory of Psychological Investigations. Two weeks later, he was authorized to do so. His purpose was to pathologize left-wing ideas. The results of his research gave the delighted military high command ‘scientific’ arguments to justify their views on the sub-human nature of their adversaries and he was promoted to colonel.129
Vallejo’s quest for the environmental factors that fostered ‘the red gene’ and the links between Marxism and mental deficiency took the form of psychological tests carried out on prisoners already physically exhausted and mentally anguished. His team consisted of two physicians, a criminologist and two German scientific advisers. His subjects were captured members of the International Brigades in San Pedro de Cardeña and fifty Republican women prisoners in Málaga, thirty of whom were awaiting execution. In the latter case, starting from the premise that they were degenerate and thus prone to Marxist criminality, he explained ‘female revolutionary criminality’ by reference to the animal nature of the female psyche and the ‘marked sadistic nature’ unleashed when political circumstances allowed females to ‘satisfy their latent sexual appetites’.130
Vallejo’s theories were used to justify the sequestration of Republican children and were gathered in a book entitled The Eugenics of Spanishness and the Regeneration of the Race’.131 More environmental than biological, his eugenic racism postulated that a race was constituted by a series of cultural values. In Spain, these values, the prerequisites of national health, were hierarchical, military and patriotic. Everything that the Republic and the left stood for was inimical to them and therefore had to be eradicated. Obsessed with what he called ‘the transcendent task of the cleansing of our race’, his model was the Inquisition, which had protected Spain from poisonous doctrines in the past. He advocated ‘a modernized Inquisition, with a different focus, other ends, means and organization but an Inquisition nonetheless’.132 The health of the race required that children be separated from their ‘red’ mothers.
Authorization for the application of his theories was facilitated by his links with both Franco (whose wife Carmen Polo was a friend of Vallejo’s wife) and the Falange.133 He dedicated his book on the psychopathology of war, which incorporated his work on the links between Marxism and mental deficiency, ‘in respectful and admiring homage to the undefeated imperial Caudillo’. Vallejo also had a direct link to the regime organization concerned with war orphans, Auxilio Social, through his friend the psychiatrist Dr Jesús Ercilla Ortega. A close friend of Onésimo Redondo, Ercilla had been one of the founders of the JONS.134 He was a member of the executive committee of Auxilio Social, its medical adviser and the liaison with other groups. After the war, Ercilla was made clinical director of the Psychiatric Clinic of San José in Ciempozuelos, a hospital officially headed by Vallejo Nágera.135 Franco himself was enthusiastic about Auxilio Social’s work with Republican orphans, seeing it as a major contribution to the long-term ‘redemption’ of Spaniards from their leftist errors.136 A key element in the process was the law of 14 December 1941 which legalized the changing of the names of Republican orphans, of the children of prisoners unable to look after them and of babies taken away (often by force) from their mothers immediately after birth in prison.137"
Francoist collaboration with Nazi's
"A factor that facilitated Franco’s state terror was the ever-closer collaboration between his security services and those of the Third Reich. This had begun in November 1937, when the authorities in Burgos requested that the German government send a team of experts to instruct the Spanish police in the latest methods for the eradication of communism. A team was assembled under the command of SS Colonel Heinz Jost, head of the Sicherheitsdienst Foreign Intelligence Office, a man who would be sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials for atrocities committed in Russia. Jost’s team reached Valladolid in mid-January 1938 and was attached to Franco’s recently created Ministry of Public Order, headed by the seventy-five-year-old General Severiano Martínez Anido. Notorious as Civil Governor of Barcelona in the early 1920s when the infamous ley de fugas (the shooting of ‘escaping’ prisoners) was the norm, Martínez Anido had won Franco’s admiration for his implacable imposition of law and order during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. He wanted to step up the purge of leftists in captured territory and was delighted to have German help in creating the necessary instruments of repression. Jost returned to Germany in February 1938 but left behind a three-man SD team which helped reorganize the Francoist police administration, the political police and the criminal police force. One of its lasting legacies was the analysis and systematization of captured Republican documentation to create a vast repository of political information in Salamanca.49"
"In April 1938, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler had contacted the Minister of Public Order, General Martínez Anido, to suggest widening the Spanish–German agreement on police co-operation. The Gestapo was interested in repatriating German Jews, Communists and Socialists who had fought in the International Brigades and been captured by Franco’s forces. The agreement signed on 31 July permitted the swift exchange of leftists caught by the two security services. International Brigaders were handed over to Gestapo interrogators stationed in Spain, then despatched to Germany without even minimal judicial procedures. Individual cases for repatriation required only the approval of Franco, which was never refused. In return, a programme of training for Franco’s political police was headed by SS Sturmbannführer Paul Winzer, the Gestapo attaché at the German Embassy in Salamanca. Martínez Anido died shortly before the end of 1938 and the functions of his Ministry were absorbed by the Ministry of the Interior. As his Director General of Security, Serrano Suñer appointed his crony José Finat y Escrivá de Romaní, the Conde de Mayalde. On Mayalde’s suggestion, Himmler was awarded the regime’s highest decoration, the Grand Cross of the Imperial Order of the Yoke and Arrows in recognition of his role in the fight against the enemies of Franco’s Spain.59
Franco got his reward when, after the collapse of France, thousands of Spanish exiles fell into the hands of the Germans. On the very day, 22 June 1940, that the Franco-German armistice was signed in Compiègne, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed the French Embassy in Madrid that Azaña, Negrín and ‘other red leaders’ had requested visas to leave France for Mexico. Francoist efforts to extradite prominent Republicans from France would meet fewer problems in the German-occupied zone than in the territory of the newly established Vichy regime. Serrano Suñer requested that the French Ambassador, Le Comte Robert Renom de la Baume, inform the Vichy premier, Marshal Philippe Pétain, that Spain was impatiently waiting for France to ‘neutralize’ the Spanish red leaders currently in its territory. Then, on 24 July, the Spanish government asked the Comte de la Baume to prevent the departure for Mexico of the seventy-four-year-old ex-Prime Minister, the conservative Manuel Portela Valladares, and several members of the Basque government.60 The Franco government’s interest in Portela’s extradition derived from his prominence in the lists of Father Juan Tusquets.
These requests were followed on 27 August by a peremptory demand for the extradition without delay of 636 prominent Republicans believed by the Madrid government to be in Vichy France. Underlying these requests was the threat that, if they were not met, Spain would use its special relationship with Nazi Germany to push its territorial claims to French North Africa. In any case, Marshal Pétain loathed the Spanish Republicans since he considered most of them to be Communists, but he was reluctant to breach the right of asylum. Accordingly, to the intense annoyance of Madrid, Vichy insisted that requests for extradition had to pass through the courts, in accordance with the Franco-Spanish extradition treaty of 1877 and a law of 1927 that required each case to be judged individually. Nevertheless, the Vichy French police, using names and addresses supplied by José Félix de Lequerica, Franco’s Ambassador, began to round up prominent Republicans, or at least place them under close surveillance. The French knew that to hand over these men would be to send them to certain death. Serrano Suñer was outraged that several, including Prieto and Negrín, had managed, with the collusion of the French authorities, to escape.61
On 1 July 1940, the President of Mexico, Lázaro Cárdenas, informed his Minister Plenipotentiary in France, Luis Ignacio Rodríguez Taboada, that Mexico was prepared to accept all Spanish refugees currently in France. Moreover, he instructed him to inform the French government that, until their transport could be arranged, all Spanish Republicans in France were under the diplomatic protection of Mexico. On 8 July, Rodríguez Taboada was received by Pétain in Vichy. After warning him that the Spaniards were undesirables, Pétain agreed in principle. A joint committee was set up to work out the details and, on 23 August, an agreement was signed by the Mexican government and Vichy. Many Vichy officials viewed this arrangement with suspicion and they, and the Germans in the occupied zone, complied with Spanish requests for many Republicans to be prevented from leaving France. Nevertheless, the Mexican initiative helped thousands of Republicans until November 1942, when the German occupation of Vichy France severed diplomatic relations between the two.62
If the Francoist authorities were hindered by the judicial scruples of the Vichy French and the humanitarian efforts of the Mexicans, they had no such problems regarding the Spaniards who found themselves in German-occupied France. In the days following the capture of Paris, groups of Falangists sacked the buildings in which various Spanish Republican organizations had their offices. Their funds and archives were seized and taken to Spain. Lequerica quickly established cordial relations with the Germans, who facilitated the activities of Spanish policemen within the occupied zone. The consequence was that the exiled Republicans’ places of residence were searched, their goods, money and documents seized and their persons mistreated even when they had not been arrested or extradited.
In late August 1940, the Conde de Mayalde visited Berlin to discuss the fate of the captured Republican refugees. He was shown the latest police installations and techniques and met Himmler and other top brass of the various German police and security services, including Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Sicherheitsdienst. Himmler proposed that Spain and Germany exchange police liaison officers who would have diplomatic immunity and the right to arrest citizens of their respective countries. Himmler would thereby be able to increase the Gestapo network in Spain to maintain surveillance of German refugees and the Spaniards would get rapid access to Republican exiles. Mayalde said he would have to consult with his Minister but suggested that Himmler might like to visit Spain himself.
Even before that visit took place, as soon as France fell Franco and Serrano Suñer hastened to take advantage of Himmler’s earlier agreement with General Martínez Anido. Officers of the Dirección General de Seguridad were sent to Paris to arrange the extradition from occupied France of several recently arrested Republican leaders. The police attaché at the Paris Embassy, Pedro Urraca Rendueles, was in charge of securing their hand-over and taking them to the Spanish frontier. The Germans arrested prominent figures from lists provided by Lequerica including Lluís Companys Jover, the President of the Catalan Generalitat. On 10 July, in Pyla-sur-Mer, near Arcachon, German police, accompanied by a Spanish agent, had arrested Cipriano Rivas Cherif, Azaña’s brother-in-law, along with two close friends of the exiled President, Carlos Montilla Escudero and Miguel Salvador Carreras. The following day, two Socialists, Teodomiro Menéndez, one of the leaders of the Asturian miners’ insurrection of October 1934, and the journalist Francisco Cruz Salido, were arrested by the Germans in Bordeaux. On 27 July 1940, the Gestapo arrested in Paris the one-time editor of El Socialista and wartime Minister of the Interior Julián Zugazagoitia Mendieta. All were handed over to the Spanish police in France and taken to Madrid. There were no judicial procedures. According to Franco himself, the Germans delivered the prisoners ‘spontaneously’.63
Companys had passed up various chances to escape from France because his son Lluís was seriously ill in a clinic in Paris. He was arrested in La Baule-les-Pins near Nantes on 13 August 1940, taken to Paris and detained in La Santé prison. However, on 26 August, La Santé received an order from the Conde de Mayalde requiring that Companys be handed over to Pedro Urraca Rendueles. He was transferred to Madrid in early September and imprisoned in the cellars of the DGS. For five weeks, he was kept in solitary confinement and tortured and beaten. Senior figures of the regime visited his cell, insulted him and threw coins or crusts of dry bread at him. On 3 October, his clothing bloodstained, a heavily manacled Companys was transferred to the Castillo de Montjuich in Barcelona.
Accused of military rebellion, he was subjected to a summary court martial on 14 October. While the military prosecutor prepared his case, Companys was given no opportunity to talk to the officer appointed to ‘defend’ him nor was he permitted to call witnesses on his own behalf. The defence advocate, an artillery captain, Ramón de Colubrí, pointed out that Companys had saved hundreds of lives of right-wingers in Catalonia, among them several army officers, including himself. At a trial lasting less than one hour, Companys was sentenced to death. The sentence was quickly approved by the Captain General of the IV Military Region, Luis Orgaz. In the early hours of the following day, the deeply Catholic Companys heard Mass and took communion. Refusing to wear a blindfold, he was taken before a firing squad of Civil Guards and, as they fired, he cried ‘Per Catalunya!’ According to his death certificate, he died at 6.30 a.m. on 15 October 1940. The cause of death was cynically given as ‘traumatic internal haemorrhage’.64"
"Four days after the death of Companys, Heinrich Himmler arrived in Spain. The invitation issued by Mayalde had been confirmed by Serrano Suñer, now newly appointed Foreign Minister. In the view of the British Ambassador, Serrano Suñer wanted to seek ‘expert advice on the liquidation of opponents and the capture of political refugees’. Himmler was interested both in police collaboration and in preparing security for the forthcoming meeting between Hitler and Franco on the French border. Arriving on the morning of 19 October 1940, he was treated to a lavishly orchestrated welcome first in San Sebastián and then in Burgos. The streets of both cities were draped with swastika flags. On 20 October, he was greeted in Madrid by Serrano Suñer and senior officials of the Falange. He set up base at the Ritz Hotel, then had a meeting with Serrano Suñer at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before both moved on to El Pardo to see Franco. Serrano Suñer was particularly interested in the whereabouts of several prominent captured Republicans, just as Himmler was concerned about exiled Germans. They reached an agreement whereby the Gestapo would establish an office in the German Embassy in Madrid and the Sicherheitsdienst would have offices in the main German consulates throughout Spain. German agents would thus operate with full diplomatic immunity. The same privilege would be applied to Spanish agents in Germany and, more importantly, in the German occupied zone of France.66
The Conde de Mayalde, who was also Mayor of Madrid, arranged an out-of-season bullfight in Himmler’s honour in a swastika-emblazoned Plaza de Ventas and also invited him to a hunting party on his estate in Toledo. Over the next few days, Himmler was taken to the Prado and the Archaeological Museum in Madrid, the historical monuments of Toledo and El Escorial and the Monastery of Montserrat in Catalonia. His visits to the archaeological museum and to Montserrat were linked to his patronage of the SS Deutsches Ahnenerbe (German Ancestral Heritage). Himmler was always on the look-out for the talisman that would win the war. On the basis of Wagner’s Parsifal, he was convinced that Montserrat was Montsalvat, the mountain where, according to Wolfram von Eschenbach and later Wagner, the Holy Grail was kept. In the magnificent library of Montserrat, he demanded to see the archives on the location of the Holy Grail. When he was informed that he was mistaken, he rudely claimed a Germanic pagan origin for everything to do with Montserrat and declared that Jesus Christ was not Jewish but Aryan.67
Alongside these cultural activities, there were visits to prisons and concentration camps. According to one of Serrano Suñer’s closest aides, Ramón Garriga, Himmler was shocked by what he saw. He thought it absurd that hundreds of thousands of able-bodied Spaniards were detained in appalling conditions, many facing the death sentence, at a time when the country was in desperate need of labour for the reconstruction of roads, buildings and houses destroyed during the Civil War. Apparently, he had been impressed by the work carried out by Republican exiles in labour battalions in France. He told Franco and Serrano Suñer that they were wasting valuable resources and that it made more sense to incorporate working-class militants into the new order rather than annihilate them. In his view, the regime should have shot a small number of prominent Republicans, imprisoned some more and let the rest go free under close police vigilance. Himmler made an important distinction between ideological and racial enemies. Franco was not convinced.68"
"The procedure for extraditions from Vichy France saw Blas Pérez González, the senior prosecutor of the Supreme Court, prepare arrest warrants that were passed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which then made the corresponding request to Vichy. In November 1940, Lequerica had delivered a list of the names of nearly three thousand Republicans wanted for trial in Spain. The official response of Vichy was lukewarm and made it clear that an individual dossier for each case was required. The majority of extradition demands were unsuccessful since the requests were absurd."
DERD
"With the prospect of the fall of Santander and Asturias following on that of the Basque Country, Ulibarri called for the collection of the documentation to be speeded up to permit the greatest efficiency in the subsequent repression. He stated that, in the wake of each victory, the police had to be supplied with ‘the documents that indicate the guilt of those persons who are to be tried immediately’. After the victory at Teruel and the subsequent drive through Aragon towards the Mediterranean, huge opportunities were opening up. The desired departmental merger was formalized on 26 April 1938 when, as Minister of the Interior, Serrano Suñer issued a decree creating the Delegación del Estado para la Recuperación de Documentos (DERD). Its purpose was to gather, store and classify all documents emanating from political parties, organizations and individuals ‘hostile to or even out of sympathy with the National Movement’ in order to facilitate their location and punishment.52"
"One of the most influential of Ulibarri’s staff was the policeman Eduardo Comín Colomer. In August 1938, all security services in the Francoist zone had been unified under the National Security Service headed by Lieutenant Colonel José Medina. One of its principal departments was the Investigation and Security Police, which in turn was divided into various sections. One of them, Anti-Marxism, consisted of three sub-sections, Freemasonry, Judaism and Publications. Comín Colomer was the head of both the Freemasonry and Judaism offices, as well as producing the Boletín de Información Antimarxista. In January 1939, he was seconded to the DERD to be Marcelino de Ulibarri’s assistant. There he would play a key role in the classification and sifting of the captured material in preparation for its use by the secret police.54 The material would become the basis for his own legendary library and also for a stream of books and pamphlets published over the following thirty-five years in which he denounced all elements of the Republican left. During this time, one of his assistants was Mauricio Carlavilla.55
DERD search teams followed Franco’s troops as they moved across Aragon and into Catalonia. Barcelona was occupied on 26 January 1939 and placed under martial law the following day. DERD operatives started to search the city on 28 January and, by 7 June, had filled fourteen buildings with paper. Two hundred tons of documents were taken by train and truck from Catalonia to Salamanca. Eight hundred tons in total were gathered from all over what had remained of the Republican zone. With the help of the German specialists, this material was converted into a massive index of 80,000 suspected Freemasons, despite the fact that there had been nearer five than ten thousand Freemasons in Spain in 1936 and that fewer than one thousand remained after 1939. These files would facilitate the purges carried out in the 1940s under the infamous Special Tribunal created to implement the Law for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism of February 1940.56 Ulibarri was named its first president on 1 September 1940 but was replaced soon afterwards by General Andrés Saliquet, who had presided over the repression in Valladolid.57"
Melchor Rodriguez trial
"Another example of the vindictiveness of Francoist ‘justice’ even with those who had worked hard to stop the repression in the Republican zone was Melchor Rodríguez. His efforts to save right-wingers in Madrid had led some of his anarchist comrades to suspect him of being a traitor. Even his wife became convinced that, at best, he had naively let himself be used by the fifth column and, when he rejected her suspicions, she left him in early 1939. Having been named Mayor of Madrid by Casado’s Junta, he surrendered the capital to Franco’s troops. Thereafter, he was arrested on 13 April 1939 and tried by court martial in December that year. After an energetic defence by Ignacio Arenillas de Chaves, an extremely competent military lawyer, he was found not guilty. However, the Auditor General of the Military Region of the Centre rejected the verdict and insisted on a retrial.
Melchor Rodríguez was tried again on 11 May 1940 accused of a crime that took place in Madrid at a time when he was in Valencia. A young and inexperienced defender was appointed two days before the trial. He was not permitted to meet his client or given any prosecution documents until the trial had actually started. The prosecutor, Leopoldo Huidobro Pardo, was a Carlist who had suffered frightening experiences in Madrid during the war. This more than accounted for his bitterly hostile attitude towards prominent CNT members. Furthermore, Huidobro’s hatred of the left was compounded by his distress at the death of his cousin Father Fernando Huidobro Polanco. He was, of course, unaware that Father Fernando had been shot in the back by a Legionario. However, his life had been saved when he was enabled to take refuge in the Finnish Embassy, something facilitated by Melchor Rodríguez. Nevertheless, he accused Melchor of being a bloodthirsty gunman and demanded the death penalty. However, the pantomime of a trial rigged with false testimonies was ruined by the unscheduled appearance of General Agustín Muñoz Grandes, who spoke on Melchor’s behalf and presented a list of over two thousand rightists whose lives he had saved. Among them were many aristocrats and one of the founders of the Falange, Raimundo Fernández Cuesta. Unlike Peiró, Melchor had not been a minister of the Republic and the main witness on his behalf outranked everyone else in the room. The planned death sentence was commuted to twenty years and one day and he was sent on 1 March 1941 to the prison of El Puerto de Santa María in Cádiz. Then Muñoz Grandes, as Captain General of the I Military Region, commuted his sentence to twelve years and a day, which permitted him provisional liberty.77"
Besteiro trial
"Melchor Rodríguez was one of the few senior elements of the Casado Junta who had remained in Madrid, naively believing that, since he had no blood on his hands, he had nothing to fear. The most senior of all was the Socialist Julián Besteiro, who had been Foreign Minister in the seven-man Junta. Besteiro had done nothing to oppose the military rising and had done more than most to put an end to Republican resistance. He was the only one of the Casado Junta’s members to stay in Madrid. The others, including the notorious organizer of the anarchist checas of Madrid, Eduardo Val Bescós, managed to escape with Casado to England. It was inevitable that Besteiro would face the full ferocity of the repression since he was a parliamentary deputy, had been president of both the Socialist Party and its trade union movement, the UGT, and been President of the Constituent Cortes in 1931.
Nevertheless, Besteiro chose wilfully to ignore the revenge being wreaked on captured Republican areas. Instead, he believed assurances from his contacts in the fifth column that Franco guaranteed the life and liberty of those innocent of common crimes. Moreover, although the Casado coup had already undermined the chances of a properly organized evacuation of those in danger, Besteiro refused to allow any government resources to be used for those who needed to flee. His logic was that the national wealth was required in Spain for post-war reconstruction and that Franco would treat those who stayed behind in Spain all the better for safeguarding resources. He facilitated the peaceful surrender of the Republic to the Francoists, in co-operation with the clandestine Falange and the fifth-column organization. He complacently believed that his contribution to shortening the war would incline Franco to use him in the process of post-war reconstruction.
Despite his hope that a shared anti-communism would permit him to be the instrument of reconciliation between the two sides, Besteiro, nearly sixty-nine years old, was arrested and, on 8 July 1939, faced a court martial charged with military rebellion. It was an indication of his importance that his case was in the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Felipe Acedo Colunga, head prosecutor of the court of the Army of Occupation. Acedo Colunga recognized that Besteiro was innocent of any crime of blood, yet demanded the death sentence.78 In the event, he was sentenced to life imprisonment which was commuted to thirty years of hard labour. At the end of August 1939, he was sent to the prison of Carmona. His health destroyed by lack of adequate food and medical attention, he was forced to undertake hard physical work, scrubbing floors, cleaning latrines. This latter activity led to an untreated septicaemia which caused his death on 27 September 1940.79 Besteiro was unfortunate that the Francoists, unable to try Azaña, Prieto, Negrín, Largo Caballero and the other major figures who had made it into exile, vented their hatred on him.80"
Francisco Largo Caballero
"Another prominent Republican who fell foul of Francoist vindictiveness was the second wartime Prime Minister, Francisco Largo Caballero. He crossed the French frontier on 29 January 1939 and lived in Paris until two days before the German occupation. Thereafter, the Vichy authorities moved him around and kept him always under surveillance. Blas Pérez prepared the application for his extradition at the end of May 1941. It accused him of direct responsibility for assassinations, theft and looting. Four months passed before the Vichy authorities arrested him on 9 October 1941. Now seventy-one years old, Largo Caballero was imprisoned in harsh conditions in Limoges. The petition from Madrid was heard, on the same day as another for the extradition of Federica Montseny, and both were rejected. Although Montseny was released, Largo Caballero was kept confined in Nyons. Shortly after the German occupation of Vichy France, he was arrested again on 20 February 1943 by the Italian political police and two Gestapo agents. He was interrogated in Lyons before being held in Paris. On 8 July, he was sent to Berlin and then on 31 July imprisoned in the brutal labour camp of Sachsenhausen in Oranienburg. Had he been extradited to Spain, the pressure for him to be shot would have been immense but, in the wake of the fall of Mussolini, Franco did not want to risk an international scandal likely to be greater than that provoked by the execution of Companys. Largo Caballero believed that the Madrid authorities did not request his transfer to Spain because they preferred to see him die in a German camp. In fact, he survived to be liberated by the Soviet forces, but his health was broken and he died in March 1946.81"
Law of political responsibilities
"When news reached Barcelona, on 23 January 1939, that the Francoists were at the River Llobregat to the south of the city, a colossal exodus began. On the night of 25 January, the Republican government fled northwards to Girona. The President of the Generalitat, Lluís Companys, drove one last time through the centre of a deserted city, as leaflets calling for resistance blew through the streets along with ripped-up party and trade union membership cards.114 The next morning, the streets were full of smoke from the burning papers of ministries, parties and unions. The young Communist Teresa Pàmies witnessed, on 26 January, horrendous scenes of the fear provoked by the advancing rebels:
There is one thing I will never forget: the wounded who crawled out of the Vallcarca hospital, mutilated and bandaged, almost naked, despite the cold, they went down to the street, shrieking and pleading with us not to leave them behind to the mercies of the victors. All other details of that unforgettable day were wiped out by the sight of those defenceless soldiers … The certainty that we left them to their fate will shame us for ever. Those with no legs dragged themselves along the ground, those who had lost an arm raised the other with a clenched fist, the youngest cried in their fear, the older ones went mad with rage. They grabbed the sides of lorries loaded with furniture, with bird cages, with mattresses, with silent women, with indifferent old people, with terrified children. They screamed, they ululated, they blasphemed and cursed those who were fleeing and were abandoning them.
There were around 20,000 wounded Republican soldiers in Barcelona. Their wounds and missing limbs were proof that they had fought and would guarantee that they would be the victims of reprisals.115
Four hundred and fifty thousand terrified women, children, old men and defeated soldiers trekked towards France. In numbers and in human suffering, the exodus far exceeded even the horrors seen by Norman Bethune on the road from Málaga to Almería. Those who could squeezed into every kind of transport imaginable. Through bitterly cold sleet and snow, on roads bombed and strafed by rebel aircraft, many others walked, wrapped in blankets and clutching a few possessions, some carrying infants. Women gave birth at the roadsides. Babies died of the cold, children were trampled to death. A witness summed up the horror of that dreadful exodus: ‘At the side of the road, a man had hung himself from a tree. One foot had a rope sandal, the other was bare. At the foot of the tree was an open suitcase in which lay a small child that had died of cold during the night.’ It is not known how many people died on the roads to France.116"
"Those who fled faced the bleakest future, but it was one that they chose in preference to being ‘liberated’ by Franco’s forces. From 28 January, a reluctant French government allowed the first refugees across the border. At first, they had to sleep in the streets of Figueras, the last town on the Spanish side of the border. Many died in sustained rebel bombing raids.117 The defeated Republicans, many sick or wounded, were received by the French Garde Mobile as if they were criminals. The women, children and the old were shepherded into transit camps. The soldiers were disarmed and escorted to insanitary camps on the coast, rapidly improvised by marking out sections of beach with barbed wire. Under the empty gaze of Senegalese guards, the refugees improvised shelters by burrowing into the wet sand of the camp at Saint-Cyprien a few miles to the south-east of Perpignan.
Meanwhile, the formal parade into an eerily empty Barcelona was headed by the Army Corps of Navarre, led by General Andrés Solchaga. They were accorded this honour, according to a British officer attached to Franco’s headquarters, ‘not because they have fought better, but because they hate better – that is to say, when the object of this hate is Catalonia or a Catalan’.118 A close friend of Franco, Víctor Ruiz Albeniz (‘El Tebib Arrumi’), published an article asserting that Catalonia needed ‘a biblical punishment (Sodom, Gomorrah) to purify the red city, seat of anarchism and separatism as the only remedy to extirpate these two cancers by implacable thermo-cauterization’. None of the conquering generals or Falangists referred to the crushing of Marxism or anarchism. Their entire discourse was about the conquest of Catalonia by Spain. One officer told a Portuguese journalist that the only solution to the ‘Catalan problem’ was ‘kill the Catalans. It’s just a question of time.’119
One of the first acts of the occupying forces was to ban the use of Catalan in public. For Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law and Minister of the Interior, Catalan nationalism was a sickness that had to be eradicated. He told the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter that the Catalan population was ‘morally and politically sick’. The man he appointed as Civil Governor of Barcelona, Wenceslao González Oliveros, announced, in a reversal of Unamuno’s famous dictum that the rebels might win (vencer) but never convince (convencer), that Franco’s forces had come ‘to save the good Spaniards and to defeat, but not convince, the enemies of Spain’. For González Oliveros, that meant the Catalans. He stated that ‘Spain opposed the divisive autonomy statutes with greater ferocity than communism’ and that any toleration of any kind of regionalism would lead once more to ‘the putrefaction represented by Marxism and separatism that we have just surgically eradicated’.120
Within a week, the military secret police was functioning. Newspaper advertisements called for recruits, preference being given to ex-prisoners of the Republican SIM. Large queues of people with denunciations gathered outside the offices of the Occupation Services. In consequence, 22,700 people were arrested in the first eight months.121 Precisely because so many of those of political or military significance had fled, those killed by the rebels in Catalonia were perhaps fewer than might have been expected. Between those murdered by the occupying troops and those tried and executed, more than 1,700 were killed in Barcelona, 750 in Lleida, 703 in Tarragona and five hundred in Girona. Many more died from mistreatment in prison.122
In Catalonia, as in other parts of Spain occupied by the rebels, the repression took many forms and merely to stay alive was a major achievement for many Republicans. Those who had not been executed, imprisoned or exiled lived in an atmosphere of terror. Daily life for the defeated was a question of combating hunger, illness and fear of arrest or of denunciation by a neighbour or by a priest. Rural parish priests were particularly active in denouncing their parishioners. Their contribution to the exacerbation of social divisions suggested a quest for vengeance rather than a Christian commitment to forgiveness or reconciliation. The sheer misery of life for the defeated explains a notable rise in the suicide rate. Considerable cruelty was visited upon women under the rhetorical umbrella of ‘redemption’. As well as confiscation of goods and imprisonment as retribution for the behaviour of a son or husband, the widows and the wives of prisoners were raped. Many were forced to live in total poverty and often, out of desperation, to sell themselves on the streets. The increase in prostitution both benefited Francoist men who thereby slaked their lust and reassured them that ‘red’ women were a fount of dirt and corruption. Soldiers billeted on poor families often abused the unprotected women of the household. Many priests defended the honour of male parishioners and denounced their female victims as ‘reds’.123
After Catalonia fell, a huge area amounting to about 30 per cent of Spain remained in the hands of the Republic. Negrín still cherished hope of fighting on until a European war started and the democracies at last realized that the anti-fascist battle of the Republic had been theirs too. Franco was in no hurry to go into battle since the repression was a higher priority. In any case, he had reason to believe that the Republic was about to face major divisions that might save him the trouble of fighting in central Spain. His confidence was such that, on 9 February 1939, he published the Law of Political Responsibilities and dashed the hopes of non-Communist Republicans who were prepared to betray Negrín in the hope of a negotiated peace. Retroactive to October 1934, the law declared Republicans guilty of the crime of military rebellion, and was essentially a device to justify the expropriation of the defeated.124
On 4 March, Colonel Segismundo Casado, commander of the Republican Army of the Centre, formed an anti-Negrín National Defence Junta, in the hope of negotiating with Franco. He thereby sparked off what was effectively a second civil war within the Republican zone. Although he defeated pro-Communist forces, there was no prospect of a deal with Franco. Troops all along the line were surrendering or just going home. On 26 March, a gigantic and virtually unopposed advance was launched along a wide front. The next day, Franco’s forces simply occupied deserted positions and entered an eerily silent Madrid. Tens of thousands of Republicans headed for the Mediterranean coast in the vain hope of evacuation. The war was over, but there would be no reconciliation. Instead, in the areas that had just fallen under Franco’s control, Valencia, Alicante, Murcia and Albacete, Almería and eastern Andalusia, and the eastern part of New Castile, a massive wave of political arrests, trials, executions and imprisonment was about to begin."