Kitabı oku: «The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain»
The Spanish Holocaust
Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain
Paul Preston
Copyright
HarperPress
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2012
Copyright © Paul Preston 2012
Paul Preston asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
THE SPANISH HOLOCAUST. Copyright © Paul Preston 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Source ISBN: 9780002556347
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780007467228
Version: 2016-07-04
Dedication
For Gabrielle
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Prologue
PART 1: THE ORIGINS OF HATRED AND VIOLENCE
1 Social War Begins, 1931–1933
2 Theorists of Extermination
3 The Right Goes on the Offensive, 1933–1934
4 The Coming of War, 1934–1936
PART 2: INSTITUTIONALIZED VIOLENCE IN THE REBEL ZONE
5 Queipo’s Terror: The Purging of the South
6 Mola’s Terror: The Purging of Navarre, Galicia, Castile and León
PART 3: THE CONSEQUENCE OF THE COUP: SPONTANEOUS VIOLENCE IN THE REPUBLICAN ZONE
7 Far from the Front: Repression behind the Republican Lines
8 Revolutionary Terror in Madrid
PART 4: MADRID BESIEGED: THE THREAT AND THE RESPONSE
9 The Column of Death’s March on Madrid
10 A Terrified City Responds: The Massacres of Paracuellos
PART 5: TWO CONCEPTS OF WAR
11 Defending the Republic from the Enemy Within
12 Franco’s Slow War of Annihilation
PART 6: FRANCO’S INVESTMENT IN TERROR
13 No Reconciliation: Trials, Executions, Prisons
Epilogue: The Reverberations
Acknowledgements
Photographic Insert
Glossary
Notes
Appendix
Searchable Terms
Other Books by Paul Preston
Copyright
About the Publisher
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Franco in Seville with the brutal leader of the ‘Column of Death’, Colonel Juan Yagüe. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)
Yagüe’s artillery chief, Luis Alarcón de la Lastra. (EFE/jt)
General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano. (EFE/Jalon Angel)
General Emilio Mola. (EFE/Delespro/jt)
Gonzalo de Aguilera. (Courtesy of Marianela de la Trinidad de Aguilera y Lodeiro, Condesa de Alba de Yeltes)
Virgilio Leret with his wife, the feminist, Carlota O’Neill. (Courtesy of Carlota Leret-O’Neill)
Amparo Barayón. (Courtesy of Ramon Sender Barayón)
A Coruña, Anniversary of the foundation of the Second Republic, 14 April 1936. (Fondo Suárez Ferrín, Proxecto “Nomes e Voces”, Santiago de Compostela)
José González Barrero, Mayor of Zafra. (Courtesy of González Barrero family)
Modesto José Lorenzana Macarro, Mayor of Fuente de Cantos. (Courtesy of Cayetano Ibarra)
Ricardo Zabalza, secretary general of the FNTT and Civil Governor of Valencia during the war, with his wife Obdulia Bermejo. (Courtesy of Abel Zabalza and Emilio Majuelo)
Mourning women after Castejón’s purge of the Triana district of Seville, 21 July 1936. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)
Queipo de Llano (foreground) inspects the 5º Bandera of the Legion in Seville on 2 August 1936. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)
Rafael de Medina Villalonga, in white, leads the column that has captured the town of Tocina, 4 August 1936. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)
Trucks taking miners captured in the ambush at La Pañoleta for execution. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)
Utrera, 26 July 1936. Townsfolk taken prisoner by the column of the Legion which captured the town. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)
Lorca’s gravediggers. (Courtesy of Víctor Fernández and Colección Enrique Sabater)
Regulares examine their plunder. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)
After a village falls, the column moves on with stolen sewing machines, household goods and animals. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)
A firing squad prepares to execute townspeople in Llerena. (Archivo Histórico Municipal de Llerena, Fondo Pacheco Pereira, legajo 1.)
Calle Carnicerías (Butchery Street) in Talavera de la Reina. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)
Mass grave near Toledo. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)
Pascual Fresquet (centre left) with his ‘death brigade’ in Caspe. (España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FC-CAUSA_GENERAL, 1426, EXP.45, IMAGEN128)
The seizure of the Iglesia del Carmen in Madrid by militiamen. (España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FC-Causa_General, 1907, 1, p.81)
Arms and uniforms of the Falange found by militiamen in the offices of the monarchist newspaper ABC. (España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FC-Causa_General, 1814, 1, IMAGEN6)
Aurelio Fernández. (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, IISG-CNT)
Juan García Oliver. (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, IISG-CNT)
Ángel Pedrero García. (España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FC-CAUSA_GENERAL, 1547, EXP.9, IMAGEN45)
The Brigada García Atadell outside their Madrid headquarters, the Rincón Palace. (EFE/Díaz Casariego/jgb)
Santiago Carrillo. (EFE/jgb)
Melchor Rodríguez. (EFE/Vidal/jgb)
The wounded Pablo Yagüe receives visitors. (EFE/Vidal/jgb)
The cameraman Roman Karmen and the Pravda correspondent Mikhail Koltsov. (Courtesy of Victor Alexandrovich Frandkin, Koltsov family)
Andreu Nin and Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko. (L’Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona)
Josif Grigulevich, the Brigadas Especiales, Roman Karmen, then two of the NKVD staff, Lev Vasilevsky and then his boss, Grigory Sergeievich Syroyezhkin. Madrid October 1936. (Cañada Blanch Collection)
Vittorio Vidali. (Imperial War Museum)
Refugees flee from Queipo’s repression in Málaga towards Almería. (Photograph by Hazen Sise, reproduced courtesy of Jesús Majada and El Centro Andaluz de la Fotografía)
Exhaustion overcomes the refugees from Málaga on the road to Almería. (Photograph by Hazen Sise, reproduced courtesy of Jesús Majada and El Centro Andaluz de la Fotografía)
The Regulares enter northern Catalonia January 1939. (España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FOTOGRAFIAS-DESCHAMPS, FOTO.7)
Republican prisoners packed into the fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona, February 1939. (España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FOTOGRAFIAS-DESCHAMPS, FOTO.764)
No military threat from those making the long trek to the French border. (Photos 12/Alamy)
A crowd of Spanish women and children refugees cross the border into France at Le Perthus. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)
Recently arrived at Argelès, women await classification. (Roger-Viollet/Rex Features)
The male refugees are detained at Argelès – the only facility being barbed wire. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)
Prisoners carry rocks up the staircase at the Mauthausen-Gusen death camp. (akg-images/ullstein bild)
Franco welcomes Himmler to Madrid. (EFE/Hermes Pato/jgb)
Antonio Vallejo-Nájera. (EFE/jgb)
Himmler visits the psycho-technic checa of Alfonso Laurencic in Barcelona. (L’Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona)
Drawings made by Simon Manfield during the excavation at Valdedios, Asturias, summer 2003. (© Simon Manfield. Part of the Memoria Histórica series, simonmanfield@hotmail.com)
PROLOGUE
Behind the lines during the Spanish Civil War, nearly 200,000 men and women were murdered extra-judicially or executed after flimsy legal process. They were killed as a result of the military coup of 17–18 July 1936 against the Second Republic. For the same reason, perhaps as many as 200,000 men died at the battle fronts. Unknown numbers of men, women and children were killed in bombing attacks and in the exoduses that followed the occupation of territory by Franco’s military forces. In all of Spain after the final victory of the rebels at the end of March 1939, approximately 20,000 Republicans were executed. Many more died of disease and malnutrition in overcrowded, unhygienic prisons and concentration camps. Others died in the slave-labour conditions of work battalions. More than half a million refugees were forced into exile and many were to die of disease in French concentration camps. Several thousand were worked to death in Nazi camps. The purpose of this book is to show as far as possible what happened to civilians and why. All of what did happen constitutes what I believe can legitimately be called the Spanish holocaust.
I thought long and hard about using the word ‘holocaust’ in the title of this book. I feel intense sorrow and outrage about the Nazis’ deliberate attempt to annihilate European Jewry. I also feel intense sorrow and outrage about the lesser, but none the less massive, suffering undergone by the Spanish people during the Civil War of 1936–9 and for several years thereafter. I could find no word that more accurately encapsulates the Spanish experience than ‘holocaust’. Moreover, in choosing it, I was influenced by the fact that those who justified the slaughter of innocent Spaniards used an anti-Semitic rhetoric and frequently claimed that they had to be exterminated because they were the instruments of a ‘Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic’ conspiracy. Nevertheless, my use of the word ‘holocaust’ is not intended to equate what happened within Spain with what happened throughout the rest of continental Europe under German occupation but rather to suggest that it be examined in a broadly comparative context. It is hoped thereby to suggest parallels and resonances that will lead to a better understanding of what happened in Spain during the Civil War and after.
To this day, General Franco and his regime enjoy a relatively good press. This derives from a series of persistent myths about the benefits of his rule. Along with the carefully constructed idea that he masterminded Spain’s economic ‘miracle’ in the 1960s and heroically kept his country out of the Second World War, there are numerous falsifications about the origins of his regime. These derive from the initial lie that the Spanish Civil War was a necessary war fought to save the country from Communist take-over. The success of this fabrication influenced much writing on the Spanish Civil War to depict it as a conflict between two more or less equal sides. The issue of innocent civilian casualties is subsumed into that concept and thereby ‘normalized’. Moreover, anti-communism, a reluctance to believe that officers and gentlemen could be involved in the deliberate mass slaughter of civilians and distaste for anti-clerical violence go some way to explaining a major lacuna in the historiography of the war.
The extent to which the rebels’ war effort was built on a prior plan of systematic mass murder and their subsequent regime on state terror is given relatively little weight in the literature on the Spanish conflict and its aftermath. The same may be said of the fact that a chain reaction which fuelled retaliatory mass assassinations within the loyalist zone was set off once the exterminatory plans of the military rebels began to be implemented from the night of 17 July 1936. The collective violence in both rearguards unleashed by brutal perpetrators against undeserving victims justifies the use of the word ‘holocaust’ in this context not just because of its extent but also because its resonances of systematic murder should be invoked in the Spanish case, as they are in those of Germany and Russia.
There were two rearguard repressions, one each in the Republican and rebel zones. Although very different, both quantitatively and qualitatively, each claimed tens of thousands of lives, most of them innocent of wrongdoing or even of political activism. The leaders of the rebellion, Generals Mola, Franco and Queipo de Llano, regarded the Spanish proletariat in the same way as they did the Moroccan, as an inferior race that had to be subjugated by sudden, uncompromising violence. Thus they applied in Spain the exemplary terror they had learned in North Africa by deploying the Spanish Foreign Legion and Moroccan mercenaries, the Regulares, of the colonial army.
Their approval of the grim violence of their men is reflected in Franco’s war diary of 1922, which lovingly describes Moroccan villages destroyed and their defenders decapitated. He delights in recounting how his teenage bugler boy cut off the ear of a captive.1 Franco himself led twelve Legionarios on a raid from which they returned carrying as trophies the bloody heads of twelve tribesmen (harqueños).2 The decapitation and mutilation of prisoners was common. When General Miguel Primo de Rivera visited Morocco in 1926, an entire battalion of the Legion awaited inspection with heads stuck on their bayonets.3 During the Civil War, terror by the African Army was similarly deployed on the Spanish mainland as the instrument of a coldly conceived project to underpin a future authoritarian regime.
The repression carried out by the military rebels was a carefully planned operation to eliminate, in the words of the director of the coup, Emilio Mola, ‘without scruple or hesitation those who do not think as we do’.4 In contrast, the repression in the Republican zone was hot-blooded and reactive. Initially, it was a spontaneous and defensive response to the military coup which was subsequently intensified by news brought by refugees of military atrocities and by rebel bombing raids. It is difficult to see how the violence in the Republican zone could have happened without the military coup which effectively removed all of the restraints of civilized society. The collapse of the structures of law and order as a result of the coup thus permitted both an explosion of blind millenarian revenge (the built-in resentment of centuries of oppression) and the irresponsible criminality of those let out of jail or of those individuals never previously daring to give free rein to their instincts. In addition, as in any war, there was the real military necessity of combating the enemy within.
There is no doubt that hostility intensified on both sides as the Civil War progressed, fed by outrage and a desire for revenge as news of what was happening on the other side filtered through. Nevertheless, it is also clear that, from the first moments, there was a level of hatred at work that sprang forth ready formed from the army in the North African outpost of Ceuta on the night of 17 July 1936 or from the Republican populace on 19 July at the Cuartel de la Montaña barracks in Madrid. The first part of the book explains how those enmities were fomented. Polarization ensued from the right’s determination to block the reforming ambitions of the democratic regime established in April 1931, the Second Republic. The obstruction of reform led to an ever more radicalized response by the left. At the same time, rightist theological and racial theories were elaborated to justify the intervention of the military and the destruction of the left.
In the case of the military rebels, a programme of terror and extermination was central to their planning and preparations. Because of the numerical superiority of the urban and rural working classes, they believed that the immediate imposition of a reign of terror was crucial. With the use of forces brutalized in the colonial wars in Africa, backed up by local landowners, this process was supervised in the south by General Queipo de Llano. In the significantly different regions of Navarre, Galicia, Old Castile and León, deeply conservative areas where the military coup was almost immediately successful and left-wing resistance minimal, the application of terror under the supervision of General Mola was disproportionately severe.
The exterminatory objectives of the rebels, if not their military capacities, found an echo on the extreme left, particularly in the anarchist movement, in rhetoric about the need for ‘purification’ of a corrupt society. In Republican-held areas, the underlying hatreds deriving from misery, hunger and exploitation exploded in a disorganized terror, particularly in Barcelona and Madrid. Inevitably, the targets were not just the military personnel identified with the revolt but also the wealthy, the bankers, the industrialists and the landowners who were regarded as the instruments of oppression. It was directed too, often with greater ferocity, at the clergy who were seen as the cronies of the rich, legitimizing injustice while the Church accumulated fabulous wealth. Unlike the systematic repression unleashed by the rebels as an instrument of policy, this random violence took place despite, not because of, the Republican authorities. Indeed, as a result of the efforts of successive Republican governments to re-establish public order, the left-wing repression was restrained and was largely at an end by December 1936.
Two of the bloodiest episodes in the Spanish Civil War, which are closely interrelated, concern the siege of Madrid by the rebels and the capital’s defence. Franco’s Africanista forces, the so-called ‘Column of Death’, left a trail of slaughter as they conquered towns and villages along their route from Seville to the capital. Having thus announced what Madrid could expect if surrender was not immediate, the consequence was that those responsible for the defence of the city made the decision to evacuate right-wing prisoners, particularly army officers who had sworn to join the rebel forces as soon as they could. The implementation of that decision led to the notorious massacres of right-wingers at Paracuellos on the outskirts of Madrid.
By the end of 1936, two differing concepts of the war had evolved. The Republic was on the defensive both against Franco and against enemies within. Such enemies included not just the burgeoning rebel fifth column, dedicated to spying, sabotage and spreading defeatism and despondency. Threats to the international image of the Republic and indeed to its war effort were also seen in the revolutionary ambitions of the anarchist movement, consisting of its trade union, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, and its activist wing, the Federación Anarquista Ibérica. The anti-Stalinist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista was equally determined to make a priority of revolution. Both thus became targets of the same security apparatus which had put a stop to the uncontrolled repression of the first months. On the rebel side, the rapid advance of the African columns was replaced by Franco’s deliberately ponderous war of annihilation through the Basque Country, Santander, Asturias, Aragon and Catalonia. His war effort was conceived ever more as an investment in terror which would facilitate the establishment of his dictatorship. The post-war machinery of trials, executions, prisons and concentration camps consolidated that investment.
The intention was to ensure that establishment interests would never again be challenged as they had been from 1931 to 1936 by the democratic reforms of the Second Republic. When the clergy justified and the military implemented General Mola’s call for the elimination of ‘those who do not think as we do’, they were not engaged in an intellectual or ethical crusade. The defence of establishment interests was assumed to require the eradication of the ‘thinking’ of progressive liberal and left-wing elements. They had questioned the central tenets of the right which could be summed up in the slogan of the major Catholic party, the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas – or Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-Wing Groups) – ‘Religion, Fatherland, Family, Order, Work, Property’, the untouchable elements of social and economic life in Spain before 1931. ‘Religion’ referred to the Catholic Church’s monopoly of education and religious practice. ‘Fatherland’ meant no challenge to Spanish centralism from the regional nationalisms. ‘Family’ denoted the subservient position of women and the prohibition of divorce. ‘Order’ meant no toleration of public protest. ‘Work’ referred to the duties of the labouring masses. ‘Property’ meant the privileges of the landowners whose position must remain unchallenged. Sometimes, the word ‘hierarchy’ was included in the list to emphasize that the existing social order was sacrosanct. To protect all of these tenets, in the areas occupied by the rebels, the immediate victims were not just schoolteachers, Freemasons, liberal doctors and lawyers, intellectuals and trade union leaders – those who might have propagated ideas. The killing also extended to all those who might have been influenced by their ideas: the trade unionists, those who didn’t attend Mass, those suspected of voting in February 1936 for the left-wing electoral coalition, the Popular Front, and the women who had been given the vote and the right to divorce.
What all this meant in terms of numbers of deaths is still impossible to say with finality, although the broad lines are clear. Accordingly, indicative figures are frequently given in the book, drawing on the massive research carried out all over Spain in recent years by large numbers of local historians. However, despite their remarkable achievements, it is still not possible to present definitive figures for the overall number of those killed behind the lines, especially in the rebel zone. The objective should always be, as far as is possible, to base figures for those killed in both zones on the named dead. Thanks to the efforts of the Republican authorities at the time to identify bodies and because of subsequent investigations by the Francoist state, the numbers of those murdered or executed in the Republican zone are known with relative precision. The most reliable recent figure, produced by the foremost expert on the subject, José Luis Ledesma, is 49,272. However, uncertainty over the scale of the killings in Republican Madrid could see that figure rise.5 Even for areas where reliable studies exist, new information and excavations of common graves see the numbers being revised constantly, albeit within relatively small parameters.6
In contrast, the calculation of numbers of Republican victims of rebel violence has faced innumerable difficulties. Nineteen-sixty-five was the year in which Francoists began to think the unthinkable, that the Caudillo was not immortal, and that preparations had to be made for the future. It was not until 1985 that the Spanish government began to take belated and hesitant action to protect the nation’s archival resources. Millions of documents were lost during those crucial twenty years, including the archives of the Franco regime’s single party, the fascist Falange, of provincial police headquarters, of prisons and of the main Francoist local authority, the Civil Governors. Convoys of trucks removed the ‘judicial’ records of the repression. As well as the deliberate destruction of archives, there were also ‘inadvertent’ losses when some town councils sold their archives by the ton as waste paper for recycling.7
Serious investigation was not possible until after the death of Franco in 1975. When researchers began the task, they were confronted not only with the deliberate destruction of much archival material by the Francoist authorities but also with the fact that many deaths had simply been registered either falsely or not at all. In addition to the concealment of crimes by the dictatorship was the continued fear of witnesses about coming forward and the obstruction of research, especially in the provinces of Old Castile. Archival material has mysteriously disappeared and frequently local officials have refused to permit consultation of the civilian registry.8
Many executions by the military rebels were given a veneer of pseudo-legality by trials, although they were effectively little different from extra-judicial murder. Death sentences were handed out after procedures lasting minutes in which the accused were not allowed to speak.9 The deaths of those killed in what the rebels called ‘cleansing and punishment operations’ were given the flimsiest legal justification by being registered as ‘by dint of the application of the declaration of martial law’ (‘por aplicación del bando de Guerra’). This was meant to legalize the summary execution of those who resisted the military take-over. The collateral deaths of many innocent people, unarmed and not offering any resistance, were also registered in this way. Then there were the executions of those registered as killed ‘without trial’ in reference to those who were discovered harbouring a fugitive, and so were shot just on military orders. There was also a systematic effort to conceal what had happened. Prisoners were taken far from their home towns, executed and buried in unmarked mass graves.10
Finally, there is the fact that a substantial number of deaths were not registered in any way. This was the case with many of those who fled before Franco’s African columns as they headed from Seville to Madrid. As each town or village was occupied, among those killed were refugees from elsewhere. Since they carried no papers, their names or places of origin were unknown. It may never be possible to calculate the exact numbers murdered in the open fields by squads of mounted Falangists and extreme right-wing monarchists of the so-called Carlist movement. It is equally impossible to ascertain the fate of the thousands of refugees from Western Andalusia who died in the exodus after the fall of Málaga in 1937 or of those from all over Spain who had taken refuge in Barcelona only to die in the flight to the French border in 1939 or of those who committed suicide after waiting in vain for evacuation from the Mediterranean ports.
Nevertheless, the huge amount of research that has been carried out makes it possible to state that, broadly speaking, the repression by the rebels was about three times greater than that which took place in the Republican zone. The currently most reliable, yet still tentative, figure for deaths at the hands of the military rebels and their supporters is 130,199. However, it is unlikely that such deaths were fewer than 150,000 and they could well be more. Some areas have been studied only partially; others hardly at all. In several areas, which spent time in both zones, and for which the figures are known with some precision, the differences between the numbers of deaths at the hands of Republicans and at the hands of rebels are shocking. To give some examples, in Badajoz, there were 1,437 victims of the left as against 8,914 victims of the rebels; in Seville, 447 victims of the left, 12,507 victims of the rebels; in Cádiz, 97 victims of the left, 3,071 victims of the rebels; and in Huelva, 101 victims of the left, 6,019 victims of the rebels. In places where there was no Republican violence, the figures for rebel killings are almost incredible, for example Navarre, 3,280, La Rioja, 1,977. In most places where the Republican repression was the greater, like Alicante, Girona or Teruel, the differences are in the hundreds.11 The exception is Madrid. The killings throughout the war when the capital was under Republican control seem to have been nearer three times those carried out after the rebel occupation. However, precise calculation is rendered difficult by the fact that the most frequently quoted figure for the post-war repression in Madrid, of 2,663 deaths, is based on a study of those executed and buried in only one cemetery, the Almudena or Cementerio del Este.12
Although exceeded by the violence exercised by the Francoists, the repression in the Republican zone before it was stopped by the Popular Front government was nonetheless horrifying. Its scale and nature necessarily varied, with the highest figures being recorded for the largely Socialist south of Toledo and the anarchist-dominated area from the south of Zaragoza, through Teruel into western Tarragona.13 In Toledo, 3,152 rightists were killed, of whom 10 per cent were members of the clergy (nearly half of the province’s clergy).14 In Cuenca, the total deaths were 516 (of whom thirty-six, or 7 per cent of the total killed, were priests – nearly a quarter of the province’s clergy).15 The figure for deaths in Republican Catalonia, according to the exhaustive study by Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté and Joan Vilarroyo i Font, was 8,360. This figure corresponds closely to the conclusions reached by a commission created by the Generalitat de Catalunya (the Catalan regional government) in 1937. Part of the efforts of the Republican authorities to register deaths, it was led by a judge, Bertran de Quintana, and investigated all deaths behind the lines in order to instigate measures against those responsible for extra-judicial executions.16 Such a procedure would have been inconceivable in the rebel zone.
Recent scholarship, not only for Catalonia but also for most of Republican Spain, has dramatically dismantled the propagandistic allegations made by the rebels at the time. On 18 July 1938 in Burgos, Franco himself claimed that 54,000 people had been killed in Catalonia. In the same speech, he alleged that 70,000 had been murdered in Madrid and 20,000 in Valencia. On the same day, he told a reporter there had already been a total of 470,000 murders in the Republican zone.17 To prove the scale of Republican iniquity to the world, on 26 April 1940 he set up a massive state investigation, the Causa General, ‘to gather trustworthy information’ to ascertain the true scale of the crimes committed in the Republican zone. Denunciation and exaggeration were encouraged. Thus it came as a desperate disappointment to Franco when, on the basis of the information gathered, the Causa General concluded that the number of deaths was 85,940. Although inflated and including many duplications, this figure was still so far below Franco’s claims that, for over a quarter of a century, it was omitted from editions of the published résumé of the Causa General’s findings.18
A central, yet under-estimated, part of the repression carried out by the rebels – the systematic persecution of women – is not susceptible to statistical analysis. Murder, torture and rape were generalized punishments for the gender liberation embraced by many, but not all, liberal and left-wing women during the Republican period. Those who came out of prison alive suffered deep lifelong physical and psychological problems. Thousands of others were subjected to rape and other sexual abuses, the humiliation of head shaving and public soiling after the forced ingestion of castor oil. For most Republican women, there were also the terrible economic and psychological problems of having their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons murdered or forced to flee, which often saw the wives themselves arrested in efforts to get them to reveal the whereabouts of their menfolk. In contrast, despite frequent assumptions that the raping of nuns was common in Republican Spain, there was relatively little equivalent abuse of women there. That is not to say that it did not take place. The sexual molestation of around one dozen nuns and the deaths of 296, just over 1.3 per cent of the female clergy, is shocking but of a notably lower order of magnitude than the fate of women in the rebel zone.19 That is not entirely surprising given that respect for women was built into the Republic’s reforming programme.
The statistical vision of the Spanish holocaust is not only flawed, incomplete and unlikely ever to be complete. It also fails to capture the intense horror that lies behind the numbers. The account that follows includes many stories of individuals, of men, women and children from both sides. It introduces some specific but representative cases of victims and perpetrators from all over the country. It is hoped thereby to convey the suffering unleashed upon their own fellow citizens by the arrogance and brutality of the officers who rose up on 17 July 1936. They provoked a war that was unnecessary and whose consequences still reverberate bitterly in Spain today.
PART ONE
1
Social War Begins, 1931–1933
On 18 July 1936, on hearing of the military uprising in Morocco, an aristocratic landowner lined up the labourers on his estate to the south-west of Salamanca and shot six of them as a lesson to the others. The Conde de Alba de Yeltes, Gonzalo de Aguilera y Munro, a retired cavalry officer, joined the press service of the rebel forces during the Civil War and boasted of his crime to foreign visitors.1 Although his alleged atrocity was extreme, the sentiments behind it were not unrepresentative of the hatreds that had smouldered in the Spanish countryside over the twenty years before the military uprising of 1936. Aguilera’s cold and calculated violence reflected the belief, common among the rural upper classes, that the landless labourers were sub-human. This attitude had become common among the big landowners since a series of sporadic uprisings by hungry day-labourers in the regions of Spain dominated by huge estates (latifundios). Taking place between 1918 and 1921, a period of bitter social conflict known thereafter as the trienio bolchevique (three Bolshevik years), these insurrections had been crushed by the traditional defenders of the rural oligarchy, the Civil Guard and the army. Previously, there had been an uneasy truce within which the wretched lives of the landless day-labourers (jornaleros or braceros) were occasionally relieved by the patronizing gestures of the owners – the gift of food or a blind eye turned to rabbit poaching or to the gathering of windfall crops. The violence of the conflicts had outraged the landlords, who would never forgive the insubordination of the braceros they considered to be an inferior species. Accordingly, the paternalism which had somewhat mitigated the daily brutality of the day-labourers’ lives came to an abrupt end.
The agrarian oligarchy, in an unequal partnership with the industrial and financial bourgeoisie, was traditionally the dominant force in Spanish capitalism. Its monopoly of power began to be challenged on two sides in the course of the painful and uneven process of industrialization. The prosperity enjoyed by neutral Spain during the First World War emboldened industrialists and bankers to jostle with the great landowners for political position. However, with both menaced by a militant industrial proletariat, they soon rebuilt a defensive alliance. In August 1917, the left’s feeble revolutionary threat was bloodily smothered by the army. Thereafter, until 1923, when the army intervened again, social ferment occasionally bordered on undeclared civil war. In the south, there were the rural uprisings of the ‘three Bolshevik years’. In the north, the industrialists of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Asturias, having tried to ride the immediate post-war recession with wage-cuts and layoffs, faced violent strikes and, in Barcelona, a terrorist spiral of provocations and reprisals.
In the consequent atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety, there was a ready middle-class audience for the notion long since disseminated by extreme right-wing Catholics that a secret alliance of Jews, Freemasons and the Communist Third International was conspiring to destroy Christian Europe, with Spain as a principal target. In Catholic Spain, the idea that there was an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity had emerged in the early Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century, the Spanish extreme right resurrected it to discredit the liberals whom they viewed as responsible for social changes that were damaging their interests. In this paranoid fantasy, Freemasons were smeared as tools of the Jews (of whom there were virtually none) in a sinister plot to establish Jewish tyranny over the Christian world.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, such views were expressed with ever increasing vehemence. They were a response to the kaleidoscopic processes of rapid economic growth, social dislocation, regionalist agitations, a bourgeois reform movement and the emergence of trade unions and left-wing parties. An explanation for the destabilization of Spanish society and the attendant collapse of the relative certainties of a predominantly rural society was found in a deeply alarming, yet somehow comforting, assertion that shifted the blame on to an identifiable and foreign enemy. It was alleged that, using Freemasons as their willing intermediaries, the Jews controlled the economy, politics, the press, literature and the entertainment world through which they propagated immorality and the brutalization of the masses. Such views had long been peddled by El Siglo Futuro, the daily newspaper of the deeply reactionary Carlist Traditionalist Communion. In 1912, the National Anti-Masonic and Anti-Semitic League had been founded by José Ignacio de Urbina with the support of twenty-two Spanish bishops. The Bishop of Almería wrote that ‘everything is ready for the decisive battle that must be unleashed between the children of light and the children of darkness, between Catholicism and Judaism, between Christ and the Devil’.2 That there was never any hard evidence was put down to the cleverness and colossal power of the enemy, evil itself.
In Spain, as in other European countries, anti-Semitism had reached even greater intensity after 1917. It was taken as axiomatic that socialism was a Jewish creation and that the Russian revolution had been financed by Jewish capital, an idea given a spurious credibility by the Jewish origins of prominent Bolsheviks such as Trotsky, Martov and Dan. Spain’s middle and upper classes were chilled, and outraged, by the various revolutionary upheavals that threatened them between 1917 and 1923. The fears of the elite were somewhat calmed in September 1923, when the army intervened again and a dictatorship was established by General Miguel Primo de Rivera. As Captain General of Barcelona, Primo de Rivera was the ally of Catalan textile barons and understood their sense of being under threat from their anarchist workforce. Moreover, coming from a substantial landowning family in Jérez, he also appreciated the fears of the big southern landowners or latifundistas. He was thus the ideal praetorian defender of the reactionary coalition of industrialists and landowners consolidated after 1917. While Primo de Rivera remained in power, he offered security to the middle and upper classes. Nevertheless, his ideologues worked hard to build the notion that in Spain two bitterly hostile social, political and, indeed, moral groupings were locked in a fight to the death. Specifically, in a pre-echo of the function that they would also fulfil for Franco, these propagandists stressed the dangers faced from Jews, Freemasons and leftists.
These ideas essentially delegitimized the entire spectrum of the left, from middle-class liberal democrats, via Socialists and regional nationalists, to anarchists and Communists. This was done by blurring distinctions between them and by denying their right to be considered Spanish. The denunciations of this ‘anti-Spain’ were publicized through the right-wing press and the regime’s single party, the Unión Patriótica, as well as through civic organizations and the education system. These notions served to generate satisfaction with the dictatorship as a bulwark against the perceived Bolshevik threat. Starting from the premise that the world was divided into ‘national alliances and Soviet alliances’, the influential right-wing poet José María Pemán declared that ‘the time has come for Spanish society to choose between Jesus and Barabbas’. He claimed that the masses were ‘either Christian or anarchic and destructive’ and the nation was divided between an anti-Spain made up of everything that was heterodox and foreign and the real Spain of traditional religious and monarchical values.3
Another senior propagandist of the Primo de Rivera regime, José Pemartín, linked, like his cousin Pemán, to the extreme right in Seville, also believed that Spain was under attack by an international conspiracy masterminded by Freemasonry, ‘the eternal enemy of all the world’s governments of order’. He dismissed the left, in generalized terms, as ‘the dogmatists deluded by what they think are modern, democratic and European ideas, universal suffrage, the sovereign parliament, etc. They are beyond redemption. They are made mentally ill by the worst of tyrannies, ideocracy or the tyranny of certain ideas.’ It was the duty of the army to defend Spain against these attacks.4
Despite his temporary success in anaesthetizing the anxieties of the middle and ruling classes, Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship did not last. His benevolent attempt to temper authoritarianism with paternalism inadvertently alienated landowners, industrialists, the Church hierarchy and some of the elite officer corps of the army. Most dramatically, his attempts to reform military promotion procedures ensured that the army would stand aside when a great electoral coalition of Socialists and middle-class Republicans swept to power on 14 April 1931. After the dictator’s departure in January 1930, one of the first to take up the defence of establishment interests was Dr José María Albiñana, an eccentric Valencian neurologist and frenetic admirer of Primo de Rivera.
The author of more than twenty novels and books on neurasthenia, religion, the history and philosophy of medicine and Spanish politics, and a number of mildly imperialist works about Mexico, Albiñana was convinced that there was a secret alliance working in foreign obscurity in order to destroy Spain. In February 1930, he distributed tens of thousands of copies of his Manifiesto por el Honor de España. In it, he had declared that ‘there exists a Masonic Soviet which dishonours Spain in the eyes of the world by reviving the black legend and other infamies forged by the eternal hidden enemies of our fatherland. This Soviet, made up of heartless persons, is backed by spiteful politicians who, to avenge offences against themselves, go abroad to vomit insults against Spain’. This was a reference to the Republicans exiled by the dictatorship. Two months later, he launched his ‘exclusively Spanish Nationalist Party’ whose objective was to ‘annihilate the internal enemies of the fatherland’. A fascist image was provided by its blue-shirted, Roman-saluting Legionaries of Spain, a ‘citizen volunteer force to act directly, explosively and expeditiously against any initiative which attacks or diminishes the prestige of the fatherland’.5
Albiñana was merely one of the first to argue that the fall of the monarchy was the first step in the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy to take over Spain. Such ideas would feed the extreme rightist paranoia that met the establishment of the Second Republic. The passing of political power to the Socialist Party (PSOE – Partido Socialista Obrero Español) and its urban middle-class allies, the lawyers and intellectuals of the various Republican parties, sent shivers of horror through right-wing Spain. The Republican–Socialist coalition intended to use its suddenly acquired share of state power to implement a far-reaching programme to create a modern Spain by destroying the reactionary influence of the Church, eradicating militarism and improving the immediate conditions of the wretched day-labourers with agrarian reform.
This huge agenda inevitably raised the expectations of the urban and rural proletariats while provoking the fear and the determined enmity of the Church, the armed forces and the landowning and industrial oligarchies. The passage from the hatreds of 1917 –23 to the widespread violence that engulfed Spain after 1936 was long and complex but it began to speed up dramatically in the spring of 1931. The fears and hatreds of the rich found, as always, their first line of defence in the Civil Guard. However, as landowners blocked attempts at reform, the frustrated expectations of hungry day-labourers could be contained only by increasing brutality.
Many on the right took the establishment of the Republic as proof that Spain was the second front in the war against world revolution – a notion fed by numerous clashes between the forces of order and workers of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the anarchist union. Resolute action against the extreme left by the Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura, did not deter the Carlist newspaper El Siglo Futuro from attacking the government and claiming that progressive Republican legislation was ordered from abroad. It declared in June 1931 that three of the most conservative ministers, the premier, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, Miguel Maura and the Minister of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos Urruti, were Jews and that the Republic itself had been brought about as a result of a Jewish conspiracy. The more moderate Catholic mass-circulation daily El Debate referred to de los Ríos as ‘the rabbi’. The Editorial Católica, which owned an influential chain of newspapers including El Debate, soon began to publish the virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic magazines Gracia y Justicia and Los Hijos del Pueblo. The editor of the scurrilously satirical Gracia y Justicia was Manuel Delgado Barreto, a one-time collaborator of the dictator General Primo de Rivera, a friend of his son José Antonio and an early sponsor of the Falange. It would reach a weekly circulation of 200,000 copies.6
The Republic would face violent resistance not only from the extreme right but also from the extreme left. The anarcho-syndicalist CNT recognized that many of its militants had voted for the Republican–Socialist coalition in the municipal elections of 12 April and that its arrival had raised the people’s hopes. As one leading anarchist put it, they were ‘like children with new shoes’. The CNT leadership, however, expecting the Republic to change nothing, aspired merely to propagate its revolutionary objectives and to pursue its fierce rivalry with the Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), which it regarded as a scab union because of its collaboration with the Primo de Rivera regime. In a period of mass unemployment, with large numbers of migrant workers returning from overseas and unskilled construction workers left without work by the ending of the great public works projects of the dictatorship, the labour market was potentially explosive. This was a situation that would be exploited by the hard-line anarchists of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) who argued that the Republic, like the monarchy, was just an instrument of the bourgeoisie. The brief honeymoon period came to an end when CNT–FAI demonstrations on 1 May were repressed violently by the forces of order.7
In late May, a group of nearly one thousand strikers from the port of Pasajes descended on San Sebastián with the apparent intention of looting the wealthy shopping districts. Having been warned in advance, the Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura, deployed the Civil Guard at the entrance to the city. They repelled the attack at the cost of eight dead and many wounded. Then, in early July, the CNT launched a nationwide strike in the telephone system, largely as a challenge to the government. It was defeated by harsh police measures and strike-breaking by workers of the Socialist UGT who refused to join the CNT in what they saw as a sterile struggle. The Director General of Security, the sleek and portly Ángel Galarza of the Radical-Socialist Party, ordered that anyone seen trying to damage the installations of the telephone company should be shot. Maura and Galarza were understandably trying to maintain the confidence of the middle classes. Inevitably, their stance consolidated the violent hostility of the CNT towards both the Republic and the UGT.8
For the Republican–Socialist cabinet, the subversive activities of the CNT constituted rebellion. For the CNT, legitimate strikes and demonstrations were being crushed by dictatorial methods indistinguishable from those used by the monarchy. On 21 July 1931, the cabinet agreed on the need for ‘an urgent and severe remedy’. Maura outlined a proposal for ‘a legal instrument of repression’ and the Socialist Minister of Labour, Francisco Largo Caballero, proposed a decree to make strikes illegal. The two decrees would eventually be combined on 22 October into the Law for the Defence of the Republic, a measure enthusiastically supported by the Socialist members of the government not least because it was perceived as directed against their CNT rivals.9 It made little difference to the right, which perceived the violent social disorder of the anarchists as characteristic of the entire left, including the Socialists who denounced it and the Republican authorities who crushed it.
What mattered to the right was that the Civil Guard and the army lined up in defence of the existing economic order against the anarchists. Traditionally, the bulk of the army officer corps perceived the prevention of political and economic change as one of its primordial tasks. Now, the Republic would attempt to reform the military, bringing both its costs and its mentalities into line with Spain’s changed circumstances. A central part of that project would be the streamlining of a massively swollen officer corps. The tough and uncompromising colonial officers, the so-called Africanistas, having benefited from irregular and vertiginous battlefield promotions, would be the most affected. Their opposition to Republican reforms would inaugurate a process whereby the violence of Spain’s recent colonial history found a route back into the metropolis. The rigours and horrors of the Moroccan tribal wars between 1909 and 1925 had brutalized them. Morocco had also given them a beleaguered sense that, in their commitment to fighting to defend the colony, they alone were concerned with the fate of the Patria. Long before 1931, this had developed into a deep contempt both for professional politicians and for the pacifist left-wing masses that the Africanistas regarded as obstacles to the successful execution of their patriotic mission.
The repressive role of both the army and the Civil Guard in Spain’s long-standing social conflicts, particularly in rural areas, was perceived as central to that patriotic duty. However, between 1931 and 1936, several linked factors would provide the military with pervasive justifications for the use of violence against the left. The first was the Republic’s attempt to break the power of the Catholic Church. On 13 October 1931, the Minister of War, and later Prime Minister and President, Manuel Azaña, stated that ‘Spain has ceased to be Catholic.’10 Even if this was true, Spain remained a country with many pious and sincere Catholics. Now, the Republic’s anti-clerical legislation would provide an apparent justification for the virulent enmity of those who already had ample motive to see it destroyed. The bilious rhetoric of the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy was immediately pressed into service. Moreover, the gratuitous nature of some anti-clerical measures would help recruit many ordinary Catholics to the cause of the rich.
The religious issue would nourish a second crucial factor in fostering right-wing violence. This was the immensely successful propagation of theories that left-wingers and liberals were neither really Spanish nor even really human and that, as a threat to the nation’s existence, they should be exterminated. In books that sold by the tens of thousands, in daily newspapers and weekly magazines, the idea was hammered home that the Second Republic was foreign and sinister and must be destroyed. This notion, which found fertile ground in right-wing fear, was based on the contention that the Republic was the product of a conspiracy masterminded by Jews, and carried out by Freemasons through left-wing lackeys. The idea of this powerful international conspiracy – or contubernio (filthy cohabitation), one of Franco’s favourite words – justified any means necessary for what was presented as national survival. The intellectuals and priests who developed such ideas were able to connect with the latifundistas’ hatred for the landless day-labourers or jornaleros and the urban bourgeoisie’s fear of the unemployed. The Salamanca landowner Gonzalo de Aguilera y Munro, like many army officers and priests, was a voracious reader of such literature.11
Another factor which fomented violence was the reaction of the landowners to the Second Republic’s various attempts at agrarian reform. In the province of Salamanca, the leaders of the local Bloque Agrario, the landowners’ party, Ernesto Castaño and José Lamamié de Clairac, incited their members not to pay taxes nor to plant crops. Such intransigence radicalized the landless labourers.12 Across the areas of great estates (latifundios) in southern Spain, Republican legislation governing labour issues in the countryside was systematically flouted. Despite the decree of 7 May 1931 of obligatory cultivation, unionized labour was ‘locked out’ either by land being left uncultivated or by simply being refused work and told to comed República (literally ‘eat the Republic’, which was a way of saying ‘let the Republic feed you’). Despite the decree of 1 July 1931 imposing the eight-hour day in agriculture, sixteen-hour working days from sun-up to sun-down prevailed with no extra hours being paid. Indeed, starvation wages were paid to those who were hired. Although there were tens of thousands of unemployed landless labourers in the south, landowners proclaimed that unemployment was an invention of the Republic.13 In Jaén, the gathering of acorns, normally kept for pigs, or of windfall olives, the watering of beasts and even the gathering of firewood were denounced as ‘collective kleptomania’.14 Hungry peasants caught doing such things were savagely beaten by the Civil Guard or by armed estate guards.15
Their expectations raised by the coming of the new regime, the day-labourers were no longer as supine and fatalistic as had often been the case. As their hopes were frustrated by the obstructive tactics of the latifundistas, the desperation of the jornaleros could be controlled only by an intensification of the violence of the Civil Guard. The ordinary Civil Guards themselves often resorted to their firearms in panic, fearful of being outnumbered by angry mobs of labourers. Incidents of the theft of crops and game were reported with outrage by the right-wing press. Firearms were used against workers, and their deaths were reported with equal indignation in the left-wing press. In Corral de Almaguer (Toledo), starving jornaleros tried to break a local lock-out by invading estates and starting to work them. The Civil Guard intervened on behalf of the owners, killing five workers and wounding another seven. On 27 September 1931, for instance, in Palacios Rubios near Peñaranda de Bracamonte in the province of Salamanca, the Civil Guard opened fire on a group of men, women and children celebrating the successful end to a strike. The Civil Guard began to shoot when the villagers started to dance in front of the parish priest’s house. Two workers were killed immediately and two more died shortly afterwards.16 Immense bitterness was provoked by the case. In July 1933, on behalf of the Salamanca branch of the UGT landworkers’ federation (Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra), the editor of its newspaper Tierra y Trabajo, José Andrés y Mansó, brought a private prosecution against a Civil Guard corporal, Francisco Jiménez Cuesta, on four counts of homicide and another three of wounding. Jiménez Cuesta was successfully defended by the leader of the authoritarian Catholic party, the CEDA, José María Gil Robles. Andrés y Mansó would be murdered by Falangists at the end of July 1936.17
In Salamanca and elsewhere, there were regular acts of violence perpetrated against trade union members and landowners – a seventy-year-old beaten to death by the rifle butts of the Civil Guard in Burgos, a property-owner badly hurt in Villanueva de Córdoba. Very often these incidents, which were not confined to the south but also proliferated in the three provinces of Aragon, began with invasions of estates. Groups of landless labourers would go to a landowner and ask for work or sometimes carry out agricultural tasks and then threateningly demand payment. More often than not, they would be driven off by the Civil Guard or by gunmen employed by the owners.18
In fact, what the landowners were doing was merely one element of unequivocal right-wing hostility to the new regime. They occupied the front line of defence against the reforming ambitions of the Republic. There were equally vehement responses to the religious and military legislation of the new regime. Indeed, all three issues were often linked, with many army officers emanating from Catholic landholding families. All these elements found a political voice in several newly emerged political groups. Most extreme among them, and openly committed to the earliest possible destruction of the Republic, were two monarchist organizations, the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista and Acción Española, founded by supporters of the recently departed King Alfonso XIII as a ‘school of modern counter-revolutionary thought’. Within hours of the Republic being declared, monarchist plotters had begun collecting money to create a journal to propagate the legitimacy of a rising against the Republic, to inject a spirit of rebellion in the army and to found a party of ostensible legality as a front for meetings, fund-raising and conspiracy against the Republic. The journal Acción Española would also peddle the idea of the sinister alliance of Jews, Freemasons and leftists. Within a month, its founders had collected substantial funds for the projected uprising. Their first effort would be the military coup of 10 August 1932. And its failure would lead to a determination to ensure that the next attempt would be better financed and entirely successful.19
Somewhat more moderate was the legalist Acción Nacional, later renamed Acción Popular, which was prepared to try to defend right-wing interests within Republican legality. Extremists or ‘catastrophists’ and ‘moderates’ shared many of the same ideas. However, after the failed military coup of August 1932, they would split over the efficacy of armed conspiracy against the Republic. Acción Española formed its own political party, Renovación Española, and Acción Popular did the same, gathering a number of like-minded groups into the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas.20 Within a year, the ranks of the ‘catastrophists’ had been swelled by the creation of various fascist organizations. What all had in common was that they completely denied the democratic legitimacy of the Republic. Despite the legalist façade of Acción Popular and the CEDA, its leaders would frequently and unrestrainedly proclaim that violence against the Republic was perfectly justifiable.
2
Theorists of Extermination
Africanista officers and Civil Guards were the most violent exponents of right-wing hostility towards the Second Republic and its working-class supporters. They received encouragement and justification in the murderous hostility to the left peddled by numerous politicians, journals and newspapers. In particular, several influential individuals spewed out a rhetoric which urged the extermination of the left as a patriotic duty. They insinuated the racial inferiority of their left-wing and liberal enemies through the clichés of the theory of the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy. The presentation at the beginning of 1933 of the draft law prohibiting schools run by religious orders was a useful trigger. On 30 January, at a mass meeting in the Monumental Cinema in Madrid, the Carlist landowner José María Lamamié de Clairac, a parliamentary deputy for Salamanca, denounced the law as a satanic plot by the Freemasons to destroy the Catholic Church.1 The Law was approved on 18 May. On 4 June, Cándido Casanueva, Lamamié’s fellow deputy for Salamanca, responded by telling the Women’s Association for Civic Education: ‘You are duty bound to pour into the hearts of your children a drop of hatred every day against the Law on Religious Orders and its authors. Woe betide you if you don’t!’2 The following day, Gil Robles declared that ‘the Freemasonry that has brought the Law on Religious Orders to Spain is the work of foreigners, just like the sects and the Internationals’.3
The idea of an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Christian world was given a modern spin in Spain by the dissemination from 1932 onwards of one the most influential works of anti-Semitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Published in Russia in 1903 and based on German and French novels of the 1860s, this fantastical concoction purveyed the idea that a secret Jewish government, the Elders of Zion, was plotting the destruction of Christianity and Jewish world domination.4 The first Spanish translation of The Protocols had been published in Leipzig in 1930. Another translation was made available in Barcelona in 1932 by a Jesuit publishing house which then serialized it in one of its magazines. Awareness and approval of The Protocols was extended through the enormously popular work of the Catalan priest Juan Tusquets Terrats (1901–98), author of the best-seller Orígenes de la revolución española. Tusquets was born into a wealthy banking family in Barcelona on 31 March 1901. His father was a descendant of Jewish bankers, a committed Catalan nationalist and a friend of the plutocrat Francesc Cambó. His mother was a member of the fabulously wealthy Milà family, the patrons of Gaudí. His secondary education took place in a Jesuit school, then he studied at the University of Louvain and the Pontifical University in Tarragona, where he wrote his doctorate. He was ordained in 1926 and was soon regarded as one of the brightest hopes of Catalan philosophy. Renowned for his piety and his enormous culture, he became a teacher in the seminary of the Catalan capital, where he was commissioned to write a book on the theosophical movement of the controversial spiritualist Madame Helena Blavatsky. In the wake of its success, he developed an obsessive interest in secret societies.5
Despite, or perhaps because of, his own remote Jewish origins, by the time the Second Republic was established Tusquets’s investigations into secret societies had developed into a fierce anti-Semitism and an even fiercer hatred of Freemasonry. In a further rejection of his family background, he turned violently against Catalan Nationalism and gained great notoriety by falsely accusing the Catalan leader Francesc Macià of being a Freemason.6 Working with another priest, Joaquim Guiu Bonastre, he built up a network of what he called ‘my faithful and intrepid informers’. His ostentatious piety notwithstanding, Tusquets was not above spying or even burglary. One of the principal lodges in Barcelona was in the Carrer d’Avinyó next to a pharmacy. Since Tusquets’s aunt lived behind the pharmacy, he and Father Guiu were able spy on the Freemasons from her flat. On one occasion, they broke into another lodge and started a fire, using the ensuing confusion to steal a series of documents. These ‘researches’ were the basis for the regular, and vehemently anti-Masonic, articles that Tusquets contributed to the Carlist newspaper El Correo Catalán and for his immensely successful book Orígenes de la revolución española. This book was notable both for popularizing the notion that the Republic was the fruit of a Jewish–Masonic conspiracy and for publishing the names of those he considered its most sinister members. He later alleged that, in retaliation for his writings, the Freemasons twice tried to assassinate him. From his account, it seems that they did not try very hard. On the first occasion, he cheated death simply by getting into a taxi. On the second, he claimed, curiously, that he was saved by an escort provided by the anarcho-syndicalist newspaper Solidaridad Obrera. This alleged benevolence on the part of the anarchists was all the more implausible given their own passionate anti-clericalism.7
Tusquets used The Protocols as ‘documentary’ evidence of his essential thesis that the Jews were bent on the destruction of Christian civilization. Their instruments were Freemasons and Socialists who did their dirty work by means of revolution, economic catastrophes, unholy and pornographic propaganda and unlimited liberalism. He condemned the Second Republic as the child of Freemasonry and denounced the President, the piously Catholic Niceto Alcalá Zamora, as both a Jew and a Freemason.8 The message was clear – Spain and the Catholic Church could be saved only by the destruction of Jews, Freemasons and Socialists – in other words, of the entire left of the political spectrum. Orígenes de la revolución española sold massively and also provoked a noisy polemic which gave even greater currency to his ideas. His notion that the Republic was a dictatorship in the hands of ‘Judaic Freemasonry’ was further disseminated through his many articles in El Correo Catalán and a highly successful series of fifteen books (Las Sectas) attacking Freemasonry, communism and Judaism.
The second volume of Las Sectas included a complete translation of The Protocols and also repeated his slurs on Macià. The section entitled ‘their application to Spain’ asserted that the Jewish assault on Spain was visible both in the Republic’s persecution of religion and in the movement for agrarian reform via the redistribution of the great estates.9 Made famous by his writings, in late 1933 Tusquets was invited by the International Anti-Masonic Association to visit the recently established concentration camp at Dachau. He remarked that ‘they did it to show what we had to do in Spain’. Dachau was established as a camp for various groups that the Nazis wished to quarantine: political prisoners (Freemasons, Communists, Socialists and liberal, Catholic and monarchist opponents of the regime) and those that they defined as asocials or deviants (homosexuals, Gypsies, vagrants). Despite his favourable comments at the time, Tusquets would claim more than fifty years later that he had been shocked by what he saw. Certainly the visit did nothing to stem the flow and the intensity of his anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic publications.10
Tusquets would come to have enormous influence within the Spanish right in general and specifically over General Franco, who enthusiastically devoured his anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic diatribes. He produced a bulletin on Freemasonry that was distributed to senior military figures. Franco’s most powerful collaborator, his brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Suñer, would later praise Tusquets’s contribution to ‘the creation of the atmosphere which led to the National uprising’.11 However, Tusquets did more than just develop the ideas that justified violence. He was involved in the military plot against the Republic through his links with Catalan Carlists. He and his crony Joaquim Guiu participated in conspiratorial meetings of the Unión Militar Española, which was powerful in Barcelona. In late May 1936, he would approach the private secretary to the Catalan millionaire Francesc Cambó to request financial assistance for the forthcoming coup d’état. Although Cambó, as a friend of Tusquets’s father, had written and congratulated him on the success of Orígenes de la revolución española, he did not provide finance for the coup.12 From the early 1930s, Tusquets and Joaquim Guiu had assiduously compiled lists of Jews and Freemasons. Their search for the enemy extended to societies of nudists, vegetarians, spiritualists and enthusiasts of Esperanto. When Tusquets finally became a collaborator of Franco in Burgos during the Civil War, his files on alleged Freemasons would provide an important part of the organizational infrastructure of the repression.13
Endorsement of The Protocols also came from the founder of the ultra-right-wing monarchist theoretical journal Acción Española, the Marqués de Quintanar. At an event held in his honour at the Ritz, Quintanar alleged that the disaster of the fall of the monarchy came about because ‘The great worldwide Jewish–Masonic conspiracy injected the autocratic Monarchies with the virus of democracy to defeat them, after turning them into liberal Monarchies.’14 Julián Cortés Cavanillas, also of the Acción Española pressure group, cited The Protocols as proof that through Masonic intermediaries the ‘evil offspring of Israel’, the Jews, controlled the anarchist, Socialist and Communist hordes. That the new Republican–Socialist government contained Freemasons, Socialists and men thought to be Jewish was proof positive that the alliance of Marx and Rothschild had established a bridgehead in Spain.15 Reviewing with total seriousness a French edition of The Protocols as if it were empirical truth, the Marqués de Eliseda implied with a veiled reference to Margarita Nelken that Castilblanco had been masterminded by the Jews.16
Other influential writers in Acción Española were the lay theologian Marcial Solana and Father Aniceto de Castro Albarrán, the senior canon of Salamanca Cathedral. They, and Father Pablo Leon Murciego, produced theological justifications for the violent overthrow of the Republic. They argued that it was a Catholic duty to resist tyranny. Solana used St Aquinas to justify the assertion that the tyrant was any oppressive or unjust government. Since power ultimately rested with God, an anti-clerical constitution clearly rendered the Republic tyrannical.17 In 1932, Castro Albarrán, at the time rector of the Jesuit University of Comillas, had written a book on the right to rebellion. Although it was not published until 1934, an extract was presented in Acción Española which reinforced Solana’s incitements to rebellion and specifically attacked the legalism of El Debate. Castro Albarrán, through his articles and sermons, would become the principal theological apologist of the military rising. He later summed up his views in his 1938 book Guerra santa (Holy War).18 He, Solana and others argued that violence against the Republic was justified because it was a holy rebellion against tyranny, anarchy and Moscow-inspired Godlessness. In 1932, Father Antonio de Pildain Zapiain, deputy for Guipúzcoa and canon of Vitoria Cathedral, declared in the Cortes that Catholic doctrine permitted armed resistance to unjust laws. Similar arguments were central to a controversial book published in 1933 by Father José Cirera y Prat.19
The writings of Castro Albarrán and Cirera horrified more moderate clerics such as Cardinal Eustaquio Ilundain Esteban of Seville and Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer of Tarragona. Vidal was distressed by the arrogance with which Castro Albarrán presented as Catholic doctrine partisan ideas which ran counter to Vatican policy on coexistence with the Republic. He protested to Cardinal Pacelli, the Papal Secretary of State, who ordered that the nihil obstat (seal of ecclesiastical approval) be removed from the book and tried to have it withdrawn from circulation. The book was serialized in the Carlist press, and the newly appointed Primate of All Spain, Archbishop Isidro Gomá of Toledo, expressed his approval to members of Acción Española.20 Gomá’s predecessor in Toledo, Cardinal Pedro Segura y Sáenz, exiled in Rome, was presented by the Carlist newspaper El Siglo Futuro as the archetype of Catholic intransigence to the Republic. He would later be found actively encouraging the Carlist leadership as their armed militia or Requetés trained for insurrection against the Republic.21
General Franco was a subscriber to Acción Española and a firm believer in the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik contubernio (filthy concubinage). Significantly, among the many other senior military figures sharing such views was General Emilio Mola, the future director of the military coup of 1936. The tall, bespectacled Mola had the air of a monkish scholar, but his background was that of no-nonsense veteran of the African wars. Born in Cuba in 1887, the son of a captain of the Civil Guard, a harsh disciplinarian, he rose to military prominence serving with the Regulares Indígenas (Native Regulars – locally recruited mercenaries) during the African wars. His memoirs of Morocco, wallowing in descriptions of crushed skulls and bloated intestines, suggest that he had been utterly brutalized by his African experiences.22 In February 1930 in the wake of the fall of the dictatorship, Mola was appointed Director General of Security. He quickly took to police work. Until the collapse of the monarchy fourteen months later, he devoted himself to crushing labour and student subversion as he had crushed tribal rebellion in Morocco.23 To this end, he created a crack anti-riot squad, physically well trained and well armed, and a complex espionage system. This so-called Sección de Investigación Comunista used undercover policemen to infiltrate opposition groups and then act as agents provocateurs. The network was still substantially in place in 1936 when Mola employed it in the preparation of the military uprising.24
Mola over-estimated the menace of the minuscule Spanish Communist Party, which he viewed as the tool of sinister Jewish–Masonic machinations. This reflected the credence that he gave to the fevered reports of his agents, in particular those of Santiago Martín Báguenas and of the sleazy and obsessive Julián Mauricio Carlavilla del Barrio. Mola’s views on Jews, Communists and Freemasons were also coloured by information received from the organization of the White Russian forces in exile, the Russkii Obshche-Voinskii Soiuz (ROVS, Russian All-Military Union) based in Paris. Thereafter, even when he was no longer Director General of Security, he remained in close contact with the ROVS leader Lieutenant General Evgenii Karlovitch Miller. Miller was, like the Nazi racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German. Their hatred of communism reflected the fact that the Bolshevik revolution saw them lose their families, property, livelihood and homeland. Believing that the Jews had masterminded the revolution, they were determined to prevent them doing the same in western Europe.25
When the Republic was established, convinced that he would be arrested for his work in defence of the monarchy, Mola went into hiding. Then on 21 April 1931, he gave himself up to the Minister of War, Manuel Azaña. Four days earlier, General Dámaso Berenguer had been arrested for his role in the Moroccan wars, as Prime Minister and later as Minister of War during the summary trial and execution of the two pro-Republican rebels Captains Fermín Galán and Ángel García Hernández. The arrests of Mola and Berenguer fed the right-wing perception of the Republic as vindictive.26 In the eyes of the Africanistas, Berenguer was being persecuted for his part in a war in which they had risked their lives, and for following military regulations in court-martialling the mutineers Galán and García Hernández. Similarly, they saw Mola as a hero of the African war who, as Director General of Security, had merely been doing his job of controlling subversion. The Africanistas were enraged that officers whom they admired were persecuted while those who had plotted against the Dictator were rewarded. The arrests gave Africanistas like Manuel Goded, Joaquín Fanjul, Mola and Franco a justification for their instinctive hostility to the Republic. They regarded the officers who received the preferment of the Republic as the lackeys of Jews and Freemasons, weaklings who pandered to the mob.
Awaiting trial for his use of excessive force against a student demonstration on 25 March, Mola was imprisoned in a ‘damp and foul-smelling cell’ in a military jail.27 Azaña arranged on 5 August for this to be changed to house arrest, but, unsurprisingly, seeing his recent targets now in positions of power, Mola nurtured a rancorous hostility to the Republic and a personal hatred of Azaña. The paranoid reports sent him by Carlavilla and the dossiers supplied by the ROVS convinced him that the triumph of the democratic regime had been engineered by Jews and Freemasons. In late 1931, in the first volume of his memoirs, he wrote of the threat of Freemasonry: ‘When, in fulfilling my duties, I investigated the intervention of the Masonic lodges in the political life of Spain, I became aware of the enormous strength at their disposal, not through the lodges themselves but because of the powerful elements that manipulated them from abroad – the Jews.’ Acción Española celebrated the appearance of the book with a rapturous nine-page review by Eugenio Vegas Latapié, one of the journal’s founders and a fierce advocate of violence against the Republic.28
By the time that Mola came to write the second volume of his memoirs, he was more explicit in his attacks on Freemasons and Jews. He himself implied that this was because, in addition to the reports of General Miller, he had read both the work of Father Tusquets and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Thus Mola wrote that the coming of the Republic was a reflection of the hatred for Spain of the Jews and Freemasonry:
What rational motives exist to explain why we Spaniards excite the hatred of the descendants of Israel? Fundamentally three: the envy produced in them by any race that has a fatherland of its own; our religion for which they feel unquenchable revulsion because they blame it for their dispersion throughout the world; the memory of their expulsion, which came about not, as is often claimed, because of a King’s whim but because the people demanded it. These are the three points of the Masonic triangle of the Spanish lodges.29
In December 1933, Mola wrote the conclusion to his bitterly polemical book El pasado, Azaña y el porvenir (The Past, Azaña and the Future), in which he gave voice to the widespread military animosity towards the Republic in general and towards Azaña in particular. Mortified by what he perceived as the unpatriotic anti-militarism of the left, he attributed it to various causes, mainly to the fact that:
decadent nations are the favourite victims of parasitical international organizations, used in their turn by the Great Powers, taking advantage of the situation in weak nations, which is where such organizations have most success, just as unhealthy organisms are the most fertile breeding ground of the virulent spread of pathological germs. It is significant that all such organizations are manipulated if not actually directed by the Jews … The Jews don’t care about the destruction of a nation, or of ten, or of the entire world, because they, having the exceptional ability to derive benefit from the greatest catastrophes, are merely completing their programme. What has happened in Russia is a relevant example and one that is very much on Hitler’s mind. The German Chancellor – a fanatical nationalist – is convinced that his people cannot rise again as long as the Jews and the parasitical organizations that they control or influence remain embedded in the nation. That is why he persecutes them without quarter.30
Morose and shy, Mola was not previously noted for his popularity. With this best-seller, he found himself an object of admiration among the most reactionary military and civilian elements.31
Since 1927, both Mola and Franco had been avid readers of an anti-Communist journal from Geneva, the Bulletin de l’Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale. While he was Director General of Security, Mola’s agents concocted inflated reports about the alleged threat from the Comintern, as the Third International was known. Mola passed these dubious reports to the Entente in Geneva where they were incorporated into the bulletin and sent back to Spain to Franco and other military subscribers as hard fact. The Entente had been founded by the Swiss rightist Théodore Aubert and a White Russian émigré, Georges Lodygensky. Its publications were given a vehemently anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik turn by Lodygensky and praised the achievements of fascism and military dictatorships as bulwarks against communism. Enjoying close contacts with Antikomintern, an organization run from Josef Goebbels’s Ministry of Information, the Entente skilfully targeted influential people and supplied them with reports which purported to expose plans for forthcoming Communist offensives. The material from the Entente devoured by Franco, Mola and other officers portrayed the Second Republic as a Trojan horse for Communists and Freemasons determined to unleash the Godless hordes of Moscow against Spain and all its great traditions.32 For the Spanish extreme right and for many of their allies abroad, the Second Republic was an outpost of the Elders of Zion.33
One of the most prominent leaders of the Spanish fascist movement, Onésimo Redondo Ortega, was a fervent believer in The Protocols. Redondo had studied in Germany and was also close to the Jesuits. He was much influenced by Father Enrique Herrera Oria, brother of the editor of El Debate, Ángel Herrera Oria. Father Herrera had encouraged Onésimo in the belief that communism, Freemasonry and Judaism were conspiring to destroy religion and the fatherland and recommended that he read the virulent anti-Jewish and anti-Masonic tract by Léon Poncins, Las fuerzas secretas de la Revolución. F
M – Judaismo, ‘FM’ signifying, of course, ‘Freemasonry’. Thus becoming aware of The Protocols, Onésimo translated and published an abbreviated text in his newspaper Libertad of Valladolid, a version later reissued with notes explicitly linking its generalized accusations to the specific circumstances of the Second Republic.34
The ultra-right-wing press in general regarded The Protocols as a serious sociological study. Since there were few Jews in Spain, there was hardly a ‘Jewish problem’. However, Spanish ‘anti-Semitism without Jews’ was not about real Jews but was an abstract construction of a perceived international threat. Anti-Semitism was central to integrist Catholicism and harked back to Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus Christ and to medieval myths and fears about Jewish ritual killings of children. Now, it was given a burning contemporary relevance by fears of revolution. The notion that all those belonging to left-wing parties were the stooges of the Jews was supported by references to the left-wingers and Jews fleeing from Nazism who found refuge in the Second Republic. As far as the Carlist press was concerned, the few incoming Jews were the advance guard of world revolution and intended to poison Spanish society with pornography and prostitution.35 Opposed to urbanism and industrialism, to liberalism and capitalism, all ideologies associated with Jews and Freemasons, the Carlists aspired to destroy the Republic by armed insurrection and to impose a kind of rural Arcadian theocracy.36
Conservative intellectuals argued that through various subversive devices the Jews had enslaved the Spanish working class. One alleged consequence of this subjugation was that the Spanish workers themselves came to possess oriental qualities. The Spanish radical right began to see the working class as imbued with Jewish and Muslim treachery and barbarism. The most extreme proponent of this view was the late nineteenth-century Carlist ideologue Juan Vázquez de Mella. He argued that Jewish capital had financed the liberal revolutions and was now behind the Communist revolution in order, in union with the Muslim hordes, to destroy Christian civilization and impose Jewish tyranny on the world. Even King Alfonso XIII believed that the rebellion of tribesmen in the Rif was ‘the beginning of a general uprising of the entire Muslim world instigated by Moscow and international Jewry’.37 Carlist ideologues took these ideas seriously, arguing that ‘the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, Judaism, Communism, Freemasonry and Death’, already controlled Britain, France and Australia and soon Spain would fall under their dominion.38
The books of Vázquez de Mella and other Carlist ideologues were eagerly devoured by Colonel José Enrique Varela during his imprisonment after the Sanjurjada. Contrasting the success of the Primo de Rivera coup of 1923 and the failure of Sanjurjo in 1932, the dynamic and courageous Varela was convinced that a successful military rising needed substantial civilian support. He was persuaded that this could be found in the fierce Carlist militia, the Requeté. Although he resisted calls to lead an exclusively Carlist uprising on the grounds that this required someone more senior such as Franco, Varela undertook to turn the Requeté into an effective citizen army. Since he was still under police surveillance, on his trips to the Carlists’ northern heartland of Navarre he took the pseudonym ‘Don Pepe’. Day-to-day training was supervised by the National Inspector of the Requeté, the retired Lieutenant Colonel Ricardo de Rada, who also would train the Falangist militia.39 Similarly, in 1934 another of the officers involved in the Sanjurjada, the Civil Guard Captain Lisardo Doval, would train the paramilitary squads of the Juventud de Acción Popular (the youth movement of Gil Robles’s Catholic party, the CEDA).
Carlists, theologians and Africanista officers were among those who through their writings and speeches fomented an atmosphere of social and racial hatred. Another was Onésimo Redondo. Although hardly a national figure, he merits attention both as one of the founders of Spanish fascism and because it was largely due to his ideas that his home town, Valladolid, experienced greater political violence than other Castilian provincial capitals. As a young lawyer, Onésimo Redondo had been involved in Acción Nacional (as Acción Popular was originally called), the Catholic political group founded on 26 April 1931 by Ángel Herrera Oria and principally supported by Castilian farmers. In early May, he set up its local branch in Valladolid and headed its propaganda campaign for the forthcoming parliamentary elections. On 13 June, Onésimo launched the first number of the fortnightly, and later weekly, anti-Republican newspaper Libertad. After the Republican–Socialist coalition won a huge majority on 28 June, Onésimo rejected democracy, broke with Acción Nacional and, in August, founded a fascist party, the Juntas Castellanas de Actuación Hispánica (the Castilian Hispanic Action Groups).40
On 10 August, he published a fiery proclamation in Libertad expressing his commitment to the traditional rural values of Old Castile, to social justice and to violence. He wrote: ‘The historic moment, my young countrymen, obliges us to take up weapons. May we know how to use them to defend what is ours and not to serve politicians.’ For him ‘nationalism is a movement of struggle, it must include warlike, violent activities in the service of Spain against the traitors within’.41 Certainly, Onésimo Redondo and the Juntas brought a tone of brutal confrontation to a city previously notable for the tranquillity of its labour relations.42 Onésimo called for ‘a few hundred young warriors in each province, disciplined idealists, to smash to smithereens this dirty phantom of the red menace’. His recruits armed themselves for street fights with the predominantly Socialist working class of Valladolid. He wrote of the need to ‘cultivate the spirit of violence, of military conflict’. The meetings of the Juntas were held in virtual clandestinity. Over the next few years, his enthusiasm for violence grew progressively more strident.43
The numerical weakness of the Juntas obliged Onésimo to seek links with like-minded groups. Accordingly, his gaze fell upon the first overtly fascist group in Spain, the tiny La Conquista del Estado (the Conquest of the State) led by Ramiro Ledesma Ramos.44 Originally from Zamora, Ledesma worked in a post office in Madrid. An enthusiastic disciple of German philosophy, he had founded his group in February 1931 in a squalid room in a Madrid office block. The light had not been connected and the only furniture was a table. The ten participants signed a manifesto he had written entitled ‘The Conquest of the State’. A newspaper of the same name was launched on 14 March. Despite public indifference and police harassment, it survived for a year.45 In the first number of Libertad, Onésimo Redondo had referred favourably to Ledesma Ramos’s newspaper: ‘We approve of the combative ardour and the eagerness of La Conquista del Estado, but we miss the anti-Semitic activity which that movement needs be effective and to go in the right direction.’46 Although Redondo translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf, his anti-Semitism drew more on the fifteenth-century Castilian Queen Isabel la Católica than on Nazism. Anti-Semitism was a recurring theme in his writings. In late 1931, for instance, he described the co-educational schools introduced by the Second Republic as an example of ‘Jewish action against free nations: a crime against the health of the people for which the traitors responsible must pay with their heads’.47
In October 1931, Onésimo met Ledesma Ramos in Madrid. Over the next few weeks, in several meetings in Madrid and Valladolid, they negotiated the loose fusion of their two groups as the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (the Groups of National Syndicalist Offensive or JONS). Launched on 30 November 1931, the JONS adopted the red and black colours of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT and took as its badge the emblem of the Catholic kings, the yoke and arrows. It was anti-democratic and imperialist, demanding Gibraltar, Morocco and Algeria for Spain and aspiring to ‘the extermination, the dissolution of the antinational, Marxist parties’. To this end, ‘national-syndicalist militias’ were to be created ‘in order to oppose red violence with nationalist violence’. Ledesma Ramos argued that political violence was legitimate and advocated the creation of armed militias along the lines of the Italian Fascist Squadri to prepare for insurrection or coup d’état.48 By way of practice, the JONS squads assaulted left-wing students and, in June 1933, sacked the Madrid offices of the Association of Friends of the USSR.49
In Valladolid, Onésimo devoted ever more time to the conversion of his forty-odd followers into warriors of what he now called ‘organized anti-communist militias’. Soon they would be involved in bloody clashes with left-wing students and workers in the University and in the streets of Valladolid. Pistols were being bought and much time was spent on training. Already by the spring of 1932, Onésimo Redondo was writing about the civil war to come – ‘The war is getting nearer; the situation of violence is inevitable. There is no point in rejecting it. It is stupid to flee from making war when they are going to make war on us. The important thing is to prepare to win, and, to win, it is necessary to seize the initiative and go on to the attack.’ On 3 May 1932, a pitched battle was fought with the left in the main square of Valladolid after which more than twenty people were hospitalized. Onésimo himself was sentenced to two months in prison for the excesses of Libertad.50
Imprisonment did nothing to mellow Onésimo Redondo. His article in the fascist monthly JONS in May 1933 reflected the growing virulence of his thought and echoed Sanjurjo’s identification of the Spanish working class with the Arabs:
Marxism, with its Mohammedan utopias, with the truth of its dictatorial iron and with the pitiless lust of its sadistic magnates, suddenly renews the eclipse of Culture and freedoms like a modern Saracen invasion … This certain danger, of Africanization in the name of Progress, is clearly visible in Spain. We can state categorically that our Marxists are the most African of all Europe … Historically, we are a friction zone between that which is civilized and that which is African, between the Aryan and the Semitic … For this reason, the generations that built the fatherland, those that freed us from being an eternal extension of the Dark Continent, raised their swords against attacks from the south and they never sheathed them … The great Isabel ordered Spaniards always to watch Africa, to defeat Africa and never be invaded by her again. Was the Peninsula entirely de-Africanized? Is there not a danger of a new kind of African domination, here where so many roots of the Moorish spirit remained in the character of a race in the vanguard of Europe? We ask this important question dispassionately and we will answer it right away by underlining the evident danger of the new Africanization: ‘Marxism’. Throughout the world, there exists the Jewish or Semite conspiracy against Western civilization, but in Spain it can more subtly and rapidly connect the Semitic element, the African element. It can be seen flowering in all its primitive freshness in our southern provinces, where Moorish blood lives on in the subsoil of the race … The follower of Spanish Marxism, especially the Andalusian, soon takes the incendiary torch, breaks into manor houses and farms, impelled by the bandit subconscious, encouraged by the Semites of Madrid; he wants bread without earning it, he wants to laze around and be rich, to take his pleasures and to take his revenge … and the definitive victory of Marxism will be the re-Africanization of Spain, the victory of the combined Semitic elements – Jews and Moors, aristocrats and plebeians who have survived ethnically and spiritually in the Peninsula and in Europe.51
By linking Marxism as a Jewish invention and its alleged threat of a ‘re-Africanization’ of Spain, Redondo was identifying Spain’s two archetypal ‘others’, the Jew and the Moor, with the Republic. His conclusion, shared by many on the right, was that a new Reconquista was needed to prevent Spain from falling into the hands of the modern foes. His views on the legitimacy of violence were similar to those of the Catholic extreme right exemplified by the writings of Castro Albarrán.52
Anti-Semitism could be found across most of the Spanish right. In some cases, it was a vague sentiment born of traditional Catholic resentment about the fate of Jesus Christ, but in others it was a murderous justification of violence against the left. Curiously, the virulence of Onésimo Redondo constituted something of an exception within Spain’s nascent fascist movement. Ledesma Ramos regarded anti-Semitism as having relevance only in Germany.53 The Falangist leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, had little or no interest in the ‘Jewish problem’ except when it came to the Jewish–Marxist influence over the working class. Nevertheless, the Falangist daily Arriba claimed that ‘the Judaic–Masonic International is the creator of the two great evils that have afflicted humanity: capitalism and Marxism’. José Antonio Primo de Rivera shared with other rightists a belief that violence was legitimate against a Republic that he perceived as influenced by Jews and Freemasons.54 He approved of attacks by Falangists on the Jewish-owned SEPU department stores in the spring of 1935.55
The identification of the working class with foreign enemies was based on a convoluted logic whereby Bolshevism was a Jewish invention and the Jews were indistinguishable from Muslims and thus leftists were bent on subjecting Spain to domination by African elements. Thus hostility to the Spanish working class was presented as a legitimate act of Spanish patriotism. According to another of the Acción Española group, the one-time liberal turned ultra-rightist Ramiro de Maeztú, the Spanish nation had been forged in its struggles against the Jews (arrogant usurers) and the Moors (savages without civilization).56 In one of his articles, the monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo neatly encapsulated the racist dimension of the anti-leftist discourse when he referred to the Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero as ‘a Moroccan Lenin’.57 José Antonio Primo de Rivera also shared this association of the left with the Moors. In his reflections in prison in 1936, he interpreted all of Spanish history as an endless struggle between Goths and Berbers. The spirit of the former lived on in monarchical, aristocratic, religious and military values while that of the latter was to be found in the rural proletariat. He denounced the Second Republic as a ‘new Berber invasion’ signifying the demolition of European Spain.58
Gil Robles, if less explicitly than Sanjurjo or Onésimo Redondo, also conveyed the view that violence against the left was legitimate because of its racial inferiority. His frequent use of the word ‘reconquest’ linked enmity towards the left in the 1930s to the central epic of Spanish nationalism, the battle to liberate Spain from Islam between 722 and 1492. During his campaign for the elections of November 1933, on 15 October in the Monumental Cinema of Madrid, he declared: ‘We must reconquer Spain … We must give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity … For me there is only one tactic today: to form an anti-Marxist front and the wider the better. It is necessary now to defeat socialism mercilessly.’ At this point, Antonio Goicoechea, the leader of the extreme rightist Acción Española group, was made to stand and received a tumultuous ovation. Gil Robles continued his speech in language indistinguishable from that of the conspiratorial right:
We must found a new state, purge the fatherland of judaizing Freemasons … We must proceed to a new state and this imposes duties and sacrifices. What does it matter if we have to shed blood! … We need full power and that is what we demand … To realize this ideal we are not going to waste time with archaic forms. Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state. When the time comes, either parliament submits or we will eliminate it.59
Gil Robles’s speech was described by El Socialista as an ‘authentic fascist harangue’. On the left, it was perceived as the real policy of his ostensibly moderate mass party, the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas). Certainly, his every sentence had been greeted by ecstatic applause. Fernando de los Ríos, Minister of Education and Fine Arts since October 1931, a moderate Socialist and a distinguished professor of law, had suffered anti-Semitic abuse for his policy of toleration for Jewish schools and his expressions of sympathy for the Sephardic community in Morocco. He pointed out that Gil Robles’s call for a purge of Jews and Freemasons was a denial of the juridical and political postulates of the Republic.60 CEDA election posters declared that Spain must be saved from ‘Marxists, Freemasons, Separatists and Jews’. The entire forces of the left – anarchists, Socialists, Communists, liberal Republicans, regional nationalists – were denounced as anti-Spanish.61 Violence against them was therefore both legitimate and indeed an urgent patriotic necessity.
The intensified vehemence of Gil Robles was matched in the pages of El Debate by the views of Francisco de Luis, who had succeeded Ángel Herrera Oria as editor. Like Onésimo Redondo, De Luis was an energetic evangelist of the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy theory. His magnum opus on the subject was published in 1935 with an ecclesiastical imprimatur. In it, enthusiastically quoting Tusquets, the Protocols, the Carlist press and General Mola, he argued that the purpose of Freemasonry was to corrupt Christian civilization with oriental values. His premise was that ‘the Jews, progenitors of Freemasonry, having no fatherland of their own, want no man to have one’. Having freed the masses of patriotic and moral impulses, the Jews could then recruit them for the assault on Christian values. In his interpretation, Catholics faced a struggle to the death because ‘inside every Jew there is a Freemason: cunning, deceitful, secretive, hating Christ and his civilization, thirsting for extermination. Freemasons and Jews are the begetters and controllers of socialism and Bolshevism.’62
Other than in the sheer scale of their impact, there was little difference between the pronouncements of Francisco de Luis and Onésimo Redondo and those of a friend, and one-time subordinate of General Mola, the policeman Julián Mauricio Carlavilla del Barrio. Born on 13 February 1896 into a poor rural family in New Castile, in Valparaíso de Arriba in Cuenca, the young Carlavilla worked as an agricultural labourer and as a shepherd before spending three years as a conscript soldier in Morocco only because he couldn’t buy himself out. On his return to Spain, he passed the entry examinations for the police and, on 9 July 1921, was posted to Valencia. Only eleven months later, he was transferred to Zaragoza after complaints from the Civil Governor of Valencia to the Director General of Security that Carlavilla’s behaviour was bringing the police into disrepute. Thereafter, he was sent in rapid succession to Segovia and Bilbao before ending up in Madrid in October 1923. In November 1925, he was transferred to Morocco, where he made contacts with military figures that would stand him in good stead later in his career. Nevertheless, just over one year later, he was sent back to the Peninsula after accusations of irregularities including pocketing fines and selling protection for prostitutes. Nevertheless, Carlavilla eventually rose, in 1935, to the rank of comisario (inspector).63
Initially, he specialized in undercover work, infiltrating left-wing groups where he would then act as an agent provocateur. He did this on his own initiative, without informing his superior officers. His efforts included provoking, and later claiming credit for frustrating, assassination attempts against both Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera during the opening of the great exhibition in Seville in May 1929.64 When General Mola became Director General of Security in early 1930, Carlavilla informed him of his clandestine activities, which he described as ‘my role as catalyst within the highest circle of the revolutionaries’.65 On Mola’s orders, Carlavilla wrote a detailed report on the supposed activities of the Communist Party in Spain. A wild mixture of fantasy and paranoia, the report was sent by Mola at the end of 1930 to the influential anti-Communist organization in Geneva, the Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale. The contents were fed into the bulletins that the Entente sent to subscribers, including General Franco. The report formed the basis of Carlavilla’s first book, El comunismo en España.66
Carlavilla was involved in the Sanjurjo coup, his role being to prevent the police discovering the nascent conspiracy.67 Between 1932 and 1936, he wrote a series of best-sellers, using the pseudonym ‘Mauricio Karl’.68 The first, El comunismo en España, described the various Socialist, anarchist and Communist elements of the working-class movement as the enemy of Spain that would have to be defeated. The second and third, El enemigo and Asesinos de España, argued that the enemies masterminding the left-wing assassins of Spain were the Jews who controlled Freemasonry, ‘their first army’, the Socialist and Communist Internationals, and world capitalism. Spanish greatness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the fruit of the expulsion of the Jews, and further greatness would require a repetition. Since there were hardly any Jews to be expelled from Spain, it was their lackeys, the Freemasons and the left, that must be eliminated. The only hope of stopping the destruction of Christian civilization and the establishment of the empire of Israel lay in joining German Nazism and Italian Fascism in defeating the ‘sectarians of Masonic Jewry’. Carlavilla claimed that General Primo de Rivera, who died of natural causes, had been poisoned by a Jewish Freemason and that the Catalan financier, Francesc Cambó, was both Jewish and a Freemason.
One hundred thousand copies of the third of his books, Asesinos de España, were distributed free to army officers. It ended with a provocative challenge to them. Describing Jews, left-wingers and Freemasons as vultures hovering over the corpse of Spain, he wrote: ‘The Enemy howls with laughter while the nations that serve Zion play diplomatic dice for the cadaver’s land. Thus the Spain once feared by a hundred nations faces such a fate because her sons no longer know how to die or how to kill.’69 Carlavilla was expelled from the police in September 1935 as a result, according to his official record, ‘of serious offences’. He would later claim that his dismissal was persecution for his anti-Masonic revelations.70
In addition to his criminal activities, Carlavilla was an active member of the conspiratorial group Unión Militar Española. Initially, his role was centred on the writing and distribution of propaganda in favour of a military coup. However, he was also believed to have been involved in plots to kill both the distinguished law professor and PSOE parliamentary deputy Luis Jiménez Asúa and Francisco Largo Caballero. In May 1936, on the orders of the UME, he was implicated in an assassination attempt on Manuel Azaña. As a result, he was obliged to flee to Portugal. All these plans seem to have been masterminded by Mola’s crony, Inspector Santiago Martín Báguenas, who had been working since September 1932 for the monarchist–military plotters. The foiled attempts also involved the same Africanista, Captain Manuel Díaz Criado, who had instigated the shootings in the Parque de María Luisa in Seville in July 1931. In Lisbon, Carlavilla linked up with the exiled General Sanjurjo and remained on the fringes of the military plot. Shortly after the outbreak of war, he went to Burgos where he was welcomed on to the staff of General Mola. Carlavilla worked for a time there alongside Father Juan Tusquets.71
Collectively, the ideas of Tusquets, Francisco de Luis, Enrique Herrera Oria, Onésimo Redondo, Mola, Carlavilla, the Carlist press and all those who alleged the existence of a Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik plot justified the extermination of the left. The reforms of the Republic and the violent anarchist attacks on the Republic were taken equally as evidence that the left was the ungodly anti-Spain. Accordingly, the brutality of the Civil Guard in crushing strikes and demonstrations, military conspiracy and the terrorist activities of fascist groups were all deemed to be legitimate efforts to defend the true Spain.
3
The Right Goes on the Offensive, 1933–1934
In the wake of their electoral victory in November 1933, the right went on to the offensive just as the unemployment crisis reached its peak. That December there were 619,000 out of work across Spain, 12 per cent of the total workforce. Given Spain’s lack of social welfare schemes, these figures, although much lower than those in Germany and Italy, signified widespread and immense physical hardship. With the Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero no longer at the Ministry of Labour, there was no protection even for those in work. In Jaén, for instance, the new Radical Civil Governor set aside existing agreements on working conditions. In the case of the turno riguroso (the strict rotation of work among unemployed labourers), during the olive harvest, the owners were left free to give work only to the cheapest, non-union labour. The consequence was large numbers of families on the verge of starvation.1 Worsening conditions saw rank-and-file pressure on union officials for militant action particularly in agriculture, metal industries and construction, all of which were represented by substantial groups within the UGT. In the agrarian south, the number of unemployed was dramatically higher than in industrial areas. The worst-hit provinces were Jaén, Badajoz and Córdoba, where the number of unemployed was 50 per cent above the national average. Once landowners began to ignore social legislation entirely and take reprisals for the discomforts of the previous two years, unemployment rose even further. By April 1934 it would reach 703,000.2
In opposition, Largo Caballero responded to rank-and-file distress with empty revolutionary slogans. However, the fact that he had no concrete plans for an insurrection did not diminish middle-class fears provoked both by his statements and by the anarchist commitment to revolutionary violence. In fact, when, on 8 December 1933, the CNT naively called for another nationwide uprising, the Socialists ostentatiously stood aside. In the event, only a few traditionally anarchist areas responded to the call. Despite CNT supporters in Asturias and most of Andalusia standing aside, there was a sporadic wave of violent strikes, some trains were derailed and Civil Guard posts assaulted. In Galicia, the Rioja, Catalonia and Alicante, the insurrectionists were easily suppressed and several hundred prisoners were taken. Throughout Spain, 125 people were killed, sixteen from the forces of order, sixty-five anarchists and forty-four innocent bystanders.3
On 9 December at Bujalance in the highly conflictive province of Córdoba, there was an echo of Casas Viejas. Tempers were running high because the landowners were flouting agreements on wages and conditions. Anarchist peasants took over parts of the town and tried to seize the town hall. The Civil Guard replied by attacking any houses whose doors were not left open. In thirty-six hours of fighting, a Civil Guard, two anarchists, four innocent civilians, including a woman, an eight-year-old child and an elderly landowner, were killed. Two alleged ringleaders were captured in nearby Porcuna and shot by the Civil Guard ‘while trying to escape’. Two hundred prisoners were taken, many of whom were badly beaten by the Civil Guard. The Civil Governor, Mariano Jiménez Díaz, blamed the events in Bujalance on the landowners for ignoring the work agreements and amassing firearms.4
The scale of social hatred in Córdoba can be deduced from the testimony of a union leader from Baena:
The same owners who would spend 400,000 pesetas on a shawl for the statue of the Virgin or on a crucifix for the Church stinted the olive oil for the workers’ meals and would rather pay a lawyer 25,000 pesetas than an extra 25 cents to the day-labourers lest it create a precedent and let the workers get their way. In Baena, there was a señorito [master] who put cattle in the planted fields rather than pay the agreed wages to the reapers. A priest who had a farm, when the lad came down to get olive oil, had made dents in the tin jug so that it would hold less oil.
The union official from Baena went on to comment on the intransigence of the employer class when it came to getting any improvement in the awful situation of the farm labourers:
They had power, influence and money; we only had two or three thousand day-labourers behind us and we constantly had to hold them back since the desperation of being unable to feed their children turns men into wild animals. We knew that the employers, well protected by the forces of order, were not bothered if there were victims, because they just bribed the officials to change the paperwork and make black white. In fact, they were happy to see violence because it was a welcome warning to any rebels of the danger of leaving the straight and narrow.
His own experience as a young man was revealing:
The few times (two or three) that I went with a committee to discuss conditions with the employers, the only issue on the table was wages; there was no question of negotiating food or working hours, since everything was considered to be included in the clause ‘Usage and customs of the locality’, which simply meant to work until your back broke, from sun-up to sun-down, or for hours expanded by the arse-licking foremen from when you could just about see until it was too dark to see a thing. I remember in one heated discussion a caci que called me a ‘snot-nosed kid recently out of the shell’ and said that if my father knew how stupid I was, he wouldn’t throw down fodder for me. This exhausted my patience and I got up and said to him as seriously as I could: ‘It is true, Señor, that on many occasions I have had to eat, not cattle feed, but the remnants of fried bread that you throw out for your dogs, a very Christian deed in a town where the workers’ children are dying of hunger.’5
There were a number of violent incidents involving the CNT in the western region of Extremadura, an area dominated by large estates or latifundios. In the province of Cáceres, two churches were set alight in Navalmoral de la Mata.6 However, since the Socialist Landworkers’ Federation (FNTT) was not involved, the more southerly province of Badajoz was largely unaffected with the exception of Villanueva de la Serena. There, an infantry sergeant, Pío Sopena Blanco, together with eight other anarchists like himself, took over an army recruiting office, killing two Civil Guards and wounding another. They were surrounded but, instead of waiting for them to surrender, the building was bombarded with heavy machine-guns and artillery by combined units of the Civil Guard, Assault Guards and the army. Pío Sopena and two others were killed in the attack and the six others were shot in cold blood. Although local Socialists were not involved, the Mayor and the officials of the Casa del Pueblo (workers’ club) were arrested. The Casas del Pueblo in Villanueva and five other pueblos were shut down.7
These violent incidents involving the CNT diverted attention from the growing problem of malnutrition. This was not only because landowners were slashing wages and refusing work to union members but also because of price rises in basic necessities. After the new Radical government removed price control on bread, the cost had risen by between 25 and 70 per cent. Demonstrations of starving women, children and old people calling for bread became a frequent sight.8 At the end of 1933, then, the Socialist leaders faced a rising tide of mass militancy, fed by the employers’ offensive and bitterness at the perceived unfairness of electoral defeat. Dismayed by the right’s determination to destroy what they regarded as basic humanitarian legislation, ever more members of the trade union movement and the Socialist Youth (Federación de Juventudes Socialistas) had come to believe that bourgeois democracy would never allow the introduction of even a minimal social justice, let alone full-blown socialism. Fearful of losing support, Largo Caballero reacted by heightening his revolutionary tone still further. In mid-January 1934, he declared that to transform society it was necessary to arm the people and disarm the forces of capitalism – the army, the Civil Guard, the Assault Guards, the police and the courts: ‘Power cannot be taken from the hands of the bourgeoisie simply by cheering for Socialism.’9
This strident rhetoric was not backed by any serious revolutionary intentions, but, replayed via the right-wing press, it could only provoke middle-class fears. Largo Caballero’s verbal extremism pandered to rank-and-file dissatisfactions but aimed also to pressure President Alcalá Zamora into calling new elections. It was dangerously irresponsible. If the President did not respond to pressure, the Socialists would be forced either to fulfil Largo Caballero’s threats or back down and lose face with their own militants. Since there was little possibility of implementing his threats, the consequence could benefit only the right.
Largo Caballero’s ill-considered rhetoric reflected both the aggressive assault on social legislation that had followed the right-wing electoral victory and fears of fascism. He felt that he had to respond to workers’ delegations from the provinces that came to Madrid to beg the Socialist Party (PSOE) leadership to organize a counter-offensive.10 At the same time, he and others suspected that not only the Republic’s legislation but also their own persons were in danger from a possible fascist coup. On 22 November, the outgoing Minister of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos, informed the PSOE executive committee of plans being prepared for a rightist coup involving the arrest of the Socialist leadership.11 Throughout November and December, the Socialist press frequently published material indicating that Gil Robles and the CEDA had fascist ambitions. Reprinted documents included the CEDA’s plans for a citizen militia to combat revolutionary activity on the part of the working class. Others showed that, with the connivance of the police, the CEDA was assembling files on workers in every village, with full details of their ‘subversiveness’, which meant their membership of a union. The appearance of the uniformed militias of the CEDA’s youth movement (the Juventud de Acción Popular) was taken as proof that preparations were afoot to establish fascism in Spain.12
Inevitably, within the Socialist Youth and among the younger, unskilled union members there was a great surge of enthusiasm for revolution. Largo Caballero was happy to go along with their demands lest they drift towards the more determinedly revolutionary CNT. Although, at a joint meeting of the union (UGT) and party (PSOE) executives on 25 November, revolutionary proposals were defeated, the moderate Indalecio Prieto reluctantly agreed on the need for ‘defensive action’. The two executives compromised with a declaration urging workers to be ready to rise up and oppose ‘reactionary elements in the event that they went beyond the bounds of the Constitution in their public determination to annul the work of the Republic’. A joint PSOE–UGT committee was set up to prepare this ‘defensive action’.13 The lack of Socialist participation in the CNT insurrection two weeks later showed that reformist habits prevailed over the new revolutionary rhetoric. The CEDA’s support for the assault on unionized labour together with its declared determination to smash socialism and to establish a corporativist state made it, for most Spanish leftists, indistinguishable from the Italian Fascist Party or the early Nazi Party. The Socialist leadership wanted to avoid the errors made by their German and Italian comrades, but they had no real intention of actually organizing a revolution. Instead, they hoped that threats of revolution would calm rank-and-file frustration and restrain right-wing aggression.
No Socialist organizations had participated in the CNT action, although a few individual militants had done so, believing it to be the ‘defensive action’ agreed on 26 November.14 In the Cortes, Prieto condemned ‘this damaging movement’. Yet, when both Gil Robles and the monarchist leader Antonio Goicoechea enthusiastically offered to help the government crush subversion, Prieto reacted angrily. It disturbed him that the ‘enemies of the Republic’ supported the regime only when the proposal was for the repression of the working class. By their determination to silence the workers’ organizations, Prieto perceptively told the deputies of the right, ‘you are closing all exits to us and inviting us to a bloody conflict’.15
4
The Coming of War, 1934–1936
The hopes of Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso had been fulfilled. While the military action in the north was still in train, there had been nationwide round-ups of workers’ leaders on a massive scale. On 11 October 1934, the CEDA daily, El Debate, reported that in Madrid alone there were already two thousand prisoners. Jails were soon full in areas where there was no revolutionary activity but where landowners had problems with their day-labourers. Workers’ clubs, the Casas del Pueblo, were closed down in towns and villages in every part of the country. The Socialist press was banned. On 8 October, in Alicante, a huge crowd demanded the liberation of the many prisoners being brought to the Castillo de Santa Bárbara. There were clashes with the police and José Alonso Mallol, the ex-Civil Governor of Seville and Asturias, and a number of other prominent Republicans were arrested. In the same session of 9 October in which Gil Robles had proposed the closing of parliament, the CEDA voted an increase in the forces of order and the re-establishment of the death penalty. At total of 1,134 Socialist town councils were simply removed and replaced by unelected right-wing nominees. There were many provincial capitals among them, including Albacete, Málaga and Oviedo.
The most scandalous case was that of Madrid, where the town council and its Republican Mayor, Pedro Rico, were suspended, falsely accused of failing to combat the strike. Control was briefly assumed by the head of the Agrarian Party, José Martínez de Velasco, as government delegate. He was replaced on 19 October by Salazar Alonso himself, who had been dropped from the new government because Lerroux felt that the presence of three CEDA ministers was already provocative enough. A week later, he took the title of alcalde (mayor).1 In Málaga, the man chosen to lead the management committee that replaced the elected council was Benito Ortega Muñoz, a liberal member of the Radical Party. As a city councillor, he had successfully opposed the attempts of more left-wing Republicans to remove crosses from the municipal cemetery. That, together with his acceptance of the position of unelected Mayor in October 1934, would lead to his murder in 1936.2
The repression in Asturias after October 1934 was a major steppingstone from the terror of Morocco to the wartime terror exercised against the civilian population of the Republic. With Franco in overall command, the brutal Juan Yagüe leading the African forces and the sadistic Doval in charge of ‘public order’, Asturias saw the elaboration of the model that would be applied in southern Spain in the summer of 1936. The right applauded the actions of Franco against what was perceived as the ‘passions of the beast’, ‘the pillaging hordes’ and ‘the rabble unleashed’. As well as the 111 Civil Guards killed, thirty-three clergy, including seven seminary students, lost their lives.3 It was not surprising then that spine-chilling exaggerations of the revolutionaries’ crimes abounded. One of the leaders of Acción Española, Honorio Maura, described the miners as ‘putrefaction, scum, the dregs of humanity’, ‘repugnant jackals unfit to be Spaniards or even humans’. They were portrayed as murderers, thieves and rapists, with female accomplices described as ‘brazen women who incited their cruelties. Some were young and beautiful but their faces reflected moral perversion, a mixture of shamelessness and cruelty.’4
For the right, the use of the African Army against ‘inhuman’ leftists was entirely justified. Inevitably, within Spain and abroad, there was loud criticism of the use of Moorish troops in Asturias, the cradle of the Christian reconquest of Spain. José María Cid y Ruiz-Zorrilla, parliamentary deputy for the right-wing Agrarian Party for Zamora and Minister of Public Works, responded with a declaration of double-edged racism: ‘For those who committed so many acts of savagery, Moors were the least they deserved, because they deserved Moors and a lot else.’5 A book published by the Oviedo branch of Ángel Herrera Oria’s Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas (ACNP) suggested in similar terms that the crimes committed against clerics by the revolutionaries were Moorish in character and deserved to be punished by exposure to Moorish atrocities.6 In the majority of Catholic writing about the events of October 1934, it was a commonplace that the revolution was an attack on Catholicism and that the suffering of religious personnel was analogous to the suffering of Christ at the hands of the Jews.7
In contrast to Asturias, the October rebellion in Catalonia was put down without savagery, thanks to the moderation and professionalism of Domingo Batet Mestres, the general commanding the Catalan Military Region. The Catalan government, the Generalitat, had found itself caught between extreme nationalists pushing for a separate Catalonia and a right-wing government in Madrid determined to curtail regional autonomy. The President, Lluís Companys, rashly declared independence on 6 October, in an attempt to forestall revolution. General Batet responded with patience and good sense to restore the authority of the central government and thereby prevented a potential bloodbath. Specifically, he bypassed Franco, who was advising the Minister of War Diego Hidalgo on the repression in Catalonia as well as Asturias. To Franco’s fury, Batet would deal only with Hidalgo and the Prime Minister, Lerroux. As the senior officer, he ignored Franco’s recommendation that he use the Foreign Legion to impose punishment on Catalonia like that inflicted by Yagüe on Asturias. Instead, he used a small number of troops to secure the surrender of the Generalitat with a minimum of casualties. Batet also prevented the bombardment of Barcelona by warships sent by Franco.8
When Batet explained in a radio broadcast how he had conducted operations, he did so in a regretful and conciliatory tone that was far from the vengeful spirit of the right. In parliament, José Antonio Primo de Rivera fulminated that Batet was ‘a general that didn’t believe in Spain’ and that his broadcast had ‘made us blush with shame’.9 Two years later, Franco would take his revenge for Batet’s moderation. In June 1936, Batet was to be given command of the VI Military Region, whose headquarters were in Burgos, one of the nerve centres of the uprising of 18 July. Faced with the virtually unanimous decision of his officers to join the rising, Batet would bravely refuse to join them. His commitment to his oath of loyalty to the Republic would guarantee his trial and execution. Franco maliciously intervened in the judicial process to ensure that Batet would be executed.10
Now, despite the triumph of the government, there were numerous civilians and army officers preparing to destroy the Republic. Onésimo Redondo was trying to build up an arsenal of small arms. He hired a sports ground on the banks of the Río Pisuerga where he would drill and train the local Falange militia. On Sundays, he led parades through Valladolid itself or other towns of the province. During October 1934, there had been bloody clashes in Valladolid between Falangists and picketing railway workers. In the aftermath, Onésimo Redondo distributed a pamphlet in which he advocated that Azaña, Largo Caballero, Prieto and Companys be hanged.11
The activities of Onésimo Redondo and others on the extreme right showed that they were oblivious to the successes of a firmly right-wing government. Pushed by them or genuinely alarmed at what he perceived to be the moderate scale of the post-October repression, José Antonio Primo de Rivera committed the Falange to armed struggle to overthrow the democratic regime.12 In early 1935, he had several meetings with Bartolomé Barba Hernández of the Unión Militar Española and an agreement was reached which also established links with the Carlists through Colonel Ricardo de Rada, who was training the militias of both groups. There was a surge in UME membership among junior officers after October 1934.13
In mid-June 1935, at a meeting of the Falange executive committee, the Junta Política, at the Parador in the Sierra de Gredos north of Madrid, the ‘official and binding decision was taken to proceed to holy civil war to rescue the Fatherland’. José Antonio reported on his contacts with the UME. He then put forward a plan for an uprising to take place near the Portuguese frontier at Fuentes de Oñoro in the province of Salamanca. An unnamed general, possibly Sanjurjo, would acquire 10,000 rifles in Portugal which would then be handed over to Falangist militants who would proceed to a ‘march on Madrid’.14 With the left already cowed by the repression and the most right-wing elements of the military in positions of power, there was no backing from senior military figures. Probably to José Antonio’s relief, the idea was dropped.15 The only practical consequence of the decision to move to armed struggle was the bid by José Antonio to get weapons from Barba Hernández’s UME.16
In fact, the successive defeats of both the June harvest strike and the October rising had left political and social tension at an all-time high. This was especially true in the south. The new Minister of Agriculture, the CEDA deputy for Badajoz, Manuel Giménez Fernández, hoped to alleviate the situation by implementing his social Catholic beliefs. Outraged landowners ensured that his aspirations came to naught. The rural population of Extremadura had suffered a long process of pauperization. While large landowners had been able to ride out crises of poor harvests and drought, the smaller owners had ended up in the hands of usurers (often the richer landowners). They had been forced to mortgage, and then lost, their farms. The problem was particularly acute for the yunteros or ploughmen who owned a yunta (yoke) of mules and rented land to farm.
A long-simmering hostility came to a head in November 1934. It had started in 1932, when the local landlords had systematically refused to grant leases to the yunteros, instead turning their land over to pasture for cattle. Their objective had been to force the yunteros to sell their oxen and tools and reduce them to the status of day-labourers. In desperation, in the autumn of 1932, the yunteros launched a series of invasions of the estates of the most recalcitrant landlords. With some ceremony, flags, bands and families, they would enter the estates at dawn and begin to plough the land. There was little violence and, when confronted by armed retainers or the Civil Guard, the yunteros would usually withdraw peacefully. Finally, on 1 November 1932, the Republican–Socialist coalition temporarily legalized the occupations for one year for 15,500 peasants in Cáceres and 18,500 in Badajoz, a measure renewed in 1933 for a further year. Big landowners in Badajoz, Cáceres and Salamanca, especially cattle-breeders, reacted with intense hostility to the ploughing of pasture.17
In late 1934, the issue of what to do about the 34,000 yunteros settled in November 1932 became urgent. The CEDA now had the opportunity to put into practice its much vaunted aim of combating revolution with social reform. As skilled farmers, with their own tools and animals, the yunteros of Extremadura were potential recruits for the social Catholic movement. They could easily have been converted into share-cropping smallholders.18 However, Giménez Fernández encountered the local right demanding their immediate eviction.19 Without attacking the agrarian problem at its root, the measures he proposed between November 1934 and March 1935 did attempt to mitigate some of its more appalling consequences. He met only the hostility of the extreme right and, in his own party, the CEDA, little solidarity and much vicious personal abuse. The bitter determination of landowners to bury his Law for the Protection of Yunteros and Small Farmers was revealed when he was visited on 16 October 1934 by a group of landowners from Cáceres accompanied by the three CEDA and four Radical deputies for the province and by Adolfo Rodríguez Jurado, CEDA deputy for Madrid and president of the landowners’ pressure group, the Agrupación Nacional de Propietarios de Fincas Rústicas. The ferocity of their objections was reflected in Giménez Fernández’s diary entry that more than one of them was a ‘fascist decided on sabotage’.20
In January 1935, Giménez Fernández’s Law on Access to Ownership offered tenants the chance to buy land they had worked for twelve years. Mild as it was, the project provoked a parliamentary coalition of ultra-rightist deputies, led by the Carlist José María Lamamié de Clairac (Salamanca) and four CEDA deputies, Mateo Azpeitia Esteban (Zaragoza province), Cándido Casanueva y Gorjón (Salamanca), Luis Alarcón de la Lastra (Seville province) and, most ferociously of all, Rodríguez Jurado. They were virulent in their hostility to the idea of peasants being given access to property.21
Luis Alarcón de la Lastra was an artillery officer and Africanista who had left the army rather than take the oath of loyalty to the Republic. He was also an aristocrat, holding the titles of Conde de Gálvez and Marqués de Rende, and owned considerable property around Carmona, the area of Seville province with one of the greatest concentrations of large estates. He had become a CEDA deputy for Seville in 1933 but failed to gain a seat in the February 1936 elections. He would rejoin the army at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and serve in Yagüe’s African columns commanding the artillery that bombarded numerous towns. By 1938, he was commander of the artillery of the Moroccan Army Corps. At the end of March 1939, Franco rewarded him by naming him Civil Governor of Madrid and five months later Minister of Industry and Commerce.22
Now, in session after session in the Cortes, Alarcón, Lamamié and the CEDA ultras stripped away the progressive features of Giménez Fernández’s law on rural leases and added clauses that permitted a spate of evictions. Gil Robles stated that only concessions made in a Christian spirit could prevent the revolution, yet stood back and watched his Minister being called a ‘white bolshevik’ and ‘a Marxist in disguise’. Moreover, Gil Robles placed Giménez Fernández’s fiercest enemies on the parliamentary committee examining the drafts of his laws. Lamamié de Clairac showed just how far his Catholic faith went when he declared that ‘if the Minister of Agriculture goes on quoting Papal Encyclicals in support of his projects, I can assure him that we will end up becoming Greek orthodox’.23 When he next provoked a cabinet crisis, Gil Robles quietly dropped Giménez Fernández.
On 3 July 1935, Giménez Fernández’s successor, Nicasio Velayos Velayos, a conservative member of the Agrarian Party from Ávila, presented what came to be known as the ‘agrarian counter-reform’. It was so reactionary that it was denounced by José Antonio Primo de Rivera as well as by various Left Republicans and Radicals. Its most dramatic change was to drop the Inventory of Expropriable Property. This permitted landowners to avoid expropriation by putting their properties in other names. Henceforth, only those who wanted their property compulsorily purchased had to undergo expropriation. Moreover, compensation would be decided case by case by tribunals consisting of landowners, who would ensure that it would be at full market value.24 In Extremadura, the local landowners began to evict the yunteros. In the village of Fregenal de la Sierra in Badajoz, one landowner alone evicted twenty families.25
The consequent level of social tension in Badajoz was starkly revealed on 10 June 1935 when the twenty-six-year-old Socialist deputy for the province, Pedro Rubio Heredia, was shot dead in a restaurant by Regino Valencia, who worked for Salazar Alonso. It will be recalled that Regino Valencia had carried out the ‘inspection’ which led to the removal of José González Barrero as Mayor of Zafra. Rubio’s funeral was attended by thousands of members of the FNTT. At Valencia’s trial, on 27 June, he was defended by Manuel Baca Mateos, a CEDA deputy for Seville, who claimed that the death had come about as a result of a fight. The Socialist Juan-Simeón Vidarte, acting for the victim’s family, proved to the satisfaction of the court that the attack had been unprovoked. Valencia was sentenced to twelve years and a day in prison. He then appealed to the Supreme Court, where he was defended by Rafael Salazar Alonso in person. Vidarte wrote later: ‘knowing as I and the entire province did, that he [Salazar Alonso] was behind the murder, this hard-faced cheek shocked and disgusted me’. At the unsuccessful appeal at the end of December 1935, there was uproar when Vidarte said that Salazar Alonso should have been wearing not lawyer’s robes but convict’s overalls.26
Despite being made Mayor of Madrid, Salazar Alonso’s political fortunes had plummeted since his removal from the Ministry of the Interior at the beginning of October 1934. Aware that the inclusion of three CEDA ministers in his cabinet would provoke fury on the left, Lerroux felt that he could not keep Salazar Alonso on. It was a gesture to secure President Alcalá Zamora’s approval for the new cabinet.27 In the parliamentary debate on the revolutionary events in Asturias and Catalonia and their subsequent repression, the ex-Prime Minister Ricardo Samper declared that responsibility for what had happened lay with Salazar Alonso. Utterly mortified, Salazar Alonso got up and walked out of the Cortes.28
Given that both in his private letters to Amparo and in his memoirs, Salazar Alonso boasted of provoking the workers’ uprising, his distress can have derived only from the fact that all had not turned out as well as he had hoped. The post-October repression brought a semblance of social peace, but violence was not far from the surface. The south was badly hit by drought in 1935, unemployment rose to more than 40 per cent in some places and beggars thronged the streets of the towns. The hungry agricultural labourers and the well-to-do rural middle and upper classes regarded each other with fear and resentment. The right-wing campaign for the elections of February 1936 prophesied that a left-wing victory would mean ‘uncontrolled looting and the common ownership of women’. Even without such apocalyptic provocation, natural disaster intensified social tension. After the prolonged drought of 1935, early 1936 brought fierce rainstorms that ruined the olive harvest and damaged wheat and barley crops. Across Andalusia and Extremadura, during the election campaign, the owners offered food and jobs to those who would vote for the right. To refuse could mean a beating or loss of work. In both urban and rural areas of unemployment, the local branches of Acción Popular began to open soup-kitchens and to distribute blankets to the poor. In many places, the right set out to buy votes.29
In most southern provinces, the Casas del Pueblo were still closed sixteen months after the October revolution. In Granada, for example, the Republican newspapers mysteriously disappeared en route from Granada to outlying towns and villages, while the CEDA paper Ideal always got through. Ideal called on right-wingers to abandon their ‘suicidal inertia’, recommending a few beatings to keep the left quiet. In many provinces, caciques hired thugs who, often with the assistance of the Civil Guard, prevented the dissemination of left-wing propaganda. Republican posters were ripped down at gunpoint; Republican orators were turned away from villages by roadblocks or simply arrested. Rumours were spread that the peasants could not vote unless they had special documentation.30
The atmosphere was captured with all its bitterness by Baldomero Díaz de Entresotos who was the land registrar in Puebla de Alcocer in the area in north-east Badajoz known as La Siberia Extremeña. Highly sympathetic to fascism, Díaz de Entresotos was affronted by the fact that a taxi firm in Castuera used second-hand cars to carry the local working class at reasonable prices. A landowner commented to him:
what we don’t need are elections and tolerance. It’s all well and good that we used to have such things when it was all kept between ourselves, just to decide whether liberals or conservatives or so-and-so or so-and-so would be in charge. But now, when it’s about law and order or revolution, we don’t need all this drivel about parliament and democracy. The answer here is to force this rabble to submit, by whatever means, if necessary cutting off their heads before they cut off ours.
One of Díaz de Entresotos’s close friends was a landowner, Alfonso Muñoz Lozano de Sosa, who was also an infantry lieutenant serving with the Assault Guards. On election day, 16 February, he came to Puebla de Alcocer with a machine-pistol. The village was also visited on that day by Ricardo Zabalza, the secretary general of the landworkers’ union, the FNTT, who was a Socialist candidate for Badajoz. Zabalza was eating alone at the local inn, with his head down, deeply aware of the hostility of his fellow middle-class customers. Díaz de Entresotos had lunch with Lieutenant Muñoz and wrote later of his visceral hatred of Zabalza (on the basis of this one sighting and without ever actually meeting him). Zabalza, a schoolmaster, was invariably neatly and cleanly dressed. However, such was Díaz de Entresotos’s paranoid loathing of the left that he saw only an abomination:
Zabalza looked just like what he was. Unkempt and repulsive, as befitted his damaging activities. He went around the villages advising riot and plunder. It was rumoured that, during the peasants’ strike of 1934, he had put a bomb on a railway line. I had no idea if this fact [sic] was true but, looking at this grim and dirty man, it seemed perfectly likely. How many times that day did I gaze on Muñoz’s machine-pistol, dwelling on the pleasure it would give me to open fire on that disgusting flesh!
When the election results began to come in, Muñoz commented ominously, ‘This has to be settled with bullets.’31 Their desire to see Zabalza dead would be satisfied four years later when he was executed by firing squad in a Francoist prison.32
The narrowness of the left-wing electoral victory reflected the polarization of Spanish society. The working masses, especially in the countryside, were in no mood for compromise after the so-called ‘two black years’ of vindictive right-wing government from 1933 to 1935. Both the rural and urban working classes demanded reparation for the post-October repression and the swift implementation of the reform programme elaborated by the leaders of the Popular Front electoral coalition. Considerable alarm ran through the middle classes when crowds gathered at prisons in Asturias and elsewhere calling for the release of those imprisoned after October 1934 and when groups of labourers presented themselves for work at the large estates. In many rural towns, there were attacks on the casinos (landowners’ clubs). In others, churches were burned in reprisal for their priests having justified the repression and using their pulpits for right-wing propaganda during the electoral campaign.
The new Prime Minister Manuel Azaña was horrified by the violence of popular agitation and rapidly embarked on a programme of conciliation. On 20 February 1936, his first cabinet meeting approved the return of the elected town councils and decreed an amnesty for those imprisoned after October 1934. The following day, Azaña made a radio broadcast to the nation in which he undertook to ‘heal the wounds caused in recent times’ and promised that his government would not seek revenge for the injustices of the last two years. He was confident that the popular ferment was a temporary phenomenon, fruit of the euphoria that accompanied the electoral victory. With a view to calming the agitation, on 29 February his cabinet issued a decree obliging employers to readmit workers sacked because of their ideology or for participating in strikes after 1 January 1934 and to compensate them with their pay for a minimum of thirty-nine days or a maximum of six months. The immediate reaction of a huge group of employers’ organizations was to issue a statement that this constituted a ‘true economic catastrophe’. In the short term, it appeared that the right in general expected from Azaña, as the dramatist Ramón del Valle Inclán put it, ‘what the sick expect from cod-liver oil’.33
However, Azaña faced debilitating problems. Despite his broadcast, the rural agitation continued. He was deeply depressed by news of events in Yecla in the north of Murcia, where seven churches, six houses and the property registry had been set alight.34 His ability to control the situation was severely undermined by the refusal of Francisco Largo Caballero to permit Socialist participation in the cabinet. Distrustful of Republican moderation, he had been prepared to support the electoral coalition only to secure political amnesty for the victims of the repression. Embittered by right-wing obstruction of reform between 1931 and 1933, Largo Caballero believed that only an exclusively Socialist cabinet could transform Spanish society. His overconfident view was that the Left Republicans should pursue their own programme and effectively exhaust themselves in carrying out the bourgeois stage of the revolution. They would then either make way for a Socialist cabinet or be engulfed by a fascist uprising which would itself trigger a successful revolution.
On 3 April 1936, Largo Caballero was interviewed by the American journalist Louis Fischer and he told him complacently: ‘The reactionaries can come back into office only through a coup d’état.’35 He was just mouthing revolutionary platitudes, but unfortunately the counterfeit nature of his revolutionary rhetoric was not perceived as such among the middle and upper classes. While their fears of revolution were intensified by right-wing propaganda, Largo Caballero’s policy prevented both revolution and strong government. It eventually ensured instead that an ineffectual Republican government would be in power while the military conspiracy was prepared.
The tension was such that Azaña felt obliged to calm things down. He wrote to his brother-in-law: ‘every night the left feared a military coup aimed at preventing communism. The right feared that the Soviet was on the horizon. I’ve never seen such panic or such a stupid situation. The Socialists have organized an intelligence system based on concierges, cleaners and chauffeurs, and they get all the below-stairs gossip.’ With the stock market falling and the streets deserted, on 3 April, Azaña made the first of only two major speeches to the new Cortes. In it, he mentioned the agitations and disturbances that had taken place in the countryside, stating that his cabinet had to deal with what he called ‘a national ulcer’.
Referring to the excesses of the first six weeks of his government, he asked: ‘can the masses, provoked and ill treated, those forced to starve for two years, those coming out of prison, be asked to behave, as we try to do, without resentment for the injustices which we remember only too well? We had to expect, and the Government did expect … that the first explosion of popular anger would see excesses that would undermine political authority and damage the Government.’ While condemning violent abuses, he also denounced those who sought to make political capital from them. He recognized that the tendency of Spaniards to resolve problems by violence engendered ‘a presumption of catastrophe’. ‘Many people are going around depressed,’ he declared, ‘imagining that Spain is going to wake up having been turned into a Soviet.’ While understanding how apolitical individuals might harbour such fears, he found it intolerable that the politically aware should foment panic in such a way as to create the atmosphere necessary for a coup d’état.
Azaña put the disorder into its proper context and went on to declare that his government aimed to remedy the disequilibrium at the heart of Spanish society. He acknowledged that this could mean harming the interests of those who benefited from ‘this horrendous imbalance’, adding that ‘we come to break up any abusive concentration of wealth wherever it may be’. While he did not expect an entire social class to commit suicide, he called on the wealthy to make sacrifices rather than face the consequences of the desperation provoked by social injustice. He ended prophetically, more so than he knew at the time, declaring that this was the last chance for the Republic because, if the redistribution of wealth he was advocating was opposed as the reforms of 1931–3 had been, then there would be no legal way forward. Astonishingly, the reaction to this ultimatum was widespread relief from the Communists to the extreme right. The stock market began to rise again and Azaña was regarded as a national hero.36
Although lacking Socialist participation, Azaña’s new government was determined to proceed rapidly with meaningful agrarian change. The task was rendered all the more difficult because of a rise in unemployment by the end of February 1936 to 843,872, or 17 per cent of the working population.37 The new Minister of Agriculture, Mariano Ruiz-Funes, announced his commitment to rapid agrarian reform. The resurgent landworkers’ union intended to make him keep his word. After the harsh rural repression of the previous two years, in 1936 the FNTT began to expand at a vertiginous rate. Its militant leadership was in no mood to tolerate delays from the government or obstruction from the big landowners.
There has been considerable debate about the accuracy of Gil Robles’s figures. The most exhaustive recent study, by Eduardo González Calleja, reached the figure of 351 dead. Significantly, the highest figures – sixty-seven for Madrid, and Seville with thirty-four – were reached in cities where Falangist gunmen were at their most active. The next highest are Santander with twenty-three and Málaga with twenty. Other southern provinces produced substantial numbers, such as Granada with fourteen, Murcia with thirteen, Córdoba with eleven, Cáceres with ten and Huelva with eight. Other highly conflictive provinces produced surprisingly low figures, such as Jaén with one, Badajoz and Cádiz each with four and Almería with three. However, focus on numbers of fatal victims, important though it is, misses the wider issue of the daily violence of grinding poverty and social abuse. Another study, by Rafael Cruz, claims that 43 per cent of all deaths were caused by the forces of order. They were the result of overreaction in repressing pacific demonstrations, the victims of which were almost exclusively of the left. Those same forces of order were to support the military uprising despite the fact that the highest number of deaths was in March and that thereafter the level of fatalities gradually diminished.109
Disorder was frequent but sporadic and hardly universal. A picture of total anarchy was being painted in the press and the speeches of Gil Robles and others by simply grouping together as ‘social disorders’ all brawls, fights and strikes, however insignificant. Incidents were magnified and statistics inflated. In Madrid, the American Ambassador Claude Bowers was told tales of uncontrolled mobs butchering monarchists and feeding their bodies to pigs.110 Fear of violence and disorder was generated by what was read about other places. Some of those who expressed their disgust at the breakdown of law and order also spoke of their relief that, thankfully, it had not reached their own towns.111
The statistics are meaningless without their social context. For instance, in Torrevieja (Alicante) in early March, it was reported that ‘extremists’ had burned down a hermitage, a hotel, the club of the Radical Party and the municipal registry. What happened was that shots were fired from the hotel balcony on a peaceful demonstration complete with brass band that was passing and one of the demonstrators was wounded. This provoked the attack on the hotel and the other crimes. Among those arrested and accused of responsibility for the shooting were the owner of the hotel, the parish priest and two of his brothers and a teacher from the town’s Catholic school.112
As late as 1 July, Mola complained that ‘there have been efforts to provoke violence between right and left that we could use as an excuse to proceed but so far – despite the help of some political elements – it has not fully materialized because there are still idiots who believe in coexistence with representatives of the masses who dominate the Popular Front’.113 The perfect conditions for a coup may not have been achieved to Mola’s satisfaction, but the violence of right-wing gunmen, incendiary speeches by Calvo Sotelo and Gil Robles and the gloss put on events by the rightist media had gone a long way towards pushing the middle classes into the arms of the military conspirators.
Gil Robles’s public pronouncements should be seen in the light of his clandestine support of the military conspiracy, which he described as ‘a legitimate resistance movement against the anarchy which threatened the very life of the country’. At the end of May, he advised the American journalist Edward Knoblaugh to take his holidays in early July so as to be back in time to cover the military coup.114 On 27 February 1942, he sent from Lisbon a signed declaration to the Francoist authorities about his role in the coup, stating that he had ‘co-operated with advice, with moral stimulus, with secret orders for collaboration, and even with economic assistance, taken in appreciable quantities from the party’s electoral funds’. This last was a reference to 500,000 pesetas which he gave to Mola, confident that its original donors would have approved of his action. Part of the money was used to pay the Falangists and Carlist Requetés who joined the military rebels in Pamplona on 19 July.115 Gil Robles also tried to help Mola in negotiating the terms of the Carlist role in the uprising. In early July, he accompanied the owner of ABC, Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena, to Saint Jean de Luz, in a vain attempt to persuade the Carlist leader, Manuel Fal Conde, to drop his demand for the rebels to carry the monarchist flag and adopt the monarchist anthem.116
Throughout June and July, Gil Robles instructed provincial CEDA leaders that, on the outbreak of the rising, all party members were to join the military immediately, party organizations were to offer full collaboration, youth sections were to join the army and not form separate militias, party members were not to take part in reprisals against the left, power struggles with other rightist groups were to be avoided, and the maximum financial aid was to be given to the authorities. Only the instruction about reprisals was ignored, and CEDA members were prominent in the repression, especially in Granada and the cities of Old Castile. The first section of the CEDA to join the rising was the Derecha Regional Valenciana. Its moderate Christian Democrat leader Luis Lucia had been marginalized by the secretary general, José María Costa Serrano. When General Mola was finalizing civilian participation in June, Costa Serrano offered 1,250 men for the early moments of the rising and promised 10,000 after five hours and 50,000 after five days. Alongside local sections of the Falange, Renovación Española and the Carlists, the radical wing of the DRV was placed by Costa Serrano under the orders of the military junta. At the beginning of the war, Lucia issued a statement condemning the coup. As a right-wing politician, he went into hiding from the anarchists only to be caught and imprisoned in Barcelona. Nevertheless, in 1939 he was tried and sentenced to death by the Francoists for the alleged offence of military rebellion. His sentence was later commuted to thirty years in prison.117
Military intervention came to seem an ever more urgent necessity in the eyes of landowners as a result of the Socialist campaign for the recovery of common lands which enjoyed the support of the Minister of Agriculture, Mariano Ruiz-Funes.118 The rhetoric of the landowners, and that of their press, generated an apocalyptic sense of utter catastrophe. On 10 July, ABC lamented that 80 per cent of the land would be in the hands of municipalities and that there would be towns where private property would disappear.119 The younger members of landowning families joined the Falange. Anticipating the coup, many owners moved into their homes in the larger towns of the province, or to Madrid or Seville, or, in the case of the very rich, even to Biarritz or Paris, where they contributed finance and expectantly awaited news of the military plot. Behind them they left gangs of Falangists who attacked local Socialists with the protection of the Civil Guard. In Don Benito, the Civil Guard helped local Falangists when they firebombed the Casa del Pueblo.120 The FNTT frequently complained that the victims of the Civil Guard were always workers and denounced the stockpiling of arms by the landowners. It was claimed that, in Puebla de Almoradiel in the south of Toledo, the local right had two hundred shotguns, three hundred pistols and more than fifty rifles.121 When workers tried to collect unpaid wages from the landowners, they were often confronted by the Civil Guard. Those who had made such demands were invariably among the victims of the right-wing columns that captured their towns in the early months of the Civil War.122
The hatred between the landless peasants and the owners and their administrators was part of daily life in the south. One major landowner from Seville, Rafael de Medina, wrote of ‘the incomprehension of the haves and the envy of the have-nots’, of those who walked in rope sandals (alpargatas) and those who travelled by car. As he and his father drove past labourers walking along a country road, they noted their ‘grimfaced look, of such profound contempt and such outright bitterness, that it had the force of a thunderbolt’. Medina always carried a pistol at meetings to discuss working conditions with union leaders.123
The hatred was explained by the Civil Governor of Seville, José María Varela Rendueles. Many of the really big owners, dukes, counts and even very rich non-aristocratic owners, lived in Paris or Biarritz or Madrid. They visited their lands occasionally to hunt and to show them off to their friends. While there, their contempt for the labourers was manifest. They, like the less grand landowners who lived on their estates, would often laughingly take advantage of the wives, sisters and daughters of their labourers. Their administrators ran the estates, hiring and firing arbitrarily, ignoring the law. After the abuses of 1933–5, the return of left-wing town councils after the February 1936 elections saw a reversal of fortunes. The prevailing spirit was one not of conciliation but of outright hatred. As Varela Rendueles put it, the landless labourers wanted to follow the example of their ‘betters’: ‘all they wanted to do was to repeat the barbaric lessons that they had been taught’.124
A key element of the hatred between the rural poor and the rich, Varela Rendueles noted, was the way in which proletarian women were used and abused. Baldomero Díaz de Entresotos expressed the patronizing and exploitative attitude of the rural middle classes when he wrote indignantly of those who tried to break free of the prostitution into which they had been forced:
You lived off the romantic adventures of the señorito … Those señoritos, once your friends, used to live for you just as you lived for them. You think they stole municipal funds? I don’t think so but if they did the people’s money returned to the people as represented by pretty proletarian women. The señoritos were unable to stay away. At siesta time, they came to your whorehouses, sat in their shirtsleeves in the shade of trailing vines and left you banknotes on the beer crates. They livened up the tedium of your nights with wine and music. They were real democrats. Is there any greater democracy than to sleep in the arms of the daughters of the people? Generous, truly Andalusian, señoritos.125
The perception and empathy with which Varela Rendueles interpreted rural tensions was rare. In notes for his unfinished autobiography, General Sanjurjo made the revealing comment: ‘In reality, the agrarian problem in the name of which so many mistakes are made to the detriment of landowners and against the overall economy of Spain, exists only in Madrid on the lips of demagogues who use it as a way of exciting and manipulating the rural population. The agrarian problem was an invention of people like Margarita Nelken.’126
Mola had complained on 1 July that the planned spiral of provocation and reprisal had not persuaded public opinion to consider a military uprising legitimate. Less than two weeks later that goal was reached. On the evening of 12 July, Falangist gunmen murdered a lieutenant of the Assault Guards, José del Castillo Sáenz de Tejada.127 This crime derived much of its catastrophic impact from the fact that, two months earlier, on 7 May, Castillo’s friend Captain Carlos Faraudo de Miches had been shot dead by a Falangist squad. On that same day, the Prime Minister and Minister of War, Santiago Casares Quiroga, showed his adjutant, Major Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros of the air force, a right-wing blacklist of fourteen members of the Unión Militar Republicana Antifascista, which had been created in late 1935 to combat the activities of the UME. Faraudo was number one, Castillo number two and Hidalgo de Cisneros fourth.128
After Faraudo’s murder, calls for reprisals had been silenced. However, when Castillo was also assassinated, fellow Assault Guards from the Pontejos barracks just behind the Dirección General de Seguridad in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol were determined on revenge. In the early hours of the following day, they set out to take revenge on a prominent right-wing politician. Failing to find Gil Robles who was holidaying in Biarritz, they kidnapped Calvo Sotelo and, shortly after he got into the truck, one of them shot him. His body was then taken to the municipal cemetery where it was discovered the next morning.129 Republican and Socialist leaders were appalled and the authorities immediately began a thorough investigation. For the right, it was the opportunity to launch the coup for which the lengthy preparations were on the point of fruition.
At Calvo Sotelo’s burial, Antonio Goicoechea swore to ‘imitate your example, avenge your death and save Spain’. Even more bellicose was the speech made to the standing committee of the Cortes on 15 July by the Conde de Vallellano, on behalf of the Carlists and Renovación Española. Vallellano, referring rather inaccurately to ‘this unprecedented crime in our political history’, claimed that Calvo Sotelo had opposed all violence. Accusing the Popular Front deputies collectively of responsibility, he announced the monarchist abandonment of parliament. In what was to be his last parliamentary intervention, Gil Robles expressed his agreement with Vallellano and blamed both the violence of recent months and the assassination on the government. Knowing full well the objectives of the imminent military uprising, he declared that the parties of the Popular Front would be the first victims of the coming backlash.130
PART TWO
5
Queipo’s Terror: The Purging of the South
The assassination of Calvo Sotelo seemed to confirm the direst predictions of the right-wing press, and the military conspirators pressed ahead. Yet only six weeks earlier, Mola, at his headquarters in Pamplona, had been so depressed by fear that the coup might fail and be followed by the revenge of the left-wing masses that he contemplated resigning his command and retiring to Cuba. He was assailed by doubts about the crucial participation of Spain’s Moroccan forces – the locally recruited mercenaries of the Native Regulars (Regulares Indígenas) and the two sections into which the Spanish Foreign Legion (Tercio de Extranjeros) was organized. Mola’s alarm had been triggered on 2 June 1936 when the Prime Minister and Minister of War, Santiago Casares Quiroga, removed a key conspirator, Lieutenant Colonel Heli Rolando de Tella, from command of the First Legion based in Melilla on the Mediterranean coast of Spanish Morocco. Even more worrying was the fact that, the next day, Casares Quiroga sent for Lieutenant Colonel Juan Yagüe, who had been placed in overall charge of the uprising in the colony.1
While waiting to hear Yagüe’s fate, Mola enjoyed a major stroke of luck on 3 June. The Director General of Security, José Alonso Mallol, swooped on Pamplona with a dozen police-filled trucks to search for arms. However, the plotters, warned in advance by Mola’s collaborator, the police superintendent Santiago Martín Báguenas, ensured that no evidence was found.2 They were even more fortunate two weeks later when Yagüe was left in post. Having practised extraordinary brutality during the repression in Asturias in October 1934, Yagüe was bitterly hated on the left. He in turn had ample reason to resent the Republic, having been demoted in 1932 from lieutenant colonel to major by Azaña’s military reforms, which had reversed many of the rapid promotions enjoyed by the Africanistas. Humiliated by losing eighty-two places in the seniority list, he had had to wait a year before being restored to the rank of lieutenant colonel.3 Yagüe commanded the Second Legion in Ceuta on the southern side of the Straits of Gibraltar. Loudly indiscreet in his hostility to the government, he enjoyed the unquestioning loyalty of the tattooed mercenaries under his command.
Leading Socialists had repeatedly warned Casares Quiroga that it was dangerous to leave Yagüe in post. Yet, when he arrived on 12 June, he was offered a transfer either to a desirable post on the Spanish mainland or to a plum position as a military attaché in Rome. Yagüe replied curtly that he would burn his uniform rather than leave the Legion. To Mola’s relief, Casares weakly acquiesced and let him return to Morocco. After their meeting, Casares said to his adjutant, Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, ‘Yagüe is a gentleman, a perfect officer, and I am sure that he would never betray the Republic. He has given me his word of honour and his promise as an officer that he will always loyally serve the Republic. And men like Yagüe keep their word.’ It was a major political error.4
In the event, Mola was persuaded by senior Carlists to stay aboard and, regaining his resolve, began to make every effort to ensure the rising’s success. Nevertheless, in the second week of July, during the fiesta of San Fermín, Mola was again plunged into despair by news brought to Pamplona by his younger brother Ramón. The thirty-nine-year-old Ramón, an infantry captain in Barcelona, was Emilio’s liaison with the plotters there. The Generalitat’s security services had uncovered the plans for the rising in Catalonia and a deeply pessimistic Ramón begged his brother to desist. Emilio replied that it was too late and ordered Ramón to return to Barcelona. It was a virtual death sentence. When the coup failed, as Ramón had predicted, he shot himself. This contributed to the further brutalization of Mola. In contrast, he would be unmoved by the fact that the President of the Generalitat, Lluís Companys, saved the life of his father, the eighty-three-year-old retired General of the Civil Guard Emilio Mola López.5
The first of Mola’s secret instructions, issued in April, echoed the practice of the Africanistas against the Rif tribesmen, calling for extreme violence to shock the left into paralysis. Throughout the army as a whole, commitment to the conspiracy was far from unanimous. If it had been, it is unlikely that there would have been a civil war. Thus, Mola’s third secret instruction ordered the immediate execution of officers who opposed, or refused to join, the coup. The fifth instruction, of 20 June, had declared that ‘the timid and the hesitant should be warned that he who is not with us is against us and will be treated as an enemy’.6 Thus the first victims executed by the military rebels would be fellow army officers.
On 24 June, Mola sent specific instructions to Yagüe. He urged three main principles: extreme violence, tempo and high mobility: ‘Vacillations lead only to failure.’7 Six days later, Yagüe received a more detailed set of twenty-five instructions about the organization of the repression. They included the following: use Moorish forces; delegate control of public order and security in the cities to the Falange; arrest all suspect authorities; eliminate all leftist elements (Communists, anarchists, trade unionists, Masons and so on); shut down all public meeting places; prohibit all demonstrations, strikes and public and private meetings.8 These instructions were the blueprint for the repression unleashed on Spain’s Moroccan territories on the night of 17 July. By sheer force of personality, Yagüe entirely dominated the overall commander of forces in Morocco, General Agustín Gómez Morato. Between 5 and 12 July, in the Llano Amarillo in the Ketama Valley, manoeuvres involving 20,000 troops from the Legion and the Regulares saw Yagüe’s tent become the epicentre of the African end of the conspiracy as he briefed the principal rebel officers. The manoeuvres concluded with Falangist chants.9
On 17 July, at Melilla, headquarters of the Second Legion, the general in command, Manuel Romerales Quintero, having refused to join the plotters, was arrested and shot for his ‘extremist ideas’. The rebels, headed by Colonel Luis Solans-Labedán, very soon had nearly one thousand prisoners in a concentration camp. When the overall commander General Gómez Morato flew to Melilla, he was immediately arrested. In Tetuán, in the western half of the Protectorate, Colonel Eduardo Sáenz de Buruaga and Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Asensio Cabanillas detained the acting High Commissioner, Arturo Álvarez Buylla, who was shot some time later. On the night of 17–18 July, the rebels shot 225 soldiers and civilians in Morocco.10
Among the first of them was one of the most brilliant officers in the Spanish forces, Captain Virgilio Leret Ruiz, a thirty-four-year-old pilot and an aeronautical engineer of genius, the commander of the Atalayón seaplane base at Melilla. He had opposed the rebels, been detained and shot after a summary trial. His wife Carlota O’Neill, a left-wing feminist, dramatist and journalist, was arrested and separated from her daughters Carlota and Mariela. Many other wives and daughters of Republicans were seized, raped and tortured by Falangists. This was central to the reign of terror initiated by Luis Solans. In late September, a gang of Falangists came to the prison with the intention of killing all the female detainees to celebrate the rebel capture of Toledo. The director of the prison reprimanded them, saying, ‘it’s outrageous to kill them all at once. When you want to kill women, by all means come and get them, but one at a time.’ They left with several victims who were never seen again. After eighteen months in prison, Carlota O’Neill was court-martialled, accused of speaking Russian, of subversion and of responsibility for her husband’s actions on 17 July 1937. Nevertheless, she was sentenced to ‘only’ six years.11
Having secured their Moroccan base, the rebels’ next objective was Cádiz, the crucial port where the African Army would disembark. At 1.00 a.m. on 18 July, the military commander of Cádiz, Brigadier General José López-Pinto, assured the Civil Governor, Mariano Zapico, of his loyalty to the Republic. Three hours later, he declared for the rebels, imposed martial law and ordered the release of Brigadier General José Enrique Varela Iglesias. Arrested by the Republican authorities on 17 July rightly suspected of military conspiracy, Varela would play a central role in the rebel cause. The civilian plotters in Cádiz were led by a prominent landowner, José de Mora-Figueroa, the Marqués de Tamarón. Mora-Figueroa was head of the Falange in Cádiz; his brother Manuel, a naval officer, led its militia. In liaison with one of the key plotters in Seville, Ramón de Carranza, a retired naval captain, who was also Marqués de Soto Hermoso, the Mora-Figueroa brothers had been busy purchasing and stockpiling weapons.
Now, López Pinto and Varela were quickly joined by Mora-Figueroa’s Falangists. The Republican authorities took refuge in the town hall and the offices of the Civil Governor. They were defended by several hundred sparsely armed civilian Republicans and about fifty Assault Guards. López Pinto and Varela had about three hundred soldiers, fifty-odd Falangists and Carlist Requetés and a dozen Civil Guards. The buildings were subjected to artillery bombardment but held out until the arrival from Ceuta, late on the night of 18 July, of the destroyer Churruca and a merchant steamer carrying a unit of Regulares.12 Thereafter, the coup was certain of success in the city.
One after another the following morning, the town hall, the Civil Governor’s offices, the telephone exchange, the main post office and the headquarters of left-wing parties and trades unions surrendered virtually without resistance. All those within were detained and numerous members of the town council murdered without even a semblance of a trial. The Mayor, Manuel de la Pinta Leal, was not in Cádiz at the time of the coup and thus in no position to oppose it. Nevertheless, he was arrested in Córdoba in September, taken to Cádiz and shot. Over the days following the capture of Cádiz, the Civil Governor, the President of the provincial assembly (Diputación) and numerous officers who had refused to join the rebellion were accused of military rebellion. While detained, they wrote statements pointing out the absurdity of the accusations, since they were obeying the orders of the legal government and had merely defended themselves. Before any trials could take place, they and several others, including a Socialist parliamentary deputy and the town-hall lawyer, were simply taken from prison and murdered on or about 16 August, on the orders of General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, rebel commander of the south.13
The annihilation of less prominent leftists took place as follows. The rebels first closed off the narrow tongue of land that connected Cádiz to the rest of Spain. Groups of Falangists, Civil Guards and Regulares then searched and looted houses. Liberals and leftists, Freemasons and trade unionists, were arrested en masse. Some were shot directly in the street. Others were taken to Falange headquarters in the Casino where they were subjected to sadistic torture. They were forced to ingest a litre of castor oil and industrial alcohol mixed with sawdust and breadcrumbs. In acute abdominal pain, they were savagely beaten. A so-called ‘Tribunal of Blood’ was established and each day would select twenty-five of the detainees for execution. Over six hundred of those arrested in Cádiz were executed in the next five months and more than one thousand in the course of the war. A further three hundred would be executed between the end of the war and 1945. These figures do not include those who died in prison as a result of torture.14
The conquest of the remainder of the province was carried out with the enthusiastic collaboration of the local landowning class, many of whose younger elements had already joined the Falange or the Requeté. In Alcalá de los Gazules, to the east of Cádiz, local Falangists and Civil Guards took control of the town immediately, murdering the Mayor and town councillors, along with fifty others. In the surrounding villages, Popular Front Committees had been formed. They had detained those rightists known to support the coup and began to distribute grain and cattle among the families of landless labourers. The local landlords responded immediately by providing horses for a mounted squad to recover their property. Moving south-west, through Roche and Campano between Chiclana and Conil, the squad recaptured numerous estates that had been occupied by peasant families. Men, women and children were seized and taken back to Alcalá de los Gazules, many to be killed.15
After the fall of Cádiz, José Mora-Figueroa took his men to Jérez de la Frontera where the rising had triumphed immediately thanks to the decisive action of the military commander, another scion of a local landowning family, Major Salvador de Arizón Mejía, the Marqués de Casa Arizón, director of the army’s horse-breeding and training establishment. He and his brother, Captain Juan de Arizón Mejía, used the horses from their unit to ride out in columns to take control of the surrounding areas.16 Mora-Figueroa also organized mounted groups with friends and their employees, which he put at the disposal of the military authorities in Cádiz.17 The aim was not just to crush opposition to the rising but also to reverse the agrarian conquests of the previous years.
Most of the other principal towns of the province fell quickly. On 19 July, Salvador Arizón Mejía sent troops from Jérez to seize the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda in the north. Supporters of the Popular Front held them off until, on 21 July, a force of Regulares entered the town, killing twelve citizens including nine in one house. Executions began immediately, although a few leftists escaped in small boats. Eighty people were shot over the next five months.18 In Rota, nothing happened on 18 July. The following day, having been deceived into believing that the Civil Guard and Carabineros were loyal, the town’s anarchists, Socialists and Communists joined in declaring a general strike and establishing an anti-fascist committee. Falangists and other rightists were detained and roads into the town barricaded. When the Civil Guard declared in favour of the rebels, the anti-fascist committee surrendered without a fight. Despite the absence of left-wing violence, the Falange and the Civil Guard set about the systematic annihilation of the town’s relatively few liberals and leftists. They were tortured and forced to drink castor oil, and over sixty were shot at night, their ears cut off as trophies.19
The ambience in Jérez itself could be deduced from a broadcast on Radio Jérez on 24 July by the monarchist intellectual José María Pemán. He sang a hymn of praise to the war against what he called ‘hordes of barbarian invaders’. The implicit comparison of the working-class left with the Berber invaders of 711 was emphasized when he declared, ‘The war with its flashes of gunfire has opened our eyes. The idea of political alternation has been replaced for ever by that of extermination and expulsion, which is the only valid response against an enemy which is wreaking more destruction in Spain than any ever caused by a foreign invasion.’20
An experienced Africanista, Captain Mariano Gómez de Zamalloa, arrived in Jérez from Ceuta to take overall charge of the landowners’ mounted columns.21 The recovery of estates in the surrounding area seized by leftists fell to the column led by the Marqués de Casa Arizón. Another column was organized by José Mora-Figueroa’s brother Manuel, with the scions of other aristocratic and landowning families and of sherry magnates, like the Duque de Medina-Sidonia and Estanislao Domecq y González. The self-styled Tercio Mora-Figueroa was made up initially of three hundred young rightists, Falangists, sons of landowners and workers from the Catholic unions.
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