The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (18 page)

The Red Terror

T
he most emotive issue in warfare is that of atrocities. It is nearly always the most visually horrific of them which become fixed in the imagination. Spain witnessed many during its civil war, but it was also one of the very first in which the techniques of mass propaganda played an important role.

The Spanish Civil War was a magnet for foreign correspondents and the enemy atrocities related by press officers provided sensational copy. In the early days little was done, or could be done, by correspondents to check the truth and background of most incidents. Refugees often justified their panic with exaggerated or imagined tales of horror. The gang of Barcelona workers said to be covered in blood from a massacre on 19 July were, in fact, from the abattoirs and had rushed straight out to resist the military rising. Wild estimates of the killing were reported: the nationalists stated at the time that half a million people had been slaughtered in republican territory and claimed the still excessive figure of 55,000 after the war. Perhaps the confusion and speed of events made journalists fall back on clichés, rather than investigate what lay behind the ferocity of the war. Having tended to ignore Spain, Europe did not understand the turbulent cycles of repression and revolt which had now built up to an explosion affecting every corner of the country.

The initial, hasty impressions passed on by journalists with little firsthand evidence seriously affected the Republic’s foreign relations when it needed to buy arms in the crucial months of the war. The violent excesses recounted in many papers justified that distaste for the revolution in the republican zone which ran strongly in British conservative and diplomatic circles. The left-wing administration in France under Léon Blum suppressed its own natural sympathies and, alarmed by Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland that spring, felt obliged to follow the British idea of refusing aid to both sides (a policy which was bound to favour the nationalists). Not until the bombing of Guernica in April of 1937 did the battle for world opinion really change in the Republic’s favour, but by then the republicans were already losing the war.

The Spanish war saw many terrible acts, but it was those of a religious significance that tended to prevail in people’s minds: ‘reds’ killing priests and disinterring the mummies in convent vaults; it was even said that Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, had bitten the jugular of a priest; or Carlist
requetés
making a republican lie in the form of a cross before hacking off his limbs to the cry of ‘Long live Christ the King!’.

If people in other countries were reminded of the Thirty Years’ War, or the religious persecutions of the Dark Ages, and shuddered at this ‘new barbarism’, it was not surprising. The slaughter did not follow the same pattern on each side. In nationalist territory the relentless purging of ‘reds and atheists’ was to continue for years, while in republican territory the worst of the violence was mainly a sudden and quickly spent reaction of suppressed fear, exacerbated by desires of revenge for the past.

The attacks on the clergy were bound to cause the greatest stir abroad, where there was little understanding of the Church’s powerful political role. The Catholic Church was the bulwark of the country’s conservative forces, the foundation of what the right defined as Spanish civilization. Not surprisingly, the outside world had a fixed impression of Spain as a deeply religious country. The jest of the Basque philosopher Unamuno, that in Spain even atheists were Catholic, was taken seriously. Centuries of fanatical superstition enforced by the Inquisition had engraved this image on European minds. Even so, it was surprising how few foreign newspapers made the connection between the religious repression dating back to the Middle Ages and the violent anti-clericalism that developed in the nineteenth century. The rage which led to such excesses in some areas was fired by one great conviction: the promise of heaven for the meek was the age-old trick by the rich and powerful to make the poor accept their lot on earth. For the anarchists, at least, the Church represented nothing less than the psychological operations branch of the state. As such it was a target which ranked in importance with the Civil Guard.

During the war the nationalists claimed that 20,000 priests had been slaughtered; afterwards they said that 7,937 religious persons were killed. This figure was still over a thousand too high. Today, we know that out of a total ecclesiastical community of around 115,000, thirteen bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 members of other orders and 283 nuns were killed, the vast majority during the summer of 1936.
¹
It was a terrible slaughter, yet liberal Catholics abroad were later to state that the killing of priests was no worse than the right’s killing of left-wingers in the name of God. The Spanish Church was furious at this attitude, yet it said nothing when the nationalists shot sixteen of the Basque clergy including the arch-priest of Mondragon. Only the Bishop of Vitoria took a stand and persuaded the Pope to protest to General Franco, who was furious and declared that he would send bishops who supported him to Rome.
²
Some twenty Protestant ministers were also killed by the nationalists, yet protests were useless.
³
The most sensational item of propaganda in the world press involved the raping of nuns, yet the detailed nationalist indictment of republican crimes published in 1946 offers no evidence for any such incident, while hinting at only one.

There were certainly occasions when wanton cruelty was inflicted on priests before they died, particularly in Aragón, Catalonia and Valencia. Some were burned to death in their churches and there are reports of castration and disembowelment, and that some were buried alive after being made to dig their own graves. Many more churches were set alight and vandalized. Copes were used for mock bullfights in the street. A republican who dressed himself in the archbishop of Toledo’s ceremonial garments as a joke was nearly shot by a drunken
miliciano
who mistook him for the primate. Communion wine was drunk out of chalices, stained-glass windows were broken and militiamen shaved in the fonts.
⁴

Following the collapse of law and order in the republican zone, the anger of the masses was directed first against the rebel generals and their supporters and then against class enemies: clergy, landowners and their
señorito
sons, factory owners,
cacique
political bosses, members of the learned professions and shopkeepers. This violence of the first days was like a brutal explosion. But the vengeance was not as indiscriminate and blind as has sometimes been claimed.

The killing of the clergy was far from universal and with the exception of the Basque country, where the Church was untouched, there was no marked regional pattern. In depressed rural areas the priests were often as poverty-stricken and ill-educated as their parishioners. Those who had taken as much trouble over burying the poor as the rich were often spared. The same was usually true of the killing of shopkeepers and members of the professional class. A lawyer or shopkeeper who had not taken advantage of the poor or showed arrogance was usually left alone. Factory owners and managers with a reputation for dealing fairly with their workforce were nearly always spared and in many cases kept on in the new co-operative. On the other hand, any ‘known exploiter’ had little chance of survival if caught in the early days. Obviously there were exceptions to this pattern, but the rumours of people being shot merely for wearing hats and ties were the product of an inevitable middle-class persecution complex.

Left-wing parties and unions requisitioned buildings and set up their own ‘commissions of investigation’, usually known by the Russian names of
checas
.
⁵
Supporters of the rising were dragged in front of these revolutionary tribunals when they were not shot out of hand. The names and addresses of those belonging to groups involved in the rising were taken from official departments or the respective party headquarters, if their records had not been destroyed in time. Evidently some victims were denounced by servants, debtors and enemies. With the intense atmosphere of suspicion and the speed of events, many mistakes were undoubtedly made.

This pretence of justice happened mainly in cities and large towns where the socialists and communists were dominant. Fake Falange membership cards, said to belong to the defendant, were often produced so as to ensure that the proceedings were rapid. When declared guilty, prisoners were taken away to be shot. Their bodies were then often left in prominent positions with placards stating that the victims were fascists.
⁶
Anarchists tended to despise this farce of legality and simply got on with the shooting. Believing in the individual’s responsibility for his actions, they rejected any form of corporate ‘statism’ for officials to hide behind. The other reason for immediate execution was their genuine horror of putting anyone in a prison, the most symbolic of all state institutions.

The establishment of the
checas
was unsurprising, considering the spy mania and the frustration caused by the government’s lack of resistance to the military rising. Some of them became gangs ruled by opportunist leaders. One
checa
set up in the palace of Count del Rincón in Madrid was run by García Altadell, a former secretary-general of the Communist Youth, who set off for Argentina with his loot, but was captured by the nationalists en route and later garrotted.

Exploiting the fear and turmoil, a great number of criminals found it easy to act under political flags of convenience. Many of those who took real and imagined fascists for rides (in the movie jargon used at the time) were teenage workers or shop assistants who were not political fanatics, but young men excited by their sudden power. The actress Maria Casares (daughter of the ex-prime minister), who worked at a Madrid hospital with her mother, described what happened when they found blood in their car one morning. Their young driver, Paco, gave ‘an imperceptible shrug. Then he said, “We took a guy for a ride at dawn, and I’m sorry I haven’t had time to clean up the car.” And in the rear-view mirror I saw his indefinable little smile; a smile of bragging and shame at the same time, and also a sort of atrocious innocence. The expression of a child caught red-handed.’
⁷

In spite of the wave of political killings in Madrid during the first few weeks, there remained a very large population of nationalists, judging by the numbers to emerge two and a half years later when Franco’s troops approached. Those of the upper and middle classes who knew they were in danger usually tried to go into hiding, disguise themselves as workers to flee Madrid, or seek refuge in overcrowded embassies. Foreign legations were estimated to have held a total of 8,500 people at the beginning of February 1937.
⁸
Some embassies, representing governments sympathetic to the nationalists, acted as espionage centres, using both radio and diplomatic bag to pass information to the other side. One
checa
opened a fake embassy some months later and killed all those who came there for shelter. The indiscriminate killing began to decline only when control was exercised over the criminals released from prison and military action began in the Madrid area.

The worst mass killing in Madrid occurred on the night of 22–23 August, just after an air raid and the arrival of reports of the massacre of 1,200 republicans in the bullring at Badajoz. Enraged militiamen and civilians marched on the Model Prison when rumours spread of a riot and a fire started by Falangist prisoners. Thirty of the 2,000 prisoners, including many prominent right-wingers, several of them former ministers, were dragged out of the prison and shot.
⁹
A horrified Azaña came very close to resigning as president of the Republic.
¹⁰

In Barcelona the top priorities for revenge (after certain police officials like Miguel Badía) were the industrialists who had employed
pistoleros
against union leaders in the 1920s and, of course, the gunmen themselves. This wave of repression was carried out mainly by ‘investigation groups’ and ‘control patrols’ created by the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias, but also by unscrupulous and sometimes psychologically disturbed individuals, taking advantage of the chaos.

There was inevitably a wide-ranging settlement of accounts against blacklegs. One or two killings even went back to old inter-union disputes. Desiderio Trillas, the head of the UGT dockers, was shot down by a group of anarchists because he had prevented CNT members from receiving work. This murder was condemned at once by the CNT-FAI leadership and they promised the immediate execution of any of their members who killed out of personal motives. It was a threat which they carried out. Several prominent anarchists, such as their building union leader, Josep Gardenyes, who had been freed from prison on 19 July, and Manuel Fernández, the head of the catering syndicate, were executed by their own comrades in the FAI for taking vengeance on police spies from the time of Primo’s dictatorship.
¹¹

The army officers who had supported the rising and then been captured soon became victims. A column of militiamen attacked the prison ship
Uruguay
and shot the majority of the rebels held there between 29 and 31 August.
¹²

It appears that freed convicts were responsible for a considerable part of the violence and much of the looting. The real anarchists burned banknotes because they symbolized the greed of society, but those they had released from prison did not change their habits with the arrival of the social revolution. The excesses of unreformed criminals caused the CNT-FAI to complain bitterly that the ‘underworld is disgracing the revolution’, but they were reluctant to admit that they had allowed almost anybody to join their organization. Falangists sought refuge in their ranks, as well as others who had no interest in libertarianism. Many on the left also alleged that civil guards were often the most flagrant killers, as they sought to protect themselves from suspicions of sympathizing with the right.
¹³