The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (19 page)

The worst of the violence occurred in the first few days throughout the republican zone of Spain, though it varied greatly from region to region. On the whole the depressed areas saw more ferocity, especially in New Castile, where over 2,000 people were killed by the left during the course of the war. In Toledo 400 were killed between 20 and 31 July, in Ciudad Real some 600 were killed in August and September. There was great savagery also in parts of Andalucia, such as Ronda where the victims were thrown over the cliffs. (Hemingway used this incident in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
.) But in Ronda, as in many towns and villages, the executions were carried out by groups from other parts. It was a phenomenon which bore a remarkable resemblance to the way in which peasants during the nineteenth century had burned the church of a neighbouring village, but not their own.

There was relatively little violence in Málaga before 27 July, but on that day nationalist aircraft bombed the market, killing women and children. Coming just after Queipo de Llano’s boasts over Seville Radio that he knew from spies everything that happened in the town, the air raid had a traumatic effect. Suspects were hauled out of prison and shot against the nearest wall and there was a further round-up in the wealthy areas of the town. Altogether some 1,100 people, including General Paxtot, were killed in Málaga between late July and the end of September. During the same period Valencia and Alicante also experienced terrible violence, which killed 4,715 people throughout the region.

The main characteristics of the situation in the republican zone were the almost total lack of control in the first days of the rising, the intensity and rapidity of the killings, and the attempts by left-wing and republican leaders to stop the violence. There would be one or two renewed outbreaks later in Madrid. At the end of October, 31 prisoners, including Ramiro de Maeztu, the author of
Defensa de la Hispanidad
, and Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, founder of the JONS, were taken out of the Prison de las Ventas and shot. There was an even more infamous event in November, when Franco’s forces were at the gates of Madrid and 2,000 prisoners were shot when evacuating them to the rear to prevent them being liberated by the nationalists.

In September Largo Caballero’s ‘government of unity’, made up of socialists, republicans and communists, took firm steps to re-establish law and order. They set up popular tribunals which, although far from perfect, were an improvement, and created municipal councils to replace the patrols whose members were ordered to the front. The cases of looting and murder rapidly diminished.

Even during the worst of the violence, leaders from all organizations and parties did what they could to save people. In Madrid, President Azaña managed to rescue the monks from his old college at the Escorial. Galarza, the minister of the interior, saved Joaquín Ruiz Jiménez. La Pasionaria intervened on behalf of many victims, including nuns. So did Juan Negrín and many others. In Catalonia Companys, Ventura Gassol, Frederic Escofet and other leading members of the Generalitat, the rector of the University Pere Bosch Gimpera, and the anarcho-syndicalist leader Joan Peiró, among others, spoke out strongly against the crimes and helped hundreds of those at risk to escape or to leave the country. And this did not happen only in the big cities. In many towns and villages civil governors, teachers, mayors and others did what they could to protect prisoners from being lynched, even when nationalist forces were close.
¹⁴

In all, the victims of the red terror in the Republican zone during the civil war rose to some 38,000 people, of whom almost half were killed in Madrid (8,815) and in Catalonia (8,352) during the summer and autumn of 1936.
¹⁵
On the republican side there was a strong mixture of feelings when the worst of the rearguard slaughter was over. The majority of republicans were sickened by what had happened. The anarchist intellectual Federica Montseny referred to ‘a lust for blood inconceivable in honest men before’. Although La Pasionaria intervened on several occasions to save people, other communists took a fatalistic attitude to the violence. Stalin’s ambassador is said to have commented, with a shrug, that the scum was bound to come to the top at such a time. The dubious rationale that the atrocities had been far worse on the other side was not used until the Republic’s propaganda campaign became effective in 1937. And yet the different patterns of violence were probably even more significant than the exact number of victims.

The White Terror

T
he pattern of killing in ‘white’ Spain was indeed different. The notion of a ‘
limpieza
’, or ‘cleansing’, had formed an essential part of the rebel strategy and the process began as soon as an area had been secured. General Mola, in his instructions of 30 June for the Moroccan zone, ordered the troops ‘to eliminate left-wing elements, communists, anarchists, union members, Freemasons etc.’
¹
General Queipo de Llano, who described their movement as ‘the purging of the Spanish people’, did not specify political movements. He simply defined their enemies as anybody who sympathized ‘with advanced social currents or simple movements of democratic and liberal opinion’.
²

The nationalists in fact felt compelled to carry out a harsh and intense repression, partly to destroy the democratic aspirations encouraged under the Republic and partly because they had to crush a hostile majority in many areas of the country. One of General Franco’s press attachés, Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera, even said to the American journalist John Whitaker that they had ‘to kill, to kill, and to kill’ all reds, ‘to exterminate a third of the masculine population and cleanse the country of the proletariat’.
³
Between July 1936 and early 1937 the nationalists allowed ‘discretionary’ killing under the flag of war, but soon the repression became planned and methodically directed, encouraged by military and civil authorities and blessed by the Catholic Church.

The repression in nationalist Spain began as soon as an area had been conquered. The first to be killed, apart from those captured in the front line who were frequently shot on the spot, were union leaders and representatives of the republican government, above all civil governors and mayors, but also other officials who had remained loyal. From the start, even republicans who were promised their lives in return for surrendering were killed. Officers who had stayed loyal to the government were also shot or imprisoned. Military custom required that loyalist or neutral regular officers be accorded court martials where possible. On the whole, waverers were imprisoned, while most of those who had continued to serve the government, including seven generals and an admiral, were shot on the grounds of ‘rebellion’. This remarkable reversal of definitions had also occurred in the navy, where nationalists described sailors who followed ministry of marine instructions as ‘mutinous’.

Once the troops had moved on, a second and more intense wave of slaughter would begin, as the Falange, or in some areas the Carlists, carried out a ruthless purge of the civilian population. Their targets included union leaders, government officials, left-of-centre politicians (40 members of the Popular Front in the Cortes were shot),
⁴
intellectuals, teachers,
⁵
doctors, even the typists working for revolutionary committees; in fact, anyone who was even suspected of having voted for the Popular Front was in danger. In Huesca 100 people accused of being Freemasons were shot when the town’s lodge did not even have a dozen members.
⁶

The nationalist counterpart to the
checas
in republican territory were the local committees, usually consisting of leading right-wingers, such as the major landowner, the local Civil Guard commander, a Falangist and quite often the priest, although some risked their lives trying to prevent massacres. All known or suspected liberals, Masons and leftists were taken before the committee. A few prisoners might try to accuse others in a panic-stricken attempt to save themselves, but otherwise they had either a dazed or a defiant manner. Their wrists were tied behind their backs with cord or wire before they were taken off for execution. In Navarre a priest gave last rites to Basque nationalists en masse in front of an open trench before the volley, but in most places the condemned were taken in batches to the cemetery wall. Those who ‘knew how to die well’ shouted ‘
Viva la República!
’ or ‘
Viva la Libertad!
’ in the same way as condemned nationalists called out ‘
Viva España!
’.

The Falange often resorted to using the local prison as a reserve of victims when their squads could not find anyone outside to execute. In Granada alone, some 2,000 people died in this way. Nobody can tell what proportion of the victims were seized at home or at work, then shot at night lined up in front of car headlights. People lying awake in bed would cross themselves instinctively on hearing shots in the distance. The corpses of these ‘clients’, as they were sometimes called, were left in the open. If they were union members they often had their membership cards pinned to their chest as proof of guilt.

In some areas, as was the case in Seville and Huelva, special lorries were used, known as ‘meat wagons’, to take the corpses to the cemetery.
⁷
At times, however, corpses were displayed as a warning, as happened to the body of the mother of the communist leader Saturnino Barnero, which was left for a number of days in the Plaza del Pumarejo in Seville. In Huelva also the body was displayed of a confectioner who had thrown an espadrille at General Sanjurjo after his failed coup in August 1932. The practice of displaying bodies continued for a long time,
⁸
until the nationalist authorities had to insist on burial for reasons of public health.

It seemed to make little difference to the Nationalists whether or not there had been open opposition to their forces. In the military centre of Burgos and the Carlist capital of Pamplona they had not been resisted, yet the purge began immediately. In Burgos, the capital of Castille, groups were taken out each night to be shot by the side of the highway. Ruiz Vilaplana, president of the College of Clerks of the Court, recounted in his memoirs that he witnessed 70 people killed in one batch.
⁹

In Pamplona on 15 August, while the procession of the Virgin del Sagrano was taking place, Falangists and
requetés
took 50 or 60 prisoners, including some priests suspected of Basque separatism. Before killing them, the
requetés
wanted to give them the opportunity of confession, but the Falangists refused. In the confusion some prisoners tried to escape but were shot down. ‘In order to sort out the situation, priests gave absolution en masse to the remainder. The executions were carried out and the trucks returned to Pamplona in time for the
requetés
to join the procession as it entered the cathedral.’
¹⁰
The Association of Families of the Murdered of Navarre have identified 2,789 people executed in the province.
¹¹

As might be expected, the repression was much more intensive and systematic in places where the UGT and the CNT had many members, especially in areas where the Popular Front had won in the elections of February. In Rioja, for example, over 60 per cent of the victims belonged to Popular Front parties. Over 2,000 people were executed and buried in mass graves outside Logroño.
¹²
There was practically no village in the Rioja which did not have inhabitants buried in the mass grave of La Barranca.
¹³
In Teruel the wells of Caudé, 84 metres deep, were used for dumping the corpses of the killed. A peasant living nearby heard and recorded in a notebook 1,005
coups de graˆce
.
¹⁴

In Seville, where Queipo de Llano’s bluff had won over the confused soldiers, the initial killing was said to be part of a military operation. But when reinforcements from the Army of Africa arrived under Major Castejón, the mopping-up was nothing more than a fearful massacre, with survivors finished off by knife or bayonet. Immediately afterwards Colonel Díaz Criado was put in charge of public order and almost all the local officials were killed. Because the prison was not large enough, the nationalists used the Jáuregui cinema as a holding centre for more than 2,000 people, also the Variedades music hall, the Falangist headquarters and even two boats anchored near the Torre del Oro. Francisca Díaz, the eighteen-year-old sister of the secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party was interrogated for a whole night. She saw many of the workers from the olive oil factory roped together. They were going to be taken out to be shot.
¹⁵
The nationalist repression in the province of Seville accounted for 8,000 lives during 1936.

Córdoba had been seized on 18 July in a few hours, with little resistance. Queipo de Llano, furious because no reprisal had been carried out, immediately sent Major Bruno Ibáñez of the Civil Guard to the city. He started with 109 people from the lists given him by landowners and clergymen. A few days later they began to shoot the prisoners out on the roads and in the olive groves. ‘The basement of Falange headquarters in which people were held was like a balloon which was blown up in the afternoon and was empty the following morning. Each day there were executions in the cemetery and along the roads leading out of the city.’
¹⁶
It is calculated that a total of 10,000 were killed in Córdoba during the war, a tenth of the population. ‘Don Bruno could have shot the whole city,’ a Falangist lawyer recounted. ‘They sent him to Córdoba with carte blanche.’
¹⁷