The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (20 page)

In Huelva, a town which the nationalists did not fully take until the middle of September, more than 2,000 people were killed, including the civil governor, Diego Jiménez Castellano, and the commanders of the Civil Guard and the
carabineros
who had stayed loyal to the Republic. It is calculated that another 2,500 inhabitants disappeared, but many of them may have escaped across the border to Portugal.
¹⁸

When Major Castejón’s ‘Column of Death’ reached Zafra on the road to Badajoz, he ordered the local authorities to provide him with a list of 60 people to be shot. ‘Little by little, those on the list were locked up in a room of the town hall. Some inhabitants who came into the mayor’s office were shown the growing list. They were allowed to remove three names providing they wrote down three others.’ In the end, 48 of the names were substitutes.
¹⁹

One of the great
lieux de mémoire
of the Spanish Civil War was Badajoz itself.
²⁰
The massacre perpetrated there by the troops of Lieutenant Colonel Yagüe during its capture and the following repression turned into the first propaganda battle of the war. The nationalists exaggerated their losses in the battle and also the numbers of right wingers killed by the left beforehand. In fact, Yagüe lost no more than 44 killed and 141 wounded. But even after the war, the nationalists could not ascribe more than 243 killings to the left, while estimates on nationalist killings in the province range from over 6,000 to 12,000.
²¹

On the road to Madrid the nationalist columns followed the same pattern. They subdued villages along the way, laying waste and daubing on the whitewashed walls graffiti such as ‘your women will give birth to fascists’. Meanwhile, General Queipo de Llano menaced republicans who listened to Radio Sevilla with stories about the sexual powers of the African troops, to whom he promised the women of Madrid as an inducement. War correspondents were held back from Toledo so that they should not witness the events which followed the relief of the Alcázar. There 200 wounded militiamen in hospital were finished off with grenades and bayonets. The conduct of the campaign was compared to the
furia española
of Philip II’s infantry in the sixteenth century, which terrorized Protestant Holland in its all-destructive advance.

Near Gibraltar a Falangist reported that the wife of a left-winger was raped by a whole firing squad of Moors before being shot. An American journalist, John Whitaker, was present when two young girls were handed over to Moroccan troops near Navalcarnero by their commanding officer, Major Mohamed Ben Mizzian, who told him calmly that they would not survive more than four hours.
²²
The Major subsequently reached the rank of lieutenant-general in Franco’s army and
regulares
were later made ‘honorary Christians’ by the nationalists. The horror they inspired in republican territory led to two of them being torn to pieces by a crowd when the truck in which they were being sent back as prisoners stopped to fill up with petrol.

Another of the great places of suffering was Granada, known above all for the murder of the poet Federico García Lorca, the most celebrated victim of the civil war. The fascist and military attitude to intellectuals showed itself to be one of deep distrust at the least, and usually consisted of an inarticulate reaction mixing hate, fear and contempt. This was shown in Granada where five university professors were murdered. García Lorca had returned to his house outside the city in the Huerta de San Vicente just before the rising. (With the start of the summer holidays many on both sides were saved or killed simply by their travel plans.) He was in danger because of his liberal sympathies although he belonged to no party. Even the refuge given him by the Falangist poet Luis Rosales and his family could not save him.

On Sunday, 16 August, a few hours after the murder of his brother-in-law, Manuel Fernández Montesinos, the mayor of Granada, he was seized by a former deputy of the CEDA, Ramón Ruiz Alonso, who later asserted that Lorca ‘did more damage with his pen than others with their guns’. He was accompanied by Luis García Alix, secretary of Acción Popular, and the Falangist landowner Juan Luis Trescastro, the perpetrator of the crime, who would say later: ‘We killed Federico García Lorca. I gave him two shots in the arse as a homosexual.’
²³
H. G. Wells, the president of PEN, demanded details on the fate of Lorca as soon as the news reached the outside world, but the nationalist authorities denied any knowledge of his fate. Lorca’s death remained a forbidden subject in Spain until the death of Franco in 1975.

The nationalists justified the brutality of their repression as reprisals for the red terror, but as had been the case in Seville, Córdoba and in Badajoz, and as would be the case in Málaga six months later, the subsequent nationalist killings exceeded those of the left several, if not many, times over. In Málaga the nationalist executions took place after the militia, and undoubtedly almost all those responsible for killing right wingers, had escaped up the coast. This shows that there was little attempt to identify the guilty. But above all, the contrast in the numbers killed by each side could not be starker.

In August 1944 the British consul in Málaga obtained the nationalists’ own figures and forwarded them to the ambassador in Madrid, who passed them on to London. He reported that while ‘the “reds” were in control of Málaga from 18 July 1936 until February 7th 1937…they executed or murdered 1,005 persons’. But that ‘during the first week of Liberation, that is from February 8th to 14th…3,500 persons were executed by the Nationalists’. And ‘from February 15th 1937 to August 25th 1944, a further 16,952 persons have been “legally” sentenced to death and shot in Málaga’.
²⁴
According to other sources, more than 700 people were shot against the walls of the San Rafael cemetery just between 1 and 23 March 1937,
²⁵
but one local historian put the total figure for Málaga at 7,000 executions,
²⁶
roughly a third of the number given to the British consul. Whatever the exact figure, the nationalist ‘reprisals’ were clearly not just a question of revenge, they were also motivated by the idea of establishing a reign of terror especially in areas where the right had been numerically weaker.

Even in areas where they were strong, however, the ‘killing machine’ was also used as a conspicuous message. In Valladolid the Falangist ‘dawn patrols’ shot 914 people, but the main reservoir of victims was once again the mass of prisoners seized just after the rising. They were locked into tram coaches and most days the Falangists would take out a dozen to execute them in public.
²⁷
‘It wasn’t just a crowd of illiterates who came to watch the spectacle,’ recounted Jesús Álvarez, a chemist in the town. ‘They were people of standing, sons of distinguished families, educated people, people who called themselves religious…they went so regularly to see the executions that stalls selling coffee and churros were set up so that they could eat and drink while they watched.’
²⁸
On 24 September the office of the civil governor of Valladolid published a statement that it had been noticed recently that although ‘military justice’ satisfied the need for punishment, large crowds were gathering at the place of execution. The civil governor appealed to pious people that they ‘should not come to watch such things, and even less bring their wives and children’.
²⁹

In the rear areas the Falange had rapidly developed into the nationalists’ paramilitary force, assuming the task of ‘cleaning up’. The young
señoritos
, often aided by their sisters and girlfriends, organized themselves into mobile squads, using their parents’ touring cars. Their leader, José Antonio, had declaimed that ‘the Spanish Falange, aflame with love, secure in its faith, will conquer Spain for Spain to the sound of military music’. The real militants were obsessed with their task of cutting out ‘the gangrenous parts of the nation’ and destroying the foreign, ‘red’ contagion. The rest simply seemed to find sanctified gangsterism appealing. The Carlists, on the other hand, were fired by religious fanaticism to avenge the Church by wiping out such modern evils as Freemasonry, atheism and socialism. They also had a far higher proportion of their able-bodied men at the front than the Falange and, despite their violent excesses on many occasions, were reputed to have treated their prisoners of war the most correctly.

Nationalist killings reached their peak in September and continued for a long time after the war was over. Not surprisingly, people wondered if Franco wanted to repeat the deathbed answer of the nineteenth-century General Narváez when asked if he forgave his enemies: ‘I have none. I have had them all shot.’

In the course of the last ten years, detailed work has been carried out region by region in Spain to establish the number, the identity and the fate of the victims. Accurate statistics have now been compiled on 25 provinces and provisional figures on another four. For just over half of Spain, this comes to a total of over 80,000 victims of the nationalists.
³⁰
If one takes into account the deaths which were never registered and allows for the provinces not yet studied, we are probably faced with a total figure for killings and executions by the nationalists during the war and afterwards of around 200,000 people. This figure is not so very far from the threat made by General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano to republicans when he promised ‘on my word of honour as a gentleman that for every person that you kill, we will kill at least ten’.
³¹

The Nationalist Zone

A
coup d’état
does not need a positive creed, just an enemy. A civil war, on the other hand, demands a cause, a banner and some form of manifesto. During the preparation for the coup, the military plotters had not concerned themselves greatly over the exact form of government which their
pronunciamiento
would herald. The urgency of the conspiracy did not allow them to waste time discussing hypothetical constitutions. They would discuss the finer points and formulate a detailed justification for their actions after the country was secured. The substance was clear to all: centralized authoritarian rule. The form, however, was not clear, although the possibilities included Falangism, Carlism, a restoration of the Alfonsine monarchy and a republican dictatorship.
¹

Until this problem could be resolved the nominal direction of nationalist Spain was constituted in Burgos on 24 July in the Junta de Defensa Nacional. General Cabanellas, the divisional commander at Saragossa, assumed the presidency supported by nine generals and two colonels. This figurehead establishment was organized by Mola, who commanded the Army of the North. It appears to have been an attempt to reduce the power of Franco, who commanded the most important military formation. Before the rising, General Hidalgo de Cisneros, the loyal commander of the republican air force, had said that ‘General Goded was more intelligent. General Mola a better soldier; but Franco was the most ambitious.’
²
(His verdict on Mola was to prove highly inaccurate.)

Mola had talked of a republican dictatorship which would maintain the separation of Church and state. He had even ordered that the monarchist flag be taken down in Pamplona. The Carlists were so horrified by his attitude that, in the last few days before the rising there had even been doubts whether they would commit their
requetés
, who were needed to assure the obedience of the regular troops to the nationalist cause. Queipo de Llano’s sudden rise to prominence in the rebellion with his seizure of Seville must have worried them almost as much. He not only finished his radio broadcasts with ‘
Viva la República!
’ and the liberal anthem, the ‘Himno de Riego’, but, worst of all, he was a Freemason. The idea of fighting under the republican tricolour was anathema to all traditionalists. Only the military plotters had sworn loyalty to it.

The Carlists’ main hope for safeguarding their interests was destroyed on 20 July with General Sanjurjo’s death. Major Ansaldo, the monarchist airman, had arrived in Portugal to fly him to Burgos with the announcement that he was now ‘at the orders of the head of the Spanish state’, which caused very emotional scenes among the general’s entourage. Their light aircraft crashed on take-off and Sanjurjo died in the flames. This accident has been attributed either to sabotage by a Franco supporter or to Sanjurjo’s vanity in taking so many cases of uniforms. The latter explanation seems the more probable, although Ansaldo claims it was sabotage.

During this time of uncertainty over the form of the new state, the Catholic Church provided the nationalist alliance with both a common symbol of tradition and a cause to transcend ideological confusion within their ranks. Its authoritarian, centralist nature and its attitude to property were acceptable to all factions, except the left wing of the Falange. Its hierarchy rallied to the cause of the right and prominent churchmen were seen giving the fascist salute. Cardinal Gomá stated that ‘Jews and Masons poisoned the national soul with absurd doctrines’.
³
The most striking piece of ecclesiastical support for the nationalist rising came in the pastoral letter ‘The Two Cities’ published by the Bishop of Salamanca, Pla y Daniel, on 30 September. It denounced the left-wing attacks on the Catholic Church and praised the nationalist movement as ‘the celestial city of the children of God’.
⁴
Pla y Daniel also demanded the reversal of all anti-clerical restrictions and reforms implemented under the Republic. He was not to be disappointed.