The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (60 page)

Once the Nationalists had taken Gijón, the process of ‘cleaning up the reds’ began in earnest throughout the region. The bullring in Gijón filled with prisoners, as did the Luarca theatre and other buildings in the city. The execution squads worked without rest.
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The northern front had ceased to exist. For Prieto, the basic cause of the defeat lay in the lack of a unified command.
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The minister of defence promoted Rojo to general and offered his resignation to Negrín who refused to accept it.

The real effects of the conquest of the north were not to become apparent until the new year, when the nationalists started to deploy the Carlist formations, the Italian corps and Aranda’s Galician troops in the southern zone. Nationalist warships in the Bay of Biscay were transferred to the Mediterranean, increasing its control of the coastline there. A new naval and air command under Admiral Francisco Moreno was set up in Palma de Mallorca.
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But for Franco, one of the most important gains lay in the coal and other mines, much of whose produce would go to paying his debt to Nazi Germany.

The considerable growth in nationalist manpower at this time was assisted by drafting more than 100,000 prisoners from the northern campaign into their infantry units as well as labour battalions. This manner of increasing their forces was not always successful, because a large proportion deserted as soon as they reached the front line. There were at least two cases of rebellion caused by left-wingers in their ranks. At Saragossa anarchists drafted into the Foreign Legion started a revolt and attempted to release their comrades from prison. And 200 sailors in El Ferrol, chiefly on the
España
, had been discovered preparing a mutiny during the previous winter. In both cases all those involved were executed.

Meanwhile in republican Spain the autumn of 1937 witnessed the continued decline of anarchist power, the isolation of the Catalan nationalists, discord in socialist ranks and the development of the secret police. Negrín’s government presided over these developments and as a result of communist power the repression of dissenters was far greater than it had been during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. The prime minister’s pretended ignorance of secret police activities was unconvincing while, as Hugh Thomas has pointed out, his attempt to restrict political activity through censorship, banning and arrests was parallel to Franco’s establishment of a state machine where ideological divergence was also contained.
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Nevertheless, most of the Republic’s supporters abroad who had defended the left-wing cause on the grounds of liberty and democracy made no protest at these developments.

The need to collaborate with the Soviet Union, together with the seriousness of the military situation, was later used by Negrín’s supporters to justify the actions of his administration. But it was Negrín who had persuaded Largo Caballero to send the gold reserves to Moscow, so he bore a major responsibility for the Republic’s subservience to Stalin in the first place. Yet during his administration the flow of Soviet military aid decreased dramatically. This was partly the result of the nationalists’ naval blockade, but it was also a consequence of Stalin’s increasing desire to extricate himself from Spain when he realized that the British and French governments were not going to challenge the Axis. And now the Soviet Union was helping China against Japanese aggression. Paradoxically, Stalin’s unease was probably increased by Negrín’s obvious hope that the Republic would be saved by a European war.

President Azaña had encouraged the prime minister’s firm rule in the early days of his administration, but his attitude was to change when he came to understand Negrín’s character better. Both men disliked Companys and Azaña supported Negrín’s plans to bring Catalonia under central government control. The president still resented Companys’s initial success in increasing the Generalitat’s independence during the turmoil of the rising. The reduction of Catalonia’s identity was both symbolized and effected by moving the Republic’s government from Valencia to Barcelona, and Negrín took every opportunity to emphasize the Generalitat’s reduced status.
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‘Negrín avoided almost any direct contact with Companys,’ wrote the communist Antonio Cordón, then under-secretary for the army. ‘I don’t remember any event or ceremony in which they took part together.’
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Largo Caballero realized after his fall from power that the Socialist Party and the UGT were in an even worse state than he imagined. He still had his loyal supporters, especially the inner circle of Luis Araquistáin, Carlos de Baráibar and Wenceslao Carrillo (the father of Santiago Carrillo). But many right socialists, a powerful faction within the UGT, and the majority of the Joint Socialist Youth were collaborating closely with the communists.
¹⁰
Some groups responded to their call for unification. A joint newspaper,
Verdad
(meaning ‘truth’ and intended as a Spanish
Pravda
), had been founded in Valencia. It was the first to praise the socialists in Jaén, who had established their own party of socialist-communist unification called the PSU (United Socialist Party).

The PSOE newspaper,
El Socialista
, and even Largo Caballero’s
Claridad
, had already been taken over by the pro-communist wing of the party. But the most disturbing event for Largo Caballero came at the end of September, when his supporters were disqualified from voting at the national plenum of the UGT. Nevertheless, many pro-communist socialists, including even Negrín, still held back from the fateful step of outright union with the PCE. Largo Caballero’s speech on 17 October (the first he had been allowed to make since May) explained the fall of his government and gave strong warnings of the dangers the party faced. Largo Caballero did not, however, recover any power, for he was kept off the executive committee, and his supporters on it remained in a minority. At the end of October he moved to Barcelona where, in a form of internal exile, he busied himself in minor affairs.
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Probably the most ominous of all the developments in republican territory at this time was the rationalization of the security services, on 9 August 1937, into the SIM, Servicio de Investigación Militar.
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Prieto had been the architect of this restructuring to increase central control. He believed that the fragmented growth of counter-espionage organizations was uncontrolled and inefficient. One intelligence chief complained that ‘everyone in our rearguard carried on counter-espionage’. Independent services with their own networks of agents were run by the army, the Directorate-General of Security, the
carabineros
, the foreign ministry, the Generalitat and the Basque government in exile (now based in Barcelona). Even the International Brigades had their own NKVD-run branch of heretic hunters based at Albacete. Its chief, ‘Moreno’, was a Yugoslav from the Soviet Union who was shot on his return.
¹³

The new department was out of its creator’s control as soon as it was constituted in August, since the communists had started to infiltrate and control the police and security services in the autumn of 1936. The first directors, the socialists Ángel Díaz Baza and Prudencio Sayagüés, were not up to the work, while others such as Gustavo Durán, whom Prieto named chief of the SIM for the Army of the Centre, had to be removed because he recruited only communists. The next director was Colonel Manuel Uribarri, who reported solely to Soviet agents and managed to flee to France with a booty of 100,000 francs.
¹⁴
Only the following year was communist control reduced. The organization did indeed manage to destroy a number of nationalist networks–‘Concepción’, ‘Círculo Azul’, ‘Capitán Mora’, ‘Cruces de fuego’ and others–but there can be no doubt that during its first eight months of existence the SIM, later described as ‘the Russian syphilis’ by the German writer Gustav Regler, was a sinister tool in the hands of Orlov and his NKVD men.

SIM officers included both unquestioningly loyal Party members and the ambitious. Its unchallenged power attracted opportunists of every sort to its ranks. The core of executive officers then created a network of agents through bribery and blackmail. They even managed to plant their organization in resolutely anti-communist formations as a result of their control of transfer and promotion. For example, a nineteen-yearold rifleman in the 119th Brigade was suborned and then promoted overnight to become the SIM chief of the whole formation with a greater power of life and death than its commander.
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Because of the destruction of records, it is difficult to know the total number of agents employed by the SIM. There were said to have been 6,000 in Madrid alone and its official payroll was 22 million pesetas. Its six military and five civilian sections, including the ‘Z Brigade’, covered every facet of life and its agents were present in every district and command.
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The most feared section was the Special Brigade, which was responsible for interrogation. When its infamous reputation became known abroad, it simply changed its name. The government insisted that it had been disbanded, but in fact there was an increase in the number of its victims who ‘crossed over to the enemy’ (the euphemism for death under torture or secret execution). It worked with a network of ‘invisible’ agents both at the front and in the rear.
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In the central region the SIM made use of mainly secret prisons which had belonged to the DEDIDE. The first was the religious college of San Lorenzo, which held 200 suspects. The second was Work Camp No. 1 in Cuenca. Those who had the misfortune to be held there are united in their evidence: maltreatment, the use of cold and hunger to extract confessions, punishment cells called ‘the icebox’ and the ‘fridge’, in which prisoners were left naked with water up to their knees, or they were sprayed with freezing water during winter months.
¹⁸

In Barcelona the SIM had two main prisons, one in the Calle Zaragoza, the second in the Seminario Conciliar, although it also used other locations, such as the Portal de l’A

´ ngel, which held 300 people in the summer of 1937, the so-called ‘Nestlé dairy’, the Hotel Colón, one in the Calle Vallmajor and others. Interrogators worked ruthlessly to extract confessions which matched their conspiracy theories. In September 1937 the security organs in Barcelona reported that they had exposed ‘an espionage organization even larger than the one in Madrid. This organization, too, was set up by Catalonian Trotskyists. Its identifying sign was the letter TS and each one of its agents had a personal identification number. Documents that were found in the mattress of one of its members show that this gang had committed a number of sabotage acts and that it was preparing assassination attempts against some top leaders of the People’s Front and the Republican Army.’ It then went on to give a list of the republican leaders targeted for assassination, perhaps in the hope of encouraging non-communist ministers to support them.
¹⁹

Under NKVD direction, the SIM performed inhuman atrocities. The nationalists exploited and exaggerated this, creating a black legend. Yet although all documents were destroyed, there can be no doubt from oral testimony, and from the continual denunciations of Manuel de Irujo and Pere Bosch Gimpera, that the Soviets were applying their ‘scientific’ methods of interrogation. The SIM’s interrogation methods had evolved beyond beatings with rubber piping, hot and cold water treatment and mock executions which had been carried out in the early days. Cell floors were specially constructed with the sharp corners of bricks pointing upwards so that the naked prisoners were in constant pain. Strange metallic sounds, colours, lights and sloping floors were used as disorientation and sensory-deprivation techniques. If these failed, or if the interrogators were in a hurry, there was always the ‘electric chair’ and the ‘noise box’ but they risked sending prisoners mad too quickly.

There are no reliable estimates of the total number of SIM prisoners, nor of the proportions, though it seems fairly certain that there were more republicans than nationalists. It was alleged that any critics of Soviet military incompetence, such as foreign volunteer pilots, were as likely to find themselves accused of treason as a person who opposed the communists on ideological grounds. The minister of Justice, Manuel de Irujo, resigned on 10 August 1938 in protest, although he remained in government as a minister without portfolio. Many other leading republicans were appalled by such judicial practices and above all by the SIM. Negrín simply dismissed critical accounts of SIM activity as enemy propaganda. Only in 1949 did he admit that he had been wrong to the American journalist Henry Buckley.
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The communists had been remarkably successful in creating a large degree of control over the government, the bureaucracy and the machinery of public order, while retaining a token presence of only two minor ministries in the cabinet–a requirement of Soviet foreign policy. They had made themselves indispensable to the centrist politicians who had wanted to restore state power and who were now too involved in the process to protest. Nevertheless, a reaction against communist power was starting to develop, especially within the army.

In the autumn of 1937 communist propaganda was making great claims about the progress of the People’s Army. It is true that there had been improvements at unit level. But few commanders or staff officers had displayed competence or tactical sense, and the supply organization was still corrupt and inefficient. Above all, damage to morale had been increased by events behind the lines. Communist preferment and proselytizing at the front had reached such levels that former communist supporters among the regular officers were horrified. Prieto was shaken when he heard that non-communist wounded were often refused medical aid. Battalion commanders who rejected invitations to join the Party found weapon replacements, rations or even their men’s pay cut off. Those who succumbed were given priority over non-communists. They were promoted and their reputations were boosted in despatches and press accounts.