The Spanish Holocaust (44 page)

On 20 July, the principal rebel officers arrested in Barcelona had been taken by Civil Guards and CNT militants to the castle of Montjuich. Six days later they were transferred to the abandoned ocean liner
Uruguay
, a rust bucket converted into a prison ship. At first, they were treated well, allowed to sit on deck and read novels from the ship’s library. This easy treatment was curtailed because of their adolescent behaviour. They insisted on greeting passing Italian naval vessels by standing to attention and giving the fascist salute. To boats full of leftists who had come to gawp and threaten them, they responded by sticking out their tongues and other more expressive gestures. Although they were prevented from going on deck, they were allowed to receive food parcels from family and friends. On 11 August, the leaders, Generals Manuel Goded and Álvaro Fernández Burriel, were tried by court martial on board the ship. They had as defence counsel a retired officer who was also a lawyer. Both were found guilty and sentenced to death and were shot by a firing squad the next day, at Montjuich. Over the following days, other rebels were tried and executed. Nevertheless, many survived, including Goded’s son, Manuel.
¹⁵

The spontaneous decision of Durruti, Sanz and García Oliver to join in creating the Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee was accepted after some discussion by the rest of the CNT leadership. They were ill prepared, both ideologically and temperamentally, to improvise state institutions capable of simultaneously organizing both a revolution and a war. Essentially, Companys had offered them a great face-saving device. For the moment, the workers seemed to be in control. At first, the Generalitat would give legal form to the wishes of the Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee, but the lack of political expertise within the CNT saw the CCMA gradually reduced to being a sub-committee of the Generalitat and then dissolved altogether. Companys had effectively ensured the continuity of state power and, in the long term, the eventual taming of the revolution by manoeuvring the CNT into accepting responsibility without long-term institutionalized power.
¹⁶

In the short term, however, the CNT was set on clearing the ground for the building of the new world. Its mouthpiece,
Solidaridad Obrera
, justified violence against priests and capitalists. The wave of criminality that had engulfed Barcelona was acknowledged and rationalized:

there is nothing like the whiff of gunpowder to unleash all the instincts lurking inside man. At the same time, the upheaval reached a point where control was lost over those people interested only in the
satisfaction of their selfish and vengeful instincts. They and they alone are responsible this week for the things (and not as many as has been claimed) that have been perpetrated in Barcelona that the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo and, alongside it, all the organizations which have participated in the revolution, would rather had not happened. Nevertheless, we cannot join the chorus of those shedding crocodile tears who, when all is said and done, bear the responsibility, not just for the fascist uprising but also for having kept the people for years on end in a condition of permanent destitution and an even more lasting ignorance. Inevitably, the outcome could hardly have been different. What has happened to the exploiting bourgeoisie, to the obscurantist clergy and to the greedy shopkeepers is that they have had to reap the consequences of the seeds they themselves sowed.
¹⁷

Three days later, on 1 August, the national committee of the CNT issued a manifesto which declared that ‘no rifle should be silent as long as there exists a single fascist in Spain’.
¹⁸

That anarchist violence would continue uncontrolled was ensured by the fact that, under the CCMA, the Departament d’Investigació which was responsible for public order was headed by the FAI extremist Aurelio Fernández Sánchez. He secured the removal of the efficient Federico Escofet as head of security because of his determination to control the FAI. In every town and village, there was created a defence or revolutionary anti-fascist committee the bulk of which were dominated by members of the CNT or the FAI. Fernández delegated power to ‘control and security teams’, known as Patrulles de Control, of which seven hundred were created within a week. Their composition reflected the fact that most committed anarchists were repelled by the idea of acting as policemen and preferred to fight at the battle front. Thus the armed members of the patrols were made up of a mixture of extremists committed to the elimination of the old bourgeois order and some recently released common criminals. In the main, they acted arbitrarily, searching and often looting houses, arresting people denounced as right-wing and often killing them. As a result, by early August, over five hundred civilians had been murdered in Barcelona. Aurelio Fernández authorized an assault on the prison ship
Uruguay
which saw many right-wing prisoners murdered.
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Sometimes, when the defence committees of given localities wanted some criminal act carried out, they would arrange for it to be done by patrols from other towns on a reciprocal basis. A so-called ‘ghost car’
would arrive from a neighbouring town or district equipped with blacklists that can only have been provided by local elements. This accounts for the impunity with which outsiders could arrive, burn a church and arrest or kill local people. There were many motorized squads or brigades whose vehicles reflected the FAI’s penchant for luxury saloons. They were often headed by men with criminal records, usually for armed robbery, appointed by Aurelio Fernández. Among the more notorious were the one-time bank robber Joaquim Aubí, alias ‘El Gordo’, who drove the ghost car of Badalona; Josep Recasens i Oliva, alias ‘El Sec de la Matinada’, whose group operated in Tarragona; Jaume Martí Mestres from Mora la Nova, whose group was active in the villages along the banks of the River Ebre; and Francesc Freixenet i Alborquers who dominated the area around Vic in the north of the province of Barcelona. Freixenet, with his accomplices Pere Agut Borrell and Vicenç Coma Cruells, known as ‘the cripple of the road to Gurb’, ran a fleet of six ghost cars, maintained by his family’s garage and paid for by the municipality. Their main targets were members of the clergy.
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One of the most feared of such itinerant groups was led by Pascual Fresquet Llopis and operated in the so-called ‘death’s-head car’. Fresquet was twenty-nine years old and known for his violent temper. He had been imprisoned in the early 1930s for armed robbery and intimidated or murdered recalcitrant industrialists on the instructions of the FAI.
²¹
At the beginning of the war, he joined the anarchist column from Barcelona led by the charismatic ex-carpenter Antonio Ortiz of the FAI. Ortiz’s base was Caspe in the south of Zaragoza, a small town which had initially been taken for the rebels by Captain José Negrete at the head of forty Civil Guards. The fact that Negrete had used Republican women and children as human shields ensured that, after the town was occupied on 25 July by Ortiz’s column, the reprisals would be ferocious with fifty-five local rightists executed before the month was out. The prominent part played by Fresquet’s group led Ortiz to give them the title of ‘brigada de investigación’ with carte blanche to hunt down fascists. Their death’s-head car was actually a black, thirty-five-seat charabanc decorated with skulls. The brigade had a skull embroidered on their caps and a metal skull-badge pinned to their chests.
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In early August, Fresquet flushed out some of the remaining right-wingers of Caspe. Before dawn, his men ran into the streets firing shots and shouting rebel slogans. Optimistic that the town was being taken by rebel forces from Zaragoza, four or five rightists came out of hiding, brandishing weapons. They were immediately detained and shot.
Thereafter, Fresquet’s group, known as the ‘Death Brigade’, spread terror through the area of Lower Aragon, Teruel and Tarragona. They moved eastwards, first to Fabara where they killed fifteen right-wingers, and then north to Riba-roja d’Ebre where they killed eight people on 5 September and another eight at Flix in Tarragona the following day. They then headed south to Mora d’Ebre where the local committee prevented them killing anyone.
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From Mora d’Ebre, they moved west to Gandesa where, on the night of 12 and the morning of 13 September, they executed twenty-nine rightists. Fresquet had the red and black flag of the FAI flown over the town hall and then harangued the town’s inhabitants as he declared libertarian communism. In the afternoon of 13 September, they went east to Falset, at the base of the steep wine-growing Priorat area in Tarragona, where an identical sequence of events was seen. Arriving in the bus and two large black cars, Fresquet and about forty-five of his men immediately detained the local ERC–UGT anti-fascist committee and sealed off roads into the town. Between nightfall and the following morning, on the basis of lists prepared by local members of the FAI, they arrested and executed twenty-seven right-wingers in the cemetery. Fresquet then assembled the entire population of the village and, under the black and red flag of the FAI, made a speech from the balcony of the town hall. He justified the killings by saying that his squad had been asked to come and ‘impose justice’. The local FAI had indeed called him in to accelerate the imposition of libertarian communism and immediately there began massive confiscations of land.
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The next stop of the Death Brigade was Reus. However, the local anti-fascist committee had been warned of their arrival. Led by Josep Banqué i Martí of the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC, the Catalan Communist Party), Communists, Socialists and even anarchists agreed to act in concert. On arrival, Fresquet himself went first to the headquarters of the committee and told Banqué that his column had come to carry out a purge of fascists. As Banqué was telling him that his services were not required, Fresquet was informed by one of his lieutenants that their convoy had been surrounded by local militiamen in the main square, La Plaça de Prim. The Death Brigade was forced to leave and a bloodbath like those at Gandesa and Falset prevented. Eventually, in late October 1936, the CNT would clamp down on the activities of Fresquet because they were bringing the organization into disrepute. By that time, Fresquet’s busload of killers had executed around three hundred people.
²⁵
As Josep Maria Planes had pointed out in the articles for which
he was murdered, it was difficult to distinguish between idealistic revolutionary fervour and plain criminality. The Patrulles de Control all over Catalonia were also giving the CNT a bad name but little was done precisely because they were being administered by Aurelio Fernández, an extremely senior figure in the movement.

Under his overall control, the Central Patrol Committee was run by its secretary general, another FAI member, Josep Asens Giol. Asens, aided by Dionís Eroles i Batlle, would issue orders for investigation and detention. Until they were dissolved after the events of May 1937, the patrols took exclusive responsibility for rooting out pro-rebel elements in the rearguard. Behind this function, crimes were committed for personal gain, revenge or class hatred by the notorious group known as ‘Eroles’s Boys’. There were a few of the patrols controlled by other parties such as those run out of the Hotel Colón by the PSUC. There were also numerous completely separate autonomous groups with their own private prisons or
checas
. Fernández, Asens and Eroles had no qualms about using criminal elements, believing them to be victims of bourgeois society. Together, they presided over a network of terror throughout Catalonia. It has been alleged that Aurelio Fernández and one of his closest collaborators, Vicente Gil ‘Portela’, were guilty of sexual crimes. Another sinister FAI figure was Manuel Escorza del Val, head of the CNT–FAI counter-espionage service who used his units to eliminate any perceived enemies of the movement.
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Escorza’s Investigation Committee, as it was called, was set up in August. The portrayal of revolutionary terrorism in the right-wing press throughout Europe, together with diplomatic protests, brought pressure from the Madrid government, from the Generalitat and from the Comité Central de Milicias Antifascistas for an end to the ‘disorder’. The CNT leadership was fearful that complaints about disorder could be a device to generate a desire for a return to the old state structures and initially set up Escorza’s committee to investigate the excesses. Operating from the wheelchair to which he was confined by paralysis, Escorza was described by García Oliver as ‘that lamentable cripple, of mind as well as of body’. The secretary of the CCMA and later Generalitat press chief, Jaume Miravitlles, remembered him as ‘the implacable and incorruptible Robespierre of the FAI’. In contrast, Miravitlles’s colleague, Joan Pons Garlandí, regarded Escorza as ‘head of the uncontrolled elements of the FAI’. The anarchist Federica Montseny, later to be Spain’s first ever female minister, described Escorza as the Felix Dzerzhinsky of the Spanish revolution. The brutality of his methods provoked in her ‘considerable
anxiety not to say anguish’. From his office on the top floor of CNT headquarters in the Via Laetana, he used his huge file-card index to pursue rightists and criminals from within the ranks of anarchism.
²⁷

An early example of Escorza’s work was the case of Josep Gardenyes Sabaté, a notoriously violent and uncontrollable thug. He had not been amnestied when the Popular Front came to power but, on 19 July, had been released along with other common criminals. With a group of comrades, he became an FAI ‘expropriator’ guilty of murder and looting. As early as 30 July, the CNT–FAI issued a statement that anyone undertaking unauthorized house searches and acts that compromised the new revolutionary order would be shot. Some days afterwards, on 3 August, Gardenyes and some members of his gang were detained and executed without trial. This caused outrage within certain sectors of the anarcho-syndicalist movement.
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