The Spanish Holocaust (60 page)

Before the arrival of Yagüe’s forces, there was little violence against rightists in Badajoz. This was largely thanks to the efforts of both the Mayor, Sinforiano Madroñero, and the head of the police, Eduardo Fernández Arlazón. Although later condemned to death by the Francoists, Fernández Arlazón’s sentence was commuted to thirty years’ imprisonment in recognition of numerous testimonies from grateful rightists. Prior to a failed uprising by the local Civil Guard garrison on 6 August, the only fatal incident in the town took place on 22 July when
militiamen killed Feliciano Sánchez Barriga, an extreme rightist landowner who had been the liaison between the military conspirators and the local Falange. The Bishop of Badajoz, José María Alcaraz Alenda, was evicted peacefully from his palace, permitted to take the Holy Sacrament from the tabernacle and also provided with a bodyguard. When casualties started to mount after daily rebel bombing raids began on 7 August, and in the wake of the Civil Guard uprising on the previous day, there were reprisals. Ten men were killed in total, the victims being two army officers, two retired Civil Guards, two religious and four prominent rightists. In one case, the victim was a man who had been on a rooftop signalling to the attacking aircraft. The gang responsible for these murders was in no way connected with the Defence Committee and most of its members were either killed in Yagüe’s attack or else escaped. Most right-wing prisoners arrested by the Committee were unharmed. That, however, did not prevent the massacre carried out in reprisal for the ‘red terror’.
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When Yagüe’s forces encircled the walled city, their reputation had preceded them. Badajoz had been flooded with refugees and, since the daily bombings had begun, the atmosphere in the city was of doom-laden anticipation. On 13 August, a rebel aircraft flew over the city and dropped thousands of leaflets carrying a dire warning signed by Franco. It read ‘Your resistance will be pointless and the punishment that you will receive will be proportionate. If you want to avoid useless bloodshed, capture the ringleaders and hand them over to our forces … Our triumph is guaranteed and, to save Spain, we will destroy any obstacles in our way. It is still time for you to mend your ways: tomorrow it will be too late.’ The leaflet clearly signalled the massacre to come.
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The defenders commanded by Puigdengolas numbered approximately 1,700, of whom about one-third were soldiers and the remainder poorly armed militiamen, some from the town itself and others who had fled there from the advancing columns. Recruitment of volunteers for the defence of the city had begun only on 4 August after the fall of Llerena. A few were armed with rifles, but ammunition was scarce. Many had only scythes and hunting shotguns. Most of the regular troops garrisoned there had been called away to reinforce the Madrid front. As the air and artillery bombardments took their toll, there had been a constant trickle of desertions. Certainly the real numbers of defenders were a fraction of those implied in rebel sources. Yagüe’s forces were altogether more numerous than the handful of heroes lauded in the same literature. The united columns of Castejón and Asensio had 2,500 soldiers, as well
as many Requetés and Falangists who had joined them on their passage from Seville. Moreover, several of Colonel Puigdengolas’s officers were of dubious loyalty and did what they could to obstruct defensive preparations, hiding weapons and misdirecting guns.
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In the early hours of 14 August, bombing attacks were mounted and the city was heavily pounded by Alarcón de la Lastra’s artillery. At about 9.00 a.m., Puigdengolas, Nicolás de Pablo, the Mayor, and other members of the Defence Committee fled to Portugal. In the course of the morning, after their flight, numerous officers went over to the attackers. By midday, despite the desperate courage of the civilian militia, the walls of Badajoz were breached by ferocious attacks from Castejón’s troops. Their task was facilitated by the small fifth column of regular officers among the defenders. Several of these abandoned their defensive positions and gathered by the town prison in order to join the right-wing detainees there in greeting their ‘liberators’. One of those released was Regino Valencia, the friend of Salazar Alonso and murderer of the PSOE deputy, Pedro Rubio Heredia. As the Legionarios and Regulares advanced into the centre, they killed anyone in their path, including those who had thrown down their weapons and had their hands up.
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Many militiamen fled into the Cathedral, where some were bayoneted in the aisles and others on the steps of the high altar. One man who hid in a confessional box was shot dead where he knelt by Father Juan Galán Bermejo, the priest from Zafra who had become a chaplain with the Legion. With his heavily brillantined hair, his swagger stick and pistol, Father Galán was carefully building a reputation for cruelty.
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The Legionarios and Regulares, and the Falangists who had accompanied them, unleashed an orgy of looting in shops and houses, most of which belonged to the very rightists who were being ‘liberated’. ‘It is the war tax they pay for salvation,’ a rebel officer told the American journalist Jay Allen. Anything portable – jewellery and watches, radios and typewriters, clothing and bales of cloth – was carried off through streets strewn with corpses and running with blood. Hundreds of prisoners were rounded up and herded to the bullring. As night fell, drunken Moors and Falangists were still entering houses in the working-class districts, looting, raping women, dragging men out either to shoot them on the spot or to take them to the bullring. Many corpses were sexually mutilated. At the bullring, machine-guns were set up on the barriers around the ring and an indiscriminate slaughter began. On the first afternoon and evening, eight hundred were shot in batches of twenty. In the course of the night, another 1,200 were brought in. There were many
innocent non-political civilians, men and women, Socialists, anarchists, Communists, middle-class Republicans, simple labourers and anyone with the bruise of a rifle recoil on their shoulders. No names were taken, no details checked. At 7.30 in the morning, the shootings began again. The screams of the dying could be heard many streets away. Accounts by survivors indicate that soon the firing squads were manned by Civil Guards.
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Over the next three days, as Yagüe’s columns prepared to move northwards, the Moors set up stalls to sell the watches, jewellery and furniture that they had looted. Yagüe himself stole a limousine belonging to the moderate Republican Luis Plá Alvarez. Together with his brother, Plá owned a thriving transport and automobile sales business. The two men had used their influence to save the lives of numerous right-wingers and had sheltered several religious in their homes, many of whom wrote appeals in their favour. They were taken out into the countryside by Civil Guards on 19 August, told that they were free to go and shot ‘while trying to escape’. Their businesses and goods were seized.
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Bishop Alcaraz Alenda had interceded on their behalf, but Yagüe told his messenger: ‘Tell the Bishop that they have already been shot this morning along with others so that the Bishop may live.’
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By the second day, cheering right-wing spectators were permitted to watch and to insult the prisoners. Even if there was not, as was later alleged in the Republican press, a simulacrum of a bullfight, men were certainly treated as if they were animals. With their amused officers looking on, Moorish troops and Falangists goaded the prisoners with bayonets. Franco’s General Staff and the Portuguese border police were working in close collaboration. Accordingly, hundreds of refugees attempting to flee into Portugal were turned back.
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The scenes in the bullring were witnessed by Portuguese landowners invited as a reward for handing over fleeing leftists.
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Although there had been few killings of rightists in Badajoz, the intense rhythm of killings was maintained for months. After the departure of Yagüe, the repression was supervised by the new Military Governor, Colonel Eduardo Cañizares, and Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Pereita Vela, sent from Seville by Queipo de Llano on 18 August as commander of the Civil Guard and Delegate for Public Order. It has been suggested that Pereita was responsible for a further 2,580 deaths before he was replaced on 11 November 1936. His successor, Manuel Gómez Cantos, reported that Pereita had accumulated a fortune on the basis of property, including land and cattle, confiscated from his victims. Egged on by a Falangist landowner from Olivenza, Pereita began to order arrests on the
basis of the most frivolous or malicious denunciations, or the slightest hint of leftist or liberal leanings. Those arrested were usually shot, without any investigation. The Falange, swollen with the young scions of the landowning class, eagerly joined in the carnage. Prisoners were brought in from other parts of Extremadura, as the local right seized the opportunity to put an end for ever to the threat of agrarian reform. Young women who had served in the houses of the wealthy as maids and seamstresses were sexually abused as punishment for having attempted to form a union in the spring of 1936. Female members of other trades suffered equally.
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On Tuesday 18 August, four hundred men, women and children were taken by cavalry escorts from Caia in Portugal to Badajoz. Nearly three hundred of them were executed. Expeditions of Falangists were given free rein to enter Portugal in search of Spanish refugees. Jay Allen described the scene in Elvas:

This very day (August 23) a car flying the red and yellow banner of the Rebels arrived here. In it were three Phalanxists (Fascists). They were accompanied by a Portuguese lieutenant. They tore through the narrow streets to the hospital where Senor Granado [sic], Republican Civil Governor of Badajoz, was lying. The Fascists ran up the stairs, strode down a corridor with guns drawn, and into the governor’s room. The governor was out of his mind with the horror of the thing. The director of the hospital, Dr. Pabgeno, threw himself over his helpless patient and howled for help. So he saved a life.
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Among the many liberals, leftists, Freemasons and others brought back to be shot were the Mayor, Sinforiano Madroñero, and two Socialist deputies, Nicolás de Pablo and Anselmo Trejo. Dragged through the streets, their clothes ripped, their flesh bruised, they were executed as the culmination of an elaborate ceremony on 30 August, after a procession with a band and a field Mass. Colonel Cañizares informed Antonio Bahamonde, Queipo de Llano’s head of press and propaganda, that the later executions were accompanied by a military band playing the royal anthem and the Falangist hymn. Many spectators came from nearby Portugal and applauded frenetically as the executed fell. Nevertheless, many ordinary Portuguese families took in refugees from Badajoz and Huelva and several Portuguese army officers saved Spanish lives.
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In mid-October, 1,435 refugees were sent to Republican Spain in a boat from Lisbon to Tarragona.
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The historian Francisco Espinosa Maestre has demonstrated that the total number of casualties suffered by Yagüe’s men in the attack on Badajoz was 185, of whom 44 were killed and 141 wounded. The disproportion with the Republican casualties could hardly have been greater.
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Estimates of those killed in the subsequent repression vary from 9,000 to ‘between two and six hundred’. Many of those executed in the days following the initial massacre were either militiamen who had come to help defend the city, refugees who had fled there or prisoners brought there from other towns. Since they were shot without trial, their bodies disposed of in common graves or else incinerated, there is no record of them. Nevertheless, an exhaustive study by Dr Espinosa Maestre has shown that the number is at least 3,800. He has demonstrated that, even limiting the comparison to the small number of the known victims whose deaths were registered, there were more executions in Badajoz between August and December 1936 than in Huelva and Seville combined, despite the fact that Huelva’s population was 12.5 per cent larger than that of Badajoz and Seville’s more than 600 per cent. Moreover, in both Seville and Huelva, it was possible to compare the names in the city registries with the names of those buried in their respective cemeteries. In both cities, in addition to those inscribed in the registry, the cemeteries have records of unnamed corpses. In the case of Huelva, there were five times as many unknown as named dead; in the case of Seville, nearly six times as many. Extrapolating from this data for Badajoz, where there are no records of the unnamed dead buried in the cemetery, Espinosa Maestre calculates that the total number of killed in the city might have been around 5.5 times the number of the named dead.
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In the intense summer heat, the piles of corpses constituted a major public health risk. They were thrown on to lorries that ran back and forth to the municipal cemetery. Since neither the local sanitation services nor private mortuaries could cope with the bodies, they were soaked in petrol, set alight and then buried in large common graves. Throughout the long hot summer, the stench of the burned corpses permeated the night. Left-wing women who were not shot or raped after the capture of the town were subjected to systematic humiliation. Their heads were shaved and they were forced to drink castor oil, on the grounds that ‘their tongues were dirty’.
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Yagüe had prevented correspondents from entering the town with the troops. However, in the early hours of the morning of 15 August, several journalists, mainly Portuguese, and two French, Marcel Dany of the
Havas Agency and Jacques Berthet of
Le Temps
of Paris, arrived from Elvas. As they drove into the town they could see a column of smoke from the cemetery and were assailed by a sickly sweet stench. They witnessed what Mário Neves of the
Diário de Lisboa
called ‘a scene of desolation and dread’. Neves managed to interview Yagüe and asked him if it were true, as he had heard, that two thousand men had already been shot in the course of the night. Yagüe replied, ‘Oh, not quite that many.’ A priest who acted as guide for Neves, Dany and Berthet took them to the cemetery to see the great piles of corpses being burned. Some were completely carbonized, but there emerged arms and legs so far untouched by the flames. Seeing the horrified looks of the journalists, the priest explained: ‘They deserved this. Moreover, it is a crucial measure of hygiene.’ It was not clear whether he referred to the killings or to the disposal of the corpses. Another Portuguese journalist, Mario Pires of the
Diário de Notícias
, was so disturbed by the executions he had witnessed that he had to be interned in a mental institution in Lisbon. Castejón told Jorge Simões of the
Diário da Manhã
that 1,500 defenders had been killed, both in the fighting and afterwards. Simões wrote that 1,300 had been shot by the Legion in the first twenty-four hours after the conquest. Two days later, Felix Correia of the
Diário de Lisboa
, the journalist closest to Queipo de Llano, wrote that 1,600 had been executed. Yagüe himself commented on 15 August, ‘After the final clean-up tomorrow, everything will be ready for a more extended operation. Now, with the Muscovites liquidated, this is a Spanish city once more.’
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