The Spanish Holocaust (65 page)

García Oliver refused to appoint Melchor Rodríguez as Director General of Prisons without first checking with the regional and national committees of the CNT, which were deeply implicated in the repression and thus highly suspicious of Melchor Rodríguez. Accordingly, García Oliver appointed two trusted CNT stalwarts who had accompanied him from Barcelona, Juan Antonio Carnero as Director General and Jaume Nebot as Inspector General of Prisons.
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Rather than to prevent atrocities, the task given by García Oliver to Nebot was to locate and destroy the criminal records of all members of the CNT or the FAI who had ever been jailed.
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Advancing through the University City and the Casa de Campo, by 6 November the rebels were only two hundred yards from the largest of the prisons, the Cárcel Modelo, in the Argüelles district. Francoist officers later claimed that advance units of Regulares organized snatch squads on that day and managed to get inside the Cárcel Modelo and rescue some prisoners. Such raids would lead to the stationing of units of the International Brigades at the prison.
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Most of the approximately two thousand army officers incarcerated there had already shown that they were ready, indeed anxious, to join the besieging forces by rejecting calls to fight for the Republic. Their resolve can only have been hardened by the successful rescue attempts. Indeed, they made no secret of their delight at the developments outside, threatened their jailers and trumpeted their intentions of joining their rebel comrades as soon as they could.
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That would have constituted a massive reinforcement for Franco’s forces.

In this context, the necessary decision for Largo Caballero’s cabinet to leave for Valencia was finally taken in the early afternoon of 6 November.
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The variations in the memoir material are such that exact timings of events on that day can be established only approximately. Not long after the fateful meeting finished, probably some time between 4.00 and 5.00 p.m., the Under-Secretary of War, General José Asensio Torrado, met Generals Sebastián Pozas, the Chief of Operations of the Army of the Centre, and José Miaja Menent, head of the 1st Military Division. After a lengthy discussion, he gave each a sealed envelope emblazoned with the words ‘Top Secret. Not to be opened until 6 a.m. tomorrow’. Given the urgency of the situation, as soon as Asensio left for Valencia,
both generals ignored the instruction and opened the envelopes. They discovered that each contained the orders meant for the other. Pozas was ordered to set up a new headquarters for the Army of the Centre at Tarancón on the road to Valencia. Miaja was placed in charge of the defence of the capital and ordered to establish a body, to be known as the Junta de Defensa, which would have full governmental powers in Madrid and its environs. Had they complied with the instruction not to open the envelopes and gone back to their respective headquarters, they would have seen their orders when they were many miles apart, with catastrophic consequences for the defence of the city. Whoever sealed the envelopes was probably a rebel sympathizer.
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The view of the cabinet and the large numbers of functionaries who fled to Valencia was that the capital was doomed and that the Junta was there merely to administer the inevitable defeat. In the event, under intolerable pressure and against all odds, it was to preside over a near miraculous victory.
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Miaja’s awesome task was to organize Madrid’s military and civil defence at the same time as providing food and shelter for its citizens and the refugees who thronged its streets. In addition, he had to deal with the violence of the
checas
and the activities of the fifth column.
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The Junta de Defensa was thus a localized mini-government. Its ‘ministers’ were known as Councillors and their deputies would be chosen from all those parties that made up the central government. However, it was to the Communists that Miaja would turn first in search of help. And they were ready and waiting.

Immediately after the cabinet meeting earlier in the afternoon, the two Communist ministers, Jesús Hernández and Vicente Uribe, reported the government’s evacuation to the top brass of the Partido Comunista de España, Pedro Checa and Antonio Mije. Checa (whose name was totally unconnected with the
checas
) was the PCE organization secretary. He and Mije were effectively leading the Party in the frequent absences of its seriously ill secretary general, José Díaz. The implications were discussed and plans made. Astonishingly, among those participating were two young leaders of the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas, Santiago Carrillo Solares and José Cazorla Maure, who were, theoretically at least, members of the Socialist Party and not of the Communist Party, for membership of which they would not formally apply until the next day. Their presence at the meeting demonstrates that they were actually already in the highest echelons of the PCE.

Late in the afternoon, Checa and Mije negotiated with Miaja the terms of the Communist participation in the Junta de Defensa. A
grateful Miaja eagerly accepted their offer that the PCE run the two ‘ministries’ or Councils (Consejerías) of War and Public Order in the Junta. He also accepted their specific nominations of Antonio Mije as War Councillor with Isidoro Diéguez Dueñas as his deputy and of Carrillo as Public Order Councillor with Cazorla as his deputy. Thus, as Carrillo recalled later, ‘on that same night of 6 November, I began to undertake my responsibilities along with Mije and others’. Mije, Carrillo and Cazorla then went to see the Prime Minister to seek a statement to explain the government’s departure to the people of Madrid. Largo Caballero denied that the government was about to leave despite the pile of suitcases outside his office. Deeply disillusioned by the lies of their broken hero, they went back to the Central Committee of the PCE.
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Several sources have confirmed that Carrillo was able to name his subordinates in the Public Order Council and assign them tasks immediately after this meeting with Miaja late on 6 November. A sub-committee, known as the Public Order Delegation, was set up under the JSU’s elegant intellectual Segundo Serrano Poncela. He was given responsibility for the work in Madrid of the Dirección General de Seguridad.
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Ramón Torrecilla Guijarro, one of the members of the Public Order Delegation, told his interrogators after he had been captured by the Francoists in 1939 that the nominations of Carrillo and of Serrano Poncela had taken effect on the night of 6 November. Torrecilla further revealed that he and the other members of the Delegation met and took decisions from the very early hours of 7 November. Another member, Arturo García de la Rosa, confirmed this in an interview with the Irish historian Ian Gibson.
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The anarchist Gregorio Gallego highlighted the Communists’ ability to hit the ground running: ‘we realized that the operation was far too well prepared and manipulated to have been improvised’.
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It had been nearly 9.00 p.m. when Miaja sat down with his aide de camp and his secretary to give some thought to the problem of how to create the Junta de Defensa. While they were still sifting the names of possible councillors, the Communist delegation had arrived and successfully pitched for the War and Public Order Councils. Because the Communists had already decided on the personnel, those two Councils were able to function immediately. Having been left to hold the city as best he could, most of the rest of Miaja’s time on the night of 6–7 November was dedicated to trying to ascertain the forces and weaponry available to him. At 7.00 in the morning of 7 November, Miaja went to the office of the Commissar General of War hoping to make contact with
other political leaders. Hitherto, there had been a daily meeting in the Ministry of War to discuss the progress of the conflict. Now, Miaja discovered that most of those he wanted to meet had fled to Valencia along with the government. Thus only gradually throughout the morning was he able to assemble the rest of the personnel of the Junta. According to various eyewitnesses, it was not until 11 a.m. that the final list was drawn up. It consisted largely of young representatives of the various parties and trade unions.
¹⁹

The first official meeting of the hastily formed Junta de Defensa was not until the late afternoon of 7 November. However, there can be no doubt that, from late the previous evening, overall operational responsibility for the prisoners lay with three men: Santiago Carrillo Solares, his deputy José Cazorla Maure and Segundo Serrano Poncela, who was effectively Director General of Security for Madrid. Key decisions about the prisoners were clearly taken in the vacuum between the departure of the government for Valencia on the evening of 6 November and the formal constitution of the Junta de Defensa twenty-four hours later. However, it is inconceivable that those decisions were taken in isolation by three inexperienced young men aged respectively twenty-one (Carrillo), thirty (Cazorla) and twenty-four (Serrano Poncela). The authorization for their operational decisions, as will be seen, had to have come from far more senior elements. Certainly, it required the go-ahead from Checa and Mije who, in turn, needed the approval of Miaja and probably of the Russian advisers. In the terror-stricken city, the aid provided by the Russians in terms of tanks, aircraft, the International Brigades and technical experience ensured that their advice would be sought and gratefully received. The implementation of the operational decisions also required, and indeed would receive, assistance from the anarchist movement.

Thus, the authorization, the organization and the implementation of what happened to the prisoners involved many people. However, Carrillo’s position as Public Order Councillor, together with his later prominence as secretary general of the Communist Party, saw him accused of sole responsibility for the deaths that followed. That is absurd, but it does not mean that he had no responsibility at all. The calibration of the degree of that responsibility must start with the question of why a twenty-one-year-old member of the Socialist Youth should have been given such a crucial and powerful position. In fact, Carrillo was not entirely who he seemed to be at the time. Late on the night of 6 November, after the meeting with Miaja, Carrillo, along with Serrano
Poncela, Cazorla and others, was formally incorporated into the Communist Party. They were not subjected to stringent membership requirements. In what was hardly a formal ceremony, they simply informed José Díaz and Pedro Checa of their wishes and were incorporated into the party on the spot.
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The brevity of the proceedings indicates that Carrillo was already an important Communist ‘submarine’ within the Socialist Party. In prison after the miners’ uprising in Asturias in October 1934, as secretary general of the Socialist Youth Movement (Federación de Juventudes Socialistas), he began to advocate its merger with the numerically smaller Communist equivalent, the Unión de Juventudes Comunistas. This was noted by Comintern agents and Carrillo was identified as a candidate for recruitment. The most senior Comintern representative in Spain, the Argentinian Vittorio Codovila, arranged for him to be invited to Moscow to discuss the potential unification of the FJS with the UJC. On being released from prison after the elections of 16 February 1936, he had immediately applied for a passport to travel to Russia. It represented a dazzling prospect for him. After a year incarcerated with Largo Caballero, Carrillo, like other prominent members of the Socialist Youth, sensed that the PSOE was yesterday’s party. The Socialist leadership of middle-aged men rarely allowed young militants near powerful positions in its sclerotic structures. Carrillo now went to Moscow as the guest of the KIM, the Communist International of Youth, on 3 March. The KIM was closely watched by the Russian intelligence service, the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). Thus it is highly likely that Carrillo, who had already been identified for grooming as a potential Comintern star, was thoroughly vetted in Moscow and would have been obliged to convince his bosses of his loyalty to the Soviet Union.

On his return to Spain, Carrillo took part in a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee on 31 March, at which he suggested that the Socialist Youth seek membership of the KIM and that the PSOE unite with the PCE and join the Comintern. Attendance at Central Committee meetings was a privilege not normally extended to outsiders.
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In his memoirs, Carrillo made the even more startling admission that by early November 1936, although still formally a member of the Socialist Party, he was attending meetings of the PCE’s Politbureau, an indication of great seniority.
²²
With the help of Codovila, in April 1936, he secured an agreement to unite the Socialist and Communist youth movements (FJS and the UJC) as the United Socialist Youth (Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas). In some areas of Spain,
although not all, unification took place immediately. In September, Carrillo would be named secretary general of the new youth movement, which was in some places a Communist organization. In general terms, the JSU constituted a massive advance of Communist influence at the expense of the Socialist Party. By this time, if Carrillo was not already a member of the PCE, he was very close to being so.

When Serrano Poncela began to run the Public Order Delegation, in the early hours of 7 November, he was able to use orders for the evacuation of prisoners left by the DGS, Manuel Muñoz, before leaving Madrid for Valencia.
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The German Felix Schlayer, a fervent supporter of the rebels, claimed that the director of the Cárcel Modelo had shown him the order for the prisoner release which was signed by Vicente Girauta Linares, overall head of the police and Muñoz’s second-in-command. Moreover, Schlayer believed that Girauta had signed the document on the spoken instruction of Muñoz. It is possible that, rather than actually signing orders, Muñoz told his deputy to draw up the necessary document. Schlayer also claimed to have been told later that Muñoz’s action was the price that he paid to Communist militiamen who were preventing him joining the rest of the government in Valencia. No proof of this has come to light.
²⁴
In any case, evacuation orders were not the equivalent of specific instructions for murder – as was shown by the safe arrival of some evacuated prisoners at their destinations.