Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  —I never believed it was possible to kill people the way they did here …

  A right-wing agricultural machinery manufacturer, Pedro QUINTANAR had welcomed the uprising, but the repression which followed it was beyond all imaginable proportions. One day he was standing outside the bishop’s palace when a friar came out.

  —The priest of the cemetery of San Rafael went over to him and I heard him say: ‘How many are there tonight?’ The friar replied, ‘Seventy-six.’ The priest, who was a very religious man, put his head to his hand and said, ‘Seventy-six! ¡Ay, por Dios! It’s atrocious.’ The other replied: ‘Seventy-six? Seven hundred it should be.’ I overheard the whole thing. It was staggering …

  *

  The connection between repression and religion (if not the church as a whole) was clearly marked in some minds from the beginning. 15 August, feast day of the Virgin, turned into a day of blood in different parts of the insurgent zone. In Seville, the bodies of the executed appeared lying beside the wall of the swimming pool that was then located where the Plaza de Cuba is today. Relatives remember turning over the bodies trying to find their kin. ‘Corpses were left in the streets to terrorize the population,’ Anita MORENO, of the communist youth women’s section, recalled.

  —They took people and shot them without even checking their identity. It happened to a man in my street; they shot him before they found out he wasn’t the man they were after. He had had no political or union activity at all …

  Her husband, secretary of the Socorro Rojo (Red Aid) organization for Andalusia, was shot. Offered freedom if he took up a rifle and joined the Falange, he refused. ‘I won’t kill anyone, they can kill me first. Look at the hatred they have for us who never hated them.’ The shock of his execution was so great that her milk dried up and she couldn’t feed her baby. In fear of her life, she went into hiding where she remained eight years, her daughter growing up to believe that she was her aunt. A civil guard who came to look for her wrote in his notebook: ‘She is not in her house. It is believed that General Queipo de Llano’s edict has been applied to her.’

  —While I was hidden my brother’s novia was shot. She was a communist party member and was arrested early on. The guard at the gaol gave her mother the watch she had left. It had stopped at 4.30 a.m. Before being taken out, she had struck the watch against the wall so that her mother should know the hour of her death …

  The news of the executions on the feast day of the Virgin in Pamplona quickly reached the Somosierra front where the Navarrese requetés and falangists who had taken the pass in the Guadarrama mountains were still stationed. Sensational accounts of the repression in the Popular Front zone were being published in the insurgent-controlled papers but little about the repression taking place in their own zone was allowed to appear. Least of all, the massacre committed by the Army of Africa after its capture of Badajoz, in Estremadura, 14 and 15 August in its advance on Madrid. Antonio IZU and his requeté companions were shaken by the news brought back from Pamplona by two of his company.

  —‘¡Cabrones!’ some expostulated. ‘Those who’ve stayed in the rear ought to be brought up to the front to fight. Send them here to face the fire!’ I was particularly shocked because one of those shot was my favourite uncle – the black sheep of the family, my father’s cousin in fact, who had become a socialist. And for that they had shot him, a man in his sixties …

  —‘This is barbarous,’ said a Carlist lawyer friend of mine, recalled Rafael GARCIA SERRANO, falangist student, on the same front, when we heard that fifteen or so people had been shot on 15 August. ‘If we permit atrocities we’ll be on the same level and will lose the war.’ What upset us particularly was that the executions had taken place on the patron saint’s day of Navarre. They were shot as leading members of the Popular Front. It was the sort of thing that happens in all revolutions; the sort of thing that was happening at the front, too. No prisoners were taken by either side – and, happily, very few prisoners were being captured.

  Very soon afterwards, we learnt of Lorca’s death. How we got the news I don’t know, for no newspapers published it in our zone. We took it badly, but believed that it was because of the poet’s homosexuality. We couldn’t imagine that it would be a political assassination. ‘Yes, of course, they’ve shot him because he’s a queer’ … 25

  But, as Antonio IZU knew, the repression was not only in the rearguard. In a village in the Guadarrama mountains where he was stationed, the company commander, a falangist career officer from Pamplona, arrested all thirty-one people who had voted for the Popular Front; the village electoral returns had been found, the right had won by seven votes. After interrogating the Popular Front voters, thirteen were put in a lorry.

  —Women gathered round crying; the falangists kicked them back, used their rifle butts on them. It was a terribly poor village, the peasants were half-starved wretches. The lorry set off for the rear, and I imagined they were being taken to Aranda de Duero …

  Not long afterwards, by chance he discovered their fate. The requetés, after an attack, withdrew to a position nearby, where they were overwhelmed by a pestilential smell. By a small stream they discovered thirteen corpses so hurriedly buried that the toes of their sandals were sticking out of the earth. The requetés reburied them. As one was lifted out of the ground, some small change fell from his pocket.

  —It was the village barber who had shaved us all, charging only 25 centimos; it was so little that we always gave him double. We made rough crucifixes, our chaplain said the responses. Later he confronted the falangist army officer and told him what he thought. The captain swore at him and threatened to shoot him if he didn’t shut up …

  * * *

  In these days in which military justice is pursuing its sad mission … an unusual number of people has been seen congregating in the place where the executions take place. Among them are children, young girls and even some ladies. These [executions] are public, it is true; but their enormous gravity … is more than sufficient reason for people, whose religious convictions are in many cases openly displayed, not to attend, even less take their wives and children …

  Note from the civil governor’s office

  (Valladolid, 24 September 1936)

  * * *

  SEGOVIA

  While the church hierarchy, with a few exceptions, maintained a prudent silence in the first six weeks, the same was not true of some priests who allowed their passions full rein. Dionisio RIDRUEJO, Falange chief in Segovia, listened with amazement to a sermon preached in the cathedral.

  —‘The Fatherland must be renewed, all the evil weed uprooted, all the bad seed extirpated. This is not the time for scruples –’ The sermon was evidently aimed at the three or four people who were trying to prevent the repression in Segovia, including myself …

  For a fortnight they were successful; left-wingers were arrested but not shot. The roadside assassination of three or four people by Acción Popular militants and falangists caused a commotion. Two tendencies emerged, one legalistic, which believed that people should be arrested and tried, the other maintaining that a certain amount of terror had to be created by summary executions. The second tendency won the day when the Valladolid Falange took charge of the region and sent a delegate to Segovia to organize the repression.

  —A special squad was formed, led by a very religious and sinister falangist from Valladolid. In place of the tassel on his cap he wore a Christ on the Cross. The squad’s task, officially, was to arrest and take people to prison; but hardly any ever reached their destination. They were left dead on the roads. I and others attacked the squad leader, asserting that he could not be both judge and executioner. ‘No, I take good care of these people,’ he answered with complete confidence. ‘They all have the chance to confess before they die, and therefore can go to heaven’ …

  The situation was aggravated by republican bombing of the town which did little damage but caused wounded (along with inevitable demands for reprisals on prisone
rs); and the closeness of the front, 35 km away.

  —Looked at quite coldly, the terror could be justified. A guerrilla movement, an uprising in the rear, could have disintegrated the thinly held Alto del León front. Monstrous as it was, the military criterion of repression had its logic. Mola believed the purge should be rapid, Franco that it should be methodical and exhaustive; both had the same basic idea …

  It was in Valladolid, where socialist workers from the railway repair shops had staged resistance, and where the Falange was strong, that the repression in Old Castile reached its maximum severity. ‘The clean-up’, as a falangist civil servant, Pedro JUAREZ, put it, ‘was very thorough. The tram company garages were turned into a prison and were kept full a long time.’

  JUAREZ had wanted to go to the front but, being a father of two young children, was assigned to guard duty in the rear. Valladolid was being bombed by a single plane almost every day, and there were rumours that the city’s water reservoirs were going to be poisoned. He was put on guard duty at the reservoirs in the Campo de San Isidro.

  —One morning we were ordered to form a cordon; the spectators were pressing too close to the firing squads carrying out public executions in the Campo. We had to keep them at least 200 metres away, and were given strict orders to prevent children joining the spectators.

  The prisoners were brought from the tram garages. Among the dozen the first day I did duty, there were some I recognized from a village near mine. Imagine my feelings! All of them, including a woman, refused to be blindfolded. Like several others, the woman raised her hand in a clenched-fist salute and cried ‘¡Viva la República!’ as the shots rang out.

  For the rest of the week, while I continued on duty, a dozen people were shot every dawn. They included three more women. Two of them, as the firing squad took aim, lifted their skirts over their faces, revealing themselves completely. Gesture of defiance? Of despair? I don’t know: it was for scenes like this that people went to watch. And then, when we returned to the city, the streets were completely deserted; all the spectators had disappeared into their homes, their beds. The city was silent …

  —This was no illiterate mob which went to watch, reflected Jesús ALVAREZ, a liberal republican chemist. In the casino, people said to each other: ‘Don’t forget to be there tomorrow –’ These were people of social standing, sons of distinguished families, men who had received an education, people who professed to be religious. It was not a lumpen-proletariat, deprived of work, education, well-being like that on the other side; but it might just as well have been, for these bourgeois showed that all their education, culture, religion was nothing – skin-deep. So many went to watch the ‘spectacle’ – for that is what it was for them – that coffee and churro stalls were set up so that they could eat and drink as they watched …

  The terror, he saw, was an important part of the counter-revolution; and the Falange did not shirk it. Though he was no admirer of the Falange, he had to admit, however, that the idealists in the main went to the front. It was the ‘scum’ left behind who did the assassinating, and the worst among them were the turncoats, the left-wingers who had joined to save their skins.

  Because of the terror, people delated, denounced each other.

  —The instinct of self-preservation. Imagine what it’s like, day after day, to go out into the street, light a cigarette, walk to the café and act as though nothing is happening. For if you don’t show your face you become an object of suspicion. Only by acting as though everything is perfectly normal can you show that you are above suspicion. You fear that if you hide your knowledge about someone else you will be executed; you hope that if you inform, your life will be spared. By becoming part of ‘normality’ the terror contributed to maintaining an appearance of normality. More than personal vendettas, of which there were enough, it was the terror which contributed most to its own perpetuation …

  Some protests were made, the most famous being that of Unamuno, the most prestigious intellectual figure in the insurgent zone.26 He was not alone. Eugenio VEGAS LATAPIE, editor of the monarchist Acción Española, felt sufficiently indignant to take the matter to the very highest level. Given the opportunity of accompanying the poet José María Pemán to see Franco, who not long before had reached the peninsula from Morocco, he raised the matter of assassinations.

  —It was of absolute importance that these be brought to an end immediately. One heard rumours all the time of people being taken from gaol and shot without trial. Falangists even suggested to me that they would liquidate political enemies of mine. It was incredible, horrifying and a grave discredit to the cause. I stressed to Franco the necessity of ensuring that no one be shot without trial, however summary, and without the chance of defending himself.

  Franco took no notice of me. As far as the repression was concerned, he knew very well what was happening and didn’t give a damn. On information I gave him later, Pemán took up the case with Franco direct of the number of people who were being kept a year or more under sentence of death. Franco explained that this was necessary in order to be able to exchange them for prisoners in similar circumstances in the red zone. That was his explanation. But hardly any exchanges were authorized by the Franco regime during the war; and moreover, when the war was over and there was not even this excuse, the situation continued exactly as before, with people being kept under sentence of death for a year, if not longer. Franco displayed the simple, cold cruelty for which he was well known in the Foreign Legion …

  At the local level, it was possible for one man to determine the outcome of the situation. In the village of Tamariz de Campos, Valladolid, Alberto PASTOR’s home village, no one was shot despite the pre-war violence in which he had participated.27

  —I wouldn’t tolerate it. From the start I said: ‘You will answer with your lives for any killings that take place.’ Tamariz must be the only village around here where no outrages were committed. Elsewhere local feuds resulted in assassinations. I was determined the same should not happen in my village. Some people were arrested, and one died in prison from illness, but none was shot …

  In Pamplona, the Carlist regional chief issued an order a few days after the uprising that no Carlist was to carry out acts of violence and must do everything possible to prevent their being committed in his presence. ‘For us, the only reprisals permitted are those ordered by the military authorities, who are always just and circumspect,’ the order, signed by Joaquín Baleztena, stated.

  —Bishop Olaechea of Pamplona, and Cardinal Gomá, primate of Spain who was on holiday in Navarre, congratulated my brother on his stance. But the note didn’t go down well at Mola’s HQ here. Officers told my sister, who had gone there to seek the release of a prisoner, that our brother’s ‘vaseline note’ had made matters worse, Dolores BALEZTENA remembered. I don’t believe there was complicity between the few falangist assassins who were carrying out their dirty work in the rearguard and the military; but there was certainly connivance. The military were the supreme authorities at that moment; had they wished to end the repression, they could obviously have done so …

  Mola, whose original plans for the uprising included the arrest and ‘exemplary punishment’ of all political and trade union leaders opposed to the military, sent a telegram from Burgos on 20 August 1936 forbidding ‘falangists and similar forces’ to commit acts of violence in Pamplona. This followed a similar note from the local commandant two weeks earlier. On 15 September, the new civil governor reminded mayors that arbitrary arrests were forbidden. After a massacre of prisoners dragged from the gaol at Tafalla, Bishop Olaechea called for an end to the blood-letting. ‘No more blood except that laid down by the Tribunals of Justice … We must not be like them … Not a drop of vengeance blood.’ In November, the new military commandant had once again to repeat orders against violence committed by people claiming to belong to the militia.

  —The repression was the great sorrow of the war. I was pleased when Bishop Olaechea protested; the clergy must s
peak out at wrong-doing. ‘How can things like this go on? How can they allow it?’ Carmen GARCIA-FALCES, a Carlist, asked her friends. The repression caused us grief because we believed we were fighting for Good. We knew many of the people who were being shot, and they seemed good people to us – why were they being executed? They had been tried, all right – but why shot? Our side was pursuing God’s cause and God would never condone such atrocities. The assassinations of priests on the other side were terrible – but there the assassins weren’t believers, it wasn’t the same thing …

  Despite the orders, prohibitions, admonitions, warnings, the killings continued. It was not surprising; nor was it a problem peculiar to Navarre. The short-term aims of pacifying a potentially hostile rearguard – a problem much more acute in other areas – coincided with the long-term aim of crushing the working class and its allies, leaders and militants, to exorcise the threat, once and for all, of proletarian disturbances, risings and revolution.28 At the same time, moreover, the repression served to show the insurgents’ supporters that the rising was not to be a simple change of political regime, but a profound change in the correlation of social forces: a counter-revolution, in short, in which they were implicated by the repression even if they did not participate directly in shedding blood.

  Militancies 5

  JUAN CRESPO

  Monarchist student

  For him this was a paradoxical war. No sooner had he left the front at the Alto del León because he was ‘fed up’29 and returned to Salamanca, than he was setting off again to fight. This time under the command of Major Doval, the civil guard officer who had organized the repression in Asturias after the October 1934 uprising and who was now leading an expeditionary force to block an enemy offensive flanking the Guadarrama and threatening Avila. Only a few days earlier, Onésimo Redondo, the Valladolid falangist leader, had been killed in an ambush 40 km behind the lines; the insurgent rear was by no means secure.