The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  Many were shot. Crimes committed in republican Spain were investigated, and those allegedly responsible for the ‘revolutionary excesses’ of 1936 were hunted down, the survivors from republican gaols being anxious to help the business of identification. The summer of 1939 was a fiesta for the informer, for the vengeful and for the blood-thirsty.1 The ruthlessness of the conquerors was sustained by a middle class which had known that they had only narrowly escaped extinction. The absence of magnanimity which characterized the end of the war was the more complete since the deteriorating international situation silenced the anyway enfeebled voice of the world’s liberal opinion. The terror in the war had been increased by propaganda; the revolutionaries had indeed done many abominable things; those who had come out alive from a republican gaol or an embassy were in no mood for forgiveness; and in the minister of the interior, Serrano Súñer, they had an appropriate spokesman, for his own experiences, as has been seen, were such as to make him close his eyes to pity.

  In addition to those shot for revolutionary crimes (the burning of a church would be counted as meriting a death sentence as much as the murder of a banker), numerous republican officers, officials and other responsible persons were executed. The numbers of those who died at the end of the war (and the shootings continued until into the 1940s) have been variously estimated, sometimes the figure being added to those killed in the nationalist zone during the war itself, sometimes also implicating those who, like Besteiro or the poet Miguel Hernández, died from neglect in gaol.2 (Besteiro, who remained in Madrid to receive the victors, realized how he had miscalculated the mood of Franco’s Spain when his efforts at mediation brought him a thirty-year sentence.) Ciano, visiting Spain in July 1939, reported ‘trials going on every day at a speed which I would call almost summary … There are still a great number of shootings. In Madrid alone, between 200 and 250 a day, in Barcelona 150, in Seville 80.’3 (Seville had been in nationalist Spain throughout the war: how could there be still enough people to shoot at this rate?) Of course, Ciano was an outsider, whose view could not have been formed from personal observation. Still, his figures have a ring of truth about them: thus the civil governor of Albacete, Martínez Amutio, described how, out of 36 tried with him at Almansa (Albacete) in December 1939, 32 were shot.4 One witness speaks of 2,000 shot at Ocaña (Toledo), an important gaol in central Spain.1 There seem to have been three hundred executions a week in Barcelona in May.2 The Basque nationalists claimed that 21,780 Basques died in the post-war repression.3 Could the overall figure have approached the much-quoted one of about 193,000 named in 1944 to Charles Foltz, an American journalist, by an unidentified official of the ministry of justice?4 It is improbable; perhaps the figure lists the number of death sentences passed, without noting the sentences which were commuted. In their 1999 work, Santos Juliá and some colleagues seem to think that about 150,000 were executed in Franco’s Spain during and after the war.5 The history of the twentieth century, despite its energy for statistics and its appetite for exactness, is unfortunately full of murky statistics of this vagueness, and it would be wiser no doubt to leave the matter unresolved, for the contempt of the present rather than for, as yet, the judgment of history. There seems no doubt whatever that tens of thousands of Spaniards died in the months following the war.

  Among those about whose death there is no doubt were Generals Aranguren and Escobar, the civil guard commanders in Barcelona at the beginning of the war; General Martínez Cabrera; Colonel Burillo; the communist director-general of security, Colonel Antonio Ortega; his namesake, the communist commissar Daniel Ortega; the socialist youth leader José Cazorla; the President of Catalonia, Luis Companys; the minister of the interior, Julián Zugazagoitia; the anarchist minister of commerce, Juan Peiró; Prieto’s secretary, Cruz Salido—the last four of whom were shot when handed over by the Gestapo in occupied France after 1940. Most of those concerned in Colonel Casado’s coup, including anarchists, survived, as did some who, like Cipriano Mera, were only captured later. The co-founder of the POUM, meantime, Joaquín Maurín, continued in gaol.6 But the leaders of the republic mostly escaped to an often disagreeable, impecunious or sad exile, while it was the rank and file, the mayor of the small village not the lord mayor, the secretary of the small collective rather than the commander-in-chief, who suffered the worst consequence of this brutal persecution.

  The responsibility for the repression lies first with the local supporters of the nationalists whose hatred and fury could only be contained by death sentences imposed by the summary courts. In addition, the director of prisons, Máximo Cuervo Radigales, of the military legal corps, and Colonel Martínez Fuset, head of that corps and the curious onetime friend of García Lorca, probably fanned the flames. The ministers of the interior, justice and war might have attempted to limit ruthlessness but they did not. Ultimately responsible was Franco, who confirmed more death sentences than any other statesman in the history of Spain. Franco thought that he was a general in command and considered his authority (mando) was that of a captain-general. A sharpness was given to the repression by the deliberate recruitment of police and security forces from among those who had been in republican gaols, or who had otherwise suffered.1

  The Spanish Civil War exceeded in ferocity many wars between nations. The losses in lives from all causes, taking into account deaths from malnutrition in the republic, as well as those shot after the war, must have been about 500,000.2 As in many wars, the number of those killed in action or who died of wounds afterwards was a modest part of the dead: probably not much more than 200,000 (say, 90,000 on the nationalist side, 110,000 on the republican) or 10 per cent of the total combatants.3 Murders or executions behind the lines account perhaps for another 130,000 (75,000 nationalist, 55,000 revolutionary or repub lican, including executions in prison camps, at the front line or as a result of tribunals after 1936).1 It would be reasonable to allow 10,000 for deaths by aerial bombardment, perhaps 25,000 for deaths by malnutrition or other diseases attributable to the war, together with 100,000 deaths from execution or other causes subsequent to the war (either in or out of gaol).2 If one supposes a permanent emigration of 300,000 (that is, people who left and did not get back), Spain may be supposed to have lost nearly 800,000 people in the civil war, including the flower of the new generation.

  The cost of the war, including both internal and external expenditures, was named later by the nationalists at 30,000 million pesetas ($9,375 million).3 The chief real cost was in labour, due on the one hand to the deaths and permanent disabilities caused, and on the other to the permanent exile of so many persons at the end of the war. It would be a hard task, however, to measure the exile of, say, the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez or the death of Lorca in terms of money. 4,250 million pesetas’ worth of damage nevertheless was done to property during the course of the war; 150 churches were completely destroyed and 4,850 damaged, of which 1,850 were more than half destroyed, including one of the priceless pre-romanesque churches in Asturias; 173 towns were so badly damaged that the Generalissimo ‘adopted’ them—his government, that is, undertook to pay the cost of restoration; 250,000 houses were so badly ruined as to be uninhabitable. Another 250,000 were partially damaged.4 This damage was much less than what happened to France in the Great War of 1914–18. All the same, the destruction of the manuscript of Jove Llanõs’s diary in the attack on the Simaneas barracks in Gíjon is hard to forget. As for the practical consequences, the victors refused to recognize money issued by the republican government after 18 July 1936: notes issued before then, however, could be exchanged for new pesetas at par. Cash deposits in banks made before 18 July 1936 were also paid in full in new pesetas. Bank accounts used in the republic after 18 July 1936 became subject to investigation, and out of 9,000 million pesetas in bank accounts in the republican zone at the end of the war, only 3,000 million survived the investigation.1

  As for the productive part of the economy, the factories of Bilbao and Barcelona lived through the war almost untouched.
The irrigation system around Valencia was not harmed. While Spain lost a third of her livestock2 and much farm machinery, farmland and farm buildings also suffered less than might have been expected. Still, land sown in 1939 showed a big drop in comparison with 1935.3 The war was hard on the railways: 1,309 engines (42 per cent of those existing in 1936), 30,000 goods wagons (40 per cent of 1936), and 3,700 passenger carriages (70 per cent of 1936) were destroyed. Lorries were scarce, but roads were in good condition. A third of the merchant marine was lost (70 ships or 220,000 tons). Stocks of raw materials and of food were low. The beginning of the Second World War, in September 1939, six months after the end of the Spanish war, prevented Spain from making up these losses from abroad. The situation was worsened by a long succession of droughts. The years of privation following the war (especially 1941–2) were thus known as the ‘great famine’. Agricultural production in 1939 was down 21 per cent, industrial production some 31 per cent, national income 26 per cent, and income per head 28 per cent.1

  The archaeological and artistic collections in Catalonia emerged from the war almost unscathed, due to the care of the Catalan government. There were no major artistic losses in central and southern Spain either. Much priceless private and ecclesiastical jewellery, however, disappeared. A few important treasures were taken abroad by the republican government in 1939, and handed to the League of Nations with the Prado paintings, but all were returned. Of the places and works of art destroyed, the church of Santa María del Mar, the Gothic church in Barcelona, the Plaza de Zocodover in Toledo, and the Infantado Palace in Guadalajara were probably the worst artistic losses.

  The end of the civil war closed an epoch in Spanish history. Nearly all the main actors of the past turbulent half-century were either dead or in exile. Many institutions and ideals had been swept away too. The ‘liberals’ and the Catholic politicians of the republic had been pushed unceremoniously to the side even before the start of the war. Now the great working-class parties of Spain had also been overwhelmed, along with their wild, generous, and violent dreams, as well as their experiments, such as the collectives in both town and on the land. The Basque and Catalan leaders were separated by exile from their own dearly loved regions, as well as from Castile. What deaths, too, there had been among the victors! Who could forget the thirteen murdered bishops, at the head of the army of six thousand ecclesiastical ghosts. The exuberant Sanjurjo, the conspirator Mola, the brilliant Calvo Sotelo, José Antonio Primo de Rivera with all his charm, Onésimo Redondo, the fascist from Valladolid, Ledesma, with his Hitlerian quiff, the eccentric Maeztu, the Carlist philosopher Pradera—all had died, and had died violently. None of the vanquished parties in the civil war had suffered such a toll of deaths among their leaders as the Falange2—unless the poets, among whom the slaughter had also been terrible, are reckoned a party: for the God-fearing humanist Unamuno was dead of grief in Salamanca; García Lorca lay in an unknown grave near Granada; Machado died an exile in a pension at Collioure; while Miguel Hernández was soon to die in Alicante gaol. Beyond all these deaths of celebrated men, there rose the mass spectre of those many thousands of warriors, known and unknown, who too had died, many giving their lives for causes which, on both sides, they had come to believe were noble; while many others had died without idealism, for causes for which they had fought without hope.

  The causes themselves were also dead by 1939. The three great quarrels which had led to the war—those of region, church, and class—had spent themselves, being transmuted in the strife from passionate conflicts between irreconcilable extremes into opportunistic battles for victory, or survival, at all costs. If liberalism and freemasonry had been exorcized, the church had been wounded by the Falange. Yet most of the social aspirations of the Falange had vanished just as completely as had communism, anarchism, and socialism. The defeat of Basque and Catalan separatism did not mean that the monarchists or Carlists were able to impose their views. Upon the heaped skulls of all these ideals, in the dust of the memory of so much rhetoric, one more cold-hearted, dispassionate, duller, and greyer man survived triumphant, as Octavius survived the civil wars in Rome. Caesar and Pompey, Brutus and Antony, Cato and Cicero—all, with all their genius, lacked the minor talent of being able to survive: Franco was the Octavius of Spain.

  Franco’s achievements in the civil war were considerable. As supreme commander of the nationalist forces his duties were strategic and political, never tactical—though he was often at the front. He had no opportunities to show himself (or risk his reputation) as a field commander. His task was to decide in what region a new offensive should be, to be certain that an offensive did not begin till all was ready, to halt a counter-attack (as at Brunete) when it had accomplished its task, and to ensure, through the aid of such efficient but undramatic officers as Dávila, or Orgaz, or Barroso, that the right equipment arrived on the right front at the right time. He was careful to give supreme field commands to men such as Saliquet, who, being old-fashioned and indeed old, could never be a rival to him. German officers serving with Franco, such as von Thoma, found him conventional. But in his caution, patience, and puritanism he resembled von Thoma’s future conqueror at El Alamein—Montgomery.

  As a supreme commander, Franco showed none of the recklessness for which he had been known as a young man in Morocco. Unlike von Thoma, Franco had no interest in military innovations per se. Perhaps his greatest military success was political. Political leaders were to General Franco merely divisional commanders, while military affairs also had their political or psychological significance; hence the decision to relieve Toledo and Brunete, the reluctance to accept faits accomplis at Teruel and the Ebro. He established himself as the political leader of a passionately concerned country by a contempt for political passions. He was no orator: a suitable visitation, it might perhaps be thought, on a country which had suffered from a surfeit of rhetoric. Alcalá Zamora, Azaña, Prieto, Calvo Sotelo, Gil Robles, Melquíades Alvarez and La Pasionaria were admirable speakers, with a real feeling for the ring of words: Franco initiated for Spain an age of statistics in which language was used to disguise, rather than to convey, thought. ‘Down with the intellectuals’, the cry of Millán Astray, Franco’s mentor in that amoral but effective corps, the Foreign Legion, was an all too appropriate cry in a country where the old political life, inspired by French-educated men of letters, with their endless tertulias in cafés in Madrid and their cult of eloquence, had so tragically failed.

  The political alliance which he achieved among his followers was the chief reason for his victory. No doubt he was assisted in providing a theoretical basis for that by Serrano Súñer, whose pre-war sympathy for a radical, right-wing system, even if it was not fascism, had been sharpened by his fearful experiences in the Model Prison. (To have seen humanity on that summer night of August 1936, in Madrid, was something to concentrate the mind only too greatly, as Azaña realized at the time.) The unity of the movement was itself the source of the propaganda which made it possible to mobilize a million men in the ‘crusade’. But Franco’s calm, effortless, professional superiority first obtained for him the leadership of the nationalists long before Serrano Súñer had escaped from a republican prison, and then enabled him to maintain himself. There were almost as many possible fissures in the nationalist side as there were among the republicans. The delay in obtaining victory, and the incessant disappointments, gave opportunities for the nationalist coalition to collapse. Doubtless agreement between Falange, church, monarchists, Carlists, and army was made easier by a certain class desperation, a greater appreciation of the disastrous consequences of defeat than existed on the republican side, perhaps by a greater cynicism which led these disparate groups, like Franco himself, to believe that there were no political aims so important that victory might be jeopardized in obtaining them. But it was Franco who turned this desperation, these fears, and this cynicism into engines of war. These negative emotions were supported by much positive enthusiasm from a right wing led in the war by i
ts extremists, who were delighted to think that the old politics of lip service to French liberalism were over at last. This extreme right, monarchist as much as falangist, was both better supported and more determined than their enemies, abroad and in the republic, supposed. Franco and his foreign minister, the Conde de Gómez Jordana, also showed themselves clever diplomatists in ensuring adequate German and Italian aid without surrendering to the dictators of those countries more than mining rights.