Fracture

by Philipp Blom

  Some thirty-eight thousand people, mostly civilians, were slaughtered by Republican forces during the first months of the civil war—8,815 in Madrid alone, and a similar number in Catalonia. Catholic clergy bore the brunt of the anger directed at the forces of the old order. Some 4,200 priests, 2,400 members of lower orders, and 283 nuns were killed, often with great cruelty. Some of them were burned alive in their churches, while others were shot, often after having had to dig their own graves; some, it appears, were castrated or disemboweled. One favored method of executing anyone suspected of being a political opponent was abduction in a car—as the slang phrase went, “being taken for a ride.” The actress Maria Casares, daughter of a former prime minister, who was working in a hospital in Madrid during the war, found blood one morning on the backseat of her car. Her young driver apologized with a shame-faced grin and a shrug, explaining, “We took a guy for a ride at dawn, and I’m sorry, I haven’t had time to clean up the car.”6

  Though widespread and often cruel, the violence inflicted by leftists was, on the whole, unplanned; it was carried out by mobs or by small groups acting on their own authority. On the Nationalist side, by contrast, the violence was part of a campaign of systematic terror, ordered from above. Vowing to “purge” Spain of all its internal enemies, Nationalist forces executed politicians, left-wing members of parliament, teachers, Freemasons, doctors, trade unionists, and sometimes people whose only crime was to be wearing glasses and thus to look like intellectuals. Though not a member of any political party, the celebrated poet Federico García Lorca was deemed to be liberal enough in his general sympathies to deserve death. One of his executioners, a Falangist landowner, would later casually remark: “We killed [him]. I gave him two shots in the arse as a homosexual.”7

  In towns and villages throughout Nationalist-held areas, committees composed of officers, Falangists, landowners, and priests condemned prisoners to death within minutes in parodic trials without witnesses or legal representation. Firing squads sometimes worked all day to dispatch the many condemned. Stood against the wall of the local cemetery, many gave a last, desperate exhortation: “¡Viva la libertad!” One village peasant in the Rioja region heard, and recorded in his notebook, 1,005 executions. Not all of those executed would be buried, and the corpses of known leftists were often displayed for days, rotting in the heat in village squares and at crossroads.

  Seville, one of the first cities to fall to the Nationalists, was “cleansed” with particular ferocity. With the prisons already overflowing with city officials, workers from the local olive oil factory, and other Republican sympathizers, those marked for death were held in local cinemas and theaters.8 Some eight thousand people were executed in Seville in the latter half of 1936 alone. In Córdoba, taken with little resistance, clergymen and landowners drew up the initial lists of those who were to die; the lists proved not long enough for Major Bruno Ibáñez, the local military commander, who “could have shot the whole city,” according to a Falangist lawyer. “They sent him to Córdoba with carte blanche.”9 Every day, the cellars of his headquarters were filled to the bursting point with prisoners, only to be empty by the evening. Some ten thousand people were victims of these summary executions, 10 percent of the entire population of the city.

  A Republican atrocity in the town of Badajozin in Estremadura province, close to the Portuguese border, called down one of the most terrible reprisals of the war. On an August night in 1936, leftists locked priests and other Nationalist sympathizers inside churches and set the buildings alight. Twelve people died, eight of them burned alive. Other murders carried out by leftists may have totaled as many as 243. But when Nationalist forces under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Juan Yagüe captured the town, they indiscriminately put men, women, and children to the knife. They then began arresting anyone they suspected of Republican sympathies and herding their prisoners into the local bullring.

  Checking who had fought for the city’s defense by ripping open the shirts of all men they encountered to see whether their shoulders bore the telltale bruises of a recoiling rifle, the Nationalists gathered fighters and suspected sympathizers by the thousands. The American journalist Jay Allen, a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, described what happened next. “At four o’clock in the morning they are turned out into the ring through the gate by which the initial parade of the bullfight enters. There machine guns await them. After the first night the blood was supposed to be palm deep on the far side of the lane. I don’t doubt it. Eighteen hundred men—there were women, too—were mowed down there in some twelve hours. There is more blood than you would think in 1800 bodies.”10 Altogether, the Nationalist forces massacred some four thousand people, mostly local farmers and workmen, in this way. Yagüe, later Franco’s minister of aviation, earned for this the epithet “Butcher of Badajoz,” with the Republican death toll in the Estremadura province as a whole estimated to have been between six thousand and ten thousand.

  Many towns suffered doubly as they changed hands between Nationalists and Republicans. In the southern city of Málaga, a British diplomat recorded that the Republicans had killed more than a thousand people, with or without trial, between July 1936 and February 1937. When the Nationalists took the city, 3,500 people were killed during the first week alone; by the end of the war, a further 16,952 individuals would be sentenced to death and executed. There are no exact figures of those put to death on the Nationalist side; historian Antony Beevor estimates that some two hundred thousand Spanish civilians were summarily executed or massacred by Franco’s troops, in what Beevor calls “the White terror.” The number of women and girls raped and then killed by Franco’s notorious Moroccan units is unknown.

  While great parts of Spain were in a state of war, the inhabitants of Barcelona had been looking forward to a festive day on July 19, 1936. It was the day of their Popular Olympiad, designed to be a leftist answer to Hitler’s fascist Olympic Games in Berlin. But with the outbreak of rebellion on July 18, barricades were hastily erected in the city, and sporadic firing could already be heard. The athletes remained stranded in their hotels, the Olympiad forgotten.

  Barcelona lay in the hinterland of the murderous conflict, along a front line stretching from the north of Catalonia to the besieged capital, Madrid, and from there south to Granada. The Nationalist rebels had planned to take the city with twelve thousand troops already stationed there, but when these units attempted to occupy strategic buildings and streets, they met with strong resistance from organized workers. Though the president of the Catalan Generalitat, Lluis Comanys, refused to arm Republican workers, fearing worse bloodshed if more weapons were in circulation, the CNT, the anarchosyndicalist trade union, quickly improvised a fighting force. Weapons were seized from watchmen in the port, gun shops were raided, and armories were emptied at gunpoint, while metalworkers transformed small trucks into armored cars by attaching steel plates—some so heavy that the truck’s engines could not cope with the weight of them, and failed to move at all.

  There was no quick victory for the Nationalists in Barcelona. As they left their barracks in the small hours of the morning of July 18, factory sirens throughout the city sounded the alarm; they were soon engaged, first in skirmishes and then, as the day wore on, in more determined fighting. One infantry regiment was attacked so fiercely that they had to retreat to their barracks, while other units contended with homemade bombs being tossed from rooftops and sniper fire from windows and dark alleyways.

  Some Nationalist fighters managed to take the Hotel Colón, the Ritz, and the telephone exchange, but as dawn gave way to day, the situation remained confused, with rebel strongholds besieged by detachments of armed workers. Inside, the Nationalists waited for reinforcements from the 1st Mountain Artillery Regiment, but these reinforcements never arrived: on their way to the city center, the entire regiment had been convinced by Republican workers that it would be a crime to shoot at their brothers, and they had joined the ranks of the Republicans. When artillery ca
ptured from the rebels was turned on their own men barricaded in the buildings they had taken, the Nationalist commander, General Goded, capitulated. The attempt to take Barcelona had failed.

  With the Nationalist threat within the city defeated, the mood turned from anxiety to chaotic celebration, and also to bloody vengeance. Churches were torched, hundreds of clergy were murdered, priests had their ears cut off, and the corpses of buried nuns in various stages of decomposition were dug up and exhibited in suggestive poses and macabre displays. The night of July 19 was bright and starlit, but in the sky the silhouettes of burning church belfries stood out against the orange sky, like martyrs burned in one huge auto-da-fé. The purges of “subversives” were brutal, with hundreds taken for a last and fatal “ride.” Thousands died in what finished, in the words of historian Piers Brendon, as “the frenzy of visionaries and criminals.”11

  Once the bloodshed had stopped, the victors began to celebrate. Young and often drunk fighters armed with guns careened dangerously through the streets in requisitioned cars. Loudspeakers on public squares blared out revolutionary music and news of Republican victories. Trade unionists, anarchists, and Communists were exhilarated by the sudden possibility of not only defeating the generals but also bringing about the revolution they had dreamed of for so long. People in the streets addressed strangers with the familiar tú and gave the antifascist clenched-fist salute; many felt certain that Europe’s democracies would soon come to their aid.

  As the leftist revolutionaries appeared to have triumphed, wealthy bourgeois stayed in their apartments or disguised themselves with shabby clothes before going out. It was the hour of revolutionary fervor, of retribution and experimentation. Workers’ councils were established everywhere, heatedly debating every aspect of the city’s present defense against fascism and of its future. The elegant boulevard Las Ramblas was taken over by working people from the suburbs; the Ritz became a public canteen, named Hotel Gastronomic No. 1. Even the brothels were collectivized, though not for long.

  Operation Fiery Magic

  BY MAY 1937 the first, chaotic period of Barcelona’s war had passed. There were tensions between anarchists and Communists, but everybody knew that their first priority was to keep a united front against Franco, whose army had made substantial territorial gains throughout Spain. Yet in spite of this realization, in that same month the Communists chose to attack the anarchist-held telephone exchange, plunging the leftist-held city into a suicidal internal war. The reason for this disastrous move, which damaged the Republican cause profoundly, lay not in Barcelona, however, but in Moscow.

  The Spanish Civil War had long since become an international conflict, and foreign powers had found ways to intervene, directly or indirectly. Franco’s successes on the battlefield were primarily owing not to his feared colonial troops, and certainly not to the regular army, but to support from abroad, which he had solicited as soon as the unsuccessful military coup had transformed into a war.

  The involvement of foreign powers had begun right at the start of the war. Seeking to gain a decisive edge against the ill-equipped but determined Republicans, Franco had sent an emissary to Germany on July 22, 1936, just four days after the initial uprising. Hitler had received Franco’s men personally, on his return from a performance of Wagner’s opera Siegfried, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. The Führer apparently frowned at the Spaniards’ seemingly amateurish way of fighting a war without equipment, funds, a properly trained army, or logistical support. Then, however, he had discovered common ground with Franco: the threat of Bolshevism. After treating his guests to a lengthy tirade about the evil looming in Russia and the need to keep it from developing elsewhere, he resolved to send help.

  Unternehmen Feuerzauber (Operation Fiery Magic) seems to have borne the imprint of the opera the Führer had just heard, in which the fiery magic accompanying Siegfried’s heroic progress is set to stirring music. Less poetically, but more usefully for the Spanish rebels, Hitler agreed to send them transport planes, bombers, funds, pilots, soldiers, and more. The airlift of troops from Morocco to Seville that enabled Franco to pursue his campaign of conquest throughout Spain was made possible by German planes.

  Franco wasted no time drumming up support. Days after Hitler had received the Spanish emissaries, the Italian foreign minister, Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, was visited by a delegation of prominent Spanish fascists and royalists. Initially, despite a stream of begging telegrams from Franco’s headquarters in Tangiers, Il Duce had shown little inclination to get involved in the Spanish rebellion. But when it began to look more likely that the rebellion might succeed and that Mussolini might secure lasting influence over a brother Fascist state in the Mediterranean, a squadron of Italian Savoia-Marchetti bombers and Fiat fighters was dispatched to Morocco. Three of the twelve planes promptly crashed, setting a pattern for the bravery combined with ineptitude that was so often to characterize Mussolini’s troops, fairly or unfairly, in the popular imagination.

  As the fighting wore on, German and Italian involvement deepened and expanded, turning a military coup that might have fizzled out for lack of equipment and manpower into a prolonged and bloody civil war. Hitler sent volunteer pilots with twenty Junkers bombers, Heinkel fighter planes, and Stuka attack planes capable of giving air cover to Nationalist advances and terrorizing the lightly armed forces on the Republican side. To bolster Franco’s forces, Mussolini would eventually send more than one hundred thousand soldiers throughout the course of the war. Ammunition and equipment, including tanks and artillery, followed in a regular stream.

  On the Republican side, things looked very different. While Franco could rely on his fascist allies as well as colonial troops and the Spanish Foreign Legion, both accustomed to fighting ruthlessly and only too happy to follow the order to terrorize the local population, the Republican forces consisted of loyal army units without battle experience and without modern weapons, alongside volunteer forces made up of socialists, communists, anarchists, and trade unionists who fought with deadly resolve and great courage but were not only badly equipped but also entirely untrained. To have a chance against a growing and increasingly well-equipped enemy, they desperately needed weapons, ammunition, supplies, training, and support.

  The government turned to France, Britain, and the United States. The Republicans were in control of the country’s gold reserves, an outstanding collateral to secure any purchases. Franco, after all, had nothing but the promise of victory. On July 19, as soon as the initial coup had taken place, Prime Minister José Giral had sent a telegram to his socialist French counterpart, Léon Blum, asking him fraternally for arms and planes.

  Moved by the appeal and wanting to help, Blum hesitated nevertheless. He understood the moral imperative to help the beleaguered Spanish Republican government and he was alive to the threat of being surrounded by fascist states on three sides, but the internal situation in France was still highly volatile. Despite the fact that government had won the 1936 elections by a landslide, Paris had already witnessed violent riots, and right-wing and fascist forces at home were only waiting for an excuse to carry their anger into the streets again. Hostile newspapers savagely attacked the prime minister, and in Le Figaro the prominent Catholic writer François Mauriac wrote menacingly: “Take care! We will never forgive you for such a crime.”12 Blum had every reason to fear that open support for socialist and anarchist forces in neighboring Spain might be enough to spark serious unrest at home, or even to risk war with Italy and Germany.

  Faced with these high stakes, Blum sounded out the position of the British government on a visit to London and received a stern warning against intervention. Her Majesty’s ministers, and indeed the greater part of the country’s social elite, were less afraid of a fascist Spain than of a communist state. Indeed, social agitation, hunger marches, and miners’ strikes had sharpened British suspicion of a communist takeover, and the British consul in Barcelona, Norman King, called the Spanish “a bloodthirsty race”
and advised his government that its best bet was to throw its weight behind the Nationalist rebels. If they were defeated, he wrote, “Spain will be plunged into the chaos of some form of bolshevism and acts of savage brutality can be expected.”13

  The strong establishment preference for Franco and his generals had another reason. As demonstrated by the brief career of Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts, there was considerable sympathy for fascist ideas inside the British elite. There were also significant British investments in Spanish olive oil, fruit, and wine. Boys from the Spanish upper classes had been sent to British boarding schools for generations, and a sense of class solidarity led politicians such as the foreign secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, to favor a policy of strict nonintervention. If Prime Minister Blum was willing to supply arms to the Republicans, he would be on his own, and would be answerable for the consequences.

  Nonintervention, of course, was anything but neutral. As the Nationalist army grew in strength and could bring to bear its bombers, fighter planes, tanks, and heavy guns, Republicans had to count every bullet in their antiquated rifles. Starved of support, they were practically condemned to lose the war. Heartbroken and unsure what to do, Blum sent some airplanes, but not enough to make a decisive impact on the war. He then set about securing a coalition of neutrality, effectively an arms embargo, that brought together the major democratic states, including the increasingly isolationist United States. Led by the pro-Franco Hearst press and the Catholic lobby in Washington, popular opinion there was also behind the Nationalist cause, despite the concerns voiced by Protestants and individual diplomats. The president of the Texaco Oil Company, Torkild Rieber, even openly supported the Nationalists with donations totaling some $6 million.

  While democratic countries wavered or stalled, Franco’s fascist allies were keen to use the war for their own ends. In July 1936 the German Luftwaffe had begun to send selected young men on a vacation in the sun organized by the Kraft Durch Freude organization, responsible for the vacations of millions of Germans. Disguised as harmless sun seekers, these hand-picked travelers were actually members of the newly formed Legion Condor, a covert German fighting unit operating in Spain and dressed in uniforms bearing no indication of belonging to the Third Reich. Some ten thousand German soldiers were part of the legion. Initially most of them belonged to airborne units, but after January 1937 they were joined by tanks complete with crews.