The Battle for Spain

by Antony Beevor

  It seemed to make little difference to the Nationalists whether or not there had been open opposition to their forces. In the military centre of Burgos and the Carlist capital of Pamplona they had not been resisted, yet the purge began immediately. In Burgos, the capital of Castille, groups were taken out each night to be shot by the side of the highway. Ruiz Vilaplana, president of the College of Clerks of the Court, recounted in his memoirs that he witnessed 70 people killed in one batch.9

  In Pamplona on 15 August, while the procession of the Virgin del Sagrano was taking place, Falangists and requetés took 50 or 60 prisoners, including some priests suspected of Basque separatism. Before killing them, the requetés wanted to give them the opportunity of confession, but the Falangists refused. In the confusion some prisoners tried to escape but were shot down. ‘In order to sort out the situation, priests gave absolution en masse to the remainder. The executions were carried out and the trucks returned to Pamplona in time for the requetés to join the procession as it entered the cathedral.’10 The Association of Families of the Murdered of Navarre have identified 2,789 people executed in the province.11

  As might be expected, the repression was much more intensive and systematic in places where the UGT and the CNT had many members, especially in areas where the Popular Front had won in the elections of February. In Rioja, for example, over 60 per cent of the victims belonged to Popular Front parties. Over 2,000 people were executed and buried in mass graves outside Logroño.12 There was practically no village in the Rioja which did not have inhabitants buried in the mass grave of La Barranca.13 In Teruel the wells of Caudé, 84 metres deep, were used for dumping the corpses of the killed. A peasant living nearby heard and recorded in a notebook 1,005 coups de graˆce.14

  In Seville, where Queipo de Llano’s bluff had won over the confused soldiers, the initial killing was said to be part of a military operation. But when reinforcements from the Army of Africa arrived under Major Castejón, the mopping-up was nothing more than a fearful massacre, with survivors finished off by knife or bayonet. Immediately afterwards Colonel Díaz Criado was put in charge of public order and almost all the local officials were killed. Because the prison was not large enough, the nationalists used the Jáuregui cinema as a holding centre for more than 2,000 people, also the Variedades music hall, the Falangist headquarters and even two boats anchored near the Torre del Oro. Francisca Díaz, the eighteen-year-old sister of the secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party was interrogated for a whole night. She saw many of the workers from the olive oil factory roped together. They were going to be taken out to be shot.15 The nationalist repression in the province of Seville accounted for 8,000 lives during 1936.

  Córdoba had been seized on 18 July in a few hours, with little resistance. Queipo de Llano, furious because no reprisal had been carried out, immediately sent Major Bruno Ibáñez of the Civil Guard to the city. He started with 109 people from the lists given him by landowners and clergymen. A few days later they began to shoot the prisoners out on the roads and in the olive groves. ‘The basement of Falange headquarters in which people were held was like a balloon which was blown up in the afternoon and was empty the following morning. Each day there were executions in the cemetery and along the roads leading out of the city.’16 It is calculated that a total of 10,000 were killed in Córdoba during the war, a tenth of the population. ‘Don Bruno could have shot the whole city,’ a Falangist lawyer recounted. ‘They sent him to Córdoba with carte blanche.’17

  In Huelva, a town which the nationalists did not fully take until the middle of September, more than 2,000 people were killed, including the civil governor, Diego Jiménez Castellano, and the commanders of the Civil Guard and the carabineros who had stayed loyal to the Republic. It is calculated that another 2,500 inhabitants disappeared, but many of them may have escaped across the border to Portugal.18

  When Major Castejón’s ‘Column of Death’ reached Zafra on the road to Badajoz, he ordered the local authorities to provide him with a list of 60 people to be shot. ‘Little by little, those on the list were locked up in a room of the town hall. Some inhabitants who came into the mayor’s office were shown the growing list. They were allowed to remove three names providing they wrote down three others.’ In the end, 48 of the names were substitutes.19

  One of the great lieux de mémoire of the Spanish Civil War was Badajoz itself.20 The massacre perpetrated there by the troops of Lieutenant Colonel Yagüe during its capture and the following repression turned into the first propaganda battle of the war. The nationalists exaggerated their losses in the battle and also the numbers of right wingers killed by the left beforehand. In fact, Yagüe lost no more than 44 killed and 141 wounded. But even after the war, the nationalists could not ascribe more than 243 killings to the left, while estimates on nationalist killings in the province range from over 6,000 to 12,000.21

  On the road to Madrid the nationalist columns followed the same pattern. They subdued villages along the way, laying waste and daubing on the whitewashed walls graffiti such as ‘your women will give birth to fascists’. Meanwhile, General Queipo de Llano menaced republicans who listened to Radio Sevilla with stories about the sexual powers of the African troops, to whom he promised the women of Madrid as an inducement. War correspondents were held back from Toledo so that they should not witness the events which followed the relief of the Alcázar. There 200 wounded militiamen in hospital were finished off with grenades and bayonets. The conduct of the campaign was compared to the furia española of Philip II’s infantry in the sixteenth century, which terrorized Protestant Holland in its all-destructive advance.

  Near Gibraltar a Falangist reported that the wife of a left-winger was raped by a whole firing squad of Moors before being shot. An American journalist, John Whitaker, was present when two young girls were handed over to Moroccan troops near Navalcarnero by their commanding officer, Major Mohamed Ben Mizzian, who told him calmly that they would not survive more than four hours.22 The Major subsequently reached the rank of lieutenant-general in Franco’s army and regulares were later made ‘honorary Christians’ by the nationalists. The horror they inspired in republican territory led to two of them being torn to pieces by a crowd when the truck in which they were being sent back as prisoners stopped to fill up with petrol.

  Another of the great places of suffering was Granada, known above all for the murder of the poet Federico García Lorca, the most celebrated victim of the civil war. The fascist and military attitude to intellectuals showed itself to be one of deep distrust at the least, and usually consisted of an inarticulate reaction mixing hate, fear and contempt. This was shown in Granada where five university professors were murdered. García Lorca had returned to his house outside the city in the Huerta de San Vicente just before the rising. (With the start of the summer holidays many on both sides were saved or killed simply by their travel plans.) He was in danger because of his liberal sympathies although he belonged to no party. Even the refuge given him by the Falangist poet Luis Rosales and his family could not save him.

  On Sunday, 16 August, a few hours after the murder of his brother-in-law, Manuel Fernández Montesinos, the mayor of Granada, he was seized by a former deputy of the CEDA, Ramón Ruiz Alonso, who later asserted that Lorca ‘did more damage with his pen than others with their guns’. He was accompanied by Luis García Alix, secretary of Acción Popular, and the Falangist landowner Juan Luis Trescastro, the perpetrator of the crime, who would say later: ‘We killed Federico García Lorca. I gave him two shots in the arse as a homosexual.’23 H. G. Wells, the president of PEN, demanded details on the fate of Lorca as soon as the news reached the outside world, but the nationalist authorities denied any knowledge of his fate. Lorca’s death remained a forbidden subject in Spain until the death of Franco in 1975.

  The nationalists justified the brutality of their repression as reprisals for the red terror, but as had been the case in Seville, Córdoba and in Badajoz, and as would be the case in Málaga six mo
nths later, the subsequent nationalist killings exceeded those of the left several, if not many, times over. In Málaga the nationalist executions took place after the militia, and undoubtedly almost all those responsible for killing right wingers, had escaped up the coast. This shows that there was little attempt to identify the guilty. But above all, the contrast in the numbers killed by each side could not be starker.

  In August 1944 the British consul in Málaga obtained the nationalists’ own figures and forwarded them to the ambassador in Madrid, who passed them on to London. He reported that while ‘the “reds” were in control of Málaga from 18 July 1936 until February 7th 1937…they executed or murdered 1,005 persons’. But that ‘during the first week of Liberation, that is from February 8th to 14th…3,500 persons were executed by the Nationalists’. And ‘from February 15th 1937 to August 25th 1944, a further 16,952 persons have been “legally” sentenced to death and shot in Málaga’.24 According to other sources, more than 700 people were shot against the walls of the San Rafael cemetery just between 1 and 23 March 1937,25 but one local historian put the total figure for Málaga at 7,000 executions,26 roughly a third of the number given to the British consul. Whatever the exact figure, the nationalist ‘reprisals’ were clearly not just a question of revenge, they were also motivated by the idea of establishing a reign of terror especially in areas where the right had been numerically weaker.

  Even in areas where they were strong, however, the ‘killing machine’ was also used as a conspicuous message. In Valladolid the Falangist ‘dawn patrols’ shot 914 people, but the main reservoir of victims was once again the mass of prisoners seized just after the rising. They were locked into tram coaches and most days the Falangists would take out a dozen to execute them in public.27 ‘It wasn’t just a crowd of illiterates who came to watch the spectacle,’ recounted Jesús Álvarez, a chemist in the town. ‘They were people of standing, sons of distinguished families, educated people, people who called themselves religious…they went so regularly to see the executions that stalls selling coffee and churros were set up so that they could eat and drink while they watched.’28 On 24 September the office of the civil governor of Valladolid published a statement that it had been noticed recently that although ‘military justice’ satisfied the need for punishment, large crowds were gathering at the place of execution. The civil governor appealed to pious people that they ‘should not come to watch such things, and even less bring their wives and children’.29

  In the rear areas the Falange had rapidly developed into the nationalists’ paramilitary force, assuming the task of ‘cleaning up’. The young señoritos, often aided by their sisters and girlfriends, organized themselves into mobile squads, using their parents’ touring cars. Their leader, José Antonio, had declaimed that ‘the Spanish Falange, aflame with love, secure in its faith, will conquer Spain for Spain to the sound of military music’. The real militants were obsessed with their task of cutting out ‘the gangrenous parts of the nation’ and destroying the foreign, ‘red’ contagion. The rest simply seemed to find sanctified gangsterism appealing. The Carlists, on the other hand, were fired by religious fanaticism to avenge the Church by wiping out such modern evils as Freemasonry, atheism and socialism. They also had a far higher proportion of their able-bodied men at the front than the Falange and, despite their violent excesses on many occasions, were reputed to have treated their prisoners of war the most correctly.

  Nationalist killings reached their peak in September and continued for a long time after the war was over. Not surprisingly, people wondered if Franco wanted to repeat the deathbed answer of the nineteenth-century General Narváez when asked if he forgave his enemies: ‘I have none. I have had them all shot.’

  In the course of the last ten years, detailed work has been carried out region by region in Spain to establish the number, the identity and the fate of the victims. Accurate statistics have now been compiled on 25 provinces and provisional figures on another four. For just over half of Spain, this comes to a total of over 80,000 victims of the nationalists.30 If one takes into account the deaths which were never registered and allows for the provinces not yet studied, we are probably faced with a total figure for killings and executions by the nationalists during the war and afterwards of around 200,000 people. This figure is not so very far from the threat made by General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano to republicans when he promised ‘on my word of honour as a gentleman that for every person that you kill, we will kill at least ten’.31

  10

  The Nationalist Zone

  Acoup d’état does not need a positive creed, just an enemy. A civil war, on the other hand, demands a cause, a banner and some form of manifesto. During the preparation for the coup, the military plotters had not concerned themselves greatly over the exact form of government which their pronunciamiento would herald. The urgency of the conspiracy did not allow them to waste time discussing hypothetical constitutions. They would discuss the finer points and formulate a detailed justification for their actions after the country was secured. The substance was clear to all: centralized authoritarian rule. The form, however, was not clear, although the possibilities included Falangism, Carlism, a restoration of the Alfonsine monarchy and a republican dictatorship.1

  Until this problem could be resolved the nominal direction of nationalist Spain was constituted in Burgos on 24 July in the Junta de Defensa Nacional. General Cabanellas, the divisional commander at Saragossa, assumed the presidency supported by nine generals and two colonels. This figurehead establishment was organized by Mola, who commanded the Army of the North. It appears to have been an attempt to reduce the power of Franco, who commanded the most important military formation. Before the rising, General Hidalgo de Cisneros, the loyal commander of the republican air force, had said that ‘General Goded was more intelligent. General Mola a better soldier; but Franco was the most ambitious.’2 (His verdict on Mola was to prove highly inaccurate.)

  Mola had talked of a republican dictatorship which would maintain the separation of Church and state. He had even ordered that the monarchist flag be taken down in Pamplona. The Carlists were so horrified by his attitude that, in the last few days before the rising there had even been doubts whether they would commit their requetés, who were needed to assure the obedience of the regular troops to the nationalist cause. Queipo de Llano’s sudden rise to prominence in the rebellion with his seizure of Seville must have worried them almost as much. He not only finished his radio broadcasts with ‘Viva la República!’ and the liberal anthem, the ‘Himno de Riego’, but, worst of all, he was a Freemason. The idea of fighting under the republican tricolour was anathema to all traditionalists. Only the military plotters had sworn loyalty to it.

  The Carlists’ main hope for safeguarding their interests was destroyed on 20 July with General Sanjurjo’s death. Major Ansaldo, the monarchist airman, had arrived in Portugal to fly him to Burgos with the announcement that he was now ‘at the orders of the head of the Spanish state’, which caused very emotional scenes among the general’s entourage. Their light aircraft crashed on take-off and Sanjurjo died in the flames. This accident has been attributed either to sabotage by a Franco supporter or to Sanjurjo’s vanity in taking so many cases of uniforms. The latter explanation seems the more probable, although Ansaldo claims it was sabotage.

  During this time of uncertainty over the form of the new state, the Catholic Church provided the nationalist alliance with both a common symbol of tradition and a cause to transcend ideological confusion within their ranks. Its authoritarian, centralist nature and its attitude to property were acceptable to all factions, except the left wing of the Falange. Its hierarchy rallied to the cause of the right and prominent churchmen were seen giving the fascist salute. Cardinal Gomá stated that ‘Jews and Masons poisoned the national soul with absurd doctrines’.3 The most striking piece of ecclesiastical support for the nationalist rising came in the pastoral letter ‘The Two Cities’ published by the Bishop of Salamanca, Pla y D
aniel, on 30 September. It denounced the left-wing attacks on the Catholic Church and praised the nationalist movement as ‘the celestial city of the children of God’.4 Pla y Daniel also demanded the reversal of all anti-clerical restrictions and reforms implemented under the Republic. He was not to be disappointed.

  A few brave priests put their lives at risk by criticizing nationalist atrocities, but the majority of the clergy in nationalist areas revelled in their new-found power and the increased size of their congregations. Anyone who did not attend mass faithfully was likely to be suspected of ‘red’ tendencies. Entrepreneurs made a great deal of money selling religious symbols, which were worn ostentatiously to ward off suspicion rather than evil spirits. It was reminiscent of the way the Inquisition’s persecution of Jews and Moors helped make pork such an important part of the Spanish diet.

  The disparate groups that made up the nationalist movement were well aware of the danger in their undertaking, for they controlled less than half of Spanish territory and just under half of the population. It was this uncertainty and the desire for strong leadership which Franco was able to exploit in the following months. He was a great admirer and worthy successor of that most cynical of statesmen, Ferdinand of Aragon, usually cited as the original of Machiavelli’s Prince. During August it became almost certain that Franco was to be the nationalists’ Caudillo, or leader, but nobody really knew what beliefs were hidden behind his bland, complacent expression, nor to what extent he would be able to reconcile the markedly different opinions about the future form of the nationalist state. The Falange was worried that it would be little more than an auxiliary force under army command. The monarchists wanted Alfonso returned. The Carlists wanted a royal Catholic dictatorship with a populist flavour, although they realized that their pretender to the throne, the eighty-year-old Don Alfonso Carlos, would not be accepted by their allies. (In any case, he died in September without heirs as a result of an automobile accident.)