The Battle for Spain

by Antony Beevor

  With its attempts at negotiation completely thwarted, the National Council for Defence collapsed. Julián Besteiro decided to remain in Madrid awaiting his fate (which would be death in prison a year later). Miaja fled to Orán in his aeroplane on 28 March. Casado went to Valencia, having given orders that formal surrender would take place at 11 a.m. on 29 March.37

  Nationalist formations continued their advance to the main ports, where thousands and thousands of people were jammed trying desperately to board one of the few boats. The pleas for help which Casado had sent to the British and French governments had received no reply, and in any case there had been too little time to organize such an evacuation. There was also still the danger of Italian submarines torpedoing any ships in the area. When Casado reached Valencia he encountered total chaos. Only one ship, the Lézardrieux, managed to get away loaded with refugees. In the port of Alicante the Maritime and the African Trade sailed without taking on passengers, unlike the Stanbrook, which left on 28 March loaded with 3,500 refugees. From Cartagena only the Campilo managed to sail. Casado carried on to Gandía where the next day he was allowed to board the British cruiser HMS Galatea, which was there to evacuate Italian prisoners as part of an exchange arrangement.

  Meanwhile, thousands of soldiers, union members and politicians still tried to get to Alicante, despite the blocked traffic of coaches, trucks and vehicles of all sorts. More than 15,000 were rounded up by Gambara’s Italian troops on 30 March. Many committed suicide, but the vast majority were marched off by nationalist troops to prisons, bullrings and camps.

  The first nationalist troops to enter Madrid were those on the Casa de Campo front on the morning of 28 March. Later, at midday, a column led by General Espinosa de los Monteros arrived, followed by trucks with food and 200 justice officials and military police who, assisted by the Falange, began to take part in the repression of the defeated. On balconies the flag of ‘Old Spain’ appeared, while fifth columnists rushed out into the streets, shouting nationalist slogans with their right arm raised in the Falangist salute. ‘They smashed portraits [of republican leaders] and tore down posters, they pulled down street signs and those on buildings, and they dismantled barricades. Yet apparently on that first night Falangists patrolled the streets to prevent revenge killings. Priests and monks appeared blessing everyone, also civil guards who had hidden away their old uniforms.’38 The Spanish capital was transformed even more dramatically than on 19 July 1936. Julián Marías, who had assisted Besteiro in the Junta, felt bemused. The slogans of the Popular Front were replaced by their nationalist counterparts. Language itself changed. People went back to saying ‘my wife’ instead of the left-wing ‘mi companˆera’, and ‘Buenos días’ instead of ‘¡Salud!’.39

  On 31 March Franco’s armies reached their ultimate objectives. ‘Lifting our hearts to God,’ ran Pope Pius XII’s message of congratulation to Franco, ‘we give sincere thanks with your Excellency for the victory of Catholic Spain.40 ‘Ciano wrote in his diary that ‘Madrid has fallen and with the capital all the other cities of red Spain. It is a new formidable victory for fascism, perhaps the greatest one so far.’41 In London on 20 April, exactly three weeks after Franco’s conquest, the Non-Intervention Committee dissolved itself at its thirtieth plenary session.

  PART SEVEN

  Vae Victis!

  35

  The New Spain and the Franquist Gulag

  On 19 May 1939 the grand victory parade of nationalist Spain took place in Madrid along the Castellana, now renamed the Avenida del Generalissimo. A huge construction of wood and cardboard had been erected to form a triumphal arch on which the word ‘Victory’ was displayed. On each side the name ‘FRANCO’ was repeated three times, and linked with the heraldic arms of the Catholic monarchs.

  Franco took the salute at this march past from a large tribune. He wore the uniform of captain-general, but the dark blue collar of a Falangist shirt could be seen underneath and on his head the red beret of the Carlists. Below him in front of the stand his personal bodyguard of Moroccan cavalry was drawn up.

  Altogether 120,000 soldiers–including legionnaires, regulares, Falangists and requetés–took part in the parade, with artillery and tanks. The rear was brought up by Portuguese viriatos and the Condor Legion. The German contingent was led by Colonel von Richthofen. ‘I am driving at the front,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The spectators go wild. “¡Viva Alemania!”’1 In the sky above, aircraft formed the initials of ‘Viva Franco’.

  The next day Cardinal Gomá, primate of Spain, gave Franco the wooden cross to kiss at the door of the church of Santa Bárbara, where the Caudillo entered under a canopy, as the kings of Spain used to do. In the middle of a solemn ceremony, imbued with heavy medieval imagery, Franco laid his victorious sword in front of the miraculous Christ of Lepanto, brought especially from Barcelona for the occasion. All the trappings and incantations represented the sentiments and self-image of the crusading conqueror. In his struggle to defeat the Marxist hydra Franco had been fighting against the past as well as the present: against the nineteenth century poisoned by liberalism; against the eighteenth century which had produced the Enlightenment and Freemasonry; and against the defeats of the seventeenth century. Only in an earlier period could the Caudillo find the roots of a great and united Spain, the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella.

  Franco was now master in his own country, but he could not ignore the debts to barons and clans who had helped him achieve the victory. In feudal style, he knew that he could maintain the loyalty of his generals by making them ministers, under-secretaries and military governors. But there were a few–Kindelán, Varela, Aranda–who only accepted his power as a form of regency until the Alphonsine line was restored. Others, such as Queipo de Llano or Yagüe, had their own plans.

  Franco heard from Beigbeder that Queipo was openly conspiring to install a military junta. With the garrulous viceroy of Andalucia, he did not have to wait long for Queipo to make a mistake. On 17 July, at the celebrations of the third anniversary of the rising, he presented the cross of San Fernando to the city of Valladolid. This irritated Queipo, since he considered that Seville (personified by himself) had played a far more important role in the rising. Queipo could not desist from making the most disobliging remarks in all directions about ‘Paca, the fat-arsed’. Franco summoned him to Burgos for consultations and at the same time sent General Saliquet to Seville to take command there as soon as Queipo arrived to see his Caudillo. Queipo was promptly sent off on a military mission to Rome. He had lost his power base.2

  On 8 August, in a move to consolidate his political position, Franco issued the law of the head of state, which gave him the right to sanction laws or decrees in cases of emergency, without deliberation by the council of ministers. Two days later Franco approved the formation of his second government with another master stroke. He made Colonel Juan Beigbeder minister of foreign affairs; Ramón Serrano Súñer minister of the interior;

  General Varela minister of the army; but then, to everyone’s stupefaction, he made General Yagüe minister of air. This dismayed both Yagüe and especially Kindelán, who had commanded the air force throughout the war. Kindelán was sent to the Balearic Isles as military governor, where he would find it difficult to conspire with other monarchists. And Yagu ¨e, given a task which he was unlikely to perform well, would find it difficult to be a credible standard-bearer for the Falangists.3 No doubt Serrano Súñer played a part, for he was still advising his brother-in-law on most appointments and would continue to play the most influential role until 1942.

  The generals, after almost three exhausting years under arms and in the field, were now content with a more sedentary role in the political barracks of Franquist Spain. The country, however, was in a terrible state. Its economy was in ruins, with both agrarian and industrial production below the already low levels of 1935. This did not take into account the massive destruction of the country’s infrastructure–railways, roads, bridges, ports, power lines and telephone sy
stems. Some 60 per cent of rolling stock had been lost and 40 per cent of the merchant fleet.

  A quarter of a million buildings had been destroyed and a similar number severely damaged.4 The new state had almost no foreign exchange and had lost all its gold reserves, so the monetary system was in chaos. There were also the war debts to the nationalists’ allies to be paid off. And the loss of manpower, some 3.5 per cent of the working population, did not take into account the prisoners and the exiles.

  One of the regime’s first priorities was to return land to its former owners, not just the farms taken over during the revolution of 1936, but also those affected by the agrarian reforms under the Republic.5 Wages were fixed and in the countryside were reduced to half of what they had been under the Republic. They would not again reach the level of 1931 until 1956. The sale of agricultural production was controlled by the state, which fixed prices. This, of course, encouraged the black market to flourish, whatever the punishments threatened under military tribunals. In Madrid, a kilo of flour was selling at 12 pesetas as opposed to the official price of 1.25. Beans, meat, olive oil, all were selling at prices up to more than three times the official level.6 The opportunities for corruption escalated rapidly in such conditions. Meanwhile, the lack of tools and the failure to invest in farm machinery meant that agricultural production fell over a number of years, with disastrous results in 1941 and 1945, when many areas were close to famine.

  State control of industry was designed to create a form of autarchy, in which priority was given to military needs in case Spain found itself involved in a European war. Owners and managers returned to find themselves in a form of barracks dirigisme. They could control their workforces, since strikes were outlawed, militants purged and working hours extended at fixed salaries; but the factory owners had little say in obtaining raw materials or the sale of their finished product.7

  On 25 September 1941 the decree of the Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI), the main mechanism for economic control and autarchy, was established.8 It covered almost everything: war production, mineral prospection, coal, iron and steel, copper and non-ferrous metals, chemicals, explosives, rubber etc. The INI intervened in aircraft production and later in all types of vehicles, as well as synthetic oil production, a concept which greatly appealed to Franco, who saw autarchy as a particularly Spanish virtue as well as a necessity. The fact that it was far from cost-efficient does not appear to have dawned on him or his ministers until 1950. He proclaimed that ‘Spain is a privileged country which can survive on its own. We have everything we need to live and our production is sufficiently abundant to assure our survival. We do not need to import anything.’9 Autarchy would only diminish after the bulk of the nationalist debts to Germany and Italy had been settled. To pay its debts to Germany required, between 1939 and 1943, the equivalent of 12 per cent of the value of all its imports and 3 per cent in the case of Italy.10

  Franco also liked the idea of cheap energy and agricultural irrigation from hydroelectric dams, the great projects which had appealed to Calvo Sotelo during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship and nearly bankrupted Spain. On 7 October 1939 he launched a plan for their construction and republican prisoners of war were put to work. The financing of such projects as well as much of the nationalist economy had created a very close relationship between the regime and the five major Spanish banks. In return for their co-operation they were protected from competition–no new banks were set up in Spain until 1962–and given great power in the economy, allowing them to amass huge profits and create veritable commercial empires.12 As one historian wrote, ‘The architectural symbol of the new Spain was not the church, as Carlists wanted before the war, but the bank.’13

  This anti-communist state also proceeded to nationalize the railway network, paying its owners in shares which were worth nothing.14 At a time when the shortage of petrol and its high cost appeared to favour railways, the RENFE managed to achieve pitiful results due to appalling management. Some commentators have observed that the effects of Franco’s nationalization programme were very similar to those of Soviet satellite states after 1945.15

  Another paradoxical parallel between Franquism and Stalinist Russia was the obsessive fear of foreign ideological contagion. While most of the senior Soviet advisers from Spain were being forced to confess by the NKVD to treasonous contacts abroad and then shot, in nationalist Spain the rhetoric called for drastic surgery to save the body politic. The Bishop of Vic called for ‘a scalpel to drain the pus from Spain’s entrails’.16 Franco’s press attaché, the Count de Alba y Yeltes, said during the war to one Englishman that they had to rid Spain of the virus of bolshevism, if necessary by eliminating a third of the male population of Spain.17 Now that the nationalists had almost all the republican prisoners in their power, they could embark on their thorough cleansing.

  Prison camps were set up all over the country. Including temporary and transit camps, there were 190 of them, holding between 367,000 and half a million inmates.18 During the final offensive 45,000 had been taken in the central zone, 60,000 in the south and 35,000 in Levante.19 When the summer of 1939 arrived, numbers had to be reduced, especially in the temporary camps. Some prisoners were given provisional liberty, 90,000 were sent off to 121 labour battalions, and 8,000 put to work in military workshops. Executions, suicides and escapes also reduced the total. Certain ‘special’ camps were maintained, such as those at Miranda de Ebro and San Pedro de Cardeña, for foreign combatants in the International Brigades. Some of those prisoners were sent off to rebuild Belchite–‘You destroyed Belchite and you will rebuild it,’ they were told.

  In January 1940 the supervision of prison camps came under General Camilo Alonso Vega, the director-general of services in the ministry of the army. Alonso Vega, who had been head of the Civil Guard, later became minister of the interior. Those condemned by military tribunals were sent to military penal colonies for reconstruction work, or to mine coal in Asturias, León and the Basque country; some had to extract mercury, and many thousands were sent to dig canals and work on other projects close to Franco’s heart. Much of this forced labour proved far from cost-effective, as was the case in Beria’s Gulag,20 but later the work was subcontracted to various companies who made better use of the unpaid labour than the military authorities. Prisoners were also hired out to landowners who were able to improve their properties with irrigation and other schemes impossible before. The rest who remained in prison, 270,719 of them according to ministry of justice figures, were spread around jails with a capacity for only 20,000.

  The 150,000 republicans, who returned across the French frontier to nationalist Spain, found a society still in a state of war, even though the trenches had been abandoned. Repressive laws, such as that of 26 April 1940, insisted on exacting revenge for everything that had happened ‘in the red zone since 18 July 1936, until the liberation’. Investigations were aimed not just at crimes against the person, but also those of a ‘moral’ nature committed ‘against religion, culture, art and the national patrimony’.21

  The ‘attribution of responsibilities’ was aimed at ‘the physical destruction of the cadres of the parties of the Popular Front, of the workers’ unions and the Masonic organizations’ and the ‘extirpation of the political forces which had sponsored and sustained the Republic’.22 We do not have a final figure for the Franquist terror, but recent researches in more than half the provinces of Spain indicates a minimum there of 35,000 official executions.23 This suggests that the generally accepted figure of 50,000 after the war may be low. If one adds on the unofficial and random killings, and those who died during the war from execution, suicide, hunger and sickness in prison,24 the total figure probably approaches 200,000.

  Once again, another unanswerable question needs to be asked. If the Republic had won, how many would have been executed and might have died in their camps? As several historians have pointed out, the winner of a civil war always kills more than the losers. Everything would have depended on the repu
blican regime which would have emerged. If it had been a communist regime, then to judge by other communist dictatorships, it would have been very high because of the paranoid nature of the system. But in Spain, much would also have depended on whether it was a Stalinist version, or whether a more Spanish variety would have evolved, as Negrín seemed to think.

  The Caudillo used to read through the sentences of death when taking his coffee after a meal, often in the presence of his personal priest, José María Bulart. He would write an ‘E’ against those he decided should be executed, and a ‘C’ when commuting the sentence. For those who he considered needed to be made a conspicuous example, he wrote ‘garrote y prensa’ (garroting and press coverage). After coffee, his aide would send off the sentences to be passed to the military governor of each region of each province, who would communicate them by telegram to the head of the prison. The sentences would then be read out in the central gallery of the prison. Some officials enjoyed reading out the first name, then pausing if it was a common one, such as José or Juan, to strike fear into all those who bore it, before adding the family name. In the woman’s prison of Amorebieta one of the nuns who acted as warders would perform this duty.25

  Those who escaped a death sentence faced many years of terrible conditions in one of the 500 penitentiaries. The director of the Model Prison of Barcelona, Isidro Castrillón López, said to his charges, ‘You should know that a prisoner is a ten millionth part of shit.’26 Prisoners were made to suffer from thirst as well as hunger. Sometimes they received no more than the equivalent of a small can of water in three days. There were epidemics of typhus and dysentery even in prisons holding mothers and small children where washing facilities hardly existed and the smell was overpowering.27 The poet Miguel Hernández suffered from pneumonia in the prison of Palencia, bronchitis in the prison of Ocaña, and typhus and tuberculosis, of which he died, in Alicante prison.