The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain

by Paul Preston

  The events of October 1934 escalated the hostility between the left and the forces of order, particularly the Civil Guard and parts of the army. The Asturian rebels knew that, to control the mining valleys, they had to overcome the Civil Guard. Accordingly, they assaulted various local barracks to neutralize them prior to an attack on the capital city of the province, Oviedo. These episodes were violent and protracted. The bloodiest took place in Sama de Langreo, seventeen miles east of Oviedo, and in Campomanes, fifty miles to the south. In Sama, the battle raged for thirty-six hours and thirty-eight Civil Guards were killed. In the battle at Campomanes, twelve Civil Guards were killed and seven wounded.105 In total, the casualties of the Civil Guard in Asturias were eighty-six dead and seventy-seven wounded. The Assault Guards lost fifty-eight dead and fifty-four wounded. The army lost eighty-eight dead and 475 wounded. Other security forces lost twenty-four dead and thirty-three wounded. These figures may be compared with the nearly two thousand civilian dead, the large majority of them working class.106

  October 1934 saw only sporadic clashes elsewhere in Spain. However, there were casualties in Albacete, at both Villarobledo and Tarazona de la Mancha, during assaults on the town halls and other public buildings. In Villarobledo, four people were killed as order was restored by the Civil Guard, which suffered no casualties. In Tarazona, earlier in the summer, the Socialist Mayor had been removed from his post by the Civil Governor of Albacete, the Radical José Aparicio Albiñana. Now, his right-wing replacement was badly wounded in the struggle. Aparicio Albiñana responded to the situation by sending in reinforcements of the Civil Guard. One Civil Guard and several municipal policemen were killed during the defence of the town hall. The rest of the province was hardly affected by the revolutionary movement.107

  In the province of Zaragoza, the call for a general strike was ignored by the CNT and therefore a failure. However, there were bloody confrontations in Mallén, Ejea de los Caballeros, Tauste and Uncastillo in the area known as Las Cinco Villas, one of the parts of Aragon where social conflict was fiercest during the Republican years. It was a cereal-producing area of huge holdings, where a few landlords held many properties and the local day-labourers depended for survival on their access to common lands which had been enclosed by legal subterfuge in the nineteenth century. The bitterness of the election campaigns of November 1933 and the June harvest strike had contributed to the intensification of class hatred in the area and this was reflected in clashes on 5 and 6 October.108 In Mallén, one Civil Guard was killed and another wounded and a villager shot dead. In Ejea, a Civil Guard and a villager were wounded. In Tauste, a revolutionary committee took over the village and the Civil Guard barracks was attacked. The revolutionaries were crushed by a regiment of the army which fired on them with machine-guns and an artillery piece. Six villagers were killed.109

  The most violent events in Cinco Villas took place at Uncastillo, an isolated village of barely three thousand inhabitants. In the early hours of the morning of Friday 5 October, emissaries arrived from the UGT in Zaragoza with instructions for the revolutionary general strike. The mild-mannered Socialist Mayor of Uncastillo, Antonio Plano Aznárez, told them that it would be madness. He was no revolutionary, but rather an unusually cultivated man adept at navigating the complex bureaucratic mechanisms of the agrarian reform. He had earned the hatred of the local landowners by dint of his success in introducing equitable job-sharing, in establishing reasonable working conditions, in recovering some common lands that had been taken from the village by legal subterfuges in the previous century and in improving the local school. Now, however, contrary to his advice, the urgings of the men from Zaragoza were enthusiastically taken up by the local labourers, many of whom were unemployed and whose families were starving.

  At 6.00 a.m., when the strikers demanded the surrender of the village Civil Guard barracks, the commander, Sergeant Victorino Quiñones, refused. Plano himself spoke to Quiñones who said that his men were loyal to the Republic but would not surrender. Their conversation was cordial and Plano, albeit without much hope of success, undertook to try to dissuade his neighbours. In fact, as he left the barracks, the strikers surrounding the building opened fire and in the subsequent gunfight two of the seven Guards were killed, Sergeant Quiñones and another badly wounded and yet another blinded. The two remaining Guards fought on until the arrival of reinforcements. Antonio Plano came out of his house with a white flag and tried to talk to them but, when they opened fire, he fled into the surrounding countryside. In the course of the fighting, the home of one of the most powerful landowners, Antonio Mola, was assaulted when he refused to hand over arms to some of the strikers. In the subsequent skirmish, his niece was wounded and Mola shot dead one of the attackers who had burned down his garage and destroyed his car. The others were trying to burn him out when the Civil Guard arrived and drove them off. One of the many wounded strikers died on 8 October.110

  In all of Spain, Civil Guard casualties in combating the insurrection of October 1934 were 111 killed and 182 wounded, the bulk of which were in Asturias.111 The memory of this would influence the part played by the Civil Guard in the Civil War. More immediately, it had a profound effect on the way in which the revolutionaries were punished. Once the Asturian miners had surrendered, the subsequent repression was overseen by the forty-four-year-old Civil Guard Major Lisardo Doval Bravo, who had a record of bitter hostility to the left in Asturias. Indeed, he was widely considered in Civil Guard circles as an expert on left-wing subversion in Asturias. He had served in Oviedo from 1917 to 1922 and, having reached the rank of captain, he had commanded the Gijón garrison from 1926 until 1931. He earned notoriety for the ferocity with which he dealt with strikes and disorder. On 15 December 1930, during the failed general strike which was intended to bring down the dictatorship of General Berenguer, he had been involved in a bloody incident in Gijón. The strikers attempted to remove from the wall of a Jesuit church a plaque in honour of the Dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera. The Jesuits opened fire on the demonstrators, killing a worker and wounding another. In response, the mob set the church ablaze and the Civil Guard was called. Doval led a cavalry charge against the workers. Afterwards, he authorized the savage beating of strikers in his quest to identify the ringleaders. In April 1931, he planned to repel a workers’ attack on his barracks with banks of machine-guns. A man who knew him well, the conservative Republican Antonio Oliveros, editor of the Gijón newspaper El Noroeste, wrote: ‘In my opinion, Doval is a man of exceptional talents in the service of the State. Brave to the point of irresponsibility, his concept of duty leads him to the worst excesses and that accounts for his frequent abuse of suspects when trying to get proof of guilt.’112

  Doval was subsequently involved in the abortive Sanjurjo coup in Seville in August 1932. Although suspended for his part therein, he had benefited from the amnesty for the conspirators passed on 24 April 1934. Until 19 September that year, when he was posted to Tetuán, he had been on secondment training the JAP militia. On 1 November, Doval was appointed ‘Special Delegate of the Ministry of War for Public Order in the Provinces of Asturias and León’. The appointment was made by Diego Hidalgo on the specific recommendation of Franco, who was fully aware of Doval’s methods and his reputation as a torturer. They had coincided as boys in Ferrol, in the Infantry Academy at Toledo and in Asturias in 1917.113 With an authorization signed by Hidalgo himself, Doval was given carte blanche to bypass any judicial, bureaucratic or military obstacles to his activities in Asturias. His fame as a crusader against the left had made him immensely popular among the upper and middle classes of the region.

  As Franco knew he would, Doval carried out his task with a relish for brutality which provoked horror in the international press.114 It was not long before there were reports of his abuses. The Director General of Security, the deeply conservative José Valdivia Garci-Borrón, on 15 November, sent one of his subordinates, Inspector Adrover, to investigate. Adrover was violently expelled from Asturias
by Doval. In view of this and of the stream of information about Doval’s excesses, Captain Valdivia pressed the new Minister of the Interior, the Radical Eloy Vaquero, for Doval’s removal. On 8 December, the special powers were revoked and five days later he was posted back to Tetuán.115

  Meanwhile in Zaragoza, after the suppression of the uprising in Uncastillo, the fugitive Mayor Antonio Plano was captured and badly beaten by Civil Guards. Back in the village, 110 men were arrested and tortured by the Civil Guard before being taken to the provincial capital for trial.116 The achievements of Plano’s time as Mayor were overturned. Over the next year or so, the Civil Guard in Uncastillo took its revenge. Numerous detentions and beatings on the slightest pretext led to the new right-wing Mayor making an official complaint. Unsurprisingly, an official investigation found no grounds for action. The trial of 110 villagers accused of participation in the events of 5–6 October took place throughout February and March 1935. It was heavily weighted in favour of the Civil Guard and of the local cacique, Antonio Mola. The prosecution’s aim was to place the blame for everything firmly on the Mayor. To achieve this, the highly respected and conciliatory Plano was portrayed as a hate-fuelled traitor to the Republic. His defence lawyer pointed out that, if the Civil Guard could not stop the revolutionary events, it was absurd to have expected Plano to do so single-handed.

  Nevertheless, the judgment of the court on 29 March 1935 was that Plano had been the ringleader and was guilty of military rebellion. Accordingly, he was condemned to death. Fourteen villagers, including the deputy Mayor, were sentenced to life imprisonment. Forty-eight villagers were given sentences ranging from twenty-five to twelve years. When the sentences were announced, confrontations between villagers and Civil Guards became increasingly bitter. After the victory of the left-liberal Popular Front coalition in the elections of February 1936, Antonio Plano and the others were amnestied and he was reinstated as Mayor and revived his reforms.117 The local caciques were furious and their revenge when the Civil War started would be terrible.

  4

  The Coming of War, 1934–1936

  The hopes of Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso had been fulfilled. While the military action in the north was still in train, there had been nationwide round-ups of workers’ leaders on a massive scale. On 11 October 1934, the CEDA daily, El Debate, reported that in Madrid alone there were already two thousand prisoners. Jails were soon full in areas where there was no revolutionary activity but where landowners had problems with their day-labourers. Workers’ clubs, the Casas del Pueblo, were closed down in towns and villages in every part of the country. The Socialist press was banned. On 8 October, in Alicante, a huge crowd demanded the liberation of the many prisoners being brought to the Castillo de Santa Bárbara. There were clashes with the police and José Alonso Mallol, the ex-Civil Governor of Seville and Asturias, and a number of other prominent Republicans were arrested. In the same session of 9 October in which Gil Robles had proposed the closing of parliament, the CEDA voted an increase in the forces of order and the re-establishment of the death penalty. At total of 1,134 Socialist town councils were simply removed and replaced by unelected right-wing nominees. There were many provincial capitals among them, including Albacete, Málaga and Oviedo.

  The most scandalous case was that of Madrid, where the town council and its Republican Mayor, Pedro Rico, were suspended, falsely accused of failing to combat the strike. Control was briefly assumed by the head of the Agrarian Party, José Martínez de Velasco, as government delegate. He was replaced on 19 October by Salazar Alonso himself, who had been dropped from the new government because Lerroux felt that the presence of three CEDA ministers was already provocative enough. A week later, he took the title of alcalde (mayor).1 In Málaga, the man chosen to lead the management committee that replaced the elected council was Benito Ortega Muñoz, a liberal member of the Radical Party. As a city councillor, he had successfully opposed the attempts of more left-wing Republicans to remove crosses from the municipal cemetery. That, together with his acceptance of the position of unelected Mayor in October 1934, would lead to his murder in 1936.2

  The repression in Asturias after October 1934 was a major steppingstone from the terror of Morocco to the wartime terror exercised against the civilian population of the Republic. With Franco in overall command, the brutal Juan Yagüe leading the African forces and the sadistic Doval in charge of ‘public order’, Asturias saw the elaboration of the model that would be applied in southern Spain in the summer of 1936. The right applauded the actions of Franco against what was perceived as the ‘passions of the beast’, ‘the pillaging hordes’ and ‘the rabble unleashed’. As well as the 111 Civil Guards killed, thirty-three clergy, including seven seminary students, lost their lives.3 It was not surprising then that spine-chilling exaggerations of the revolutionaries’ crimes abounded. One of the leaders of Acción Española, Honorio Maura, described the miners as ‘putrefaction, scum, the dregs of humanity’, ‘repugnant jackals unfit to be Spaniards or even humans’. They were portrayed as murderers, thieves and rapists, with female accomplices described as ‘brazen women who incited their cruelties. Some were young and beautiful but their faces reflected moral perversion, a mixture of shamelessness and cruelty.’4

  For the right, the use of the African Army against ‘inhuman’ leftists was entirely justified. Inevitably, within Spain and abroad, there was loud criticism of the use of Moorish troops in Asturias, the cradle of the Christian reconquest of Spain. José María Cid y Ruiz-Zorrilla, parliamentary deputy for the right-wing Agrarian Party for Zamora and Minister of Public Works, responded with a declaration of double-edged racism: ‘For those who committed so many acts of savagery, Moors were the least they deserved, because they deserved Moors and a lot else.’5 A book published by the Oviedo branch of Ángel Herrera Oria’s Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas (ACNP) suggested in similar terms that the crimes committed against clerics by the revolutionaries were Moorish in character and deserved to be punished by exposure to Moorish atrocities.6 In the majority of Catholic writing about the events of October 1934, it was a commonplace that the revolution was an attack on Catholicism and that the suffering of religious personnel was analogous to the suffering of Christ at the hands of the Jews.7

  In contrast to Asturias, the October rebellion in Catalonia was put down without savagery, thanks to the moderation and professionalism of Domingo Batet Mestres, the general commanding the Catalan Military Region. The Catalan government, the Generalitat, had found itself caught between extreme nationalists pushing for a separate Catalonia and a right-wing government in Madrid determined to curtail regional autonomy. The President, Lluís Companys, rashly declared independence on 6 October, in an attempt to forestall revolution. General Batet responded with patience and good sense to restore the authority of the central government and thereby prevented a potential bloodbath. Specifically, he bypassed Franco, who was advising the Minister of War Diego Hidalgo on the repression in Catalonia as well as Asturias. To Franco’s fury, Batet would deal only with Hidalgo and the Prime Minister, Lerroux. As the senior officer, he ignored Franco’s recommendation that he use the Foreign Legion to impose punishment on Catalonia like that inflicted by Yagüe on Asturias. Instead, he used a small number of troops to secure the surrender of the Generalitat with a minimum of casualties. Batet also prevented the bombardment of Barcelona by warships sent by Franco.8

  When Batet explained in a radio broadcast how he had conducted operations, he did so in a regretful and conciliatory tone that was far from the vengeful spirit of the right. In parliament, José Antonio Primo de Rivera fulminated that Batet was ‘a general that didn’t believe in Spain’ and that his broadcast had ‘made us blush with shame’.9 Two years later, Franco would take his revenge for Batet’s moderation. In June 1936, Batet was to be given command of the VI Military Region, whose headquarters were in Burgos, one of the nerve centres of the uprising of 18 July. Faced with the virtually unanimous decision of his officers
to join the rising, Batet would bravely refuse to join them. His commitment to his oath of loyalty to the Republic would guarantee his trial and execution. Franco maliciously intervened in the judicial process to ensure that Batet would be executed.10

  Now, despite the triumph of the government, there were numerous civilians and army officers preparing to destroy the Republic. Onésimo Redondo was trying to build up an arsenal of small arms. He hired a sports ground on the banks of the Río Pisuerga where he would drill and train the local Falange militia. On Sundays, he led parades through Valladolid itself or other towns of the province. During October 1934, there had been bloody clashes in Valladolid between Falangists and picketing railway workers. In the aftermath, Onésimo Redondo distributed a pamphlet in which he advocated that Azaña, Largo Caballero, Prieto and Companys be hanged.11

  The activities of Onésimo Redondo and others on the extreme right showed that they were oblivious to the successes of a firmly right-wing government. Pushed by them or genuinely alarmed at what he perceived to be the moderate scale of the post-October repression, José Antonio Primo de Rivera committed the Falange to armed struggle to overthrow the democratic regime.12 In early 1935, he had several meetings with Bartolomé Barba Hernández of the Unión Militar Española and an agreement was reached which also established links with the Carlists through Colonel Ricardo de Rada, who was training the militias of both groups. There was a surge in UME membership among junior officers after October 1934.13