by Paul Preston
When rightists hunting for ‘reds’ began to look for him, Lorca took refuge in the home of his friend the Falangist poet Luis Rosales. On 16 August, at the home of the Rosales family, Lorca was seized by Civil Guards who were accompanied by the sinister Ramón Ruiz Alonso, a one-time deputy for the local CEDA, Trescastro and another member of Acción Popular, Luis García-Alix Fernández. Ruiz Alonso, who had hitched his cart to the Falange, harboured grudges against both Lorca and the Rosales brothers.138 Lorca was ludicrously denounced by Ruiz Alonso to Valdés as a Russian spy, communicating with Moscow via a high-powered radio. Valdés sent a message to Queipo de Llano asking for instructions. The reply was ‘Dale café, mucho café’ – ‘give him coffee’ being slang for ‘kill him’.139 Federico García Lorca was shot at 4.45 a.m. on 18 August 1936 between Alfacar and Víznar to the north-east of Granada.140
Trescastro later boasted that he personally had killed the poet and others, including the humanist Amelia Agustina González Blanco. ‘We were sick to the teeth of queers in Granada. We killed him for being a queer and her for being a whore.’ On the day after the poet’s death, Trescastro entered a bar and declared: ‘We just killed Federico García Lorca. I put two bullets in his arse for being a queer.’141 Murdered with Lorca were a disabled primary school teacher, Dióscoro Galindo, and two anarchists who had fought in the defence of the Albaicín.142 The cowardly murder of a great poet was, however, like that of the loyal General Campins, merely a drop in an ocean of political slaughter.
A prominent figure in the right-wing support for the coup, the banker and lawyer José María Bérriz Madrigal, wrote to the head of his bank who had been on holiday in Portugal, on 18 August: ‘The way forward is to win or die killing rogues. The army wants to destroy by the roots the noxious plant that was consuming Spain. And I think they’re going to do it.’ On 22 August, he wrote approvingly: ‘Lots more shootings, union leaders, schoolteachers, small-town officials and doctors are going down by the dozen.’143 The following day, the American poet and novelist Baroness de Zglinitzki, a firm rebel supporter, commented with less enthusiasm that the executions were ‘increasing at a rate that alarmed and sickened all thinking people’.144
The victims referred to by Bérriz included the brilliant journalist and editor of the Republican daily El Defensor, Constantino Ruiz Carnero. In its pages, he had satirized Ruiz Alonso as the honorary worker who lived in considerable luxury and wore silk pyjamas. Ruiz Carnero had been Mayor for two weeks after the Popular Front election in February 1932.145 Seven other men who had been Republican mayors, including the present incumbent, Lorca’s brother-in-law Dr Manuel Fernández-Montesinos, were also shot. Ten professors of the University, five of whom had protested about Falangist disorders, were shot. Among them was the thirty-two-year-old rector of the University, the brilliant Arabist Salvador Vila Hernández, a close friend of the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. Vila’s arrest in Salamanca on 7 October was the last straw that led to Unamuno’s famous ‘you will win but you will not convince’ (‘venceréis pero no convenceréis’) speech. Vila’s German Jewish wife, Gerda Leimdörfer, was arrested with him and taken to Granada. He was shot on 22 October, but the intervention of the distinguished composer Manuel de Falla managed to save Gerda’s life only after she had been forcibly baptized. Gerda Leimdörfer’s parents, Jewish refugees, were deported to Nazi Germany. A friend of both Vila and Lorca, the architect Alfonso Rodríguez Orgaz, went into hiding and the Falange arrested his girlfriend, Gretel Adler, to use as bait to catch him. When this did not work, she was murdered. On 26 November, Unamuno wrote in his notebook: ‘In Granada, poor Salvador Vila has been shot by the Falangists, degenerate Andalusians with the passions of syphilitic perverts and frustrated eunuchs.’146
The outrages in Granada were seen by the local bourgeoisie as acceptable because they were perceived as less appalling than the atrocities that they were told were being committed by the Republicans elsewhere. Their perception of events elsewhere was fed by Queipo de Llano’s broadcasts. Thus they included the notion that people were flung from the cliff at Ronda, that men were impaled alive on stakes then forced to watch as their wives and daughters ‘were first raped before their eyes, then drenched with petrol and burned alive’, that nuns were exposed naked in the shop windows at Antequera, that priests had their stomachs cut open and filled with quicklime, that nuns were raped and priests tortured on the streets of Barcelona, that the sea around Málaga was full of the headless bodies of all those who were not anarchists, that in Madrid ‘famous doctors, lawyers, men of science and letters, actors and artists’ were being shot as fast as they could be caught. Baroness de Zglinitzki believed Queipo’s broadcasts to the extent of writing that the Republican government, ‘composed of anarchists, jailbirds and Russians, were determined to exterminate every man of brains and outstanding ability in Spain’.147
Republican Málaga was a rich source of Queipo’s horror stories. After sustained bombing raids by Italian aircraft and bombardment by rebel warships, on Monday 8 February 1937 the city was occupied by columns of rebel and Italian troops.148 For months, Queipo had been threatening in broadcasts and in leaflets dropped on the city to inflict bloody revenge for the repression during the seven months that Málaga had been in the hands of the CNT–FAI-dominated Public Safety Committee.149 His threats merely confirmed the spine-chilling tales brought by thousands of refugees about the savagery unleashed by the Regulares and the Legion when they entered their pueblos in Cádiz, Seville, Córdoba and Granada. The collapse of Antequera on 12 August and of Ronda on 17 September had seen Málaga flooded by desperate and hungry women, children and old people. With food scarce, many suffering serious illness, they had to be accommodated in the Cathedral and other churches as part of a huge relief operation mounted by the parties of the left. This humanitarian effort was presented by the occupiers as vicious desecration and uncontrolled anti-clericalism.150
Despite the ease of the victory and the lack of resistance encountered, Queipo showed no mercy. Civilians were not allowed to enter the city for a week while hundreds of Republicans were shot on the basis of denunciations. Many rightists emerged claiming that they had escaped death at the hands of the ‘reds’ only because they had not had time to kill them. One of Queipo de Llano’s officials commented sarcastically: ‘In seven months, the Reds didn’t have enough time. Seven days is more than enough for us. They really are suckers.’151
Thousands of arrests were made. As the prisons overflowed, concentration camps had to be opened at Torremolinos and Alhaurín el Grande. After the immediate slaughter, the repression was organized by the newly appointed Civil Governor, Captain Francisco García Alted, a Civil Guard and Falangist. It was implemented by Colonel Bohórquez, under the overall jurisdiction of General Felipe Acedo Colunga, chief prosecutor of the Army of Occupation, as the rebel forces now called themselves. Trials were no longer justified by the application of the edict of martial law but rather on the pseudo-legal basis of ‘urgent summary courts martial’. The scale of the repression carried out is revealed by a report by Bohórquez in April 1937. In the seven weeks following the capture of Málaga, 3,401 people had been tried of whom 1,574 had been executed. In order to try so many people in such a short time, a large team of prosecutors had been brought from Seville. The trials, often of several people at once, provided no facilities for the accused’s defence and rarely lasted for more than a few minutes.152
Even before the occupiers began the executions, tens of thousands of terrified refugees fled via the only possible escape route, the 109 miles along the coast road to Almería. Their flight was spontaneous and they had no military protection. They were shelled from the sea by the guns of the warships Cervera and Baleares, bombed from the air and then machine-gunned by the pursuing Italian units. The scale of the repression inside the fallen city explained why they were ready to run the gauntlet. Along the roughly surfaced road, littered with corpses and the wounded, terrified people trudged, without food or water. Dead
mothers were seen, their babies still suckling at their breasts. There were children dead and others lost in the confusion as their many families frantically tried to find them.153
The reports of numerous eyewitnesses, including Lawrence Fernsworth, the correspondent of The Times, made it impossible for rebel supporters to deny one of the most horrendous atrocities perpetrated against Republican civilians. It has been calculated that there were more than 100,000 on the road, some with nothing, others carrying kitchen utensils and bedding. It is impossible to know accurately but the death toll seems to have been over three thousand. The Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, his assistant Hazen Size and his English driver, the future novelist T. C. Worsley, shuttled back and forth day and night for three days, carrying as many as they could. Bethune described old people giving up and lying down by the roadside to die and ‘children without shoes, their feet swollen to twice their size crying helplessly from pain, hunger and fatigue’. Worsley wrote harrowingly of what he saw:
The refugees still filled the road and the further we got the worse was their condition. A few of them were wearing rubber shoes, but most feet were bound round with rags, many were bare, nearly all were bleeding. There were seventy miles of people desperate with hunger and exhaustion and still the streams showed no signs of diminishing … We decided to fill the lorry with kids. Instantly we were the centre of a mob of raving shouting people, entreating and begging, at this sudden miraculous apparition. The scene was fantastic, of the shouting faces of the women holding up naked babies above their heads, pleading, crying and sobbing with gratitude or disappointment.154
Their arrival brought horror and confusion to Almería. It was also greeted by a major bombing raid which deliberately targeted the centre of the town where the exhausted refugees thronged the streets. The bombing of the refugees on the road and in the streets of Almería was a symbol of what ‘liberation’ by the rebels really meant.
6
Mola’s Terror: The Purging of Navarre, Galicia, Castile and León
In his proclamation of martial law in Pamplona on 19 July 1936, Mola declared: ‘Re-establishing the principle of authority demands unavoidably that punishments be exemplary in terms of both their severity and the speed with which they will be carried out, without doubt or hesitation.’1 Shortly afterwards, he called a meeting of the mayors of the province of Navarre and told them: ‘It is necessary to spread terror. We have to create the impression of mastery, eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do. There can be no cowardice. If we vacillate one moment and fail to proceed with the greatest determination, we will not win. Anyone who helps or hides a communist or a supporter of the Popular Front will be shot.’2
Such instructions imply a degree of insecurity on the part of the conspirators desperate to impose control as soon as possible before mass resistance to the coup developed. Thus over half of the executions carried out by the rebels between 18 July 1936 and 1945 took place in the first three months after their seizure of power in each area. Both the short-and long-term objectives of the terror would be more easily accomplished in conservative smallholding areas such as Galicia, Old Castile and Navarre. Terror was the chosen method for the annihilation of everything that the Republic signified, whether specific challenges to the privileges of landowners, industrialists, the clerics and soldiers or a general rejection of subservience by rural and urban workers and, most irksome for the right, women. This was what Sanjurjo, Franco, Gil Robles, Onésimo Redondo and others meant when they railed against the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik threat of ‘Africanization’. The rhetoric of the need to eradicate such foreign poisons, which always had clerical advocates like Tusquets and Castro de Albarrán, would soon be taken up by the majority of the Church hierarchy. At the beginning of September, José Álvarez Miranda, the Bishop of León, called the Catholic faithful to join the war against ‘Soviet Jewish–Masonic laicism’.3
On 31 July, after being told that the French press had suggested that Prieto had been appointed to negotiate with the rebels, Mola exploded: ‘Negotiate? Never! This war can end only with the extermination of the enemies of Spain.’ Again on 9 August, he boasted that his father, who was a crack shot with a rifle, used his wife for his frequent imitations of William Tell. The unfortunate woman was made to balance pieces of fruit on her head and hold others in her hand as targets for her husband to show off his skill. Mola told his secretary, José María Iribarren, that ‘A war of this kind has to end with the domination of one side and the total extermination of the defeated. They’ve killed one of my brothers but they’ll pay for it.’4 This was a reference to his brother Ramón, who had committed suicide when the rising failed.
In the areas of Spain where the military coup met little or no resistance, the war aims of the rebels were starkly revealed. The execution of trade unionists, members of left-wing parties, elected municipal officials, Republican functionaries, schoolteachers and Freemasons, who had committed no crimes, have been called ‘preventive assassinations’. Or, as the commander of the Civil Guard in Cáceres defined it: ‘the sweeping purge of undesirables’.5
In Navarre, Álava, the eight provinces of Old Castile, the three of León, the four of Galicia, two-thirds of Zaragoza and virtually all of Cáceres, the coup was successful within hours or days. In these predominantly right-wing, Catholic areas, the excuses used for the slaughter in Andalusia and Badajoz – alleged left-wing atrocities or a threatened Communist take-over – were not plausible. Essentially, the ‘crime’ of those executed was to have voted for the Popular Front, or to have challenged their own subordination as workers or as women.6
The intention of the rebels was to uproot the entire progressive culture of the Republic. This was made clear in a series of draft decrees prepared by Mola for the Unión Militar Española. ‘It is a conclusively demonstrated lesson of history that peoples fall into decadence, misery and ruin when their governments are infiltrated by parliamentary democratic systems, inspired by the erroneous doctrines of Jews, Freemasons, anarchists and Marxists … All those who oppose the victory of the Movement to save Spain will be shot after summary judgement as miserable assassins of our sacred Fatherland.’ The destruction of the Republic by armed violence was justified by the claim that it was illegitimate, based on electoral falsification, and that its political leaders were thieving parasites who had brought only anarchy and crime.7
The first step towards establishing a military dictatorship was the establishment of a National Defence Junta. A thin legal veneer was provided by its first decree, on 24 July 1936, which claimed ‘full state powers’, something repeated in subsequent decrees. Decree no. 37 of 14 August declared that the Republic was guilty of armed rebellion against the legitimate government of the Junta. On 28 July, an edict of martial law placed military law above civil law across the entire territory in the hands of the rebels. It thereby unified the various edicts issued in different places which had seen the military arbitrarily assume the right to punish opposition to its actions with summary execution. All those who supported the legitimate Republic either morally or by taking up arms were declared guilty of military rebellion, liable to court martial and subject to the death penalty or long jail terms. This was justified by the sophistry that the rebels’ own military rebellion was carried out in the name of ‘the highest moral and spiritual values of religion and the Fatherland, threatened by the perversity of the pseudo-politicians in the pay of the triple Judaeo-Masonic lie: Liberalism, Marxism and Separatism. That is why the term military rebellion can be applied only to the red camp. Regarding our side, we must speak of Holy Rebellion.’8 Thus the rebels always referred to themselves as ‘nacionales’ (usually translated as ‘Nationalists’), implying that the Republicans were somehow not Spanish and therefore had to be annihilated as foreign invaders.
In some cases, such as Segovia, the local military authorities went further, referring to ‘the Madrid government, which since 19 July has been in armed rebellion against th
e Army, which found itself obliged to assume the responsibility of power to prevent chaos taking hold of the country’.9 A decree of 31 August 1936 permitted any officer to be a judge, prosecutor or defender in a trial. Officers were thus obliged to fight the enemy on the battlefield and also in the courtroom, where the enemy had even less opportunity to fight back. So wide was the range of the offences deemed to be military rebellion that, in 1937, a handbook was issued to assist officers in the conduct of ‘trials’. The author, a military lawyer, recognized that ‘in view of the number of proceedings in progress, the consequence of the glorious deeds with which our army, valiantly supported by the true Spanish people, is astounding the world, those who have to act in such trials are facing many difficulties’.10
On 20 July, Mola was given the news that a lorry full of Republicans fleeing the Navarrese capital Pamplona had been captured on the road to Bilbao. Without hesitation, he barked into the telephone: ‘Shoot them immediately by the roadside!’ Aware of the deathly hush that this outburst had provoked, Mola had second thoughts and instructed his aide to rescind the order, saying to the rest of the room: ‘Just so you can see that even in such serious times, I am not as bloodthirsty as the left thinks.’ At that, one of the officers present said: ‘General, let us not regret being too soft.’ Three weeks later, on 14 August, Mola would be heard saying, ‘A year ago, I would have trembled at having to authorize a firing squad. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep for the sorrow of it. Now, I can sign three or four every day without batting an eyelid.’11
