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

by Paul Preston

  It was typical of Martín Veloz’s volatile personality that he found no difficulty in combining acts of cruelty against the many with benevolent acts of clemency for friends. One example was that of José Delgado Romero, a Republican and the village doctor of El Pedroso, whom he saved from execution by Falangists. Others were the distinguished liberal politician Filiberto Villalobos and the Socialist Manuel Frutos.64 He helped some acquaintances to reach the Portuguese frontier or the Republican lines, allegedly by dressing them as women. Others he hid on his estate. He was even reconciled to his lifelong enemy Miguel de Unamuno, allegedly paying him three visits during which he agreed with the philosopher’s denunciations of the atrocities being perpetrated in the province. It was also claimed that he prevented a scheme by local Falangists to bury the remains of José Andrés y Manso under the entrance to Salamanca cemetery so that all who entered would walk on his grave.65 Nevertheless, the widow of Andrés y Manso made reference to Veloz ‘with his Falangist hordes, razing to the ground the humble homes of the Salamanca countryside’. His column was involved in the ferocious repression in Cantalpino and El Pedroso. On 24 August, twenty-two men and one woman were murdered in Cantalpino, numerous women were raped and nearly one hundred women forced to parade through the village with their heads shaved.66 Martín Veloz died of illness in Salamanca on 12 March 1938.67

  The Falangist Ángel Alcázar de Velasco was struck by the dreadful silence of the peasants who brought their produce to market in Salamanca. ‘You could see that they had neither bread nor justice. Almost all those villagers in their flat berets were in mourning and yet the black they wore was not for anyone killed at the front.’ They brought their products either on donkeys or on their own backs to a sordid back-street market far from the gloating glances of the landowners sitting with army officers at the terraces of the cafés in the squares: ‘Placing their wares on the floor of a little market-place that was like a medieval souk, they worked in silence, in the silence of terror. They worked with that fear which inundates the very soul, terrified that to annoy the boastful victors in the slightest would mean being accused of opposing the regime (and everybody knew that any accusation meant inevitable captivity, and sometimes mysteriously prolonged captivity).’68

  Any guilt that might have been felt by the killers anywhere in rebel Spain was assuaged by the justifications provided by the senior clergy. In mid-August, Aniceto de Castro Albarrán, the senior canon of Salamanca Cathedral, declared on Radio Nacional:

  Ah! When one knows for certain that to kill and to die is to do what God wishes, the hand does not waver when firing a rifle or pistol, nor does the heart tremble when facing death. Is it God’s will? Is it God’s will that, if necessary, I should die and, if necessary, that I should kill? Is this a holy war or a miserable military coup? The brave men who today are rebels are the men of the deepest religious spirit, the soldiers who believe in God and in the Fatherland, young men who take communion daily. Our battle cry will be that of the crusaders: It is God’s will. Long live Catholic Spain! Up with the Spain of Isabel la Católica!69

  The Bishop of Ávila issued instructions to his diocesan priests which suggest complicity in the execution of prisoners without trial: ‘When dealing with one of the frequent and deplorable cases of the unexpected discovery in the countryside of the corpse of a person apparently of revolutionary sympathies, but without official confirmation of them having been condemned to death by the legitimate authorities, then simply record that “the corpse appeared in the countryside … and was given ecclesiastical burial”. However, parish priests must make sure to avoid any suggestion that could reveal the author or the cause of this tragic death.’70 Certificates of good conduct issued by priests could save a life. The refusal by a priest to certify that someone was a practising Catholic was the equivalent of a denunciation. Those priests who did sign certificates to save a parishioner from death or imprisonment were chastised by their superiors. The Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela noted that scandal was provoked by such acts of Christian charity. He ordered the priests of his diocese not to sign certificates for anyone who belonged to ‘anti-Christian Marxist societies’. All others should be considered ‘without timidity or hesitations born of humane considerations’.71

  The Bishop of Salamanca, Monsignor Enrique Plá y Deniel, in a celebrated pastoral letter, declared the military rebellion to be a religious crusade. Issued on 28 September, his text, ‘The Two Cities’, based on St Augustine’s notion of the cities of God and of the Devil, thundered that ‘Communists and Anarchists are sons of Cain, fratricides, assassins of those whom they envy and martyr merely for cultivating virtue.’ In early 1942, Enrique Plá y Deniel became Archbishop of Toledo. In his farewell sermon in Salamanca Cathedral, he gave thanks that the city he was leaving had never suffered any violence at the hands of the ‘reds’. Accordingly, as Indalecio Prieto noted, the victims lost their lives simply for being Republicans or Socialists. José Sánchez Gómez, the popular bullfight critic of the local newspaper El Adelanto, was executed for the crime of being a friend of Indalecio Prieto.72

  The first victims in Salamanca, as elsewhere, were those who opposed the military coup and prominent local left-wing politicians or union leaders. Schoolteachers and university lecturers were favoured targets. The repression soon embraced those who had helped the Popular Front, by distributing leaflets or by acting as stewards in meetings. In some cases, those who had supported centrist groups were put on trial, accused of taking votes away from the right. The victims, as in so many places, had been denounced by those who coveted their property or their womenfolk. This was especially the case with those who owned businesses. When trials became the norm, the victims who had money were frequently blackmailed by those named as their defenders. In fact, the ‘defenders’ rarely did more than act as court reporters. Nevertheless, there was a racket run by Lieutenant Marciano Díez Solís. The accused was told that a punitive sentence awaited him but that Díez Solís could get it reduced for a price. Díez Solís was finally stopped, not for extorting money, but because it was discovered that he was homosexual and had tried to blackmail some of his victims into having sex with him.73

  The prevailing mentality among the rebel military authorities was revealed during an exchange in General Mola’s headquarters in Burgos on 7 August 1936 between the recently appointed Provincial Governor, Lieutenant Colonel Marcelino Gavilán Almuzara, and the renegade Republican lawyer Joaquín del Moral. Del Moral asserted that ‘Spain is the country where cowardice wears the nicest clothes. Fear in Spain is dressed up as resolving conflict, tolerance of the differences between people, coexistence and formulas. No one dared face up to the fundamental problems of the Fatherland.’ Gavilán agreed, saying: ‘we must get rid of all that drivel about the Rights of Man, humanitarianism, philanthropy and other Masonic clichés’. A lively conversation followed on the need to exterminate in Madrid ‘tram workers, policemen, telegraph-operators and concierges’. One of those present suggested that the notice in apartment buildings that read ‘Speak to the concierge before entering’ should be changed to ‘Kill the concierge before entering’.74

  Joaquín del Moral was perhaps typical of those who manifested an extreme hatred of the left in order to cover up their own short-lived Republican past. A lawyer, he had been a Freemason and, after the fall of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, had joined a Republican party. He wrote virulent articles against the monarchy, but never achieved political office. In consequence, deeply embittered and blaming his failure on what he assumed to be electoral fraud, he turned against the Republic and wrote poisonous diatribes against those more successful than himself. Prieto was ‘the plutocrat’, Azaña ‘the cave-dweller’ and Francesc Macià ‘the paranoid old grandfather’. Those who held more than one paid position in the government were ‘illiterate parasites’. Suspected of complicity in the preparation of the Sanjurjada in 1932, Del Moral had been arrested in Bilbao. He was retained as defence lawyer by four of the military conspira
tors. He then wrote a book applauding the Sanjurjo coup, denouncing the trial and imprisonment of the ringleaders as sadistic persecution and describing Azaña as an ignorant coward for his efforts to reform the army. Del Moral thereby clinched a relationship with the plotters of 1936. Documentary proof of this was found when his apartment in Madrid was searched in August that year by the militia group known as ‘Los Linces de la República’ (the lynxes of the Republic).75

  In July 1936, finding himself in Burgos, it had been easy for Del Moral to attach himself to Mola’s entourage. Having detailed knowledge of the Republican and Socialist movements, he assumed the task of selecting those for arrest and also of compiling lists of those to be seized from the prison in Burgos to be shot. He was notorious for his prurient enjoyment of the executions. Each morning, he would take groups of his friends to watch the condemned beg for mercy before being shot. General Cabanellas protested about these distasteful dawn excursions to Franco who, typically, just let Del Moral know about the complaints. Del Moral then wrote to Cabanellas in an effort to secure his patronage. The General told his own son: ‘I replied that I regretted ever having met him, that he has done nothing but damage, that I had learned with disgust of his passion for watching executions and of the pleasure he derived from producing misery and that I regarded him as a wretch.’ Cabanellas’s views were shared by Mola’s private secretary and by the Falangist Maximiano García Venero, who wrote of Del Moral’s ‘inhuman viciousness’.76

  Despite the distaste with which Del Moral was regarded by some, he was rewarded for his murderous zeal and soon found himself propelled ever further upwards. After Franco had been declared head of the rebel state on 1 October 1936, seven commissions, embryonic ministries, were set up under the governmental structure initially called the Junta Técnica. The second of these was the Justice Commission. Within it, over the next three weeks, various departments were set up, including the High Court of Military Justice and the Inspectorate of Prisons. Joaquín del Moral was made Inspector of Prisons.77

  The vindictiveness of the military high command and the senior clergy took its toll throughout most of Castile and León. The weakness of the working class in most of the region facilitated the rapid annihilation of opposition. In Soria, a profoundly conservative province whose capital was a town of only 10,098 inhabitants, three hundred local people were executed along with others brought from Guadalajara. Soria had seen no violence during the years of the Republic and there was no resistance to the military coup. The arrival of Requetés on 22 July was the trigger for the killing. The wives of those murdered were forced to sign documents stating that their husbands had simply disappeared.78 In neighbouring Segovia, there was also no resistance yet there were 217 illegal executions during the war and a further 175 as a result of sentences passed by military tribunals. Another 195 men died in prison.79

  All the local military forces in Segovia had long been committed to the coup. Unaware of this, the Civil Governor, Adolfo Chacón de la Mata, of the centrist Republican party Unión Republicana, informed representatives of the left-wing parties that he had full confidence in the local garrisons and refused to have arms distributed to the workers. At 10.00 a.m. on Sunday 19 July, Chacón de la Mata was arrested by army officers and Civil Guards. Half an hour later, martial law was declared. The main post, telephone and telegraph office, the town hall and the Casa del Pueblo were occupied by troops. The left, without leaders or weapons, and totally outnumbered, was unable to resist beyond some sporadic pacific strike action.80 Chacón de la Mata was tried in Valladolid on 13 October on charges of ‘military rebellion’, sentenced to death and shot on 5 December.

  In the wider province, there were strikes in the towns along the main railway line. Although largely unarmed, apart from a few hunting shotguns, local workers took advantage of the absence of the Civil Guard in the provincial capital to establish Popular Front Committees in their villages. However, when the Civil Guard returned, accompanied by Falangists and Japistas, they took over without a shot being fired. Leftists were disarmed and arrested. Many others, including municipal councillors and schoolteachers, and individuals who were neither left-wing nor politically active, were shot out of hand. Individuals who showed a lack of enthusiasm for the new authorities were forced to drink castor oil. In El Espinar to the south of the province, there were uneven clashes between Civil Guards and poorly armed workers. Of eighty-four workers involved, thirty-two were subsequently tried and shot. According to the Francoist authorities, there was soon almost total tranquillity in the province. Nevertheless, arrests continued of liberals and leftists who had remained confident that nothing would happen to them because they had done nothing.81

  In all cases, the terror – acts of robbery, torture, sexual violation and murder – was carried out by Falangists under the loose supervision of the new Civil Governor, a Civil Guard major. The military authorities provided institutional justification, turning a blind eye, giving permission or even issuing direct orders to murder individuals known, or merely assumed, to be supporters of the Republic. In Segovia, as in all of rebel Spain, the military recruited civilian vigilantes to carry out what one of the Falange’s leaders later described as ‘the dirty work’. Even after a town or village had been ‘purged’, killing continued on the basis of denunciations of those who had been imprisoned earlier or even to ‘celebrate’ some anniversary or other.82 In Segovia, it was recognized publicly that ‘mobile units of Falangists, under the direct orders of the Civil Governor, who has provided their itinerary, are moving around the province disarming Marxist elements’ and preventing any disturbance of public order. When San Rafael in the south of the province was taken, the prisoners shot included two seventeen-year-old girls. In Segovia itself, the bulk of the victims were workers and members of the liberal professions known to have liberal or progressive views.83

  The Casa del Pueblo of each town was looted and often requisitioned but first scoured for membership lists of left-wing parties or unions. Discovery of a name could lead to murder. Equally, Falangist groups executed people simply on the basis of accusations that they were Republicans, Freemasons, Marxists or simply opposed to the military coup. No judicial procedures were carried out to ascertain the validity of the accusations. Once arrested in a village, allegedly to enable them to make a statement before judicial authorities, some men were simply murdered en route to the provincial capital. Others were first taken to the local Falange headquarters, tortured, forced to drink castor oil and beaten. Frequent use was made of the ley de fugas, known locally as ‘the greyhound or rabbit race’. Men supposedly being transferred from one prison to another were set down from the truck transporting them and told that they were free to go. When they ran, they were shot in the back. Some of the killings were carried out by very young adolescents. There were cases of entire families being executed, usually with the children shot first in order to intensify the suffering of the parents. Bodies were generally left where they fell as part of the terror. Subsequently, letters were delivered to the homes of men already shot, demanding information as to their whereabouts or requiring them to present themselves for military service.84

  When the columns arrived, the landowners seized the opportunity to take revenge for Republican reforms. Labourers regarded as subversive were denounced. Individuals of little political significance were shot in several pueblos, such as Navas de Oro where Falangists murdered five individuals virtually at random. There, a cacique offered a huge sum of money to thugs to cut off the head of the left-wing Mayor. The sons of caciques, wearing recently acquired Falangist uniforms, were prominent in the repression. The Falange in Segovia swelled from a mere thirty members before 18 July to several hundred in a matter of months. Progressive country schoolmasters, believed to have poisoned the minds of the workers with liberal ideas, were a particular target in Segovia. In some places, the local villagers prevented the murder of the schoolteacher or some other well-liked Republican. The few towns where committees of the Popular
Front had been able to maintain power for a few days saw especially vicious repression, despite the fact that there had been no violence against, or even arrests of, right-wingers.85

  In Palencia, an equally conservative province where the resistance was minimal, it has been estimated by local historians that the total of those executed was around 1,500, or 0.72 per cent of the population. Among the executed were the Civil Governor, the Mayor and the miners and other leftists who had led a failed attempt to combat the coup in the provincial capital. They were accused of military rebellion. Mineworkers in the northern towns were the most numerous casualties in Palencia, although in more southerly towns like Carrión de los Condes, Astudillo and Osorno the repression was also fierce. Throughout the province, the number of people executed ranged from 1.1 to 3.3 per cent of the population. Mola’s edict of martial law was used to justify the repression. Those who did not hand over any arms in their possession within two hours were shot. Those who did were detained and executed.86