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

by Paul Preston

  The situation in the neighbouring province of León was almost identical. There was little resistance against the coup but considerable repression, especially in the mining districts in the north and in the three other principal towns, Ponferrada near the border with Ourense, and La Bañeza and Astorga towards the border with Zamora.87 Despite early enthusiasm for the coup, the Bishop of León, Monsignor José Álvarez Miranda, was so appalled by the scale of killing that he began to intercede with the local military on behalf of some of the prisoners, including Manuel Santamaría Andrés, Professor of Literature at the Instituto de León. Santamaría was imprisoned at the end of July, in the notorious San Marcos prison, simply because he was a prominent member of Azaña’s Izquierda Republicana party. On 4 September, along with the Civil Governor and twenty-nine other Republicans, he was sentenced to death. His wife and family went to Burgos and successfully interceded for his sentence to be commuted to imprisonment. The news of this concession reached León before they did and when they returned, they were met with a hail of bullets. The commutation was revoked in response to protests by the military authorities. All thirty-one were shot on 21 November 1936. The Bishop was fined the enormous sum of 10,000 pesetas for his temerity in questioning a military tribunal.88

  In Zamora, the coup triumphed easily, although railway workers maintained a resistance movement which would continue until the late 1940s. In both the provincial capital and the other principal town, Toro, the prisons were soon overflowing. Beatings, torture and mutilation and the rape of female prisoners were frequent. As elsewhere, the targets were Socialists, trade unionists, Republican officials and schoolteachers. Local historians calculate that more than 1,330 people were murdered in the province. Between 31 July 1936 and 15 January 1937, a total of 875 bodies were buried in the cemetery of San Atilano, registered simply as ‘found dead’ or ‘executed after sentence’.89

  Perhaps the most extreme example of the impact on the innocent of the repression in Zamora, as in so many places in Castile and León, was that of Amparo Barayón, the wife of Ramón J. Sender, world-famous novelist and anarchist sympathizer. Sender and his wife and two children were on holiday in San Rafael in Segovia at the beginning of the war. He decided to return to Madrid and told Amparo to take the children to her native city of Zamora where he was sure they would be safe. In fact, on 28 August 1936, she was imprisoned along with her seven-month-old daughter, Andrea, after protesting to the Military Governor that her brother Antonio had been murdered earlier the same day. This thirty-two-year-old mother, who had committed no crime and was barely active in politics, was mistreated and eventually executed on 11 October. Her crime was to be a modern, independent woman, loathed because she had escaped the stultifying bigotry of Zamora and had children with a man to whom she was married only in a civil ceremony.

  Amparo was not alone in her suffering. Kept in below-zero temperatures, without bedding, other mothers saw their babies die because, themselves deprived of food and medicines, they had no milk to breast-feed them. One of the policemen who arrested Amparo told her that ‘red women have no rights’ and ‘you should have thought of this before having children’. Another prisoner, Pilar Fidalgo Carasa, had been arrested in Benavente because her husband, José Almoína, was secretary of the local branch of the PSOE. Only eight hours before her detention and transport to Zamora, she had given birth to a baby girl. In the prison, she was forced to climb a steep staircase many times each day in order to be interrogated. This provoked a life-threatening haemorrhage. The prison doctor, Pedro Almendral, was called. He refused to prescribe anything either for Pilar or for her baby and told her that the best cure for her was death. Numerous young women were raped before being murdered.90

  Burgos, where there had been relatively little social conflict before the war, fell immediately to the rebels. In the provincial capital, the Republican authorities were detained immediately, among them the Civil Governor and the General in command of the military region, Domingo Batet Maestre. As a Catalan and for his moderation in repressing the rebellion of the Generalitat in October 1934, Batet was a marked man. The extreme centralist right despised him because he avoided the exemplary slaughter that they considered appropriate for use against the Catalans. When he refused to join the rising, he was arrested. Because of their long-standing friendship, Mola prevented his immediate execution. However, Franco intervened in Batet’s subsequent trial to ensure that he was sentenced to death and executed.91

  Burgos saw around four hundred extra-judicial murders between August and October 1936 and a further one thousand in the wider province. Overall, in Burgos, there were more than 1,700 people either murdered by the rebels or who died of mistreatment in the massively overcrowded prisons. The old prison of Santa Águeda had been built for two hundred but held nearly one thousand; the central Penal de Burgos, built for nine hundred, held three thousand prisoners. Those awaiting execution were union leaders, Republican officials, schoolteachers and those who had voted for the Popular Front. These included children and women, some pregnant, shot on the bizarre grounds of ‘right of representation’ which meant that they were executed in substitution for their husbands who could not be found. Another 5,500 people suffered beatings, torture and/or imprisonment. By 2007, some 550 bodies had been exhumed from unmarked graves.92

  Throughout most of Old Castile, the violence was carried out by groups of recently recruited Falangists and the younger members of other right-wing groups, students, the younger sons and permanent employees of landowners. There, as elsewhere, men joined for money, to curry favour with the powerful or to blur a left-wing past. Just as in the Republican zone, there were criminal elements that enjoyed the grisly opportunities for violence and rape.93 They were egged on and often financed by landowners and helped with denunciations and information by local villagers, either out of fear or because they had in some way felt threatened by Republican legislation. With vehicles and weapons provided by the military authorities, legitimized by the Church, these groups acted with impunity. In the minds of the local conservative establishment, which included poor small farmers as well as rich landowners, the enemies were those who had disturbed the traditional structure. That meant the trade unionists who had encouraged landless labourers to negotiate for better wages and working conditions, the left-wing municipal officials who had supported them or the schoolteachers who had disseminated subversive and secular ideas that persuaded the poor to question the established order. Those who, to a large extent, formed the social basis of Republicanism were among the first targets of the repression.94

  Although the rising succeeded very quickly in Ávila, the repression was severe. By the early hours of the morning of 19 July, the provincial capital was in the hands of the Civil Guard, the Popular Front authorities had been detained and Onésimo Redondo and eighteen of his followers had been released from the provincial prison. The Civil Governor, the Republican writer and friend of Azaña, Manuel Ciges Aparicio, was shot on 4 August. There was greater resistance in the small towns and villages. Columns of Civil Guards, soldiers and Falangists from the provincial capital quickly took Navalperal on 21 July and Las Navas the following day. Then, the arrival of a militia column from Madrid under Lieutenant Colonel Julio Mangada saw various villages change hands over the following weeks. However, when, in the course of August, they were occupied by rebel forces, the repression was especially severe. This was in no small part the consequence of the arrival from Salamanca of the column led by the notorious Civil Guard Lisardo Doval. The death of Onésimo Redondo at the village of Labajos in a clash between Falangists and Mangada’s men would also contribute to the ferocity of the repression in Ávila. Throughout the ensuing months and for long afterwards, corpses would be found on country roads. Well over six hundred people were executed in the province.95

  In the course of the operations in Ávila, the village of Peguerinos was captured on 30 August by a unit of Regulares accompanied by Falangists. The atrocities that they committed gained p
articular notoriety. Two Republican nurses insisted on staying to look after the wounded in an improvised field hospital set up in the village church. The hospital was shelled, the wounded bayoneted and the nurses and a number of other women were raped by the Moors and Falangists. Houses were looted and many set on fire. When the village was retaken, the two nurses and a fourteen-year-old girl who had also been sexually assaulted were discovered in a state of collapse.96

  For the families of those executed or murdered, the suffering did not end with the loss of their menfolk. Gruesome details of the executions would reach them from members of the squads, who often boasted publicly of killing a particular individual. They would recount with relish how prisoners had begged for water or how fear had made them lose control of their bowels. Frequently, the surviving families of executed left-wingers were subjected to punitive fines. A notable case was that of Eduardo Aparicio Fernández, a bank manager in Ciudad Rodrigo and a man of broadly liberal views. He was arrested on 15 December 1936, along with seven others. In the early hours of the morning of the next day, all eight were taken from their cells, on the basis of an order for their release from the local military commander. They were brought to a nearby estate, shot and buried in a shallow grave. Eduardo Aparicio’s family was given permission for him to be buried in the cemetery in Béjar on 24 December. At the end of the war, twenty-eight months after his death, Eduardo Aparicio was called for trial on a charge of political responsibilities. The judge demanded that his widow reveal where he was since he had been ‘released’ from prison on 15 December 1936. The accusations against him were that he had worn a red tie, had announced the news of Calvo Sotelo’s murder in the Ciudad Rodrigo Casino and was a member of the Socialist Party. The third charge was demonstrably untrue. On the basis of the first two, the deceased was sentenced to a fine of 500 pesetas, which had to be paid by his widow.97

  For all families, the death of a loved one without proper burial and ritual was traumatic. To be able to visit a grave, leave flowers or meditate permits some reconciliation with the fact of loss. This was denied to almost all the families of those killed in the repression. The theft of the dignity of the dead caused intense pain. In the deeply Catholic areas, like Castile and Navarre, the experience was especially painful. Those brought up there, Catholics practising or not, believed that, after death, the body would be buried and the soul pass on to heaven, purgatory or hell. Most Catholics would assume that their loved ones would go to purgatory, the halfway house, where they would purge their sins in order to continue on to heaven. Friends and relatives on earth could hasten this process by prayer, lighting candles in church, or paying for Masses to be said. In Castile, there even existed fraternities dedicated to praying for the dead. All such spiritual comfort was denied to the families of Catholics killed in the repression. For the families of all the victims, Catholic or not, mourning and the support of their community were replaced by insult, humiliation, threats and economic hardship.

  To some extent, this was just an organic part of the process as hatred escalated. However, it also had an official dimension. Within days of the uprising succeeding, all Civil Governors and senior police officials who had not been totally committed to the uprising were removed from their posts. The edict of 28 July, whereby martial law was declared in all of Spain by the rebel Junta de Defensa, ratified all the previous local impositions of martial law. It stated that ‘Any functionaries, authorities or corporations that do not lend the immediate aid demanded either by my authority or by my subordinates for the re-establishment of order or the implementation of the provisions of this edict, will be immediately suspended from their positions, without prejudice to the corresponding criminal proceedings against them which will be pursued by the wartime authorities.’98 Among those immediately hit were schoolteachers. Large numbers were sacked and many jailed. The charges against them were often as trivial as to have worn a red tie, to have been a reader of a Republican newspaper or to have been a Freemason, an atheist or an anti-fascist.99

  From his first headquarters in Burgos, Mola made a number of radio broadcasts in all of which he underlined his commitment to merciless continuation of the repression. On 31 July, on Radio Pamplona, he declared: ‘I could take advantage of our present favourable circumstances to offer the enemy some negotiated settlement; but I do not want to. I want to defeat them to impose my, and your, will upon them and to annihilate them. I want Marxism and the red flag of Communism to be remembered in history as a nightmare but as a nightmare that has been washed clean by the blood of patriots.’100 On 15 August, speaking on Radio Castilla of Burgos, he stated: ‘There will be no surrender nor anything other than a crushing and definitive victory.’101 On 28 January 1937, he spoke on Radio Nacional from Salamanca. After denying categorically that there were any German volunteers fighting with the rebels, he went on to denounce the Republic’s leaders as ‘traitors, arsonists, murderers and bank-robbers’.102

  On 20 August, Mola moved his headquarters to the town hall in Valladolid, where he would remain for two months. While there, he went to Salamanca to receive a visit from Colonel Juan Yagüe, who was congratulated for the bloodshed in Badajoz. When it was time for Yagüe to leave, a cheering crowd gathered around his convoy of cars. Mola embraced him and called him ‘my favourite pupil’.103

  Although Yagüe was not involved, an Africanista ferocity was unleashed on Galicia. Even in comparison with the provinces of Old Castile, the repression throughout Galicia was massively disproportionate to the limited scale of resistance.104 Indeed, the repression there was comparable to that in Navarre and La Rioja, where the presence of militant Carlism constituted something of an explanation. In Galicia, however, albeit a highly conservative region, the extreme right was not prominent before the military coup. In the course of 20 July, the rebels took over the region. The only places where there was any significant resistance were A Coruña, Vigo and Ferrol, but it was sporadic and had been crushed well before the end of the month. In Vigo, when the edict of martial law was read out, the crowd protested and twenty-seven people died when troops opened fire.105

  The first few days after the coup saw relatively few deaths, just over one hundred. Thereafter the pace of executions increased with more than 2,500 in the five months from 1 August to the end of December. Recent research identified the total number of executions in Galicia as 4,560, including seventy-nine women. Of these 836 were the result of trials; the rest were extra-judicial murders. The worst of the repression was in A Coruña with nearly 1,600 executions and in Pontevedra with nearly 1,700. In these two Atlantic provinces, the Popular Front had won, albeit with a predominance of moderate left-of-centre Republican deputies. In Lugo, where the centre party had won, there were 418 deaths, of which two-thirds were the victims of extra-judicial murders. In Orense, where Renovación Española and the CEDA triumphed, there were 569.106 The experience of Galicia shows that, as in Castile, the rebels aimed not just to defeat the left but to eradicate an ideal and to terrorize the population into subservience.

  Between February and July 1936, throughout Galicia there had been intense civilian collaboration with the military conspirators. In the beautiful medieval Cathedral city of Santiago de Compostela, members of the JAP and the Falange were trained in military barracks and, in Orense, local elements of Renovación Española were in close contact with the Civil Guard. In Galicia, in comparison with most of Spain, there was relatively little disorder other than some fatal street fights between Falangists and Socialists in Santiago, Vigo, Ourense and Ferrol. In every province, when news of the rebellion arrived, the Republican authorities were confident, indeed complacent. The workers’ unions, especially the CNT, tried to organize resistance, but the Civil Governors, fearful of revolution, refused to distribute arms. In the bustling port of A Coruña, the Governor, the twenty-six-year-old law professor Francisco Pérez Carballo, obeying messages from Madrid to maintain calm, put his confidence in the Civil Guard. He was also swayed by the fact that the head of the
Galician Military Region (VIII), General Enrique Salcedo Molinuevo, was not a partisan of the coup. When he refused to declare martial law without news from his friend Sanjurjo, Salcedo was arrested and eventually executed by the conspirators, along with the other key commanders, the Military Governor of A Coruña and the commander of the naval arsenal in Ferrol, both of whom remained loyal. Pérez Carballo was forced to surrender after an artillery bombardment of the Civil Governor’s building. His calls for calm had persuaded the majority of local authorities throughout the province to assume that a general strike would be enough to foil the coup.107

  Accordingly, resistance was minimal and in inverse proportion to the ferocity of the repression. The establishment of martial law in A Coruña prompted resistance in the naval base at Ferrol. A mutiny by sailors on the warships España and Cervera was crushed. Both the town hall and the Casa del Pueblo surrendered after artillery bombardment and false promises that there would be no reprisals. On 26 July, the executions began of the sailors who had opposed the rising. On 3 August, the Admiral in charge of the base was tried and sentenced to death for the ‘offence of abandoning his post’. Captain Victoriano Suances of the Civil Guard, who was put in charge of public order, supervised a particularly savage repression, with Falangist squads given free rein to eliminate Republicans.108

  Columns of troops and Civil Guards moved out from A Coruña and Ferrol to organize the ‘pacification’ of the towns and villages of the province. Although there were few examples of church-burnings in Galicia, in Betanzos retreating anarchists set fire to the Convento de San Francisco. In consequence, the repression was all the more intense. In Curtis, to the east of A Coruña, sporadic resistance was smashed with ferocity. Throughout the province, the Falange suddenly found itself overflowing with new recruits from among the unemployed and petty criminals.109