by Paul Preston
Despite the murder of clergy, including nearly three hundred female religious, the propaganda stories of naked nuns forced to dance in public and gang-raped by Republican militiamen were wild exaggerations. One celebrated post-war account, published under the name of Fray Justo Pérez de Urbel, the mitred Abbot of the monastery of the Valle de los Caídos, was entirely invented by his ghost writer, Carlos Luis Álvarez, a journalist who used the pseudonym ‘Cándido’.37 In 1936, Spain had just over 115,000 clergy, of whom about 45,000 were nuns, 15,000 monks and the remainder lay priests. The latest figure for the deaths of nuns in the war is 296, just over 1.3 per cent of the female clergy present in the Republican zone. This contrasts dramatically with the figures for male clergy killed, 2,365 monks and 4,184 secular priests – over 30 per cent of the monks and 18 per cent of the lay clergy in Republican territory.38
Although still shocking, the figures for confirmed sexual molestation are also extremely low, even taking into account the reluctance of victims to speak out. After exhaustive research, Montero Moreno concluded that, even if threatened, nuns were normally protected from sexual abuse, if not from death. Nuns belonging to orders devoted to social work such as the Little Sisters of the Poor were those most likely to escape any kind of persecution. The diocesan archivist of Barcelona, Father José Sanabre Sanromá, assembled details of all the female religious murdered. Almost all were killed in the first few days. Sanabre Sanromá made no mention of sexual crimes in the Barcelona dioceses. Those incidents that did take place, such as the sexual torture and murder of five nuns in the village of Riudarenes in Girona between 22 and 25 September, were the exception. The most frequently cited reason for this is the widespread male conviction that young women could have entered convents only as a result of coercion or deception. In contrast, male religious personnel were singled out for symbolic and often barbaric tortures which often involved sexual humiliation. This reflected burning resentment of the Church’s overwhelming privileges and its power to control everyday lives, especially those of women.39
Anti-clerical violence was firmly combated by key figures in the Generalitat, despite the enormous risks involved in doing so. Jaume Miravitlles, for instance, hid groups of priests and religious in the dressing rooms of Barcelona Football Club while they awaited passage out of Catalonia. Josep Maria Espanya, the Interior Minister, Joan Casanovas as both Prime Minister until late September and as President of the Catalan Parliament, and Ventura Gassol, the Conseller de Cultura, all made heroic efforts. Azaña commented in his notes: ‘Gassols has saved many priests. And the Archbishop.’40 This was a reference to Cardinal Francesc Vidal i Barraquer, the Archbishop of Tarragona. The Bishop of Girona was given an escort out of the city and sent to Italy and the Bishops of Tortosa, La Seu d’Urgell and Vic were also saved. In his report of 24 August, the Italian Consul, Carlo Bossi, noted the facilities granted by Josep Maria Espanya to ensure the evacuation of numerous religious communities including those of the Abbey of Montserrat. He noted that obstacles were placed on the issuing of passports by the head of the local police, who was from the PSUC. Nevertheless, he could report on 11 September that a further 996 religious personnel had been evacuated in Italian vessels.41
On 20 July, the delegate of the Generalitat in Tarragona urged Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer to abandon the episcopal palace, but he rejected the advice. However, as the city’s churches began to go up in smoke, he agreed that the palace and the nearby seminary should be converted into a military hospital. A large group of heavily armed anarchists arrived from Barcelona on the afternoon of 21 July. They released all the common criminals from the city’s prison, then looted and set fire to first the monastery of Santa Clara, then the contiguous convent and orphanage run by the Barefoot Carmelites. Ordinary citizens stopped them burning the libraries of the churches. Still the Cardinal refused to move. Finally, he agreed to leave when he was told that, if he delayed any further, he could be got out only at the cost of considerable bloodshed. On 21 July, he took refuge in the Monastery of Poblet in the interior halfway to Lleida. An anarchist patrol from Hospitalet in the south of Barcelona appeared and at gunpoint forced him to go with them. They were driving towards Hospitalet so that he could be put on trial when their car ran out of petrol. A unit of Assault Guards arrived and freed him. He was taken to Barcelona where the Generalitat arranged with Carlo Bossi for him to go into exile in Italy.42
Despite the rescue of Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer, eighty-six members of the clergy, fifty-eight secular priests and twenty-eight religious were murdered in the provincial capital of Tarragona between 23 July and 22 December, when the repression was brought under control. One-third of these were killed in the first ten days, a further third in the following three weeks of August and the remainder over the next four months. In the entire province, 136 clergy were murdered.43 Vidal i Barraquer’s Vicar General, Salvador Rial i Lloberas, was captured on 21 August by a group of CNT railwaymen and tried by a spontaneous tribunal. Its president declared that Rial was automatically sentenced to death since ‘the proletariat had agreed to exterminate all priests’. He was offered his life if he would reveal where the diocesan funds were hidden. When he refused, he was imprisoned without food or water in a minuscule storeroom on the prison ship Río Segre in Tarragona harbour. As he continued to refuse to reveal the location of the funds, he was about to be shot when jurisdiction was taken away from the local militiamen by the creation of people’s courts (jurats populars) on 24 August.44
What happened to the clergy in Tarragona was representative of the entire region. In general terms, the greatest number of murders of religious personnel in Catalonia took place between 19 July and the end of September 1936. Thereafter, the functioning of people’s courts with some minimal judicial guarantees meant that the clergy were usually given prison sentences. The reactionary Bishop of Barcelona, Dr Manuel Irurita Almandoz, was less fortunate than Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer. On 21 July, when a patrol searched the bishop’s palace, he had gone into hiding in the home of Antoni Tort, a piously Catholic jeweller, who had also given refuge to four nuns. On 1 December, a patrol from Poble Nou searched the jeweller’s workshop and discovered Dr Irurita. Although Irurita claimed to be a simple Basque priest, the militiamen concluded that he was someone important. It is believed that he was shot in Moncada, along with Antoni Tort, on 4 December. Nevertheless, rumours circulated that he had been rescued. He was certainly the object of negotiations for a prisoner exchange carried out in 1937 by the Basque priest Alberto de Onaindia. It was also claimed widely that he was seen in Barcelona in 1939. Doubts were not resolved by DNA tests carried out in 2000 and speculation continues.45
Thus, behind a rhetoric of revolutionary justice, acts of violence were being perpetrated and not just against the clergy. The violence reflected popular outrage at the military coup and its attempt to destroy the advances made by the Republic. Revenge was taken against the sections of society on whose behalf the military was acting. So hatred of an oppressive social system found expression in the murder or humiliation of parish priests who justified it, of Civil Guards and policemen who defended it, of the wealthy who enjoyed it and of their agents who implemented it. In some cases, the acts did have a revolutionary dimension – the burning of property records and land registries in the countryside or the occupation of the homes of the rich in the big cities. Although there were also criminal acts, murder, rape, theft and the settling of personal scores, for some the liquidation of the old ruling class was seen as a revolutionary act within a new morality, as it had been in France, Mexico and Russia. The targets of ‘revolutionary justice’ were ‘proven fascists’, which meant right-wingers of any kind who could be supposed to support the coup. Accordingly, landowners, bankers, factory owners, shopkeepers, senior personnel, engineers and technicians in factories and even workers thought to be too close to the bosses were likely to be condemned by any of the many tribunals that were set up by factory or neighbourhood committees in the towns or village committ
ees in the countryside.
The initial rage against the military rebels and a desire to punish them for the bloodshed that they had caused soon combined with a determination to consolidate the revolution by eliminating all those supposed to be its enemies. Equally, news of military reverses and the arrival of the corpses of the fallen provoked outbursts of vengeful executions.46 A different kind of violence was sparked by the rivalries – sometimes ideological, sometimes personal – between the various political parties and militia groups. On the one hand, Companys’s Esquerra and the PSUC sought to rebuild a judicial system, thus offering captured political opponents constitutional guarantees, while the anarchists saw the immediate physical annihilation of the enemy, without any due process, as the basis of a new utopian revolutionary order.
Initially, most local committees put enormous energy into confiscating motor vehicles, radios and typewriters, requisitioning the headquarters of right-wing organizations and the mansions of the wealthy and placing patrols on the roads in and out of towns. This latter activity ensured that journeys of any distance became interminable as papers were demanded at every turn. Theft and vandalism during house searches were not uncommon.47 While most local committees were concerned with the collectivization of agriculture and the eradication of rebel elements, there were others that were unequivocally criminal. Typical examples in Girona were the Comitè d’Orriols whose members committed particularly violent acts of banditry, and those from Riudarenes. Along the frontier, at Portbou, La Jonquera and Puigcerdà, there were elements of the FAI that carried out the systematic extortion of those who wanted to cross into France. Many were murdered after giving up their valuables. These frontier patrols also facilitated the smuggling of property stolen by the FAI patrols in Barcelona, sometimes for private benefit, sometimes for arms purchases.48
A priority for the anarchists was to secure reparation for the perceived injustice of sentences passed by monarchist and Republican courts before 18 July 1936. The first step had to be the destruction of judicial records. The anarchist leadership, including Diego Abad de Santillán, one of the leaders of the CCMA militias, believed that the people’s justice had no need of lawyers or judges. Accordingly, on 11 August, they sent an armed squad to take control of the Palace of Justice in Barcelona. Their excuse for entering the building was that they had come to search for arms. The radical anarchist lawyer and journalist Ángel Samblancat witnessed the consequent stand-off between the Civil Guards protecting the Palace and the patrol whose leader announced that they had come to arrest ‘the scoundrels who combat the revolution from behind their barricades of files and indictments’.
At this point, Samblancat went to inform the CNT representatives on the CCMA. They explained that they had sent the first patrol because ‘that nest of vipers has to be fumigated whether the Generalitat likes it or not’. It was then suggested that he take over the Palace and they instructed him to get substantial reinforcements and return to the building to clear out ‘rogues’ still there. This he did and the professional jurists were evicted. The official announcement in the press at the time claimed that Samblancat had been sent to prevent uncontrolled elements destroying material archived there. Since this was far from the anarchists’ intention, it is reasonable to assume that it was the cover used to secure the approval of the other members of the CCMA for the operation.49 Several judges were murdered. The proceedings were legitimized on 17 August 1936, when the Generalitat dismissed all judicial personnel and set up a revolutionary body, known as the Oficina Jurídica, run initially and briefly by Samblancat.50
On 28 August, Samblancat resigned and was replaced by the anarchist lawyer Eduardo Barriobero. He declared that all crimes were social in origin and boasted of destroying hundreds of tons of judicial records from before 19 July 1936. Huge quantities of paper were burned on the sidewalk of the Passeig de Sant Joan. Barriobero claimed that he renounced a salary but was later accused of using his position to accumulate considerable wealth. He took on as assistants two members of the FAI prisoners’ aid committee, José Batllé i Salvat and Antonio Devesa i Bayona, who both had prison records, having been sentenced to twelve and fourteen years respectively for armed robbery. Large amounts of money held in escrow in relation to cases under consideration simply disappeared. Certificates of anti-fascist reliability were sold. Sixty anarchist militiamen were on the payroll of the Oficina. People that they arrested had money extorted from their families for their release. Huge fines were imposed for possession of religious artefacts, the money disappearing into the pockets of Barriobero’s men. According to Pons Garlandí, Barriobero worked in cahoots with Aurelio Fernández, Escorza and Eroles.51
During the period that Barriobero and his CNT cronies ran the justice system, the Generalitat was largely impotent in terms of public order. The only active step that it was able to take towards stopping spontaneous ‘justice’ was the creation, on 24 August, in each of the four Catalan provinces, of people’s courts composed of three magistrates and twelve jurors from workers’ unions and left-wing parties. This was partly a reaction to the central government’s introduction of popular tribunals by decrees of 23 and 25 August in response to the murder of prisoners at the Cárcel Modelo of Madrid. The Generalitat’s establishment of its own version, the jurats populars, was accepted by the CNT.52 Their mission was initially the repression of fascism, but it was quickly expanded to include crimes of rebellion and sedition. In general, the lack of juridical training of their members meant that proceedings were often shambolic. Much time was wasted as jurors, witnesses, the accused and even the public were given free rein to speak at length. Overall, there was a tendency towards leniency. Sentences were usually extreme, either absolution or the death penalty, with most of the latter generally commuted to imprisonment.53
By mid-September, in response to the ineffectiveness of the dual system of power, President Companys had decided that the Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee had to be dissolved. The fear and unpopularity generated by the Patrulles de Control made this slightly easier. Believing that the initiative should come from the CCMA itself, Companys first broached the idea with a CNT–FAI delegation consisting of Durruti, García Oliver and Aurelio Fernández. They agreed and, on 26 September, a new coalition government was formed, under Josep Tarradellas, including CNT ministers (consellers). This did not immediately put an end to the abuses of the patrols. In fact, because of the arrogance and sectarianism with which the CNT consellers behaved, they quickly provoked the enmity of other left-wing groups. In particular, the Conseller de Defensa ensured that the bulk of the arms purchased by the Generalitat ended up in anarchist hands. Similarly, the way Josep Joan i Domènech, the CNT Minister of Supply, organized the requisitioning of food provoked conflict in the Catalan countryside and the hostility of the PSUC. This would fester until it caused a mini-civil-war in Catalonia in May 1937.54
One of the major issues facing Tarradellas’s government was the growing concern about Eduardo Barriobero’s probity. In mid-September, seven Falangists had been discovered hiding in his home in Madrid. It was alleged that his wife took money to hide them. When Barriobero himself was interviewed in Barcelona, he denied all knowledge of the matter.55 The problem was resolved when the Oficina Jurídica was dissolved on 20 November by the new Minister of Justice, Andreu Nin, the leader of the POUM, who exposed the abuses of Barriobero. Having been chosen by Tarradellas as the only man likely to be able to challenge the power of the CNT, Nin had Barriobero, Batlle and Devesa arrested and tried for theft. Evidence was discovered that they had been crossing the frontier and depositing money in French banks. Nin’s achievement was to reinstate conventional justice and put an end to the arbitrary ‘justice’ of the CNT–FAI.56
The Generalitat’s opposition to uncontrolled violence is further evidenced by the major investigation that was begun in April 1937 into the assassinations in the first months of the war and the clandestine cemeteries where the victims were buried. The president of the high court
of Barcelona, Josep Andreu i Abellò, set up a special court and, as a result of its investigations throughout Catalonia, the corpses of many missing persons were located and their assassins identified. Among those arrested was Dionís Eroles, accused of involvement with a clandestine cemetery in Cerdanyola, although he was released on bail. Aurelio Fernández was also arrested, albeit for offences related to the extortion of individuals arrested by the patrols. There were numerous trials of those accused of murder and robbery. After the mini-civil-war in Barcelona in May 1937, witnessed by George Orwell, the CNT presented these trials as Communist revenge on the anarchists and the POUM, but they had started one month before. Moreover, on 2 August that year, FAI gunmen made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Andreu i Abellò. Subsequent investigation suggested that Eroles was behind the attempt, although nothing was proven. Nevertheless, it is the case that atrocities committed by members of the PSUC and the Esquerra were not pursued with the same vigour as those of the anarchists. When the denunciations had come from those whose houses or land had been confiscated, the accused were released. Nevertheless, those found guilty of murder and looting were punished.57
Not long after the creation of Tarradellas’s government, major problems quickly became apparent in the Ministry of Internal Security. The new Minister, Artemi Aiguader i Miró of the Esquerra, inherited much of the personnel of the old Departament d’Investigació of the CCMA, including Aurelio Fernández, Dionís Eroles, Manuel Escorza and Josep Asens. Inevitably, there was tension bordering on violence as Aiguader’s first chief of police, Andreu Revertés i Llopart of the ERC, tried to restrain the patrols. In late November 1936, he was falsely accused of plotting against the Generalitat by Aurelio Fernández and Eroles. He was imprisoned and later murdered. Aiguader then chose as his chief of police Eusebio Rodríguez Salas, ‘El Manco’, a PSUC member. Rodríguez Salas was as enthusiastic as his predecessor about controlling the FAI. Aurelio Fernández physically attacked him in Aiguader’s office and the Conseller himself had to intervene, pistol in hand, to prevent a serious crime. The freedom given by Eroles to the FAI patrols led to conflict with the Civil Guard.58
