by Paul Preston
The victims of the rebels in the south inevitably were those who had been prominent in the social war that had festered throughout the first half of the decade, but also included many innocent members of their families and others whose only crime was to have belonged to a union or voted for the Popular Front. In those parts of Andalusia where the coup had failed, such as Málaga, the targets of left-wing vengeance were priests, landowners and their agents, foremen and guards as well as Civil Guards, right-wing militants and army officers. In Jaén, where the rising had been defeated by the local peasantry, there were widespread land seizures and acts of revenge for the daily brutality of the previous years. As in so many places, the bulk of the killing took place in the first five months of the war and was at its height during August and September 1936. Despite public statements by successive Civil Governors, Luis Ruiz Zunón and José Piqueras Muñoz, that crimes against persons and property would be inflexibly punished, social hatred led to savage violence. In the course of September and October, in the town of Martos, to the west of the provincial capital and near the rebel-held zone, 159 rightists were murdered, including nine priests and twelve women, among them three nuns, the only ones killed in the entire province. There is evidence that some corpses were dismembered and decapitated.95
There were significant differences in the social structures of rural Andalusia, the Levante and Catalonia and also within those regions. Nevertheless, there were striking similarities in the origins and practice of repression. In all cases, the degree of bitterness of the pre-1936 class struggles was a key determinant of the scale of violence. Bombing raids and tales carried by terrified refugees from the rebel zone had a huge impact everywhere. In this regard, a revealing case is that of Elche near Alicante, a large town of about 46,000 inhabitants. There, the first assassination did not take place until 18 August 1936, when news of the massacre of Badajoz arrived, and the last two murders were in reprisal for a sustained bombing raid on the night of 28 November 1936. The fact that the CNT had fewer than four hundred militants in the town might account for the fact that the overall figure for extra-judicial executions in Elche, sixty-two, was very low for a town of its size. Relatively low too was the total number of clergy assassinated – four priests. The bulk of the murders have been attributed to members of the Communist Party.96 In Alicante itself, the largest single atrocity, with thirty-six deaths, took place when the provincial prison was attacked after the sustained bombing of 28–29 November 1936. The bombing had been a deliberate, and previously announced, reprisal for the execution of José Antonio Primo de Rivera eight days earlier.97
The correlation between CNT–FAI strength and the nature of extra-judicial repression is far from clear. Two other towns in Alicante with similar populations of around 45,000, Orihuela and Alcoy, offer puzzling comparisons. In Alcoy, in the north of the province, where the CNT was dominant, there were one hundred murders of which twenty were clergy. Anarchist anti-clericalism saw the most important church in Alcoy not burned down but demolished stone by stone and the materials reused to build an Olympic-size swimming pool. In Orihuela, in the Socialist-dominated south of the province, the total number of assassinations was low at forty-six. Yet, despite a marginal CNT presence, as in Elche, twenty-five of those murdered were members of the clergy. The killers responsible were identified as young men not affiliated to any party, although it has been plausibly suggested that they might have been working on instructions from the Socialist Committee.98
In general, anti-clericalism tended to be more acute where anarchism was stronger, but there were also dramatic examples of anti-clerical violence where the PSOE was the dominant force, in Orihuela, Castilla-La Mancha and Asturias. The south-east of Toledo in Castilla-La Mancha had one of the highest indexes of extra-judicial deaths per head of the population. This contrasted with the north of the province where one hundred villages saw minimal rearguard violence, forty-seven with no deaths at all and fifty-three with between one and five. The difference is explained by the high levels of illiteracy in the south of the province and the especially conflictive social context in the large estates there. Equally dramatic were the figures for the much larger anarchist-dominated area from the south of Zaragoza, through Teruel into the Terra Alta and Priorat regions of Tarragona.99 Nevertheless, whatever the differences and similarities, one thing remains clear. Had the basic norms of social coexistence not been torn asunder by the military coup, the bloodshed in the Republican rearguard would never have taken place on the scale seen.
8
Revolutionary Terror in Madrid
The military uprising, ostensibly against a non-existent Communist take-over plot, provoked a collapse of the structures of law and order. To make matters worse, in an effort to convince the Great Powers to support the Republic, the cabinet formed on 19 July was made up exclusively of middle-class liberals and thus neither respected nor, initially, obeyed by the left-wing parties and unions that defeated the uprising. An outburst of revolutionary fervour and an orgy of killing would demonstrate once more that Spain’s harshly repressive society had produced a brutalized underclass. The key events that underlay the violence in Republican Madrid took place in the first two days. The opening of the prisons saw hundreds of common criminals released, among them sadists and psychopaths who were only too willing to use the political chaos as a shield for their activities. Moreover, they had ample motives to seek revenge against the magistrates and judges who had put them in jail. In fact, out of fear of reprisals or because of their sympathy with the coup, many judicial functionaries went into hiding. More than one hundred judges were murdered.1
A central factor in the violence was the distribution of arms in the wake of the defeat of the military uprising. On the evening of 19 July, the General in charge of the coup in the capital, Joaquín Fanjul, took command of the troops and Falangist volunteers gathered in the Montaña barracks near the Plaza de España. He was unable to lead them out because the building was surrounded by a huge crowd of civilians together with about one hundred Civil Guards and a few Assault Guards. Fanjul’s men opened fire with machine-guns. Those with rifles replied. Early the following morning, an even larger crowd converged on the barracks, accompanied now by two artillery pieces, albeit with few shells. Cannon fire and a bomb dropped by a loyalist aircraft saw a white flag extended through a window. The flag may have been waved by one of the many pro-Republican soldiers among Fanjul’s forces, but the crowd advanced in expectation of an immediate surrender. Many were killed or wounded when they were met by a burst of machine-gun fire. The outraged throng pulled back but, when a second white flag appeared, swarmed forward only to be greeted once more by the rattle of the machine-guns. Finally, just before noon, the now infuriated mob broke in. Weapons were distributed and a massacre ensued at the hands of the pro-Republican conscripts from within and the militiamen from outside. A giant left-winger hurled officers from the windows. Some officers committed suicide and Falangists who had joined the rebels inside were shot.2
On that brilliantly sunny Monday morning, 20 July, an English nurse, Mary Bingham de Urquidi, saw defeated soldiers being shot while a baying crowd howled abuse. She counterpointed her gruesome tale with evidence of the humanity of some of the Republicans. She saw a ten-year-old boy beg for the life of his father who was about to be shot. His plea that he and his father were Republicans was successful. The mob was moved on by Republican soldiers and numerous corpses could be seen. Mary Bingham seemed unaware that many of the bodies were of Republican civilians killed while attacking the barracks.3 In contrast, the firmly pro-rebel Ambassador of Chile, Aurelio Núñez Morgado, described the events at La Montaña as ‘the start of the Madrid massacre’. Certainly many of the weapons distributed when the barracks was taken would be used over the next five months in the repression.4
In the course of 19 July, some churches were burned, often because rebel supporters had been storing arms there and now had fired from the towers on groups of workers. Other churches w
ere left intact because their parish priest had opened them and invited the militiamen to see that there were no fascists inside. The art treasures therein were thus saved.5 In the first few days, what was called ‘popular justice’ was meted out spontaneously and indiscriminately against anyone denounced as a rightist. However, in Madrid, as had happened in Barcelona and Valencia, virtually every left-wing political party and trade union soon established its own squads, the checas, to eliminate suspected fascists. At headquarters set up in requisitioned buildings, they often had private prisons where detainees were interrogated. Executions usually took place on the outskirts of the city. In Madrid, there were nearly two hundred of these squads, if those set up by recently freed common criminals are included. The principal checas run by left-wing parties and unions numbered about twenty-five.6 Considered to be warriors in the social war, criminals were often accepted into anarchist rearguard militias. Although far from having a monopoly of the worst excesses, the anarchists were the most prominent in the bloodshed in Madrid. Their checas often took the names given respectively to CNT and PCE neighbourhood headquarters and cells – the anarchists using ‘Libertarian Atheneum’ and the Communists using the name ‘Radio’.
The ability of the forces of order to control the checas was severely circumscribed. Many policemen, Assault Guards and Civil Guards supported the military rebellion and had either crossed the lines or else been arrested. Many others were often suspect, and the Assault Guards and Civil Guards who remained loyal had to be deployed at the front. The consequent decimation of the various police forces facilitated the activities of the rearguard militia groups. Nevertheless, the government began almost at once to take faltering steps to put a stop to the theft, extortion and murder being committed by some checas, although it would be five months before anything like full control was established. The new Minister of the Interior, General Sebastián Pozas Perea, had been Inspector General of the Civil Guard until 19 July. He had worked frantically, albeit in vain, to limit the spread of the rebellion within the corps.7 Now he worked equally hard and equally unsuccessfully to stop the checas carrying out arrests and house searches.8
The targets of the self-appointed checas and militia groups were not only the active supporters of the military coup. Many totally innocent individuals were arrested and sometimes murdered, as one middle-class detainee wrote later, simply for owning a business, for having opposed a strike, for having expressed support for the suppression of the Asturian rising, for belonging to the clergy or ‘for being rude to the maid’s boyfriend or to the lout of a doorman’. Concierges would often tip off a checa on the basis of the arrival of an unknown visitor or an unusual package, or because an occupant of the building never left home. Suspicion was enough.9 Antonio Machado, the fervently pro-Republican poet, was arrested in the early days of the war in a café in the Glorieta de Chamberí because a militiaman mistook him for a priest.10
The Consul of Norway, the pro-rebel German Felix Schlayer, compiled a similar list of likely innocent victims of the checas, adding landowners resident in Madrid murdered by labourers from their estates and eccentric aristocrats, too old to have played any part in the uprising. Henry Helfant, the commercial attaché of the Romanian Embassy, considered that Schlayer was pro-Nazi.11 Although Schlayer collaborated with the fifth column, passing information about troop movements to the rebels besieging the capital and, after leaving Republican Spain, spending time in Salamanca, he was a valuable eyewitness. One of the names on his list was that of the last descendant of Christopher Columbus, the Duque de Veragua, whose murder by an unknown checa sent shockwaves around the Latin American embassies. As in the rebel zone, denunciations were often motivated by nothing more than a desire to avoid a debt or by sexual jealousy. Crimes of theft and murder were frequently committed in the name of revolutionary justice. Often corpses were found with notes pinned to their clothing bearing the words ‘Justicia del Pueblo’.12
Some responsibility for the violence must fall on a significant part of the anarcho-syndicalist leadership. At the end of July, the principal anarchist daily in Madrid, CNT, carried the banner headline ‘Popular Justice. The Fascist Murderers Must Fall’. The passionate article went on to dismiss the Republican authorities as if they were as much the enemy as the rebels:
Faced with a judiciary and courts that stink of rot and whose spirit and whose laws are purely bourgeois, the people must take control of justice for itself … the Republic was and is bourgeois, strictly conservative and authoritarian. Having survived the events that we have just survived, and with the popular forces in the street, with the weapons of their free will in their hands, there is no other law and no other authority than that of the people. This is justice: what the people want, what the people order, what the people impose. The Spanish people must smash its enemies, both at the front and in the rearguard. We must destroy the thousand-year-old enemy who hides in the administration, in the laws of the State, in the banks and in the management of companies. The murderers of the people have to fall! They pululate in industry, in commerce, in politics, in the courts. That is where fascism hides … it is necessary to purify with fire. Exactly. We must burn much, MUCH, in order to purify everything.13
As in Barcelona, for many anarchists in the capital, destruction of churches and the assassination of the representatives of the old order, whether clergy, police or property-owners, were steps towards the creation of a new world. Overall control of CNT groups, both front-line militias and rearguard checas, was exercised in Madrid by the CNT–FAI Defence Committee. Its secretary and mastermind was a twenty-eight-year-old waiter from Jaca in Huesca, Eduardo Val Bescós, who had overall control of the militas and the checas. The volatile Amor Nuño Pérez, secretary of the Madrid Federation of the CNT, ran the checas on a day-to-day basis. Manuel Salgado Moreira ran the investigation units. Cipriano Mera commanded front-line militia units which operated out of the Cine Europa, headquarters of one of the most notorious checas. The CNT militia units that controlled the roads out of Madrid were under the direct command of Eduardo Val.14
Before the Civil War, the intelligent and elusive Val – ‘as silent as a shadow’, in the words of a comrade – had run the CNT–FAI ‘action groups’ in Madrid. This fact was not known by most of the rest of the anarcho-syndicalist leadership. Indeed, according to both Durruti’s close friend Ricardo Sanz and Gregorio Gallego, the leader of the regional organization of the Federación de Juventudes Libertarias (the anarchist youth movement), Val was as little known at the end of the war as he had been before 1936. Gallego wrote of the taciturn Val:
Professionally, he was an elegant waiter, smiling and amiable. When, in evening dress, he served table in the great political banquets organized at the Ritz and Palace hotels, nobody suspected that behind his gentle, slightly ironic smile lurked the man who pulled the secret strings of the terrorist groups. By nature, he was mysterious, elusive and little given to revealing anything. Many militants accused him of being a chameleon and there were those who thought he had bourgeois aspirations because of his stylish way of dressing and his refined manners. Nevertheless, as soon as the war started, he squeezed himself into a pair of overalls and the elegant cove turned himself into a scruffy wretch. Was it just another mask to permit him to pass unnoticed? I think so, because he got through the war without anyone really knowing him … Upon this man, fiercely private, secretive, more violent and daring than anyone could imagine, rested the security of the Castilian CNT.15
Some anarchists were appalled by the paseos (people ‘being taken for a ride’ that culminated in their murder), but many others favoured the elimination of enemy supporters both as an opportunity to build a new world and as a necessary part of the war effort. For most elements of the Popular Front, the annihilation of the enemy within was a central wartime imperative. Política, the daily newspaper of Azaña’s middle-class party Izquierda Republicana, expressed outrage that rightists had been released because some Republican had intervened on their behalf.
Arguing that neither friendship nor family ties should hinder the purging of the rearguard, the paper threatened to publicize the names of those involved in future cases.16 The Communists and the anarchists were both ruthless in wanting to root out the enemy within. Eventually, however, the Communists would come to see the anarchists as damaging the war effort and would turn on them, somewhat later than in Barcelona, and thus open a new phase of the repression.
More urgent incitements to violence came in the form of bombing raids and news of atrocities committed by the rebels. Both the bombings and the tales of the refugees were pervasively toxic in their effects, producing outbursts of mass fury that the Republican authorities were often unable to contain. In Madrid, on the night of 7 August, in reprisal for the first bombing raid, a number of rightist prisoners were assassinated. In response to the violence in general and to these murders, the moderate Socialist Indalecio Prieto made a much publicized radio broadcast. Prieto was effectively prime minister in the shadows from 20 July to 4 September while apparently serving merely as adviser to the cabinet led by the liberal Republican Professor José Giral. From a large office in the Navy Ministry, he worked untiringly to give direction to the shambles that was Giral’s government. On 8 August, he declared:
Even if the terrible and tragic reports about what has happened and is still happening in areas dominated by our enemies are really to be believed, even if day after day we receive lists of the names of comrades, of beloved friends, whose commitment to an ideal ensured their death at the hands of traitors, do not, I beg you, I entreat you, do not imitate their behaviour. Meet their cruelty with your pity, meet their savagery with your mercy, meet the excesses of the enemy with your generous benevolence. Do not imitate them! Do not imitate them! Be better than them in your moral conduct! Be better than them in your generosity.17
