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

by Paul Preston

  Prieto referred to this broadcast in a speech made in Chile near the end of the war: ‘I ask you to show me a single word of mercy pronounced by the rebels. I ask you to show me, if there are none from the military rebels, words of mercy from the civilian elements that supported the insurgency. And lastly, I ask, with even more justification, that you show me, because I don’t know of any, a single word, similar to mine, pronounced in public before the bloodthirsty crowds, by a representative of the Catholic Church in the Francoist zone.’18 Felix Schlayer later testified to Prieto’s efforts to stop the violence.19 One way in which the Republic tried to save lives was its tolerance of the questionable legality with which several embassies, including Schlayer’s, rented buildings in which refuge was given – sometimes at a price – to rebel supporters. Similarly, efforts to permit those under threat to leave Spain had no equivalent on the rebel side.20 After the war, the only embassy to offer asylum to defeated Republicans was that of Panama. It was raided by Falangists and those who had sought asylum therein were seized.

  Prieto’s appeal on 8 August was supported by Socialists and Republicans of the centre-left who also expressed concern that round-ups by extremist militiamen were netting respectable citizens. However, it fell on deaf ears as far as most of the left was concerned.21 This was especially true of the Socialist youth who were drawing ever closer to the Communist Party. They had been attacking Prieto since 1934. Now, one of the most prominent adult followers of Largo Caballero, Carlos Baraibar, editor of the left-Socialist daily Claridad, published a firm editorial two days after Prieto’s speech, with the title ‘About a Speech. Neither brothers nor compatriots’. In it, while recognizing Prieto’s generosity and good faith, he argued that it was impossible to regard as brothers those who had taken up arms against the Republic and were murdering workers in order to enslave them in a dictatorship. He referred to ‘the feudal landowners, the warlike and anti-Christian clergy, the military barbarians who lead the campaign, the pseudo-intellectuals who justify them, and the bankers who finance them’.22

  On the same day, in the Communist Party daily, Dolores Ibárruri replied to Prieto in similar terms:

  We must exterminate them! We must put an end once and for all to the threat of a coup d’état, to military intervention! There has been too much blood spilt for us to forgive while the horrendous crimes, the multiple murders committed coldly, sadistically weigh on us like blocks of lead … We must not agree to a single one being pardoned; and if at any time we should feel weakness then let the memory of our comrades burned alive, of the children murdered, of the men mutilated, be the spur that strengthens us in the hard but necessary work of liquidating the enemies of democracy and the Republic.23

  Similar sentiments emanated from the Communists’ militia, the so-called Fifth Regiment. Under the headline ‘Pity? Mercy? No!’, its mouthpiece, Milicia Popular, declared: ‘The struggle against fascism is a battle of extermination. Pity would be an encouragement to the fascist bandits. Where they pass, they sow death, sorrow, misery. They rape our women. They burn our houses … Pity? Mercy? No; a thousand times no.’24

  One of Prieto’s closest allies, Julián Zugazagoitia, the editor of El Socialista, decided not to print personal accusations of the kind that in the anarchist press often led to assassinations. ‘We worked’, he wrote later, ‘to build up popular confidence and to strengthen the authority of the government.’ Marcelino Domingo, the president of Azaña’s moderate Izquierda Republicana, was interviewed in Milicia Popular. Pointing out that the international standing of the Republic was in the hands of the militiamen, he said that they must establish a reputation ‘for their daring but also for their civic feelings; for their determination to annihilate the enemy on the field of battle but also for their religious respect for the rights of the adversary when he is no longer a combatant but a prisoner … It is important for each militiaman to have medals for heroism on his chest but it is even more important that he be able hold his head high and show that his hands are clean.’ The impact of his words was no doubt diluted by the details of rebel atrocities reported elsewhere in the paper.25

  There were no such ambiguities in the rebel zone where the working class and the liberal bourgeoisie were either exterminated or terrified into near total passivity. In contrast, despite the crisis of state authority provoked by the military coup and the consequent extra-judicial abuses, the Republican authorities tried to curb extremist atrocities and to rebuild the state. The militias of the most left-wing parties and trade unions were determined to annihilate the representatives of the Church, the army, the upper class and the non-liberal bourgeoisie. In other words, they aimed to create a revolutionary society to combat the military/fascist state. However, the Republican establishment and the bulk of the Socialist and Communist parties stood out against it because they understood that the Republic needed the backing of the Western democracies and that required law and order. Accordingly, they tried to recreate the structures that would permit a multi-class democracy. However, the determination of the extremists rendered the task immensely difficult.

  There was widespread terrorism for a period of about five months which gradually diminished over the subsequent four months. Hatred of the clergy was fanned by evidence of the exorbitant wealth of the Church and also by examples of clergy seen fighting on the rebel side.26 There were frequent reports in the Republican press about the wealth found during searches of monasteries, convents and other ecclesiastical properties. In early August, it was claimed that, when the Bishop’s palace in Jaén was searched, 8 million pesetas in cash was found. When the Bishop’s sister, Teresa Basulto Jiménez, was arrested, she allegedly had 1 million pesetas concealed in her corsets. On 18 August, it was reported that in the offices of the Madrid diocese there had been found nearly 17 million pesetas’ worth of government bonds and a further million in cash and jewels. The following day, a search of the Madrid branch of Credit Lyonnais discovered two safe-deposit boxes belonging to the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul – sometimes known as the Little Sisters of the Poor. They contained 340,000 pesetas in cash, 60 million pesetas’ worth of shares, the deeds of ninety-three properties in Madrid worth another 100 million pesetas, a quantity of gold ingots and three kilos of gold coins, some of great numismatic value. One day later, it was reported that, in a Carmelite convent in the Calle de Góngora in Madrid, works of art worth 1 million pesetas had been found.27

  Reports of exorbitant ecclesiastical wealth were based on claims from the militia groups carrying out the searches. They further intensified popular anti-clericalism by confirming age-old clichés. A similar boost came from the belief that, in the early days of the rising, Church premises were used by rebel supporters to store weapons and also as a refuge from which snipers could operate. A moderate Republican army officer, José Martín Blázquez, claimed that six monks fired on the crowd from the church tower in the Montaña barracks.28 The Civil Governor of Almería, Juan Ruiz Peinado Vallejo, recalled that, on 23 July, his offices were fired on from a nearby monastery by three priests.29 In general, however, outside of Navarre, there is only limited evidence of priests taking part in fighting.

  Despite dogged international propaganda about nuns being molested, there is substantial anecdotal evidence of nuns being protected. The English nurse Mary Bingham recounted examples of nuns being looked after by Assault Guards. Many nuns had been arrested in the first days when militiamen had entered the convents. Jesús de Galíndez, of the Basque Nationalist Party’s delegation in Madrid, found little difficulty in securing their release and finding safe refuge for them. There were cases of convents and their cloistered nuns being ‘socialized’, by which they were left to function as before except that, alongside the mother superior, there was a supervisor named by the authorities and their work consisted of making uniforms and blankets.30

  The official stance of the CNT was that nuns should not be molested in any way but that their communities were to be dissolved. The nuns thereby
‘liberated’ should work in collectivized workshops or as nurses in military hospitals. They could also choose protective detention in prison or return to live with family members. There were cases of ex-nuns marrying their ‘liberators’.31 When Cardinal Gomá returned to Toledo after the city fell to the rebels, he found his cellar drunk dry and his crucifixes damaged. However, the nuns who served in the episcopal palace assured him that they had been well treated during the two months that it had been occupied by thirsty militiamen.32

  The collapse of the apparatus of the state inevitably facilitated violence of all kinds, whether in the name of revolutionary justice or of personal satisfaction. In Madrid, as elsewhere, the judiciary was bypassed by ‘revolutionary’ tribunals spontaneously set up by political parties, trade unions or individual militia groups. Because of the frequency of the paseos, as early as 28 July the Portuguese Chargé d’Affaires reported that the corpses left in the streets of Madrid were provoking fears of an epidemic.33

  Prominent among those in danger of losing their lives in the Republican zone were army officers who had taken part in the failed coup. That was the usual punishment for mutiny. However, they were not the only ones at risk. The potential stance of all officers was being investigated by a rapidly created committee under the presidency of Captain Eleuterio Díaz-Tendero Merchán. A Socialist and a Freemason, and somewhat embittered by his being only a captain at the age of fifty-four, he was one of the founders of the Unión Militar Republicana Antifascista, of which he became president. In the spring of 1936, he had built up a file-card system on the officer corps which included the conspirators’ own lists of officers they could trust not to betray their plans. Now, on the basis of the file-cards and interviews, the committee classified officers by an A (anti-fascist), R (Republican), I (indifferent) or F (fascist). Those classified as ‘fascist’ or as ‘indifferent’ and refusing to fight for the Republic were arrested.34 In prison, they were given the opportunity to recant their rightist views, fulfil their oath of loyalty and fight against the rebels. Few accepted the chance and, guilty of mutiny, virtually guaranteed their own eventual execution.35

  The trial of the leading rebels in Madrid, General Joaquín Fanjul and Colonel Fernández de la Quintana, began on 15 August in the Cárcel Modelo, in the presence of foreign journalists and photographers. The judge was the distinguished jurist and acting president of the Supreme Court Mariano Gómez González, who had presided at the trial of General Sanjurjo in 1932. Scrupulously fair, Gómez ensured that due legal process was observed at Fanjul’s trial.36 Fanjul, himself a trained lawyer, undertook his own defence. His defence was that he was obeying the orders of General Mola. When it was pointed out that Mola was not his superior officer, Fanjul admitted that, in obeying such orders, he had recognized Mola’s position as head of the military uprising. One of the witnesses against him was Ricardo Zabalza, who had found the declaration of martial law signed by Fanjul at the press where it had been printed. Fanjul and Fernández de la Quintana were both found guilty and sentenced to death on 16 August. They were executed at dawn the following day. The anarcho-syndicalist newspaper CNT thundered: ‘The shooting of these military traitors symbolizes the death of an entire class. What a pity that this is no more than a metaphor!’37

  A victim of the popular rage fuelled by such inflammatory journalism was General Eduardo López Ochoa, commander of government forces in Asturias in 1934. After the Popular Front electoral victory, he was arrested, accused of ordering the execution without trial of twenty civilians in the Pelayo barracks in Oviedo. These charges were never proven. Far from being a rightist, López Ochoa was loathed by the military conspirators as a Freemason, for having negotiated with the Asturian miners in order to avoid bloodshed and for ordering exemplary punishment for those members of Yagüe’s African columns guilty of atrocities.38

  López Ochoa was awaiting trial in the military prison in Burgos until, in the late spring, his wife had secured his transfer to the Hospital Militar in Carabanchel in the south of Madrid. For his role in Asturias, the Republican authorities expelled him from the army on 11 August, news of which may have triggered his death. On the next day, the Madrid anarchist daily, CNT, published an editorial demanding that the leaders of the failed coup in Barcelona, Generals Manuel Goded and Álvaro Fernández Burriel, be shot. The headline, ‘The People’s Justice. There can be mercy for no one’, could well have been a reply to Prieto’s earlier appeal. The article declared that ‘this is no time for Christian sentiments which were only ever applied to the high-flying evil-doers in cahoots with the Church and never to the people’.39

  The government tried to have General López Ochoa transferred to somewhere safer but was prevented twice by anarchists surrounding the hospital. A third attempt, on 17 August, saw him being taken out in a coffin drugged with morphine to appear dead, when the ruse was discovered. He was later alleged to have been dragged from the coffin by an anarchist called Manuel Muñoz de Molino and shot in the gardens of the hospital. His head was severed and carried around the streets on a pole, with a card reading: ‘This is the butcher of Asturias’.40 When one of the many militiamen accused of being involved was interrogated after the war, he claimed, almost certainly having been tortured to do so, that they were acting on the orders of the Ministry of War. The Chilean Ambassador, Aurelio Núñez Morgado, had been informed that López Ochoa was in danger but reached the military hospital in Carabanchel too late. Núñez Morgado later made the utterly baseless claim that General Pozas had authorized the handing over of López Ochoa to his eventual assassins, members of the Libertarian Atheneum of Carabanchel.41

  On the same day as the murder of López Ochoa, a much greater atrocity took place. In Jaén, with the provincial prison bursting at the seams, other captured right-wingers were held in the Cathedral. There were around eight hundred prisoners bunking down in the various naves and chapels. The problems of feeding them were acute and trucks bringing them food were regularly attacked. They had every reason to fear for their lives. Already on the night of 30 July, forty-eight right-wingers had been massacred by an armed mob that assaulted the prison at Úbeda. The Civil Governor, Luis Ruiz Zunón, was anxious to avoid similar bloodshed in Jaén itself. Ruiz Zunón secured permission from the Director General of Prisons in Madrid, Pedro Villar Gómez, himself from Jaén, to transfer several hundred to the prison at Alcalá de Henares. However, Manuel Muñoz Martínez, the Director General of Security, claimed, when interrogated in 1942, that he had not been informed of the plan and therefore had been unable to arrange adequate security.

  At dawn on 11 August, a first expedition of 322 detainees from the provincial prison were taken in trucks to the railway junction at Espelúy north of the capital where they were put on a train. It would appear that someone in Jaén tipped off extremists further north that the train was coming. At each station along the way, stones and insults were hurled by hostile mobs. On reaching Atocha station in the capital, eleven of the prisoners, prominent landowners and right-wing figures including two priests, were murdered. The remaining 311, a third of whom required medical attention, reached Alcalá de Henares. Early in the morning of the following day, there was a second expedition of 245 captives from the Cathedral and from the recently conquered town of Adamuz (north-east of Córdoba). Among them was the sixty-seven-year-old Bishop of Jaén, Manuel Basulto Jiménez, his sister Teresa and the Dean of the Cathedral chapter, Felix Pérez Portela.

  When the train reached the station of Santa Catalina Vallecas in the south of Madrid, it was stopped by anarchist militiamen who uncoupled the locomotive. The station master and the commander of the Civil Guard escort telephoned the Director General of Security, Manuel Muñoz, and told him that the anarchists had set up three machine-guns and threatened to shoot the Civil Guards if they did not leave. Muñoz allowed the Civil Guards to leave because, he claimed later, the government’s authority was a fiction that would crumple if the forces of order were overwhelmed in a clash with the armed people. When the g
uards withdrew, 193 of the prisoners were executed in groups of twenty-five. In the course of the carnage, the Bishop fell to his knees and began to pray. His sister, Teresa Basulto, shouted at one of the militiamen, ‘This is an outrage. I’m just a poor woman.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ he replied, ‘we’ll get a woman to shoot you,’ and she was shot by an anarchist named Josefa Coso. Two days later, devastated by the denouement of an initiative intended to avoid bloodshed, Luis Ruiz Zunón resigned as Civil Governor.42 A further 128 prisoners were seized from the provincial prison of Jaén between 2 and 7 April 1937 and shot in reprisal for a series of rebel bombing raids.43

  The assassination of López Ochoa and of the prisoners from Jaén revealed the scale of the task facing the Republican authorities. The Director General of Prisons, Pedro Villar Gómez, a moderate Republican, was as affected as Ruiz Zunón by ‘the trains of death’. Overwhelmed by atrocities being committed in the prisons of Madrid by militiamen who freed and armed common prisoners and abducted rightists, he resigned in September. As a landowner in Quesada in the east of Jaén, he had seen his own property confiscated. Moreover, his son Bernardo Villar was an artillery captain who had joined the military rebels in Córdoba. Perceiving himself to be hated by both sides, Villar Gómez went into exile in France. His absence was just one more factor in the subsequent escalation of the outrages in the capital’s prisons.44

  Juan García Oliver, the anarchist who was to become Minister of Justice in November 1936, justified atrocities on the grounds that ‘the military uprising destroyed all social restraints because it was carried out by those classes that usually maintained the social order. Accordingly, efforts to re-establish a legal equilibrium saw the spirit of justice revert to its most distant and pure form: the people: vox populi, suprema lex. And the people, while the abnormality continued, created and applied its own law and procedure, the paseo.’45 Uncontrolled acts of reprisal and revenge, responses to offences real and imagined, were not confined to high-profile atrocities like the murders of López Ochoa or of the passengers on the train from Jaén. Corpses found strewn along roadsides at dawn were the gruesome products of midnight paseos which could equally have been the work of militia patrols or of private enterprise hoodlums.