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

by Paul Preston

  The Legionarios and Regulares, and the Falangists who had accompanied them, unleashed an orgy of looting in shops and houses, most of which belonged to the very rightists who were being ‘liberated’. ‘It is the war tax they pay for salvation,’ a rebel officer told the American journalist Jay Allen. Anything portable – jewellery and watches, radios and typewriters, clothing and bales of cloth – was carried off through streets strewn with corpses and running with blood. Hundreds of prisoners were rounded up and herded to the bullring. As night fell, drunken Moors and Falangists were still entering houses in the working-class districts, looting, raping women, dragging men out either to shoot them on the spot or to take them to the bullring. Many corpses were sexually mutilated. At the bullring, machine-guns were set up on the barriers around the ring and an indiscriminate slaughter began. On the first afternoon and evening, eight hundred were shot in batches of twenty. In the course of the night, another 1,200 were brought in. There were many innocent non-political civilians, men and women, Socialists, anarchists, Communists, middle-class Republicans, simple labourers and anyone with the bruise of a rifle recoil on their shoulders. No names were taken, no details checked. At 7.30 in the morning, the shootings began again. The screams of the dying could be heard many streets away. Accounts by survivors indicate that soon the firing squads were manned by Civil Guards.45

  Over the next three days, as Yagüe’s columns prepared to move northwards, the Moors set up stalls to sell the watches, jewellery and furniture that they had looted. Yagüe himself stole a limousine belonging to the moderate Republican Luis Plá Alvarez. Together with his brother, Plá owned a thriving transport and automobile sales business. The two men had used their influence to save the lives of numerous right-wingers and had sheltered several religious in their homes, many of whom wrote appeals in their favour. They were taken out into the countryside by Civil Guards on 19 August, told that they were free to go and shot ‘while trying to escape’. Their businesses and goods were seized.46 Bishop Alcaraz Alenda had interceded on their behalf, but Yagüe told his messenger: ‘Tell the Bishop that they have already been shot this morning along with others so that the Bishop may live.’47 By the second day, cheering right-wing spectators were permitted to watch and to insult the prisoners. Even if there was not, as was later alleged in the Republican press, a simulacrum of a bullfight, men were certainly treated as if they were animals. With their amused officers looking on, Moorish troops and Falangists goaded the prisoners with bayonets. Franco’s General Staff and the Portuguese border police were working in close collaboration. Accordingly, hundreds of refugees attempting to flee into Portugal were turned back.48 The scenes in the bullring were witnessed by Portuguese landowners invited as a reward for handing over fleeing leftists.49

  Although there had been few killings of rightists in Badajoz, the intense rhythm of killings was maintained for months. After the departure of Yagüe, the repression was supervised by the new Military Governor, Colonel Eduardo Cañizares, and Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Pereita Vela, sent from Seville by Queipo de Llano on 18 August as commander of the Civil Guard and Delegate for Public Order. It has been suggested that Pereita was responsible for a further 2,580 deaths before he was replaced on 11 November 1936. His successor, Manuel Gómez Cantos, reported that Pereita had accumulated a fortune on the basis of property, including land and cattle, confiscated from his victims. Egged on by a Falangist landowner from Olivenza, Pereita began to order arrests on the basis of the most frivolous or malicious denunciations, or the slightest hint of leftist or liberal leanings. Those arrested were usually shot, without any investigation. The Falange, swollen with the young scions of the landowning class, eagerly joined in the carnage. Prisoners were brought in from other parts of Extremadura, as the local right seized the opportunity to put an end for ever to the threat of agrarian reform. Young women who had served in the houses of the wealthy as maids and seamstresses were sexually abused as punishment for having attempted to form a union in the spring of 1936. Female members of other trades suffered equally.50

  On Tuesday 18 August, four hundred men, women and children were taken by cavalry escorts from Caia in Portugal to Badajoz. Nearly three hundred of them were executed. Expeditions of Falangists were given free rein to enter Portugal in search of Spanish refugees. Jay Allen described the scene in Elvas:

  This very day (August 23) a car flying the red and yellow banner of the Rebels arrived here. In it were three Phalanxists (Fascists). They were accompanied by a Portuguese lieutenant. They tore through the narrow streets to the hospital where Senor Granado [sic], Republican Civil Governor of Badajoz, was lying. The Fascists ran up the stairs, strode down a corridor with guns drawn, and into the governor’s room. The governor was out of his mind with the horror of the thing. The director of the hospital, Dr. Pabgeno, threw himself over his helpless patient and howled for help. So he saved a life.51

  Among the many liberals, leftists, Freemasons and others brought back to be shot were the Mayor, Sinforiano Madroñero, and two Socialist deputies, Nicolás de Pablo and Anselmo Trejo. Dragged through the streets, their clothes ripped, their flesh bruised, they were executed as the culmination of an elaborate ceremony on 30 August, after a procession with a band and a field Mass. Colonel Cañizares informed Antonio Bahamonde, Queipo de Llano’s head of press and propaganda, that the later executions were accompanied by a military band playing the royal anthem and the Falangist hymn. Many spectators came from nearby Portugal and applauded frenetically as the executed fell. Nevertheless, many ordinary Portuguese families took in refugees from Badajoz and Huelva and several Portuguese army officers saved Spanish lives.52 In mid-October, 1,435 refugees were sent to Republican Spain in a boat from Lisbon to Tarragona.53

  The historian Francisco Espinosa Maestre has demonstrated that the total number of casualties suffered by Yagüe’s men in the attack on Badajoz was 185, of whom 44 were killed and 141 wounded. The disproportion with the Republican casualties could hardly have been greater.54 Estimates of those killed in the subsequent repression vary from 9,000 to ‘between two and six hundred’. Many of those executed in the days following the initial massacre were either militiamen who had come to help defend the city, refugees who had fled there or prisoners brought there from other towns. Since they were shot without trial, their bodies disposed of in common graves or else incinerated, there is no record of them. Nevertheless, an exhaustive study by Dr Espinosa Maestre has shown that the number is at least 3,800. He has demonstrated that, even limiting the comparison to the small number of the known victims whose deaths were registered, there were more executions in Badajoz between August and December 1936 than in Huelva and Seville combined, despite the fact that Huelva’s population was 12.5 per cent larger than that of Badajoz and Seville’s more than 600 per cent. Moreover, in both Seville and Huelva, it was possible to compare the names in the city registries with the names of those buried in their respective cemeteries. In both cities, in addition to those inscribed in the registry, the cemeteries have records of unnamed corpses. In the case of Huelva, there were five times as many unknown as named dead; in the case of Seville, nearly six times as many. Extrapolating from this data for Badajoz, where there are no records of the unnamed dead buried in the cemetery, Espinosa Maestre calculates that the total number of killed in the city might have been around 5.5 times the number of the named dead.55

  In the intense summer heat, the piles of corpses constituted a major public health risk. They were thrown on to lorries that ran back and forth to the municipal cemetery. Since neither the local sanitation services nor private mortuaries could cope with the bodies, they were soaked in petrol, set alight and then buried in large common graves. Throughout the long hot summer, the stench of the burned corpses permeated the night. Left-wing women who were not shot or raped after the capture of the town were subjected to systematic humiliation. Their heads were shaved and they were forced to drink castor oil, on the grounds that ‘their tongues were dirty’.56

>   Yagüe had prevented correspondents from entering the town with the troops. However, in the early hours of the morning of 15 August, several journalists, mainly Portuguese, and two French, Marcel Dany of the Havas Agency and Jacques Berthet of Le Temps of Paris, arrived from Elvas. As they drove into the town they could see a column of smoke from the cemetery and were assailed by a sickly sweet stench. They witnessed what Mário Neves of the Diário de Lisboa called ‘a scene of desolation and dread’. Neves managed to interview Yagüe and asked him if it were true, as he had heard, that two thousand men had already been shot in the course of the night. Yagüe replied, ‘Oh, not quite that many.’ A priest who acted as guide for Neves, Dany and Berthet took them to the cemetery to see the great piles of corpses being burned. Some were completely carbonized, but there emerged arms and legs so far untouched by the flames. Seeing the horrified looks of the journalists, the priest explained: ‘They deserved this. Moreover, it is a crucial measure of hygiene.’ It was not clear whether he referred to the killings or to the disposal of the corpses. Another Portuguese journalist, Mario Pires of the Diário de Notícias, was so disturbed by the executions he had witnessed that he had to be interned in a mental institution in Lisbon. Castejón told Jorge Simões of the Diário da Manhã that 1,500 defenders had been killed, both in the fighting and afterwards. Simões wrote that 1,300 had been shot by the Legion in the first twenty-four hours after the conquest. Two days later, Felix Correia of the Diário de Lisboa, the journalist closest to Queipo de Llano, wrote that 1,600 had been executed. Yagüe himself commented on 15 August, ‘After the final clean-up tomorrow, everything will be ready for a more extended operation. Now, with the Muscovites liquidated, this is a Spanish city once more.’57

  On 17 August, the cameraman René Brut of Pathé newsreels arrived and was able to film piles of bodies, for which act of courage he was later imprisoned and threatened with death by the insurgent authorities.58 Some days later, Franco sent a telegram to Queipo de Llano with instructions for the strict control of photographers, ‘even those from Nationalist newspapers’, although this was to conceal the delivery of German and Italian war material as much as to hide the atrocities committed by his columns.59 It was the beginning of a massive campaign by the rebel authorities and their foreign supporters to deny that the massacre at Badajoz had taken place. Their cause was not helped when Yagüe cheerfully boasted to the journalist John Whitaker, ‘Of course, we shot them. What do you expect? Was I supposed to take four thousand Reds with me as my column advanced racing against time? Was I expected to turn them loose in my rear and let them make Badajoz Red again?’ In a town of 40,000 people, the killings may have reached nearly 10 per cent of the population.60

  According to Yagüe’s biographer, in ‘the paroxysm of war’ it was impossible to distinguish pacific citizens from leftist militiamen, the implication being that it was perfectly acceptable to shoot prisoners. Another semi-official military historian of the rebel war effort, Luis María de Lojendio, later mitred Abbot of the monastery of the Valle de los Caídos, not only claimed that the defending forces were greater but also managed to explain away the deaths among them with pious sophistry:

  A really criminal war is that in which chemical or technological mechanisms destroy human life pointlessly. But this was not the case in Badajoz. The material advantage, the fortress and the barricades, lay with the Marxists. The men of Lieutenant Colonel Yagüe triumphed because of that indubitably spiritual superiority which maintains in combat the will to win, the virtues of sacrifice and discipline. The streets of Badajoz were sown with corpses. Well, war is a hard and cruel spectacle.61

  The savagery unleashed on Badajoz reflected both the traditions of the Spanish Moroccan Army and the outrage of the African columns at encountering solid resistance and, for the first time, suffering serious casualties. It was part of a deliberate attempt to paralyse the enemy, as well as to reward the men of the column with an orgy of rape, looting, killing and alcohol. It had a past, a colonial tradition. It had a present, as a reflection of the determination of the landowners to crush the rural proletariat once and for all. It also had a future. In late August, as the Basque towns of Irún and Fuenterrabía were being shelled from the sea and bombed from the air, the rebels dropped pamphlets threatening to deal with the population as they had dealt with the people of Badajoz. In consequence, panic-stricken refugees headed for France.62 The events of Badajoz were also meant as a message to the inhabitants of the capital as to what would happen when the columns reached Madrid.

  The speed with which the African columns had progressed left many towns and villages still unconquered to the west of the line of their advance and between Badajoz and Cáceres. In these places, desperate refugees gathered. Following the pattern of what had happened in Seville and Huelva, before setting off for Madrid Yagüe organized small columns of local rightists, landowners, their sons and faithful retainers, Falangists, Requetés and a sprinking of Civil Guards, under the command of an officer. They spread out from Badajoz to the surrounding villages where they implemented a brutal repression. Irrespective of whether local rightists had been killed or merely suffered preventive detention, men and women were shot without the slightest pretence of a trial. Among the more enthusiastically brutal leaders of such columns were the Civil Guard Captain Ernesto Navarrete Alcal and two Africanistas, Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Delgado Serrano and the Major of Regulares Mohammed ben Mizzian. Among the civilian volunteers were not only local Falangists of more or less recent vintage but also contingents from Vigo and Valladolid, who had run out of victims in their provinces of origin.

  Between 19 and 29 August, these rebel columns captured dozens of towns and villages in the western part of the province of Badajoz. It was often the case that the Defence Committee of these villages had arrested local rightists and confiscated their weapons. In most cases they were insulted, in some forced to pay outstanding wages to day-labourers. Later accounts record their indignation at such humiliations which were sometimes no more than the Committee insisting that their own families, as opposed to their servants, delivered their food. Sometimes, the able-bodied prisoners were obliged to undertake physical labour ranging from road-mending to agricultural tasks. There was outrage expressed later that they had been forced to clean their prison, a church or a warehouse, and dispose of their own excrement. More irksome was the requisition of cows, sheep and pigs to be rationed to feed the workers. Olive oil, hams, chorizos and other food were also collected from the houses of the rich.63 In some villages, the rightist prisoners were beaten and, in others, murdered. The cases where this happened were greatly outnumbered by those where the local authorities prevented atrocities being committed by militiamen from other villages bent on revenge for the horrors committed by the African columns.

  The subsequent revenge was wildly disproportionate. Where there had been murders of right-wingers, those killed in reprisal were rarely the perpetrators, who had usually fled. The executions were justified on the specious grounds that the left had intended to kill all the prisoners but had not done so thanks to the arrival of the column. Similarly, although there were generalized allegations of sexual abuse of right-wing women prisoners, specific accusations tend to centre on intentions which had been thwarted by members of the Defence Committees. The leftist authorities did not have a programme of extermination like that of the military rebels. Landowners who had sought confrontation with their workers by denying them jobs and often wages, supporters of the Falange and of the military coup and rabidly right-wing priests were in the hands of the left in many towns and villages across the south of Spain. In most places, the bulk of them were not harmed.64

  An appalling exception was Azuaga in the east of the province of Badajoz. The local working class, consisting of miners and agricultural day-labourers, was already deeply radicalized. From 1931 to the summer of 1936, landowners had belligerently blocked the Republic’s agrarian measures, such as the decree of municipal boundaries, which protected work
ers from the import of cheap outside labour. The levels of unemployment and hunger had led to a degree of social tension that raised fears that the town might see clashes like those of Castilblanco or Casas Viejas. Aware that the military uprising heralded a brutal repression, local anarchist leaders demanded that the workers be armed. In the course of 19 July, in clashes with the town’s Civil Guard unit, sixteen civilians and one Civil Guard were killed. On 21 July, Lieutenant Antonio Miranda Vega, commander of Azuaga’s substantial Civil Guard detachment, concluded that he could not win, abandoned the town and took his men to Llerena, where, as was seen earlier, he played a crucial part in the fall of the town to Castejón’s column.

  The withdrawal of the Civil Guard opened the way to the tragic events that unfolded in Azuaga. Following Miranda’s departure, a Revolutionary Committee was formed and, under its control, the town remained peaceful for two weeks. Things changed with the fall of Llerena on 5 August. Many refugees arrived with horror stories of the repression unleashed there. Then, as happened when refugees from elsewhere had reached Llerena, Almendralejo and Fuente de Cantos, a wave of indignation swept the town. The committee ordered the arrest of rebel sympathizers. At dawn on 8 August, twenty-eight of them were taken to the cemetery on the outskirts and shot. They included three priests, three retired Civil Guards, three lawyers and most of the town’s landowners and businessmen. Another two were shot on 10 August. A factor in the killings was that Azuaga was constantly swelled by refugees and militiamen from other towns such as Cazalla de la Sierra and Guadalcanal (Seville), Granja de Torrehermosa (Badajoz) and Peñarroya (Córdoba). Those from outside had no compunction about venting their rage on strangers. Thus the arrival of a contingent of miners from Peñarroya on 20 August was the prelude to a further nine deaths, eight of whom, including four children aged from two to five, were from the closely related Vázquez and Delgado families.