by Paul Preston
The repression in Talavera was as brutal as anything that had taken place further south. Itinerant workers from Galicia were shot along with militiamen. An eyewitness, at the time a child, recalled a massacre in the prophetically named Calle de Carnicerías (Butchery Street) on 3 September. A large number of Republican prisoners with their hands tied behind their backs were being herded down the street by Regulares. When one tried to escape, the Moors just shot the entire group. The bodies were left there for three days, some wounded but not yet dead. The terrified neighbours were locked in their houses listening to the agonized groans and screams of the dying. Eventually, the municipal rubbish carts collected them.82 So numerous were the victims in Talavera de la Reina that, for health reasons, the corpses were soaked in petrol and burned.83 As part of the operation to justify the massacre at Badajoz, Luis Bolín, the head of Franco’s propaganda apparatus, published photographs of the rebel killings at Talavera de la Reina, presenting them as left-wing atrocities encountered by the columns at Talavera la Real, between Mérida and Badajoz. In fact, Antonio Bahamonde, Queipo’s propaganda chief, recounted how the corpses of both battle casualties and executed men and women were frequently mutilated and then photographed to fabricate evidence of Republican atrocities.84
Noel Monks of the Daily Express wrote: ‘In Talavera, because not much was going on at the front, one was fed on a steady diet of atrocity propaganda; the things the Reds did as they fell back into Madrid. And the strange thing was that the Spanish troops I met – Legionaires, Requetés and Falangists – bragged openly to me of what they’d done when they took over from the Reds. But they weren’t atrocities. Oh no, señor. Not even the locking up of a captured militia girl in a room with twenty Moors. No, señor. That was fun.’85 According to Edmund Taylor of the Chicago Tribune, a militia girl captured near Santa Olalla was locked in a big room with fifty Moors.86 John T. Whitaker witnessed a scene on the road to Madrid similar to those related by Monks and Taylor. He knew that gang rape was a frequent occurrence:
These ‘regenerators’ of Spain rarely denied, too, that they deliberately gave white women to the Moors. On the contrary, they circulated over the whole front the warning that any woman found with Red troops would meet that fate. The wisdom of this policy was debated by Spanish officers in a half-dozen messes where I ate with them. No officer ever denied that it was a Franco policy. But some argued that even a Red woman was Spanish and a woman. This practice was not denied by El Mizzian, the only Moroccan officer in the Spanish Army. I stood at the cross-roads outside Navalcarnero with the Moorish major when two Spanish girls, not out of their teens, were brought before him. One had worked in a textile factory in Barcelona and they found a trade-union card in her leather jacket. The other came from Valencia and said she had no politics. After questioning them for military information, El Mizzian had them taken into a small schoolhouse where some forty Moorish soldiers were resting. As they reached the doorway an ululating cry rose from the Moors within, I stood horrified in helpless anger. El Mizzian smirked when I remonstrated with him. ‘Oh, they’ll not live more than four hours,’ he said.87
The rising in Toledo was initially successful. The Socialist Domingo Alonso, one-time parliamentary deputy and editor of El Heraldo de Toledo, was shot and his wife and daughter seized as hostages. Many other Republicans were arrested. After the arrival of an army column from Madrid, the rebel leader Colonel José Moscardó ordered his forces into the Alcázar, the huge fortress that dominates both Toledo and the River Tagus which curls around it.88 About one thousand Civil Guards from around the province and Falangists retreated into the impregnable building with around six hundred non-combatants, mainly their wives and children, together with an unknown number of leftists as hostages. There has been bitter debate about the numbers of the latter. The civilian in charge of the siege, Luis Quintanilla, was told by Major Manuel Uribarri Barrutell that there were more than five hundred. At the other extreme, Colonel Moscardó never admitted to more than sixteen. In a numerical list of various categories of those present in the Alcázar, including those killed and wounded during the siege, the semi-official military historian of the war, Manuel Aznar, included the figure of fifty-seven ‘disappeared’. This figure is additional to the number of those named as present, given in official lists, and thus it could well refer to the hostages who were shot. The Austrian sociologist Franz Borkenau saw the photographs of twenty hostages displayed in the militia refectory, while several scholars have calculated that there were at least fifty hostages. Francoist sources do not mention the fate of the sixteen hostages admitted by Moscardó.89
For all, the circumstances were appalling – cooped up in the dank cellars, with no light and little food or water. Another reason why Quintanilla came to count all of the women and children as hostages was the fact that Moscardó consistently refused offers to evacuate them all to a place of safety.90 They served, some willingly, others not, as a kind of human shield, since their existence seriously inhibited the Republican attackers. Allegedly, women and children were forcibly placed next to windows. Among them were several servant girls, one of whom escaped and, before she died from her mistreatment, claimed that she had been raped by eight or nine officers in the Alcázar.91 Moscardó’s recently discovered correspondence indicates that he did release a small number of hostages.92 Moscardó also made a deal with the attackers whereby, in return for the families of the besieged being safeguarded, the Legion and the Regulares would not commit the excesses that had characterized the conquest of other towns.93 Unlike the Army of Africa, the Republicans kept their word.
Franz Borkenau commented after his visit in early September: ‘The town has always been very Catholic and anti-socialist, the administration and the militia feel themselves surrounded by passive resistance and treason.’94 The repression was considerable while Toledo was in the Republican zone, leading to 222 assassinations – an appalling figure, yet no clergy felt the need to take refuge in the Alcázar other than the five nuns who already worked in the infirmary. Of the nearly 1,500 clergy in Toledo, a relatively small number were killed and they included eighteen Carmelite monks accused of fighting alongside the Civil Guard. The town’s substantial population of nuns was evacuated to Madrid without incident. Nevertheless, after a bombing raid on 23 August, anarchist militiamen seized and murdered sixty-four right-wing prisoners, including twenty-two clergy. In contrast, the wives and children of the principal leaders of the coup in Toledo were not molested in any way.95 Huge amounts of time, energy and ammunition had been squandered by the Republican militia in a vain effort to take the strategically unimportant fortress. The resistance of the besieged garrison had thus become a symbol of heroic rebel resistance. On 21 September, Franco’s columns had reached Maqueda, a junction where the road from Talavera de la Reina divided to go north-east to Madrid or south-east to Toledo. Rather than send the columns on to Madrid, Franco ordered them to turn to Toledo, to relieve the besieged Alcázar.
On the day after this fateful decision was taken, Franco was visited by a delegation of his monarchist supporters, including one of the most prominent theorists of the uprising, Eugenio Vegas Latapié, and the poet and intellectual José María Pemán. Vegas Latapié took the risk of expressing his concerns about the scale of the repression in the insurgent zone. Although believing, erroneously, that it was on a smaller scale than in the Republican zone, Vegas Latapié told Franco in unequivocal terms that it was a moral issue, fundamental ‘for those of us who claimed to be fighting out of religious motives’. He told Franco that ‘it was normal and even necessary that summary courts function with rigorous and severe criteria, provided that the accused are allowed to defend themselves fully and freely. To act otherwise, to seize a citizen indiscriminately, no matter how much an adversary he might be, and just shoot him was a crime against morality and was, moreover, the quickest way of discrediting us politically.’ As Vegas noted later, Franco ‘knew very well what was happening and didn’t give a damn’. He listened
impassively and with total indifference changed the subject to talk about the imminent attack on Toledo.96
By diverting his troops to Toledo, Franco deliberately lost an unrepeatable chance to sweep on to the Spanish capital before its defences were ready. He was in no hurry to end the war before the captured territories had been purged and he was aware that an emotional victory and a great journalistic coup would strengthen his position within the rebel zone. By 26 September, the rebel columns were at the gates of Toledo. The Jesuit chronicler Father Alberto Risco described the passage of the Moroccan Regulares of El Mizzian through the outlying districts: ‘with the breath of God’s vengeance on the blades of their machetes, they pursue, they destroy, they kill … and intoxicated with blood, the column moves on’. The following day, the African columns entered the city centre along what Risco called ‘their path of extermination’. Large numbers of refugees trying to flee on foot, on bicycles, in cars and in trucks were bombarded by artillery.97
Luis Bolín ensured that no correspondents were permitted to enter Toledo for two days during the bloodbath that followed its occupation. Father Risco wrote with relish of ‘a second day of extermination and punishment’. It was hardly surprising that Bolín would not want newspapermen reporting the atrocities taking place while, in the words of Yagüe, ‘we made Toledo the whitest town in Spain’.98 What the journalists witnessed, when they were allowed in on 29 September, shocked them deeply. Webb Miller of the United Press saw pools of fresh blood which denoted a mass execution only just before the reporters arrived. At many other places, he saw pools of clotted blood, often with a militia cap lying next to them. John Whitaker reported that ‘The men who commanded them never denied that the Moors killed the wounded in the Republican hospital. They boasted of how grenades were thrown in among two hundred screaming and helpless men.’ Whitaker was referring to the Tavera Hospital, housed in the hospice of San Juan Bautista on the outskirts of Toledo. Webb Miller also reported on what happened there, claiming that two hundred militiamen were burned to death when the grenades were thrown in. As in Badajoz, most of the shops had been looted as a ‘war tax’. At the maternity hospital, more than twenty pregnant women were forced from their beds, loaded on to a truck and taken to the municipal cemetery where they were shot. The hostages in the Alcázar had already been shot. Webb Miller told Jay Allen that, after he saw what the rebels did to the wounded and to the nurses and the doctors in the hospital in Toledo, ‘he came close to going off his rocker’.99 Father Risco describes men and women committing suicide to avoid capture by the African columns. Those who were taken in the house-to-house searches, he commented, ‘had to die’. They were rounded up and conveyed to different town squares where they were shot in groups of twenty or thirty.100 More than eight hundred people were shot and then buried in a mass common grave in the municipal cemetery. Nothing more was known of the executed hostages.101
An insight into the behaviour of the columns during the march on Madrid is provided by the extraordinary experience of one of its chaplains, Father Fernando Huidobro Polanco. A thirty-four-year-old Jesuit from Santander, he had spent the last few years pursuing theological studies in Portugal, Germany, Holland and Belgium. He regarded the Republic as a pigsty and, while still in Belgium, he wrote in justification of the massacre of Badajoz that it was an isolated event provoked by the atrocities of the reds.102 In late August, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Father Wlodimiro Ledochowski, a keen sympathizer of the rebels, granted Huidobro’s request to return to Spain. On reaching Pamplona, he discovered that there was a surfeit of priests keen to join the rebels and so he went on to Valladolid, where he briefly served with the Falangist militia. From there, he went to Franco’s headquarters in Cáceres and was granted an audience. Franco said: ‘A warning, Father. You and your companions should do all you can for the good of Spanish soldiers, but, for various common-sense reasons, refrain from trying to convert the Moors.’ Huidobro wanted to join the Foreign Legion as a chaplain, so Franco sent him to see Yagüe at Talavera de la Reina. On 8 September, Yagüe agreed.103
The slight, bespectacled Huidobro, a one-time pupil of Heidegger, was initially received with ribaldry by the brutal Legionarios whose spiritual welfare he had come to tend. His bravery impressed some, but others were irritated by his efforts to persuade them to make confession, to stop gambling and to avoid prostitutes. During the advance on Madrid, and particularly in Toledo, Father Huidobro witnessed a number of atrocities. His efforts to prevent the shooting of prisoners or, as his biographer put it, ‘to save them from the just fury of his men’, did not endear him to the merciless Legionarios. He tried to justify what he saw: ‘our style is clean. Our procedures are different from theirs. They shoot, they torture, they exterminate. But they are criminals. We, because we are Christians and gentlemen, know how to fight.’ In this spirit, he gave prior absolution to the men of his unit before they went into action. However, he found their savagery disturbing since it damaged the image of the cause in which he fervently believed. He tried to protect the wounded and, when he could, attended to the spiritual needs of those about to be shot.104
Accordingly, in the lull that followed the fall of Toledo, he wrote down his reflections on the issue in two papers for ‘the military authorities’ and for the Military Legal Corps. Both papers were sent to the military authorities on 4 October. Under the heading, ‘On the Application of the Death Penalty in the Present Circumstances. Rules of Conscience’, he proposed that the ‘justice’ being exercised should not lead to excesses that besmirched the honour of the army. He argued against ‘the war of extermination advocated by some’ on the grounds that it would create lasting hatreds that would make the war last longer and impede reconciliation, deprive Spain of labour for its reconstruction and damage the country’s international reputation. He asserted that ‘Every wholesale condemnation, wherein no effort is made to ascertain if there are innocents among the crowd of prisoners, is to commit murder, not perform an act of justice … To kill those who have thrown down their arms or surrendered is always a criminal act.’
In the paper sent to the Military Legal Corps, he justified the death penalty for leftist murderers of women, priests and the innocent, and for Communists, or those ‘who, through the medium of a newspaper, a book or a pamphlet, have agitated the masses’. However, he suggested that membership of a left-wing trade union such as the CNT or UGT deserved not death but prison or a labour camp. He went on to denounce as murder the execution of those whose guilt had not been proven. His final words would not have endeared him to his readers: ‘the procedure being followed is deforming Spain and ensuring that instead of being a chivalrous and generous people, we are turning into a people of murderers and informers. The things that are happening make those of us who have always considered ourselves above all else to be Spaniards begin to be ashamed that we were born in this land of implacable cruelty and endless hatred.’105
It took great courage to stand up against the blanket savagery of the Legion. He sent both papers to many officers and to other chaplains and they were seen by both Castejón and Varela. Castejón was outraged. In front of other chaplains, he commented that Huidobro’s papers were ‘a kick in the teeth’.106 On 14 November 1936, when the army was on the outskirts of Madrid, Father Huidobro wrote to Varela to say that his glorious name should not be stained by the bloodletting that some junior officers were planning in order to teach the Madrileños a lesson. If a massacre were to take place, Huidobro feared that Varela’s name would go down in history ‘as monstrous and linked to the most cruel and barbaric deed of modern times’. After his forces had failed to take Madrid, Varela replied on 3 December from Yuncos in Toledo, congratulating Huidobro on his sentiments and claiming to share them.107
Father Huidobro had also written on 4 October to Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Díaz Varela, adjutant to General Franco, asking him to hand on to the Generalísimo copies of his two papers. Given Franco’s more pressing concerns, Díaz Varela passed Fa
ther Huidobro’s reflections to Yagüe, who commanded the division to which Huidobro’s unit belonged. Since the atrocities were part of a deliberate policy, Yagüe did nothing. Frustrated, Huidobro continued to make a nuisance of himself. He wrote a letter to Franco drawing his attention to:
the haste with which the execution takes place of people whose guilt is not only not proven but not even investigated. This is what is happening at the front, where every prisoner is shot, irrespective of whether he was deceived or forced to fight or even if he has sufficient capacity to understand the evil of the cause for which he was fighting. This is a war with neither wounded nor prisoners. Militiamen are shot for the mere fact of being militiamen without being given a chance to speak or to be questioned. Thus many are dying who do not deserve such a fate and who could mend their ways.
Since he was describing the usual practice of the Army of Africa, it was obvious that nothing would be done. Nevertheless, his letter, for all its naivety, constituted an astonishing act of courage.108
He wrote again to Díaz Varela on 10 November 1936 describing as ‘iniquitous and criminal’ the general order that anyone found with arms should be summarily shot. He called instead for them to be taken prisoner, interrogated and then, if ‘guilty’, sent to punishment camps. He asserted that ‘the limitless executions on a scale never before seen in history’ provoked the dogged resistance of the desperate Republicans who knew that there was no point in surrender. He went on to draw conclusions about the reaction in Madrid to the massacre that followed the fall of Toledo: ‘If they knew that in Toledo the wounded were murdered in the hospitals, would they need to know anything more about our harsh barbarity? Already some say that when we reach Madrid, we should shoot the wounded in the hospitals. We are falling back into barbarism and we are corrupting people’s morals with so much irresponsible killing. Previously, no one was killed until their guilt had been proved; now people are killed in order to hide their innocence.’ Huidobro begged Díaz Varela to raise the matter with Franco and had the temerity to suggest that he might go public: ‘Up to now, I have made my observations prudently and without raising my voice. Now the time has come to cry out. I do not fear either the right or the left but only God.’ He ended in dramatic terms: ‘I have witnessed murders, as we all have, and I do not want the new regime to be born with blood on its hands.’109
