by Paul Preston
Díaz Varela finally replied on 25 November to say that Franco had been appalled to hear about the excesses that Huidobro had denounced and was determined to punish all those responsible. It goes without saying that nothing was done. Himself in hospital after being wounded, Huidobro knew that the shootings were continuing on the same scale but chose to believe that Franco was sincere. Over the next months, Huidobro became ever more vocal about the need for an eventual reconciliation of both sides. A number of officers told him that if he continued to preach his message ‘they’re going to shoot you’. On 11 April 1937, Huidobro was killed at Aravaca on the outskirts of Madrid, allegedly by shrapnel from an exploding Russian shell. This detail helped initially when, in 1947, the process was put in train by the Jesuits for his beatification and canonization. Huidobro had saved lives and lived a thoroughly Christian existence. However, in the course of the thorough investigation of the case instituted by the Vatican, it emerged that he had been shot in the back by one of the Legionarios of his own unit, tired perhaps of the preaching of his chaplain. When it was discovered that Huidobro had been killed by the Francoists and not by the reds, the Vatican shelved his case.110
10
A Terrified City Responds: The Massacres of Paracuellos
Franco once claimed that he would never bomb Madrid, but already in September 1936, there were major raids. He ensured, however, that the Barrio de Salamanca, the wealthiest neighbourhood, would be spared. Accordingly, its streets were crowded and, at night, people who could not get into Metro stations for shelter slept on the pavements of the Barrio’s great boulevards, Salamanca, Velázquez, Goya and Príncipe de Vergara. The raids on the rest of the city, far from undermining the morale of the Madrileños, did exactly the opposite and also provoked a deep loathing of the rebels, a loathing whose immediate targets were those assumed to be their supporters within the capital. This included both as yet undetected members of the fifth column and right-wingers already in prison. In the paranoia of the siege, they were indiscriminately regarded as ‘fifth columnists’.
Hatred was intensified when a rebel aircraft inundated the city with leaflets announcing that ten Republicans would be shot for every prisoner killed in Madrid. The acrimony was whipped up by the Republican daily La Voz, which announced that ‘it is estimated that Madrid, if it falls, will be the terrifying theatre of one hundred thousand sacrificial victims’. On the basis of what had been done in the south by the African columns, it was believed that anyone who had been a member of any party or group linked to the Popular Front, had held a government post or was an affiliate of a trade union would be shot. ‘After a final orgy of blood, when the barbaric revenge of the enemies of freedom has been consummated, with the most significant men of the bourgeois left and the proletarian left murdered, twenty-two million Spaniards would suffer the most atrocious and humiliating slavery.’1 Another Republican daily, Informaciones, reported that Queipo de Llano had told a British journalist that half of Madrid’s population would be shot by the victorious rebels.2
However, in terms of propagating fear and hatred, nothing could equal what happened a fortnight after La Voz’s hair-raising prediction. On 16 November, the diplomats still in Madrid were shown the horribly mutilated corpse of a Republican pilot. On the previous day, he had crash-landed behind the Francoist lines near Segovia. He was beaten to death and his body dragged around the streets of the town. His captors had then taken the trouble to dismember him, place his body parts in a box, attach a parachute, load the box on to an aircraft, fly to Madrid and drop it over the aerodrome at Barajas. In the box was a paper which said, ‘this gift is for the head of the red air force so that he knows the fate that awaits him and all his bolsheviks’.3
In the claustrophobia generated by the siege, the daily terror had long since found expression in a popular rage which focused on the prison population. A potent mixture of fear and resentment inevitably fuelled the actions of the many militia groups that operated in Madrid, whether independent vigilante groups or ‘official’ groups such as the Rearguard Security Militias (Milicias de Vigilancia de Retaguardia – MVR) created in mid-September or those still operating within the Comité Provincial de Investigación Pública. This had been starkly demonstrated by both the events in the Cárcel Modelo on 22 August and subsequent sacas from the prisons. Neither ordinary citizens nor political leaders made any significant distinction between the active ‘fifth column’ and the nearly eight thousand imprisoned rightists. At this stage, the fifth column was far from being the organized network that it became in 1937 and the exploits of snipers, saboteurs and defeatists were relatively random. However, among those detained as rebel supporters were many, especially the army officers, who were considered potentially very dangerous.
As Franco’s columns advanced ever nearer to the capital, to generalized hatred of rightists there was added a much more specific concern about the presence in Madrid’s prisons of so many experienced right-wing officers who had already categorically refused invitations, individual and collective, to honour their oath of loyalty to the Republic and fight in defence of the city. On a razor’s edge between survival and annihilation, the Republican military and political authorities were determined that these men should not be permitted to form the basis of new units for the rebel columns. This would be the most crucial factor in the eventual fate of prisoners throughout November 1936.
Already, on 1 November, this problem had been discussed at a tense meeting of the War Commissariat – the body set up two weeks earlier under the chairmanship of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Socialist Julio Álvarez del Vayo. The War Commissariat’s purpose was to invigilate the loyalty of the new Popular Army created when ‘all armed and organized forces’ had been placed under the command of the Minister of War, the beginning of the militarization of the militias.4 When the question of the prisoners was raised on 1 November, Álvarez del Vayo left the meeting to go and seek advice from Largo Caballero. He returned to say that the Prime Minister had ordered the Minister of the Interior, Ángel Galarza, to arrange the evacuation of the prisoners; but little was done over the next five days.5
On 2 November, a group of anarchists had visited the Cárcel de San Antón, a converted convent, and picked out the file-cards of the four hundred army officers detained there. The youngest had been interrogated and offered the chance to fight for the Republic. They all refused, which constituted mutiny. On 4 November, Getafe to the south fell and, on the same day, between thirty and forty officers were ‘tried’ by a Tribunal Popular. Having reaffirmed that they abjured their oath of loyalty, at dawn on 5 November they were removed from the prison and shot. Another forty were taken later the same day and also shot on the outskirts of the capital. The following day, a further 173 were evacuated in three batches. The first and the third, each of fifty-nine prisoners, reached Alcalá de Henares safely. The fifty-five prisoners of the second convoy were executed at Paracuellos, halfway to Alcalá. These evacuations on 6 November, but not the murders, were authorized by the Director General of Security, Manuel Muñoz, who had also ordered others from the Cárcel de Ventas between 27 October and 2 November.6
As a result of the tribunals conducted by agents of the CPIP, from late October onward the rhythm of sacas accelerated. The illegality of this deeply distressed senior Republicans. Luis Zubillaga, the secretary general of the Bar Association, and Mariano Gómez, the acting president of the Supreme Court, took the extraordinary step of seeking the help of the anarchist Melchor Rodríguez, whose efforts to save many rightists had already earned him the suspicion of his comrades. The incorporation into the government, on 4 November, of four anarchist ministers, Juan López (Commerce), Federica Montseny (Health), Juan Peiró (Industry) and Juan García Oliver (Justice), led Zubillaga and Gómez to hope that some official support might be given to Melchor’s humanitarian efforts. In fact, García Oliver had been one of the founders of the FAI along with Durruti. His record of frequent imprisonment for terrorist acts made him a rem
arkable choice. The logic behind it was the hope that he might be able to persuade the anarchist rank and file that the implementation of justice could be left to the state. Zubillaga and Gómez wanted him to appoint Melchor Rodríguez to the post of Director General of Prisons, vacant since the resignation of Pedro Villar Gómez in late September. However, given the threat to Madrid posed by Franco’s columns, the protection of prisoners was not a priority for García Oliver.
García Oliver refused to appoint Melchor Rodríguez as Director General of Prisons without first checking with the regional and national committees of the CNT, which were deeply implicated in the repression and thus highly suspicious of Melchor Rodríguez. Accordingly, García Oliver appointed two trusted CNT stalwarts who had accompanied him from Barcelona, Juan Antonio Carnero as Director General and Jaume Nebot as Inspector General of Prisons.7 Rather than to prevent atrocities, the task given by García Oliver to Nebot was to locate and destroy the criminal records of all members of the CNT or the FAI who had ever been jailed.8
Advancing through the University City and the Casa de Campo, by 6 November the rebels were only two hundred yards from the largest of the prisons, the Cárcel Modelo, in the Argüelles district. Francoist officers later claimed that advance units of Regulares organized snatch squads on that day and managed to get inside the Cárcel Modelo and rescue some prisoners. Such raids would lead to the stationing of units of the International Brigades at the prison.9 Most of the approximately two thousand army officers incarcerated there had already shown that they were ready, indeed anxious, to join the besieging forces by rejecting calls to fight for the Republic. Their resolve can only have been hardened by the successful rescue attempts. Indeed, they made no secret of their delight at the developments outside, threatened their jailers and trumpeted their intentions of joining their rebel comrades as soon as they could.10 That would have constituted a massive reinforcement for Franco’s forces.
In this context, the necessary decision for Largo Caballero’s cabinet to leave for Valencia was finally taken in the early afternoon of 6 November.11 The variations in the memoir material are such that exact timings of events on that day can be established only approximately. Not long after the fateful meeting finished, probably some time between 4.00 and 5.00 p.m., the Under-Secretary of War, General José Asensio Torrado, met Generals Sebastián Pozas, the Chief of Operations of the Army of the Centre, and José Miaja Menent, head of the 1st Military Division. After a lengthy discussion, he gave each a sealed envelope emblazoned with the words ‘Top Secret. Not to be opened until 6 a.m. tomorrow’. Given the urgency of the situation, as soon as Asensio left for Valencia, both generals ignored the instruction and opened the envelopes. They discovered that each contained the orders meant for the other. Pozas was ordered to set up a new headquarters for the Army of the Centre at Tarancón on the road to Valencia. Miaja was placed in charge of the defence of the capital and ordered to establish a body, to be known as the Junta de Defensa, which would have full governmental powers in Madrid and its environs. Had they complied with the instruction not to open the envelopes and gone back to their respective headquarters, they would have seen their orders when they were many miles apart, with catastrophic consequences for the defence of the city. Whoever sealed the envelopes was probably a rebel sympathizer.12
The view of the cabinet and the large numbers of functionaries who fled to Valencia was that the capital was doomed and that the Junta was there merely to administer the inevitable defeat. In the event, under intolerable pressure and against all odds, it was to preside over a near miraculous victory.13 Miaja’s awesome task was to organize Madrid’s military and civil defence at the same time as providing food and shelter for its citizens and the refugees who thronged its streets. In addition, he had to deal with the violence of the checas and the activities of the fifth column.14 The Junta de Defensa was thus a localized mini-government. Its ‘ministers’ were known as Councillors and their deputies would be chosen from all those parties that made up the central government. However, it was to the Communists that Miaja would turn first in search of help. And they were ready and waiting.
Immediately after the cabinet meeting earlier in the afternoon, the two Communist ministers, Jesús Hernández and Vicente Uribe, reported the government’s evacuation to the top brass of the Partido Comunista de España, Pedro Checa and Antonio Mije. Checa (whose name was totally unconnected with the checas) was the PCE organization secretary. He and Mije were effectively leading the Party in the frequent absences of its seriously ill secretary general, José Díaz. The implications were discussed and plans made. Astonishingly, among those participating were two young leaders of the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas, Santiago Carrillo Solares and José Cazorla Maure, who were, theoretically at least, members of the Socialist Party and not of the Communist Party, for membership of which they would not formally apply until the next day. Their presence at the meeting demonstrates that they were actually already in the highest echelons of the PCE.
Late in the afternoon, Checa and Mije negotiated with Miaja the terms of the Communist participation in the Junta de Defensa. A grateful Miaja eagerly accepted their offer that the PCE run the two ‘ministries’ or Councils (Consejerías) of War and Public Order in the Junta. He also accepted their specific nominations of Antonio Mije as War Councillor with Isidoro Diéguez Dueñas as his deputy and of Carrillo as Public Order Councillor with Cazorla as his deputy. Thus, as Carrillo recalled later, ‘on that same night of 6 November, I began to undertake my responsibilities along with Mije and others’. Mije, Carrillo and Cazorla then went to see the Prime Minister to seek a statement to explain the government’s departure to the people of Madrid. Largo Caballero denied that the government was about to leave despite the pile of suitcases outside his office. Deeply disillusioned by the lies of their broken hero, they went back to the Central Committee of the PCE.15
Several sources have confirmed that Carrillo was able to name his subordinates in the Public Order Council and assign them tasks immediately after this meeting with Miaja late on 6 November. A sub-committee, known as the Public Order Delegation, was set up under the JSU’s elegant intellectual Segundo Serrano Poncela. He was given responsibility for the work in Madrid of the Dirección General de Seguridad.16 Ramón Torrecilla Guijarro, one of the members of the Public Order Delegation, told his interrogators after he had been captured by the Francoists in 1939 that the nominations of Carrillo and of Serrano Poncela had taken effect on the night of 6 November. Torrecilla further revealed that he and the other members of the Delegation met and took decisions from the very early hours of 7 November. Another member, Arturo García de la Rosa, confirmed this in an interview with the Irish historian Ian Gibson.17 The anarchist Gregorio Gallego highlighted the Communists’ ability to hit the ground running: ‘we realized that the operation was far too well prepared and manipulated to have been improvised’.18
It had been nearly 9.00 p.m. when Miaja sat down with his aide de camp and his secretary to give some thought to the problem of how to create the Junta de Defensa. While they were still sifting the names of possible councillors, the Communist delegation had arrived and successfully pitched for the War and Public Order Councils. Because the Communists had already decided on the personnel, those two Councils were able to function immediately. Having been left to hold the city as best he could, most of the rest of Miaja’s time on the night of 6–7 November was dedicated to trying to ascertain the forces and weaponry available to him. At 7.00 in the morning of 7 November, Miaja went to the office of the Commissar General of War hoping to make contact with other political leaders. Hitherto, there had been a daily meeting in the Ministry of War to discuss the progress of the conflict. Now, Miaja discovered that most of those he wanted to meet had fled to Valencia along with the government. Thus only gradually throughout the morning was he able to assemble the rest of the personnel of the Junta. According to various eyewitnesses, it was not until 11 a.m. that the final list was drawn up. It consis
ted largely of young representatives of the various parties and trade unions.19
The first official meeting of the hastily formed Junta de Defensa was not until the late afternoon of 7 November. However, there can be no doubt that, from late the previous evening, overall operational responsibility for the prisoners lay with three men: Santiago Carrillo Solares, his deputy José Cazorla Maure and Segundo Serrano Poncela, who was effectively Director General of Security for Madrid. Key decisions about the prisoners were clearly taken in the vacuum between the departure of the government for Valencia on the evening of 6 November and the formal constitution of the Junta de Defensa twenty-four hours later. However, it is inconceivable that those decisions were taken in isolation by three inexperienced young men aged respectively twenty-one (Carrillo), thirty (Cazorla) and twenty-four (Serrano Poncela). The authorization for their operational decisions, as will be seen, had to have come from far more senior elements. Certainly, it required the go-ahead from Checa and Mije who, in turn, needed the approval of Miaja and probably of the Russian advisers. In the terror-stricken city, the aid provided by the Russians in terms of tanks, aircraft, the International Brigades and technical experience ensured that their advice would be sought and gratefully received. The implementation of the operational decisions also required, and indeed would receive, assistance from the anarchist movement.
