by Paul Preston
At the beginning of December, under cover of a rebel bombing raid, home-made bombs were thrown from one of these houses into a nearby militia barracks and snipers fired on militiamen. On 3 December, the Dirección General de Seguridad informed all the foreign embassies that measures would be taken to prevent a repetition. Using the illegal status of the improvised asylum as justification, a police raid on the houses (not on the Finnish Embassy itself) was mounted the next day by José Cazorla and Serrano Poncela using the Brigada Especial commanded by David Vázquez Baldominos. The Republican security forces were met with gunfire. When they finally gained entry, they found maps with targets, an arsenal of guns and hand grenades. It was reported that numerous armed rebel supporters had been found, of whom 387 men and women were arrested.104 According to official Soviet sources, Grigulevich was involved in organizing this raid, which confirms his links with the Brigada Especial.105
Schlayer and Henry Helfant, the commercial attaché of the Romanian Embassy, appealed to Melchor Rodríguez to prevent the execution of prisoners taken in the Finnish raid. Melchor and Helfant went to see Serrano Poncela. After a tense encounter, Serrano agreed that the prisoners should be placed under Melchor’s charge.106 With Madrid’s prisons bursting at the seams, Melchor set out on 8 December to see if the prison at Alcalá de Henares had accommodation for them.
On 6 December, the prison at Guadalajara had been attacked by a mob that had killed 282 prisoners.107 That mob had included nearly one hundred militiamen under the orders of Valentín González, ‘El Campesino’. Two days later, in Alcalá de Henares, a furious crowd including some of the same militiamen gathered to seek revenge for those killed and maimed in a bombing raid. Their target was the prisoners held there, many of them as a result of the evacuation from the Cárcel Modelo. Among the more famous prisoners were the Falangist leader, Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, the founder of the Assault Guards, Colonel Agustín Muñoz Grandes, the secretary of the CEDA, Javier Martín Artajo, and the radio personality Bobby Deglané. The recently arrived Melchor Rodríguez, showing greater courage than the prison functionaries who had fled, confronted the mob. Braving threats, insults and accusations of being a fascist, he argued that the prisoners were not responsible for the air raid and that the murder of defenceless men would bring shame on the Republic. His voice raw from making himself heard above the tumult, he said that they would have to kill him to get to the galleries. He also gave them pause by threatening to arm the prisoners. Campesino’s militiamen were led away by Major Coca, their commander, and the rest of the crowd drifted after them. Fearing that Coca planned to come back, Melchor went to his headquarters and, in a bitter confrontation with the Major, persuaded him to guarantee the safety of the prisoners. Melchor thereby saved over 1,500 lives.108
However, on his return to Madrid on the night of 8 December, Melchor was called before the CNT–FAI Defence Committee and severely criticized by its secretary, Eduardo Val. Melchor managed to calm his critics, but they were suspicious of his claim that he could stop the bombing of Madrid by negotiating with the rebels and offering to prevent any more assassinations of prisoners.109 Nevertheless, from 12 December, the situation was changing yet again. The Junta de Defensa had decreed that the militarization of all the militias and all their functions were under the control of the new Director General of Security, José Cazorla. In agreement with Cazorla, arrangements were made for young prisoners either to be forcibly conscripted into the Republican Army or, if they chose, to join work battalions building fortifications. It was later alleged that some of those ‘released’ or ‘transferred’ were taken to checas under the control of Cazorla. Certainly, Cazorla and Melchor Rodríguez did arrange for the release of those against whom there were no charges and of female prisoners over the age of sixty. Melchor Rodríguez also took measures to improve the food in prisons and created an information office where families could find out where prisoners were being held and their state of health. With the help of the Red Cross, he created a hospital service which ended up being used as a centre for fifth columnists. He also organized a party in the Romanian Embassy for recently released detainees.110 Despite suspicions of his links with the fifth column, Melchor Rodríguez’s success in stopping sacas raises questions about Santiago Carrillo’s inability to do the same.
Subsequently, Francoist propaganda built on the atrocity of Paracuellos to depict the Republic as a murderous Communist-dominated regime guilty of red barbarism. Francoists have even claimed that the number murdered was 12,000.111 Despite the fact that Santiago Carrillo was only one of the key participants in the entire process, the Franco regime, and the Spanish right thereafter, never missed any opportunity to use Paracuellos to denigrate him during the years that he was secretary general of the Communist Party (1960–82) and especially in 1977 as part of the effort to prevent the legalization of the Communist Party. Carrillo has himself inadvertently contributed to keeping himself in the spotlight by absurdly denying any knowledge of, let alone responsibility for, the killings. However, a weight of other evidence confirmed by some of his own partial revelations makes it clear that he was fully involved.112
For instance, in more than one interview in 1977 Carrillo claimed that, by the time he took over the Council for Public Order in the Junta de Defensa, the operation of transferring prisoners from Madrid to Valencia was ‘coming to an end and all I did, with General Miaja, was order the transfer of the last prisoners’. It is certainly true that there had been sacas before 7 November, but the bulk of the killings took place after that date while Carrillo was Councillor for Public Order. His admission that he ordered the transfers of prisoners after 7 November clearly puts him in the frame.113 Elsewhere, he claimed that, after an evacuation had been decided on, the vehicles were ambushed and the prisoners murdered by uncontrolled elements. He has frequently insinuated that the killers were anarchists and has stated, ‘I can take no responsibility other than having been unable to prevent it.’114 This would have been hardly credible under any circumstances, but especially so after the discovery that there had been a CNT–JSU meeting on the night of 7 November.
Moreover, Carrillo’s post-1974 denials of knowledge of the Paracuellos killings were contradicted by the congratulations heaped on him at the time. Between 6 and 8 March 1937 the PCE celebrated an amplified plenary meeting of its Central Committee in Valencia. Francisco Antón said: ‘It is difficult to say that the fifth column in Madrid has been annihilated but it certainly has suffered the hardest blows there. This, it must be proclaimed loudly, is thanks to the concern of the Party and the selfless, ceaseless effort of two new comrades, as beloved as if they were veteran militants of our Party, Comrade Carrillo when he was the Councillor for Public Order and Comrade Cazorla who holds the post now.’ When the applause died down, Carrillo rose and praised ‘the glory of those warriors of the JSU who can fight in the certain knowledge that the rearguard is safe, cleansed and free of traitors. It is no crime nor is it a manoeuvre [against the CNT] but a duty to demand such a purge.’115
Comments made at the time and later by Spanish Communists such as Pasionaria and Francisco Antón, by Comintern agents, by Gorev and by others show that prisoners were assumed to be fifth columnists and that Carrillo was to be praised for eliminating them. On 30 July 1937, in a report to the head of the Comintern Giorgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian Stoyan Minev, alias ‘Boris Stepanov’, from April 1937 the Comintern’s delegate in Spain, wrote indignantly of the ‘Jesuit and fascist’ Irujo that he had tried to arrest Carrillo because he had given ‘the order to shoot several arrested officers of the fascists’.116 In his final post-war report to Stalin, Stepanov referred to Mola’s statement about his five columns. Stepanov went on to write proudly that the Communists took note of the implications thereof and ‘in a couple of days carried out the operations necessary to cleansing Madrid of fifth columnists’. Stepanov explained in more detail his outrage against Irujo. In July 1937, shortly after becoming Minister of Justice, Manuel Irujo initiated investig
ations into what happened at Paracuellos, including a judicial inquiry into the role of Carrillo.117 Unfortunately, no trace of this inquiry has survived and it is a reasonable assumption that any evidence was among the papers burned by the Communist-dominated security services before the end of the war.118
What Carrillo himself said in his broadcast on Unión Radio and what Stepanov wrote in his report to Stalin were echoed years later in the Spanish Communist Party’s official history of its role in the Civil War. Published in Moscow when Carrillo was secretary general of the PCE, it declared proudly that ‘Santiago Carrillo and his deputy Cazorla took the measures necessary to maintain order in the rearguard, which was every bit as important as the fighting at the front. In two or three days, a serious blow was delivered against the snipers and fifth columnists.’119
What has gone before, like everything written about Paracuellos, is inevitably distorted because of the imbalance of material about the three phases of authorization, organization and implementation. It is possible to know that meetings took place at which evacuation and elimination were almost certainly discussed and authorization almost certainly given. These are the meetings on 6 November of José Miaja with Pedro Checa and Antonio Mije, of Mikhail Koltsov with Checa, and of Mije with Vladimir Gorev and Vicente Rojo. However, there is little or nothing by way of records of those conversations. In contrast, there is a vast quantity of material in the Causa General on the administrative organization of the sacas and on what happened at the prisons when militiamen arrived to load the prisoners on to the buses. Nevertheless, there is little material on the actual murders, on the specific parts played in the killing by the anarchists, by the Fifth Regiment or by the Brigada Especial created with the help of Orlov and Grigulevich. Accordingly, there will always be an element of deduction if not speculation about the collective responsibility.
Astonishingly, despite all the other problems of defending the besieged and starving city, the Junta managed to make a priority of controlling the checas and centrally co-ordinating the forces of order and security in Madrid. Its efforts in terms of rebuilding the state apparatus went far beyond the ineffective measures of General Pozas and the slightly more energetic efforts to control the checas made by Ángel Galarza in October. Nevertheless, the greatest death toll of rebel supporters in the city would take place on the Junta’s watch between 7 November and 4 December. Thereafter, there would be little of the indiscriminate violence that marked the early months of the war as the reorganized security forces targeted more specifically those perceived to be undermining the war effort, and the numbers executed plummeted.
PART FIVE
Two Concepts of War
11
Defending the Republic from the Enemy Within
By the end of 1936, the spontaneous mass violence of the early months was no more, although in early February 1937 President Azaña could still note the disgust felt by the Minister of Finance, Juan Negrín, about the atrocities. He suggested that they made Negrín ashamed to be Spanish.1 Negrín’s commitment to ending the uncontrolled violence is corroborated by his friend Mariano Ansó, who recounted that, in Valencia on one occasion, he accosted armed militiamen who had detained a man and were clearly planning to shoot him as a fascist. At enormous risk, and by sheer force of personality, he obliged them to release the man.2
From January 1937, repressive violence behind the Republican lines was not uncontrolled and hate-fuelled as it had been in the first weeks of the war. Henceforth, it was largely a question of the Republican state rebuilding itself and, of course, defending itself. Accordingly, it took two principal forms which occasionally overlapped. On the one hand, the security services focused their efforts on the enemy within, the saboteurs, snipers and spies of the fifth column. On the other, there were bitter rivalries over the nature of the war effort. The Communists, many of the Socialists and the Republicans perceived as subversives those on the libertarian and anti-Stalinist left who resisted the creation of a strong state capable of pursuing a centralized war effort. A substantial segment of the anarchist left was concerned with revolutionary goals and was actively hostile to the Republican state. A significant minority was simply involved in criminal activities. Clashes with the security forces were inevitable. This already fraught scenario was further complicated by the fact that, in the case of the Spanish and foreign anti-Stalinists, the Russian security advisers regarded them as Trotskyists who had to be eliminated.
Ever since the Republican government in Valencia, the Madrid Junta and the Catalan Generalitat had all made a determined effort to centralize the police and security services and disarm the various rearguard militia groups, they had been on a collision course with the anarchists. Anarchist militiamen had violently resisted efforts to collect their weapons or to shut down their control posts on the roads in and out of the capital and on the Catalan–French border. There had been numerous incidents, including one in November 1936 when Antonio Mije, the War Councillor in the Junta, had been prevented from leaving the city on an official mission.3 There was a long-standing and fierce hostility between the PCE and the CNT. This was fuelled by the assassination by anarchists of prominent Communist union leaders such as Andrés Rodríguez González in Málaga in June and Desiderio Trillas Mainé in Barcelona on 31 July. Similarly, the foiled assassination attempts in Madrid by anarchists from the Checa del Cine Europa on both Vittorio Vidali and Enrique Líster in September had merely intensified the Communist determination to exact revenge.4
At the beginning of December 1936, when Serrano Poncela left the Dirección General de Seguridad, his executive responsibilities were taken over by José Cazorla, Carrillo’s deputy. Cazorla appointed David Vázquez Baldominos as his police chief. One of his tasks was to expand the Brigada Especial created by Carrillo and Grigulevich. Two more of these special squads were set up, led by two JSU militants, Santiago Álvarez Santiago and José Conesa Arteaga. From the beginning of 1937, all three brigades, under the operational command of Fernando Valentí Fernández, would concentrate on the detention, interrogation and, sometimes, elimination of suspicious elements. This meant not only Francoists but also members of the Madrid CNT, which Cazorla believed to be out of control and infiltrated by the fifth column.5
Cazorla was not the only one to believe that the anarchist movement was infested with fifth columnists. Largo Caballero told PSOE executive committee member Juan-Simeón Vidarte that ‘the FAI has been infiltrated by so many agents provocateurs and police informers that it is impossible to have dealings with them’.6 Neither was entirely wrong. The ease with which membership cards of the CNT could be acquired gave the fifth column access to information, an instrument for acts of provocation and relative ease of movement. With CNT accreditation, fifth columnists could also get identity cards for the Republican security services.7
A bitter example of the consequent conflict between Communists and anarchists took place in Murcia. Luis Cabo Giorla, the Communist Civil Governor of the province from mid-October 1936 until early January 1937, was fierce in his pursuit of fifth columnists, some of whom had had CNT credentials since before the outbreak of war. After their defeat in Valencia, elements of the anarchist Iron Column had moved into Murcia and been guilty of pillage and violence against peasants who resisted them. In December, Cabo Giorla appointed Ramón Torrecilla Guijarro, who had played a key role in Paracuellos, as Delegate of the Dirección General de Seguridad in the province. After Cabo Giorla had been replaced by Antonio Pretel, Torrecilla operated ruthlessly on the blanket assumption that anyone not a member of the Communist Party was likely to be a fifth columnist. Detainees were subjected to torture, beatings and simulated executions. Eventually, in April 1937, a CNT campaign backed by the PSOE led to an official investigation, the arrest of Torrecilla and his collaborators and the resignation of Pretel. Torrecilla spent six months in prison and, after his release, joined the security staff of Cazorla, who had become Civil Governor of Albacete. There his obsessive determination to purge the rea
rguard led to further complaints from non-Communist elements of the Popular Front.8
Communist suspicions of the CNT were confirmed by the announcement, by a self-evidently fit Amor Nuño, at the 23 December 1936 session of the Junta Delegada de Defensa, that he was resigning for health reasons. It emerged that, some days before, a meeting of senior militants from the CNT, FAI and the Federación de Juventudes Libertarias had considered expelling him from the anarchist movement and even having him shot. According to Gregorio Gallego, Cipriano Mera, the CNT’s front-line military commander, had grabbed Nuño by the neck, shaken him and hurled him against the wall, saying that he deserved to be executed. Nuño’s offence derived from his sexual involvement with the daughter of a rebel officer. He had appointed her his secretary and taken her to important meetings where she had been able to listen to secret discussions. Nuño’s comrades suspected that she was a rebel spy and that she had him brainwashed. They spared his life but, regarding him as unreliable, made him resign from the Junta de Defensa. He took a lesser post on the secretariat of the CNT’s transport union and moved to Barcelona, where he would be arrested for his involvement in the May 1937 conflict. At the end of the war, Nuño would be captured in Alicante and beaten to death by policemen in Madrid.9
Amor Nuño was not the only Councillor of the Madrid Junta to resign on 23 December 1936. He was accompanied by Santiago Carrillo, who was replaced on Christmas Day by his former deputy José Cazorla Maure. Carrillo announced that he was leaving to devote himself totally to preparing the forthcoming congress to seal the unification of the Socialist and Communist youth movements. That may indeed have been his motive, but his replacement was also connected with an incident two days earlier.10
At 3 p.m. in the afternoon of 23 December, the Councillor for Supply in the Junta, Pablo Yagüe Esteverá, had been stopped at an anarchist control point when he was leaving the city on official business. Since Carrillo’s decree of 9 November, control of roads in and out of the capital had been supervised by the police, the Assault Guards and the rearguard militias (MVR) under the overall co-ordination of the Public Order Council. The anarchists who stopped Yagüe thus had no authority to do so. After they had refused to recognize his credentials as a Councillor of the Junta, Yagüe continued past the roadblock and they shot and seriously wounded him. They then took refuge in the Ateneo Libertario of the Ventas district. Carrillo ordered their arrest, but the police who went to the Ateneo were told that they were under the protection of the CNT’s regional committee. Carrillo then sent in a company of Assault Guards to seize them. When this was discussed at the meeting of the Junta later that night, he called for them to be shot.11
