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

by Paul Preston

  By March 1938, the Republic was in dire straits, demoralized and suffering badly from a drastic lack of food and armaments. Indeed, so bleak did the prospects seem that Negrín’s friend and ally Prieto had come to believe, as did Azaña, that all was lost. Prieto advocated a negotiated peace to avoid the senseless loss of more lives. At tense cabinet meetings on 16 and 29 March, Prieto supported Azaña in proposing a request to the French government to mediate an end to the war. Negrín had reasserted his conviction that the war should go on precisely because he was aware of what would befall the defeated Republic at the hands of the vengeful Francoists. Appalled by the demoralizing impact of Prieto’s words and determined that the Republic would continue to resist, Negrín removed Prieto from the Ministry of Defence on 5 April. Ten days later, the rebels reached the Mediterranean.

  Resistance meant combat not only at the battle front but also in the rearguard. The determination to follow judicial procedure did not stop the war on spies and saboteurs. A significant success of the SIM took place that April in Barcelona with the discovery and arrest of several fifth-column networks. The British and French diplomatic staff appealed for mercy, but the cabinet voted seven to five for the execution, at the end of June, of ten fifth columnists. The British Chargé d’Affaires, John Leche, commented, ‘I fear repercussions on the other side may be serious, and gave the government serious warning to this effect, but the president of the council and his supporters in the Cabinet are pitiless, and now seem to have as little consideration for their people in the hands of Franco as the latter has for his supporters here.’ The ten prisoners were shot on the morning of 25 June.141

  As the battle of the Ebro raged, the militarization of society was intensified. Control of the rearguard became ever more implacable against those suspected of sabotage or espionage. This provoked the severe discomfort of those who felt that the democratic values of the Republic were being compromised by wartime necessities. Thus, on 9 August 1938, there was a cabinet crisis when Negrín forced through approval for the execution of a further sixty-two fifth columnists the following day. Now Minister without Portfolio, Irujo complained of irregularities in the investigation carried out by the SIM. Negrín lost his temper and accused him of ‘legalistic drivel’. In contrast to the rebel practice of rarely reporting executions, the full coverage by the Republican press of this decision led to a considerable scandal. President Azaña was mortified. The Francoists replied immediately by executing sixty-six people.142 The next day, when Irujo said that the SIM had used torture, Negrín undertook to ensure that it ceased forthwith. Irujo resigned, albeit not over this issue. He did so, obliged by an agreement between the Generalitat and the Basque government in exile, in support of Jaume Aiguader’s resignation in protest at further limits on the powers of the Generalitat.143

  In the spring of 1938, the British had set up an exchange commission under Field Marshal Sir Philip Chetwode. Denys Cowan, a former vice-consul to Havana and both a Conservative and a Catholic, was the Commission’s liaison officer with the Republican authorities. He arrived in Barcelona on 20 August and immediately met Álvarez del Vayo, Giral, Negrín and Azaña. Two days later, he reported that the Republican government was prepared to go to ‘almost any lengths’ to exchange all prisoners ‘provided they could receive proper reciprocity from the other side’.144 Indeed, so willing were the Republican ministers that Leche felt the need to protect them from themselves and suggested to the Chetwode Commission that, in view of the Francoists’ ‘previous intransigence and bad faith it would be better that first proposals should come from them’.145

  Cowan approached Álvarez del Vayo to seek a suspension of executions, telling him that it would create a better atmosphere for the Republic. Del Vayo passed the proposal to Negrín and the cabinet agreed to suspend executions until 30 September, as the basis for negotiation of a general amnesty on both sides. There was to be no reciprocity from Burgos, merely a radio communiqué stating that Franco’s system of justice was so pure that there was no reason to make a similar concession. Nevertheless, to facilitate Chetwode’s work, Negrín undertook to maintain the suspension of executions until 11 October. Although the Burgos authorities still refused to reciprocate, Negrín told Cowan just before the 11 October deadline that he would extend the suspension to the end of the month and would authorize no further executions without lengthy prior notice to the Chetwode Commission.

  One problem was that there were fewer than three hundred persons under sentence of death in the Republican zone but many thousands in rebel territory. Negrín suggested that all death sentences on both sides be commuted, but Burgos refused. Throughout the period after the Republican suspension of executions, the Francoists continued to implement death sentences. Cowan was inevitably worried that this would provoke Republican reprisals. He reminded Negrín that he had declared that his policy was one of ‘clemency ad infinitum’. Negrín responded by undertaking to recommend to the cabinet that there be no reprisals.146 The moratorium on executions was extended until the end of December. On Christmas Eve 1938, Negrín made a broadcast in which, referring to ‘the norms of tolerance and civility that are the essence of our fundamental law’, he appealed to Franco to ‘stop unnecessary ferocity!’ Pointing out that the Republic had suspended executions four months previously, he called on Franco to reciprocate.147

  In Burgos, Chetwode met the Conde de Jordana, Franco’s Foreign Minister, who claimed falsely that ‘only those persons were executed by his side who had committed abominable felonies and had been convicted after fair trial in a court of law’. To support this fiction, Jordana produced the chief of Franco’s military juridical corps, Lieutenant Colonel Lorenzo Martínez Fuset, who declared that the Burgos regime had executed nobody for their political opinions, or even for taking up arms, but ‘only because they had committed crimes which in common law would have been worthy of death’. Accordingly, he said, Franco could not interfere and was prepared to risk Republican reprisals.148 Chetwode wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, in mid-November:

  I can hardly describe the horror that I have conceived of Spain since my interview with Franco three days ago. He is worse than the Reds and I could not stop him executing his unfortunate prisoners. And when I managed to get 140 out of the Cuban embassy in Madrid across the lines the other day, having got them across, Franco frankly refused to give anyone for them in spite of his promise. And when he did send people down nearly half of them were not the people he had promised to release but criminals who had been in jail, many of them, since before the war started.149

  Yet again, Franco reneged on an exchange agreement after the Republican government had already made it possible for many of its prisoners to cross into insurgent territory.150 Meanwhile, as the war drew to a close, Franco refused to exchange forty or fifty senior officers in return for his supporters in the embassies. According to Chetwode, Franco was gambling, successfully as it turned out, on the Republicans being able to prevent any harm coming to them.151

  In a speech to the Standing Committee of the Cortes six months after coming to power, Negrín had referred to his own efforts, and those of Zugazagoitia and Irujo, to maintain legal norms. Essentially, his speech was a hymn of praise to the re-establishment of normality by successive Republican governments.152 Nevertheless, there had been considerable tension between Negrín and Irujo over the eventual trial of the POUM executive committee members and the investigation into the death of Nin.153 When the trial took place in October 1938, Irujo was no longer Minister of Justice. The summary procedures of the Special Court saw it referred to jokily as the ‘fotomatón’ (photo machine). There were complaints that lawyers could not properly represent their clients, that police evidence was given without police witnesses being identified or that the only evidence presented was confessions secured by the SIM. The fact that such complaints could be published and heard constituted another dramatic contrast with the rebel zone.154

  Irujo had been replaced as Minister of Justice by
Negrín’s friend the Republican Mariano Ansó. Nevertheless, Irujo remained in the cabinet as Minister without Portfolio, having ensured that any death penalties imposed by the Special Court would have to be ratified by the cabinet. The trial of the seven POUM executive committee members eventually proceeded in an atmosphere of great tension during the final stages of the decisive battle of the Ebro. Nevertheless, it was conducted, as Irujo had promised Katia Landau, with full judicial guarantees. Irujo was in Paris at the time but returned in order to appear in court, as Julián Zugazagoitia also did, as a witness. Their declarations were a crucial element in the prosecutor withdrawing the demand for the death penalty. Two of the accused were acquitted and five given prison sentences. All escaped from Spain at the end of the war.155

  After defeat on the Ebro, with Franco’s forces pouring into Catalonia, the bulk of prisoners held by the Republic were evacuated on 23 January 1939. Thousands crossed the border into France. At Pont de Molins, however, Negrín ordered the transfer of several of the more important ones to the central zone, where they could be used for prisoner exchanges. They included Bishop Anselmo Polanco, who had been captured when Republican forces took Teruel in January 1938. Polanco was first imprisoned in Valencia but was soon moved to Barcelona, where he remained for the rest of the war. He was kept in comfortable circumstances and permitted to carry out his spiritual exercises and to say Mass for his fellow prisoners. The government wanted to avoid the scandal of anything happening to Polanco, but Franco blocked Prieto’s efforts via the Red Cross to exchange him for General Rojo’s fourteen-year-old son.

  As the remnants of the defeated Republican Army headed for an uncertain exile, harassed by rebel supporters within the civilian population, Negrín’s orders for the safety of the prisoners were ignored. A truck containing thirty soldiers, under the command of Major Pedro Díaz, arrived at Pont de Molins and took charge of the prisoners, ostensibly in order to transfer them to the port of Roses. The convoy stopped near a ravine at a place called Can de Tretze and the prisoners were shot. Their corpses were soaked in petrol and ignited. The forty-two victims included most of the captured rebel top brass from Teruel: Bishop Polanco and his vicar general, the military commander Colonel Rey d’Harcourt, the head of the Civil Guard and the police chief. Twenty-one Italians and one German who had been taken prisoner at Guadalajara were among those killed. This senseless act of revenge became a symbol of red barbarism. Polanco was eventually beatified by the Vatican in 1995.156

  After the fall of Catalonia in January 1939 and an exodus of hundreds of thousands of civilians, at the last meeting of the Cortes at Figueras Negrín presented a plan to bring the war to an end in return for Franco observing certain conditions, above all no reprisals.157 The plan was put to British and French representatives, who replied that the Burgos government was not interested in humanitarian sentiments, peace-making or magnanimity and anyway declared that it punished only common crimes. The hypocrisy thereof was underlined by Negrín’s comment that ‘in a savage and pitiless civil war like ours, either everything is a common crime or nothing is’. Accordingly, Negrín offered himself as an expiatory victim, letting it be known that he would hand himself over if Franco would accept his symbolic execution in exchange for the lives of the mass of innocent Republican civilians. He did not reveal this offer to the majority of his own cabinet apart from Zugazagoitia.158 Negrín’s offer was ignored by Franco. The government remained in Spain at the Castle at Figueras until the last units of the Republican army had crossed the French frontier on 9 February. The night before, one of the few colleagues who remained with Negrín, his friend Dr Rafael Méndez, Director General of Carabineros, said to Julio Álvarez del Vayo: ‘I don’t know what we’re doing here. I fear that we will be woken up tonight by Carlist rifle-butts.’ Negrín called Méndez aside and said: ‘We are not leaving here until the last soldier has crossed the frontier.’ Determined to see these Republicans safe from the reprisals of Franco, he watched for eighteen hours until General Rojo arrived to announce that all the Republican troops had crossed into France. Only then did Negrín move on to Toulouse to take a plane back to Alicante. Some ministers thought that he was mad, but as he himself explained: ‘If I had not done that then, today I would die of shame.’159 Back in Spain, he tried to reorganize the military forces of the centre to mount resistance either until a European war started or at least until a massive evacuation could ensure the lowest number of Republican deaths possible. On 16 February, he held a meeting of the military high command in Albacete. Having ascertained that the morale of the ordinary soldier seemed high, he was surprised when senior officers insisted that it was necessary to end the war as soon as possible. Asked why he did not sue for peace, he replied: ‘because to beg for peace is to provoke a catastrophe’.160

  As his friend the American journalist Louis Fischer wrote later, ‘Negrín and del Vayo hoped, by holding out a little while longer, to extract a promise of mercy and clemency from Franco and to win time for the flight of those with a price on their heads.’161 The idea that Franco might guarantee that there would be no reprisals against the defeated was a vain one given his Law of Political Responsibilities, announced on 9 February, by which supporters of the Republic were effectively guilty of the crime of military rebellion, which in Franco’s topsy-turvy moral world meant all those who had not supported the military coup of 1936. Negrín was convinced that a fight to the finish was possible and, as a result, had been accused by Prieto of having provoked ‘the gigantic hecatomb’. Prieto claimed that a negotiated peace had been possible and blamed the policy of resistance for Francoist vengeance. This revealed either culpable ignorance of what the rebels had been doing in captured territory or else a cynical desire to make political capital for use against Negrín in the coming Republican power struggle in exile. With some bitterness, Negrín reflected on those who just wanted the war to be over, ‘without thinking about the millions of unfortunates who could not save themselves’.162 In the event, his hopes of resistance to save more Republicans would be dashed as much by the coup of Colonel Segismundo Casado in March 1939 as by Franco himself. More in sadness than in anger, he told the Standing Committee of the Cortes that ‘We could still have resisted and held on and that was our obligation. It was our obligation to remain to save those who are now going to end up murdered or in concentration camps.’ As things had turned out, thanks to Casado, he said, the Republic ended ‘in terms of catastrophe and shame’.163

  12

  Franco’s Slow War of Annihilation

  In Galicia, Castile, León and Navarre, the areas of the north where there had been virtually no resistance to the coup, the elimination of leftists, trade unionists and supposed supporters of the Republic was immediate and thorough. In the meantime, Franco’s African forces and the columns organized by army officers and landowners were bloodily purging the southern countryside. That still left the Basque Country, Santander, Asturias, much of Aragon and all the eastern seaboard in Republican hands. The military coup had failed in most of Guipúzcoa, and the Popular Front parties had created a Defence Junta in San Sebastián. It and the smaller juntas in other towns were largely dominated by the Socialists and Communists. Basque nationalists participated in the hope of maintaining public order. Their priority was to prevent executions of rightists being carried out by the Communists.1

  The military coup in the profoundly conservative province of Álava was organized by Franco’s lifelong friend Camilo Alonso Vega. Except in the north of the province, it met little resistance. A general strike was quickly suppressed and large numbers of armed Carlists and some Falangists gathered in the provincial capital, Gasteiz/Vitoria. Hundreds of CNT members were arrested, some Republicans and Basque nationalists taken as ‘hostages’ and municipal functionaries and schoolteachers removed from their jobs. On 22 July 1936, an aircraft from Vitoria bombed the village square of Otxandio in the south of Vizcaya, killing eighty-four people, of whom forty-five were children, and mutilating a further 113. In
justification, the rebel command in Vitoria announced: ‘our aircraft have struck a heavy blow against a group of rebels gathered in the rearguard at Otxandiano’. The repression in Álava was overseen by the military but largely carried out by Carlists and Falangists. Carlists from the neighbouring provinces of Navarre, Logroño and Burgos undertook executions in small towns on the basis of lists provided by the local right. The Church hierarchy replaced parish priests if they were sympathetic to Basque Nationalism and some were even imprisoned. Often, where the priest was a Carlist, leftists and Basque nationalists could expect little mercy, although there were honourable exceptions. Elsewhere, the Basque clergy did much to save lives. There were 170 executions in Álava of people from the province and another thirty or so in neighbouring areas. More than half of all the killings were extra-judicial.2

  While the rest of the Basque Country remained under Republican control, anti-clerical violence was relatively limited, significantly less than in many other provinces. Sixty-nine priests died at the hands of leftists, the majority in Vizcaya, while in Guipúzcoa, four clergy were killed. This was the consequence of the lesser influence of the CNT and the committed efforts of Basque nationalists, Republicans and moderate Socialists to prevent bloodshed. Churches were not attacked and religious practices continued without interruption. Nevertheless, right-wingers were in danger. In the industrial town of Rentería, near the provincial capital San Sebastián, the local Carlist leader was arrested and shot. The total number of deaths in Rentería was three. In Tolosa, in the south of the province, right-wingers involved in the military plot were shot and thirteen Carlists were taken to San Sebastián and executed. As in most places, revolutionary committees were established which arrested wealthy holidaymakers along with members of the local bourgeoisie. Moderate Socialists and Basque nationalists tried hard to ensure their safety. The starkest exception was the provincial capital, where 183 people were executed, more than half of the total of 343 people killed in Guipúzcoa while it was under Republican control.3