by Paul Preston
The most notorious incident concerned eighty-six rebel army officers and policemen arrested on 29 July and taken to the provincial assembly. The president of the Defence Junta of San Sebastián addressed a seething mob and announced that the prisoners would be properly tried with judicial guarantees. The War Councillor of the Junta, the local Communist leader Jesús Larrañaga, demanded summary ‘justice’, and Communist militants assaulted the assembly building and seized the leader of the coup, the Military Governor Colonel León Carrasco Amilibia. They were prevented from shooting him by the Catholic Manuel de Irujo, who was denounced by Larrañaga as a fascist. A second, successful attempt to seize Carrasco saw him murdered that night alongside a railway track. Larrañaga then issued the order for the execution of the prisoners in the provincial prison at Ondarreta beach. As well as the rebel officers, those named included policemen prominent in the repression of strikes in previous years. At dawn the next day, the prison was assaulted. Despite the efforts of Catholic Basque nationalists and Socialists, forty-one rebel army officers and twelve of their civilian supporters were shot. The assassins included militiamen from Galicia thirsting for revenge for the repression unleashed in A Coruña and Ferrol.4
Already on 23 July, Carlist troops from Navarre had entered the southern part of Guipúzcoa. Although they encountered no resistance, in Cegama and Segura they sacked the headquarters of Republican parties and the Batzoki (centres) of the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party), whose militants were detained and mistreated. Some were shot and many more subjected to arbitrary fines.5 In early August, General Mola began a campaign to cut off the Basque Country from the French border. Thus under the Carlists Colonel José Solchaga Zala and Colonel Alfonso Beorleguí y Canet, commander of the Civil Guard in Navarre, large numbers of Requetés set off from Navarre towards Irún and San Sebastián. Beorleguí was a fearless but rather childlike giant. When his column was bombed, he simply opened his umbrella.6 Irún and Fuenterrabía were being shelled from the sea and attacked daily by German and Italian bombers. They dropped rebel pamphlets threatening to repeat what had been done in Badajoz. San Sebastián was also heavily shelled from the sea and eight civilian right-wingers and five army officers were executed in reprisal.7 Irún’s poorly armed and untrained militia defenders fought bravely but were overwhelmed on 3 September. Thousands of panic-stricken refugees fled across the international bridge from Irún across the River Bidasoa to France. The last defenders, largely anarchists enraged by their lack of ammunition, shot some rightist prisoners in Fuenterrabía and set parts of Irún on fire.8
The Basque Country, Santander and Asturias were now cut off from France as well as from the rest of Republican Spain. Rebel forces occupied San Sebastián on Sunday 13 September, too late to prevent the shooting of several right-wing prisoners, including the Carlist ideologue Víctor Pradera and his son Javier. It was the second provincial capital captured from the Republic by rebel troops, and by the end of September virtually all of Guipúzcoa was in Mola’s hands.9 A substantial number of the city’s 80,000 inhabitants had fled either towards Vizcaya or else by boat to France. Despite that exodus, the number of executions in San Sebastián would be the highest carried out by the rebels in any Basque city. Mass detentions began immediately, beginning with the wounded Republicans who could not be evacuated from the military hospital. Soon two prisons, at Ondarreta and Zapatari, the offices of the Falange, the San José hospice and the Kursaal cinema were all bursting at the seams with detainees. There is considerable doubt regarding the exact number of executions in the immediate aftermath of the rebel occupation. It is impossible to reach figures for the extra-judicial paseos carried out by Requetés or Falangists. Between 1936 and 1943, a total of 485 people were executed as a result of pseudo-trials mounted by the army. Forty-seven of these were women, almost all members of the CNT. Accordingly, if paseos are included, according to the exhaustive researches of Pedro Barruso Barés and of Mikel Aizpuru and his team, the total number for the first months is likely to be well over six hundred.10
The most notorious executions by the rebels in Guipúzcoa were those of thirteen Basque priests, which were carried out at the behest of the Carlists. In mid-September, Manuel Fal Conde, the Carlist leader, protested to General Cabanellas, the President of the Burgos Junta, about the ‘feeble nature’ of the military repression in Guipúzcoa compared with that in the south, complaining: ‘this leniency is especially notable where the clergy is concerned. The military are afraid of falling foul of the Church.’ He repeated his complaints to Cardinal Isidro Gomá, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of All Spain, and to his deeply reactionary predecessor, the exiled Cardinal Pedro Segura. He urged the use of the rules of martial law to enable the execution of Basque nationalists, including priests. Since the usual practice of extra-judicial executions was inappropriate for priests, he suggested that problems with the Church be avoided by means of a simulacrum of military trial. For Fal Conde to assume that the Church hierarchy would give written approval for the execution of priests is an accurate reflection of the Carlist mentality.11
In total, the rebels murdered sixteen priests in the entire Basque region and imprisoned and tortured many more. One of those killed, Celestino Onaindía Zuloaga, was selected because his younger brother Alberto, a canon of the Cathedral of Valladolid, was a friend of the Basque President José Antonio Aguirre, for whom he was a kind of roving ambassador. Another, Father Joaquín Iturricastillo, was shot on 8 November, after being denounced as a dangerous nationalist for criticizing cheek-to-cheek waltzing as contrary to Basque customs. In general, the names of those to be executed appeared in blacklists brought by the Carlists from Pamplona. Executions of priests led to protests to Franco by Cardinal Gomá, who nonetheless justified them to the Vatican as the result of priests engaging in political activity. When Father Alberto Onaindía heard the news of the murder of his brother, he said: ‘if this was how the army behaved with the Basque clergy, what would it be like for civilians!’12
On 20 January 1937, the Military Governor of Guipúzcoa, Alfonso Velarde, wrote to the Vicar General of Vitoria demanding ‘energetic punishment’ of Basque nationalist priests. In some twisted logic, he held them responsible for an assault on the prisons of Bilbao in reprisal for a bombing attack two weeks earlier. The letter was accompanied by a list of 189 priests divided into three groups, ‘extremists, nationalists and sympathizers’, and another list of ninety priests who were allegedly members of the Basque Nationalist Party. After some dispute between the military and ecclesiastical authorities, it was agreed that the clergy of Guipúzcoa should be purged, with twenty-four priests expelled from the province, thirty-one exiled from Spain, thirteen transferred and forty-four imprisoned.13
The visceral hatred underlying the repression carried out by the Carlists and the military in the Basque Country is reflected in the memoirs of Jean Pelletier, a French toy manufacturer who was travelling to Bilbao in order to donate gliders to children. On 15 October 1936, he left Bayonne on the trawler Galerna, which had been requisitioned by the Basque government to carry mail to Bilbao. It was seized, with the probable collusion of its captain, by six armed rebel trawlers from Pasajes, the port of San Sebastián. The trawlers were crewed by Basque fishermen but controlled by Carlists. The passengers were all imprisoned. Because he had served as a pilot in the French air force during the Great War and his luggage contained the toy gliders, Pelletier was assumed to be selling aircraft to the Basque government. He was severely tortured and nineteen of his fellow passengers, most of whom were entirely non-political, were shot on the night of 18 October. Among them were an eighteen-year-old girl, some old men, a sixteen-year-old boy and the writer ‘Aitzol’ (Father José Ariztimuño), who was first beaten and tortured. At the last minute Pelletier himself was withdrawn from the group about to board the bus to the cemetery at Hernani where they were to be shot. He was valuable as a hostage. Others were shot at a later date.
When the fall of Madrid was erroneously announced in Guip
úzcoa in mid-November, numerous businessmen and shopkeepers were arrested and their money and property confiscated because they had not displayed the requisite patriotic fervour. Several priests were also detained and, to humiliate them, their cassocks were confiscated. Pelletier was kept imprisoned because the Francoist authorities were trying to persuade the French government to pay a high ransom, of the order of a shipload of foodstuffs. After six months, he was released when the Basque government agreed to exchange him for a German bomber pilot.14
While the attack on Madrid was the principal rebel preoccupation, the Basque front remained static until late March 1937. Even before the fall of San Sebastián, Mola had initiated secret negotiations with the Basque Nationalist Party. He hoped for a peaceful surrender of Vizcaya in return for a promise not to destroy Bilbao and a guarantee of no subsequent repression. Given what had happened after the captures of Irún and San Sebastián, the PNV leadership was not inclined to believe him. Alberto Onaindía was the principal PNV interlocutor with Mola’s representative. He appealed for Mola not to bomb Bilbao on the grounds that to do so would provoke reprisals against the 2,500 imprisoned rightists in the city.15 On 25 and 26 September 1936, major bombing raids on Bilbao caused dozens of deaths and mutilations of women and children.
As had been predicted, this provoked an outburst of rage from the starving population. Despite the intervention of the local forces of order, anarchists assaulted two prison ships and murdered sixty rightist detainees, including two priests. Greater efforts to prevent similar atrocities were made in the wake of the formation of a Basque government on 7 October, after the Republic had granted regional autonomy the day before. Sporadic bombing raids continued, but nothing had prepared the city for the scale of a sustained attack on 4 January 1937. In response, there was an even more ferocious incursion into the city’s four prisons, when 224 right-wingers were killed, mostly Carlists, but also several priests and some Basque nationalists. The main culprits were anarchists, but UGT militiamen sent to put a stop to the killing joined in at one of the prisons. At considerable risk, members of the Basque government went to the prisons and managed to control the carnage before it reached all the prisoners.16 In contrast with the repression in Madrid and even more so with that throughout the rebel zone, the Basque government accepted responsibility for the atrocities and permitted the families of the victims to hold public funerals. Proceedings to bring the culprits to justice were initiated but had not been completed when Bilbao fell. The remaining prisoners were well treated and released safe and sound before the rebel occupation of Vizcaya. The Tribunal Popular in Bilbao, which had begun to function in October 1936, held 457 trials and issued 156 death sentences, of which nineteen were carried out.17
By the end of March 1937, Mola had gathered nearly 40,000 troops for a final assault on Vizcaya. He opened his campaign with a widely publicized threat broadcast on radio and printed in thousands of leaflets dropped on the main towns: ‘If your submission is not immediate, I will raze Vizcaya to the ground, beginning with the industries of war. I have ample means to do so.’18 On 31 March, he arrived in Vitoria to put the final touches to the offensive that was to be launched the following day. To crush enemy morale, he ordered the execution of sixteen prisoners, including several popular local figures, one of whom was the Mayor. This led to protests from the local right.19 This act of gratuitous violence was followed by a massive four-day artillery and aircraft bombardment of eastern Vizcaya, in which the small picturesque country town of Durango was destroyed: 127 civilians died during the bombing and a further 131 died shortly afterwards as a consequence of their wounds. Among the dead were fourteen nuns and two priests.20 Four days after the bombing of Durango, Franco met the Italian Ambassador, Roberto Cantalupo, and explained the reasons for such savagery: ‘Others might think that when my aircraft bomb red cities I am making a war like any other, but that is not so.’ He declared ominously that ‘in the cities and the countryside which I have already occupied but still not redeemed, we must carry out the necessarily slow task of redemption and pacification, without which the military occupation will be largely useless’. He went on: ‘I am interested not in territory but in inhabitants. The reconquest of the territory is the means, the redemption of the inhabitants the end.’21
Increasingly, Mola relied on the air support of the German Condor Legion, whose Chief of Staff and later leader was Lieutenant Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, who was to mastermind the German Blitzkrieg invasion of Poland. Durango saw the beginning of Richthofen’s experiments in terror bombing designed to break the morale of the civilian population and also to destroy road communications where they passed through population centres. On the night of 25 April, presumably on Mola’s instructions, the rebel radio at Salamanca broadcast the following warning to the Basque people: ‘Franco is about to deliver a mighty blow against which all resistance is useless. Basques! Surrender now and your lives will be spared.’22 The mighty blow was the obliteration of Guernica in one afternoon of relentless bomb attacks. On the day after the bombing, an eyewitness, Father Alberto Onaindía, wrote a passionate letter to Cardinal Gomá: ‘I have just arrived from Bilbao with my soul destroyed after having witnessed the horrific crime that has been perpetrated against the peaceful town of Guernica.’ He told the Cardinal of ‘Three hours of terror and Dantesque scenes. Children and mothers collapsed on the roadside, mothers screaming in prayer, a population of believers murdered by criminals who have not the slightest claim to humanity. Señor Cardinal, for dignity, for the honour of the gospel, for Christ’s infinite pity, such a horrendous, unprecedented, apocalyptic, Dantesque crime cannot be committed.’ Describing scenes of the sick burned alive, the wounded buried in mounds of ashes, Onaindía appealed to Gomá to intercede, reminding him of international law and ‘an eternal law, God’s law, that forbids the killing and murder of the innocent. This was trampled underfoot on Monday in Guernica. Which cruel personage coldly planned this horrific crime of burning and killing an entire peaceful town?’
Onaindía’s letter ended with a plea to Gomá to prevent the implementation of the rebel threats that Bilbao would be next. Gomá’s dismissive reply with its repetition of Mola’s threat was a spine-chilling affirmation of the Church’s official support for Franco’s war of annihilation: ‘I regret, as anyone would, what is happening in Vizcaya. I have suffered for months, God is my witness. I particularly regret the destruction of your towns, where the purest faith and patriotism once dwelt. But it was not necessary to be a prophet to foresee what is now happening.’ In an angry reference to Basque loyalty to the Madrid government, Gomá fulminated, ‘Peoples pay for their pacts with evil and for their perverse wickedness in sticking to them.’ He then casually endorsed Mola’s threats: ‘I take the liberty of replying to your anguished letter with a simple piece of advice. Bilbao must surrender, it has no other choice. It can do so with honour, as it could have done two months ago. Whichever side is responsible for the destruction of Guernica, it is a terrible warning for the great city.’23
When the insurgents reached the burned-out remnants of Guernica on 29 April, the Carlist Jaime del Burgo asked a lieutenant colonel of Mola’s staff: ‘was it necessary to do this?’ The officer barked: ‘This has to be done with all of Vizcaya and with all of Catalonia.’24 Although the Caudillo’s propaganda service went to great lengths to deny that Guernica had been bombed, there is no doubt that Mola and Franco shared the ultimate responsibility and were pleased with the outcome.25
Euskadi was subjected to another six weeks of bombing, against which the defenders had only sporadic air cover. However, dogged Basque resistance in the steep hills held up the rebel advance. As towns fell, the repression was fierce. In Amorebieta on 16 May, the Father Superior of the Carmelite monastery tried to negotiate with the rebel attackers to limit the repression. He was shot as a Basque nationalist and robbed of a substantial sum of money. The rebels announced in the press that he had been murdered by the red separatists; at the same time the
y privately informed the Carmelite Order that he had been executed as a spy.26
The terror provoked by artillery and aerial bombardment and political divisions within the Republican ranks ensured the gradual collapse of Basque resistance. The death of Mola in an aircraft accident on 3 June made no difference. The Army of the North, under the command of General Fidel Dávila, continued its march on Bilbao. When the city fell on 19 June, 200,000 people were evacuated westwards into Santander, first on trawlers. Then, when the Francoists had taken the port of Bilbao, the refugees fled in cars, lorries, horse carts or on foot. They were bombed and strafed by the Condor Legion along the way.27 Fifteen women were shot, their deaths announced as suicides.28 Shops were looted and Falangists from Valladolid were given free rein. The subsequent repression was implemented on the pseudo-legal basis of the ‘emergency summary courts martial’ which had replaced the application of the edict of martial law since the conquest of Málaga in February. Nearly eight thousand were imprisoned in punishment for their nationalist ambitions, many of whom were forced into work battalions. When executions began, in December following the first trials, there would be several hundred victims of firing squads and at least thirty executed by garrotte vil.29 Nevertheless, the repression in the Basque Country was, according to the senior military prosecutor Felipe Acedo Colunga, of notably less severity than elsewhere. Two possible reasons for this were the rebels’ need for skilled labour to run Basque industries and the fact that the Catholic Church had less need to pursue a vengeful policy in a largely Catholic province.30 There have been wildly different claims of the number of executions in Vizcaya but the most reliable estimate to date is 916.31
