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

by Paul Preston

  When the front collapsed on 21 October, people fled in cars, buses, trucks and on foot to El Musel. As many as could squeezed on to fishing boats and headed for France. Some trawlers got through but others were intercepted by the rebel fleet and forced to sail to Galicia, where the passengers were herded into concentration camps. Groups of Falangists came to seek victims and many were taken back to Gijón or Oviedo for trial. Some were murdered on the spot. Others were forced to enlist in work battalions. Military trials were brief, with the accused given little or no chance to speak.56

  Back in Gijón, Father Alejandro Martínez was deeply shocked by the ferocity of the repression, which he described as of an ‘inopportune rigour, as though a certain species of human being had to be liquidated … The troops sacked and looted Gijón as though it were a foreign city.’ The Regulares and Legionarios had the usual licence to pillage and rape and, given the lingering hatred from 1934, did so with especial vehemence. The fifth columnists who had been in hiding during the period of Republican dominance came out hungry for revenge. Colonel José Franco Mussió, a rebel sympathizer, had remained in Asturias in the hope of saving right-wing prisoners and had stayed behind in Gijón rather than flee to the Republican zone. He was tried immediately along with seven other Republican officers and shot on 14 November 1937. At least twenty schoolteachers were shot and many more were imprisoned. In the mining valleys, villagers were subjected to assassinations and beatings. Haystacks were burned at farms to force out those hiding. Paseos and the sexual abuse and even mutilation of women were frequent.57 Of the many atrocities committed, one of the most notorious took place at the Monastery of Valdediós near Villaviciosa. The building had been requisitioned when the Psychiatric Hospital of Oviedo was evacuated there in October 1936. On 27 October 1937, troops of the Brigadas de Navarra arrived. Without motive, they shot six men and eleven women of the staff. They were buried in a large unmarked grave, one of sixty fosas in Asturias.58

  Institutionalized violence was most acute in the mining valleys. In Pola de Lena, more than two hundred people were assassinated, many being forced to dig their own graves. Afterwards, their assassins held a drink-fuelled celebration. When the rebels entered Sama de Langreo, wounded militiamen were loaded on to trucks, taken to the trenches used during the siege of Oviedo, shot and buried there. In the small mining town of San Martín del Rey Aurelio, in the Turón Valley, east of Langreo, at least 261 people were murdered. Near Turón itself, more than two hundred corpses were brought in trucks to a mine shaft known as the Pozo del Rincón.59 Their unions crushed, those not executed or imprisoned were then forced into slave labour in the mines in penal battalions. Some went into hiding or else became involved in a sporadic guerrilla war often linking up with others on the run from Galicia. For years, the Civil Guard and Falangist patrols hunted them down.

  One guerrillero who was caught was Pascual López from Sobrado dos Monxes in A Coruña, whose wife and six children had had no news of him since he fled at the beginning of the war. In June 1939, a man who had served in Franco’s forces returned to the village and said that he had seen Pascual in a concentration camp near Oviedo. Pascual’s wife packed some food and clothes and sent her thirteen-year-old son Pascualín to find him. It took him two weeks to walk to Oviedo and another to locate the correct camp among those in the area. Although his father told him to go home, Pascualín stayed, stealing food during the day and sneaking into the camp at night to sleep, in the open air, alongside Pascual. In early October, a group of Falangists arrived and selected the Galician prisoners to take for execution in Gijón. The Falangists were on horse-back, the prisoners walking. Against his father’s orders, Pascualín followed for twelve days, keeping out of sight. Along the way, the oldest who were too weak to keep up were murdered. When they reached El Musel, the remaining prisoners were lined up and shot on a row of rocks used as a sea defence. The youngest of the Falangists, seeing that several were still alive, asked why they had been ordered to aim at the prisoners’ legs. Their veteran leader, calling him a novice, explained: ‘Because that way they take longer to bleed to death.’ Pascual was not dead and his son managed to pull him out of the water and get him into the hills where a bullet was prised out of his leg with a knife. When he had recovered, he sent Pascualín home to Galicia while he rejoined the guerrillas and was killed shortly afterwards.60

  In Oviedo, as well as the many extra-judicial murders carried out by Falangists between November 1937 and April 1938, a total of 742 people were sentenced to death. In May 1938 alone, 654 people were tried and 260 sentenced to death. When the military courts left Asturias in January 1939 in order to begin the repression in Catalonia, the senior judge praised the police in Oviedo for the speed with which death sentences had been carried out. Altogether, 1,339 people were sentenced to death and all were shot except for fifteen who were executed by garrotte vil. In order to be buried in the cemetery, the prisoner was obliged to confess before a priest and be reconciled with the Church. Only two hundred made their confessions, but a further 102 were able to be buried when their families paid a special fee. In addition to those executed after a trial, another 257 people died in prison as a result of ill-treatment or malnutrition. Approximately one-third of those killed were miners. Many women suffered rape, beatings to reveal the whereabouts of their menfolk, head shaving and imprisonment. At least nine were executed.61

  The repression was most acute in Gijón since the Republican administration, union and political leaders and the military command had been there. The prison of El Coto which had a capacity for two hundred prisoners soon had nearly 2,500. Nine hundred and three prisoners were tried and shot in the twelve months starting 9 November 1937. There were many other unrecorded cases of prisoners being taken out and shot by groups of Falangists. Beatings and torture were common. The bullring, an old glass factory and a cotton mill were used as improvised prisons. All those who had had any form of political or trade union responsibility were to be eliminated. The military prosecutor in Gijón demanded so many death sentences in such a short time that he was called ‘machine-gun’. Ninety-eight were executed in the last two months of 1937 and 849 in 1938. In addition, there were the extra-judicial murders. The director of the cemetery of El Sucu (Ceares) claimed that on many days between seventy and eighty corpses were dumped there. A recently inaugurated monument at El Sucu carries the names of 1,882 men and fifty-two women buried in the common grave between 21 October 1937 and 1951. They include the more than 1,245 from El Coto shot after court martial, the eighty-four who died there from beatings, torture or illness caused by malnutrition, overcrowding and insanitary conditions, others who died in the glass factory and those murdered whose names are known. Seventy per cent of those executed were workers.62

  On 1 October 1937, after the conquest of the north, all over Spain there was a celebration of the anniversary of Franco’s elevation to the headship of state, now consecrated as ‘el Día del Caudillo’. In San Leonardo in Soria, Yagüe, dressed in the blue shirt of the Falange, made a speech that provoked wild applause when he spoke of the working class in the following terms: ‘They are not bad. The really evil ones are their leaders who deceive them with gilded promises. They are the ones that we must attack until we have entirely exterminated them.’ He then described the Falangist new order and prompted laughter and applause when he declared:

  and for those of you who resist, you know what will happen, prison or the firing squad, either will do. We have decided to redeem you and we will redeem you whether you want to be redeemed or not. Do we need you for anything? No, there will never again be any elections, so why would we need your vote? The first thing to do is to redeem the enemy. We are going to impose our civilization on them and if they don’t accept it willingly, we will impose it by force, defeating them as we defeated the Moors when they didn’t want our roads, our doctors, and our vaccinations, in a word, our civilization.63

  Yagüe’s speech was a reminder, if one was needed, of what would happen if an
y more territory fell into rebel hands. Assuming that Franco’s next move would be an attack on Madrid, the Republican high command decided on a pre-emptive attack against Teruel, capital of the bleakest of the Aragonese provinces. The insurgent lines there were weakly held and the city was already virtually surrounded by Republican forces. In freezing weather, with the lowest temperatures of the century, savage house-to-house fighting saw the Republicans capture the rebel garrison on 8 January 1938. Enjoying massive material superiority, Franco made a fierce counter-attack. After a debilitating defence, the Republicans had to retreat on 21 February, with Teruel about to be encircled. Franco now launched a huge eastwards offensive at the beginning of March. By the middle of April, his forces had reached the Mediterranean, splitting the Republican zone in two, and occupying all of Aragon.

  In fact, much of the region had long been in rebel hands and had suffered a brutal repression. The military coup was successful in most of the province of Zaragoza apart from the salient between Huesca and Teruel. Before the March rebel offensive conquered that remnant, the repression in the province had already seen intense violence.64 In the first two weeks of July 1936, around eighty Republican officials and the leaders of trade unions and political parties had been arrested and executed. Thereafter, there was a wave of terror with 730 executions in August alone. Nocturnal paseos by ‘vigilance patrols’ of Falangists and Carlists aided the police in this purge of ‘undesirables’. The scale of killing was not diminished by the establishment of military courts from September, and 2,578 were shot before 1936 was out. The ferocity of the repression was part of the prior plan of extermination, but was intensified by the fears provoked by the anarchist columns pressing on the east of the province. However, the readiness of civilians to participate in the killing in Zaragoza, as elsewhere, was motivated by sheer bloodlust, by the desire to hide a left-wing past and seek favour with the new regime, by envy or by long-festering resentment.65

  The proximity of the anarchist columns could be an explanation for a brutal mass execution that took place in Zaragoza at the beginning of October. In late August, the rebel radio in Zaragoza had announced that recruiting had started for a new unit of the Foreign Legion named after General Sanjurjo. In Navarre, Civil Guard posts received orders to oblige men suspected of left-wing sympathies to appear at the recruiting offices. Summoned to the barracks, they were given the stark choice ‘the Legion or the ditch’. In La Rioja, similar calls were made in the local press but, to meet the numbers required, young men were also given a choice between being shot or joining the Sanjurjo unit. Between 2 and 10 September, several hundred young men were transported to Zaragoza for training. On 27 September, they were sworn in and on 1 October sent to the front at Almudévar south of Huesca. However, before they went into action against the anarchist columns from Catalonia, they were ordered to return to Zaragoza, where they were disarmed because the military authorities suspected that many of them planned to desert. Between 2 and 10 October, they were taken in small groups to a field behind the Military Academy in Zaragoza and shot. The bodies were conveyed to the Torrero cemetery and buried in a huge common grave. Two hundred and eighteen of those murdered were from Navarre out of a total of more than three hundred.66

  Personal hatreds and resentments were much more instrumental in the events in the tiny and remote village of Uncastillo in the far north of the province of Zaragoza, midway between Pamplona and Huesca. There an act of revenge for the events of October 1934 saw 180 people killed. As in other areas of rural Aragon under rebel control, groups of Falangists and Requetés, together with the Civil Guard, entered houses, took goods and detained members of left-wing organizations and unions, as well as their friends and family. These arrests were made on the basis of captured documentation, mere rumours or denunciations from local right-wingers that were often motivated by purely personal resentments deriving from economic or sexual conflicts. The arrests of men, women and adolescents were followed by savage beatings and, often, death. For the ‘crime’ of having embroidered a Republican flag, two young women, Rosario Malón Pueyo aged twenty-four and Lourdes Malón Pueyo aged twenty, were raped and then murdered, and their corpses burned. That was done away from the village, but many executions were public with the entire village forced to watch.

  In many cases, the arrests and assassinations were carried out on the recommendation of the parish priest. In the case of a young woman of nineteen who was pregnant with twins, the village doctor argued that she should be spared, and the Civil Guard accepted his reasoning. With reluctance, the local Falange also agreed, but a priest who was present exclaimed, ‘with the animal dead, there is no more rabies’, and she was shot.67 The most prominent victim was the Mayor, Antonio Plano Aznárez. It will be recalled that he was hated by the landowners of the area for his success in improving the working conditions of the day-labourers. He was also held responsible, unjustly, for the revolutionary events of 5–6 October 1935. At first held in Zaragoza, at the beginning of October 1936, Antonio Plano was brought to Uncastillo and imprisoned with his wife Benita and his children Antonio and María in the Civil Guard barracks.

  The plan was for him to be assassinated on the second anniversary of the events of October 1934. It was an act not only of revenge for the past but also a warning for the future. Plano represented in the area everything that the Republic offered in terms of social justice and education. He was not only killed but made the object of the most brutal humiliation both before and after his death. As a result of his beatings, he was brought out of the Civil Guard barracks covered in blood. The Civil Guard and Falangists obliged the remaining villagers to come to the square to watch. Plano had been forced to drink a bottle of castor oil. Bloodied and besmirched, he had to be carried on a wooden board. In front of the church, he was shot, to the delight and applause of the right-wingers present. His corpse was then kicked and abused before it was mutilated by one of the Falangists with an axe. A year after his death, he was fined the colossal sum of 25,000 pesetas and his wife a further 1,000. In order for these fines to be paid, the family home and contents were confiscated. There were many similar cases which provided an excuse for the theft of the property of those who had been assassinated. Altogether, 140 leftists were murdered in Uncastillo. Of the 110 who had been tried for the events of 1934, many had fled, but of those who remained, forty-four were executed.68

  In Teruel in July 1936, the least populated of Spanish provinces, the western part fell immediately to a tiny rebel garrison. Despite the fact that there had been little social conflict in the area, detentions began immediately. The first victims were, as elsewhere, trade union and Republican political leaders and officials. A second wave of violence began in March 1938, with the entry of rebel troops into towns and villages that had been under Republican control. One of the worst incidents in this second wave took place in the small town of Calanda, where around fifty people were killed, including a pregnant woman beaten to death, and numerous others raped. At the end of the war, those who had fled from the province of Teruel when it had been taken by the Francoists faced the choice of either going into exile or returning home. Hoping that the fact that they were guilty of no crimes meant that they would face no problems, many returned home. In Calanda, as they descended from a bus, they were set upon. Tortures, beatings, murders and sexual attacks were organized by the local chief of the Falange and the secretary of the town council. So scandalous were these events that the Civil Governor of the province reported them to the military authorities. In consequence, the perpetrators were tried and imprisoned for eight years.69 In none of these explosions of repression were all the deaths formally registered. Nevertheless, the names are known of 1,030 people who were executed in Teruel, 889 in the course of the war and 141 afterwards. To these have to be added a further 258 who were taken to Zaragoza for execution. There were many more whose names were not recorded in the civil register or buried in cemeteries. It was not in the interests of their assassins for too much to be kno
wn and subsequently the Francoist authorities made a concerted effort to hide the magnitude of the violence in Teruel.70

  The scale of the repression in Teruel reflects a combination of the basic exterminatory plan of the insurgents and consciousness that the province was vulnerable to Republican attack. Among the first to be arrested from 20 July 1936 were the Mayor, the secretary of the provincial branch of the Socialist Party and the directors of the local secondary school and of the teachers’ training college. The wives and families of men who had fled to the Republican zone were detained. For instance, the wife and seventeen-year-old daughter of a Socialist town councillor were arrested and eventually shot. All the detainees were herded into the local seminary where they were kept in appalling conditions of acute overcrowding before being killed. Until 13 August, when the executions began, men and women were used as forced labour, mending roads. They were taken out at dawn in a truck known variously as the ‘dawn truck’, the ‘death truck’ or the ‘one-way truck’.71

  One of their destinations was the village of Concud, about two and a half miles from the provincial capital. Here, into a pit six feet wide and 250 feet deep, known as Los Pozos de Caudé, were hurled the hundreds of bodies of men and women, including adolescent boys and girls. Few of them were political militants. Their crime was simply to be considered critical of the military coup, to be related to someone who had fled, to have had a radio or to have read liberal newspapers before the war. Throughout the years of the dictatorship fear prevented anyone from even going near the pit, although occasionally at night bunches of flowers would be left near by. In 1959, without the permission of the relatives of those murdered, a lorryload of human remains was taken to Franco’s mausoleum at the Valle de los Caídos. Once the Socialists achieved power in 1982, people began openly to leave floral tributes. Then in 1983 a local farmer came forward and said that he had kept a notebook with the numbers of shootings that he heard each night throughout the Spanish Civil War. They totalled 1,005. Among the unregistered deaths were Republican prisoners as well as people brought from small villages. In 2005, the works for the laying of a major gas pipe unearthed remains which led to the excavation of fifteen bodies. Caudé was only one of several places in the province where bodies were dumped by the executioners.72