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

by Paul Preston

  There were further bombing raids in the last three days of March and the first two of April. There were also artillery barrages directed by Luis Alarcón de la Lastra, who now commanded the artillery of the Moroccan Army Corps. Despite a courageous defence by the division led by Valentín González ‘El Campesino’, Lleida was occupied the following day. Franco’s forces found a ghost town. In a city normally of 40,000 inhabitants, barely two thousand were there to greet their conquerors. The Generalitat had organized a massive evacuation of refugees and the bulk of the local population. A Francoist newspaper crowed, ‘A few reds who could not flee have take refuge in some houses but they will soon be annihilated.’ Shops and houses were looted. One of the first acts of the occupying forces was to remove the records of the deaths from the bombing raids. In Lleida, Gandesa and the towns along the right bank of the Ebro, Corbera, Mora d’Ebre and many others, summary trials and executions began. In Lleida, one of those to be sentenced to death and executed was the director of one of the city’s hospitals. His crime was to have organized the evacuation of the hospital despite having been ordered by the fifth column to hand it over complete with all wounded soldiers to the rebels. The director of another hospital, who did obey such orders, was nevertheless dismissed simply because his post made him an employee of the Generalitat de Catalunya.92

  The depth of anti-Catalan sentiment that had been generated in the rebel zone was inevitably reflected in the repression unleashed there. The entry of the occupiers into any town or village was immediately followed by the prohibition of the Catalan language, despite the fact that many of the inhabitants knew no other. The ban on use of the regional language was extended, as it had been in Euskadi, to all the public activities of the clergy.93 The extent of a near-racist hatred is illustrated by the fate of Manuel Carrasco i Formiguera, a deeply pious Catholic who was a senior member of the Christian Democrat party, Unió Democràtica de Catalunya. Denounced in Barcelona by the FAI for his conservative and Catholic views, Carrasco was forced to flee his beloved Catalonia because the Generalitat could not guarantee his safety. He went to work on behalf of the Generalitat in the Basque Country. After an initial visit to Bilbao, where he was received as if he were an ambassador, he returned to Barcelona to collect his family. On 2 March 1937, he set off with his wife and six of his eight children through France. The final part of the journey to Bilbao was from Bayonne by sea. The steamer Galdames on which they were travelling was captured by the rebel battlecruiser, Canarias. His wife and children were held in four separate prisons.

  After five months in jail, Carrasco i Formiguera was tried on 28 August 1937 accused of military rebellion. Prominent Catalans in Franco’s circle, men whose lives and fortunes had been saved in Barcelona by Carrasco’s intervention, were too frightened by the prevailing anti-Catalanism to speak up on his behalf. In a vengeful atmosphere, charged with anti-Catalan prejudice, no account was taken of his humanitarian efforts or of the fact that Carrasco had defended the Church during the 1931 constitutional debates. The future Mayor of Barcelona, Mateu i Pla, whose fortune had been secured by Carrasco, did nothing to help his defence despite the fact that he was part of Franco’s secretariat in Burgos.

  Given the military court’s insistence on speed, there was little time for Carrasco’s defence. In any case, his official advocate, a captain of the medical corps with no juridical training, had already been told that the death sentence had been decided upon before the trial started. Then, for nearly seven and a half months, suffering acute cardiac problems, Carrasco was kept in a freezing cell. Despite energetic efforts to secure a prisoner exchange by José Giral and Manuel Irujo and prominent clergymen, including the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, Franco was immovable. One of the Caudillo’s senior collaborators commented: ‘I know all about Carrasco being an exemplary Christian but his politics are criminal. He has to die!’ Carrasco i Formiguera was executed by firing squad on Easter Saturday, 9 April 1938 because he was a Republican and a Catalan nationalist. Franco had chosen the moment that his forces were occupying Catalonia to send a message to the population.94

  In the days following the occupation of Lleida, the press in the rebel zone gave vent to an ecstatic imperialist rhetoric, rejoicing in the crushing of the ‘separatist hydra’ by Yagüe’s African troops. Republican prisoners who were identified as Catalans were shot without trial. Anyone overheard speaking Catalan was likely to be arrested. The arbitrary brutality of the anti-Catalan repression reached such a scale that Franco himself felt obliged to issue an order that errors must be avoided which might cause regret in the future.95 The many executions that followed immediately on the occupation of the eastern part of Lleida were not registered. Accordingly, the task for local historians of quantification of those who ‘disappeared’ between 5 April and 31 May 1938 has been rendered almost impossible. Those who have been identified include eighteen women, of whom two were pregnant and at least two were raped. Seventeen men and five women were shot in Almacelles, north-east of Lleida, on 20 April. In the tiny village of Santa Linya, halfway between Lleida and Tremp, all men of military age were arrested, twenty in all. They were interrogated with questions like: ‘How many priests have you murdered?’ Nine considered to be Catalan nationalists were taken away and never seen again. The rest were transported to a concentration camp in Valladolid, where three died almost immediately. A high proportion of the executions took place during ‘evacuations’ or when prisoners were ostensibly being transferred to prison in Barbastro.96

  The gratuitously savage nature of the repression was demonstrated in the north, near the Pyrenees in El Pallars Sobirà. The area was occupied by the 62nd Division under the command of General Antonio Sagardia, who established his headquarters at the town of Sort. On the grounds that the battle front was near, Sagardía decreed that ‘vigilance and cleansing’ and the evacuation of ‘suspect inhabitants’ were crucial, tasks to which he devoted three companies of Civil Guards, aided by Falangists.97 In consequence, between 15 April and the end of May, sixty-nine civilians from tiny villages previously untouched by the war were murdered. The first were from València d’Aneu, Borén (nine men), Isavarre and Llavorsí (five men and a woman). On 14 May, nine people from Escaló were shot, four men and five women, including a mother and her daughter. The next day, eleven men from Rialb were shot despite being vouched for by the parish priest and local rightists. Their crime was to have belonged to the CNT. On 24 May, nine people were shot at Unarre after being detained for interrogation. Among the five men executed was a seventy-four-year-old shot because his son could not be found and an eighteen-year-old shot instead of his father. Three of the four women were killed because their husbands had fled. One of them was eight months pregnant. Another was her sister-in-law whose seventeen-year-old daughter had asked permission to go as her interpreter since she didn’t speak Castilian. The girl was forced to watch her mother being executed and was then herself gang-raped before being shot. Many of the prisoners were badly beaten before being executed and the younger women sexually assaulted.98

  Entering the south of Catalonia, the Moroccan forces of Colonel Mohammed ben Mizzian captured Batea, Pinell de Brai and Gandesa on 2 April. There, as in the towns along the right bank of the Ebro and through the Terra Alta, Arnes, Corbera, Mora d’Ebre, Ascó, Flix, Tortosa, Amposta and many others, they found houses locked and the streets deserted. Many had fled, but there were both extra-judicial executions and summary trials. As was common with the arrival of African columns, houses were pillaged and women raped.99

  Although he had Catalonia at his mercy, Franco ordered Yagüe to dig in along the River Segre, much to the frustration and incomprehension of his staff. An offensive against Catalonia, where the Republic’s remaining war industry lay, would have brought the war to a speedier conclusion, but Franco had no interest in a quick victory that would still have left hundreds of thousands of armed Republicans in central and southern Spain. Nor did he want to turn to Madrid, since a swift debacle there would have l
eft numerous Republican forces in Catalonia and in the south-east. Either option would have meant an armistice by which some consideration would have to be given to the defeated. As he had made clear to the Italians, Franco’s aim remained the gradual but total annihilation of the Republic and its supporters.100

  Thus, in July, instead of attacking Madrid or Barcelona, he launched a major attack on Valencia. As before, he sought to write in Republican blood the message of his invincibility. In this instance, the cost to his own side was considerable. As his armies moved through the Maestrazgo into Castellón, skilful defence saw the Republican troops inflict heavy casualties on the Francoists while suffering relatively few themselves. Nonetheless, the progress of the rebels, if painfully slow, was inexorable. Castellón, Burriana and Nules were occupied in July after heavy bombing attacks. The rebel entry into the southern part of Tarragona and the province of Castellón was accompanied by a scale of repression on a par with that inflicted on Lleida. In Vinarós, for example, the Church of San Francisco was commandeered by the military as a prison. The acting parish priest, later Cardinal-Archbishop, Vicente Enrique y Tarancón, was appalled by the overcrowded and unhygienic conditions. He was even more appalled by the frequency of executions. When he complained that the accused in military trials were not allowed to defend themselves and that their guilt was simply taken for granted, he was told that there was no time for legal niceties in wartime.101 The bombing raids were extended to the port cities of the Levante coast – Valencia, Gandía, Alcoy and Alicante. By 23 July 1938, Valencia was under direct threat, with the Francoists less than twenty-five miles away. If Valencia fell, the war would effectively be over.

  As defeat became inevitable, the Republican Prime Minister Juan Negrín became ever more determined to fight on, believing that capitulation would simply open the floodgates to mass slaughter. When a senior Republican figure, almost certainly Azaña, suggested that an agreement with the rebels was an inevitable necessity, he responded: ‘Make a pact? And what about the poor soldier of Medellín?’ At the time, Medellín, near Don Benito, was the furthermost point on the Extremadura front. Since Franco demanded total surrender, Negrín knew that, at best, a mediated peace might secure the escape of several hundred, maybe some thousands, of political figures. However, the great majority of ordinary Republican soldiers and citizens would be at the mercy of the Francoists, who would be pitiless.102 On 25 July 1938, Medellín and the entire area of La Serena in the province of Badajoz fell to the insurgents. In the following weeks, large numbers of people from the surrounding villages were taken to Medellín and shot and many more transferred to the concentration camp at Castuera. Under the command of the notorious Major Ernesto Navarrete Alcal, it was ruled with his characteristic brutality. The prisoners experienced starvation, overcrowding, slave labour, beatings and frequent sacas.103

  With the insurgents less than twenty-five miles away from Valencia, on the same day that La Serena fell, the Republic mounted a spectacular diversion. In an attempt to restore contact between Catalonia and the rest of Republican Spain, a huge army of 80,000 men crossed the River Ebro. The advance through an immense curve in the Ebro from Flix in the north to Miravet in the south surprised the thinly held rebel lines. Negrín hoped that, if the Republic could fight on for another year, it would find salvation in the general war which he believed to be inevitable. Within a week, the Republicans had advanced twenty-five miles and reached Gandesa, but there they were bogged down as Franco rushed in reinforcements. Knowing that Franco would not consider an armistice, Negrín refused to contemplate unconditional surrender. On 7 August, he said to his friend Juan-Simeón Vidarte: ‘I will not hand over hundreds of defenceless Spaniards who fight heroically for the Republic so that Franco can have the pleasure of shooting them like he did in his own Galicia, in Andalusia, in the Basque country and wherever the hooves of Attila’s horse have left their mark.’104

  Franco could have contained the Republican advance across the Ebro and advanced on a near helpless Barcelona. Instead, he seized the opportunity to catch the Republicans in a trap, encircle and destroy them, turning the fertile Terra Alta into their graveyard. With nearly one million men now under arms, he could afford to be careless of their lives. As the battle was moving in his favour, on 7 November, he announced to the vice-president of the United Press, James Miller, ‘there will be no mediation because the criminals and their victims cannot live together’. He went on threateningly: ‘We have on file more than two million names along with proof of their crimes.’105 He was referring to the political files and documentation captured as each town had fallen. This information, archived in Salamanca, provided the basis for a massive card index of members of political parties, trade unions and Masonic lodges which in turn would be the database for a policy of institutionalized terror.106

  By mid-November 1938, at a cost of nearly 15,000 dead and 110,000 wounded or mutilated, the Francoists had pushed the Republicans out of the territory captured in July. The Republic had lost its army. The Francoists would soon sweep further into Catalonia. The war had been prolonged in accordance with Negrín’s hope of seeing the democracies wake up to the Axis’s aggressive ambitions, but the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich turned the Ebro into a useless sacrifice. After a brief lull for his forces to rest and regroup, in late November Franco began to gather a massive army along a line surrounding the remainder of Republican Catalonia from the Mediterranean to the Ebro and to the Pyrenees. After delays caused by torrential rain, and despite the pleas of the Papal Nuncio for a Christmas truce, the final offensive was launched on 23 December.107 The Caudillo had new German equipment in abundance, total air superiority and sufficient Spanish and Italian reserves to be able to relieve his troops every two days. The attacking force consisted of five Spanish army corps together with four Italian divisions. A heavy artillery barrage preceded the attack. The shattered Republicans could put up only token resistance.108

  In the course of the advance, many Republican prisoners were shot as soon as they were captured. There were also many atrocities committed against the civilian population. There were examples of peasants being murdered for no apparent reason other than the fact that they spoke Catalan. On Christmas Eve 1938, when Maials in the far south of Lleida was captured by Regulares, at least four women were raped. In one case, a woman was raped while her husband and seven-year-old son were forced at gunpoint to watch. In another, a woman’s father was shot for protesting at her violation. In an isolated country house, a young woman was raped and died when she was stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. Fifteen minutes later, her mother was raped then shot. In Vilella Baixa in the Priorat, a man was shot for trying to prevent a woman being raped. At another farm outside Callús, in the province of Barcelona, a man who lived with his wife, his daughter and her cousin was shot by some Regulares who raped the three women and then killed them at bayonet point. In the tiny nearby village of Marganell, two women were raped by Regulares who then killed them by placing hand grenades between their legs.109

  As fear of the Moors saw the roads to Barcelona blocked with terrified refugees, Franco announced his plans for the defeated in an interview given to Manuel Aznar on 31 December 1938. He divided them into hardened criminals beyond redemption and those who had been deceived by their leaders and were capable of repentance. There would be no amnesty or reconciliation for the defeated Republicans, only punishment and repentance to open the way to their ‘redemption’. Prisons and labour camps were the necessary purgatory for those who had committed minor ‘crimes’. Others could expect no better fate than death or exile.110 A good example of what redemption by Franco really meant could be found in the experience of Catalonia after the occupation of Tarragona on 15 January 1939. The city was deserted and thousands of refugees were trudging north. An elaborate ceremony was held in the Cathedral involving a company of infantry. The officiating priest, a canon of the Cathedral of Salamanca, José Artero, got so carried away that, during his sermon, he shouted: ‘Cat
alan dogs! You are not worthy of the sun that shines on you!’111

  In Tarragona, there were the inevitable executions that followed the occupation of the city. The fact that so many people had fled reduced the potential for mass killings but, as people came forward with denunciations, large numbers of arrests were made. Formal military trials began on 16 February 1939. Although they were brief, without any juridical guarantees, the military authorities held them in public and advertised the time and place. The new Francoist Mayor, disconcerted when the population did not react with enthusiasm to this free entertainment, made public appeals to their patriotism in order to ensure that the courts would be full. When death sentences were confirmed, the executions were also held in public. Numerous executions were carried out in the course of 1939 – on 22 April, twenty-three were shot, on 15 July, thirty-one, on 20 October, forty-three, and on 15 November, forty. In each case, the doctor in attendance certified death by ‘internal haemorrhage’.112 The repression in the surrounding area of the Alt Camp was on a similar scale. The trials and subsequent executions took place in Valls. On 17 July forty-one people were executed, on 8 August another forty and on 19 October another forty-four.113

  When news reached Barcelona, on 23 January 1939, that the Francoists were at the River Llobregat to the south of the city, a colossal exodus began. On the night of 25 January, the Republican government fled northwards to Girona. The President of the Generalitat, Lluís Companys, drove one last time through the centre of a deserted city, as leaflets calling for resistance blew through the streets along with ripped-up party and trade union membership cards.114 The next morning, the streets were full of smoke from the burning papers of ministries, parties and unions. The young Communist Teresa Pàmies witnessed, on 26 January, horrendous scenes of the fear provoked by the advancing rebels: