by Paul Preston
There is one thing I will never forget: the wounded who crawled out of the Vallcarca hospital, mutilated and bandaged, almost naked, despite the cold, they went down to the street, shrieking and pleading with us not to leave them behind to the mercies of the victors. All other details of that unforgettable day were wiped out by the sight of those defenceless soldiers … The certainty that we left them to their fate will shame us for ever. Those with no legs dragged themselves along the ground, those who had lost an arm raised the other with a clenched fist, the youngest cried in their fear, the older ones went mad with rage. They grabbed the sides of lorries loaded with furniture, with bird cages, with mattresses, with silent women, with indifferent old people, with terrified children. They screamed, they ululated, they blasphemed and cursed those who were fleeing and were abandoning them.
There were around 20,000 wounded Republican soldiers in Barcelona. Their wounds and missing limbs were proof that they had fought and would guarantee that they would be the victims of reprisals.115
Four hundred and fifty thousand terrified women, children, old men and defeated soldiers trekked towards France. In numbers and in human suffering, the exodus far exceeded even the horrors seen by Norman Bethune on the road from Málaga to Almería. Those who could squeezed into every kind of transport imaginable. Through bitterly cold sleet and snow, on roads bombed and strafed by rebel aircraft, many others walked, wrapped in blankets and clutching a few possessions, some carrying infants. Women gave birth at the roadsides. Babies died of the cold, children were trampled to death. A witness summed up the horror of that dreadful exodus: ‘At the side of the road, a man had hung himself from a tree. One foot had a rope sandal, the other was bare. At the foot of the tree was an open suitcase in which lay a small child that had died of cold during the night.’ It is not known how many people died on the roads to France.116
Those who fled faced the bleakest future, but it was one that they chose in preference to being ‘liberated’ by Franco’s forces. From 28 January, a reluctant French government allowed the first refugees across the border. At first, they had to sleep in the streets of Figueras, the last town on the Spanish side of the border. Many died in sustained rebel bombing raids.117 The defeated Republicans, many sick or wounded, were received by the French Garde Mobile as if they were criminals. The women, children and the old were shepherded into transit camps. The soldiers were disarmed and escorted to insanitary camps on the coast, rapidly improvised by marking out sections of beach with barbed wire. Under the empty gaze of Senegalese guards, the refugees improvised shelters by burrowing into the wet sand of the camp at Saint-Cyprien a few miles to the south-east of Perpignan.
Meanwhile, the formal parade into an eerily empty Barcelona was headed by the Army Corps of Navarre, led by General Andrés Solchaga. They were accorded this honour, according to a British officer attached to Franco’s headquarters, ‘not because they have fought better, but because they hate better – that is to say, when the object of this hate is Catalonia or a Catalan’.118 A close friend of Franco, Víctor Ruiz Albeniz (‘El Tebib Arrumi’), published an article asserting that Catalonia needed ‘a biblical punishment (Sodom, Gomorrah) to purify the red city, seat of anarchism and separatism as the only remedy to extirpate these two cancers by implacable thermo-cauterization’. None of the conquering generals or Falangists referred to the crushing of Marxism or anarchism. Their entire discourse was about the conquest of Catalonia by Spain. One officer told a Portuguese journalist that the only solution to the ‘Catalan problem’ was ‘kill the Catalans. It’s just a question of time.’119
One of the first acts of the occupying forces was to ban the use of Catalan in public. For Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law and Minister of the Interior, Catalan nationalism was a sickness that had to be eradicated. He told the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter that the Catalan population was ‘morally and politically sick’. The man he appointed as Civil Governor of Barcelona, Wenceslao González Oliveros, announced, in a reversal of Unamuno’s famous dictum that the rebels might win (vencer) but never convince (convencer), that Franco’s forces had come ‘to save the good Spaniards and to defeat, but not convince, the enemies of Spain’. For González Oliveros, that meant the Catalans. He stated that ‘Spain opposed the divisive autonomy statutes with greater ferocity than communism’ and that any toleration of any kind of regionalism would lead once more to ‘the putrefaction represented by Marxism and separatism that we have just surgically eradicated’.120
Within a week, the military secret police was functioning. Newspaper advertisements called for recruits, preference being given to ex-prisoners of the Republican SIM. Large queues of people with denunciations gathered outside the offices of the Occupation Services. In consequence, 22,700 people were arrested in the first eight months.121 Precisely because so many of those of political or military significance had fled, those killed by the rebels in Catalonia were perhaps fewer than might have been expected. Between those murdered by the occupying troops and those tried and executed, more than 1,700 were killed in Barcelona, 750 in Lleida, 703 in Tarragona and five hundred in Girona. Many more died from mistreatment in prison.122
In Catalonia, as in other parts of Spain occupied by the rebels, the repression took many forms and merely to stay alive was a major achievement for many Republicans. Those who had not been executed, imprisoned or exiled lived in an atmosphere of terror. Daily life for the defeated was a question of combating hunger, illness and fear of arrest or of denunciation by a neighbour or by a priest. Rural parish priests were particularly active in denouncing their parishioners. Their contribution to the exacerbation of social divisions suggested a quest for vengeance rather than a Christian commitment to forgiveness or reconciliation. The sheer misery of life for the defeated explains a notable rise in the suicide rate. Considerable cruelty was visited upon women under the rhetorical umbrella of ‘redemption’. As well as confiscation of goods and imprisonment as retribution for the behaviour of a son or husband, the widows and the wives of prisoners were raped. Many were forced to live in total poverty and often, out of desperation, to sell themselves on the streets. The increase in prostitution both benefited Francoist men who thereby slaked their lust and reassured them that ‘red’ women were a fount of dirt and corruption. Soldiers billeted on poor families often abused the unprotected women of the household. Many priests defended the honour of male parishioners and denounced their female victims as ‘reds’.123
After Catalonia fell, a huge area amounting to about 30 per cent of Spain remained in the hands of the Republic. Negrín still cherished hope of fighting on until a European war started and the democracies at last realized that the anti-fascist battle of the Republic had been theirs too. Franco was in no hurry to go into battle since the repression was a higher priority. In any case, he had reason to believe that the Republic was about to face major divisions that might save him the trouble of fighting in central Spain. His confidence was such that, on 9 February 1939, he published the Law of Political Responsibilities and dashed the hopes of non-Communist Republicans who were prepared to betray Negrín in the hope of a negotiated peace. Retroactive to October 1934, the law declared Republicans guilty of the crime of military rebellion, and was essentially a device to justify the expropriation of the defeated.124
On 4 March, Colonel Segismundo Casado, commander of the Republican Army of the Centre, formed an anti-Negrín National Defence Junta, in the hope of negotiating with Franco. He thereby sparked off what was effectively a second civil war within the Republican zone. Although he defeated pro-Communist forces, there was no prospect of a deal with Franco. Troops all along the line were surrendering or just going home. On 26 March, a gigantic and virtually unopposed advance was launched along a wide front. The next day, Franco’s forces simply occupied deserted positions and entered an eerily silent Madrid. Tens of thousands of Republicans headed for the Mediterranean coast in the vain hope of evacuation. The war was over, but there would be no
reconciliation. Instead, in the areas that had just fallen under Franco’s control, Valencia, Alicante, Murcia and Albacete, Almería and eastern Andalusia, and the eastern part of New Castile, a massive wave of political arrests, trials, executions and imprisonment was about to begin.
PART SIX
Franco’s Investment in Terror
13
No Reconciliation: Trials, Executions, Prisons
As Franco had demonstrated by the nature of his war effort and made explicit in interviews private and public, he was engaged in an investment in terror. With all of Spain in his hands at the beginning of April 1939, the war against the Republic would continue by other means, not on the battle fronts but in military courts, in the prisons, in the concentration camps, in the labour battalions and even in pursuit of the exiles. The immediate tasks were the classification and punishment of those who had gathered in the eastern seaboard, the cleansing of the provinces that had just fallen and the marshalling of the hundreds of thousands of prisoners into work battalions. The long-term institutionalization of Franco’s victory required the perfection of the machinery of state terror to protect and oversee the original investment. For that reason, the martial law declared in July 1936 was not rescinded until 1948.
That Franco had no inclination to magnanimity and saw the repression as a long-term undertaking was made clear by his speech on 19 May 1939, the day on which he presided over the spectacular Victory Parade in Madrid. ‘Let us not deceive ourselves: the Jewish spirit, which permitted the alliance of big capital with Marxism and which was behind so many pacts with the anti-Spanish revolution, cannot be extirpated in a day and still beats in the hearts of many.’1 The belief that the war had been against the Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy was reiterated in his end-of-year message on 31 December 1939. Franco praised German anti-Semitic legislation, declaring that the persecution of the Jews by the fifteenth-century Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel had shown the Nazis the way:
Now you will understand the reasons which have led other countries to persecute and isolate those races marked by the stigma of their greed and self-interest. The domination of such races within society is disturbing and dangerous for the destiny of the nation. We, who were freed of this heavy burden centuries ago by the grace of God and the clear vision of Ferdinand and Isabel, cannot remain indifferent before the modern flourishing of avaricious and selfish spirits who are so attached to their own earthly goods that they would sacrifice the lives of their children more readily than their own base interests.
In the same speech, he rejected any notion of reconciliation with the defeated:
It is necessary to put an end to the hatreds and passions of our recent war but not in the manner of liberals, with their monstrous and suicidal amnesties, which are more fraud than pardon, but rather with the redemption of sentences through work, with repentance and penance. Anyone who thinks otherwise is guilty of irresponsibility or treason. Such damage has been done to the Patria and such havoc has been wreaked on families and on morality, so many victims cry out for justice that no honourable Spaniard, no thinking being, could stand aside from the painful duty of punishment.2
The repressive judicial system applied after 1 April 1939 used both the administrative machinery and the pseudo-legal framework developed throughout the war. On 28 July 1936, the Burgos Junta’s declaration of martial law had proclaimed its determination to punish those who, ‘blinded by an incomprehensible sectarianism, commit actions or omissions that might prejudice this Movement of Redemption of the Fatherland’. Any such offence was deemed to be a crime of military rebellion and thus subject to summary court martial. The sophistry underlying this legal fiction was that the military had legitimately assumed power on 16 and 17 July (before the actual military uprising) and therefore that the defence of the Republic constituted rebellion. All political activities on behalf of parties of the left or trade unions from the beginning of October 1934 were deemed retrospectively to constitute ‘support for military rebellion’ on the grounds that they had contributed to the disorder which was said to have provoked the military take-over.3
On 15 August 1936 in Burgos, General Mola had declared, in a broadcast on Radio Castilla, ‘My words go out to our enemies, since it is only right and proper that they know what to expect lest, when the time arrives for the settling of scores, they have recourse to the legal principle that “no punishment can be imposed on an offender that was not established before the offence was committed”.’4 Franco had reiterated this nonsensical position in an interview given on the first anniversary of the military coup: ‘The National Movement was never an uprising. The reds were and are the rebels.’5
The absurdity of these declarations was underlined by the author of the Republican Constitution and distinguished criminal lawyer, Luis Jiménez de Asúa, when he described the accusation of military rebellion as ‘reverse rebellion’, for which ‘crime’ the accused would receive ‘a vice-versa sentence’. Franco’s Minister of the Interior, Ramón Serrano Suñer, retrospectively called it ‘back-to-front justice’. Jiménez de Asúa observed that ‘a more curious reversal of the truth is inconceivable and can only be explained in psychological terms as the projection of guilt’.6
The initial basis for the repression was formalized further with a decree issued on 13 September 1936 by the Burgos Junta which outlawed all political parties, trade unions and social organizations that supported the Popular Front and opposed the ‘National Movement’. The decree ordered the confiscation of all goods, effects and documents, as well as buildings and other properties of such entities. Also liable were left-wing and liberal parties and trade unions, Freemasons, Jews, the Rotary Club, feminist, vegetarian, nudist, Esperanto and homeopathic societies, Montessori schools and sports clubs. Furthermore, the decree ordered the purging of all public servants, functionaries and schoolteachers who had served the institutions of the Republic. Special tribunals were established to judge those deemed worthy of keeping their livelihood. The human cost was colossal. For instance, when Catalonia was occupied at the end of the war, out of 15,860 public servants, 15,107 lost their jobs.7 The paranoia that lay behind the blanket denunciation of anything and everything that fell outside right-wing Catholic values was in large part thanks to the anti-Republican campaigns of the right-wing press which had fed off the writings of Juan Tusquets, Mauricio Carlavilla and Onésimo Redondo. Father Tusquets in particular had linked all these peripheral organizations to the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy.
The fiction that defence of the Republic was a crime of military rebellion was the basis of all the summary courts martial. Except in some cases of famous defendants, the accused were usually denied the possibility of defending themselves. The military would choose the judge, the prosecutor and the defence ‘lawyer’, this latter always being an officer junior to the judge and prosecutor. Given that the Army Legal Corps simply did not have sufficient personnel to cope with the demands made by the new situation, trials were usually conducted by officers with no legal training whatsoever. Groups of prisoners, unknown to one another and accused of notably different offences, would be tried together en masse. They would have no access to the ‘case’ against them, which consisted of accusations read out without evidence. Only rarely, after the prosecutor had finished making the ‘case’, were the accused permitted to confer with the defending officer and consider their defence. If lucky, they were given an hour to prepare their case but not allowed to call witnesses or present any evidence. They were often not permitted to hear the ‘case’ against them, either because they had already been shot or because, in ‘emergency summary trials’, the charges were not even read out. In no cases were appeals permitted.8
When Juan Caba Guijarro, a CNT member from Manzanares, was tried with nineteen others, the prosecutor stated:
I do not care, nor do I even want to know, if you are innocent or not of the charges made against you. Nor will I take cognizance of any excuses, alibis or mitigating circ
umstances that you might present. I must base my accusations, as in previous courts martial, on the files prepared by the investigators on the basis of the denunciations. As far as the accused are concerned, I represent justice. It is not me who condemns them but their own towns, their enemies, their neighbours. I merely give voice to the accusations that others have made discreetly. My attitude is cruel and pitiless and it may appear as if my job is just to feed the firing squads so that their work of social cleansing can continue. But no, here all of us who have won the war participate and it is our wish to eliminate all opposition in order to impose our own order. Considering that there are crimes of blood in all the accusations, I have reached the conclusion that I must demand the death penalty, and I do demand the firing squad for the first eighteen in the list and, for the other two, garrotte vil. Nothing more.
The defence lawyer represented all twenty defendants at the same time, without having had time or opportunity to prepare any kind of defence. He rose and said: ‘After hearing the serious charges that have been laid against all those I am here to defend, I can only plead for mercy. Nothing more.’ The judge then proceeded to sentence the accused.9
Some of those tried by the innumerable military courts were guilty of real crimes in the checas, although many such had escaped into hiding or exile. Most were men and women whose crime was simply their failure actively to support the coup. The majority were condemned on the basis of an assumption of guilt, without the need for evidence. In a typical case, that of a railwayman accused of involvement in crimes of blood, the guilty verdict was justified on the grounds that ‘although there is no evidence that he took a direct part in looting, theft, arrests or murders, his beliefs make it reasonable to suppose that he did’. Membership of a left-wing committee in a town or village where right-wingers were killed would usually guarantee a death sentence even if the accused knew nothing of the killing or had opposed it. Men and women were condemned to death for participation in crimes not on the basis of direct evidence but because the prosecutor extrapolated from their known Republican, Socialist, Communist or anarchist convictions that ‘they must have taken part’.10
