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

by Paul Preston

  As territory fell to the rebels, and especially after the end of the war, prisoners were herded into camps, frequently beaten and tortured to reveal the names of other Republicans. Inquiries were made in the prisoners’ home towns. If the local report was negative, the camp officials would usually send the prisoner back to his home town to face further investigation and prosecution. By carrying out trials in the town of origin of the detainees, it would ensure that they would be at the mercy of their neighbours who provided the necessary denunciations.11 Statements by ‘reliable’ citizens that a suspect was an undesirable or left-wing were sufficient to secure an arrest and usually a trial. Such statements were taken by the military authorities, without further investigation, as trustworthy ‘evidence’.

  The military instructions for the re-establishment of civilian life in ‘liberated areas’ invited the local population of occupied territory to present denunciations of criminal acts of which they had been victims during the period of left-wing control.12 When Catalonia was occupied, ‘all good Spaniards’ were urged to come forward with information about any crimes or injustices committed ‘in the Companys period’.13 In Los Pedroches in the north-east of Córdoba, 70 per cent of trials were triggered by denunciations from civilians.14 There and elsewhere, this suggested considerable social support for the Francoists, much more than would have been found in 1936. This was hardly surprising given the scale of both the terror and the anti-Republican propaganda carried out by the victors. Whether a denunciation would fail or prosper frequently depended on the stance of the local clergy.

  Denunciations often came from the bereaved relatives of those who had died in the violence that followed the defeat of the military uprising. Their grief and their desire for revenge led to them denouncing people assumed to belong to the same group as the real killers. Any leftist could thus be incorporated into a collectivity presented as the barbaric and depraved ‘red horde’. Coincidentally, many of those denounced happened to belong to the unions and parties that had threatened the social, economic and political privileges of the denouncers. Businessmen and landowners keen to recoup the economic losses that their enterprises had suffered during the revolutionary period often denounced their competitors.15

  From November 1936, increasing numbers of civilian lawyers, judges and even law students had been drafted into the military judicial corps. The main requirement was that they demonstrate right-wing sympathies. Entirely under the vigilance of the military authorities and often fearful for their own safety, even those who had qualms about what was happening had to be harsh in order to guarantee their own survival.16 At the beginning of 1938, Felipe Acedo Colunga, the senior military prosecutor, produced a report on the activities of the Auditoría de Guerra (War Court) created in November 1936 when the rebels had believed that they were about to capture Madrid. This report argued that the military courts must work pitilessly to clear the ground for the creation of a new state. Acedo Colunga insisted that there should be no equality between prosecution and defence and that the presumed intentions of defendants were every bit as reprehensible as their actual deeds.17

  Acedo Colunga’s report revealed the industrial scale of the work of this one court up to the end of 1938. It had held 6,770 trials and, by trying multiple defendants together, it had been possible to prosecute 30,224 people, of whom 3,189 had been condemned to death.18 When the Republic finally fell, the military courts intensified their activity. They continued to function in regions long since occupied as well as in the recently conquered areas where they now had to deal with large numbers of captured soldiers and civilians. In Granada, where many who had fled from the rebel-held capital were captured when the eastern part of the province fell, there were 5,500 cases tried in 1939; four hundred defendants were sentenced to death and more than one thousand to life imprisonment. Between 1939 and 1959, a total of 1,001 people in Granada were executed after military trial. A decree of 8 November 1939 multiplied the number of courts martial by creating numerous provisional courts and increasing the size of the military juridical corps.19

  The repression was facilitated by the betrayal of the Republic perpetrated by the military coup by Colonel Segismundo Casado on 4 March 1939. Casado, commander of the Republican Army of the Centre, hoping to stop further slaughter, formed an anti-Negrín National Defence Junta along with fiercely anti-Communist anarchist leaders such as Cipriano Mera, the Socialist intellectual Julián Besteiro and Miaja. Casado and Besteiro were culpably naive to believe assurances from the fifth column that Franco would contemplate an armistice and that those without blood on their hands had nothing to fear. Widespread hunger and demoralization saw Casado receive unexpectedly wide support. In the subsequent mini-civil war against the Communists, about two thousand people were killed. To the delight of Franco, troops were withdrawn from the front to fight the Communists.20

  Many Communists were left in prison where they were found by the Francoists and soon executed. This was especially true of the areas in the centre such as Madrid and Guadalajara. In the latter province, it will be recalled that 282 right-wingers had been killed in the local prison in reprisal for a rebel bombing raid on 6 December 1936. The reprisals now were brutal. The Communists left imprisoned by Cipriano Mera, the local military commander, were shot immediately. José Cazorla, the Civil Governor, had been arrested with his wife Aurora Arnaiz and their baby son, who died during their detention. Aurora and Cazorla managed to escape along with Ramón Torrecilla Guijarro, who had been Cazorla’s chief of police. After failing to get on board a ship at Alicante, Cazorla and Torrecilla returned to Madrid, where they worked for several months trying to build up the clandestine networks of the PCE. They were arrested by the Francoist forces on 9 August 1939 and interrogated under torture. They were tried on 16 January 1940 and sentenced to death. Cazorla was eventually executed on 8 April that year and Torrecilla on 2 July.21 Meanwhile, in Guadalajara, a small province of 200,000 people, 822 were executed. There were six thousand prisoners, 3 per cent of the total population and nearer 10 per cent of the adult male population. One hundred and forty-three died in prison because of the appalling conditions, overcrowding, disease and non-existent hygiene. Torture and maltreatment provoked many suicides, some of them faked to conceal beatings that had gone too far. The levels of malnutrition were such that any prisoner without family to bring in food was condemned to die.22

  In Jaén, in return for the arrested Communists being left in jail, the Francoist command agreed with the Casadista authorities that the victorious troops would enter the city without bloodshed and two hundred Republicans and Socialists be given safe passage to Almería. Those prisoners not released by the warders on their own initiative were shot immediately. The convoy of Republicans and Socialists that was heading for the coast was ambushed en route by Falangists. Some were killed in the fighting, while the majority were captured and taken to Granada to be shot. Four who escaped were picked up later, tried and executed in Jaén. Thereafter in Jaén, 1,984 people were executed after military trial, 425 murdered extra-judicially and a further 510 died in prison.23

  When he visited recently conquered Almería on 11 April 1939, Queipo de Llano declared that ‘Almería must make an act of contrition.’ This provoked a Falangist assault on the provincial prison and the murder of at least three prisoners. Formal executions began two weeks later on 25 April; 1,507 people were tried in 1939, another 1,412 in 1940, and 1,717 in 1941 – a total of 6,269 between 1939 and 1945, but the number executed, 375, was the lowest in any Andalusian province. This is because many leftists had protected rightists from the repression and, unusually, the rightists now returned the favour. The squeezing of more than six thousand prisoners into a prison built for five hundred led inevitably to conditions of malnutrition and minimal hygiene. However, this accounts only in part for the notably high level of 227 deaths of prisoners, many of them young men, suspiciously registered as victims of cardiac failure.24

  Such prison overcrowding was common. In Ciudad
Real, in the provincial prison built for one hundred, at any one time the number of prisoners ranged from 1,300 to 2,200. In total, between 1939 and 1943, more than 19,000 passed through the prison and over two thousand were executed.25 In Murcia too, well over five thousand people were imprisoned and more than one thousand executed. In addition to the usual privations, many prisoners were subjected to beatings. There, as elsewhere, the sexual abuse of women prisoners was notorious.26 In nearby Albacete, where 920 rightists had met their deaths while the province was under Republican control, the Francoist revenge saw this number doubled. Between 1939 and 1943, more than one thousand Republicans were shot after trial and at least 573 murdered extra-judicially, several after sacas by Falangists from the prison at Villarobledo and the castle at Yeste. A further 291 people died in the overcrowded prisons.27 In the three provinces of the Valencian region, Castellón, Valencia and Alicante, more than 15,000 people were imprisoned, of whom, after interrogation, at the end of 1939 there remained 7,610 still behind bars. A total of 1,165 people died in prison in the years following the Francoist occupation. Together with the more than 4,700 people executed, these figures constitute, in percentage terms, double the scale of the repression in Catalonia. The difference is explained by the escape of hundreds of thousands of potential victims from Catalonia at the end of January 1939.28

  Much of the suffering undergone in the recently conquered areas was the direct consequence of the Casado coup. Cipriano Mera had made a worthless promise that if the self-styled National Defence Council did not secure an honourable peace his men would fight on. However, while the prisoners were being handed over to the Francoists and others fled to the eastern coast, all the members of Casado’s Junta who wished to escape were evacuated from Gandía on the British destroyer Galatea in the early hours of the morning of 30 March 1939.29 Betrayed by Casado’s coup, tens of thousands of desperate Republican men, women and children fled from Madrid on 28 March pursued by Falangists. They headed for Valencia and Alicante. They had been promised that there would be ships to take them into exile. In fact, there was no chance of that. The French company normally used by the Republic refused to undertake any evacuation on the grounds that it had had no dealings with Casado, only with Negrín. It also claimed to be owed money. Moreover, the Republican fleet had abandoned Spain and landed in Bizerta in Algeria. Therefore, there was no protection against the rebel fleet blockading the Spanish ports of the eastern Mediterranean, under orders from Franco to permit no refugees to escape.

  The last boats to leave, organized by the Socialist Federation of Alicante, were the British steamers Stanbrook, Maritime, Ronwyn and African Trader and some fishing boats. They carried 5,146 passengers. The greatest number were on the Stanbrook, while the Maritime carried only thirty-two important politicians.30 The very last of the ships to leave Alicante, the Stanbrook, precariously carried 2,638 refugees. There were passengers on every inch of the deck and in the holds and its Plimsoll line was well below the surface of the water. Miraculously, its captain, Archibald Dickson, managed to manoeuvre through the rebel gauntlet. The Stanbrook reached Oran in Algeria. For nearly a month, the French authorities refused to let Captain Dickson disembark his passengers, though they were short of food and water, in conditions of extreme overcrowding. The French relented only when there was a danger of contagious illnesses spreading, and at last the refugees were taken to internment camps.31

  Back in Alicante, over the next few days, those who had arrived too late were joined by thousands more refugees from all over the remaining Republican territory. In despair, many committed suicide, some drowning themselves, others shooting themselves.32 Some ships came into view but, with their captains fearful of interception by the rebel navy, they either left empty or turned back before even reaching the dockside. Having already recognized Franco, neither London nor Paris was prepared to let its navies intervene against the rebel fleet. The refugees waited in vain for three and a half days without food or water. Children died of inanition. The Mexican government offered to take all the refugees, but Franco refused, declaring that they were all prisoners of war and must face the consequences. On Friday 31 March, the city was occupied by Italian forces. There was a repetition of what had happened to the Basque Army at Santoña. The Italians undertook to arrange evacuation if the thousands of Republicans gave up their weapons. After they had done so, the Italians were overruled once more by Franco. When two ships carrying Francoist troops arrived, the majority of the refugees were taken away and the remainder followed the next morning.33 Families were violently separated and those who protested were beaten or shot. The women and children were transferred to Alicante, where they were kept for a month packed into a cinema with little food and without facilities for washing or changing their babies. The men – including boys from the age of twelve – were taken either to the bullring in Alicante or to a large field outside the town, the Campo de los Almendros, so called because it was an orchard of almond trees.34

  As the prisoners were marched to the improvised concentration camp, they passed substantial numbers of corpses of men who had been shot ‘while trying to escape’. One commented, ‘Soon, we’ll envy the dead.’ They were stripped of valuables and their jackets and coats by the Francoist troops.35 For six days, 45,000 were kept virtually without food or water, sleeping in mud in the open, exposed to the wind and the rain. On two occasions in six days, they were fed – the first time with a small tin of sardines between four and a small loaf of bread between five and the second with a small tin of lentils between four and a crust of bread between five. The prisoners stripped the trees of the young unripe nuts and then resorted to eating the leaves and the bark. Machine-gun emplacements prevented mass break-outs.36

  Delegations of rightists came from all over Spain in search of leftists from their villages. On 7 April, 15,000 prisoners were taken to the bullring in Alicante and the castles of San Fernando and Santa Barbara. The remaining 30,000 were packed into cattle trucks and driven to the concentration camp built by the Republicans at Albatera in the south-west of the province. Many died during the journey.37 The site of the camp had been chosen precisely so that prisoners could work on draining the inhospitable saltmarsh which surrounded it. It was intended to hold a maximum of two thousand prisoners and, during the Republic, had never held more than 1,039. Between its creation and the end of the Civil War, five prisoners had died.38 Now, there were 30,000 prisoners. Hundreds died of malnutrition, many more were taken for execution in their home towns and many were shot each night for trying to escape.

  Food and fresh water were as scarce as they had been in the Campo de los Almendros or the bullring. The prisoners were fed on only four occasions between 11 and 27 April, when they were given approximately sixty-five grams of sardines and sixty grams of bread on 11, 15, 20 and 27 April. Only the youngest and strongest survived as spectres of their former selves, prematurely aged and skeletal. It rained solidly for the first two weeks. Forced to sleep in mud, in soaking-wet clothes, many caught fevers and died. In the open, in mud that got ever deeper as the rain drove in, they were afflicted with plagues of mosquitoes, fleas and other parasites. Since there was no sanitation, many died of malaria, typhus and dysentery. There were few latrines, and the holes over which they were placed were not emptied and soon overflowed. Although there were many doctors among the prisoners, they had no access to medicines. To add to the humiliations of diarrhoea and constipation, many prisoners, tormented by scurvy, mange, fleas and other parasites, could barely remain upright during the daily rituals during which they were kept standing for hours. Twice a day, they had to sing Francoist anthems. Any mistakes with the lyrics were punished with beatings. On a daily basis, when commissions came from towns and villages looking for their enemies, the prisoners were expected to stand often for as long as four hours, being insulted throughout. Those taken away were often shot near by by commissions too impatient to wait until they reached their towns of origin.39 Such conditions were replicated in camps a
ll over Spain.

  Among those in the greatest danger from the Francoists were Republican politicians, political commissars and journalists, all of whom were regarded as keeping alive Republican ideals throughout the war. Perhaps those most hated and sought were members of the SIM or the judiciary, the police or the prison service. The one-time head of the SIM in Madrid, Ángel Pedrero, who was in the Campo de los Almendros with two hundred of his men, remarked prophetically that they were doomed because of what they knew about the fifth column and its betrayals. The empty boasts of those who were claiming to have been fifth columnists would be exposed if Pedrero lived. To justify their exiguous triumphs, they had to exaggerate the horrific sufferings that he was alleged to have imposed upon them. Tens of thousands of others, whose only ‘crime’ was to have supported the Republic or served in the army, as well as their innocent wives and children, were appallingly treated.40 Those who tried to escape were shot and the other prisoners were obliged to line up to witness the executions. Very few escape bids were successful and most of those who tried were quickly captured. One of those who managed to get away was Benigno Mancebo, of the CNT, who had supervised the tribunals of the Comité Provincial de Investigación Pública in Madrid. He was picked up in Madrid many months later and executed. In other prisons, the sacas were organized according to the date – three to be murdered on the 3rd of the month, seven on the 7th and so on.41