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

by Paul Preston

  The anarchist journalist Eduardo de Guzmán recounted how he was taken to Madrid from Albatera in mid-June 1939 in a group that included Ricardo Zabalza, José Rodriguez Vega, the secretary general of the UGT, and David Antona, who, as secretary of the Madrid CNT, had tried to restrain the sacas and was later Civil Governor of Ciudad Real. It will be recalled that, as Civil Governor of Valencia, Zabalza had played a key role in halting the excesses of the anarchist Iron Column. The group was split up, and individuals were detained in any police station that happened to have room. They were packed together with twenty to thirty men in cells meant for two. With non-existent hygiene, they were persecuted by fleas and scabies. They were barely fed, receiving in the morning a quantity of filthy water with some malt that was presented as coffee, and at midday and in the evening a bowl of equally filthy water in which floated the occasional bits of carrot or turnip that was presented as soup or stew. For their survival, they had to depend on food parcels sent in by their families. With their breadwinners dead, in exile, on the run or in jail, the families were impoverished. Excoriated as worthless red scum, their chances of work were minimal. They still sent in food parcels at the cost of going hungry themselves. Many had no family in Madrid, or in whichever town they were imprisoned, but a spirit of solidarity prevailed and the more fortunate shared their parcels with them.

  The dreadful conditions were merely the background to the central experience for most prisoners. In the police station in the Calle Almagro, where Eduardo de Guzmán was detained, they were repeatedly subjected to savage beatings for days without actually being asked any questions. It was part of a softening-up process. The beatings were delivered not by professional policemen but by men who had worked in the checas but now claimed to have been fifth columnists acting as provocateurs. There were humiliating rituals such as attempts to force them to beat each other up or immersing them in toilets full of faecal matter. Sometimes, the beatings went too far and the prisoner would be killed. There were many cases of prisoners who found a way of committing suicide rather than take the pain. They thereby avoided the risk of breaking down and confessing to something they had or had not done or even worse of becoming an informer. Several did break. In the end, nearly all prisoners would be forced to sign ‘declarations’ and confessions without being allowed to read them. Thus anyone who happened to be from Vallecas was held responsible for the massacre of rightists on the trains from Jaén, and those from Carabanchel were assumed guilty of the murder of General López Ochoa, even if they had been fighting on a distant front at the time.42

  In Madrid, Zabalza was tortured but wrote no confession. He was tried on 2 February 1940 and shot at dawn on the 24th. One of the principal charges against him was that he had organized the perfectly legal harvest strike of the summer of 1934. Shortly before he was led out to the firing squad, he wrote to his parents:

  When you read these lines, I will be just a memory. Men who describe themselves as Christians have wished it so and I, who never knowingly did anyone harm, submit myself to this test with the same clear conscience that has ruled my entire life. You in the simplicity of your religious faith will never be able to understand how a man who committed no crime – even the prosecutor recognized that – and against whom there are no accusations of any shameful act should suffer the death that awaits him.43

  One of the most notable cases of a confession extracted after torture was that of the FAI assassin Felipe Sandoval. Already suffering from advanced tuberculosis, he was beaten mercilessly for days on end. Bones broken in his chest, he would lie groaning in agony, coughing blood. He would be beaten again until he cleaned up the blood. Eventually, after repeated hours of being kicked and punched in the chest and stomach, he began to give up the names of comrades on the run, stating where they were to be found. Under threat of further beatings, and barely able to speak, he was forced to confront his fellow prisoners. He repeated, parrot-fashion, the accusations which his torturers had instructed him to make. Most of the prisoners already regarded Sandoval with disgust but, once they discovered his treachery, this turned into hatred. The general consensus was that his lack of moral fibre proved that, far from being a warrior in the social struggle, he was merely a thief and an assassin. They set about persuading him to commit suicide. Whether in response to their arguments or to his own suffering, finally on 4 July 1939 he threw himself from a window and died in the patio below. The anarchist Amor Nuño, who negotiated the agreement between the CNT and the JSU for the evacuation of prisoners from Madrid that led to the massacre of Paracuellos, was beaten to death in the Dirección General de Seguridad.44

  When Guzmán and others had finally signed their ‘confessions’, they were transferred to prisons. In the truck carrying Guzmán, the driver visited nine prisons before he could find one which would admit the prisoners. Eventually, they were allowed into Yeserías in the southern outskirts of the city near Carabanchel. Food was scarce. After each meal, they were obliged to line up in the gallery for at least an hour and sing the Falangist, Carlist and monarchist anthems, ‘Cara al Sol’, ‘Oriamendi’ and the ‘Marcha Real’, with their right arms outstretched in the fascist salute. The ceremony would end with them having to shout ‘¡Viva Franco! ¡Viva la Falange!’ and the ritual chant of ‘¡España, una, España, grande, España, libre!’ Those considered to be singing with insufficient gusto would be taken out and punished by having their heads shaved, being beaten, sometimes even being shot. The most common punishment was for them to be obliged to stand singing, arm outstretched, for four or five hours. Most week nights, those sentenced to death there would be executed.45

  Eduardo de Guzmán’s trial was similar to that of Juan Caba Guijarro. More than thirty prisoners, accused of various ‘crimes’, were tried at the same time. One defender was named for all of them and they had no chance to talk to him until the eve of the trial. The prior assumption of the court was that all were guilty as charged. It was up to the accused to prove their innocence, but they were not usually allowed to speak. Theoretically, if they were accused of killing a named victim on a specific date in a specific place, and if they had not been in that place at that time, there was the slight possibility that they might be able to be heard and thus prove their innocence. However, it was common for someone to be accused of numerous murders without the victims, the times or the places being specified.46

  The accusations were based on the declarations that, after weeks of beatings and torture, they had signed but not been allowed to read. Accordingly, the prisoners had little prospect of being found innocent. One of the women recounted to Guzmán the torture that had obliged her to sign a false confession of having participated in murders in the Checa del Cine Europa. She showed him how her breasts had been horribly deformed as a result of being burned with lighters and matches until sections of flesh had burned away. Her nipples had been ripped off with staplers.47

  On the day that Guzmán was tried, nearly two hundred men and sixteen women were tried in four trials which lasted little more than two hours. In Guzmán’s trial, the proceedings started with the reading by the clerk of the charges against the twenty-nine accused. This was done in a nearly inaudible, mechanical monotone. The fact that the charges were incomprehensible bothered only the accused and their families. The judges, the prosecutor and the defending lawyer gave no sign of being interested. The charges that could be deciphered were wildly disparate, ranging from membership of a checa to having set fire to a church, been a political commissar in the Republican army, been an officer or simply been a volunteer. One of Guzmán’s fellow defendants was the poet Miguel Hernández, who was accused both of having been a Communist commissar and of having written poems that were injurious to the Francoist cause. Guzmán himself was accused of being an editor of the newspaper La Tierra and of being the director of Castilla Libre, of insulting the rebel leaders and exaggerating Republican triumphs and of being responsible for the crimes committed by the readers of both newspapers. After the reading of the cha
rges, there was cross-examination by the prosecutor. The prisoners were allowed to answer only yes or no. No witnesses were called. The members of the tribunal then took a recess. When they returned, the prosecutor gave a twenty-minute speech during which he accused the prisoners of being sub-human scum, cowards, criminals, illiterate savages, thieves and murderers.

  All of the crimes of the bulk of the prisoners were then attributed to the inspiration of Hernández and Guzmán. The pages of La Tierra and Castilla Libre were alleged to have caused the electoral victory of the Popular Front in February 1936, the fire and subsequent massacre in the Cárcel Modelo in August that year and the resistance of Madrid in November. The prosecutor seemed unaware or unconcerned that La Tierra had closed down in May 1935 and that Castilla Libre was not created until February 1937. The defending lawyer, who had not been allowed to speak to any of the prisoners until the previous evening, had not received the files of all twenty-nine, nor those of others that he had to defend later, and had barely had time to skim over them. He basically asked for the accused to be given the sentence inferior to that demanded by the prosecutor – life imprisonment instead of the death penalty, thirty years instead of life imprisonment and so on. When the accused were allowed to speak, they were interrupted as soon as they opened their mouths. When Guzmán tried to point out the prosecutor’s error in accusing him of publishing in non-existent newspapers, he was ordered to sit down and told that the court already knew everything he could possibly say.

  The entire proceedings had taken less than two hours; indeed, if the recess was counted, less than ninety minutes. In that time, less than three minutes per accused, fifteen of the twenty-nine men had been sentenced to death and the remainder to prison sentences of life or thirty years. One man whose name had not even figured in the list of accusations was sentenced to death for an unspecified crime. One of Guzmán’s fellow prisoners, the Communist Narciso Julián, was tried and sentenced to death along with sixteen others in a court martial lasting eleven minutes. In Tortosa, the trials were presided over by the notorious Lisardo Doval. On 10 August 1939, in two trials of fourteen and fifteen men, he barely permitted the prosecutor time to read out the charges. The accused had not met the defence lawyer before. The entire proceedings lasted less than half an hour. In the military court of Tarragona, it was common for twenty to thirty men and women to be tried together.48

  A factor that facilitated Franco’s state terror was the ever-closer collaboration between his security services and those of the Third Reich. This had begun in November 1937, when the authorities in Burgos requested that the German government send a team of experts to instruct the Spanish police in the latest methods for the eradication of communism. A team was assembled under the command of SS Colonel Heinz Jost, head of the Sicherheitsdienst Foreign Intelligence Office, a man who would be sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials for atrocities committed in Russia. Jost’s team reached Valladolid in mid-January 1938 and was attached to Franco’s recently created Ministry of Public Order, headed by the seventy-five-year-old General Severiano Martínez Anido. Notorious as Civil Governor of Barcelona in the early 1920s when the infamous ley de fugas (the shooting of ‘escaping’ prisoners) was the norm, Martínez Anido had won Franco’s admiration for his implacable imposition of law and order during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. He wanted to step up the purge of leftists in captured territory and was delighted to have German help in creating the necessary instruments of repression. Jost returned to Germany in February 1938 but left behind a three-man SD team which helped reorganize the Francoist police administration, the political police and the criminal police force. One of its lasting legacies was the analysis and systematization of captured Republican documentation to create a vast repository of political information in Salamanca.49

  Already before the war, Father Juan Tusquets had been feverishly compiling lists of supposed Jews and Freemasons. In 1937, with his help and the encouragement of the Caudillo himself, the Cuartel General (Franco’s headquarters) had been collecting material seized in captured areas from the offices of political parties and trade unions, from Masonic lodges and from the houses of leftists. This had been done principally within the Judaeo-Masonic Section of the Military Information Service under the direction of Father Tusquets and Major Antonio Palau. The documentation was scoured by Tusquets to swell his lists of suspected Freemasons. The task was extended on 20 April 1937 with the additional creation of the Oficina de Investigación y Propaganda Antimarxista, manned by army officers and volunteers. The official objective was ‘to collect, analyse, and catalogue all types of propaganda material that has been used by communism and its puppet organizations for its campaigns in our fatherland, with a view to organizing counter-propaganda, both in Spain and abroad’. Accordingly, efforts were made to seize all possible material on all the organizations of the left from conservative Republicans to anarchists, including Freemasons, pacifists and feminists. Limited numbers of copies of printed material were kept and the rest destroyed. More important than the counter-propaganda objective, correspondence and membership and subscription lists were scoured for names to go into a great file-card index of leftists to be arrested and tried.

  On 29 May 1937, in a parallel initiative, Franco had named Marcelino de Ulibarri Eguílaz as head of the Delegation of Special Services. Its brief was to ‘recover all documentation related to secret sects and their activities in Spain found in the possession of individuals or official entities, storing it carefully in a place far removed from danger where it can be catalogued and classified in order to create an archive that will permit the exposure and punishment of the enemies of the fatherland’.50 Ulibarri, one of the most prominent Navarrese Carlists, had first met Franco in Zaragoza when he was Director of the General Military Academy. Ulibarri had also been instrumental in promoting the political career of Franco’s brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Suñer, in the city. His nomination was a reward for the part that he had played in facilitating the docile acceptance in April 1937 by the Carlist movement of its fusion with the Falange within Franco’s single party, the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS. The appointment was also in recognition of the obsessive anti-Freemasonry that Ulibarri shared with Franco and, of course, with Father Tusquets. Ulibarri, long an admirer of Father Tusquets, became acquainted with his fellow anti-Masonic campaigner on his frequent visits to Franco’s residence in the Episcopal Palace in Salamanca. So fierce was his hatred of Freemasons and Jews that Ulibarri was known among his Carlist comrades as ‘the hammer of Freemasonry’.51

  Within weeks, Ulibarri had set up the Office for the Recovery of Documents. With the Basque Country about to fall into Francoist hands, the ORD’s purpose was the systematic seizure and subsequent classification of captured documentation. This task was entrusted to a small group of specially selected Civil Guards. Ulibarri soon argued for the merger of the ORD with the Oficina de Investigación y Propaganda Antimarxista. The determination of the overbearing and authoritarian Ulibarri to centralize all such activities eventually led to a clash with Tusquets.

  With the prospect of the fall of Santander and Asturias following on that of the Basque Country, Ulibarri called for the collection of the documentation to be speeded up to permit the greatest efficiency in the subsequent repression. He stated that, in the wake of each victory, the police had to be supplied with ‘the documents that indicate the guilt of those persons who are to be tried immediately’. After the victory at Teruel and the subsequent drive through Aragon towards the Mediterranean, huge opportunities were opening up. The desired departmental merger was formalized on 26 April 1938 when, as Minister of the Interior, Serrano Suñer issued a decree creating the Delegación del Estado para la Recuperación de Documentos (DERD). Its purpose was to gather, store and classify all documents emanating from political parties, organizations and individuals ‘hostile to or even out of sympathy with the National Movement’ in order to facilitate their location and punishment.52

  The d
ocumentation gathered by the Judaeo-Masonic Section of the Military Information Service was passed over to the ORD in the immediate wake of the merger. However, in his efforts to centralize all information on Freemasons, Ulibarri also tried to make Tusquets hand over his personal archive and file-card system which had been swelled by material collected under the auspices of the SIM. Tusquets replied by denying that he had any material and claiming that his papers were in Barcelona. Eventually, however, it appears that Tusquets’s archive was put at the disposal of the DERD. Until the occupation of Catalonia in January 1939, Tusquets continued to work in a much reduced Judaeo-Masonic Section within the Military Information Service.53

  One of the most influential of Ulibarri’s staff was the policeman Eduardo Comín Colomer. In August 1938, all security services in the Francoist zone had been unified under the National Security Service headed by Lieutenant Colonel José Medina. One of its principal departments was the Investigation and Security Police, which in turn was divided into various sections. One of them, Anti-Marxism, consisted of three sub-sections, Freemasonry, Judaism and Publications. Comín Colomer was the head of both the Freemasonry and Judaism offices, as well as producing the Boletín de Información Antimarxista. In January 1939, he was seconded to the DERD to be Marcelino de Ulibarri’s assistant. There he would play a key role in the classification and sifting of the captured material in preparation for its use by the secret police.54 The material would become the basis for his own legendary library and also for a stream of books and pamphlets published over the following thirty-five years in which he denounced all elements of the Republican left. During this time, one of his assistants was Mauricio Carlavilla.55