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

by Paul Preston

  DERD search teams followed Franco’s troops as they moved across Aragon and into Catalonia. Barcelona was occupied on 26 January 1939 and placed under martial law the following day. DERD operatives started to search the city on 28 January and, by 7 June, had filled fourteen buildings with paper. Two hundred tons of documents were taken by train and truck from Catalonia to Salamanca. Eight hundred tons in total were gathered from all over what had remained of the Republican zone. With the help of the German specialists, this material was converted into a massive index of 80,000 suspected Freemasons, despite the fact that there had been nearer five than ten thousand Freemasons in Spain in 1936 and that fewer than one thousand remained after 1939. These files would facilitate the purges carried out in the 1940s under the infamous Special Tribunal created to implement the Law for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism of February 1940.56 Ulibarri was named its first president on 1 September 1940 but was replaced soon afterwards by General Andrés Saliquet, who had presided over the repression in Valladolid.57

  Tusquets’s labours bore fruit in that, in Franco’s Spain, to be considered a Freemason was to be guilty of treason. This often meant execution without trial. Before the end of 1936, thirty members of the Masonic lodge Helmanti of Salamanca had been shot. A similar fate awaited thirty members of the Masonic lodge Constancia of Zaragoza, fifteen in Logroño, seven in Burgos, five from Huesca, seventeen in Ceuta, twenty-four in Algeciras, twelve in La Línea, fifty-four in Granada. All the Freemasons of Vigo, Lugo, A Coruña, Zamora, Cádiz, Melilla, Tetuán and Las Palmas were shot. The paranoiac exaggerations of the files accumulated in Salamanca meant that in Huesca, for example, where there were five Freemasons before the outbreak of war, one hundred men were shot after being accused of belonging to a lodge. As late as October 1937, eighty men in Málaga, accused of Freemasonry, were shot.58

  In April 1938, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler had contacted the Minister of Public Order, General Martínez Anido, to suggest widening the Spanish–German agreement on police co-operation. The Gestapo was interested in repatriating German Jews, Communists and Socialists who had fought in the International Brigades and been captured by Franco’s forces. The agreement signed on 31 July permitted the swift exchange of leftists caught by the two security services. International Brigaders were handed over to Gestapo interrogators stationed in Spain, then despatched to Germany without even minimal judicial procedures. Individual cases for repatriation required only the approval of Franco, which was never refused. In return, a programme of training for Franco’s political police was headed by SS Sturmbannführer Paul Winzer, the Gestapo attaché at the German Embassy in Salamanca. Martínez Anido died shortly before the end of 1938 and the functions of his Ministry were absorbed by the Ministry of the Interior. As his Director General of Security, Serrano Suñer appointed his crony José Finat y Escrivá de Romaní, the Conde de Mayalde. On Mayalde’s suggestion, Himmler was awarded the regime’s highest decoration, the Grand Cross of the Imperial Order of the Yoke and Arrows in recognition of his role in the fight against the enemies of Franco’s Spain.59

  Franco got his reward when, after the collapse of France, thousands of Spanish exiles fell into the hands of the Germans. On the very day, 22 June 1940, that the Franco-German armistice was signed in Compiègne, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed the French Embassy in Madrid that Azaña, Negrín and ‘other red leaders’ had requested visas to leave France for Mexico. Francoist efforts to extradite prominent Republicans from France would meet fewer problems in the German-occupied zone than in the territory of the newly established Vichy regime. Serrano Suñer requested that the French Ambassador, Le Comte Robert Renom de la Baume, inform the Vichy premier, Marshal Philippe Pétain, that Spain was impatiently waiting for France to ‘neutralize’ the Spanish red leaders currently in its territory. Then, on 24 July, the Spanish government asked the Comte de la Baume to prevent the departure for Mexico of the seventy-four-year-old ex-Prime Minister, the conservative Manuel Portela Valladares, and several members of the Basque government.60 The Franco government’s interest in Portela’s extradition derived from his prominence in the lists of Father Juan Tusquets.

  These requests were followed on 27 August by a peremptory demand for the extradition without delay of 636 prominent Republicans believed by the Madrid government to be in Vichy France. Underlying these requests was the threat that, if they were not met, Spain would use its special relationship with Nazi Germany to push its territorial claims to French North Africa. In any case, Marshal Pétain loathed the Spanish Republicans since he considered most of them to be Communists, but he was reluctant to breach the right of asylum. Accordingly, to the intense annoyance of Madrid, Vichy insisted that requests for extradition had to pass through the courts, in accordance with the Franco-Spanish extradition treaty of 1877 and a law of 1927 that required each case to be judged individually. Nevertheless, the Vichy French police, using names and addresses supplied by José Félix de Lequerica, Franco’s Ambassador, began to round up prominent Republicans, or at least place them under close surveillance. The French knew that to hand over these men would be to send them to certain death. Serrano Suñer was outraged that several, including Prieto and Negrín, had managed, with the collusion of the French authorities, to escape.61

  On 1 July 1940, the President of Mexico, Lázaro Cárdenas, informed his Minister Plenipotentiary in France, Luis Ignacio Rodríguez Taboada, that Mexico was prepared to accept all Spanish refugees currently in France. Moreover, he instructed him to inform the French government that, until their transport could be arranged, all Spanish Republicans in France were under the diplomatic protection of Mexico. On 8 July, Rodríguez Taboada was received by Pétain in Vichy. After warning him that the Spaniards were undesirables, Pétain agreed in principle. A joint committee was set up to work out the details and, on 23 August, an agreement was signed by the Mexican government and Vichy. Many Vichy officials viewed this arrangement with suspicion and they, and the Germans in the occupied zone, complied with Spanish requests for many Republicans to be prevented from leaving France. Nevertheless, the Mexican initiative helped thousands of Republicans until November 1942, when the German occupation of Vichy France severed diplomatic relations between the two.62

  If the Francoist authorities were hindered by the judicial scruples of the Vichy French and the humanitarian efforts of the Mexicans, they had no such problems regarding the Spaniards who found themselves in German-occupied France. In the days following the capture of Paris, groups of Falangists sacked the buildings in which various Spanish Republican organizations had their offices. Their funds and archives were seized and taken to Spain. Lequerica quickly established cordial relations with the Germans, who facilitated the activities of Spanish policemen within the occupied zone. The consequence was that the exiled Republicans’ places of residence were searched, their goods, money and documents seized and their persons mistreated even when they had not been arrested or extradited.

  In late August 1940, the Conde de Mayalde visited Berlin to discuss the fate of the captured Republican refugees. He was shown the latest police installations and techniques and met Himmler and other top brass of the various German police and security services, including Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Sicherheitsdienst. Himmler proposed that Spain and Germany exchange police liaison officers who would have diplomatic immunity and the right to arrest citizens of their respective countries. Himmler would thereby be able to increase the Gestapo network in Spain to maintain surveillance of German refugees and the Spaniards would get rapid access to Republican exiles. Mayalde said he would have to consult with his Minister but suggested that Himmler might like to visit Spain himself.

  Even before that visit took place, as soon as France fell Franco and Serrano Suñer hastened to take advantage of Himmler’s earlier agreement with General Martínez Anido. Officers of the Dirección General de Seguridad were sent to Paris to arrange the extradition from occupied France of several recently arreste
d Republican leaders. The police attaché at the Paris Embassy, Pedro Urraca Rendueles, was in charge of securing their hand-over and taking them to the Spanish frontier. The Germans arrested prominent figures from lists provided by Lequerica including Lluís Companys Jover, the President of the Catalan Generalitat. On 10 July, in Pyla-sur-Mer, near Arcachon, German police, accompanied by a Spanish agent, had arrested Cipriano Rivas Cherif, Azaña’s brother-in-law, along with two close friends of the exiled President, Carlos Montilla Escudero and Miguel Salvador Carreras. The following day, two Socialists, Teodomiro Menéndez, one of the leaders of the Asturian miners’ insurrection of October 1934, and the journalist Francisco Cruz Salido, were arrested by the Germans in Bordeaux. On 27 July 1940, the Gestapo arrested in Paris the one-time editor of El Socialista and wartime Minister of the Interior Julián Zugazagoitia Mendieta. All were handed over to the Spanish police in France and taken to Madrid. There were no judicial procedures. According to Franco himself, the Germans delivered the prisoners ‘spontaneously’.63

  Companys had passed up various chances to escape from France because his son Lluís was seriously ill in a clinic in Paris. He was arrested in La Baule-les-Pins near Nantes on 13 August 1940, taken to Paris and detained in La Santé prison. However, on 26 August, La Santé received an order from the Conde de Mayalde requiring that Companys be handed over to Pedro Urraca Rendueles. He was transferred to Madrid in early September and imprisoned in the cellars of the DGS. For five weeks, he was kept in solitary confinement and tortured and beaten. Senior figures of the regime visited his cell, insulted him and threw coins or crusts of dry bread at him. On 3 October, his clothing bloodstained, a heavily manacled Companys was transferred to the Castillo de Montjuich in Barcelona.

  Accused of military rebellion, he was subjected to a summary court martial on 14 October. While the military prosecutor prepared his case, Companys was given no opportunity to talk to the officer appointed to ‘defend’ him nor was he permitted to call witnesses on his own behalf. The defence advocate, an artillery captain, Ramón de Colubrí, pointed out that Companys had saved hundreds of lives of right-wingers in Catalonia, among them several army officers, including himself. At a trial lasting less than one hour, Companys was sentenced to death. The sentence was quickly approved by the Captain General of the IV Military Region, Luis Orgaz. In the early hours of the following day, the deeply Catholic Companys heard Mass and took communion. Refusing to wear a blindfold, he was taken before a firing squad of Civil Guards and, as they fired, he cried ‘Per Catalunya!’ According to his death certificate, he died at 6.30 a.m. on 15 October 1940. The cause of death was cynically given as ‘traumatic internal haemorrhage’.64

  General Orgaz was displeased by having to sign the death sentence, not for moral or humanitarian considerations but because he resented having to do what he regarded as the dirty work of Falangists. Until the beginning of 1940, all death sentences had required the approval of General Franco. However, there were long delays before he could review the large numbers of pending cases. So, on 26 January that year, to speed up the process, it was decreed that Franco’s signature was no longer required. It was further decided that, in cases where those sentenced had been ministers, parliamentary deputies or civil governors or who had held other senior posts in the Republican administration, there could be no appeal for clemency.65

  Four days after the death of Companys, Heinrich Himmler arrived in Spain. The invitation issued by Mayalde had been confirmed by Serrano Suñer, now newly appointed Foreign Minister. In the view of the British Ambassador, Serrano Suñer wanted to seek ‘expert advice on the liquidation of opponents and the capture of political refugees’. Himmler was interested both in police collaboration and in preparing security for the forthcoming meeting between Hitler and Franco on the French border. Arriving on the morning of 19 October 1940, he was treated to a lavishly orchestrated welcome first in San Sebastián and then in Burgos. The streets of both cities were draped with swastika flags. On 20 October, he was greeted in Madrid by Serrano Suñer and senior officials of the Falange. He set up base at the Ritz Hotel, then had a meeting with Serrano Suñer at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before both moved on to El Pardo to see Franco. Serrano Suñer was particularly interested in the whereabouts of several prominent captured Republicans, just as Himmler was concerned about exiled Germans. They reached an agreement whereby the Gestapo would establish an office in the German Embassy in Madrid and the Sicherheitsdienst would have offices in the main German consulates throughout Spain. German agents would thus operate with full diplomatic immunity. The same privilege would be applied to Spanish agents in Germany and, more importantly, in the German occupied zone of France.66

  The Conde de Mayalde, who was also Mayor of Madrid, arranged an out-of-season bullfight in Himmler’s honour in a swastika-emblazoned Plaza de Ventas and also invited him to a hunting party on his estate in Toledo. Over the next few days, Himmler was taken to the Prado and the Archaeological Museum in Madrid, the historical monuments of Toledo and El Escorial and the Monastery of Montserrat in Catalonia. His visits to the archaeological museum and to Montserrat were linked to his patronage of the SS Deutsches Ahnenerbe (German Ancestral Heritage). Himmler was always on the look-out for the talisman that would win the war. On the basis of Wagner’s Parsifal, he was convinced that Montserrat was Montsalvat, the mountain where, according to Wolfram von Eschenbach and later Wagner, the Holy Grail was kept. In the magnificent library of Montserrat, he demanded to see the archives on the location of the Holy Grail. When he was informed that he was mistaken, he rudely claimed a Germanic pagan origin for everything to do with Montserrat and declared that Jesus Christ was not Jewish but Aryan.67

  Alongside these cultural activities, there were visits to prisons and concentration camps. According to one of Serrano Suñer’s closest aides, Ramón Garriga, Himmler was shocked by what he saw. He thought it absurd that hundreds of thousands of able-bodied Spaniards were detained in appalling conditions, many facing the death sentence, at a time when the country was in desperate need of labour for the reconstruction of roads, buildings and houses destroyed during the Civil War. Apparently, he had been impressed by the work carried out by Republican exiles in labour battalions in France. He told Franco and Serrano Suñer that they were wasting valuable resources and that it made more sense to incorporate working-class militants into the new order rather than annihilate them. In his view, the regime should have shot a small number of prominent Republicans, imprisoned some more and let the rest go free under close police vigilance. Himmler made an important distinction between ideological and racial enemies. Franco was not convinced.68

  While Himmler was still in Spain, the trial began of the other prominent Republicans handed over by the Germans at the end of July. Cipriano Rivas Cherif, Francisco Cruz Salido, Carlos Montilla, Miguel Salvador, Teodomiro Menéndez and Julián Zugazagoitia were charged with military rebellion and tried on 21 October. Recognizing that they had committed no crime, the prosecutor declared that he had no intention of citing concrete facts or calling witnesses since it was clear that they had all contributed to ‘inducing revolution’. Their posts before and during the Civil War were considered to be more than sufficient proof. According to the prosecutor, anyone who held a position in a government that organized, tolerated or was impotent to prevent crimes of blood was guilty of those crimes. That Teodomiro Menéndez had retired from politics after October 1934 and, more crucially, that Ramón Serrano Suñer came and spoke on his behalf meant that he escaped the death penalty and was sentenced instead to thirty years’ imprisonment. All five of the others were sentenced to death. Several significant Francoists, including the writer Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, the Falangist Rafael Sánchez Mazas and Antonio Lizarra, a leader of the Carlist Requetés, testified that Zugazagoitia, far from tolerating crimes of blood, had saved many lives, particularly of priests and nuns. Amelia de Azarola, the widow of Julio Ruiz de Alda, spoke of Zugazagoitia’s efforts on her behalf. It was to n
o avail. Cruz Salido and Zugazagoitia were executed in the Madrid Cementerio del Este on 9 November 1940, along with fourteen other Republicans. On 21 December, Rivas Cherif, Montilla and Salvador learned that Franco had commuted their sentences to life imprisonment.69

  There were many victims of the notion that, irrespective of their intentions and efforts, anyone who worked for the government had been impotent to prevent crimes of blood and so was guilty thereof. On 10 July 1940, the man who had been Civil Governor of Málaga from the beginning of the Civil War until mid-September 1936, José Antonio Fernández Vega, had been arrested in France by the Gestapo and brought to Spain along with Companys, Zugazagoitia, Cruz Salido, Cipriano Rivas Cherif, Teodomiro Menéndez and other deputies. He was tried in Málaga in March 1942, accused of responsibility for all the assassinations committed during his period of office. Despite an abundance of testimonies regarding the thousands of people that he had saved and the fact he had been overwhelmed by the local anarchist committees, he was sentenced to death and executed on 18 May 1942.70

  The procedure for extraditions from Vichy France saw Blas Pérez González, the senior prosecutor of the Supreme Court, prepare arrest warrants that were passed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which then made the corresponding request to Vichy. In November 1940, Lequerica had delivered a list of the names of nearly three thousand Republicans wanted for trial in Spain. The official response of Vichy was lukewarm and made it clear that an individual dossier for each case was required. The majority of extradition demands were unsuccessful since the requests were absurd.

  For instance, Ventura Gassol had been the Minister of Culture in the Generalitat and had saved many lives of right-wingers and religious personnel threatened by the extreme left. In consequence, he himself had received death threats from extremist groups and, in October 1936, had been forced into exile in France. Nevertheless, the extradition request accused him of being a common criminal. All those who were the object of extradition demands were arrested and imprisoned until their cases were heard. Gassol remained in prison for three months before his case came to trial. The request was rejected when the French court heard the testimony of one of those whose life he had saved, the Archbishop of Tarragona, Francesc Vidal i Barraquer, himself exiled in Italy.71 Another extradition that was turned down was that of Federica Montseny, the Minister of Health in the Largo Caballero cabinet.72