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

by Paul Preston

  Many of the sentences imposed under the Law were applied against people who had long since been executed or gone into exile. In such cases, their fines were passed on to their widows or other relatives if they could be found. A case was brought against the exiled lawyer Eduardo Ragasol i Sarrà. The denunciation which provoked the case came from members of the town council of Caldes de Monbui, north of Barcelona. They wanted to evict his mother from the family property to get hold of it. The Tribunal of Political Responsibilities confiscated the family patrimony in December 1939, although, three years later, his mother managed to get part of the property returned.86

  A more striking case was that of Josep Sunyol i Garriga, the president of Barcelona football club since 1934, who was executed in August 1936. Sunyol, the wealthy owner of sugar factories in La Rioja, Zaragoza, Málaga and Lleida, had represented Barcelona for Esquerra Republicana in all three Cortes. The dressing rooms of the football club’s stadium at Les Corts had been used to hide many religious personnel while the Generalitat made arrangements to evacuate them. At the beginning of the war, Sunyol had been sent to Madrid to liaise with the government of José Giral. On 6 August, he went to the Guadarrama front to the north-west of the capital to see the Alto del León, from which the Republican press had erroneously announced the expulsion of Mola’s troops. His car strayed into rebel territory and he and his companions were shot by the roadside. There was no trial. His properties located in the rebel zone were confiscated immediately. On 24 October 1939, the regional Tribunal of Political Responsibilities opened proceedings, charging him with being a Communist and a separatist. Since Josep Sunyol failed to appear to respond to these charges, his father was sentenced to a fine of 5 million pesetas and exclusion from any senior position in the industrial or banking world.87

  Hardly less extraordinary was the case of Camil Companys i Jover, the youngest of the Catalan President’s three brothers. Although his political activity had been negligible, as a precaution he had gone into exile when the rebels occupied Barcelona. He had been obliged to leave behind his wife and five-year-old son and faced acute economic difficulties in France. Before the war, he had been a member of the Catalan Socialist Party and then of Esquerra Republicana, and had served as president of the executive committee of the Barcelona Bar Association. In September 1939, the Tribunal of Political Responsibilities started proceedings against him despite the fact that its preliminary investigations had produced testimony from his parish priest and his neighbours to the effect that he had protected numerous religious during the war. The proceedings continued even after Camil had committed suicide on 20 September 1940 when he heard of the arrest of his elder brother Lluís. His widow, Josefa Pascual, was interrogated one month after his death. On 28 February 1941, the deceased Camil was sentenced to fifteen years’ exclusion from professional activity and a fine of 1,000 pesetas, for which Josefa was made liable.88

  Nothing better illustrated the spirit of the law than Franco’s choice of Enrique Suñer Ordóñez as president of the national Tribunal of Political Responsibilities. During the war, as vice-president of the Education and Culture Committee of Franco’s first government, Suñer, previously a professor of paediatric medicine at Madrid University, had overseen the purging of schoolteachers. In a book published in 1938, he wrote of the blood shed during the war. He contrasted the blood ‘of vile brutes, with worse instincts that those of wild beasts’, with the blood that flowed ‘from noble Spanish breasts – soldiers and militiamen – generous youth, full of sacrifice and heroism so immense that their wounds raise them to the status of the demigods of Greek myth’. Then he asked: ‘And this horrific mortality, must it go without its just punishment? Our spirit rebels against a possible impunity of the pitiless individuals who caused our tragedy. It is just not possible that Providence and man leave without punishment so many murders, rapes, cruelties, pillages and destructions of artistic wealth and the means of production. It is necessary to swear before our beloved dead that the deserved sanctions will be executed with the most holy of violence.’89

  Suñer regarded Republican politicians as:

  horrific, truly devilish men. Sadists and madmen working with professional thieves, fraudsters, armed robbers and murderers have occupied the posts of ministers, under-secretaries, senior civil servants and all kinds of important jobs … Wild boars and cloven-hoofed beasts running through parliament, in search of sacrificial victims to bite with their fangs or smash with their hooves … Monsters in the style of Nero, leaders of sects and their agents, murdered the greatest hope of the Fatherland: Calvo Sotelo … Behind them stand the Freemasons, the socialists, the communists, the Azañistas, the anarchists, all the Jewish leaders of the black Marxism that has Russia for its mother and the destruction of European civilization for its motto. Spain has been before and is again the theatre of an epic combat between Titans and apocalyptic monsters. The programmes laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are beginning to become reality.90

  The aim of the war, wrote Suñer, was ‘to strengthen the race’, for which ‘it is necessary to bring about the total extirpation of our enemies, of those front-line intellectuals who brought about the catastrophe’.91 Determined to eliminate any intellectuals who had contributed to the liberal culture of the Republic, Suñer sent many denunciations to the rebel intelligence service, the Servicio de Información Militar. At the end of June 1937, he denounced the family of the distinguished medievalist and philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal, president of the Spanish Academy. A conservative, Menéndez Pidal had fled into exile, terrified of being the victim of the left. Suñer also denounced Menéndez Pidal’s wife, the feminist and philologist María Goyri, who had been the first woman in Spain to earn a university degree (1896) and later a doctorate (1909). Suñer claimed that she had perverted her husband and children and was one of the most dangerous people in Spain.92

  The machinery of the Tribunal was soon clogged with a massive backlog of cases, not least since the process invited denunciations. The extent to which these were motivated by personal envy or resentment led to expressions of disgust by the military authorities who had to judge them.93 Unable to cope, Suñer was succeeded in December 1940 by the man who had been first Civil Governor of Barcelona after its capture. The pro-Nazi Wenceslao González Oliveros had immediately embarked on a fierce persecution of Catalan language and culture. He too had difficulty dealing with the huge backlog left by Suñer. In fact, this was inevitable given the extent of the application of the Law of Political Responsibilities as merely part of the ongoing repression. There was a shortage of legally trained personnel that could be hired by the Tribunal. Hundreds of thousands of cases were opened, including against Negrín, Azaña, Largo Caballero, Dolores Ibárruri and many more exiled Republicans. Fines imposed on dead or exiled Republicans were collected by the confiscation of their families’ goods. Eventually, the Tribunal collapsed under the weight of its own ambition. The regional Tribunal of Albacete had resolved only 9.25 per cent of its open cases. The Tribunal in Madrid had resolved only 15.51 per cent of the cases that had gone to trial. It had eleven times as many files still awaiting trial. The Law was modified in February 1942 to reduce the number of cases and, in April 1945, the regime declared that the Tribunal had done its job. No more new cases were opened, but 42,000 were still pending. Eventually, in 1966, a general pardon was announced for offences defined as coming under the jurisdiction of the Tribunal.94

  Systematic persecution would continue in virtually every aspect of daily life well into the 1950s. The mass of the Republican population would suffer from grinding poverty, with families deprived of their menfolk, women forced into prostitution, labouring men forced to take work at miserable wages, schoolteachers deprived of their jobs and a rationing system which intensified social division. The worst hit was the prison population. As early as 15 August 1936, Mola had told his secretary, José María Iribarren, ‘prison must be a place of atonement’.95 Two and a half years later, the decision of th
e regime to ignore the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war ensured that the prisons and camps which held hundreds of thousands of Republicans would become what one of them called ‘cemeteries for the living’.96 In the north of Lugo, the provincial prison quickly became so full that is was necessary to improvise another. This provisional jail was set up in a decrepit and run-down old convent, known as the Prisión Habilitada de Alfoz. It held more than five hundred prisoners, the majority peasants. It would not have been difficult to escape, but they never tried. Weakened by hunger, their spirits broken, they would not have escaped, in the view of one of them, even if the gates had been left open. After all, outside the walls, all of Spain had been converted into a gigantic prison.97

  Provincial prisons held between ten and fifteen times more inmates than they had been built for. Temporary prisons were established in converted colleges and schools, convents, hospitals and military barracks. Confusingly, some, such as the charity hospital in the Horta district of Barcelona, were denominated concentration camps. The regime used the term ‘concentration camp’ in a confused and chaotic manner when referring to detention or classification centres in improvised premises often in old buildings spread over a wide area.98 These additional premises barely reduced the problem of overcrowding, the scale of which can be deduced from the fact that many detainees were held for more than a year before their first interrogation. On 6 May 1940, Colonel Máximo Cuervo Radigales, the Director General of Prisons, sent a report to Franco complaining about the excessive number of prisoners. It stated that, in round numbers, in addition to those awaiting trial, 103,000 prisoners had already been tried and sentenced, and 40,000 of them had faced trial since 1 April 1939. He estimated that, at the current rate of trials and sentencing, it would take at least three years to deal with the backlog and that only if no new arrests were made. He went on to lament that there were not enough judges from the Military Legal Corps to cope and that the people recruited were not of the required quality.99

  Franco’s rhetoric of the need for the defeated to seek redemption through sacrifice provided a clear link between the repression and the capital accumulation that made possible the economic boom of the 1960s. The destruction of trade unions and the repression of the working class led to starvation wages. This permitted banks, industry and the landholding classes to record spectacular increases in profits. There can be few doubts about the extent to which this was a deliberate policy approved by Franco. This was most starkly obvious in terms of the exploitation of captured Republican soldiers. At first, they were herded into rapidly constructed ‘camps’ such as those at Castuera in Badajoz, Nanclares de la Oca in Álava or Miranda de Ebro in Burgos. After a crude process of classification aimed at identifying officers and political commissars, who were shot, others were deemed to be usable in the Francoist ranks or, as was the case with a huge number, left to wait until their cases could be clarified.100 Those deemed suitable for recycling had to redo their military service and were usually sent to work on fortifications, or to punishment or work battalions known as penal columns.101

  The human cost of forced labour, the deaths and the suffering of the workers and their families were matched by the fortunes made by the private companies and the public enterprises that exploited them. The penal columns provided labour for mines, railway building and the reconstruction of the so-called ‘devastated regions’. Stone walls were erected around coal mines in Asturias, the Basque Country and León so that prisoners could be used to dig coal. Many would die from silicosis. More died in the mercury mines of Almadén because of the dangerous conditions. Before the war, no one was permitted to work for more than three hours on two days per week; now, they were forced to work for four and a half hours on three days. In the pyrites mines of Tharsis and Rio Tinto in Huelva, productivity was greater than before 1936 with several thousand fewer workers.102

  The Militarized Penal Colonies Service was set up on 8 September 1939 for long-term public-works projects such as the hydraulic schemes along the rivers Guadiana, Tagus, Guadalquivir and Jarama. The largest such project was the Canal del Bajo Guadalquivir, dug out over 110 miles and twenty years, a huge irrigation venture in the interests of the same landowners who had backed the military coup. Begun in January 1940, it soon involved five thousand prisoners, among them Republican engineers, architects, doctors and accountants as well as carpenters, electricians, plumbers and builders’ labourers.103 Two thousand prisoners were used building mountain roads in the Pyrenees in Navarre. Many more were used on irrigation channels, dams and reservoirs.104 The great public works could be presented as a programme of retribution that both perpetuated and honoured the sacrifice made by the martyrs in the struggle against Republican depravity.

  The most extreme example of the exploitation of Republican prisoners was Franco’s personal caprice, the gigantic basilica and towering cross of the Valle de los Caídos. Twenty thousand were employed, and several were killed or badly injured, in the construction of this mausoleum for the Caudillo, a monument to his victory which was intended, in his own words, ‘to have the grandeur of the monuments of old, which defy time and forgetfulness’.105

  The use of prisoners as slave labour was a way of making them pay the costs of their own incarceration and of rebuilding the Spain destroyed by the war. The conditions in the camps and prisons were unsustainable. During the terrible winter of 1940–1, many prisoners died of hunger and the intense cold. Many also died from tuberculosis and typhoid especially during the epidemic in the spring of 1941. Indeed, more died from disease in prison than from execution. In the prison of Córdoba alone, 502 died in 1941.106 In addition to the use of prisoners as slave labour, there was a variation, given a theological veneer by the Jesuit Father José Agustín Pérez del Pulgar, known as ‘the redemption of sentences through work’. This enabled prisoners to shorten their sentences and, at the same time, earn some money for their families. It raised substantial funds for the regime.107 In October 1938, the Board of Trustees for the Central Trust (Patronato) for the Redemption of Sentences through Work had been established. The work was regarded as reparation for war damage which was blamed on the prisoners, despite being largely caused by rebel artillery and air raids. Indeed, the National Service for the Reconstruction of Devastated Regions established by Serrano Suñer in March 1938 was represented on the Patronato and made full use of the labour pool.108

  The scheme was also necessary because the prison system was on the verge of collapse. In response to an international commission, in 1954 the Francoist Ministry of Justice admitted that there had been more than 270,719 prisoners in 1940. In fact, these figures referred only to those prisoners who had already been sentenced and there were at least another 100,000 awaiting trial. Nor did they refer to those working in ‘militarized penal colonies’. It was hardly surprising that the prisons received constant visits from priests preaching the ideas of Pérez del Pulgar.109 Sometimes the jobs offered were in primitive workshops established in the prisons themselves, producing clothing, furniture and many other kinds of goods, but more often they were for dangerous jobs in mines, digging railway tunnels and other public works for which the wages were scandalously low. Many prisoners accepted the appalling conditions in order to contribute in some small way to the maintenance of their wives and children and in the hope of being transferred to somewhere nearer their families. When the average daily wage for manual labour was 10 pesetas per day, the prisoners were rented out to private companies for 5 or 6. The government took half and the rest theoretically was paid to the prisoners. However, they did not receive all the money that they were due. One peseta was deducted for the prisoner’s exiguous rations, one was placed in a savings account which the prisoner could collect when he was eventually freed and the third, theoretically, was sent to the family. In fact, this latter was distributed, if at all, via the town council where the family lived and often was never handed over. Those under a death sentence were not allowed to participate in the scheme.110

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bsp; In prisons, no newspapers were allowed, even though the only ones existing were those of the totally controlled Falange network, the Press of the Movement. The reason for the prohibition was not to prevent access to already heavily censored news but rather to oblige prisoners to buy the Patronato’s own weekly newssheet, Redención, which was written by imprisoned Republican journalists. The print run of Redención was well over one million copies. A copy cost the same as a commercial newspaper. In theory, no prisoner was obliged to buy it, but visits from family were often conditional on the prisoner being a subscriber to the paper, which placed an intolerable strain on the economies of families already on the verge of starvation.111

  A British musician arrested on suspicion of espionage was told by the wardress who confiscated her belongings: ‘In here, nothing belongs to you except what you’ve eaten, and then not always, as you’re likely to throw up.’112 That woman’s suffering would be relatively mild. The scale of deprivation suffered by the defeated Republican women may be deduced from the fact that, by the third week of April 1939, the women’s prison at Ventas in Madrid, designed for five hundred inmates, had more than 3,500 and would eventually hold nearly 14,000. Cells designed for one prisoner held twelve or more. It was common for women to be arrested in lieu of their missing menfolk. Some of the charges against them were self-evidently absurd, ranging from washing clothes or frying eggs for Republican soldiers to having been a cleaner in a Republican hospital.113 In addition to the horrors of overcrowding, disease and malnutrition, the suffering of women in the prisons had dimensions unknown in the male population. Many of the women arrested were pregnant or had very young children with them. Mothers of children older than three were not allowed to take them into the prison. Often they did not have family to care for them, since they too had been imprisoned, exiled or executed. These mothers suffered the anguish of knowing that their children were alone on the streets. Older women were forced to watch while their sons were tortured and sometimes murdered.114