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

by Paul Preston

  Rape was a frequent occurrence during interrogation in police stations. Transfer to prisons and concentration camps was no guarantee of safety. At night, Falangists took young women away and raped them. Sometimes their breasts were branded with the Falangist symbol of the yoke and arrows. Many were impregnated by their captors. The executions of women sentenced to death who were pregnant were sometimes delayed until they had given birth and their children taken for adoption.115 Nevertheless, in the prison in Zamora, numerous pregnant women and nursing mothers were shot. On 11 October 1936, Amparo Barayón, the wife of Ramón J. Sender, was told that ‘reds had no right to feed children’ and her eight-month-old baby daughter Andrea was ripped from her arms and placed in a Catholic orphanage. Utterly distraught, Amparo was shot the next day.116 From 1937 to 1941, the Franciscan Capuchin friar Gumersindo de Estella served as a chaplain at the prison of Torrero in Zaragoza. In September 1937, he recalled the execution of three young women whose crime had been an attempt to reach the Republican zone. He was appalled not least by their anguished cries when their one-year-old daughters had been dragged from them by the guards. On another occasion in May 1938, he appealed for the execution of a twenty-one-year-old to be halted on the grounds that she was pregnant. The judge replied indignantly: ‘Wait seven months for every woman who was to be executed? You know that is just not possible!’117

  Savage beatings were administered, often to pregnant women, but torture was often more refined. Among the tortures were electric shocks delivered to nipples, genitals and ears. In addition to the pain and humiliation of all of these tortures, the application of electric shocks to the ears caused profound mental problems and headaches that lasted for years afterwards. Many young girls among those arrested were submitted to beatings, torture and sexual harassment. Women in their seventies and eighties were also subject to mistreatment. The mother of Juana Doña was unable to use her hands for two months because of electrical torture.118 Women were sentenced to death and imprisonment for the crime of military rebellion, yet they were given the status not of political prisoners but of common criminals.119

  On 5 August 1939 in Madrid, fifty-six prisoners were executed including a fourteen-year-old boy and thirteen women, seven of whom were under the age of twenty-one. They came to be known as the Trece Rosas, thirteen roses whose fate symbolized the cruelty of the Franco regime. They were members of the United Socialist Youth, the JSU. Their capture in the spring of 1939 had been facilitated because the Casado Junta had seized JSU membership lists then left them for the Francoists. The excuse for the executions was a non-existent plot to murder Franco. In reality, it was an act of revenge for the murder on 27 July of a Civil Guard, Major Isaac Gabaldón, his eighteen-year-old daughter and their driver by members of the resistance. Unknown to the car-hijackers who killed him, Gabaldón was head of the Freemasonry and Communism Archive gathered by Marcelino de Ulibarri. Those shot on 5 August were already in prison when the murders took place. The consequent international scandal saw the death penalties imposed on three women in a later trial commuted to lengthy prison sentences, although twenty-seven men were executed on 9 September.120

  Another victim of the Casado coup was a woman who had just given birth when her husband, arrested and left in prison by Casado’s forces, was condemned to death. Evicted from her home, she lived on the streets with her baby daughter, sleeping in doorways and on the steps of the Metro. When a lawyer told her that her husband’s sentence could be commuted if she paid a bribe of 10,000 pesetas, she became a thief and ended up in prison with her baby daughter.121 An example of the brutality inflicted on women was the case of a mother who, when the police came to arrest her, called to her son who was crying. On hearing that his name was Lenin, they picked him up by the legs and killed him by smashing his head against a wall.122

  Once in jail, the conditions for nursing mothers were horrendous. With no facilities to wash themselves or their children’s clothes, they were forced to live in filth and fight a daily battle against rats. In the prison of Ventas, the water to the bathrooms and toilets was cut off. For every two hundred women, there was only one toilet which had to be flushed with dirty water that had been used for cleaning the floors and was then collected in big tins. Paz Azati, a Communist from Valencia, recounted that ‘every day on the floor of the Ventas infirmary you would see the corpses of fifteen to twenty children dead from meningitis’. The Communist Julia Manzanal had just given birth to a daughter when she was arrested in Madrid in the spring of 1939. Manzanal’s death sentence was commuted to thirty years in prison. Ten months later, her baby died of meningitis.123 While some women suffered the agony of seeing their babies die, others had them torn from their arms.124

  After the war, the sequestration of the children of Republican prisoners, not just of those executed, became systematic. Twelve thousand children were taken to religious or state institutions where they were brainwashed. After one woman’s husband was shot in front of her and her small daughter, she was arrested and the child taken to a Catholic orphanage. The mother wrote regularly until one day her daughter replied saying, ‘Don’t write to me any more about papa. I know he was a criminal. I am taking the veil.’ Many children were taken from their mothers, put into religious orphanages and brainwashed into denouncing their fathers as assassins. Amparo Barayón’s daughter Andrea became a nun. Pilar Fidalgo noted that orphans were obliged ‘to sing the songs of the murderers of their father; to wear the uniform of those who have executed him, and to curse the dead and to blaspheme his memory.’125 In the book signed by the chaplain of the prison in Barcelona, Father Martín Torrent (in reality ghost-written by a near-destitute Luis Lucia), great pride is expressed in the fact that seven thousand indigent children of prisoners found starving on the streets had been taken to religious orphanages. Father Torrent expressed even greater satisfaction that some of them had decided to join the priesthood.126

  Children were stolen from their mothers in several prisons, most notoriously in Saturrarán in the Basque Country and in the prison for nursing mothers in Madrid. More than one hundred women and over fifty children died of illness in Saturrarán, which was run under the harsh direction of María Aranzazu, known to the prisoners as ‘the white panther’. In Madrid, the brutal regime in the improvised prison for nursing mothers was run by María Topete Fernández, a wealthy woman who had herself been imprisoned in the Republican zone. She assuaged her own resentments in the treatment of the mothers and their children. The principal food they received was a thin gruel containing bugs and maggots. If the children regurgitated it, María Topete made them eat their vomit. Separated from them for much of the daytime and at night, the women lived in constant terror of their children being taken from them. Once the children were three years old they could be removed and many were forcibly seized from their mothers. By 1943, more than 10,000 were in religious orphanages.127 The justification for this policy was provided by the head of the psychiatric services of the rebel army, Major Antonio Vallejo Nágera.

  Obsessed with the need for racial cleanliness, Vallejo had written a book in 1934 arguing in favour of the castration of psychopaths.128 As a member of the army medical corps, he had served in Morocco and spent time in Germany during the First World War visiting prison camps. He also met the German psychiatrists Ernst Kretschmer, Julius Schwalbe and Hans Walter Gruhle, whose work influenced him profoundly. During the Civil War, he was made head of the Psychiatric Services of the rebel army. In August 1938, he requested permission from Franco to set up the Laboratory of Psychological Investigations. Two weeks later, he was authorized to do so. His purpose was to pathologize left-wing ideas. The results of his research gave the delighted military high command ‘scientific’ arguments to justify their views on the sub-human nature of their adversaries and he was promoted to colonel.129

  Vallejo’s quest for the environmental factors that fostered ‘the red gene’ and the links between Marxism and mental deficiency took the form of psychological tests carried
out on prisoners already physically exhausted and mentally anguished. His team consisted of two physicians, a criminologist and two German scientific advisers. His subjects were captured members of the International Brigades in San Pedro de Cardeña and fifty Republican women prisoners in Málaga, thirty of whom were awaiting execution. In the latter case, starting from the premise that they were degenerate and thus prone to Marxist criminality, he explained ‘female revolutionary criminality’ by reference to the animal nature of the female psyche and the ‘marked sadistic nature’ unleashed when political circumstances allowed females to ‘satisfy their latent sexual appetites’.130

  Vallejo’s theories were used to justify the sequestration of Republican children and were gathered in a book entitled The Eugenics of Spanishness and the Regeneration of the Race’.131 More environmental than biological, his eugenic racism postulated that a race was constituted by a series of cultural values. In Spain, these values, the prerequisites of national health, were hierarchical, military and patriotic. Everything that the Republic and the left stood for was inimical to them and therefore had to be eradicated. Obsessed with what he called ‘the transcendent task of the cleansing of our race’, his model was the Inquisition, which had protected Spain from poisonous doctrines in the past. He advocated ‘a modernized Inquisition, with a different focus, other ends, means and organization but an Inquisition nonetheless’.132 The health of the race required that children be separated from their ‘red’ mothers.

  Authorization for the application of his theories was facilitated by his links with both Franco (whose wife Carmen Polo was a friend of Vallejo’s wife) and the Falange.133 He dedicated his book on the psychopathology of war, which incorporated his work on the links between Marxism and mental deficiency, ‘in respectful and admiring homage to the undefeated imperial Caudillo’. Vallejo also had a direct link to the regime organization concerned with war orphans, Auxilio Social, through his friend the psychiatrist Dr Jesús Ercilla Ortega. A close friend of Onésimo Redondo, Ercilla had been one of the founders of the JONS.134 He was a member of the executive committee of Auxilio Social, its medical adviser and the liaison with other groups. After the war, Ercilla was made clinical director of the Psychiatric Clinic of San José in Ciempozuelos, a hospital officially headed by Vallejo Nágera.135 Franco himself was enthusiastic about Auxilio Social’s work with Republican orphans, seeing it as a major contribution to the long-term ‘redemption’ of Spaniards from their leftist errors.136 A key element in the process was the law of 14 December 1941 which legalized the changing of the names of Republican orphans, of the children of prisoners unable to look after them and of babies taken away (often by force) from their mothers immediately after birth in prison.137

  As the Second World progressed, conditions for all prisoners worsened. Already undernourished, they were forced to give blood transfusions for the German Army.138 Perhaps the most shocking example of the malice that underlay the Francoist treatment of the defeated Republicans was the fate of the Spanish exiles captured in France by the Germans. Some had been fighting in the French forces, others were still in French internment camps. Around 10,000 ended up in German camps, something made possible by the acquiescence of Franco’s government when the prisoners were offered by the Germans. Numerous letters were sent in July 1940 from the Spanish Embassy in Paris to the Foreign Ministry asking for instructions regarding the German offer to hand over the prisoners. When no reply came, the German Embassy in Paris wrote to Madrid in August asking for clarification of the Spanish government’s wishes regarding 100,000 Spanish refugees. The only reply that has been found was a list of specific individuals, which led to the extraditions discussed earlier in the chapter. In the absence of other documentation, this alone condemned Republicans to German camps. According to SS Standartenführer August Eigruber, Gauleiter of Oberdonau in Austria, the Germans were told ‘by Franco’ that, as they had fought for ‘a Soviet Spain’, the prisoners were not considered to be Spaniards. This is consistent with Franco’s public declarations about those Republicans regarded as unredeemable criminals. Accordingly, the Spanish prisoners were treated as stateless persons and transferred from the front-line prisoner-of-war camps (Stalags) to concentration camps. Ninety per cent of the ‘Fighters for Red Spain’ (Rotspanienkämpfer) were in Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria.139

  On 20 August 1940, a cattle train left Angoulême. A total of 927 Spanish refugees, 490 of them men, the remainder women and children, were squeezed – forty to fifty per wagon – into twenty wagons each designed for eight horses. They believed that they were being taken to Vichy. They travelled for three days and nights, with room only to stand, without food or water. On 24 August, they reached Mauthausen. The males over the age of thirteen were separated from their families and taken to the extermination camp near by. They were told by the camp commander Franz Ziereis in his ‘welcome speech’, ‘you enter by the door and you will leave by the crematorium chimney’. Three hundred and fifty-seven of the 490 would die in the camp.140 The women and children were then sent to Spain – they had been put on the train because the Germans did not want French civilians seeing the families being separated. There can be no doubt that the French authorities knew all about Mauthausen. In Spain, the returned women were interrogated and those with no one to vouch for them were imprisoned. The children were put in state orphanages even when there were Republican families willing to look after them.141

  It was just the beginning. Spanish Republicans ended up facing the whole gamut of horrors in many different Nazi camps, including Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen in Germany, and Auschwitz and Treblinka in Poland. In Ravensbrück, there were 101 Spanish women who had belonged to the French resistance.142 Mauthausen was an extermination camp where those not murdered on arrival were required to work until they died of exhaustion. From the quarry at Mauthausen, an endless chain of men carried stones weighing between 44 and 88 pounds in backpacks up 186 steep steps.143 About 60 per cent of the Spanish Republicans who died in German camps perished at Mauthausen.144

  Franco’s propagandists presented the executions, the overflowing prisons and camps, the slave-labour battalions and the fate of the exiles as the scrupulous yet compassionate justice of a benevolent Caudillo. In 1964, they launched a highly choreographed, nationwide celebration of the ‘Twenty-Five Years of Peace’ since the end of the war. Every town and village in Spain was bedecked with posters rejoicing in the purging of the atheistic hordes of the left. The celebrations began on 1 April, with a Te Deum in the basilica at the Valle de los Caídos. This, together with an interview given by Franco to ABC, made it clear that the celebrations were not for peace but for victory.145 This was confirmed eight days later when he told the Consejo Nacional that the festivities were a ‘commemoration of the twenty-five years of victory’. That the Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy was still on his mind was made clear when he warned his audience of plots and sectarianism coming from Europe, of ‘secret machinations, subversive action and the power of occult forces’.146 The unspoken message of the elaborate celebrations was that the return on Franco’s investment in terror could not have been more successful.

  Epilogue

  The Reverberations

  In mid-July 1939, Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and the Foreign Minister of Fascist Italy, made an official visit to Spain. When his guides proudly took him to see a work gang of Republican prisoners, he remarked to his own officials: ‘They are not prisoners of war, they are slaves of war.’ On his return to Rome, he described Franco to one of his cronies: ‘That queer fish of a Caudillo, sits there in his Ayete palace, in the midst of his Moorish Guard, surrounded by mountains of files of prisoners condemned to death. With his work schedule, he will see about three a day, because that fellow enjoys his siestas.’1

  There is no evidence that Franco’s sleep was ever interrupted by concern for his victims. Indeed, his regime made considerable efforts to ensure that the same tranquillity w
as enjoyed by all of his collaborators. The consequence is that Spain today is still in the throes of a memory war. There are two sets of historical memory: the homogeneous Francoist one imposed on the country during four decades of dictatorship and the diverse Republican ones, repressed until recent years. The Francoist one was constructed in three stages before, during and after the Civil War. It was based on the need to justify the military coup against the democratically elected government and the planned slaughter that the coup was to entail. During the first stage, before 18 July 1936, the betrayal of the military oath of loyalty to the government was justified by the assertion that Spain had to be saved from the ‘Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy’ which was allegedly responsible for the greatly exaggerated breakdown of law and order. As the war progressed, the second stage saw the tightly controlled rebel media and the Catholic Church collaborate to publicize and exaggerate atrocities in the Republican zone. Thus was created a deep fear of ‘red barbarism’, an untrammelled violence allegedly masterminded by Moscow, with a view to destroying Spain and its Catholic traditions. At the same time, the atrocities committed by the rebels and their Falangist and Carlist allies were encouraged as part of the prior plan of extermination and also by way of sealing a covenant of blood among the perpetrators. Thus those guilty of the atrocities would never contemplate any reconciliation with the defeated for fear of the vengeance of their victims.