We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  The suitcases of documents that he then took to Paris demonstrated a web of Nazi influence in the Spanish media, but provided no specific proof of involvement in the military coup. The material that he discovered was incorporated into the book produced by Otto Katz, with the title The Nazi Conspiracy in Spain. In Paris, Münzenberg persuaded Koestler to write a book on the origins of the Civil War, on the role of Hitler and Mussolini and the atrocities being committed by the rebels. Established in Otto Katz’s own apartment, Koestler wrote fast. His book, complete with horrific photographs, was published in January 1937 as L’Espagne ensanglantée in French and as Menschenopfer Unerhört in German. An abridged version would eventually appear in English as the first part of Spanish Testament. In his autobiography, written when he had become fiercely anti-Communist, he disowned the book as too propagandistic, yet subsequent research has substantiated all of the atrocity stories recounted there.26

  Having finished the book, Koestler was then commissioned by Otto Katz and the Republican news agency, Agence Espagne, to cover the war on the southern front. On 15 January 1937, armed with credentials from the News Chronicle, Koestler, accompanied by Willy Forrest, had gone to Valencia, where they had spent some time with Mikhail Koltsov. Nine days later, Koestler left Valencia en route to Málaga. When the beleagured city was occupied by rebel forces, he remained in the hope of getting a scoop by being able to witness and report on the expected massacre. He had become friendly with a retired English zoologist, Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, whose villa on the outskirts of the city was next to that of Luis Bolín’s uncle, Tomás, whose family he had sheltered. Despite that act of kindness to his uncle, Luis Bolín was determined to arrest Chalmers-Mitchell because on 22 October 1936, The Times had published a letter from him denouncing insurgent atrocities.

  Rebel troops arrived at the house on 9 February accompanied by Bolín. He recognized Koestler and arrested him. So threatening was Bolín’s manner that Koestler believed that he would be shot there and then. He was taken to a place where men were being executed by a gleeful mob of rebel soldiers. He was then held for four days in the prison at Málaga before being transferred to the central prison in Seville, where he was kept in solitary confinement for three months. He owed his life to the fact that the British authorities had intervened to save Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, and this led Bolín to believe that Koestler also enjoyed powerful protection and that his execution would provoke an international incident. Nevertheless, in prison from 13 February to 14 May, Koestler’s nights were punctuated by the sound of prisoners being taken out and shot. Although he was not officially informed of the fact, he had been sentenced to death for espionage. Confined on death row, he counted ninety-five executions before he worked out a technique of sleeping through the crucial hours. On Thursday 15 April 1937, the occupants of the cells on both sides of his were taken and shot after the warder had mistakenly tried to open his door. At one point, he was visited by a delegation of Falangists, who informed him that he would be sentenced to death but could get that sentence reduced to life imprisonment if he made a statement in favour of General Franco. After some hesitation, he had refused.

  Meanwhile, Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell had managed to reach England, where he informed the News Chronicle of Koestler’s plight. The news of his capture was printed by the paper on 15 February. A campaign for his release was set in motion by Koestler’s wife Dorothy. With the assistance of Otto Katz, she managed to arrange a wave of newspaper articles, pleas to the Foreign Office to intervene and letters and telegrams of protest to Franco, some from Conservative MPs and clergymen. Winston Churchill wrote to the Foreign Office on Koestler’s behalf. H. G. Wells sent a cable to Franco pleading for clemency. Katz even organized, fruitlessly as it happened, a trip by the English journalist Shiela Grant Duff to Málaga to intervene on Koestler’s behalf. The British Consul advised her to forget about helping Koestler, pointing out that to raise questions about him would do him no good at all and bring considerable harm to her. Mikhail Koltsov commented to Gustav Regler: ‘We know where he is. We’ve been shaking up the British Labour Party and the Foreign Office. The wires have been burning since yesterday. He’s being looked after. We’re the only people who can do that, you know – stir up the whole world on behalf of a single man. And the same time no one knows that we’re at the back of it. That’s something else only we can do.’ Regarding the international campaign, both Koestler and Regler later reflected on the contradiction that similar campaigns were not mounted in favour of the old Bolsheviks being immolated in the purges in Moscow.27 The Minister of Foreign Affairs in Negrín’s new government, Professor José Giral, took a particular interest in the case and made it possible for Dr Marcel Junod of the International Red Cross finally to arrange an exchange of Koestler for the beautiful wife of the rebel air ace, Captain Carlos Haya. The lady in question was not in prison but merely under surveillance in the Hotel Inglés in Valencia.28

  Six weeks after their triumph at Málaga, the rebels suffered the humiliating defeat of Guadalajara and made every attempt to keep news coverage to a minimum. Aware of what happened to journalists considered to be unfriendly, many correspondents tried to evade the censorship by ensuring that their papers did not use their by-line. After the news arrived of the Italian rout at Guadalajara, the Australian Noel Monks had driven to the French border and telephoned the story, insisting that his name be omitted. Unfortunately, the article appeared under his name. He was arrested in Seville, where Franco happened to be visiting, accompanied by Bolín. In his clipped Oxford English, a furious Bolín threatened Monks: ‘You’ve put your foot in it now, Monks. Evading censorship is equivalent to spying and spies get short shrift in this country.’ With Bolín ranting ‘Shooting is too good for you journalists’, Monks was taken before Franco himself. The paunchy rebel leader, ‘the most unmilitary figure I have ever seen’, glared at Monks with hard eyes and banged his fist on the table while repeating in Spanish that Monks was to be shot. When Bolín announced that he was to be taken before a firing squad, Monks protested: ‘You can’t shoot me. I’m British.’ The remark provoked hoots of laughter from Franco when Bolín translated for him. In the event, Monks was expelled from Nationalist Spain for the sin of mentioning the presence of Italian and German forces and thereby refusing to be ‘a party to Franco’s hoodwinking the world into believing that his revolt against the democratic Government of Spain was an all-Spanish affair, opposed to a gang of Moscow-led thugs’. The deeply Catholic Monks felt relief when he left: ‘My six months in Franco Spain deeply shocked my religious sensibilities. And they were to receive further shocks when I went to Government Spain, but for totally different reasons.’ As he commented sadly when he left Spain for the last time: ‘one thing my assignment in Madrid taught me was that Republican Spain had the greatest cause of all – freedom. I suffered no religious restrictions in Madrid, and went to Mass as I willed.’29

  During the latter stages of the march on Madrid of Franco’s African columns, a press office had been set up at Talavera de la Reina shortly after its occupation on 3 September. The bureau was run by an aristocratic playboy, Pablo Merry del Val, who had been briefly the Paris correspondent of El Debate and was also a member of the Falange. He had been educated at Stonyhurst, the elite Jesuit school in north-west England, while his father had been Ambassador in London. Accordingly, he spoke fluent, aristocratic English. Peter Kemp, one of the few English volunteers for Franco, admired Merry del Val. He described him as still retaining

  the austere manner and appearance of a Sixth Form prefect confronted by a delinquent from the Lower Fourth; he became a very good friend of mine, and I am indebted to him for a great deal of kindness, but I always had the feeling that at any moment he might tell me to bend over and take six of the best.

  Alan Dick, of the Daily Telegraph, met Merry del Val in Salamanca in the summer of 1937 and described him in similar but less benevolent terms:

  He was sleek and black, and very English in manner
and speech. In fact, I was told that he was unpopular in some quarters because he spoke broken Spanish. Not even Spain at war could crack the hard veneer of English public school and university. Outwardly he was the complete Spanish aristocrat. A stiff red Requeté beret – insignia of the Royalists of Navarre – sat like a pancake on his small oiled head. His lean face rarely abandoned its expression of tolerant hauteur. His voice was clipped and precise.

  When he said ‘I think we shall understand one another’, Dick took it as a threat.30

  Millán Astray remained in overall charge of the rebel press and propaganda machinery during the advance on Madrid. However, on 12 October 1936, he had brought the insurgent cause into considerable international disrepute by his behaviour during the celebrations of the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America. He had clashed with the world-famous Rector of the University of Salamanca, the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. His hysterical intervention had provoked from Unamuno words that went around the globe: ‘You will win but you will not convince. You will win because you have more than enough brute force; but you will not convince because to convince means to persuade. And to persuade you need something which you lack: right and reason. It seems to me pointless to ask you to think about Spain’.31 As far as Franco was concerned, Millán Astray had behaved as he should in his confrontation with Unamuno. Indeed, it was Franco himself who had recommended that Millán Astray take on, as his assistant, the deranged sycophant Ernesto Giménez Caballero, self-styled founder of Spanish surrealism, and author of a book admired by the Generalísimo, the extraordinary panegyric of fascist mysticism, Genio de España. Nevertheless, even Franco had to recognize that there was a need for a more tightly run operation than could be provided by Millán Astray and Giménez Caballero.32

  Accordingly, on 24 January 1937, the Oficina de Prensa y Propaganda became the Delegación para Prensa y Propaganda, under the direction of Vicente Gay Forner, a virulently anti-Semitic professor of the University of Valladolid. Gay had contributed enthusiastically pro-Nazi, and virtually unreadable, articles to Informaciones, under the pseudonym Luis de Valencia. Vicente Gay had also received subsidies from Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry for his pro-Nazi writings, including the book La revolución nacional-socialista. He chose as his deputy Ramón Ruiz Alonso, the ex-CEDA deputy for Granada, who has been accused of responsibility for the murder of Federico García Lorca. Vicente Gay’s lack of diplomatic skills and his ideological confusion soon earned him the hostility of most of the key groups in Salamanca. Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law and effectively his political factotum, replaced Gay in April 1937 with the military engineer Major Manuel Arias Paz, on the extraordinary grounds that he had built a radio transmitter in La Coruña. Arias Paz would be no more than a figurehead with the real task of organizing Nationalist propaganda assumed by the monarchist intellectual, Eugenio Vegas Latapié.33

  The daily contact with journalists was left in the hands of Captain Gonzalo Aguilera y Yeltes, who was also a Stonyhurst product. For journalists already sympathetic to the rebels, the clipped Oxford English of these men gave an added credibility to their passing on of atrocity propaganda. Other journalists, especially Americans, tended to be much more sceptical, particularly of Aguilera. He was a deeply reactionary latifundista with lands in Salamanca and Cáceres, who told journalists that all Spain’s problems were the result of the interference with the natural order constituted by the introduction of sewers.34 He had retired from the army in protest at the requirement that officers swear an oath of loyalty to the Republic, taking advantage of the generous voluntary retirement terms of the decrees of 25 and 29 April 1931 promulgated by the newly installed Minister of War, Manuel Azaña.35 On the outbreak of war, Aguilera had come out of retirement and volunteered for the nationalist forces. He had been informally attached to the general staff of General Mola, commander of the Army of the North. Because he spoke fluent English, French and German, he had been given the task of supervising the movements and the production of the foreign press correspondents – sometimes serving as a guide, others as a censor.36 When Mola’s Army of the North finally made contact with Franco’s African columns in early September, Aguilera had moved south to take charge of the press accompanying the columns during the remainder of their march on Toledo and Madrid.37

  Unlike most press officers, who felt responsible for the safety of the journalists assigned to them, Aguilera operated on the principle that, if risks had to be taken to get stories then, so long as they were favourable to the Nationalists, he would help the reporters take them. He regularly took his charges into the firing line and was ‘bombed, machine-gunned and shelled’ with them.38 It was the most frequent complaint of the journalists in the Nationalist zone that they were expected to publish anodyne communiqués while being kept away from hard news. This was more often the case when the Nationalists were doing badly and especially so for journalists regarded as too ‘independent’. Even favoured individuals were subjected to humiliating delays while waiting to be issued with passes for accompanied visits to the front.39 Accordingly, Aguilera was extremely popular with the right-wing journalists who met him because he was prepared to take them dangerously near to the front and would use his influence with the censor to help them get their stories through.40

  A journalist who had enormous personal regard for Aguilera was Sefton Delmer of the Daily Express. Delmer was most welcome in the Nationalist zone since he was reputed to be a personal friend of Hitler. Born and educated in Germany, he spoke the language fluently and had accompanied the Führer on Nazi election campaign tours. Indeed, he had famously joined Hitler when he inspected the smoking ruins of the Reichstag after the February 1933 fire. He made little secret of his admiration for the German leader.41 On reaching Perpignan after leaving the anarchists of Mollet, his editor instructed him to head for Seville. He went to Toulouse, where he linked up with H. R. Knickerbocker, the internationally famous correspondent of the Hearst press, and Louis Delaprée of Paris-Soir, for the first leg of the flight which took them to Burgos. On arrival, Knickerbocker was especially outraged that his celebrity went unrecognized when they were all arrested and their aircraft commandeered. After an interview with General Mola, they were permitted to stay. Delmer discovered that Burgos shared with revolutionary Catalonia the inconvenience of nightly executions:

  Punctually at two o’clock every night I was awakened by volleys of shots. They were the shots fired by Mola’s executions squads who night after night dragged their captives from the crowded prison to carry out the summary death sentences passed by the courts martial during the day. And day after day more prisoners – civilians, not soldiers taken in battle – were being brought in to take the places of those killed the night before.42

  Delmer and the others were permitted to send reports to their papers only after they had pointed out that the more lenient conditions in the Republican zone favoured the enemy. Knickerbocker was deputed to take the reports of all three to Bordeaux for onward transmission. The many atrocities that Delmer witnessed were reported only years later in his memoirs. In his first article for the Daily Express from Burgos, he quoted the rebels’ claims to be freeing Spain from the ‘Red Marxist tyrants’ and, understandably given the scale of censorship, failed to mention any rebel killings. Nevertheless, after six weeks, in September 1936, Aguilera expelled Delmer from Nationalist Spain on the grounds that one of his despatches published information likely to be of use to the enemy and also was ‘calculated to make the Spanish armed forces look ridiculous’. The report in question had recounted an air-raid on Burgos by an aged Republican DC3. Delmer had described how, in the midst of it, a small British plane returning Knickerbocker from France had inadvertently arrived. It had been mistaken for an enemy aircraft, attracted the anti-aircraft fire of the Burgos batteries and still managed to land unscathed. The despatch, Aguilera told him over a drink, ‘not only encourages the Reds to attack Burgos again. But it makes our ack-ack gunners look ineff
icient.’

  Aguilera liked Delmer and so confided in him that he did not give a damn what the reporter said about the artillery since he was a cavalryman himself. He also told him that the real motive behind the incident was that German agents had requested that he be removed because they considered him, not without justification, to be an agent of British Intelligence.43 Expelled by the Nationalists, Sefton Delmer then represented the Daily Express in the Republican zone. Other correspondents who knew him regarded him as fiercely independent and extremely clever but, in the Republican press office, he would be viewed with some suspicion. This was not entirely surprising given that in his memoirs he referred to Republicans throughout as ‘Reds’ and to Aguilera as ‘dear Aggy’. Moreover, he and Aguilera were friends in London after the Spanish Civil War.44

  The fiercely pro-Nationalist Harold Cardozo, of the Daily Mail, was considered something of a leader by other British and American correspondents – they called him ‘the Major’.45 Edmund Taylor thought Cardozo ‘a courageous cool hand and a cheerful travelling companion, apart from politics’.46 However, despite his enthusiasm for, and friendship with, Francoist officers, there was a noticeable tension between Bolín and Cardozo. Sir Percival Phillips thought that Bolín enjoyed bullying and humiliating correspondents in general but had a particular grudge against Cardozo. He claimed that, because the Daily Mail had refused to publish articles submitted by Bolín while he was in London, ‘he’s now treating the Mail men as if they were dirt beneath his feet’. Cardozo made little secret of his opinion that Bolín’s articles had been rejected because they were ‘damned rubbish’. Without mentioning Bolín by name, Cardozo complained that the Nationalist press censorship was rigidly applied even to those journalists, such as himself, who were ‘heart and soul for the movement’. Frustrated by the bureaucratic obstacles imposed even on ‘responsible war correspondents’, he even commented enviously that in Madrid and Valencia, cables ‘were transmitted with a fairly lenient censorship and with a minimum of delay’. Cardozo was not alone. The enthusiastically pro-Nazi Nigel Tangye, of the Daily Mail’s sister paper, the Evening News, despite a close personal relationship with Bolín, soon grew equally exasperated by the contemptuous treatment given to journalists. William F. Stirling, who briefly represented The Times, wrote to London to complain that Luis Bolín regularly hindered his work because he ‘suffers from acute Anglophobia with Times complications’.47