The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  After a while (at least in the north), the exposure of corpses to the public gaze was suspended, at the request of General Mola. He declared himself inconvenienced by the bodies on the roadside. Hence-forward, the executions occurred discreetly in the orchards of a remote monastery or among the boulders on some desolate hillside, while in many places, the executions would be conveniently in the cemetery itself.

  Many details of these days remain obscure. Stories were invented for propaganda purposes, sometimes by republican Spaniards, sometimes abroad. Arthur Koestler, then working with the propaganda department of the Comintern in Paris, described how distortions were deliberately written into his book L’Espagne ensanglantée by his superior, the Czech impresario of propaganda, Otto Katz.2 But some of the most damning allegations of atrocities were prepared by the respectable council of lawyers in Madrid. Horrible stories echo down the years; how a schoolmaster of Huesca was beaten almost to death by falangists to make him confess knowledge of ‘revolutionary plots’; to try and commit suicide, he opened a vein with his teeth.3 In Navarre, and Alava, Basque nationalists were shot without confessors. One man was apparently told by certain requetés to extend his arms in the form of a cross and to cry ‘Viva Christ the King!’ while his limbs were amputated. His wife, forced to watch, went mad as he was finally bayoneted to death.4 A few priests who attempted to intervene were shot also.1 Whether or no these particular atrocities occurred quite as has been alleged, there need be no doubt that many such events did happen up and down nationalist Spain. They even happened in places such as Córdoba and Granada, where the rebellion had been almost immediately successful.2

  As for the authors of these atrocities, most of them were members of the army or the old parties of the right, or merely civil servants or officers of the civil guard. Of course, the falangists shot a lot of people, but they were not in command and if they sometimes were in execution squads, there were also some who, like the Falange’s interim national leader Hedilla, tried (in some cases successfully) to stem the tide by protest or the use of influence.3 The bishop of Pamplona, Marcelino Olaechea, called for an end to blood-letting in Navarre, and there were places where executions were carried out by ‘uncontrollables’ against the express orders of the authorities. Many large cities, however, had blood-thirsty, even sadistic, new police chiefs or military governors who prevented protest: Captain Díaz Criado in Seville, Major Doval (already well-known from Asturias) in Salamanca, Colonel Cascajo and Major Bruno Ibañez in Córdoba, Captain Rojas and Colonel Valdés Guzmán in Granada, the ex-republican Joaquín del Moral in Burgos: their names live in history as master-butchers of their own people. Jesús Muro, the falangist leader in Saragossa, the Falange in Andalusia, and Andrés and Onésimo Redondo, in Valladolid, also had much to answer for.4

  The leaders did not react warmly to pleas for compassion. Mola, when approached to exchange prisoners on one side for those on the other, by the Red Cross representative, Dr Junod, replied: ‘How can you expect us to exchange a Spanish gentleman for a Red dog? If I let the prisoners go, my own people would regard me as a traitor … You have arrived too late, Monsieur, these dogs have already destroyed the most glorious spiritual values of our country.’5 Fear of being thought a traitor was, it is true, an obsession with Mola, but the statement reflected the reality of what many rebels, now that they had burned their boats, believed, their conviction that their opponents were worthless being daily reinforced by the news coming to them from the cities where the rising had been defeated.

  It will always, probably, be difficult to know the number of those killed by the rebels or their supporters in these early days of the war. Records were not kept unless there were courts-martial. It was simply part of the process of cleaning up, the limpieza, ridding Spain of noxious freemasonry, Marxism, and Jewry, a trilogy still menacing to the Spanish Right even though its first leg, so to speak, was relatively harmless and its third had been destroyed in the sixteenth century. Still, a patient examination of mortuary statistics for the whole of Spain may one day tell much, though perhaps not all, of the truth.

  Figures have already been given, though often as matters of propaganda rather than based on evidence. They may have been exaggerated without desire to deceive, because the recollection by, say, a survivor from a prison in which there were innumerable nocturnal executions can easily be magnified by imagination. The best independent study commanding conviction is that done for Granada; 2,137 are listed in the interment records and the cemetery of that city as being shot in Granada between 26 July 1936 and 1 March 1939.1 The greatest number in a single month was August 1936: 572 were killed. The historian may well suppose, therefore, that the likely numbers shot in Granada and its immediate surroundings were about 4,000 and perhaps for the whole province about double that number.2

  Probably what happened in Granada was characteristic of nationalist Spain generally, both at the moment of the rising and afterwards. Granada had, it is true, a high level of political consciousness, and right-wing bitterness was great, because of the by-elections in June, when the Right believed that they had been thwarted. Nevertheless, the hatreds in Granada existed in Seville, Córdoba, Valladolid, Saragossa, Pamplona and in Corunna too, to name only a few of the capital cities won for the rising. For each of these places substantial figures have been suggested for the dead behind the lines: probably 2,000 were shot in the first few weeks in the city of Córdoba,1 about 3,000 in Sevilla,2 5,000 in Saragossa and its surroundings,3 2,000 in Navarre4 and 2,000 in the Canary Islands.5 The killings in Valladolid do not seem to have been investigated but there, in Zamora, Galicia, León and other places in Castille, thousands were certainly killed. The numbers for all Spain must have been in the tens of thousands: possibly 50,000 for the first six months of the war, and perhaps half that again for the subsequent months, taking into account such repression as was carried out in places conquered by the rebels.6

  Among those executed were several officers loyal to the republic. These eventually included six generals and an admiral: Núñez de Prado, director-general of aviation; Batet, general of the 6th Division in Burgos; Generals Salcedo and Caridad Pita, the two generals in Corunna; Romerales, in Melilla; Campins, of Granada (shot by Queipo’s orders, despite an appeal by Franco); and Admiral Azarola, commander of the arsenal at El Ferrol.1 Among others killed were nearly all the deputies of the Popular Front captured in nationalist territory save Joaquín Maurín, who miraculously managed to conceal his identity for some months, until the worst was over.2 Thirty-four Popular Front members of the Cortes were shot in 1936,3 including a quarter (twenty-five) of all socialist deputies. Others killed included Arturo Menéndez, the director of security at the time of Casas Viejas, taken off the train at Calatayud between Saragossa and Madrid; the former rector of the University of Oviedo, Leopoldo Alas Argüelles; the penalist Luis Rufilanches; and the anarchist author of the Saragossa programme, Isaac Puente. But a few isolated instances mean little against the background of the wave of executions which began in July 1936 and continued until 1941 or 1942. A large number of doctors, school-masters and civil governors in the towns captured were among the victims. In Córdoba, nearly the entire republican élite, from deputies to booksellers, were executed in August, September and December, the soldiers responsible disputing as to who had killed most.4

  The most unforgettable of these deaths was that of Federico García Lorca, the greatest Spanish poet of the time. Though never a member of a political party, his brother-in-law was Fernández Montesinos, the socialist mayor of Granada, whose death has just been noted, and Lorca was naturally connected with the whole of the literary Left in Spain. After the victory of the rising in Granada, his home-town (to which he was paying a visit), Lorca took refuge in the house of the Rosales family, friends of his for years, despite their membership in the Falange (José Antonio was also a friend of his). Despite this protection, he was discovered and shot. His arrest was the responsibility of the ex-CEDA deputy for Granada, Ramón Ruiz Alonso
, but the decision to shoot him was taken by the then deranged new civil governor of Granada, José Valdés Guzmán, chief of the local falangist militia, as well as a colonel in the garrison. Lorca’s execution probably did not happen till the middle of August, about the 18th. His body certainly now rests in a remote part of the province of Granada.1

  The legal justification for all these summary executions was the state of war which had been proclaimed on the day of the rising. The government of the republic were assumed to be the rebels, and the nationalists the legitimate power. In the beginning, no form of trial at all was used. A man shot was deemed a man judged. A series of emergency military tribunals were, however, shortly set up, composed of retired officers and conscripted lawyers. The former acquired legal status and the latter military, so both were pleased.2 The paradoxical legal position ‘troubled all who were not blindly sectarian’.3 But the blood had gone to people’s heads, and remained there a long time. A general who would have hesitated a week in 1935 over a single death sentence, in August 1936 was thoughtlessly approving twenty a day. The rebel commanders, from Mola to the youngest fascist in Valladolid, were henceforward linked by a blood bond which was one reason why they would never give in, or contemplate a compromise. The shootings went on, of prisoners caught in the battles of the summer—either in a ditch, or in the courtyards of prisons, or at crossroads. Probably more people were being shot in August and September than in July. Over this bloodbath, the rebels rode calmly towards power. Some were made the more insensitive to brutality by their need to approve the death of old friends or relations: Franco, for instance, approved the death sentence on his first cousin Major de la Puente on arriving in Tetuán. Others were made more determined by deaths of comrades, brothers or sons in the republic. Some of the gang leaders were merely youths who enjoyed killing. Some no doubt believed that they had a duty to extirpate the unclean heresies of liberalism, socialism, communism, anarchism and freemasonry; and the longer the war lasted, the more evil those things seemed.

  Revolution, meantime, was sweeping through the towns where the nationalist rising had either been defeated or where it had not occurred. Committees of control were everywhere formed, nominally proportionate to the parties of the Popular Front, together with the anarchists. They reflected in fact the political strengths in the place concerned.1 Everywhere municipal councils vanished. Police and civil guard, even in places where these forces had been loyal to the republic, in the first days of the rebellion, often also disappeared. Sometimes mayors, if left-wing, would become presidents of revolutionary committees, and sometimes the police would reappear as security officials. The committees would seek then to change the society of the town, and its surroundings, in accordance with the views of the strongest party. The first steps, common to all republican Spain, would be the proscription of right-wing parties, along with the requisition of hotels, right-wing newspaper-offices, factories, and houses of the rich. In the latter, the revolutionary parties and unions would find sumptuous new headquarters. Roads would be guarded by patrols of militiamen. Committees would be set up to deal with all departments of life. Republican Spain, as the country had been in the Napoleonic wars or at the end of the First Republic, seemed to constitute less a single state than an agglomeration of republics.

  The revolution began, as the counter-revolution did, with a wave of assassination, destruction, and spoliation. Militia units from the political parties and unions formed themselves into gangs with names resembling those of football teams. There were, for instance, the ‘Lynxes of the Republic’, the ‘Red Lions’, the ‘Furies’, ‘Spartacus’, and ‘Strength and Liberty’. Other gangs took the name of political leaders of the Left, in Spain and abroad. Their passions were directed first against the church. Throughout republican Spain, but particularly in Andalusia, Aragon, Madrid and Catalonia, churches and convents were indiscriminately burned and despoiled. Practically nowhere had the church taken part in the rising. Nearly all the stories of firing by rebels from church towers were untrue,2 though perhaps, sometimes, priests had permitted monarchists to store arms in their quiet vestries. The church was attacked because of the way that religion had become the critical question of politics since 1931, because of the supposed subordination of priests to the upper classes, and because of the provocative wealth of many churches, and of the old suspicion about the secretiveness of orders and nunneries. There was some ‘provocation’ after the Rising, though that might be expected. For instance, the CNT-FAI information bulletin in Barcelona reported on 25 July: ‘In San Pablo Hospital on Saturday, a priest entered into a heated argument with a doctor, pulled out a revolver and discharged his whole magazine, not at the doctor, but at the wounded around him. Bystanders were so infuriated that they picked out four of the most priestly and fascist of the brethren and shot them out of hand.’ Destruction, rather than loot, was the aim. Federica Montseny, the anarchist, was proudly handed a burned thousand-peseta note.1 An anarchist in Madrid was heard to upbraid a boy for stealing a chair, rather than breaking it.2 Certain churches and convents in central positions in Madrid, it is true, were saved from attack by the government. But in Barcelona, only the cathedral and the monastery of Pedralbes were protected. The greatest works of art, however, were preserved, the Generalidad mobilizing its guardians to save art collections and libraries. Although many minor treasures were lost, the only disastrous act of vandalism was the burning of ten thousand volumes of the library of the cathedral of Cuenca, including the celebrated Catecismo de Indias. Goya’s alleged earliest known paintings on the wooden door of a reliquary cabinet in the parish church of Fuendetodos, his birthplace, were also destroyed. In Vich, the fire which destroyed the cathedral was prevented from spreading to the museum and the bishop’s palace. The cathedrals of Gerona and Tarragona, and also the monasteries of Montserrat, Poblet, and Santa Creus, remained intact. Burning of churches was usually watched with unconcern, rather than with excitement. But the breaking of images and of sacred objects, or the wearing by militiamen of ecclesiastical robes, was often greeted with laughter. Thereafter the churches, whether gutted or still usable as a store or refuge, were as firmly closed in republican Spain as were right-wing political party offices.1

  These attacks were accompanied by a colossal onslaught on the lives of members of the church and of the bourgeoisie. The nationalists after the war have named a figure of about 55,000 for all lay persons reputed murdered or executed in republican Spain during the war.2 This calculation, large as it is, compares favourably with accusations of three or four hundred thousand made during the course of the war.3 6,832 are believed to have been religious persons: 12 bishops, 283 nuns, 4,184 priests, and 2,365 monks.4 The figure for murdered priests can thus be compared well with Paul Claudel’s glorification in his poem ‘Aux Martyrs Espagnols’:5

  On nous met le ciel et l’enfer dans la main et nous avons

  quarante secondes pour choisir.

  Quarante secondes, c’est trop! Sœur Espagne, sainte

  Espagne, tu as choisi!

  Onze évêques, seize mille prêtres massacrés et pas une

  apostasie!

  Ah! Puisse-je comme toi un jour à voix haute témoigner

  dans la splendeur de midi!

  But such a comparison is invidious: the figures, like those of the nationalist fury, are overwhelming. Many of these crimes were accompanied by a frivolous, sadistic cruelty. The parish priest of Torrijos, Liberio González Nonvela, for example, apparently told the militiamen who took him prisoner, ‘I want to suffer for Christ’. ‘Oh do you,’ they answered. ‘Then you shall die as Christ did.’ They stripped him and scourged him mercilessly. Next, they fastened a beam of wood on their victim’s back, gave him vinegar to drink, and crowned him with thorns. ‘Blaspheme and we will forgive you’, said the leader of the militia. ‘It is I who forgive and bless you’, replied the priest. The militiamen discussed how they should kill him. Some wished to nail him to a cross, but in the end they shot him. His last request was t
o die facing his tormentors so that he might die blessing them.1 The bishop of Jaén was killed with his sister by a militiawoman nicknamed ‘La Pecosa’ (The Freckled One) before a crowd of two thousand tumultuous people near Madrid in a piece of swampy ground known as ‘Uncle Raymond’s pool’. The bishops of Guadix and Almería were forced to wash the deck of the prison ship Astoy Mendi before being murdered near Málaga. The bishop of Ciudad Real was murdered while at work on a history of Toledo. After he was shot, his card index of 1,200 cards was destroyed. A nun was killed because she refused the proposition of marriage offered to her by one of the militiamen who stormed her convent of Nuestra Señora del Amparo in Madrid. The ‘Blood Committee’ of El Pardo, just outside Madrid, became gradually intoxicated on communion wine while its members tried the parish priest. One of the militiamen shaved himself after using the chalice as a washing bowl. There were isolated instances of the violation of nuns, before their execution.2 The corpse of a Jesuit was laid in the Calle María de Molina, Madrid, with a placard stating ‘I am a Jesuit’ fastened about his neck. In Cervera (Lérida), rosary beads were forced into monks’ ears till their eardrums were perforated. An exhibition of the exhumed bodies of nineteen Salesian nuns attracted crowds in Barcelona. Antonio Díaz del Moral of Ciempozuelos (near Madrid) was taken to a corral filled with fighting bulls, where he was gored to unconsciousness. Afterwards, one of his ears was cut off, in imitation of the amputation of the ear of a bull in honour of a matador, following a successful faena. Ears of priests were often passed round. Certain persons were burned, and others buried alive—the latter after being forced to dig their own graves. At Alcázar de San Juan, a young man, distinguished for his piety, had his eyes dug out. In that province, Ciudad Real, the crimes were indeed atrocious. A crucifix was forced down the mouth of a mother of two Jesuits. Hundreds were thrown down a mine shaft. Often, the moment of death would be greeted with applause, as if it were the moment of truth in a corrida. Then there would be shouts of ‘Liberty! Down with fascism’. More than one priest went mad at these events. One Barcelona parish priest wandered crazy for days before being asked for his union card. ‘What need have I of cards, I am the priest of St Just’, he unwisely remarked.1 The onslaught on the church in Catalonia and Aragon astonished many of those who lived there. Few suspected that anti-clericalism was so strong. No churches, after all, had burned there in 1931.