A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  Spanish anarchists were unique among the factions, a group brought into being by a reaction against the Catholic Church, Spain’s general poverty, and some abuses of Christian teachings. They viewed the Catholic Church as largely responsible for Spain’s poverty, repeatedly contrasting the Church’s wealth with the people’s poverty. As a result, anarchists developed a new variation of Catholicism with a commandment to end hereditary wealth and bring down the rich. This belief produced an exceptionally violent strain of anticlericalism. Under the cover of the revolution, anarchists killed 88 percent of the diocesan clergy in Barbastio (Aragon), most of whom were poor themselves and scarcely lived above the level of the peasants they served.93 Anarchist communities excised all forms of wealth from their societies, eschewing communism, capitalism, and the Catholic Church.

  In the fall of 1931, a constitution for the republic was drawn up, and as usual then in Europe, leftists overrode the concerns of the conservatives to make it a document that expressed their political agenda with no compromises. Following the principles of the French Revolution a century and a half earlier, the constitution stated: “Spain is a democratic republic of workers of all classes, organized in a regime of liberty and justice.”94 Renouncing war, obliterating titles of nobility, and invoking breath-taking anticlericalism, the new constitution effectively banned Jesuits and religious education, placing all religions under the control and sanction of the state. Prime Minister Alcalá-Zamora assumed the office of president—a position previously held by the king. Following an attempted coup by Carlists (a party dedicated to restoring the Spanish monarchy) in 1932, the government began to disintegrate as violence escalated both inside and outside the government. Asalto guards executed a number of anarchists under the authorization of the Ley de Fugas (that is, while trying to escape) and new elections were ordered.

  An election the following year saw Alcalá-Zamora’s Radical Republican Party form a new government, even though CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas, or Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right), consisting of five major parties and several tiny ones under Gil Robles, won a plurality. Both Right and Left fragmented, witnessing a rise of the Falange fascist party and the resurgence of disciplined Communists. By 1936, the elections and their runoff, which ended with the Popular Front, consisting of five major parties and several smaller ones, coming out ahead with only 4.1 million votes (out of 8.6 million cast), illustrated the weakness of a democratic system lacking a history of individual liberty and even a skeletal grounding in common law. Alcalá-Zamora was replaced by Manuel Azaña—his prime minister and a non-Socialist anticlericalist who largely failed to carry out any land reform, thereby simultaneously alienating both the Left and the conservatives. CEDA deputies were denied their seats and infiltrated by the growing Spanish Communist Party, while the Popular Front split internally between Largo Caballero and Prieto. Street gangs, anarchists, and anticlericals lined up behind the Communists, provoking a reaction by the Falange. Largo Caballero, who had restrained himself, working nonviolently for years to improve the material circumstances of workers, found himself pulled further left by the Socialist press and street mobs.95 Gil Robles, the fat, nearly bald bankerlike politician who led CEDA, warned that the new Popular Front was thumbing its nose at half the country. His pleas went unheeded. But the leftist parties were split as well, as Prieto and Largo Caballero were unwilling to be in the same room with each other. Radicals wanted strikes, peasant uprisings on farms, armies of militant youths in the streets—all of which terrified the law-abiding, everyday Spaniard, and most of which was inspired and influenced by Communist malefactors. Violence spread; the army was dispatched on leave; and strikers and peasants occupied factories and farms, all under the approving eye of the Asaltos. Fire-eating Communists such as “La Pasionaria” (Dolores Ibárruri) goaded strikers and gangs to kill Catholic priests and sack churches. La Pasionaria, a dramatic sight with her silver-streaked black hair wrapped tightly in a bun and always in her signature black dress and brightly colored scarf, carried her fanaticism into legislative debates, openly threatening other members of the Cortes.96

  At that moment, General Francisco Franco took center stage. A supporter of the Republic, he came to see the demonic spread of communism as consuming Spain. Short, pudgy, and introverted, Franco tackled tasks with a plodding diligence and command of detail that had gained him the respect of his military superiors over the years. For four years he led the Spanish Foreign Legion; his reckless courage while heading an attack against rebellious Moroccan tribes earned him the nickname “Ace of the Legion” and convinced his Moorish troops he was baraka—protected by the divine. Franco had remained aloof from the violence and the 1932 abortive coup, and as late as February 1936 thought military intervention would be unnecessary. On July 17, four days after José Calvo Sotelo, a leader in the National Front (rightist) Party, was murdered at the order of La Pasionaria, the Communists threatened to seize control of the parliament. Franco reluctantly participated in a rebellion led by Spanish officers headed by General José Sanjurjo. Sanjurjo was Spain’s most prestigious general—“the Lion of the Rif”—and at sixty-four years old he commanded great respect throughout the military. But he was in exile in Portugal, separated from the officers and troops in Spanish Morocco, preparing for a flight on July 20 to Burgos and a heroic march on Madrid. Unfortunately, his plane crashed on takeoff from Lisbon, and the leader of Catholic, conservative, nationalist Spain was dead.

  Meanwhile, Franco had taken control of the Canary Islands where he had been placed in command in February 1936, remaining safely out of the line of fire much as Napoléon had in Egypt more than a century before. He returned to Spanish Morocco through Casablanca, arriving after the country had been secured by Nationalist rebels and taking command of the army. From the outset, he expected a long war with the big cities supporting the Popular Front government, and recognized that for the rebellion to succeed, he had to lead it. His expectation of a long war was correct—fighting lasted into 1939, and cost Spain nearly 400,000 killed in action, with another 100,000 executed by the Republicans including 13 Catholic bishops, 5,235 priests, and 2,669 nuns.97 Possibly up to 500,000 more were executed by Nationalists, and tens of thousands of murders, executions, and acts of terror were carried out by rival factions on the Republican side against one another—losses that severely weakened the Republican efforts.98 Another more scholarly estimate leaves the Republican numbers as above, lowers the number of Nationalist executions to 40,000, but adds deaths by malnutrition, disease, and starvation as being not less than 200,000.99 Regardless of the actual number of deaths on both sides, it is difficult to underestimate the total suffering by the Spanish people during the war and afterward.

  Initially, the Republican Army in 1936 consisted of undisciplined militia, made less reliable by anarchist volunteers, who at the outset were unsure they could support a Popular Front Army. The anarchists were led by a woman, Federica Montseny, the first female minister in a Western government, who had made her name campaigning for abortion on demand in Catholic Spain. To fuse together the anarchists and other forces, the Republicans abolished party affiliation of units and instituted a draft. Communists quickly rose above other factions in quality of fighting forces because of their ruthlessness and discipline.100 What saved the Nationalists was the ineffectiveness of the Republicans, who never overcame their factionalism. Troops failed to trust units around them, and every setback was seen as treachery from competitors. Murder and betrayal within the officer corps posed further problems.

  Despite Spain’s relatively small size, its Civil War stood third in line behind the Taiping Rebellion in China and the Russian Civil War in brutality and hardship on the native civilian population. One of the most outstanding features of this conflict was that the rebels were fully mixed in with loyalists (Republicans) at the start of the conflict, and a great many people, both military and civilian, lost their lives simply by being in the wrong place (the minority) wh
en war broke out. There was little opportunity for a conservative Catholic to flee his home and seek safety in a Nationalist-held area at the outset; conversely, if an individual was a known Republican in an area where Nationalist troops were able to establish themselves, arrest and probable death was almost certain to follow. Catholic priests, monks, and nuns were hounded and killed in the most unspeakable fashion, and on the second day of the uprising, sixty churches were burned to the ground in Madrid alone. The Civil Guard almost invariably supported the Nationalists, while the Asaltos allied with the Republic, but groups of either caught unawares were slaughtered by their opponents without mercy.

  As battle lines ebbed and flowed, no one could establish order throughout much of Spain. Mob rule often reigned as wealthy landowners, businessmen, and professionals fled for their lives. An exceptionally high number of Nationalist officers, particularly generals and colonels, died one way or another. General Sanjurjo became the first; soon the war also claimed notables such as Generals Emilio Mola, Manuel Goded, Álvaro Fernández Burriel, Joaquín Fanjul, and Miguel García de la Herrán. In Catalonia the anarchists seized power; their administration in Barcelona was chaotic and incompetent beyond belief and marked the only time in Western history when anarchists controlled a substantial governmental entity. It produced a dismal failure. Skill in bombing a police station or stock exchange did not translate into administrative aptitude.

  No one remained safe from the chaos and murder. Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, watching Falangists march past his university building in Salamanca in 1936, observed:

  The truth is that we are on the verge of an international war on our national territory. What a sad thing it would be if, in place of a barbaric Bolshevik regime, anti-social and inhuman, another regime would appear which was just as barbaric, anti-social, and inhuman. Neither one nor the other [Fascism or Communism], for, at the bottom, they are one and the same.101

  Because Franco emerged as the last dictator standing, it is easy to ignore his competitors or dismiss the level of opposition he overcame. In fact, although he was widely respected by the Spanish Foreign Legion and throughout Spanish Morocco, he stood fourth in line among the leaders of the Nationalist revolt, after General Emilio Mola, who commanded the rebellion within Spain from his headquarters at Burgos; General Sanjurjo; and Manuel Goded. However, Sanjurjo was killed taking off from Portugal, and Goded, the former chief of the General Staff, was captured at the rebellion’s onset and later executed for his attempted revolt in Barcelona. Mola’s situation rapidly became desperate although he seized the mountain passes leading to Madrid from Navarre in the north. His Carlist volunteers ran out of ammunition, and he was forced to send them a message: “Not one shot more. I have only twenty-six thousand cartridges for the whole northern army.”102 His forces had few tanks, and the few planes fit to fly were still under Republican control. Franco, isolated in Morocco and without transportation to send supplies to Spain, could not help him. Republican forces moved on Seville and the army garrison at Cádiz, and Republican warships controlled the Strait of Gibraltar. Disaster and failure threatened, but Franco rapidly found the solution to his problem—the Germans.

  In June, Johannes Bernhardt, an agent of a German export firm in Morocco, had offered to furnish transport planes on credit to assist the revolt. Sanjurjo had rejected the proposal, but Bernhardt had flown back to Berlin, obtained Göring’s assistance, and returned with a letter of greeting to Franco from Hitler. A Lufthansa plane was detached from service and ordered to stand by in Morocco for Franco’s use. On July 21, facing utter ruin, Franco sent two of his staff officers to Berlin with bank drafts on London banks. Hitler immediately sent thirty transport planes to Spanish Morocco, and Franco enthusiastically radioed Mola to hang on, reinforced the small detachment holding Seville, drove the Republicans out of Cádiz, and sent arms and ammunition to Mola.

  Suddenly sensing in Franco they had found a horse they could back, others provided support. Italy sent troops and assistance, Portugal sent supplies. This allowed Franco’s Moroccan army to head north to attack Madrid. Mola readily placed himself under Franco’s authority, not least because Franco controlled the foreign cash and matériel, and on September 30, Franco was named “Chief of the Government of the Spanish State” and assumed all the powers of the new state, in reality holding dictatorial power. He also brought with him the well-trained Foreign Legion and his Moorish soldiers of the African Army, who tipped the balance in favor of Nationalist troops every time they were employed—and came to be the target of Republican propaganda.

  The actual fighting was always brutal and ugly, with heavy casualties on both sides. But when Britain and France signed a Non-Intervention Agreement in August 1936, a Nationalist victory was essentially secured. Although Communist propaganda of “republicans” and “loyalists” fighting against “Fascists” convinced many in Britain, France, and the United States that the angels were on the Republican side, reality was substantially different. Franco’s regime became a typical and somewhat benign dictatorship of the type so often formed in Europe. Responding to the propaganda, however, a unit of volunteers called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was formed in the United States to fight with the Communists. Certainly the name would have been an affront to Lincoln, for neither side stood for individual liberty. The Soviet Union sent planes, pilots, tanks, troops, and supplies for the Republican side, taking as a fee for its efforts the entire Spanish gold reserve, which they had been storing for “safekeeping” since 1936 (nicknamed the “Moscow gold”). Soviet aid and the arrival of the International Brigades probably saved Madrid from the Nationalists in 1936, and certainly gave the Republicans a new lease on life. Germany contributed supplies to Franco and, most famously, the Condor Legion that performed well against the Soviet aircraft, and tank units under Wilhelm von Thoma, who would later command the Afrika Korps. The Condor Legion undertook the first terror bombing of an urban area, the town of Guernica, which foreshadowed the use of air power to a high degree in World War II. But Italy, not Germany, provided the most foreign manpower, 50,000 troops, while France later allowed Soviet and Comintern aid to flow across its borders in 1938. Nevertheless, Germany provided the decisive edge twice: in the opening days by providing transport for Franco’s army and supplies to reach mainland Spain, and later in 1938, by sending aid (in return for iron ore mining rights) that allowed Franco to decisively defeat Republican armies in the Catalan campaign and drive the northern Republican forces into internment in France. In short, foreign intervention was critical at a number of points in the war, and to the benefit of both sides.

  Hitler’s actions in the Spanish Civil War suggest he may have actively sought to prolong it to distract the West from Germany’s military preparations and other diplomatic efforts. For example, German officers misdirected the attacks at the battle for Madrid, and from that point forward until the Catalan campaign at the end of 1938, German aid came primarily to keep the Nationalists from being defeated, not to help them win when they were on the offensive. It would later appear that Franco was aware of this policy, and he paid Hitler back by not allowing the Nazis to move through Spain to attack Gibraltar after 1939 or significantly assisting Germany on the Eastern Front.

  On March 31, 1939, the Nationalists finally took the remaining Republican cities of Almería, Murcia, and Cartagena, and the following day, the United States recognized Franco’s government, leaving the Soviet Union as the only major power not to recognize the Nationalist regime. By summer, all foreign troops had been sent home. In Germany, these returning veterans would figure prominently in World War II, whereas most Soviet returnees were shot or demoted in Stalin’s purges because they had been contaminated by their association with the West. Khrushchev publicly regretted their deaths in his speech denouncing Stalin in 1956.103

  The Serpent Unwinding

  While the rest of Europe was concentrated on Spain’s ongoing civil war, Germany marched from the easy Anschluss with Austria in March 1938 to
demands for the Sudetenland (Southland) in the newly created state of Czechoslovakia. About 3,200,000 ethnic Germans lived in Czechoslovakia, along with 7,450,000 Czechs, 2,300,000 Slovaks, 720,000 Hungarians, 560,000 Ukrainians, and 100,000 Poles in a pot that refused to melt. A majority of the Sudetenland population was ethnically German, so Hitler focused on this German-speaking population, regurgitating Wilson’s “self-determination” phrase to argue in favor of taking the territory. Again, he was aided and abetted by the democracies. Chamberlain told his cabinet that if Hitler sought a popular vote there, “it would be difficult for the democratic countries to go to war,” despite the fact that Britain and France had already moved millions of people after World War I without a single ballot cast.104

  Through it all, many in the British government—particularly Chamberlain—fretted endlessly about treating Hitler as a legitimate and reasonable head of state, convinced that the right concoction of rewards and reason would bring him into the family of nations. Indeed, they continued to appease Hitler despite the lack of credible evidence that Germany could fight, let alone win, a war. Just before the democracies buckled to Hitler’s demands, the Czechs were getting the Sudetenland under control and away from Nazi agitators and had mobilized their army to handle any German attack.

  Significantly, the Czech army in April 1938 was larger and better equipped than the Wehrmacht, comprising forty-six divisions, of which twenty-five were field divisions, twenty-one infantry, and four mechanized cavalry, the remainder being static and service troops manning the excellent Czech fortifications facing Germany. German forces that occupied Austria during the Anschluss in March had embarrassed themselves; many tanks and motor transport vehicles had broken down and troop mobilization was poor, leaving the Czechs unimpressed. In April the General Staff could count on only twenty-four infantry, one tank, one cavalry, and one mountain division. Although the balance of power was changing rapidly, by autumn the best the Wehrmacht could hope to deploy was fifty-five divisions of varied strength, equipment, and training.105 General Ludwig Beck, head of the German General Staff, concluded a war with Czechoslovakia spelled the end of Germany if Britain and France entered the conflict. He warned Hitler and wrote a memo for distribution throughout the General Staff: “In order to safeguard our position before history and to keep the repute of the Supreme Command of the Army unstained, I hereby place on record that I have refused to approve any warlike adventures of the National Socialists.”106 Beck resigned when he saw it was impossible to change Hitler’s policy, and later perished in the abortive July 1944 plot against Hitler.