by Philipp Blom
The goal of the Legion Condor was not just to help Franco. German military planners were especially interested in assessing the effectiveness of new weaponry and strategies. They abandoned the traditional V formation of their fighter planes in favor of paired hunting groups, which would become important in the Battle of Britain; they tried new methods of combined artillery and fighter plane attacks on enemy positions, experimented with tank assaults, and tested the accuracy and destructive force of new bombs such as thousand-pound explosive charges and phosphorus incendiary devices.
The result of two decades? Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, 1937.
One such training run happened on April 26, 1937, when the Legion, supported by planes of the Italian Aviazione Legionaria, attacked the small Basque town of Guernica, ten miles behind the front lines. The town itself, with its ten thousand inhabitants, was of little strategic significance. It was expected that it could be used as a fallback position by retreating Republican units, and the town had a small factory for military equipment as well as an important bridge, but the planes appearing in the sky on this market day did not drop their loads on the factory or the bridge. Instead, they annihilated the town center in wave after wave of attacks.
Commanded by Wolfram von Richthofen, a cousin of the famous World War I flying ace Manfred von Richthofen, the Legion Condor used the raid as a valuable opportunity to try out carpet bombing, a tactic designed to wreak a maximum of havoc and terrorize the civilian population. The exact circumstances and intention of the attack are still being debated, and the evidence is inconclusive. Some historians argue that it is likely that Guernica was chosen simply for its transport links, but in this case it is impossible to understand why the bridge and roads were not bombed. Equally, Guernica’s status as a town symbolic of Basque independence was unlikely to have influenced the decision to bomb it, as von Richthofen apparently learned of its importance only after the bombing. Whatever the precise intentions, the town was annihilated, first by some forty tons of bombs that smashed the buildings, and then by incendiary ordnance that turned the rubble into a sea of flames. After two hours of bombing, Guernica was reduced to bloody, blackened rubble. It is not known how many people died in the attack, with plausible estimates ranging from three hundred to three thousand.
Help from the East
ABANDONED BY THEIR NEIGHBORS—callously in the case of Britain and against his own moral judgment by Blum—the Republican government made a last bid for survival by turning to the Soviet Union, only to find that Moscow, too, was ambivalent about helping its socialist brothers. Stalin knew all too well that the USSR was not ready for war. He was unwilling to risk antagonizing Germany and Italy, and he preferred to wait. Only when the Italian fighter planes crashed in Morocco did he begin to modify his stance. Dangerous as it was to provoke the Third Reich, another fascist state in Europe would undermine Soviet ambitions even more, and ultimately the great mother country of the revolution could not be seen to stand by while proletarian brothers perished in their revolutionary struggle. In September, after carefully orchestrated demonstrations by 150,000 people on Red Square, the first food deliveries were made to the Republican side.
In the end a different consideration pushed Stalin to act in favor of the beleaguered republic. Soviet nonintervention created a power vacuum within the Communist International that could be filled by others, notably by his former archrival Leon Trotsky, who was already living in exile in Mexico and who might use Republican Spain as a personal power base. To maintain the ideological leadership within the communist movement, it was imperative for Stalin to be seen to act in Spain, and to prevent any competing ideological positions from gaining ground. Though he had at first declared that the USSR would not send weapons to Spain, while at the same time infiltrating spies and military personnel into the country, these considerations finally prevailed. The first ship carrying heavy arms, the Komsomol, reached the harbor of Cartagena on October 15, 1936. The rebellion of the generals had finally become a war beginning to affect the entire continent.
Moscow’s slow route to involvement on the Iberian Peninsula had another momentous consequence: the founding of the International Brigades. Recruitment centers run by the Comintern (the Moscow-led Communist International) and other organizations began to enlist volunteers, an initiative that met with considerable enthusiasm from antifascists of all ideological stripes who felt outraged about the lack of an international response and wanted to stop Franco and by extension Hitler and Mussolini.
In Barcelona a first nucleus of an international fighting force had already come into existence, as athletes sympathetic to left-wing ideals who had assembled for the abortive Popular Olympiad joined the Republican fighters in a brigade named after the imprisoned German communist Ernst Thälmann. As recruitment centers in Paris, London, and the Netherlands began to smuggle volunteers into Spain by the truckload, their numbers quickly grew, and by the end of the war some thirty-five thousand foreigners from fifty-three countries had been enlisted for the Republicans.
The International Brigades attracted mainly idealistic young men (women were allowed only as nurses or in other non-combat-related capacities). Most of them were workers from Wales or the north of England, the industrial areas of Germany and France, Italy, and the United States. Many but by no means all were communists, and some were intellectuals seeking to marry their strong convictions with the authentic experience of battle. Among them were George Orwell, who fought close to Barcelona and was wounded in the neck; the German communist and former Reichstag member Hans Beimler; and the Croatian communist Josip Broz, who was later to become famous as Marshal Tito. Another fighter on the Republican side was one Fritz Leissner, who after the Second World War would become head of the Stasi under his real name, Erich Mielke.
For fighters and civilians on the Republican side, the International Brigades provided not only much-needed military support but also a huge morale boost. There were spontaneous celebrations on the streets of Barcelona when the first columns of volunteers entered the city. In Madrid, the practically untrained and woefully underequipped young idealists were greeted like heroes, as a British journalist reported:
The few people who were about lined the roadway, shouting almost hysterically, “¡Salud! ¡Salud!,” holding up their fists in salute, or clapping vigorously. An old woman with tears streaming down her face, returning from a long wait in a queue, held up a baby girl, who saluted with her tiny fist. . . . The crowd took them for Russians. The barman turned to me saying “the Rusos have come, the Rusos have come.” But when I heard a clipped Prussian voice shout an order in German, followed by other shouts in French and Italian, I knew they were not Russians. The International Column of Anti-Fascists had arrived in Madrid. The boost to the morale of the Madrileños was incalculable.14
Writing About the War
A TASTE FOR ADVENTURE and the chance of a great story also brought journalists to Spain, most of whom had never before worked as war correspondents and who were attracted by the human drama of the conflict. Ernest Hemingway made a name for himself as a daredevil reporter not averse to picking up a gun himself. The German socialist Herbert Frahm covered the conflict for the newspaper in his place of exile, Norway, where he was already working under his operational name Willy Brandt, under which he would become German chancellor in 1969.
The English poet Stephen Spender was in Spain to observe and report on the war, as was the American writer and activist Langston Hughes, who wrote for the Baltimore Afro-American. The Austro-Hungarian novelist Arthur Koestler even used his journalistic assignment from the London News Chronicle as cover for a mission to spy on Franco’s headquarters. He managed to escape after being recognized, but he would soon return to Spain, only to be captured by Nationalist soldiers and condemned to death. Only an exchange for a high-profile hostage saved his life after his cellmates had already been executed.
As with the Dust Bowl catastrophe in the United States, images proved a crucial factor in infl
uencing public opinion. In 1937, the photographer Robert Capa published the image of a Republican soldier at the very moment of his death, falling to the ground as he was hit by a bullet. The photograph went around the world and became an emblem of Republican and pacifist sympathies. As was discovered later, after decades of controversy, the history of this iconic picture was more complicated than it appeared, and it now seems certain that nothing was quite as it seemed. Painstaking research has identified the spot at which the photo was made and proven conclusively that the soldier depicted was nowhere near the front when it was taken and was not dying, but probably simply lost his footing while running down a hill during a training exercise.
The truth behind Capa’s famous image, however, was even more convoluted. It was taken not by Capa himself but by his partner Gerda Taro, who was in Spain with him on an assignment for French newsmagazines. Even “Robert Capa” was an invention that had first seen the light of day in Paris, when the two young people had decided that their actual names, Endre Ernö Friedmann and Gerda Pohorylle, were hindering their professional progress and had invented the “famous American photographer” Robert Capa, under whose name they both sold images to magazines. Their imaginative marketing had paid off, as magazine editors were immensely more willing to buy images from a US star they had never heard of than from a Hungarian Jew or his German Jewish girlfriend. In the end, Friedmann appropriated the alias for himself and Gerda adopted the surname Taro. She would never witness the fame of the photo she had taken, however. On July 25, 1937, she was crushed by a reversing tank and died of her wounds. Capa would later sell the photo under his own name. It became the most famous of his career.
The International Brigades, a conflation of extraordinary talents and immense courage, were powerless to save the fragile Spanish republic, which was now slowly but surely being crushed between the iron jaws of fascism and Soviet communism. Stalin’s commissars and secret agents were hard at work not only to defeat Franco but also to purge the Republican forces of all dissent. The communist Hans Beimler, the commander of the famous Thälmann brigade, criticized the Soviet line in Spain and was shot in December 1936, probably by a comrade who was also a Soviet agent. Many others suffered a similar fate.
The internecine warfare in Barcelona in May 1937 in which communists and Marxists fought against anarchists and Trotskyists was part of this cleansing operation, which was directed by Stalin’s most important operative in Spain, Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov, a professional agent, guerrilla fighter, and killer who had lived in many European countries under several assumed names. It was Orlov who organized the payment for the Soviet deliveries of weapons and supplies by transferring Spain’s entire gold reserves, all 510 tons of it, to Moscow in a major organizational coup, using trucks in a convoy during four successive nights bound for the port of Cartagena and thence to Russia.
Orlov was also entrusted with purging the Spanish left of communist heretics. His main target was the POUM, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, a dominant force in the Republican camp and a communist alternative to the Moscow-controlled Comintern. “In Barcelona,” wrote George Orwell,
there was a particular evil feeling in the air—an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, uncertainty, and veiled hatred. The May fighting had left ineradicable after-effects behind it. With the fall of the Caballero Government the Communists had come definitely into power, the charge of internal order had been handed over to Communist ministers, and no one doubted that they would smash their political rivals as soon as they got a quarter of a chance. Nothing was happening as yet, I myself had not even any mental picture of what was going to happen; and yet there was a perpetual vague sense of danger, a consciousness of some evil thing that was impending. However little you were actually conspiring, the atmosphere forced you to feel like a conspirator. You seemed to spend all your time holding whispered conversations in corners of cafes and wondering whether that person at the next table was a police spy.15
After the May events, the POUM was outlawed and marginalized by the Republican leadership, which was unwilling to risk Soviet support of the war. Its leader, Andreu Nin i Pérez, was arrested on Orlov’s orders and most likely flayed alive in a jail controlled by Soviet sympathizers before being murdered on June 20. “We sent our young unexperienced secret agents as well as our trained inspectors with years of experience into the theatre of war. Spain proved a good training ground for future secret service operations. The Spanish Revolution suffered defeat. Stalin’s men and women, however, were victorious,” wrote the NKVD agent Pavel Souplanov about his participation in the Spanish Civil War.16
Yezovshchina
THE POLITICAL MURDERS and brutal purges of communists and other leftists in Spain who were deemed not totally and unquestionably loyal to the Stalinist party line were only a small mosaic stone in Stalin’s vast panorama of terror in his own country. In a paranoid bid to secure total power he began a season of persecution, torture, and death from which literally nobody was safe.
There had always been waves of political executions in Russia, settling scores between political opponents or simply terrorizing the population for terror’s sake. After the 1922 Kronstadt rebellion, for example, Anna Akhmatova’s husband had been one of the unfortunates who had been rounded up and shot. Whenever anything was seen to go wrong, guilt had to be assigned. Scientific communism and the paradise of workers and peasants had no place for chance, coincidence, and bad luck. Everything that went wrong was bound to be somebody’s responsibility, somebody’s act of sabotage, counterrevolution, and bourgeois wickedness. The enemy within was lurking everywhere—a crucial precept of a revolution that was threatening to solidify into a new order. Only the continued presence of enemies could keep the urgency of revolution alive.
The purges had begun in 1934, after the murder of Sergei Kirov, a protégé of Stalin’s who had begun to stray from the total obedience expected of him. A popular party official in Leningrad and a member of the Politburo, he had dared to challenge Stalin’s decision to arrest all dissenters within the party. What happened next was never fully explained. A mentally disturbed man, Leonid Nikolaev, had been picked up by police close to Kirov’s office. In Nikolaev’s briefcase officers had found a loaded pistol, but they had let the suspect go and even returned his weapon to him. Soon afterward, Kirov’s bodyguards were assigned to other tasks.
Nikolaev was a social misfit who had been expelled from the party. Resentful of the hierarchy, he sought revenge. On December 1, he entered the Smolny Institute, in which Kirov had his office, went up to the third floor without being challenged, and fatally shot Stalin’s old friend and potential rival. He was then immediately apprehended and arrested together with several other men. One of these men, who had helped to subdue the assassin, died several days later, allegedly by accident, having fallen from an NKVD truck.
Stalin personally took it upon himself to interrogate Nikolaev. After the questioning, the mentally disturbed murderer was portrayed as part of a vast conspiracy involving dozens of others as well as foreign diplomats. On December 29 he was tried together with 115 other alleged conspirators. They were all sentenced to death and shot an hour after the trial. Three months later, Nikolaev’s wife was executed as well, and it appears that his mother and other members of his family suffered the same fate.
Kirov’s death was the signal for what was to become known as the Great Purge. During the following four years, and especially in 1936 and 1937, about a million people were arrested and shot by the NKVD. Initially the campaign concentrated on people who had been close to Lenin or supporters of Trotsky, but soon the arrests became random and the accusations absurd. Nothing, not loyalty and lifelong devotion, not hard work or blind faith in the revolution, could save those who stood accused, and accusations grew out of nothing: a foreign-sounding name, a jealous neighbor, a quota for arrests yet to be fulfilled, a rumor, a job done too conspicuously well, an accident at work that could be made to look like sabotage, a name mentioned i
n a letter, the whim of a Party official, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As in Nikolaev’s case, the murder of political opponents and arbitrary victims was used to spread fear, but also to serve propaganda purposes. The accused men and women had to be shown to have been plotting and acting against the revolution. This particularly applied to some of the better-known victims of the purges. In 1936 Stalin had used the witch hunt following the Kirov murder to eliminate two of his main political rivals, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, with whom he had ruled the Soviet Union in a triumvirate after Lenin’s death in 1923. He had already sidelined and humiliated his two rivals, but now he totally destroyed them. In 1934, they were condemned to long prison terms for “moral complicity” in Kirov’s death. Then, after months in secret prisons and countless interrogations, Zinoviev and Kamenev had agreed to admit to the false charges of conspiracy leveled against them in return for avoiding the death penalty.
Stalin’s most useful lieutenant in the secret interrogations of political prisoners was Nikolai Yezhov, the people’s commissioner for internal affairs and director of the notorious secret police, the NKVD. He was a slight man known by ladies as a charmer, by friends as a party animal with a fine baritone voice, by casual acquaintances as a man of impeccable manners, and by prisoners as a cruelly efficient torturer. Yezhov’s first task as chief of the NKVD had been to question and break Genrikh Yagoda, his predecessor in this position, who was suspected by Stalin of harboring sympathies for his revolutionary comrades in arms and of slowing down the investigation of their cases. Yezhov proved an ideal tool in Stalin’s hands. Ruthless, imaginative, and sadistic, he extracted the appropriate confessions from his prisoners, among them Yagoda, who would be tried for spying and corruption in 1938.