The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain
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Theorists of Extermination
Africanista officers and Civil Guards were the most violent exponents of right-wing hostility towards the Second Republic and its working-class supporters. They received encouragement and justification in the murderous hostility to the left peddled by numerous politicians, journals and newspapers. In particular, several influential individuals spewed out a rhetoric which urged the extermination of the left as a patriotic duty. They insinuated the racial inferiority of their left-wing and liberal enemies through the clichés of the theory of the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy. The presentation at the beginning of 1933 of the draft law prohibiting schools run by religious orders was a useful trigger. On 30 January, at a mass meeting in the Monumental Cinema in Madrid, the Carlist landowner José María Lamamié de Clairac, a parliamentary deputy for Salamanca, denounced the law as a satanic plot by the Freemasons to destroy the Catholic Church.1 The Law was approved on 18 May. On 4 June, Cándido Casanueva, Lamamié’s fellow deputy for Salamanca, responded by telling the Women’s Association for Civic Education: ‘You are duty bound to pour into the hearts of your children a drop of hatred every day against the Law on Religious Orders and its authors. Woe betide you if you don’t!’2 The following day, Gil Robles declared that ‘the Freemasonry that has brought the Law on Religious Orders to Spain is the work of foreigners, just like the sects and the Internationals’.3
The idea of an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Christian world was given a modern spin in Spain by the dissemination from 1932 onwards of one the most influential works of anti-Semitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Published in Russia in 1903 and based on German and French novels of the 1860s, this fantastical concoction purveyed the idea that a secret Jewish government, the Elders of Zion, was plotting the destruction of Christianity and Jewish world domination.4 The first Spanish translation of The Protocols had been published in Leipzig in 1930. Another translation was made available in Barcelona in 1932 by a Jesuit publishing house which then serialized it in one of its magazines. Awareness and approval of The Protocols was extended through the enormously popular work of the Catalan priest Juan Tusquets Terrats (1901–98), author of the best-seller Orígenes de la revolución española. Tusquets was born into a wealthy banking family in Barcelona on 31 March 1901. His father was a descendant of Jewish bankers, a committed Catalan nationalist and a friend of the plutocrat Francesc Cambó. His mother was a member of the fabulously wealthy Milà family, the patrons of Gaudí. His secondary education took place in a Jesuit school, then he studied at the University of Louvain and the Pontifical University in Tarragona, where he wrote his doctorate. He was ordained in 1926 and was soon regarded as one of the brightest hopes of Catalan philosophy. Renowned for his piety and his enormous culture, he became a teacher in the seminary of the Catalan capital, where he was commissioned to write a book on the theosophical movement of the controversial spiritualist Madame Helena Blavatsky. In the wake of its success, he developed an obsessive interest in secret societies.5
Despite, or perhaps because of, his own remote Jewish origins, by the time the Second Republic was established Tusquets’s investigations into secret societies had developed into a fierce anti-Semitism and an even fiercer hatred of Freemasonry. In a further rejection of his family background, he turned violently against Catalan Nationalism and gained great notoriety by falsely accusing the Catalan leader Francesc Macià of being a Freemason.6 Working with another priest, Joaquim Guiu Bonastre, he built up a network of what he called ‘my faithful and intrepid informers’. His ostentatious piety notwithstanding, Tusquets was not above spying or even burglary. One of the principal lodges in Barcelona was in the Carrer d’Avinyó next to a pharmacy. Since Tusquets’s aunt lived behind the pharmacy, he and Father Guiu were able spy on the Freemasons from her flat. On one occasion, they broke into another lodge and started a fire, using the ensuing confusion to steal a series of documents. These ‘researches’ were the basis for the regular, and vehemently anti-Masonic, articles that Tusquets contributed to the Carlist newspaper El Correo Catalán and for his immensely successful book Orígenes de la revolución española. This book was notable both for popularizing the notion that the Republic was the fruit of a Jewish–Masonic conspiracy and for publishing the names of those he considered its most sinister members. He later alleged that, in retaliation for his writings, the Freemasons twice tried to assassinate him. From his account, it seems that they did not try very hard. On the first occasion, he cheated death simply by getting into a taxi. On the second, he claimed, curiously, that he was saved by an escort provided by the anarcho-syndicalist newspaper Solidaridad Obrera. This alleged benevolence on the part of the anarchists was all the more implausible given their own passionate anti-clericalism.7
Tusquets used The Protocols as ‘documentary’ evidence of his essential thesis that the Jews were bent on the destruction of Christian civilization. Their instruments were Freemasons and Socialists who did their dirty work by means of revolution, economic catastrophes, unholy and pornographic propaganda and unlimited liberalism. He condemned the Second Republic as the child of Freemasonry and denounced the President, the piously Catholic Niceto Alcalá Zamora, as both a Jew and a Freemason.8 The message was clear – Spain and the Catholic Church could be saved only by the destruction of Jews, Freemasons and Socialists – in other words, of the entire left of the political spectrum. Orígenes de la revolución española sold massively and also provoked a noisy polemic which gave even greater currency to his ideas. His notion that the Republic was a dictatorship in the hands of ‘Judaic Freemasonry’ was further disseminated through his many articles in El Correo Catalán and a highly successful series of fifteen books (Las Sectas) attacking Freemasonry, communism and Judaism.
The second volume of Las Sectas included a complete translation of The Protocols and also repeated his slurs on Macià. The section entitled ‘their application to Spain’ asserted that the Jewish assault on Spain was visible both in the Republic’s persecution of religion and in the movement for agrarian reform via the redistribution of the great estates.9 Made famous by his writings, in late 1933 Tusquets was invited by the International Anti-Masonic Association to visit the recently established concentration camp at Dachau. He remarked that ‘they did it to show what we had to do in Spain’. Dachau was established as a camp for various groups that the Nazis wished to quarantine: political prisoners (Freemasons, Communists, Socialists and liberal, Catholic and monarchist opponents of the regime) and those that they defined as asocials or deviants (homosexuals, Gypsies, vagrants). Despite his favourable comments at the time, Tusquets would claim more than fifty years later that he had been shocked by what he saw. Certainly the visit did nothing to stem the flow and the intensity of his anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic publications.10
Tusquets would come to have enormous influence within the Spanish right in general and specifically over General Franco, who enthusiastically devoured his anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic diatribes. He produced a bulletin on Freemasonry that was distributed to senior military figures. Franco’s most powerful collaborator, his brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Suñer, would later praise Tusquets’s contribution to ‘the creation of the atmosphere which led to the National uprising’.11 However, Tusquets did more than just develop the ideas that justified violence. He was involved in the military plot against the Republic through his links with Catalan Carlists. He and his crony Joaquim Guiu participated in conspiratorial meetings of the Unión Militar Española, which was powerful in Barcelona. In late May 1936, he would approach the private secretary to the Catalan millionaire Francesc Cambó to request financial assistance for the forthcoming coup d’état. Although Cambó, as a friend of Tusquets’s father, had written and congratulated him on the success of Orígenes de la revolución española, he did not provide finance for the coup.12 From the early 1930s, Tusquets and Joaquim Guiu had assiduously compiled lists of Jews and Freemasons. Their search for the enemy extended to so
cieties of nudists, vegetarians, spiritualists and enthusiasts of Esperanto. When Tusquets finally became a collaborator of Franco in Burgos during the Civil War, his files on alleged Freemasons would provide an important part of the organizational infrastructure of the repression.13
Endorsement of The Protocols also came from the founder of the ultra-right-wing monarchist theoretical journal Acción Española, the Marqués de Quintanar. At an event held in his honour at the Ritz, Quintanar alleged that the disaster of the fall of the monarchy came about because ‘The great worldwide Jewish–Masonic conspiracy injected the autocratic Monarchies with the virus of democracy to defeat them, after turning them into liberal Monarchies.’14 Julián Cortés Cavanillas, also of the Acción Española pressure group, cited The Protocols as proof that through Masonic intermediaries the ‘evil offspring of Israel’, the Jews, controlled the anarchist, Socialist and Communist hordes. That the new Republican–Socialist government contained Freemasons, Socialists and men thought to be Jewish was proof positive that the alliance of Marx and Rothschild had established a bridgehead in Spain.15 Reviewing with total seriousness a French edition of The Protocols as if it were empirical truth, the Marqués de Eliseda implied with a veiled reference to Margarita Nelken that Castilblanco had been masterminded by the Jews.16
Other influential writers in Acción Española were the lay theologian Marcial Solana and Father Aniceto de Castro Albarrán, the senior canon of Salamanca Cathedral. They, and Father Pablo Leon Murciego, produced theological justifications for the violent overthrow of the Republic. They argued that it was a Catholic duty to resist tyranny. Solana used St Aquinas to justify the assertion that the tyrant was any oppressive or unjust government. Since power ultimately rested with God, an anti-clerical constitution clearly rendered the Republic tyrannical.17 In 1932, Castro Albarrán, at the time rector of the Jesuit University of Comillas, had written a book on the right to rebellion. Although it was not published until 1934, an extract was presented in Acción Española which reinforced Solana’s incitements to rebellion and specifically attacked the legalism of El Debate. Castro Albarrán, through his articles and sermons, would become the principal theological apologist of the military rising. He later summed up his views in his 1938 book Guerra santa (Holy War).18 He, Solana and others argued that violence against the Republic was justified because it was a holy rebellion against tyranny, anarchy and Moscow-inspired Godlessness. In 1932, Father Antonio de Pildain Zapiain, deputy for Guipúzcoa and canon of Vitoria Cathedral, declared in the Cortes that Catholic doctrine permitted armed resistance to unjust laws. Similar arguments were central to a controversial book published in 1933 by Father José Cirera y Prat.19
The writings of Castro Albarrán and Cirera horrified more moderate clerics such as Cardinal Eustaquio Ilundain Esteban of Seville and Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer of Tarragona. Vidal was distressed by the arrogance with which Castro Albarrán presented as Catholic doctrine partisan ideas which ran counter to Vatican policy on coexistence with the Republic. He protested to Cardinal Pacelli, the Papal Secretary of State, who ordered that the nihil obstat (seal of ecclesiastical approval) be removed from the book and tried to have it withdrawn from circulation. The book was serialized in the Carlist press, and the newly appointed Primate of All Spain, Archbishop Isidro Gomá of Toledo, expressed his approval to members of Acción Española.20 Gomá’s predecessor in Toledo, Cardinal Pedro Segura y Sáenz, exiled in Rome, was presented by the Carlist newspaper El Siglo Futuro as the archetype of Catholic intransigence to the Republic. He would later be found actively encouraging the Carlist leadership as their armed militia or Requetés trained for insurrection against the Republic.21
General Franco was a subscriber to Acción Española and a firm believer in the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik contubernio (filthy concubinage). Significantly, among the many other senior military figures sharing such views was General Emilio Mola, the future director of the military coup of 1936. The tall, bespectacled Mola had the air of a monkish scholar, but his background was that of no-nonsense veteran of the African wars. Born in Cuba in 1887, the son of a captain of the Civil Guard, a harsh disciplinarian, he rose to military prominence serving with the Regulares Indígenas (Native Regulars – locally recruited mercenaries) during the African wars. His memoirs of Morocco, wallowing in descriptions of crushed skulls and bloated intestines, suggest that he had been utterly brutalized by his African experiences.22 In February 1930 in the wake of the fall of the dictatorship, Mola was appointed Director General of Security. He quickly took to police work. Until the collapse of the monarchy fourteen months later, he devoted himself to crushing labour and student subversion as he had crushed tribal rebellion in Morocco.23 To this end, he created a crack anti-riot squad, physically well trained and well armed, and a complex espionage system. This so-called Sección de Investigación Comunista used undercover policemen to infiltrate opposition groups and then act as agents provocateurs. The network was still substantially in place in 1936 when Mola employed it in the preparation of the military uprising.24
Mola over-estimated the menace of the minuscule Spanish Communist Party, which he viewed as the tool of sinister Jewish–Masonic machinations. This reflected the credence that he gave to the fevered reports of his agents, in particular those of Santiago Martín Báguenas and of the sleazy and obsessive Julián Mauricio Carlavilla del Barrio. Mola’s views on Jews, Communists and Freemasons were also coloured by information received from the organization of the White Russian forces in exile, the Russkii Obshche-Voinskii Soiuz (ROVS, Russian All-Military Union) based in Paris. Thereafter, even when he was no longer Director General of Security, he remained in close contact with the ROVS leader Lieutenant General Evgenii Karlovitch Miller. Miller was, like the Nazi racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German. Their hatred of communism reflected the fact that the Bolshevik revolution saw them lose their families, property, livelihood and homeland. Believing that the Jews had masterminded the revolution, they were determined to prevent them doing the same in western Europe.25
When the Republic was established, convinced that he would be arrested for his work in defence of the monarchy, Mola went into hiding. Then on 21 April 1931, he gave himself up to the Minister of War, Manuel Azaña. Four days earlier, General Dámaso Berenguer had been arrested for his role in the Moroccan wars, as Prime Minister and later as Minister of War during the summary trial and execution of the two pro-Republican rebels Captains Fermín Galán and Ángel García Hernández. The arrests of Mola and Berenguer fed the right-wing perception of the Republic as vindictive.26 In the eyes of the Africanistas, Berenguer was being persecuted for his part in a war in which they had risked their lives, and for following military regulations in court-martialling the mutineers Galán and García Hernández. Similarly, they saw Mola as a hero of the African war who, as Director General of Security, had merely been doing his job of controlling subversion. The Africanistas were enraged that officers whom they admired were persecuted while those who had plotted against the Dictator were rewarded. The arrests gave Africanistas like Manuel Goded, Joaquín Fanjul, Mola and Franco a justification for their instinctive hostility to the Republic. They regarded the officers who received the preferment of the Republic as the lackeys of Jews and Freemasons, weaklings who pandered to the mob.
Awaiting trial for his use of excessive force against a student demonstration on 25 March, Mola was imprisoned in a ‘damp and foul-smelling cell’ in a military jail.27 Azaña arranged on 5 August for this to be changed to house arrest, but, unsurprisingly, seeing his recent targets now in positions of power, Mola nurtured a rancorous hostility to the Republic and a personal hatred of Azaña. The paranoid reports sent him by Carlavilla and the dossiers supplied by the ROVS convinced him that the triumph of the democratic regime had been engineered by Jews and Freemasons. In late 1931, in the first volume of his memoirs, he wrote of the threat of Freemasonry: ‘When, in fulfilling my duties, I investigated the intervention of the Masonic lodges in the polit
ical life of Spain, I became aware of the enormous strength at their disposal, not through the lodges themselves but because of the powerful elements that manipulated them from abroad – the Jews.’ Acción Española celebrated the appearance of the book with a rapturous nine-page review by Eugenio Vegas Latapié, one of the journal’s founders and a fierce advocate of violence against the Republic.28
By the time that Mola came to write the second volume of his memoirs, he was more explicit in his attacks on Freemasons and Jews. He himself implied that this was because, in addition to the reports of General Miller, he had read both the work of Father Tusquets and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Thus Mola wrote that the coming of the Republic was a reflection of the hatred for Spain of the Jews and Freemasonry:
What rational motives exist to explain why we Spaniards excite the hatred of the descendants of Israel? Fundamentally three: the envy produced in them by any race that has a fatherland of its own; our religion for which they feel unquenchable revulsion because they blame it for their dispersion throughout the world; the memory of their expulsion, which came about not, as is often claimed, because of a King’s whim but because the people demanded it. These are the three points of the Masonic triangle of the Spanish lodges.29
In December 1933, Mola wrote the conclusion to his bitterly polemical book El pasado, Azaña y el porvenir (The Past, Azaña and the Future), in which he gave voice to the widespread military animosity towards the Republic in general and towards Azaña in particular. Mortified by what he perceived as the unpatriotic anti-militarism of the left, he attributed it to various causes, mainly to the fact that: