The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain

Recent scholarship, not only for Catalonia but also for most of Republican Spain, has dramatically dismantled the propagandistic allegations made by the rebels at the time. On 18 July 1938 in Burgos, Franco himself claimed that 54,000 people had been killed in Catalonia. In the same speech, he alleged that 70,000 had been murdered in Madrid and 20,000 in Valencia. On the same day, he told a reporter there had already been a total of 470,000 murders in the Republican zone.¹⁷ To prove the scale of Republican iniquity to the world, on 26 April 1940 he set up a massive state investigation, the Causa General, ‘to gather trustworthy information’ to ascertain the true scale of the crimes committed in the Republican zone. Denunciation and exaggeration were encouraged. Thus it came as a desperate disappointment to Franco when, on the basis of the information gathered, the Causa General concluded that the number of deaths was 85,940. Although inflated and including many duplications, this figure was still so far below Franco’s claims that, for over a quarter of a century, it was omitted from editions of the published résumé of the Causa General’s findings.¹⁸

A central, yet under-estimated, part of the repression carried out by the rebels – the systematic persecution of women – is not susceptible to statistical analysis. Murder, torture and rape were generalized punishments for the gender liberation embraced by many, but not all, liberal and left-wing women during the Republican period. Those who came out of prison alive suffered deep lifelong physical and psychological problems. Thousands of others were subjected to rape and other sexual abuses, the humiliation of head shaving and public soiling after the forced ingestion of castor oil. For most Republican women, there were also the terrible economic and psychological problems of having their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons murdered or forced to flee, which often saw the wives themselves arrested in efforts to get them to reveal the whereabouts of their menfolk. In contrast, despite frequent assumptions that the raping of nuns was common in Republican Spain, there was relatively little equivalent abuse of women there. That is not to say that it did not take place. The sexual molestation of around one dozen nuns and the deaths of 296, just over 1.3 per cent of the female clergy, is shocking but of a notably lower order of magnitude than the fate of women in the rebel zone.¹⁹ That is not entirely surprising given that respect for women was built into the Republic’s reforming programme.

The statistical vision of the Spanish holocaust is not only flawed, incomplete and unlikely ever to be complete. It also fails to capture the intense horror that lies behind the numbers. The account that follows includes many stories of individuals, of men, women and children from both sides. It introduces some specific but representative cases of victims and perpetrators from all over the country. It is hoped thereby to convey the suffering unleashed upon their own fellow citizens by the arrogance and brutality of the officers who rose up on 17 July 1936. They provoked a war that was unnecessary and whose consequences still reverberate bitterly in Spain today.

PART ONE

1

Social War Begins, 1931–1933

On 18 July 1936, on hearing of the military uprising in Morocco, an aristocratic landowner lined up the labourers on his estate to the south-west of Salamanca and shot six of them as a lesson to the others. The Conde de Alba de Yeltes, Gonzalo de Aguilera y Munro, a retired cavalry officer, joined the press service of the rebel forces during the Civil War and boasted of his crime to foreign visitors.¹ Although his alleged atrocity was extreme, the sentiments behind it were not unrepresentative of the hatreds that had smouldered in the Spanish countryside over the twenty years before the military uprising of 1936. Aguilera’s cold and calculated violence reflected the belief, common among the rural upper classes, that the landless labourers were sub-human. This attitude had become common among the big landowners since a series of sporadic uprisings by hungry day-labourers in the regions of Spain dominated by huge estates (latifundios). Taking place between 1918 and 1921, a period of bitter social conflict known thereafter as the trienio bolchevique (three Bolshevik years), these insurrections had been crushed by the traditional defenders of the rural oligarchy, the Civil Guard and the army. Previously, there had been an uneasy truce within which the wretched lives of the landless day-labourers (jornaleros or braceros) were occasionally relieved by the patronizing gestures of the owners – the gift of food or a blind eye turned to rabbit poaching or to the gathering of windfall crops. The violence of the conflicts had outraged the landlords, who would never forgive the insubordination of the braceros they considered to be an inferior species. Accordingly, the paternalism which had somewhat mitigated the daily brutality of the day-labourers’ lives came to an abrupt end.

The agrarian oligarchy, in an unequal partnership with the industrial and financial bourgeoisie, was traditionally the dominant force in Spanish capitalism. Its monopoly of power began to be challenged on two sides in the course of the painful and uneven process of industrialization. The prosperity enjoyed by neutral Spain during the First World War emboldened industrialists and bankers to jostle with the great landowners for political position. However, with both menaced by a militant industrial proletariat, they soon rebuilt a defensive alliance. In August 1917, the left’s feeble revolutionary threat was bloodily smothered by the army. Thereafter, until 1923, when the army intervened again, social ferment occasionally bordered on undeclared civil war. In the south, there were the rural uprisings of the ‘three Bolshevik years’. In the north, the industrialists of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Asturias, having tried to ride the immediate post-war recession with wage-cuts and layoffs, faced violent strikes and, in Barcelona, a terrorist spiral of provocations and reprisals.

In the consequent atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety, there was a ready middle-class audience for the notion long since disseminated by extreme right-wing Catholics that a secret alliance of Jews, Freemasons and the Communist Third International was conspiring to destroy Christian Europe, with Spain as a principal target. In Catholic Spain, the idea that there was an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity had emerged in the early Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century, the Spanish extreme right resurrected it to discredit the liberals whom they viewed as responsible for social changes that were damaging their interests. In this paranoid fantasy, Freemasons were smeared as tools of the Jews (of whom there were virtually none) in a sinister plot to establish Jewish tyranny over the Christian world.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, such views were expressed with ever increasing vehemence. They were a response to the kaleidoscopic processes of rapid economic growth, social dislocation, regionalist agitations, a bourgeois reform movement and the emergence of trade unions and left-wing parties. An explanation for the destabilization of Spanish society and the attendant collapse of the relative certainties of a predominantly rural society was found in a deeply alarming, yet somehow comforting, assertion that shifted the blame on to an identifiable and foreign enemy. It was alleged that, using Freemasons as their willing intermediaries, the Jews controlled the economy, politics, the press, literature and the entertainment world through which they propagated immorality and the brutalization of the masses. Such views had long been peddled by El Siglo Futuro, the daily newspaper of the deeply reactionary Carlist Traditionalist Communion. In 1912, the National Anti-Masonic and Anti-Semitic League had been founded by José Ignacio de Urbina with the support of twenty-two Spanish bishops. The Bishop of Almería wrote that ‘everything is ready for the decisive battle that must be unleashed between the children of light and the children of darkness, between Catholicism and Judaism, between Christ and the Devil’.² That there was never any hard evidence was put down to the cleverness and colossal power of the enemy, evil itself.

In Spain, as in other European countries, anti-Semitism had reached even greater intensity after 1917. It was taken as axiomatic that socialism was a Jewish creation and that the Russian revolution had been financed by Jewish capital, an idea given a spurious credibility by the Jewish origins of prominent Bolsheviks such as Trotsky, Martov and Dan. Spain’s middle and upper classes were chilled, and outraged, by the various revolutionary upheavals that threatened them between 1917 and 1923. The fears of the elite were somewhat calmed in September 1923, when the army intervened again and a dictatorship was established by General Miguel Primo de Rivera. As Captain General of Barcelona, Primo de Rivera was the ally of Catalan textile barons and understood their sense of being under threat from their anarchist workforce. Moreover, coming from a substantial landowning family in Jérez, he also appreciated the fears of the big southern landowners or latifundistas. He was thus the ideal praetorian defender of the reactionary coalition of industrialists and landowners consolidated after 1917. While Primo de Rivera remained in power, he offered security to the middle and upper classes. Nevertheless, his ideologues worked hard to build the notion that in Spain two bitterly hostile social, political and, indeed, moral groupings were locked in a fight to the death. Specifically, in a pre-echo of the function that they would also fulfil for Franco, these propagandists stressed the dangers faced from Jews, Freemasons and leftists.

These ideas essentially delegitimized the entire spectrum of the left, from middle-class liberal democrats, via Socialists and regional nationalists, to anarchists and Communists. This was done by blurring distinctions between them and by denying their right to be considered Spanish. The denunciations of this ‘anti-Spain’ were publicized through the right-wing press and the regime’s single party, the Unión Patriótica, as well as through civic organizations and the education system. These notions served to generate satisfaction with the dictatorship as a bulwark against the perceived Bolshevik threat. Starting from the premise that the world was divided into ‘national alliances and Soviet alliances’, the influential right-wing poet José María Pemán declared that ‘the time has come for Spanish society to choose between Jesus and Barabbas’. He claimed that the masses were ‘either Christian or anarchic and destructive’ and the nation was divided between an anti-Spain made up of everything that was heterodox and foreign and the real Spain of traditional religious and monarchical values.³

Another senior propagandist of the Primo de Rivera regime, José Pemartín, linked, like his cousin Pemán, to the extreme right in Seville, also believed that Spain was under attack by an international conspiracy masterminded by Freemasonry, ‘the eternal enemy of all the world’s governments of order’. He dismissed the left, in generalized terms, as ‘the dogmatists deluded by what they think are modern, democratic and European ideas, universal suffrage, the sovereign parliament, etc. They are beyond redemption. They are made mentally ill by the worst of tyrannies, ideocracy or the tyranny of certain ideas.’ It was the duty of the army to defend Spain against these attacks.⁴

Despite his temporary success in anaesthetizing the anxieties of the middle and ruling classes, Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship did not last. His benevolent attempt to temper authoritarianism with paternalism inadvertently alienated landowners, industrialists, the Church hierarchy and some of the elite officer corps of the army. Most dramatically, his attempts to reform military promotion procedures ensured that the army would stand aside when a great electoral coalition of Socialists and middle-class Republicans swept to power on 14 April 1931. After the dictator’s departure in January 1930, one of the first to take up the defence of establishment interests was Dr José María Albiñana, an eccentric Valencian neurologist and frenetic admirer of Primo de Rivera.

The author of more than twenty novels and books on neurasthenia, religion, the history and philosophy of medicine and Spanish politics, and a number of mildly imperialist works about Mexico, Albiñana was convinced that there was a secret alliance working in foreign obscurity in order to destroy Spain. In February 1930, he distributed tens of thousands of copies of his Manifiesto por el Honor de España. In it, he had declared that ‘there exists a Masonic Soviet which dishonours Spain in the eyes of the world by reviving the black legend and other infamies forged by the eternal hidden enemies of our fatherland. This Soviet, made up of heartless persons, is backed by spiteful politicians who, to avenge offences against themselves, go abroad to vomit insults against Spain’. This was a reference to the Republicans exiled by the dictatorship. Two months later, he launched his ‘exclusively Spanish Nationalist Party’ whose objective was to ‘annihilate the internal enemies of the fatherland’. A fascist image was provided by its blue-shirted, Roman-saluting Legionaries of Spain, a ‘citizen volunteer force to act directly, explosively and expeditiously against any initiative which attacks or diminishes the prestige of the fatherland’.⁵

Albiñana was merely one of the first to argue that the fall of the monarchy was the first step in the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy to take over Spain. Such ideas would feed the extreme rightist paranoia that met the establishment of the Second Republic. The passing of political power to the Socialist Party (PSOE – Partido Socialista Obrero Español) and its urban middle-class allies, the lawyers and intellectuals of the various Republican parties, sent shivers of horror through right-wing Spain. The Republican–Socialist coalition intended to use its suddenly acquired share of state power to implement a far-reaching programme to create a modern Spain by destroying the reactionary influence of the Church, eradicating militarism and improving the immediate conditions of the wretched day-labourers with agrarian reform.

This huge agenda inevitably raised the expectations of the urban and rural proletariats while provoking the fear and the determined enmity of the Church, the armed forces and the landowning and industrial oligarchies. The passage from the hatreds of 1917 –23 to the widespread violence that engulfed Spain after 1936 was long and complex but it began to speed up dramatically in the spring of 1931. The fears and hatreds of the rich found, as always, their first line of defence in the Civil Guard. However, as landowners blocked attempts at reform, the frustrated expectations of hungry day-labourers could be contained only by increasing brutality.

Many on the right took the establishment of the Republic as proof that Spain was the second front in the war against world revolution – a notion fed by numerous clashes between the forces of order and workers of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the anarchist union. Resolute action against the extreme left by the Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura, did not deter the Carlist newspaper El Siglo Futuro from attacking the government and claiming that progressive Republican legislation was ordered from abroad. It declared in June 1931 that three of the most conservative ministers, the premier, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, Miguel Maura and the Minister of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos Urruti, were Jews and that the Republic itself had been brought about as a result of a Jewish conspiracy. The more moderate Catholic mass-circulation daily El Debate referred to de los Ríos as ‘the rabbi’. The Editorial Católica, which owned an influential chain of newspapers including El Debate, soon began to publish the virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic magazines Gracia y Justicia and Los Hijos del Pueblo. The editor of the scurrilously satirical Gracia y Justicia was Manuel Delgado Barreto, a one-time collaborator of the dictator General Primo de Rivera, a friend of his son José Antonio and an early sponsor of the Falange. It would reach a weekly circulation of 200,000 copies.⁶

The Republic would face violent resistance not only from the extreme right but also from the extreme left. The anarcho-syndicalist CNT recognized that many of its militants had voted for the Republican–Socialist coalition in the municipal elections of 12 April and that its arrival had raised the people’s hopes. As one leading anarchist put it, they were ‘like children with new shoes’. The CNT leadership, however, expecting the Republic to change nothing, aspired merely to propagate its revolutionary objectives and to pursue its fierce rivalry with the Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), which it regarded as a scab union because of its collaboration with the Primo de Rivera regime. In a period of mass unemployment, with large numbers of migrant workers returning from overseas and unskilled construction workers left without work by the ending of the great public works projects of the dictatorship, the labour market was potentially explosive. This was a situation that would be exploited by the hard-line anarchists of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) who argued that the Republic, like the monarchy, was just an instrument of the bourgeoisie. The brief honeymoon period came to an end when CNT–FAI demonstrations on 1 May were repressed violently by the forces of order.⁷

In late May, a group of nearly one thousand strikers from the port of Pasajes descended on San Sebastián with the apparent intention of looting the wealthy shopping districts. Having been warned in advance, the Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura, deployed the Civil Guard at the entrance to the city. They repelled the attack at the cost of eight dead and many wounded. Then, in early July, the CNT launched a nationwide strike in the telephone system, largely as a challenge to the government. It was defeated by harsh police measures and strike-breaking by workers of the Socialist UGT who refused to join the CNT in what they saw as a sterile struggle. The Director General of Security, the sleek and portly Ángel Galarza of the Radical-Socialist Party, ordered that anyone seen trying to damage the installations of the telephone company should be shot. Maura and Galarza were understandably trying to maintain the confidence of the middle classes. Inevitably, their stance consolidated the violent hostility of the CNT towards both the Republic and the UGT.⁸

For the Republican–Socialist cabinet, the subversive activities of the CNT constituted rebellion. For the CNT, legitimate strikes and demonstrations were being crushed by dictatorial methods indistinguishable from those used by the monarchy. On 21 July 1931, the cabinet agreed on the need for ‘an urgent and severe remedy’. Maura outlined a proposal for ‘a legal instrument of repression’ and the Socialist Minister of Labour, Francisco Largo Caballero, proposed a decree to make strikes illegal. The two decrees would eventually be combined on 22 October into the Law for the Defence of the Republic, a measure enthusiastically supported by the Socialist members of the government not least because it was perceived as directed against their CNT rivals.⁹ It made little difference to the right, which perceived the violent social disorder of the anarchists as characteristic of the entire left, including the Socialists who denounced it and the Republican authorities who crushed it.

What mattered to the right was that the Civil Guard and the army lined up in defence of the existing economic order against the anarchists. Traditionally, the bulk of the army officer corps perceived the prevention of political and economic change as one of its primordial tasks. Now, the Republic would attempt to reform the military, bringing both its costs and its mentalities into line with Spain’s changed circumstances. A central part of that project would be the streamlining of a massively swollen officer corps. The tough and uncompromising colonial officers, the so-called Africanistas, having benefited from irregular and vertiginous battlefield promotions, would be the most affected. Their opposition to Republican reforms would inaugurate a process whereby the violence of Spain’s recent colonial history found a route back into the metropolis. The rigours and horrors of the Moroccan tribal wars between 1909 and 1925 had brutalized them. Morocco had also given them a beleaguered sense that, in their commitment to fighting to defend the colony, they alone were concerned with the fate of the Patria. Long before 1931, this had developed into a deep contempt both for professional politicians and for the pacifist left-wing masses that the Africanistas regarded as obstacles to the successful execution of their patriotic mission.

The repressive role of both the army and the Civil Guard in Spain’s long-standing social conflicts, particularly in rural areas, was perceived as central to that patriotic duty. However, between 1931 and 1936, several linked factors would provide the military with pervasive justifications for the use of violence against the left. The first was the Republic’s attempt to break the power of the Catholic Church. On 13 October 1931, the Minister of War, and later Prime Minister and President, Manuel Azaña, stated that ‘Spain has ceased to be Catholic.’¹⁰ Even if this was true, Spain remained a country with many pious and sincere Catholics. Now, the Republic’s anti-clerical legislation would provide an apparent justification for the virulent enmity of those who already had ample motive to see it destroyed. The bilious rhetoric of the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy was immediately pressed into service. Moreover, the gratuitous nature of some anti-clerical measures would help recruit many ordinary Catholics to the cause of the rich.

The religious issue would nourish a second crucial factor in fostering right-wing violence. This was the immensely successful propagation of theories that left-wingers and liberals were neither really Spanish nor even really human and that, as a threat to the nation’s existence, they should be exterminated. In books that sold by the tens of thousands, in daily newspapers and weekly magazines, the idea was hammered home that the Second Republic was foreign and sinister and must be destroyed. This notion, which found fertile ground in right-wing fear, was based on the contention that the Republic was the product of a conspiracy masterminded by Jews, and carried out by Freemasons through left-wing lackeys. The idea of this powerful international conspiracy – or contubernio (filthy cohabitation), one of Franco’s favourite words – justified any means necessary for what was presented as national survival. The intellectuals and priests who developed such ideas were able to connect with the latifundistas’ hatred for the landless day-labourers or jornaleros and the urban bourgeoisie’s fear of the unemployed. The Salamanca landowner Gonzalo de Aguilera y Munro, like many army officers and priests, was a voracious reader of such literature.¹¹

Another factor which fomented violence was the reaction of the landowners to the Second Republic’s various attempts at agrarian reform. In the province of Salamanca, the leaders of the local Bloque Agrario, the landowners’ party, Ernesto Castaño and José Lamamié de Clairac, incited their members not to pay taxes nor to plant crops. Such intransigence radicalized the landless labourers.¹² Across the areas of great estates (latifundios) in southern Spain, Republican legislation governing labour issues in the countryside was systematically flouted. Despite the decree of 7 May 1931 of obligatory cultivation, unionized labour was ‘locked out’ either by land being left uncultivated or by simply being refused work and told to comed República (literally ‘eat the Republic’, which was a way of saying ‘let the Republic feed you’). Despite the decree of 1 July 1931 imposing the eight-hour day in agriculture, sixteen-hour working days from sun-up to sun-down prevailed with no extra hours being paid. Indeed, starvation wages were paid to those who were hired. Although there were tens of thousands of unemployed landless labourers in the south, landowners proclaimed that unemployment was an invention of the Republic.¹³ In Jaén, the gathering of acorns, normally kept for pigs, or of windfall olives, the watering of beasts and even the gathering of firewood were denounced as ‘collective kleptomania’.¹⁴ Hungry peasants caught doing such things were savagely beaten by the Civil Guard or by armed estate guards.¹⁵

Their expectations raised by the coming of the new regime, the day-labourers were no longer as supine and fatalistic as had often been the case. As their hopes were frustrated by the obstructive tactics of the latifundistas, the desperation of the jornaleros could be controlled only by an intensification of the violence of the Civil Guard. The ordinary Civil Guards themselves often resorted to their firearms in panic, fearful of being outnumbered by angry mobs of labourers. Incidents of the theft of crops and game were reported with outrage by the right-wing press. Firearms were used against workers, and their deaths were reported with equal indignation in the left-wing press. In Corral de Almaguer (Toledo), starving jornaleros tried to break a local lock-out by invading estates and starting to work them. The Civil Guard intervened on behalf of the owners, killing five workers and wounding another seven. On 27 September 1931, for instance, in Palacios Rubios near Peñaranda de Bracamonte in the province of Salamanca, the Civil Guard opened fire on a group of men, women and children celebrating the successful end to a strike. The Civil Guard began to shoot when the villagers started to dance in front of the parish priest’s house. Two workers were killed immediately and two more died shortly afterwards.¹⁶ Immense bitterness was provoked by the case. In July 1933, on behalf of the Salamanca branch of the UGT landworkers’ federation (Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra), the editor of its newspaper Tierra y Trabajo, José Andrés y Mansó, brought a private prosecution against a Civil Guard corporal, Francisco Jiménez Cuesta, on four counts of homicide and another three of wounding. Jiménez Cuesta was successfully defended by the leader of the authoritarian Catholic party, the CEDA, José María Gil Robles. Andrés y Mansó would be murdered by Falangists at the end of July 1936.¹⁷

In Salamanca and elsewhere, there were regular acts of violence perpetrated against trade union members and landowners – a seventy-year-old beaten to death by the rifle butts of the Civil Guard in Burgos, a property-owner badly hurt in Villanueva de Córdoba. Very often these incidents, which were not confined to the south but also proliferated in the three provinces of Aragon, began with invasions of estates. Groups of landless labourers would go to a landowner and ask for work or sometimes carry out agricultural tasks and then threateningly demand payment. More often than not, they would be driven off by the Civil Guard or by gunmen employed by the owners.¹⁸

In fact, what the landowners were doing was merely one element of unequivocal right-wing hostility to the new regime. They occupied the front line of defence against the reforming ambitions of the Republic. There were equally vehement responses to the religious and military legislation of the new regime. Indeed, all three issues were often linked, with many army officers emanating from Catholic landholding families. All these elements found a political voice in several newly emerged political groups. Most extreme among them, and openly committed to the earliest possible destruction of the Republic, were two monarchist organizations, the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista and Acción Española, founded by supporters of the recently departed King Alfonso XIII as a ‘school of modern counter-revolutionary thought’. Within hours of the Republic being declared, monarchist plotters had begun collecting money to create a journal to propagate the legitimacy of a rising against the Republic, to inject a spirit of rebellion in the army and to found a party of ostensible legality as a front for meetings, fund-raising and conspiracy against the Republic. The journal Acción Española would also peddle the idea of the sinister alliance of Jews, Freemasons and leftists. Within a month, its founders had collected substantial funds for the projected uprising. Their first effort would be the military coup of 10 August 1932. And its failure would lead to a determination to ensure that the next attempt would be better financed and entirely successful.¹⁹

Somewhat more moderate was the legalist Acción Nacional, later renamed Acción Popular, which was prepared to try to defend right-wing interests within Republican legality. Extremists or ‘catastrophists’ and ‘moderates’ shared many of the same ideas. However, after the failed military coup of August 1932, they would split over the efficacy of armed conspiracy against the Republic. Acción Española formed its own political party, Renovación Española, and Acción Popular did the same, gathering a number of like-minded groups into the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas.²⁰ Within a year, the ranks of the ‘catastrophists’ had been swelled by the creation of various fascist organizations. What all had in common was that they completely denied the democratic legitimacy of the Republic. Despite the legalist façade of Acción Popular and the CEDA, its leaders would frequently and unrestrainedly proclaim that violence against the Republic was perfectly justifiable.