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

Barely three weeks after the establishment of the new regime, at a time when the government was notable mainly for its timidity in social questions, Acción Nacional had been created as ‘an organization for social defence’. It was the creation of Ángel Herrera Oria, editor of the militantly Catholic (and hitherto monarchist) daily El Debate. A shrewd political strategist, Herrera Oria would be the brains behind political Catholicism in the early years of the Second Republic. Acción Nacional brought together two organizations of the right that had combated the rising power of the urban and rural working class for the previous twenty years. Its leaders came from the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas, an elite Jesuit-influenced organization of about five hundred prominent and talented Catholic rightists with influence in the press, the judiciary and the professions. Its rank-and-file support would be found within the Confederación Nacional Católico-Agraria, a mass political organization which proclaimed its ‘total submission to the ecclesiastic authorities’. Established to resist the growth of left-wing organizations, the CNCA was strong among the Catholic smallholding peasantry in north and central Spain.²¹

Acción Nacional’s manifesto declared that ‘the advance guards of Soviet Communism’ were already clambering on the ruins of the monarchy. It denounced the respectable bourgeois politicians of the Second Republic as weak and incapable of controlling the masses. ‘They are the masses that deny God and, in consequence, the basic principles of Christian morality; that proclaim, against the sanctity of the family, the instability of free love; that substitute private property, the basis and the motor of the welfare of individuals and of collective wealth, by a universal proletariat at the orders of the State.’ In addition, there was ‘the lunacy of Basque and Catalan ultra-nationalism, determined, irrespective of its sweet words, to destroy national unity’. Acción Nacional unequivocally announced itself as the negation of everything for which, it claimed, the Republic stood. With the battle cry ‘Religion, Fatherland, Family, Order, Work, Property’, it declared that ‘the social battle is being waged in our time to decide the triumph or extermination of these eternal principles. In truth, this will not be decided in a single combat; what is being unleashed in Spain is a war, and it will be a long one.’²²

By 1933, when Acción Popular had developed into the CEDA, its analysis of the Republic was even less circumspect: ‘the rabble, always irresponsible because of their lack of values, took over the strongholds of government’. Even for Herrera Oria’s legalist organization, the Republic was created when ‘the contagious madness of the most inflamed extremists sparked a fire in the inflammable material of the heartless, the perverted, the rebellious, the insane’. The supporters of the Republic were sub-human and, like pestilent vermin, should be eliminated: ‘The sewers opened their sluice gates and the dregs of society inundated the streets and squares, convulsing and shuddering like epileptics.’²³ All over Europe, endangered elites were mobilizing mass support by stirring up fears of a left presented as ‘foreign’, a disease that threatened the nation and required a crusade of national purification.

Both at the time and later, the right-wing determination to annihilate the Republic was justified as a response to its anti-clericalism. However, as had been amply demonstrated by its enthusiastic support for the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the right hated the Republic for being democratic long before it was able to denounce it for being anti-clerical. Moreover, those who opposed the Republic on religious grounds also cited social, economic and political grounds, especially in opposition to regional autonomy.²⁴

Nevertheless, the religious issue was the occasion of intense conflict, both verbal and physical. On Sunday 10 May 1931, the inaugural meeting of the Circulo Monarquico Independiente in the Calle Alcalá ended with loudspeakers provocatively blaring out the Royal Anthem. Republican crowds returning from an afternoon concert in Madrid’s Parque del Buen Retiro were outraged. There was a riot; cars were burned and the offices of the monarchist newspaper ABC in neighbouring Calle Serrano were assaulted. The fierce popular reaction spilled over into the notorious church burnings which took place in Madrid, Málaga, Seville, Cádiz and Alicante from 10 to 12 May. This suggested how strongly ordinary people identified the Church with the monarchy and right-wing politics. The Republican press claimed that the fires were the work of provocateurs drawn from the scab union, the Sindicatos Libres. Indeed, it was claimed that, to discredit the new regime, young monarchists had distributed leaflets inciting the masses to attack religious buildings.²⁵

Even if there were agents provocateurs involved, many on the left were convinced that the Church was integral to reactionary politics in Spain and physical attacks were carried out in some places by the more hotheaded among them. In many villages in the south, priests had stones thrown at them. For those on the right, the identity of the true culprits mattered little. The church burnings confirmed and justified their prior hostility to the Republic. Nevertheless, Miguel Maura, the Minister of the Interior, commented bitterly: ‘Madrid’s Catholics did not think for a second that it was appropriate or their duty to make an appearance in the street in defence of what should have been sacred to them.’ There were serious clashes in many small towns (pueblos) where the faithful protected their churches from elements intent on profaning them. Later in May, when the provisional government decreed an end to obligatory religious education, there were many petitions in protest.²⁶

While most of Spain remained peaceful, from the earliest days of the Republic an atmosphere of undeclared civil war festered in the latifundio zones of the south and in other areas dominated by the CNT. Miguel Maura claimed that, in the five months from mid-May 1931 until his resignation in October, he had to deal with 508 revolutionary strikes. The CNT accused him of causing 108 deaths with his repressive measures.²⁷ This was demonstrated most graphically by the bloody conclusion to a period of anarchist agitation in Seville. As the culmination of a series of revolutionary strikes, the anarchist union called a general stoppage on 18 July 1931. This was directed not just at the local employers but also at the CNT’s local rivals in the Socialist Unión General Trabajadores. There were violent clashes between anarchist and Communist strikers on the one hand and blacklegs and the Civil Guard on the other. At the cabinet meeting of 21 July, the Socialist Minister of Labour, Francisco Largo Caballero, demanded that Miguel Maura take firm action to end the disorders which were damaging the Republic’s image. When the Prime Minister, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, asked if everyone was agreed that energetic measures against the CNT were called for, the cabinet assented unanimously. Maura told Azaña that he would order artillery to demolish a house from which anarchists had fired against the forces of order.²⁸

Meanwhile, on the night of 22–23 July 1931, extreme rightists were permitted to take part in the repression of the strikes in Seville. Believing that the forces of order were inadequate to deal with the problem, José Bastos Ansart, the Civil Governor, invited the landowners’ clubs, the Círculo de Labradores and the Unión Comercial, to form a paramilitary group to be known as the ‘Guardia Cívica’. This invitation was eagerly accepted by the most prominent rightists of the city, Javier Parladé Ybarra, Pedro Parias González, a retired lieutenant colonel of the cavalry and a substantial landowner, and José García Carranza, a famous bullfighter who fought as ‘Pepe el Algabeño’. Arms were collected, and the Guardia Cívica was led by a brutal Africanista, Captain Manuel Díaz Criado, known as ‘Criadillas’ (Bull’s Balls). On the night of 22 July, in the Parque de María Luisa, they shot four prisoners. On the following afternoon, the Casa Cornelio, a workers’ café in the neighbourhood of La Macarena, was, as Maura had promised Azaña, destroyed by artillery fire. Elsewhere in the province, particularly in three small towns to the south of the capital, Coria del Río, Utrera and Dos Hermanas, strikes were repressed with exceptional violence by the Civil Guard. In Dos Hermanas, after some stones had been thrown at the telephone exchange, a lorryload of Civil Guards arrived from Seville. With the local market in full swing, they opened fire, wounding several, two of whom died later. In total, seventeen people were killed in clashes in the province.²⁹

Azaña’s immediate reaction was that the events in the park ‘looked like the use of the ley de fugas’ (the pretence that prisoners were shot while trying to escape) and he blamed Maura, commenting that ‘he shoots first and then he aims’. Azaña’s reaction was influenced by the fact that Maura had recently hit him for accusing him of revealing cabinet secrets to the press. Two weeks later, he learned that the cold-blooded application of the ley de fugas was nothing to do with Maura but had been carried out by the Guardia Cívica on the orders of Díaz Criado.³⁰ The murders in the Parque de María Luisa and the shelling of the Casa Cornelio were the first in a chain of events leading to the savagery of 1936. Díaz Criado and the Guardia Cívica would play a prominent role both in the failed military coup of August 1932 and in the events of 1936.

The events in Seville and the telephone strike were symptomatic of clashes between the forces of order and the CNT throughout urban Spain. In Barcelona, in addition to the telephone conflict, a strike in the metallurgical industry saw 40,000 workers down tools in August. The activist FAI increasingly advocated insurrection to replace the bourgeois Republic with libertarian communism. Paramilitary street action directed against the police and the Civil Guard was to be at the heart of what the prominent FAI leader Juan García Oliver defined as ‘revolutionary gymnastics’. This inevitably led to bloody clashes with the forces of order and with the more moderate Socialist UGT. The consequent violence in Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, Zaragoza and Madrid, although directed against the government, was blamed by the right on the Republic.³¹

The unease thereby fomented among the middle classes was consolidated among Catholics by the anti-clericalism of the Republic. Little distinction was made between the ferocious iconoclasm of the anarchists and the Republican–Socialist coalition’s ambition to limit the Church’s influence to the strictly religious sphere. Right-wing hostility to the Republic was mobilized fully, with clerical support, in the wake of the parliamentary debate over the proposed Republican Constitution. The text separated Church and state and introduced civil marriage and divorce. It curtailed state support for the clergy and ended, on paper at least, the religious monopoly of education. The proposed reforms were denounced by the Catholic press and from pulpits as a Godless, tyrannical and atheistic attempt to destroy the family.³² The reaction of a priest from Castellón de la Plana was not uncommon. In a sermon he told his parishioners, ‘Republicans should be spat on and never spoken to. We should be prepared to fight a civil war before we tolerate the separation of Church and State. Non-religious schools do not educate men, they create savages.’³³

The Republic’s anti-clerical legislation was at best incautious and at worst irresponsible, perceived on the right as the fruit of Masonic-inspired hatred. Republicans felt that to create an egalitarian society, the power of the Church education system had to be replaced with nondenominational schools. Many measures were easily sidestepped. Schools run by religious personnel continued as before – the names of schools were changed, clerics adopted lay dress. Many such schools, especially those of the Jesuits, tended to be accessible only to the children of the rich. There was no middle ground. The Church’s defence of property and its indifference to social hardship inevitably aligned it with the extreme right.³⁴

Substantial popular hostility to the Republic’s plans for changes in the social, economic and religious landscape was garnered during the so-called revisionist campaign against the Constitution. Bitter right-wing opposition to the Constitution passed on 13 October was provoked by plans to advance regional autonomy for Catalonia and to introduce agrarian reform.³⁵ Nevertheless, it was the legalization of divorce and the dissolution of religious orders – seen as evil Masonic machinations – that raised Catholic ire.³⁶ During the debate on 13 October 1931, the parliamentary leader of Acción Popular, José María Gil Robles, declared to the Republican–Socialist majority in the parliament, the Cortes, ‘Today, in opposition to the Constitution, Catholic Spain takes its stand. You will bear responsibility for the spiritual war that is going to be unleashed in Spain.’ Five days later, in the Plaza de Toros de Ledesma, Gil Robles called for a crusade against the Republic.³⁷

As part of the campaign a group of Basque Traditionalists created the Association of Relatives and Friends of Religious Personnel. The Association attracted considerable support in Salamanca and Valladolid, towns notable for the ferocity of the repression during the Civil War. It published an anti-Republican bulletin, Defensa, and many anti-Republican pamphlets. It also founded the violently anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic weekly magazine Los Hijos del Pueblo under the editorship of Francisco de Luis, who would eventually run El Debate in succession to Ángel Herrera Oria. De Luis was a fervent advocate of the theory that the Spanish Republic was the plaything of an international Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy.³⁸ Another leading contributor to Los Hijos del Pueblo was the integrist Jesuit Father Enrique Herrera Oria, brother of Ángel. The paper’s wide circulation was in large part a reflection of the popularity of its vicious satirical cartoons attacking prominent Republican politicians. Presenting them as Jews and Freemasons, and thus part of the international conspiracy against Catholic Spain, it popularized among its readers the notion that this filthy foreign plot had to be destroyed.³⁹

The idea that leftists and liberals were not true Spaniards and therefore had to be destroyed quickly took root on the right. In early November 1931, the monarchist leader Antonio Goicoechea declared to a cheering audience in Madrid that there was to be a battle to the death between socialism and the nation.⁴⁰ On 8 November, the Carlist Joaquín Beunza thundered to an audience of 22,000 people in Palencia: ‘Are we men or not? Those not prepared to give their all in these moments of shameless persecution do not deserve the name Catholic. We must be ready to defend ourselves by all means, and I don’t say legal means, because all means are good for self-defence.’ Declaring the Cortes a zoo, he went on: ‘We are governed by a gang of Freemasons. And I say that against them all methods are legitimate, both legal and illegal ones.’ At the same meeting, Gil Robles declared that the government’s persecution of the Church was decided ‘in the Masonic lodges’.⁴¹

Incitement to violence against the Republic and its supporters was not confined to the extreme right. The speeches of the legalist Catholic Gil Robles were every bit as belligerent and provocative as those of monarchists, Carlists and, later, Falangists. At Molina de Segura (Murcia) on New Year’s Day 1932, Gil Robles declared: ‘In 1932 we must impose our will with the force of our rightness, and with other forces if this is insufficient. The cowardice of the Right has allowed those who come from the cesspools of iniquity to take control of the destinies of the fatherland.’⁴² The intransigence of more moderate sections of the Spanish right was revealed by the inaugural manifesto of the Juventud (youth movement) de Acción Popular which proclaimed: ‘We are men of the right … We will respect the legitimate orders of authority, but we will not tolerate the impositions of the irresponsible rabble. We will always have the courage to make ourselves respected. We declare war on communism and Freemasonry.’ In the eyes of the right, ‘communism’ included the Socialist Party and Freemasonry signified the various Republican liberal parties and their regional variants known as Left Republicans.⁴³

Justification for hostility to the Republic could easily be found in its efforts to secularize society. Distress had been caused by the fact that municipal authorities were forbidden to make financial contributions to the Church or its festivals. In January 1932, Church cemeteries came under municipal jurisdiction. The state now recognized only civil marriage, so those who had a Church wedding also had to visit a registry office. Burial ceremonies were to have no religious character unless the deceased, being over the age of twenty, had left specific instructions to the contrary, something involving complicated bureaucracy for relatives.⁴⁴

In May 1932, during the feast of San Pedro Mártir in Burbáguena (Teruel), a brass band played in the town square, thereby deliberately clashing with the religious music being sung in the church in honour of the saint. In Libros (Teruel), a dance was organized outside the parish church while a mass was being said in honour of the Virgen del Pilar.⁴⁵ In Seville, fear of attack led to more than forty of the traditional fraternities (cofradías) withdrawing from the Holy Week procession. Their members were predominantly militants of Acción Popular and of the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista and their gesture popularized among right-wing Catholics the phrase ‘Seville the martyr’, despite the fact that every effort was made by Republican authorities to see the processions go ahead. Vociferous complaints came from the same men who were also prominent in employers’ and landowners’ organizations. In the event, only one cofradía marched and was the target of insults and stones. Some days later, on 7 April 1932, the Church of San Julián was burned down.⁴⁶

Some local municipalities removed crucifixes from schools and religious statues from public hospitals as well as prohibiting the ringing of bells. Such measures went beyond official government policy, which was that municipal permission was required for public ceremonies. Perceived as persecution, they caused ordinary Catholics to see the Republic as their enemy. In many villages in the province of Salamanca, there were street protests and children were kept away from school until the crucifixes were returned. Ordinary Catholics were upset when, in late September 1932, the ringing of church bells was prohibited in Béjar for mass, weddings or funerals. Elsewhere, many left-wing alcaldes (mayors) levied a local tax on bell-ringing.⁴⁷ In Talavera de la Reina (Toledo), the Mayor imposed fines on women wearing crucifixes. In the socially conflictive province of Badajoz, numerous incidents, such as the prohibition of funeral processions, incited hatred. In Fuente de Cantos, the Mayor imposed a tax on bell-ringing of 10 pesetas for the first five minutes and 2 pesetas for every minute thereafter. In Fregenal de la Sierra, bell-ringing was forbidden altogether and a tax levied on Catholic burials. There were church burnings in several villages. In Villafranca de los Barros, the Socialist majority of the town council voted in April 1932 for the removal of the statue of the Sacred Heart from the main square.⁴⁸

Religious frictions were quickly exploited by the right. Processions became demonstrations, pilgrimages became protest marches, and Sunday sermons became meetings which often provoked anti-clerical reactions, sometimes violent.⁴⁹ It was but a short step from the rhetoric of persecution and suffering to the advocacy of violence against Republican reforms portrayed as the work of a sinister foreign Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik plot.⁵⁰ In later years, Gil Robles would admit that he had deliberately set out to push his audiences towards conflict with the authorities. In April 1937, when Acción Popular was being dissolved and incorporated by Franco into his new one-party state, Gil Robles claimed proudly that the reserves of mass rightist belligerence which he had built up during the Republic made possible the victory of the right in the Civil War. He saw this ‘splendid harvest’ as the fruit of his own propaganda efforts. He was still taking pride in this achievement when he published his memoirs in 1968.⁵¹

Gil Robles’s rhetoric during the Republic reflected the feelings and the fears of his most powerful backers, the big landowners or latifundistas. Their outrage at the sheer effrontery of landless labourers in daring to take part in the revolutionary upheavals of 1918–21 reflected their sense of social, cultural and indeed near-racist superiority over those who worked their estates. That the Republican–Socialist coalition should declare its intention to improve the daily lot of the wretched day-labourers implied a sweeping challenge to the very structures of rural power. The hostility of the landowners towards the new regime was first manifested in a determination to block Republican reforms by any means, including unrestrained violence. The hatred of the latifundistas for their braceros would find its most complete expression in the early months of the Civil War when they would collaborate enthusiastically with Franco’s African columns as they spread a wave of terror through south-western Spain.

The Republic’s attempts to streamline the officer corps had provoked the hostility of many officers but especially of the Africanistas. General José Sanjurjo, Director General of the Civil Guard and a prominent African veteran, was one of the first officers publicly to identify the subject tribes of Morocco with the Spanish left – a transference of racial prejudice which would facilitate the savagery carried out by the Army of Africa during the Civil War. Sanjurjo blurted this out in the wake of the atrocity at the remote and impoverished village of Castilblanco in Badajoz, when villagers murdered four Civil Guards in an outburst of collective rage at systematic oppression. The Socialist landworkers’ union, the Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra (FNTT), had called a forty-eight-hour strike in the province to protest against the landowners’ constant infractions of the Republic’s social legislation. On 31 December 1931, in Castilblanco, urged on by the Mayor, Civil Guards opened fire on a peaceful demonstration by strikers, killing one man and wounding two others. Shocked, the infuriated villagers turned on the four Civil Guards and beat them to death. For the left, the events of Castilblanco were the result of the area’s long history of appalling economic deprivation.⁵²

Sanjurjo was furious because the obligation to go to Castilblanco forced him to miss a big society wedding banquet in Zaragoza.⁵³ On 2 January 1932, when he arrived in the village, now occupied by a substantial detachment of Civil Guards, the officer in charge indicated the hundred or so prisoners with the words: ‘Here are the murderers, just look at their faces!’ Sanjurjo burst out, ‘But haven’t you killed them yet?’ The prisoners were severely mistreated. For seven days and nights, they were kept stripped to the waist and, in temperatures below freezing, forced to stand with their arms upright. If they fell, they were beaten with rifle butts. Several died of pneumonia. Speaking to journalists at the funeral of the murdered guards, Sanjurjo compared the workers of Castilblanco to the Moorish tribesmen he had fought in Morocco, commenting, ‘In a corner of the province of Badajoz, Rif tribesmen have a base.’ He declared mendaciously that after the colonial disaster at the battle of Annual in July 1921, when nine thousand soldiers had died, ‘even in Monte Arruit, when the Melilla command collapsed, the corpses of Christians were not mutilated with such savagery’.⁵⁴

This prejudice was echoed in the national and local press by journalists who never actually visited Castilblanco. The monarchist daily ABC remarked that ‘the least civilized Rif tribesmen were no worse’.⁵⁵ Right-wing journalists described the landless labourers of Extremadura as ‘these Rif tribesmen with no Rif’ and as ‘Berbers, savages, bloodthirsty savages and Marxist hordes’. In general terms, the local newspaper reports of Castilblanco reflected the belligerently racist attitudes of the rural elite. The inhabitants of Castilblanco, and by extension the rural proletariat as a whole, were presented as an inferior race, horrible examples of racial degeneration. It was common for them to be described as sub-human and abnormal. Colourfully exaggerated descriptions pandered to the ancestral fears of the respectable classes: the allegation that a woman had danced on the corpses recalled the witches’ Sabbath.⁵⁶ The often explicit conclusion was that the rural proletariat should be disciplined in the same way as the colonial enemy in Morocco, and there were calls for the Civil Guard to be reinforced with crack motorized units.⁵⁷

Over the course of the week following the incident at Castilblanco, the bloody revenge of the Civil Guard saw eighteen people die. Three days after Castilblanco, they killed two and wounded three in Zalamea de la Serena (Badajoz). Two days later, a striker was shot dead and another wounded in Calzada de Calatrava and one striker was shot in Puertollano (both villages in Ciudad Real), while two strikers were killed and eleven wounded in Épila (Zaragoza), and two strikers killed and fifteen wounded, nine seriously, in Jeresa (Valencia). On 5 January 1932, there took place the most shocking of these actions, when twenty-eight Civil Guards opened fire on a peaceful demonstration at Arnedo, a small town in the northern Castilian province of Logroño.

One of Arnedo’s main sources of employment was a shoe factory, owned by Faustino Muro, a man of extreme right-wing convictions. Towards the end of 1931, he sacked several of his workers for failing to vote for monarchist candidates in the elections of April and others for belonging to the UGT. The case was put before the local arbitration committee, which declared in favour of the workers, but Muro refused to give them back their jobs. A public protest meeting was held in front of the Ayuntamiento (town hall). Without apparent motive, the Civil Guard opened fire, shooting dead a worker, a twenty-six-year-old pregnant mother, her two-year-old son and three other women bystanders. Bullet wounds were suffered by a further fifty townspeople, including many women and children, some of them babes-in-arms. Over the next few days, a further five died of their wounds and many had to have limbs amputated, among them a five-year-old boy and a widow with six children.⁵⁸ The inhabitants of Arnedo would suffer further in the early months of the Civil War. Forty-six would be murdered between late July and early October 1936, including some who had been wounded in 1932.⁵⁹

Azaña observed in his diary that Spanish public opinion was now divided between those who hated the Civil Guard and those who revered it as the last-ditch defender of the social order.⁶⁰ After Arnedo, Sanjurjo declared that the Civil Guard stood between Spain and the imposition of Soviet communism and that the victims were part of an uncultured rabble that had been deceived by malicious agitators.⁶¹ His words after Castilblanco and the Civil Guard’s revenge reflected the way in which the cruelty and savagery of the Moroccan wars was imported into Spain and used against the working class. Sanjurjo, however, was not the first person to note the link. The Asturian miners’ leader, Manuel Llaneza, wrote after the repression of the revolutionary general strike of 1917 of ‘the African hatred’ with which the military columns had killed and beaten workers and wrecked and looted their homes.⁶²

Unfortunately for the Republican–Socialist coalition, for an increasing number of middle-class Spaniards the excesses of the army and the Civil Guard were justified by the excesses of the CNT. On 18 January 1932, there was an insurrection by miners who took over the town of Fígols in the most northerly part of the province of Barcelona. The movement spread to the entire region of northern Catalonia. The CNT immediately declared a solidarity strike. The only place outside Catalonia where there was any significant response was Seville. There, the CNT, with the backing of the Communist Party, called a general strike on 25 and 26 January. The strike was total for the two days and public services were maintained by the Civil Guard. The accompanying violence convinced the Socialists that there were agents provocateurs in the anarchist movement working to show that the government was incapable of maintaining order. On 21 January, Azaña also declared in the Cortes that the extreme right was manipulating the anarchists. He stated that those who occupied factories, assaulted town halls, uprooted railway tracks, cut telephone lines or attacked the forces of order would be treated as rebels. His response was to send in the army, apply the Law for the Defence of the Republic, suspend the anarchist press and deport the strike leaders from both Catalonia and Seville. Inevitably, CNT hostility against the Republic and the UGT intensified to a virtual war.⁶³