The Spanish Civil War (75 page)

Thus ended the experiment of the Basque republic, Euzkadi, whose political leaders transferred themselves, a government-in-exile, to Barcelona. General Gámir preoccupied himself with withdrawing as many troops as he could towards Santander, losing as he did so, in an aerial attack, the new Italian commander of his second division, Nino Nanetti.
²
His tasks were easier since Franco made no serious effort to follow up the capture of Bilbao quickly, as his air chief Kindelán complained.
³
The nationalists had lost some 30,000 casualties since March, including 4,500 deaths; Gámir estimated a total of 35,000 casualties for the republic, of which 10,000 would have been the maximum for deaths.
⁴

Franco had learnt his lesson from the ‘senseless shootings’ after the fall of Málaga. He forbade large troop detachments from entering Bilbao, so avoiding excesses.
⁵
Immediate reprisals did not occur, and few civilian prisoners were made. But the conquerors made immediately every effort to extinguish Basque separatist feelings. Schoolmasters were dismissed unless they could positively prove at least their political neutrality. The Basque tongue was officially forbidden. Within a fortnight, Herr Bethke, of ROWAK, had visited the iron mines, blast furnaces, and rolling mills of Bilbao. He found them undamaged. Work could continue to provide for future offensives.
⁶
Ores sent in the past to Britain, particularly to the Steel Company of Wales, were diverted.
⁷
So, too, were the important chemical works at Galdacano, the
only factory in Spain capable of the manufacture of artillery shells. Vizcaya had half the production of explosives in all Spain. The fall of Bilbao also meant that all three of Spain’s principal cableheads for telecommunications were in Franco’s hands (the others were Vigo and Málaga).
¹

The news of the fall of Bilbao was given by a priest to the Basque refugee children in England at their main camp at Stoneham (Hampshire). The assembled children were so appalled that they fell upon the bringer of such bad tidings with stones and sticks. Three hundred children out of the 3,500 broke out of the camp in grief-stricken purposelessness.
²

The fall of Bilbao intensified an already heated worldwide controversy over the religious implications of the Spanish Civil War. The tone of the dispute had been set in January when
Osservatore Romano,
the Vatican periodical, had ruminated: ‘To a militant conception of life, struggle for a doctrine is a holy war … only liberal agnosticism, with its conception of tolerance in theory, as well as in practice … can be shocked by ideological struggles.’
³
But, despite this, the republican affiliation of the Basques, ‘the most Christian people in Spain’,
⁴
made Catholics look to their loyalties. In the spring, two eminent French Catholics, François Mauriac and Jacques Maritain, had issued a pro-Basque manifesto. Dr Múgica, Bishop of Vitoria, in Rome, wrote supporting the French manifesto even if he still refused to give his name publicly to the defence of the Basques:
⁵
he kept his protests to the Vatican, where, however, his views had an effect. The destruction of Guernica strengthened the hands of those whom the right-wing French
Catholic press dubbed the ‘
chrétiens rouges
’. On 15 May, two Spanish Dominicans in Rome, Father Carro and Father Beltrán de Heredia, published a violent pamphlet denouncing the idea ‘prevalent in too many Catholic homes’ that one could be neutral in the Spanish Civil War. For that meant giving equal rights to ‘the murderers, the traitors to God, and to the Fatherland’. Sin, like crime, had no rights. The archbishop of Westminster described the war as ‘a furious battle between Christian civilization and the most cruel paganism that has ever darkened the world’.
¹
The Pope officially declared all those priests who had been murdered to be martyrs. Claudel thereupon wrote his ode ‘
Aux Martyrs Espagnols
’, as a verse preface to a pro-nationalist book by Juan Estelrich, a Francoist diplomatic agent in Paris. On 1 July, Maritain replied with an article in
La Nouvelle Revue française,
in which he described those who killed the poor, ‘the people of Christ’, in the name of religion, as being as culpable as those who killed priests by hatred of religion.
²

That day the Spanish hierarchy, led by Cardinal Gomá, archbishop of Toledo, took the unusual step of dispatching a joint letter to the ‘Bishops of the Whole World’.
³
They explained that they had not wished an ‘armed plebiscite’ in Spain, though thousands of christians ‘had taken up arms on their personal responsibility to save the principles of religion’. They argued that the legislative power since 1931 had sought to change ‘Spanish history in a way contrary to the needs of the national spirit’. The Comintern had armed ‘a revolutionary militia to seize power’. The civil war was, therefore, theologically just.
⁴
The bishops recalled the martyred priests and comforted themselves with the reflection that, when their enemies who had been fascinated by ‘doctrines of demons died under the sanction of law, they had been reconciled’ in their vast majority to the God of their fathers. In Majorca, only 2 per cent had died impenitent; in the southern regions no more than 20 per cent. The bishops concluded by naming the national movement
‘a vast family, in which the citizen attains his total development’. Despite this, they added that they ‘would be the first to regret that the irresponsible autocracy of parliament should be replaced by the more terrible one of a dictatorship without roots in the nation’. They finally reproved the Basque priests for not having listened ‘to the voice of the Church’. This letter was signed by neither the archbishop of Tarragona (in exile in Switzerland), nor by the bishop of Vitoria.
¹
The latter prelate denied from Rome that there was a religious freedom in nationalist Spain (even the Germans had complained about persecution of protestants),
²
nor was it true that death sentences were only administered after trial.
³
Despite this championship by their bishop, the Basque priests were accused before the Pope by the Spanish hierarchy of having acted as politicians and of carrying arms. The Basque clergy replied that none of their priests had ever been affiliated
qua
priest with the Basque nationalist party and that none, not even the corps of almoners, had carried arms.
⁴
But, on 28 August, the Vatican formally recognized the ‘Burgos authorities’—as the British Foreign Office referred to them—as the official government of Spain. An apostolic delegate, Monsignor Antoniutti, was dispatched to the Castilian capital. Hence-forward any Catholic who sided with the republic or who even, like Maritain, preached that the church should be neutral, became technically a rebel against the Pope. But until late 1938, the rebels still felt aggrieved towards the Vatican, since the Pope did not accord them full recognition, and did not send a nuncio, only an apostolic delegate.

The pamphlet war continued during the rest of the Spanish conflict, above all in France. Accusations of espionage, or that foreigners were plotting with right- or left-wing terrorist groups, were made daily.
⁵
Mauriac continued his articles in favour of the republic. Charles Maur
ras replied, in
L’Action française,
by proclaiming that the church was the only real International. Bernanos soon published
Les Grands cimetières sous la lune,
which gave a terrible account of the nationalist repression in Majorca. A right-wing writer replied, with
Les Grands chantiers au soleil.
A Jesuit priest, Juan Vilar Costa, who had sided with the republic, founded a Catholic institute for religious studies, to give the republic a better name than it had previously among the world’s Catholics. He also published a clever book,
Montserrat,
commenting on the Spanish bishops’ letter. In Liège, a characteristic prayer of the exiled Spanish priests to the Virgin of the Pillar appeared:

To You, O Mary, Queen of Peace, we always return, we the faithful sons of Your best-loved Spain, now vilified, outraged, befouled by criminal bolshevism, deprived by Jewish Marxism, and scorned by savage communism. We pray You, tears in our eyes, to come to our help, to accord final triumph to the glorious armies of the liberator and reconqueror of Spain, the new Pelayo, the Caudillo!
Viva
Christ the King!
¹

In England, judgements were almost as elated: for example, the prominent Catholic apologist Douglas Jerrold, who, a year previously, had constituted a small link in the chain leading to the rising, wrote in his autobiography,
Georgian Adventure,
of a visit to Franco: Franco might ‘not be a great man, as the world judges, but he is certainly something a thousand times more important—a supremely good man, a hero possibly; possibly a saint’.
²

In America, the Basque priests relied upon protestants for active championship. But polls suggested that only four out of ten American Catholics were with the bishops. Opinion was so cautious that a project to bring certain Basque children to America was dropped as risking neutrality.
³
Certainly, fear of alienating the Catholic vote was always a factor in Roosevelt’s decisions. In the Basque provinces themselves, persecution had started. Two hundred seventy-eight priests and 125 monks (including 22 Jesuits) suffered deprivation, imprisonment, or deportation to other parts of Spain.

In July 1937 the ‘Second International Writers’ Congress’, ‘a travelling circus’ of writers, was held at Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid, intended as a culmination to these controversies. The declared purpose was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals to the war. One concealed aim, however, was to condemn André Gide, who, in his recent book,
Retour de l’URSS,
had attacked the Soviet Union, where he had been received as a friend of the government. This congress was attended by Hemingway, Spender, Pablo Neruda, Nicolás Guillén, Octavio Paz, and most of the leading literary apologists for the republic. Others present included Julien Benda, André Chamson, Ilya Ehrenburg, Ludwig Renn, and Eric Weinert (of whom Weinert and Renn had both served in the International Brigades). The congress was dominated by Malraux, ‘with his nervous sniff and tic’, who gamely defended Gide from the accusations of being a ‘Hitlerian fascist’.
¹
The delegates drove about in Rolls-Royces and talked with the Spanish poets of the war—Rafael Alberti, Altolaguirre, Bergamín, Antonio Machado, and Miguel Hernández.

Of these, Rafael Alberti was the most prolific: there were few editions, for example, of
Volunteer for Liberty,
the paper of the 15th International Brigade, which did not contain one of his verses. The best new poet was, however, probably Miguel Hernández, a member of the Fifth Regiment at the start of the war. He was a shepherd who had been taught to read by a priest in the hills through examples of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing. The outbreak of the civil war inspired in him a sudden outburst of poetic activity. For example:

The winds of the people sustain me,

Spreading within my heart.

The winds of the people impel me,

And roar in my very throat …

I come not from a people of oxen,

My people praise

The lion’s leap,

The eagle’s straight swoop,

And the strong charge of the bull

Whose pride is in his horns.

Hernández was representative of a whole generation of young socialists or communists who believed that they were fighting for liberty in Spain. Most of them would not have put up with Stalinism for a minute had they known what it involved. They were scornful of defeatism and, rather than rendered political by the war, were made military by it.
¹

A speech by Bertolt Brecht was read at the congress.
²
As on many occasions of this kind, the national anthems of the different nations were played, so that the English poet Stephen Spender found himself at Barcelona giving the salute of the clenched fist while the band trumpeted ‘God Save the King’. Azaña refused to give the closing address. He thought that nobody important had come from abroad, and that the Spanish delegation was ‘no more lucid’ than were the foreigners.
³

During the summer, Manuel de Irujo, the minister of justice, was doing his best, with Negrín’s encouragement, and the collaboration of the Catalan councillors, to revive conventional justice: regular judges sat as chairmen of popular tribunals, prison directors were appointed from the old career service rather than by political affiliation, the
biretta
returned to the court, as did the republican flag over the law court building. Such radical revolutionary lawyers as Angel Samblancat and Eduardo Barriobero lost their terrifying power in Barcelona. Many who had at first greeted the revolution with enthusiasm welcomed these setbacks to it. For these acts were important victories of justice over the rule of force, predictability over arbitrariness. But there was a dark side to these occurrences. Ever since the formation of Negrín’s government, the communists had concentrated upon the persecution of the POUM. Its leaders were accused of fascism and of conspiring with Franco. The work of persecution, including arrest, interrogation, and torture, was mainly carried out by foreign communists. The Spanish communists, not knowing or not daring to guess the truth, observed what was going on and cravenly applauded, thereby causing the demoralization of the republican cause in a way which they never fully realized. Did the Catholic communist José Bergamín really believe that Nin, Gorkin and Andrade were spies? It is impossible to believe. Yet he wrote that he thought the POUM leaders had no
right to any defence.
¹
The
Prietista
wing of the socialists and even the left republicans connived at these actions in a way which damaged them also. Beset by problems of war and its cruelties, they read the accounts of the alleged treachery by the POUM, and gave the benefit of the doubt—to the accusers, not the accused.

In April, the communist-controlled police in Madrid had unearthed a conspiracy by the Falange. One of the conspirators, named Castilla, was induced to become an
agent provocateur.
Castilla prevailed upon another falangist in the capital, Javier Golfín, to prepare a fraudulent plan for a military rising by the Fifth Column. Golfín did this, and he, and his plan, were then apprehended. Next, someone, probably the head of the Soviet espionage in Spain, Orlov, forged a letter purporting to be from Nin, a leader in the POUM, to Franco, on the back of Golfín’s plan. At about the same time, another genuine falangist, José Roca, who kept a bookshop in Gerona, was unmasked by the Catalan communists. Roca’s task in the Fifth Column was to pass on messages to a hotelier in the same town, named Dalmau. One day, sometime in May, a well-dressed individual called at the bookshop, left some money for Roca, and a message for Dalmau, and asked if he could leave a suitcase in the shop for three days. Roca agreed to his request. Not long after, the police arrived to carry out a search. Naturally, they came upon the suitcase which, when opened, was found to contain a pile of secret documents, all sealed, curiously enough, with the stamp of the POUM military committee.
²

It was upon these documents, the letter from Nin to Franco, and the suitcase found in Gerona that the communist case against the POUM rested. All were forgeries.

By mid-June, the communists judged their position strong enough to take final action. They had secured the banning of the POUM’s paper,
La Batalla,
on 28 May. Antonov-Ovsëenko, Berzin, and Stashev
sky, the most prominent Russians who had been in Spain since August 1936 (as consul-general in Barcelona, chief of the military mission and economic councillor), were all recalled in June 1937 to Moscow and vanished forever: Stashevsky had unwisely visited Moscow in April and complained to Stalin of the recklessness of the Russian secret police’s activity in Spain. But doubtless his fate was settled before that anyway.
¹
On 12 June, in Russia, Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven other senior Russian generals were shot for ‘intrigues with Germany’. It could thus hardly have been a surprise to the communist minister of education, Jesús Hernández, when, on 14 June, he was told by Colonel Antonio Ortega, the director-general of security, that the GPU chief in Spain, Orlov, had given orders for the arrest of all the leaders of the POUM.
²
Hernández went to Orlov, who insisted that the cabinet should be told nothing of the matter, since the minister of the interior, Zugazagoitia, and others, were friends of those detained. There was proof, Orlov added, of the POUM’s connection with a fascist spy-ring. Hernández went to Díaz, who was furious. Together, they went to the communist party headquarters, where a quarrel occurred. Díaz and Hernández denounced the foreign ‘advisers’. Codovilla suggested smoothly that excess of work was making Díaz ill. Why did he not take a holiday for a while? In Barcelona, meanwhile, on 16 June, on the orders of the new head of public order there, the
comunizante
Colonel Ricardo Burillo, the POUM headquarters at the Hotel Falcón was closed. It was immediately turned into a prison. The POUM itself was declared illegal, and forty members of its central committee arrested. Rovira, the commander of the 29th POUM Division, on the Aragon front, received a
telegram to go to Barcelona to the headquarters of the Army of the East: on arrival, he was arrested.
¹
Small POUM battalions at the other fronts were disbanded. Andrés Nin was taken off separately, but friends found themselves in the Atocha prison in Madrid. All members of the POUM went in fear of arrest, since Stalin’s habit of visiting the alleged crimes of the leaders upon friends and families was well known. The communist newspapers screamed accusations against those whom their party had arrested, but did not bring to trial. A rumour then spread that Andrés Nin had been murdered in prison. Nin had once been Trotsky’s secretary, had worked in Russia throughout the 1920s until he had left it, and Stalinist communism, through disillusionment with its methods, and he was precisely the kind of individual whom Stalin desired dead.

Negrín sent for Hernández. He asked Nin’s whereabouts. Hernández said that he knew nothing. Negrín complained that the Russians were behaving as if Barcelona were their own country. What would happen in the cabinet that afternoon when Nin’s disappearance would be raised? Hernández promised to investigate. Codovilla told him that Nin was being interrogated. The cabinet meeting followed. At the door, journalists asked for news of Nin. Inside, Zugazagoitia demanded if his jurisdiction as minister of the interior were to be limited by Russian policemen. Prieto, Irujo, and Bernardo Giner supported this protest. Hernández and Uribe replied that they knew nothing of Nin. No one believed them, not realizing that there could be secrets even among communists. Negrín then suspended the discussion until all the facts were known.

Had they been able to purchase and transport good arms from US, British, and French manufacturers, the socialist and republican members of the Spanish government might have tried to cut themselves loose from Stalin. But non-intervention meant that the alliance with Russia could not be broken. Since the gold had already gone to Moscow, there was also little possibility of being able to buy elsewhere.

A widespread campaign in Spain and abroad now began asking, ‘Where is Nin?’ Nin, after all, was one of the internationally best-known people in the Spanish revolutionary movement. The CNT national committee sent a protest to the government, on 28 June, complaining that they needed evidence before they could believe that
people such as Nin, Gorkin and Andrade were fascists, just as they would need proof to believe such an accusation against Miaja: ‘We beg, in the name of justice, constitutional legality and the right of all citizens, defended and represented by their own democracy, that the political persecution against the POUM cease.’
¹
Negrín begged the communist party to end the discreditable affair. The Spanish communists, who were in a scarcely better position to answer these questions than their questioners, replied that Nin was no doubt in Berlin, or Salamanca. In fact, he was almost certainly already dead.

It seems that Nin had first been taken by car from Barcelona to Orlov’s own prison, in the dilapidated ex–cathedral city of Alcalá de Henares, Azaña’s birthplace and Cervantes’s, but now almost a Russian colony. He there underwent the customary Soviet interrogation of traitors to the cause.
²
His resistance to these methods was amazing. He refused to sign documents admitting his guilt and that of his friends. Orlov was at his wits’ end. So were Bielov and Vittorio Vidali, who apparently were his colleagues in the actual interrogation of Nin. What should they do? Orlov himself went in deadly fear of Yezhov, the insensate chief of the GPU in Russia. Eventually, according to Hernández later, the Italian Vidali (Carlos Contreras) suggested that a ‘Nazi’ attack to liberate Nin should be simulated. So, one dark night, probably 22 or 23 June, they took him to a house in Alcalá used by the (communist) head of the air force, Ignacio Hildago de Cisneros. There he was tortured but he confessed nothing. He was taken out and killed in a field halfway between Alcalá and Perales de Tajuna. Orlov with an assistant (Juzik) went to the prison in Alcalá where Nin had been held. His refusal to admit his guilt probably saved the lives of his friends. Stalin and Yezhov perhaps planned a trial in Spain on the model of the Moscow trials, with a paraphernalia of confessions; if so, they were thwarted, though, during subsequent months, the remaining POUM leaders were subjected to interrogation and torture in, for example, the convent of Saint Ursula in Barcelona, ‘the Dachau of republican Spain’ as one of its survivors described it. Although Nin was the only member of the POUM’s leadership to be killed, a number of interna
tional sympathizers with it also died in mysterious circumstances: these included Erwin Wolf, half-Czech, half-German, another ex-secretary of Trotsky, who was kidnapped in Barcelona, and never seen again; the Austrian socialist Kurt Landau; Marc Rhein, the journalist son of the old menshevik leader, Rafael Abramovich (Abramovich himself made two fruitless journeys to Spain to discover what had happened); José Robles, sometime lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, perhaps killed because he had been interpreter to the disgraced General Berzin;
¹
and, perhaps, ‘Bob’ Smilie, the English journalist, son of the miners’ leader of that name, who had come to Spain on behalf of the British Independent Labour party and died apparently of appendicitis, in a prison to which he had been sent without justification.

What did the members of the republican government think of this affair? It is hard to be certain: Negrín told Azaña that Nin had been detained and freed by German agents within the International Brigades. Was that not a little novelesque? asked Azaña. Not at all, Negrín said. The same sort of thing had occurred in respect of several Russian advisers at Gaylord’s Hotel, who had been poisoned by Nazi spies. Azaña noted this ‘fact’ in his diary without comment.
²
The question is open whether, on the one hand, Negrín suspected the truth, and misled Azaña; or whether Negrín was deceived by the communists. It seems likely that the first was the case: and that Negrín knew it to be ‘a dirty business’, as he put it to Hernández.
³
Both Azaña’s and Negrín’s attitudes to the POUM were conditioned by their irritation with what they believed to be a provocative group of revolutionaries who they thought were damaging the war effort. Nin’s councillorship of justice in Catalonia had not been distinguished by a nice concern for humanity towards the ‘bourgeoisie’, and a comment by a member of the POUM, Manuel Casanova, on the party’s brutal activities at Lérida in
1936 is a reminder that that party ‘knew how to hate’.
¹
This of course does not justify, but it helps to explain, the opinions of the President and the Prime Minister.

The affair of the POUM caused, in the world of communism, as great an intellectual controversy as that of the Basque priests in the world of Roman Catholicism. In some cases, the same men who protested against the Pope’s treatment of Basque priests protested against Stalin’s treatment of the POUM: for example, Mauriac, Jean Duhamel and Roger Martin du Gard wrote to the republican government to protest against the trial of the POUM, and to implore them to permit rights of defence. Ilya Ehrenburg, the one Russian writer of his generation apart from Pasternak who survived the purges in Russia and who had, as has been seen, been much in Spain, wrote in
Izvestia:

I must express the sense of shame which I now feel as a man. The same day that the fascists are busy shooting the women of Asturias, there appeared in the French paper a protest against injustice … But these people did not protest against the butchers of Asturias but rather against the republic who dares to detain fascists and
provocateurs
of the POUM.
²

Ehrenburg, alas, knew only too well how innocent were those who died in the purges, as his subsequent memoir shows.
³
Meantime, George Orwell, in trying to defend the POUM in liberal England, found his articles refused by Kingsley Martin, the editor of the
New Statesman.
⁴

The republican government were doing their best to escape from the trap into which, through excessive reliance on the Russians, they had fallen. Irujo, the Basque nationalist minister of justice, named a special magistrate, Miguel Moreno Laguía, to act as a judge in the case of Nin. Moreno Laguía did detain a number of policemen who, he thought, were involved, among them a certain Vázquez. A unit of assault guards arrived to release him, while he was in the judge’s custody. When the judge protested, the guards sought to arrest him also. The judge let Vázquez go. Irujo, Prieto and Zugazagoitia threatened to resign unless Moreno were confirmed. Later, the cabinet transferred the director-general of security, Ortega, who had been responsible for the original arrest of Nin, to a field command, and eventually replaced him with Carlos de Juan, the chief prosecutor of the republic. Judge Moreno Laguía continued vainly looking for Nin, while Nin’s companions remained months more in gaol before being brought to trial,
¹
and his presumed murderers continued in influential positions. During the latter part of 1937, a number of the POUM rank and file were also ruthlessly shot, after summary courts-martial manned by the communists.
²
According to Gorkin, meantime, there were about 1,500 ‘antifascist prisoners’—anarchists,
POUMistas,
others—in the Model Prison in Valencia in late 1937.