The Spanish Holocaust (11 page)

The ultra-right-wing press in general regarded
The Protocols
as a serious sociological study. Since there were few Jews in Spain, there was hardly a ‘Jewish problem’. However, Spanish ‘anti-Semitism without Jews’ was not about real Jews but was an abstract construction of a perceived international threat. Anti-Semitism was central to integrist Catholicism and harked back to Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus Christ and to medieval myths and fears about Jewish ritual killings of children. Now, it was given a burning contemporary relevance by fears of revolution. The notion that all those belonging to left-wing parties were the
stooges of the Jews was supported by references to the left-wingers and Jews fleeing from Nazism who found refuge in the Second Republic. As far as the Carlist press was concerned, the few incoming Jews were the advance guard of world revolution and intended to poison Spanish society with pornography and prostitution.
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Opposed to urbanism and industrialism, to liberalism and capitalism, all ideologies associated with Jews and Freemasons, the Carlists aspired to destroy the Republic by armed insurrection and to impose a kind of rural Arcadian theocracy.
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Conservative intellectuals argued that through various subversive devices the Jews had enslaved the Spanish working class. One alleged consequence of this subjugation was that the Spanish workers themselves came to possess oriental qualities. The Spanish radical right began to see the working class as imbued with Jewish and Muslim treachery and barbarism. The most extreme proponent of this view was the late nineteenth-century Carlist ideologue Juan Vázquez de Mella. He argued that Jewish capital had financed the liberal revolutions and was now behind the Communist revolution in order, in union with the Muslim hordes, to destroy Christian civilization and impose Jewish tyranny on the world. Even King Alfonso XIII believed that the rebellion of tribesmen in the Rif was ‘the beginning of a general uprising of the entire Muslim world instigated by Moscow and international Jewry’.
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Carlist ideologues took these ideas seriously, arguing that ‘the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, Judaism, Communism, Freemasonry and Death’, already controlled Britain, France and Australia and soon Spain would fall under their dominion.
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The books of Vázquez de Mella and other Carlist ideologues were eagerly devoured by Colonel José Enrique Varela during his imprisonment after the Sanjurjada. Contrasting the success of the Primo de Rivera coup of 1923 and the failure of Sanjurjo in 1932, the dynamic and courageous Varela was convinced that a successful military rising needed substantial civilian support. He was persuaded that this could be found in the fierce Carlist militia, the Requeté. Although he resisted calls to lead an exclusively Carlist uprising on the grounds that this required someone more senior such as Franco, Varela undertook to turn the Requeté into an effective citizen army. Since he was still under police surveillance, on his trips to the Carlists’ northern heartland of Navarre he took the pseudonym ‘Don Pepe’. Day-to-day training was supervised by the National Inspector of the Requeté, the retired Lieutenant Colonel Ricardo de Rada, who also would train the Falangist militia.
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Similarly, in 1934 another of the officers involved in the Sanjurjada, the Civil
Guard Captain Lisardo Doval, would train the paramilitary squads of the Juventud de Acción Popular (the youth movement of Gil Robles’s Catholic party, the CEDA).

Carlists, theologians and Africanista officers were among those who through their writings and speeches fomented an atmosphere of social and racial hatred. Another was Onésimo Redondo. Although hardly a national figure, he merits attention both as one of the founders of Spanish fascism and because it was largely due to his ideas that his home town, Valladolid, experienced greater political violence than other Castilian provincial capitals. As a young lawyer, Onésimo Redondo had been involved in Acción Nacional (as Acción Popular was originally called), the Catholic political group founded on 26 April 1931 by Ángel Herrera Oria and principally supported by Castilian farmers. In early May, he set up its local branch in Valladolid and headed its propaganda campaign for the forthcoming parliamentary elections. On 13 June, Onésimo launched the first number of the fortnightly, and later weekly, anti-Republican newspaper
Libertad
. After the Republican–Socialist coalition won a huge majority on 28 June, Onésimo rejected democracy, broke with Acción Nacional and, in August, founded a fascist party, the Juntas Castellanas de Actuación Hispánica (the Castilian Hispanic Action Groups).
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On 10 August, he published a fiery proclamation in
Libertad
expressing his commitment to the traditional rural values of Old Castile, to social justice and to violence. He wrote: ‘The historic moment, my young countrymen, obliges us to take up weapons. May we know how to use them to defend what is ours and not to serve politicians.’ For him ‘nationalism is a movement of struggle, it must include warlike, violent activities in the service of Spain against the traitors within’.
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Certainly, Onésimo Redondo and the Juntas brought a tone of brutal confrontation to a city previously notable for the tranquillity of its labour relations.
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Onésimo called for ‘a few hundred young warriors in each province, disciplined idealists, to smash to smithereens this dirty phantom of the red menace’. His recruits armed themselves for street fights with the predominantly Socialist working class of Valladolid. He wrote of the need to ‘cultivate the spirit of violence, of military conflict’. The meetings of the Juntas were held in virtual clandestinity. Over the next few years, his enthusiasm for violence grew progressively more strident.
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The numerical weakness of the Juntas obliged Onésimo to seek links with like-minded groups. Accordingly, his gaze fell upon the first overtly
fascist group in Spain, the tiny La Conquista del Estado (the Conquest of the State) led by Ramiro Ledesma Ramos.
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Originally from Zamora, Ledesma worked in a post office in Madrid. An enthusiastic disciple of German philosophy, he had founded his group in February 1931 in a squalid room in a Madrid office block. The light had not been connected and the only furniture was a table. The ten participants signed a manifesto he had written entitled ‘The Conquest of the State’. A newspaper of the same name was launched on 14 March. Despite public indifference and police harassment, it survived for a year.
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In the first number of
Libertad
, Onésimo Redondo had referred favourably to Ledesma Ramos’s newspaper: ‘We approve of the combative ardour and the eagerness of
La Conquista del Estado
, but we miss the anti-Semitic activity which that movement needs be effective and to go in the right direction.’
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Although Redondo translated Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
, his anti-Semitism drew more on the fifteenth-century Castilian Queen Isabel la Católica than on Nazism. Anti-Semitism was a recurring theme in his writings. In late 1931, for instance, he described the co-educational schools introduced by the Second Republic as an example of ‘Jewish action against free nations: a crime against the health of the people for which the traitors responsible must pay with their heads’.
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In October 1931, Onésimo met Ledesma Ramos in Madrid. Over the next few weeks, in several meetings in Madrid and Valladolid, they negotiated the loose fusion of their two groups as the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (the Groups of National Syndicalist Offensive or JONS). Launched on 30 November 1931, the JONS adopted the red and black colours of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT and took as its badge the emblem of the Catholic kings, the yoke and arrows. It was anti-democratic and imperialist, demanding Gibraltar, Morocco and Algeria for Spain and aspiring to ‘the extermination, the dissolution of the antinational, Marxist parties’. To this end, ‘national-syndicalist militias’ were to be created ‘in order to oppose red violence with nationalist violence’. Ledesma Ramos argued that political violence was legitimate and advocated the creation of armed militias along the lines of the Italian Fascist Squadri to prepare for insurrection or coup d’état.
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By way of practice, the JONS squads assaulted left-wing students and, in June 1933, sacked the Madrid offices of the Association of Friends of the USSR.
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In Valladolid, Onésimo devoted ever more time to the conversion of his forty-odd followers into warriors of what he now called ‘organized anti-communist militias’. Soon they would be involved in bloody clashes with left-wing students and workers in the University and in the streets
of Valladolid. Pistols were being bought and much time was spent on training. Already by the spring of 1932, Onésimo Redondo was writing about the civil war to come – ‘The war is getting nearer; the situation of violence is inevitable. There is no point in rejecting it. It is stupid to flee from making war when they are going to make war on us. The important thing is to prepare to win, and, to win, it is necessary to seize the initiative and go on to the attack.’ On 3 May 1932, a pitched battle was fought with the left in the main square of Valladolid after which more than twenty people were hospitalized. Onésimo himself was sentenced to two months in prison for the excesses of
Libertad
.
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Imprisonment did nothing to mellow Onésimo Redondo. His article in the fascist monthly
JONS
in May 1933 reflected the growing virulence of his thought and echoed Sanjurjo’s identification of the Spanish working class with the Arabs:

Marxism, with its Mohammedan utopias, with the truth of its dictatorial iron and with the pitiless lust of its sadistic magnates, suddenly renews the eclipse of Culture and freedoms like a modern Saracen invasion … This certain danger, of Africanization in the name of Progress, is clearly visible in Spain. We can state categorically that our Marxists are the most African of all Europe … Historically, we are a friction zone between that which is civilized and that which is African, between the Aryan and the Semitic … For this reason, the generations that built the fatherland, those that freed us from being an eternal extension of the Dark Continent, raised their swords against attacks from the south and they never sheathed them … The great Isabel ordered Spaniards always to watch Africa, to defeat Africa and never be invaded by her again. Was the Peninsula entirely de-Africanized? Is there not a danger of a new kind of African domination, here where so many roots of the Moorish spirit remained in the character of a race in the vanguard of Europe? We ask this important question dispassionately and we will answer it right away by underlining the evident danger of the new Africanization: ‘Marxism’. Throughout the world, there exists the Jewish or Semite conspiracy against Western civilization, but in Spain it can more subtly and rapidly connect the Semitic element, the African element. It can be seen flowering in all its primitive freshness in our southern provinces, where Moorish blood lives on in the subsoil of the race … The follower of Spanish Marxism, especially the Andalusian, soon takes the incendiary torch, breaks into manor houses and farms, impelled by the bandit subconscious, encouraged by the Semites of Madrid; he wants bread
without earning it, he wants to laze around and be rich, to take his pleasures and to take his revenge … and the definitive victory of Marxism will be the re-Africanization of Spain, the victory of the combined Semitic elements – Jews and Moors, aristocrats and plebeians who have survived ethnically and spiritually in the Peninsula and in Europe.
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By linking Marxism as a Jewish invention and its alleged threat of a ‘re-Africanization’ of Spain, Redondo was identifying Spain’s two archetypal ‘others’, the Jew and the Moor, with the Republic. His conclusion, shared by many on the right, was that a new Reconquista was needed to prevent Spain from falling into the hands of the modern foes. His views on the legitimacy of violence were similar to those of the Catholic extreme right exemplified by the writings of Castro Albarrán.
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Anti-Semitism could be found across most of the Spanish right. In some cases, it was a vague sentiment born of traditional Catholic resentment about the fate of Jesus Christ, but in others it was a murderous justification of violence against the left. Curiously, the virulence of Onésimo Redondo constituted something of an exception within Spain’s nascent fascist movement. Ledesma Ramos regarded anti-Semitism as having relevance only in Germany.
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The Falangist leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, had little or no interest in the ‘Jewish problem’ except when it came to the Jewish–Marxist influence over the working class. Nevertheless, the Falangist daily
Arriba
claimed that ‘the Judaic–Masonic International is the creator of the two great evils that have afflicted humanity: capitalism and Marxism’. José Antonio Primo de Rivera shared with other rightists a belief that violence was legitimate against a Republic that he perceived as influenced by Jews and Freemasons.
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He approved of attacks by Falangists on the Jewish-owned SEPU department stores in the spring of 1935.
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The identification of the working class with foreign enemies was based on a convoluted logic whereby Bolshevism was a Jewish invention and the Jews were indistinguishable from Muslims and thus leftists were bent on subjecting Spain to domination by African elements. Thus hostility to the Spanish working class was presented as a legitimate act of Spanish patriotism. According to another of the Acción Española group, the one-time liberal turned ultra-rightist Ramiro de Maeztú, the Spanish nation had been forged in its struggles against the Jews (arrogant usurers) and the Moors (savages without civilization).
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In one of his articles, the monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo neatly encapsulated the racist dimension of the anti-leftist discourse when he referred to the
Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero as ‘a Moroccan Lenin’.
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José Antonio Primo de Rivera also shared this association of the left with the Moors. In his reflections in prison in 1936, he interpreted all of Spanish history as an endless struggle between Goths and Berbers. The spirit of the former lived on in monarchical, aristocratic, religious and military values while that of the latter was to be found in the rural proletariat. He denounced the Second Republic as a ‘new Berber invasion’ signifying the demolition of European Spain.
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