The Spanish Holocaust (27 page)

The first of Mola’s secret instructions, issued in April, echoed the practice of the Africanistas against the Rif tribesmen, calling for extreme violence to shock the left into paralysis. Throughout the army as a whole, commitment to the conspiracy was far from unanimous. If it had been, it is unlikely that there would have been a civil war. Thus, Mola’s third secret instruction ordered the immediate execution of officers who opposed, or refused to join, the coup. The fifth instruction, of 20 June, had declared that ‘the timid and the hesitant should be warned that he who is not with us is against us and will be treated as an enemy’.
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Thus the first victims executed by the military rebels would be fellow army officers.

On 24 June, Mola sent specific instructions to Yagüe. He urged three main principles: extreme violence, tempo and high mobility: ‘Vacillations
lead only to failure.’
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Six days later, Yagüe received a more detailed set of twenty-five instructions about the organization of the repression. They included the following: use Moorish forces; delegate control of public order and security in the cities to the Falange; arrest all suspect authorities; eliminate all leftist elements (Communists, anarchists, trade unionists, Masons and so on); shut down all public meeting places; prohibit all demonstrations, strikes and public and private meetings.
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These instructions were the blueprint for the repression unleashed on Spain’s Moroccan territories on the night of 17 July. By sheer force of personality, Yagüe entirely dominated the overall commander of forces in Morocco, General Agustín Gómez Morato. Between 5 and 12 July, in the Llano Amarillo in the Ketama Valley, manoeuvres involving 20,000 troops from the Legion and the Regulares saw Yagüe’s tent become the epicentre of the African end of the conspiracy as he briefed the principal rebel officers. The manoeuvres concluded with Falangist chants.
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On 17 July, at Melilla, headquarters of the Second Legion, the general in command, Manuel Romerales Quintero, having refused to join the plotters, was arrested and shot for his ‘extremist ideas’. The rebels, headed by Colonel Luis Solans-Labedán, very soon had nearly one thousand prisoners in a concentration camp. When the overall commander General Gómez Morato flew to Melilla, he was immediately arrested. In Tetuán, in the western half of the Protectorate, Colonel Eduardo Sáenz de Buruaga and Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Asensio Cabanillas detained the acting High Commissioner, Arturo Álvarez Buylla, who was shot some time later. On the night of 17–18 July, the rebels shot 225 soldiers and civilians in Morocco.
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Among the first of them was one of the most brilliant officers in the Spanish forces, Captain Virgilio Leret Ruiz, a thirty-four-year-old pilot and an aeronautical engineer of genius, the commander of the Atalayón seaplane base at Melilla. He had opposed the rebels, been detained and shot after a summary trial. His wife Carlota O’Neill, a left-wing feminist, dramatist and journalist, was arrested and separated from her daughters Carlota and Mariela. Many other wives and daughters of Republicans were seized, raped and tortured by Falangists. This was central to the reign of terror initiated by Luis Solans. In late September, a gang of Falangists came to the prison with the intention of killing all the female detainees to celebrate the rebel capture of Toledo. The director of the prison reprimanded them, saying, ‘it’s outrageous to kill them all at once. When you want to kill women, by all means come and get them, but one at a time.’ They left with several victims who were never seen again. After
eighteen months in prison, Carlota O’Neill was court-martialled, accused of speaking Russian, of subversion and of responsibility for her husband’s actions on 17 July 1937. Nevertheless, she was sentenced to ‘only’ six years.
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Having secured their Moroccan base, the rebels’ next objective was Cádiz, the crucial port where the African Army would disembark. At 1.00 a.m. on 18 July, the military commander of Cádiz, Brigadier General José López-Pinto, assured the Civil Governor, Mariano Zapico, of his loyalty to the Republic. Three hours later, he declared for the rebels, imposed martial law and ordered the release of Brigadier General José Enrique Varela Iglesias. Arrested by the Republican authorities on 17 July rightly suspected of military conspiracy, Varela would play a central role in the rebel cause. The civilian plotters in Cádiz were led by a prominent landowner, José de Mora-Figueroa, the Marqués de Tamarón. Mora-Figueroa was head of the Falange in Cádiz; his brother Manuel, a naval officer, led its militia. In liaison with one of the key plotters in Seville, Ramón de Carranza, a retired naval captain, who was also Marqués de Soto Hermoso, the Mora-Figueroa brothers had been busy purchasing and stockpiling weapons.

Now, López Pinto and Varela were quickly joined by Mora-Figueroa’s Falangists. The Republican authorities took refuge in the town hall and the offices of the Civil Governor. They were defended by several hundred sparsely armed civilian Republicans and about fifty Assault Guards. López Pinto and Varela had about three hundred soldiers, fifty-odd Falangists and Carlist Requetés and a dozen Civil Guards. The buildings were subjected to artillery bombardment but held out until the arrival from Ceuta, late on the night of 18 July, of the destroyer
Churruca
and a merchant steamer carrying a unit of Regulares.
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Thereafter, the coup was certain of success in the city.

One after another the following morning, the town hall, the Civil Governor’s offices, the telephone exchange, the main post office and the headquarters of left-wing parties and trades unions surrendered virtually without resistance. All those within were detained and numerous members of the town council murdered without even a semblance of a trial. The Mayor, Manuel de la Pinta Leal, was not in Cádiz at the time of the coup and thus in no position to oppose it. Nevertheless, he was arrested in Córdoba in September, taken to Cádiz and shot. Over the days following the capture of Cádiz, the Civil Governor, the President of the provincial assembly (Diputación) and numerous officers who had refused to join the rebellion were accused of military rebellion. While
detained, they wrote statements pointing out the absurdity of the accusations, since they were obeying the orders of the legal government and had merely defended themselves. Before any trials could take place, they and several others, including a Socialist parliamentary deputy and the town-hall lawyer, were simply taken from prison and murdered on or about 16 August, on the orders of General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, rebel commander of the south.
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The annihilation of less prominent leftists took place as follows. The rebels first closed off the narrow tongue of land that connected Cádiz to the rest of Spain. Groups of Falangists, Civil Guards and Regulares then searched and looted houses. Liberals and leftists, Freemasons and trade unionists, were arrested en masse. Some were shot directly in the street. Others were taken to Falange headquarters in the Casino where they were subjected to sadistic torture. They were forced to ingest a litre of castor oil and industrial alcohol mixed with sawdust and breadcrumbs. In acute abdominal pain, they were savagely beaten. A so-called ‘Tribunal of Blood’ was established and each day would select twenty-five of the detainees for execution. Over six hundred of those arrested in Cádiz were executed in the next five months and more than one thousand in the course of the war. A further three hundred would be executed between the end of the war and 1945. These figures do not include those who died in prison as a result of torture.
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The conquest of the remainder of the province was carried out with the enthusiastic collaboration of the local landowning class, many of whose younger elements had already joined the Falange or the Requeté. In Alcalá de los Gazules, to the east of Cádiz, local Falangists and Civil Guards took control of the town immediately, murdering the Mayor and town councillors, along with fifty others. In the surrounding villages, Popular Front Committees had been formed. They had detained those rightists known to support the coup and began to distribute grain and cattle among the families of landless labourers. The local landlords responded immediately by providing horses for a mounted squad to recover their property. Moving south-west, through Roche and Campano between Chiclana and Conil, the squad recaptured numerous estates that had been occupied by peasant families. Men, women and children were seized and taken back to Alcalá de los Gazules, many to be killed.
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After the fall of Cádiz, José Mora-Figueroa took his men to Jérez de la Frontera where the rising had triumphed immediately thanks to the decisive action of the military commander, another scion of a local landowning family, Major Salvador de Arizón Mejía, the Marqués de Casa
Arizón, director of the army’s horse-breeding and training establishment. He and his brother, Captain Juan de Arizón Mejía, used the horses from their unit to ride out in columns to take control of the surrounding areas.
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Mora-Figueroa also organized mounted groups with friends and their employees, which he put at the disposal of the military authorities in Cádiz.
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The aim was not just to crush opposition to the rising but also to reverse the agrarian conquests of the previous years.

Most of the other principal towns of the province fell quickly. On 19 July, Salvador Arizón Mejía sent troops from Jérez to seize the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda in the north. Supporters of the Popular Front held them off until, on 21 July, a force of Regulares entered the town, killing twelve citizens including nine in one house. Executions began immediately, although a few leftists escaped in small boats. Eighty people were shot over the next five months.
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In Rota, nothing happened on 18 July. The following day, having been deceived into believing that the Civil Guard and Carabineros were loyal, the town’s anarchists, Socialists and Communists joined in declaring a general strike and establishing an anti-fascist committee. Falangists and other rightists were detained and roads into the town barricaded. When the Civil Guard declared in favour of the rebels, the anti-fascist committee surrendered without a fight. Despite the absence of left-wing violence, the Falange and the Civil Guard set about the systematic annihilation of the town’s relatively few liberals and leftists. They were tortured and forced to drink castor oil, and over sixty were shot at night, their ears cut off as trophies.
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The ambience in Jérez itself could be deduced from a broadcast on Radio Jérez on 24 July by the monarchist intellectual José María Pemán. He sang a hymn of praise to the war against what he called ‘hordes of barbarian invaders’. The implicit comparison of the working-class left with the Berber invaders of 711 was emphasized when he declared, ‘The war with its flashes of gunfire has opened our eyes. The idea of political alternation has been replaced for ever by that of extermination and expulsion, which is the only valid response against an enemy which is wreaking more destruction in Spain than any ever caused by a foreign invasion.’
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An experienced Africanista, Captain Mariano Gómez de Zamalloa, arrived in Jérez from Ceuta to take overall charge of the landowners’ mounted columns.
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The recovery of estates in the surrounding area seized by leftists fell to the column led by the Marqués de Casa Arizón. Another column was organized by José Mora-Figueroa’s brother Manuel, with the scions of other aristocratic and landowning families and of
sherry magnates, like the Duque de Medina-Sidonia and Estanislao Domecq y González. The self-styled Tercio Mora-Figueroa was made up initially of three hundred young rightists, Falangists, sons of landowners and workers from the Catholic unions.

As if on a hunting party, Mora-Figueroa and his men, accompanied by Civil Guards and Requetés, set out eastwards towards Arcos de la Frontera, where his family owned land. Despite the fact that Arcos had fallen without violence, a terrible repression was unleashed which saw the deaths of eighty-six Republicans.
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The column attacked villages to the north-east of Cádiz still in Popular Front hands and recaptured estates occupied by their workers. From Arcos, Gómez de Zamalloa’s column of Regulares and Mora-Figueroa’s men moved on to Algodonales and Olvera, where the repression was fierce.
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On 13 August, Mora-Figueroa’s group reached Villamartín, which had been under the control of the Civil Guard since 19 July. There had been a few isolated incidents of left-wing violence but the repression was disproportionately severe. The landowners of Villamartín were determined to annihilate all members of trade unions and of the Socialist and Republican parties and any Republican who had held any elected office.

Despite the protests of the parish priest, men and women were tortured and shot without trial for reasons as capricious as having advocated improved working conditions or for having taken part in a carnival involving a spoof funeral of Gil Robles and songs ridiculing the right. One seventeen-year-old was shot because his father was a Socialist and a sixteen-year-old because his anarcho-syndicalist father had fled. Altogether four teenagers were murdered. A couple aged seventy-three and sixty-three were shot because their anarcho-syndicalist son had also escaped. Married couples were shot, their young children left to starve. In another case, Cristóbal Alza and his wife were arrested, their heads were shaved and they were given castor oil. Believing that they were now safe, they stayed in the town but were arrested again. Cristóbal’s brother Francisco pleaded for their lives with the Captain of the Civil Guard, who replied that he would spare only one and that Francisco must choose. He chose his brother. Between July 1936 and February 1937, a total of 102 men and nine women were executed in Villamartín.
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Three women were murdered in Bornos, two in Espera, one in Puerto Serrano, one in Arcos de la Frontera, at least ten in Ubrique and five in Olvera.
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