The Spanish Holocaust (36 page)

In some cases, such as Segovia, the local military authorities went further, referring to ‘the Madrid government, which since 19 July has been in armed rebellion against the Army, which found itself obliged to assume the responsibility of power to prevent chaos taking hold of the country’.
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A decree of 31 August 1936 permitted any officer to be a judge, prosecutor or defender in a trial. Officers were thus obliged to fight the enemy on the battlefield and also in the courtroom, where the enemy had even less opportunity to fight back. So wide was the range of the offences deemed to be military rebellion that, in 1937, a handbook was issued to assist officers in the conduct of ‘trials’. The author, a military lawyer, recognized that ‘in view of the number of proceedings in progress, the consequence of the glorious deeds with which our army, valiantly supported by the true Spanish people, is astounding the world, those who have to act in such trials are facing many difficulties’.
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On 20 July, Mola was given the news that a lorry full of Republicans fleeing the Navarrese capital Pamplona had been captured on the road to Bilbao. Without hesitation, he barked into the telephone: ‘Shoot them
immediately by the roadside!’ Aware of the deathly hush that this outburst had provoked, Mola had second thoughts and instructed his aide to rescind the order, saying to the rest of the room: ‘Just so you can see that even in such serious times, I am not as bloodthirsty as the left thinks.’ At that, one of the officers present said: ‘General, let us not regret being too soft.’ Three weeks later, on 14 August, Mola would be heard saying, ‘A year ago, I would have trembled at having to authorize a firing squad. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep for the sorrow of it. Now, I can sign three or four every day without batting an eyelid.’
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It was in Navarre that Mola had been able to feel totally confident of success. The wealthy landowners whose properties had been occupied in October 1933 by thousands of landless labourers were thirsting for revenge. Moreover, from the very first, the rebels enjoyed massive popular support from the deeply Catholic local population. According to two apologists of the Carlist militia, the Requeté, ‘what was threatened was not just the peaceful digestion and the sleep of the powerful’ but an entire value system.
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Mola’s instructions were transcribed and distributed by Luis Martínez Erro, the son of the manager of the Pamplona branch of the Banco de Bilbao who liaised between the conspirators and the local bourgeoisie. Luis Martínez Erro owned a shop in the city selling religious objects. There and in the clerical outfitters of Benito Santesteban, conspiratorial priests, hungry for news of the uprising, had lingered among the racks of cassocks and the shelves of chalices and statues of the Virgin. Among them was the Bishop of Zamora, Manuel Arce Ochotorena, who had been on holiday in Pamplona. On his last visit just before the rising, to order some cassocks, he said to Santesteban, ‘if you send me rifles instead of cassocks that would be best of all!’ The Navarrese clergy had close contact with military and Carlist conspirators. Except for the Basque clergy, most Spanish priests and religious sided with the rebels. They denounced the ‘reds’ from their pulpits and adopted the fascist salute. All over Spain, they blessed the flags of rebel regiments, and some – especially Navarrese priests – hastened to the front.
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Indeed, they urged their congregations to fight and some were among the first to join rebel columns. Cartridge belts slung over their cassocks, rifles in hand, they joyfully set off to kill reds. So many did so that the faithful were left without clergy to say Mass or hear confessions and the ecclesiastical authorities had to call some of them back.
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Peter Kemp, a British volunteer with the Requeté, spoke admiringly of Father Vicente, the company chaplain. ‘He was the most fearless and the most
bloodthirsty man I ever met in Spain; he would, I think, have made a better soldier than priest. “Hola, Don Pedro!” he shouted to me. “So you’ve come to kill some Reds! Congratulations! Be sure you kill plenty!”’ When not occupied with spiritual duties, he would be in the thick of the action. The role of minister of Christ caused him dreadful frustrations. He would point out targets to Kemp, urging him to shoot them. ‘It seemed to me that he could barely restrain himself from snatching my rifle and loosing off … Whenever some wretched militiaman bolted from cover to run madly for safety, I would hear the good Father’s voice raised in a frenzy of excitement: “Don’t let him get away – Ah!
Don’t
let him get away! Shoot, man, shoot! A bit to the left! Ah!
that’s
got him,” as the miserable fellow fell and lay twitching.’
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Unlike those who went to the front, the tall, wild-eyed clerical outfitter Benito Santesteban stayed in Pamplona, like a rapacious carrion crow, devoting himself instead to purging the rearguard of leftists, liberals and Freemasons. He later boasted that he had killed 15,000 reds in Navarre, and more in San Sebastián, Bilbao and Santander. The province’s left-wing minority faced immediate extermination at the hands of the fanatical enthusiasts of the rising. In the first months in Pamplona, early-morning executions attracted large crowds and with them stalls selling hot chocolate and
churros
(fried dough fingers). Many were taken as hostages and shot in reprisal when the death of a Carlist was reported.
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Others were seized at night by the Falangist squad known as ‘Black Eagle’ and murdered on the outskirts of the city. Santesteban’s boast was a wild exaggeration and he was also known to have saved individuals.
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Nevertheless, many prisoners taken to the Requeté headquarters in the monastery of Los Escolapios were never seen again. In this ultra-conservative province, 2,822 men and thirty-five women were assassinated. A further 305 people died of mistreatment or malnutrition in prison. One of every ten who had voted for the Popular Front in Navarre was murdered.
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Whereas bombing raids or news of atrocities elsewhere often provoked mob violence in the Republican zone, the terror in the rebel zone was rarely ‘uncontrolled’. An illustrative example took place in Pamplona on Sunday 23 August. The Bishop of Pamplona, Monsignor Marcelino Olaechea Loizaga, presided over a huge procession in honour of the Virgin of Santa María la Real. On the same day, the
Diario de Navarra
published his description of the rebel war effort as a crusade. While the ceremony was taking place, fifty-two detainees were taken from Pamplona prison by a group of Falangists and Requetés. At a large cattle
farm on the outskirts of the village of Caparros, the majority of the prisoners, including the local Socialist leader Miguel Antonio Escobar Pérez, were shot. One escaped. Since Monsignor Olaechea sent six priests (including the future Bishop of Bilbao, Antonio Añoveros) to hear the condemned prisoners’ confessions and give them spiritual consolation, there can be no doubt that he was aware of what was happening. When the priests took longer than expected, the impatient Falangists went ahead and shot those waiting in order to get back to Pamplona in time to take part in the last part of the religious ceremony.
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Another massacre took place on 21 October 1936 near Monreal, a small town south-east of Pamplona. Three days earlier, in the town of Tafalla, after the funeral of a Requeté lieutenant killed in battle, an enraged crowd went to the local prison to lynch the one hundred men and twelve women detained there. When the Civil Guard prevented bloodshed, a delegation secured written authorization from the military authorities. Three days later, at dawn, sixty-five of the prisoners were taken to Monreal and shot by Requetés. Those prisoners still alive were given the coup de grâce by Luis Fernández Magaña, the deputy parish priest of Murchante, a distant town far to the south of the province. He had left his congregation to go to war.
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The repression in Navarre was especially ferocious in the area known as the Ribera, along the River Ebro. The Socialist landworkers’ union, the FNTT, had been strong there before the war and this was reflected in the scale of the killing. In the small town of Sartaguda, for example, with 1,242 inhabitants, there were eighty-four extra-judicial executions – 6.8 per cent of the population. In Peralta, eighty-nine of the 3,830 inhabitants (2.3 per cent of the population) were killed. Sartaguda was widely known in northern Spain as ‘the town of widows’. When the very young, the very old and almost all women are excluded, the scale of the terror can be imagined. The figures suggest that around 10 per cent of the male working class were murdered. Republican women were, of course, molested and humiliated in various ways. Family networks in the area were close, so these killings reverberated throughout the province and beyond.
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Father Eladio Celaya, the seventy-two-year-old parish priest of the village of Cáseda, was notable for his benevolent concern for his parishioners whose campaign for the return of common lands he had supported. On 8 August, he went to Pamplona to protest at the diocesan offices about the killings. He was told to go home because nothing could be done. Because of his efforts to prevent the violence, he was murdered
on 14 August 1936 and his head cut off. Father Celaya was not the only Catholic priest murdered by the ultra-religious Navarrese. Father Santiago Lucus Aramendia was a captain in the military chaplaincy corps and a lawyer. He was known to be a Republican, to sympathize with the Socialists and to have advocated land redistribution. He had taken refuge in the Convento del Carmen de Vitoria but was seized by Carlists and taken to Pamplona. On 3 September 1936, Carlists from his home town of Pitillas murdered him in nearby Undiano. He was given the last rites by a priest who accompanied the assassins, the same Luis Fernández Magaña from Murchante who was involved in the massacre at Monreal.
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Eventually, even Monsignor Olaechea was sufficiently shocked by the slaughter to speak out in a sermon delivered on 15 November. He appealed for ‘No more blood! No more blood other than that which God wants to be shed on his behalf on the battlefields to save our Fatherland. No more blood other than that decreed by the courts of justice, serenely considered and scrupulously debated.’ This homily, despite justifying the judicial executions, found no echo elsewhere in the Church. In the prevailing atmosphere, it represented considerable courage on the Bishop’s part.
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It would be from Pamplona that Cardinal Isidro Gomá, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of All Spain, would broadcast on Radio Navarra on 28 September 1936 to celebrate the ‘liberation’ of Toledo, ‘the city of the most Christian Spanish empire’. He proclaimed the rebel capture of Toledo to be the high point of the ‘clash of civilization with barbarism, of the inferno against Christ’. He thundered against ‘the bastard soul of the sons of Moscow’ and ‘Jews and the Freemasons who poisoned the nation’s soul with absurd doctrines, Tartar and Mongol tales dressed up as a political and social system in the dark societies controlled by the Semite International’.
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The neighbouring province to the south, Logroño, suffered a similar level of repression. Like Navarre, it was largely conservative, albeit with a considerable degree of underlying social tension. As in Navarre, there were rural tensions and a number of strikes by rural labourers, but the easy domination of the right was symbolized by what had happened at Arnedo in January 1932. The position of the province’s landowners was not seriously challenged by the anarchist insurrections of January and December 1933 in the wine-producing towns of the Rioja Alta. The weakness of the left ensured that, in 1934, both the harvest strike of June and the revolutionary movement of October had a limited impact in Logroño.
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Nevertheless, the subsequent repression left a legacy of bitterness which found expression both in the campaign for the elections of February 1936 and in the celebration of the Popular Front victory. On 14 March that year, in complicated circumstances, Assault Guards intervened in a clash between Falangists and workers. Three workers were killed and another six wounded. In reprisal, several religious schools, the premises of the local right-wing newspaper and the headquarters of the Falange, the Carlists and the CEDA were attacked. A few days later, in country districts, there were land invasions by unemployed labourers attempting to speed up agrarian reform. Throughout May, there was a construction strike in Logroño. In other clashes set off by agents provocateurs, a Carlist died in Haro on 16 April and two Falangists died in Nájera on 14 June.
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On 19 July, the coup triumphed in Logroño when the Civil Governor refused to distribute arms to the left. A general strike collapsed when a column of 1,800 men under Colonel Francisco García Escámez travelled through the night in trucks, buses and cars from Pamplona. As they crossed the two bridges over the Ebro, a military band greeted their entry into Logroño. The Mayor, Dr Basilio Gurrea Cárdenas, a dental surgeon, was immediately arrested. He was a moderate Republican and a friend of Mola, who had been his patient during the many years he had spent in Logroño. Mola refused to intervene in Gurrea’s case and he was executed in Logroño on 7 August.
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García Escámez quickly crushed the feeble resistance of unarmed leftists in towns such as Calahorra and Alfaro. Thereafter, the repression throughout the province was undertaken by columns of Civil Guards and a heterogeneous mixture of civilians. A remarkably high number of the Falangists and Requetés who took part in the killing had, prior to the war, been members of the CNT or UGT, or of Republican parties. Several had taken part in the anarchist insurrection of December 1933. It is impossible to say who among them had been agents provocateurs or were simply trying to hide a left-wing past. Some of their victims were shot; others were flung from high bridges into rivers.
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There were also cases of Republicans thrown from bridges across the Ebro in Burgos and the Tagus as it passed through Cáceres. The corpses caused public health problems.
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