The Spanish Holocaust (37 page)

Logroño was a small, tranquil city at the centre of the Rioja wine trade. As Civil Governor, Mola appointed an artilleryman, Captain Emilio Bellod Gómez, telling him, ‘be harsh, very harsh’, to which he replied: ‘Don’t worry, General, that is exactly what I will do.’ The bulk of
the executions, mostly extra-judicial, took place from 19 July until Bellod’s replacement six months later. More formal military trials began only after his departure. Beatings and torture, imprisonment and death were the fate of leftists. There were women murdered and the wives of executed leftists had their heads shaved, were forced to drink castor oil and were frequently subjected to other forms of sexual humiliation. In the capital, Logroño, the provincial prison was soon full to bursting and a jai-alai (pelota) court and a commercial training school were converted into prison annexes. The municipal cemetery was soon equally full and, similarly, the corpses of those executed had to be accommodated outside the town of Lardero, to the south of Logroño. By the end of December, there had been nearly two thousand executions in the province, including more than forty women. In the course of the war, 1 per cent of the total population was executed. As in Navarre, the worst-hit places were the towns along the banks of the River Ebro where the Popular Front had gained most votes, such as Logroño with 595, Calahorra with 504, Haro with 309, Alfaro with 253 and Arnedo with 190.
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A notable feature of the repression was the scale of support it enjoyed in the small towns and villages from Catholic smallholding farmers infuriated by the wage demands of the FNTT.
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The experience of Republican prisoners in Logroño is known in large part thanks to the survival of one of them, Patricio Escobal, the municipal engineer in Logroño and a member of Azaña’s Izquierda Republicana party. Although most of his fellow party members were murdered, Escobal survived prison, despite appalling mistreatment, because he had been a famous footballer, a distinguished captain of Real Madrid and a member of Spain’s Olympic silver-medal team of 1920. The potential scandal if he was murdered restrained his persecutors. Thus he lived to write his memoirs.
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In La Rioja there were cases of the clergy trying to restrain the perpetrators. There were eighty-three villages where, in part as a result of their priests’ action and, crucially, because of a pre-existing level of tolerance between right and left, there were no deaths. Unfortunately, there were another ninety-nine towns and villages where extra-judicial killings did take place. To intervene against the killing required great bravery. Father Antonio Bombín Hortelano, a Franciscan monk from Anguciana just outside Haro, was murdered by Falangists because, in his sermons, he had criticized the rich and spoken out about social injustice. Other priests who went to see the Civil Governor, Emilio Bellod, to plead for mercy on behalf of parishioners were thrown out of his office. Sadly,
there is no evidence to sustain recent claims that the Bishop of Calahorra protested to Bellod about the arbitrary executions.
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One of Mola’s closest and most reliable collaborators was the bluff, luxuriantly moustachioed Major General Andrés Saliquet Zumeta. Without a posting during the Republic, Saliquet lived in Madrid but cultivated close connections with the ultra right in the dour Castilian city of Valladolid. Saliquet was the key liaison between the military conspirators and Onésimo Redondo’s followers.
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Falangists were involved daily in violent clashes with the left in the provincial capital and in other small towns. A cycle of provocation and reprisal created a climate of terror. A local journalist, Francisco de Cossío, wrote of the Falange: ‘on a daily basis, we witnessed heroic retaliations based on the law of an eye for an eye’. In mid-June, Falangists armed with machine-pistols assaulted several taverns where left-wingers were known to congregate. Bombs were placed at the homes of prominent leftists and in various workers’ clubs (Casas del Pueblo). Leftist reprisals were swift: Falangists were attacked and the Carlist Traditionalist Centre sacked.
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By the eve of the military uprising, Valladolid was a city seething with hatred. The Republican Civil Governor, Luis Lavín Gautier, faced enormous difficulty in containing street clashes between right and left since the local forces of order sympathized with Onésimo Redondo. Even before General Saliquet arrived to co-ordinate the rising, the unity of the Falange, the local police, Assault Guards, Civil Guard and army units ensured its early success. Lavín’s orders that the workers be armed were disobeyed and guns were distributed to the Falange instead. The general strike declared by the left-wing unions was quickly and brutally smashed. A delighted Cossío reported seeing a leading Socialist ‘run like a hare down a city centre street looking for somewhere to hide’. Hundreds of Socialists took refuge with their families in the cellars of their headquarters in the Casa del Pueblo. After the building had been briefly shelled with artillery, they surrendered.
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Most of the women and all of the children were allowed to go free, but 448 men were arrested. According to official figures, nearly one thousand Republicans, Socialists and anarcho-syndicalists were arrested in the city, of whom a relatively small number had taken part in armed resistance. The Civil Governor Lavín, the city’s Socialist Mayor, Antonio García Quintana, and the province’s only Socialist deputy, Federico Landrove López, were all arrested and shot.

Subsequently, as the first city in the mainland where the coup was successful, Valladolid came to be known as ‘the capital of the uprising’.
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On Sunday 19 July, within twenty-four hours of the coup, Onésimo Redondo, who had been imprisoned after a bomb attack on the main police station on 19 March, was freed from jail in Ávila. He returned to Valladolid and quickly made contact with General Saliquet. Having secured the General’s permission to deploy the Falangist militias, Redondo set up headquarters in the Cavalry Academy, sending squads of armed Falangists all over the province to crush left-wing resistance. He was tireless in implementing his commitment to the extermination of Marxism. His first radio broadcast, on 19 July, was typically intransigent: ‘There will be no peace until our victory is total. We can have no qualms and nothing must stand in our way. We have no relatives, no children, no wives, no parents; only the Fatherland.’ Declaring that the economic life of the city should go on as normal, he threatened that ‘the lives of workers and shop-assistants will depend on their conduct. And hidden subversives, if there are any left, will be hunted down by the vigilant eyes of our Falangists.’
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Elsewhere, the rebels did not have it as easy as in Valladolid. Franco and the African Army were blockaded in Morocco by the Republican fleet. Anarchist forces from Barcelona were moving virtually unopposed towards Zaragoza. The overall leader of the coup, General Sanjurjo, had been killed when his plane crashed on take-off for Spain and command was assumed by Mola when he reached the neighbouring Castilian city of Burgos on 20 July. The hope of rebel forces that they would capture Madrid had come to nothing. Faced with an acute shortage of ammunition, they had been held at the sierras to the north of the capital. Mola himself was plunged into a depression by this accumulation of reverses. His spirits were somewhat revived by a visit to Zaragoza on 21 July to consult with General Miguel Cabanellas. At Cabanellas’s suggestion, they decided to create a provisional rebel government, the Junta de Defensa Nacional. Its formation was announced by Mola in Burgos on 23 July.
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This lay behind the stark reality of the repression in Valladolid. Despite the rapid success of the coup, the city witnessed a pitiless assault on the local left. The slaughter was accelerated as a result of the death of Onésimo Redondo in a clash with Republican forces at Labajos, in the province of Segovia on 24 July. When other Falangists reached Labajos, unable to find those who had killed their leader they shot a local worker and took a further five back to Valladolid where they would be executed in September.
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A requiem Mass for Onésimo at Valladolid Cathedral on 25 July was celebrated with the pomp normally reserved for national heroes. All shops in the city were closed. Redondo’s coffin, covered by a
monarchist flag, was carried on a carriage pulled by six white horses. The procession was led by Falangist squads and followed by a military band and girls carrying huge wreaths of flowers. The atmosphere was heavy with a thirst for rapid revenge. After the ceremony, an emotional crowd ‘elected’ by acclamation Onésimo’s brother, Andrés, to be the Falangist Territorial Chief of León and Old Castile. Fully prepared to maintain the same violent policies as his brother, later that night of 25 July Andrés Redondo declared on local radio that ‘all Falangists have sworn to avenge his death’.
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Years later, Onésimo Redondo’s widow, Mercedes Sanz Bachiller, spoke of her conviction that her husband’s death had intensified the subsequent repression. In fact, the process of revenge against the left in Valladolid was already well under way and would gather momentum over the next few months. Large numbers of Socialist workers from the railway engineering works were herded into the tram company garages. Those who, having obeyed the union order to strike on Saturday 18 July, had not returned to work by Tuesday 21 July were shot, accused of ‘abetting rebellion’. Throughout the late summer and autumn, anyone who had held a position in a left-wing party, municipality or trade union was subject to arrest and the likehood of being
paseado
– that is to say, seized by Falangists, taken out and shot – or subjected to summary court martial. For many, their crime was simply to carry a membership card of a trade union or left or liberal organization. General Saliquet’s edict of martial law, published at dawn on 19 July, effectively passed a death sentence on all those who had not actively supported the uprising. ‘Crimes’ subject to summary trial and immediate execution included ‘rebellion’ (either action in defence of the Republic or failure to support the rebels) and extended to disobedience, disrespect, insult or calumny towards both the military and those who had been militarized (thus including Falangists). Men were arrested on suspicion of having their radio dials set to stations broadcasting from Madrid. Court martials were set up and firing squads began to function. In addition to the 448 men arrested on 18 July, one thousand more would be detained in August and September.
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While awaiting trial, the prisoners in Valladolid, as in most other places, were kept in appalling conditions. Because the local prison had neither the space nor the resources to look after so many inmates, two repair sheds at the tram depot were used to house prisoners. The acute overcrowding, malnutrition and the lack of basic hygiene facilities led to many deaths from sickness. In the prison, more than six prisoners were
squeezed into individual cells. They were forced into icy showers and then, while still wet and shivering, made to run a gauntlet of guards who beat them with truncheons or rifle butts. Responsibility for food, clothing and laundry fell upon their families, an acute hardship given that, by dint of the arrest and imprisonment, the families had already been deprived of their principal breadwinner.
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Estimates of the scale of the repression in the province of Valladolid have varied wildly, as high as 15,000 but none lower than 1,303. Exact figures are impossible since many deaths were not recorded. The most recent local study places the figure at over three thousand.
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There were 1,300 men and women tried between July and December 1936, often in large groups. Such ‘trials’ consisted of little more than the reading of the names of the accused and the charges against them, followed by the passing of sentence. Although most of those accused of military rebellion were likely to face the death penalty or prison sentences of thirty years, they were given no chance to defend themselves and were not even permitted to speak. On most weekdays, several courts martial were held, rarely lasting more than one hour. All 448 men detained after the surrender of the Casa del Pueblo were tried together accused of the crime of military rebellion. Forty were sentenced to death, 362 to thirty years’ imprisonment, twenty-six to twenty years’ imprisonment, and nineteen were found not guilty. The selection of the forty to be executed was made on the basis of their having held some position of responsibility in the local Socialist organizations. The one woman condemned to death had her sentence commuted to thirty years’ imprisonment, although at least sixteen other women were executed in Valladolid. There were other cases in which fifty-three, seventy-seven and eighty-seven accused were ‘tried’ at once. In some cases, the ‘crime’ was simply to be a Socialist member of parliament, as was the case with Federico Landrove and also with José Maesto San José (deputy for Ciudad Real) and Juan Lozano Ruiz (Jaén) who were captured on the outskirts of Valladolid.
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Prisoners condemned by court martial were taken out in the early hours of the morning and driven in trucks to the Campo de San Isidro on the outskirts of the city. This became such a regular occurrence that coffee and
churro
stalls were set up for the spectators. Each evening in the Casino, members of distinguished local families, educated middle-class Catholics, would remind each other not to miss the following day’s show. Guards had to be assigned to hold back the crowds that thronged to watch and shout insults at the condemned. So shocking did this seem
that the newly appointed Civil Governor of the province issued a communiqué reprimanding those who had turned the shootings into an entertainment. Declaring bizarrely that the repression should reflect ‘noble feelings and generosity towards the defeated’, he deplored the presence of small children, young girls and married women at the executions. The terror had become ‘normal’ and no one dared condemn it for fear of being denounced as a red.
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Similarly, in Segovia, middle-class ladies attended military trials, laughing and cheering when death sentences were passed. Executions in the provincial capital were praised as ‘a good bullfight’. In the tiny village of Matabuena, to the north-east of Segovia, the inhabitants were forced to watch executions.
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