The Spanish Holocaust (41 page)

From his first headquarters in Burgos, Mola made a number of radio broadcasts in all of which he underlined his commitment to merciless continuation of the repression. On 31 July, on Radio Pamplona, he declared: ‘I could take advantage of our present favourable circumstances to offer the enemy some negotiated settlement; but I do not want to. I want to defeat them to impose my, and your, will upon them and to annihilate them. I want Marxism and the red flag of Communism to be remembered in history as a nightmare but as a nightmare that has been washed clean by the blood of patriots.’
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On 15 August, speaking on Radio Castilla of Burgos, he stated: ‘There will be no surrender nor anything other than a crushing and definitive victory.’
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On 28 January 1937, he spoke on Radio Nacional from Salamanca. After denying categorically that there were any German volunteers fighting with the rebels, he went on to denounce the Republic’s leaders as ‘traitors, arsonists, murderers and bank-robbers’.
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On 20 August, Mola moved his headquarters to the town hall in Valladolid, where he would remain for two months. While there, he went to Salamanca to receive a visit from Colonel Juan Yagüe, who was congratulated for the bloodshed in Badajoz. When it was time for Yagüe to leave, a cheering crowd gathered around his convoy of cars. Mola embraced him and called him ‘my favourite pupil’.
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Although Yagüe was not involved, an Africanista ferocity was unleashed on Galicia. Even in comparison with the provinces of Old Castile, the repression throughout Galicia was massively disproportionate to the limited scale of resistance.
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Indeed, the repression there was comparable to that in Navarre and La Rioja, where the presence of militant Carlism constituted something of an explanation. In Galicia, however, albeit a highly conservative region, the extreme right was not prominent before the military coup. In the course of 20 July, the rebels took over the region. The only places where there was any significant resistance were A Coruña, Vigo and Ferrol, but it was sporadic and had been crushed well before the end of the month. In Vigo, when the edict of martial law was read out, the crowd protested and twenty-seven people died when troops opened fire.
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The first few days after the coup saw relatively few deaths, just over one hundred. Thereafter the pace of executions increased with more than 2,500 in the five months from 1 August to the end of December. Recent research identified the total number of executions in Galicia as 4,560, including seventy-nine women. Of these 836 were the result of trials; the rest were extra-judicial murders. The worst of the repression was in A Coruña with nearly 1,600 executions and in Pontevedra with nearly 1,700. In these two Atlantic provinces, the Popular Front had won, albeit with a predominance of moderate left-of-centre Republican deputies. In Lugo, where the centre party had won, there were 418 deaths, of which two-thirds were the victims of extra-judicial murders. In Orense, where Renovación Española and the CEDA triumphed, there were 569.
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The experience of Galicia shows that, as in Castile, the rebels aimed not just to defeat the left but to eradicate an ideal and to terrorize the population into subservience.

Between February and July 1936, throughout Galicia there had been intense civilian collaboration with the military conspirators. In the beautiful medieval Cathedral city of Santiago de Compostela, members of the JAP and the Falange were trained in military barracks and, in Orense, local elements of Renovación Española were in close contact with the Civil Guard. In Galicia, in comparison with most of Spain, there was relatively little disorder other than some fatal street fights between Falangists and Socialists in Santiago, Vigo, Ourense and Ferrol. In every province, when news of the rebellion arrived, the Republican authorities were confident, indeed complacent. The workers’ unions, especially the CNT, tried to organize resistance, but the Civil Governors, fearful of revolution, refused to distribute arms. In the bustling port of A Coruña,
the Governor, the twenty-six-year-old law professor Francisco Pérez Carballo, obeying messages from Madrid to maintain calm, put his confidence in the Civil Guard. He was also swayed by the fact that the head of the Galician Military Region (VIII), General Enrique Salcedo Molinuevo, was not a partisan of the coup. When he refused to declare martial law without news from his friend Sanjurjo, Salcedo was arrested and eventually executed by the conspirators, along with the other key commanders, the Military Governor of A Coruña and the commander of the naval arsenal in Ferrol, both of whom remained loyal. Pérez Carballo was forced to surrender after an artillery bombardment of the Civil Governor’s building. His calls for calm had persuaded the majority of local authorities throughout the province to assume that a general strike would be enough to foil the coup.
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Accordingly, resistance was minimal and in inverse proportion to the ferocity of the repression. The establishment of martial law in A Coruña prompted resistance in the naval base at Ferrol. A mutiny by sailors on the warships
España
and
Cervera
was crushed. Both the town hall and the Casa del Pueblo surrendered after artillery bombardment and false promises that there would be no reprisals. On 26 July, the executions began of the sailors who had opposed the rising. On 3 August, the Admiral in charge of the base was tried and sentenced to death for the ‘offence of abandoning his post’. Captain Victoriano Suances of the Civil Guard, who was put in charge of public order, supervised a particularly savage repression, with Falangist squads given free rein to eliminate Republicans.
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Columns of troops and Civil Guards moved out from A Coruña and Ferrol to organize the ‘pacification’ of the towns and villages of the province. Although there were few examples of church-burnings in Galicia, in Betanzos retreating anarchists set fire to the Convento de San Francisco. In consequence, the repression was all the more intense. In Curtis, to the east of A Coruña, sporadic resistance was smashed with ferocity. Throughout the province, the Falange suddenly found itself overflowing with new recruits from among the unemployed and petty criminals.
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In A Coruña itself, Lieutenant Colonel Florentino González Vallés, of the Civil Guard, was made Delegate for Public Order. He was the pro-Falange officer who had organized the anti-Republican demonstration by the Civil Guard after the funeral of Anastasio de los Reyes in Madrid. He was punished by being arrested and held briefly before being posted to A Coruña, where he played a crucial role in the uprising. Now, he
conducted a particularly vicious repression making full use of the newly swollen Falange. He ordered the Civil Governor, Francisco Pérez Carballo, to be shot on 24 July, along with the commander of the Assault Guards and his second-in-command. There was no kind of trial. Pérez Carballo’s death was initially inscribed in the registry as ‘executed’. Since this implied, as assumed by the press, an official trial and sentence, it was later altered to death as a result of ‘internal haemorrhage’.
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Their executions were followed by those of large numbers of workers and schoolteachers, as well as of some of the most distinguished doctors, lawyers, writers and professors of Galicia. Trials of the remaining Republican authorities began at the beginning of August. Their crime was dual, to have supported the Republic before 20 July and not to have supported the uprising on that date. Extra-judicial murders were carried out by Falangist groups with names like the ‘Knights of Santiago’ or the ‘Knights of Coruña’. The latter gang’s role in what was called ‘the repression and pacification of the zones of the province attacked by subversive elements’ was overseen by Lieutenant Colonel Benito de Haro Lumbreras, brother of Gregorio who had achieved notoriety in Huelva. To cover up the torture and/or disappearance of prisoners, it was claimed that they had been shot while trying to escape – in application of the
ley de fugas
. The places where bodies were left, next to crossroads or bridges, were carefully chosen for the terror to have greatest impact. Many bodies were just thrown into the sea and their appearance in fishing nets and traps augmented the sensation of ubiquitous terror.
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After the arrest of Francisco Pérez Carballo, his wife, the thirty-one-year-old Juana María Clara Capdevielle Sanmartín, a well-known feminist intellectual, was alleged to have urged her husband to arm the workers and to have helped organize the resistance. No proof of this was ever put forward. She was already bitterly hated by the local right, assumed to dominate her husband and to have dangerous opinions. When the fighting began, Pérez Carballo had made her go and stay in the home of a pharmacist friend whose family, aware that she was pregnant, had kept her husband’s death from her. Left alone one day, she phoned the Civil Governor’s office for news of him. González Vallés told her her husband was well and that he would send a car for her to join him. The car took her directly to prison. After a week, she was released and took refuge with the family of another friend in Vilaboa outside A Coruña. Some days later, on the orders of González Vallés, Juana Capdevielle was detained by the Civil Guard on 17 August, taken to A Coruña and handed over to a Falangist squad. She was murdered the next day. Her assassins
apparently discussed whether to poison her to provoke a miscarriage or to fling her into the sea, deciding finally to shoot her. Her body was found far to the east of A Coruña in Rábade in the province of Lugo. She had been shot in the head and chest and had recently had a miscarriage.
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Rumours abounded to the effect that Juana Capdevielle had been raped. It was common in Galicia for Republican women to be raped, to be beaten, to have their heads shaved, to be made to drink castor oil, to be detained and separated from their children. María Purificación Gómez González, the Republican Mayoress of A Cañiza in the south of Pontevedra, the only female mayor in Galicia, was arrested, summarily tried and condemned to death. Her execution was postponed because she was pregnant, and her sentence commuted to life imprisonment. She served seven years in the notorious prison of Saturrarán (Vizcaya) until released on conditional liberty in 1943.
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Those tried by court martial in A Coruña were usually executed by firing squad in the early hours of the morning. Nevertheless, it was common for there to be crowds of spectators. However, they did not compare with the spectacle mounted on 23 October 1936 when eight young conscripts were shot after being accused of plotting to rebel against their superior officers. They were paraded through the city in mid-afternoon and executed before a huge crowd. Their stentorian shouts of ‘¡Viva la República!’ as they stood before the firing squad undermined the effect being sought.
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The repression in Galicia was notable for the high level of denunciations by parish priests, the Falange or hostile neighbours. In country districts, this was perhaps a reflection of the resentments provoked by poverty. There were also cases of denunciations of professional rivals such as led to the arrest and subsequent murder in A Coruña of Dr Eugenio Arbones, a distinguished obstetrician who had been a Socialist deputy in 1931 but had been now retired from politics for some years. His ‘crime’ was to have treated men wounded by the military rebels.
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A more striking case was that of José Miñones Bernárdez, a popular lawyer, banker and businessman from A Coruña who was elected deputy for Unión Republicana in the February 1936 elections. In the immediate aftermath of the elections, when there were riots in response to right-wing voting fraud, he had been acting Civil Governor. With remarkable courage, he had prevented the burning of two convents and a Jesuit church and protected a number of right-wingers. In gratitude, the Compañía de María granted his children and descendants free education
in perpetuity. In response to the assassination of Calvo Sotelo, he called upon his fellow deputies of Unión Republicana to renounce their participation in the Popular Front. He returned from Madrid to A Coruña on 18 July, convinced that he was in no danger, having always been fair in his treatment of both left and right. This was demonstrated by the fact that, on 19 July, he appealed for military protection for the local electricity generating company of which he was managing director and he also successfully persuaded a convoy of workers to refrain from going to A Coruña to oppose the coup. Nevertheless, he was arrested, accused of military rebellion, condemned to pay a fine of 1 million pesetas and shot on 2 December. The reasons behind his death lay in his home town of Corcubión, where his family had incurred the hatred of the local commander of the Civil Guard.
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Santiago was quickly taken, with military trials beginning as early as 26 July. Five men, tried for crimes such as using the clenched-fist salute or shouting ‘Long live Russia’, were sentenced to life imprisonment. Murders began on 14 August; many of those who had been sentenced to imprisonment were taken from the jail illegally and shot. One of the victims was Eduardo Puente Carracedo, well known in the town for his fierce anti-clericalism. This derived from the fact that a young cousin of his, made pregnant by a canon of the Cathedral, had died when she was obliged to have a (necessarily illegal) abortion. Thereafter, Eduardo Puente would interrupt religious processions (on one occasion with a donkey bearing a crucifix). If the canon in question was taking part, Puente would attempt to hit him. Detained in the early days of the war, Puente was seized from the local prison; on 28 June 1937 he was murdered, and his body dumped under a bridge. The registry recorded the deaths of those murdered as the consequence of ‘internal haemorrhage’, ‘cardiac arrest’ or ‘organic destruction of the brain’.
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