The Spanish Holocaust (42 page)

On 3 October 1936, Father Andrés Ares Díaz, the parish priest of the tiny hamlet of Val do Xestoso near Monfero, in the province of A Coruña, was shot by a group of Falangists and Civil Guards. He had been denounced for refusing to donate to the rebels the funds collected for the religious festival of Los Remedios, scheduled for the first Sunday of September but suspended by the military authorities. He was accused of belonging to International Red Aid, arrested and taken to the village of Barallobre, near Ferrol, where he was obliged to make his confession to the parish priest there, Antonio Casas. It was hoped that the distressing sight of his fellow priest about to be shot might pressure Father Casas into admitting that he had helped Republicans escape. Casas had
provoked suspicion because of his efforts to stop the repression in Barallobre. After making his confession, Father Ares handed over 200 pesetas and his watch to Father Casas. Andrés Ares was then taken to the cemetery and executed at 11 p.m. There was no trial, although the commander of the firing squad is alleged to have shouted, ‘On the orders of Suances!’, a reference to the Delegate for Public Order in Ferrol, Victoriano Suances. Although Father Casas was interrogated on several occasions, he escaped arrest and death because of the protest by Cardinal Gomá about the execution of Basque priests by the rebels.
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In the province of Lugo, east of A Coruña, the rising triumphed quickly without violence. The feeble attempt by the Civil Governor, Ramón García Núñez, to make the Civil Guard distribute arms had been ignored. The substantial local organization of the Falange and the local clergy were closely involved in the conspiracy. The military commander, Colonel Alberto Caso Agüero, had reluctantly declared martial law but made no arrests. Then a column arrived led by Captain Molina, who brusquely informed Caso: ‘Colonel, the time for Vaseline is over. If we do not act energetically, we will lose control.’ Caso himself was detained and the Civil Governor, the Mayor and most of the city’s prominent Republicans were arrested. They were all tried in mid-October, condemned to death and shot at the end of the month. All working-class organizations were banned. There was little resistance except in the towns in the south of the province like Quiroga and Becerreá where, according to a priest, the population was notable for its ‘lack of subordination’. In Monforte, an important railway junction, where the working class was Socialist, the Civil Guard, helped by Falangists, crushed the resistance.
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In the years before the war, violence in Ourense, Galicia’s only inland province, was minimal. Even during the events of October 1934, and despite the unity shown by Socialists, Communists and anarchists, the general strike was defeated without significant bloodshed. In the elections of February 1936, Ourense registered the most notable conservative victories in Galicia with the province won by Renovación Española and the CEDA. The Popular Front was left without representation. The only violence provoked during the spring was the work of Falangists who killed four people on 8 June. On 18 July, the Civil Governor refused to arm the workers and all resistance melted away as soon as the edict of martial law was read out. There was some sporadic resistance in the Valdeorras area to the east of the province, in the course of which a Civil Guard was killed, the only casualty suffered by the rebels. A
thirteen-year-old boy was shot because he had criticized the brutality of the Civil Guard. Despite this peaceful history, extra-judicial murders and trials quickly started in parallel. The
ley de fugas
was applied and bodies were thrown into the River Miño. Falangists were recent recruits with no real ideological commitment, some just paid thugs or men trying to hide a left-wing past, but all under the orders of the military. In a conservative, rural society, it was easy to find passive support for the repression of left-wingers.
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Throughout Galicia, the usual routine was that men would be detained, then ‘freed’, taken to outskirts and shot, their bodies left in places where they would be seen and the message of terror spread.
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On the Portuguese border, in Galicia’s coastal province of Pontevedra, the Civil Governor, like his counterparts elsewhere, refused to arm the workers. As in Ourense, there was a high level of collaboration in the repression in poor rural communities. Indeed, the military authorities issued a statement on 9 August that unsigned denunciations would not be pursued and eventually threatened to impose fines on those who made false accusations. Perhaps the most striking death in Pontevedra was that of Alexandre Bóveda Iglesias, founder of the Galician Nationalist Party, a conservative Catholic greatly admired by Calvo Sotelo. General Carlos Bosch y Bosch, the commander of the VIII Military Region, dismissed a plea for clemency, saying, ‘Bóveda is not a Communist but he is a Galician Nationalist which is worse.’
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In the prosperous fishing port of Vigo, the complacency of the Republican authorities facilitated the military take-over. The Mayor, a moderate Socialist businessman, had accepted assurances of loyalty from the military commander and had prevented the arming of the workers. Nevertheless, along with other Republican figures, he was tried and executed for military rebellion. Seven young men were shot for listening to a Madrid radio station. The repression in the province was organized by the military authorities and implemented by the Civil Guard and civilian squads. Under the umbrella of general instructions from the military authorities, local
caciques
were able to remove subversive elements. People could be shot without trial for having arms or for harbouring a fugitive or merely for making an unfavourable comment about the progress of the rebel war effort.
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Great notoriety was gained by two groups known as the ‘Dawn Brigades’ organized by Dr Víctor Lis Quibén, deputy for Renovación Española. Several hundred prisoners died in the infamous concentration camp on the Isle of San Simón, in the Ría de Vigo near Redondela, some as a result of the appalling conditions, others shot by Falangists.
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While this rebel repression had proceeded in Spain’s north-western corner, similar horrors were taking place far to the south and the east outside the Spanish peninsula. In the Canary Islands where the rebellion had triumphed immediately, there were no deaths at the hands of Republicans. Nevertheless, in the course of the war, it has been estimated that as many as 2,500 people were killed by the rebels.
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It has been reckoned that more than two thousand people were executed in the Balearic Islands. In Mallorca alone, despite having an extremely weak workers’ movement, there were at least 1,200 and probably as many as two thousand executed. The initial coup provoked a general strike as a result of which large numbers of workers were arrested and imprisoned.
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The bulk of them were killed after Alberto Bayo’s ill-fated attempt to retake the island for the Republic in mid-August. Prisoners captured by the rebels were immediately executed. They included five nurses, all aged between seventeen and twenty, and a French journalist.
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Bayo’s attack was beaten off by rebel forces assisted by Italian air support and Italian troops led by Mussolini’s viceroy, Arconovaldo Bonacorsi, the self-styled Conde Rossi. A homicidal maniac, Bonacorsi tutored the local Falange in unleashing a savage repression against the civilian population of the island. The French Catholic author Georges Bernanos was appalled as he watched lorryloads of men seized from their villages and taken to be shot. He was told by military contacts that more than two thousand people had been killed. He blamed the ferocity of the repression on Bonacorsi and the acquiescence of the Bishop of Mallorca, Josep Miralles.
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One of the most significant victims of the repression in Mallorca was Alexandre Jaume i Rosselló, a distinguished intellectual from a wealthy bourgeois family of great military tradition. He was the first Socialist parliamentary deputy for the Balearic Islands. For this ‘treachery’, in a military trial on 13 February 1937, he was absurdly accused of trying to establish a Soviet dictatorship in Mallorca. He was condemned to death and shot on 24 February against the wall of the cemetery of Palma.
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The victims included several women and a priest. Among the most celebrated was Aurora Picornell i Femenies, known as ‘La Pasionaria Mallorquina’ and married to the future Communist leader, Heriberto Quiñones. She was murdered by Falangists on 5 January 1937 at the cemetery of Porreres, along with four other women. Perhaps the most famous was Matilde Landa, who, after lengthy psychological torture, committed suicide in Mallorca on 26 September 1942.
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On 8 June
1937, Father Jeroni Alomar Poquet was shot in the cemetery of Palma because of his loud protests at the imprisonment of his brother Francesc, a member of the middle-class Catalanist party, the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya. Another priest, Father Antoni Rosselló i Sabater, arrested because of links with Father Alomar and because his brother was the Republican Mayor of Bunyola, was sentenced to thirty years in prison.
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As the death toll mounted throughout rebel Spain, in September 1936 the monarchist poet José María Pemán coincided in Pamplona with General Cabanellas, who was still head of the Junta. Cabanellas requested his help in drafting a decree to forbid the wearing of mourning. His reasoning was twofold. In the case of the widows and bereaved mothers of rebels, the gesture of not wearing black would proclaim that ‘the death of someone fallen for the Fatherland is not a black episode but a white one, a joy that should overcome any sorrow’. For the mothers, widows and fiancées of executed Republicans, forbidding the wearing of mourning ‘would put an end to that sort of living protest and dramatic testimony that, when we conquer any town, we see in the squares and on the street corners – those black and silent figures that in reality represent protest as much as sorrow’.
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Cabanellas was right that Republican mourning implied a protest since it signified solidarity with the recently eliminated family member. However, a decree forbidding Spanish women in rural areas to wear mourning would have been impractical because most older or widowed women wore black dresses as a matter of course. Moreover, the Catholic womenfolk of the rebel dead could not be deprived of their right to mourn their heroic loved ones. The issue was how to deprive the mothers, sisters, wives and fiancées of liberal and left-wing men of the opportunity to mourn and express that solidarity. In the south, Queipo simply issued a decree prohibiting mourning. In the north, it had to be done through more informal social pressures and fear of further reprisals.

Sometimes, after a man had been taken away at night, family members would bring food for him to the jail only to be told brutally that ‘where he has gone, he won’t be needing it’. The agony would often never end. They would see, as did Mola’s secretary, José María Iribarren, while walking in Burgos, children playing at capturing a Republican then shooting the ‘prisoner’ who had refused, as the game required, to shout the rebel slogan ‘¡Viva España!’
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Women whose menfolk had ‘disappeared’ could never remarry since, without an official death certificate, they were not legally widows. They had no right to administer the property registered
in the names of their husbands. It is doubtful that Mola cared about, or was even aware of, the wider consequences of the terror that he had initiated.

PART THREE

The Consequence of the Coup: Spontaneous Violence in the Republican Zone

7

Far from the Front: Repression behind the Republican Lines

Once the military rebellion had provoked the collapse of many instruments of the state, in every city not conquered by the insurgents, power in the streets was assumed by the armed workers who had contributed to the defeat of the rising. Committees set up by working-class unions and parties created their own autonomous police forces and detention centres, known as
checas
(in a misuse of the name of the early Soviet security service). In the chaos created by the disappearance of most of the conventional structures of law and order, there was also an element of sheer criminality. This reflected long-standing resentments of years of social injustice, but it was also born of the unleashing of the worst instincts of those who took advantage of the removal of social restraints. The problem was exacerbated by the opening of the prisons and the release of thousands of common criminals.