The Spanish Holocaust (49 page)

Ariza’s funeral on 30 October saw the decisive showdown between anarchists and Communists in Valencia. The leaders of the Iron Column called on their militiamen and those of other CNT columns to abandon the front in Teruel to attend the burial of their comrade and make those responsible for his death pay. Knowing this, the authorities decided, contrary to usual practice with public funerals, to take the cortège down the narrow Plaza de Tetuán, where both the PCE offices and the local Republican military headquarters were located. A bloody battle ensued.
The Communists claimed that shots had been fired from an armoured truck that led the procession. Fire was returned by militants in the PCE building and by soldiers in the military headquarters. A later statement by the Columna de Hierro alleged that there had been a trap and that crossfire had come first from machine-guns set up in both buildings. Certainly, the memoirs of Carlos Llorens, a Communist eyewitness, suggest that the Guardia Popular Antifascista had prepared an ambush. The members of the Iron Column fled, abandoning their banners and the corpse of Tiburcio Ariza. Around thirty people were killed, either shot or else drowned trying to escape by swimming across the River Trubia. The anarchists were set on bloody revenge, but further violence was prevented when the CNT leadership, which was about to join Largo Caballero’s government, persuaded the columns to return to the Teruel front. In many respects, the events of October 1936 in Valencia anticipated what would happen in Barcelona in May 1937.
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In Alicante, the round-up of local right-wingers began immediately after the defeat of the uprising in the city. Many of the military personnel arrested were transferred to the prison ship
Río Sil
, whose passengers were to be murdered in Cartagena in mid-August. Corpses began to appear on beaches and in the fields. Many house searches were merely an excuse for robbery. Militia groups, and among them many recently released common criminals, were largely responsible for the wave of killings and other abuses. However, the murders of several prominent Republicans indicated that Falangist hitmen were operating under cover of the prevailing confusion. As early as 28 July, the Civil Governor published an edict: ‘anyone who, whether or not they belong to a political entity, carries out acts against life or property, is threatened with the immediate application of the maximum penalty, since such criminals will be regarded as rebels at the service of the enemies of the Republic’. Moreover, by the end of August, even the CNT newspaper
El Luchador
felt obliged by the ‘monstrous’ occurrence of house searches for theft, arrests and murders based on personal grudges to adopt an ‘authoritarian and statist’ stance and to express a determination to put an end to such abuses. It was to little avail. The biggest massacre took place on 29 November 1936 when forty-nine right-wingers were shot against the walls of the cemetery in reprisal for a bombing raid.
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Moving further south, in the province of Murcia, the death toll was much lower than in Valencia or Catalonia. This was a reflection of the lesser presence of the FAI. As elsewhere, the bulk of the violence took place in the early months of the war. The deaths of 84 per cent (622) of
the total number of rightists killed in the city (740) took place between 18 July and 31 December 1936. Unusually, however, there were relatively few deaths in the immediate wake of the coup – eighteen in the remainder of July, only two of them in the naval port of Cartagena, the province’s second city. This reflected the fact that on 21 July the Popular Front Committee issued a manifesto in which it declared: ‘Those who feel and understand what the Popular Front is and what it represents at this moment, must scrupulously respect people and property.’ Nevertheless, complaints about the house searches and arrests carried out by extremist militia groups saw the Popular Front Committee in Cartagena issue an edict, on 13 August, banning unauthorized house searches, the confiscation of property and arrests. It declared that anyone contravening the edict would be shot. Since the activities of the militias continued, a further edict was issue on 12 September threatening that further house searches would be punished by execution without trial.
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The numbers of assassinations rocketed, with over three hundred deaths in August. Most of these were of military personnel in Cartagena. The naval and army officers who had risen in Cartagena were held on a prison ship,
España No. 3
. In another, the
Río Sil
, were held the Civil Guards who had taken part in the unsuccessful uprising in Albacete. With tension building up in response to news of the massacres in the south, crowds of militiamen and sympathizers gathered daily on the quayside demanding ‘justice’ – in other words, their execution. While being transferred to the city’s prison on the morning of 14 August, ten of the Civil Guards were murdered after provoking the crowd and then trying to escape. To prevent further assassinations, both ships put to sea. However, bloody events were triggered around 1.00 p.m. when the battleship
Jaime I
arrived in port carrying three dead and eight wounded crewmen as a result of being bombed by rebel planes in Málaga. The ship’s anarchist-dominated revolutionary committee linked with the port’s anarchist militias in demanding revenge. That night, the crew of the
Río Sil
threw overboard fifty-two of the nearly four hundred Civil Guards. On the
España No. 3
, ninety-four naval officers and fifty-three army, Civil Guard and Carabinero officers, 147 prisoners in total, were shot and then thrown overboard. Another five were shot the next morning.
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Thereafter, as will be seen below, the creation and operation of the so-called People’s Courts (Tribunales Populares) gradually reduced the scale of executions. During the worst month of the war, August 1936, nearly 70 per cent of the executions were of military personnel involved
in the coup. Indeed, in the worst year, 1936, more than 40 per cent of the deaths were of army and naval officers. Over the entire war, military personnel constituted 31 per cent of the total rearguard executions in Murcia, although they constituted 66 per cent of those killed in Cartagena. The next most numerous group of victims were priests and religious, around 9 per cent of the total, followed by a similar number of property-owners, industrialists and rightists in general.
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Rebel bombing attacks frequently led to popular reprisals in the Republican zone. In Málaga, this was a frequent occurrence in response to bombs dropped by a rebel seaplane. The city was largely in the hands of the CNT–FAI-dominated Committee of Public Safety. Approximately five hundred right-wingers had been detained by various militia groups working on its orders and were held in the city’s Cárcel Nueva. These groups, which had names like ‘Death Patrol’, ‘Dawn Patrol’, ‘Lightning Patrol’ and ‘Pancho Villa’, were predominantly anarchist, and included common criminals released in the immediate wake of the uprising. On 22 August, a furious crowd gathered after thirty women, children and old people were killed and many more wounded in a bombing raid. To appease the mob, the Committee drew up a list of sixty-five prisoners, who were taken out and shot. On 30 August, after another visit from the seaplane, a further fifty-three prisoners were selected and shot; on 20 September another forty-three; the following day, a further seventeen; on 24 September ninety-seven. In fact, 25 per cent (275) of all the rightists killed in the city of Málaga (1,110) while it remained in Republican hands met their fates in reprisals for bombing raids.
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Similarly, the bulk of killings in both Guadalajara and Santander were in response to bombing attacks on both cities.
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One of those murdered in Málaga was the seventy-year-old Benito Ortega Muñoz. He had been sought by FAI militiamen, who wanted revenge for the fact that he had been imposed as Mayor after the uprising of October 1934. He had gone into hiding and they had arrested his eldest son, Bernardo, who was shot when he refused to reveal his father’s hiding-place. Finally, Benito was denounced by a household servant and arrested by an FAI patrol on 11 August. Even though, as Mayor, he had acted fairly, he was among those shot on 30 August despite an attempt to save him by the then Mayor, Eugenio Entrambasaguas of Unión Republicana, who made constant efforts to stop the assassinations being carried out by the various patrols. Nevertheless, when Málaga was occupied by the Francoists, Entrambasaguas was condemned to death and shot.
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The victims of the rebels in the south inevitably were those who had been prominent in the social war that had festered throughout the first half of the decade, but also included many innocent members of their families and others whose only crime was to have belonged to a union or voted for the Popular Front. In those parts of Andalusia where the coup had failed, such as Málaga, the targets of left-wing vengeance were priests, landowners and their agents, foremen and guards as well as Civil Guards, right-wing militants and army officers. In Jaén, where the rising had been defeated by the local peasantry, there were widespread land seizures and acts of revenge for the daily brutality of the previous years. As in so many places, the bulk of the killing took place in the first five months of the war and was at its height during August and September 1936. Despite public statements by successive Civil Governors, Luis Ruiz Zunón and José Piqueras Muñoz, that crimes against persons and property would be inflexibly punished, social hatred led to savage violence. In the course of September and October, in the town of Martos, to the west of the provincial capital and near the rebel-held zone, 159 rightists were murdered, including nine priests and twelve women, among them three nuns, the only ones killed in the entire province. There is evidence that some corpses were dismembered and decapitated.
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There were significant differences in the social structures of rural Andalusia, the Levante and Catalonia and also within those regions. Nevertheless, there were striking similarities in the origins and practice of repression. In all cases, the degree of bitterness of the pre-1936 class struggles was a key determinant of the scale of violence. Bombing raids and tales carried by terrified refugees from the rebel zone had a huge impact everywhere. In this regard, a revealing case is that of Elche near Alicante, a large town of about 46,000 inhabitants. There, the first assassination did not take place until 18 August 1936, when news of the massacre of Badajoz arrived, and the last two murders were in reprisal for a sustained bombing raid on the night of 28 November 1936. The fact that the CNT had fewer than four hundred militants in the town might account for the fact that the overall figure for extra-judicial executions in Elche, sixty-two, was very low for a town of its size. Relatively low too was the total number of clergy assassinated – four priests. The bulk of the murders have been attributed to members of the Communist Party.
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In Alicante itself, the largest single atrocity, with thirty-six deaths, took place when the provincial prison was attacked after the sustained bombing of 28–29 November 1936. The bombing had been a deliberate,
and previously announced, reprisal for the execution of José Antonio Primo de Rivera eight days earlier.
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The correlation between CNT–FAI strength and the nature of extra-judicial repression is far from clear. Two other towns in Alicante with similar populations of around 45,000, Orihuela and Alcoy, offer puzzling comparisons. In Alcoy, in the north of the province, where the CNT was dominant, there were one hundred murders of which twenty were clergy. Anarchist anti-clericalism saw the most important church in Alcoy not burned down but demolished stone by stone and the materials reused to build an Olympic-size swimming pool. In Orihuela, in the Socialist-dominated south of the province, the total number of assassinations was low at forty-six. Yet, despite a marginal CNT presence, as in Elche, twenty-five of those murdered were members of the clergy. The killers responsible were identified as young men not affiliated to any party, although it has been plausibly suggested that they might have been working on instructions from the Socialist Committee.
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In general, anti-clericalism tended to be more acute where anarchism was stronger, but there were also dramatic examples of anti-clerical violence where the PSOE was the dominant force, in Orihuela, Castilla-La Mancha and Asturias. The south-east of Toledo in Castilla-La Mancha had one of the highest indexes of extra-judicial deaths per head of the population. This contrasted with the north of the province where one hundred villages saw minimal rearguard violence, forty-seven with no deaths at all and fifty-three with between one and five. The difference is explained by the high levels of illiteracy in the south of the province and the especially conflictive social context in the large estates there. Equally dramatic were the figures for the much larger anarchist-dominated area from the south of Zaragoza, through Teruel into the Terra Alta and Priorat regions of Tarragona.
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Nevertheless, whatever the differences and similarities, one thing remains clear. Had the basic norms of social coexistence not been torn asunder by the military coup, the bloodshed in the Republican rearguard would never have taken place on the scale seen.

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