The Spanish Holocaust (50 page)

Revolutionary Terror in Madrid

The military uprising, ostensibly against a non-existent Communist take-over plot, provoked a collapse of the structures of law and order. To make matters worse, in an effort to convince the Great Powers to support the Republic, the cabinet formed on 19 July was made up exclusively of middle-class liberals and thus neither respected nor, initially, obeyed by the left-wing parties and unions that defeated the uprising. An outburst of revolutionary fervour and an orgy of killing would demonstrate once more that Spain’s harshly repressive society had produced a brutalized underclass. The key events that underlay the violence in Republican Madrid took place in the first two days. The opening of the prisons saw hundreds of common criminals released, among them sadists and psychopaths who were only too willing to use the political chaos as a shield for their activities. Moreover, they had ample motives to seek revenge against the magistrates and judges who had put them in jail. In fact, out of fear of reprisals or because of their sympathy with the coup, many judicial functionaries went into hiding. More than one hundred judges were murdered.
¹

A central factor in the violence was the distribution of arms in the wake of the defeat of the military uprising. On the evening of 19 July, the General in charge of the coup in the capital, Joaquín Fanjul, took command of the troops and Falangist volunteers gathered in the Montaña barracks near the Plaza de España. He was unable to lead them out because the building was surrounded by a huge crowd of civilians together with about one hundred Civil Guards and a few Assault Guards. Fanjul’s men opened fire with machine-guns. Those with rifles replied. Early the following morning, an even larger crowd converged on the barracks, accompanied now by two artillery pieces, albeit with few shells. Cannon fire and a bomb dropped by a loyalist aircraft saw a white flag extended through a window. The flag may have been waved by one of the many pro-Republican soldiers among Fanjul’s forces, but the crowd advanced in expectation of an immediate surrender. Many were killed or
wounded when they were met by a burst of machine-gun fire. The outraged throng pulled back but, when a second white flag appeared, swarmed forward only to be greeted once more by the rattle of the machine-guns. Finally, just before noon, the now infuriated mob broke in. Weapons were distributed and a massacre ensued at the hands of the pro-Republican conscripts from within and the militiamen from outside. A giant left-winger hurled officers from the windows. Some officers committed suicide and Falangists who had joined the rebels inside were shot.
²

On that brilliantly sunny Monday morning, 20 July, an English nurse, Mary Bingham de Urquidi, saw defeated soldiers being shot while a baying crowd howled abuse. She counterpointed her gruesome tale with evidence of the humanity of some of the Republicans. She saw a ten-year-old boy beg for the life of his father who was about to be shot. His plea that he and his father were Republicans was successful. The mob was moved on by Republican soldiers and numerous corpses could be seen. Mary Bingham seemed unaware that many of the bodies were of Republican civilians killed while attacking the barracks.
³
In contrast, the firmly pro-rebel Ambassador of Chile, Aurelio Núñez Morgado, described the events at La Montaña as ‘the start of the Madrid massacre’. Certainly many of the weapons distributed when the barracks was taken would be used over the next five months in the repression.
⁴

In the course of 19 July, some churches were burned, often because rebel supporters had been storing arms there and now had fired from the towers on groups of workers. Other churches were left intact because their parish priest had opened them and invited the militiamen to see that there were no fascists inside. The art treasures therein were thus saved.
⁵
In the first few days, what was called ‘popular justice’ was meted out spontaneously and indiscriminately against anyone denounced as a rightist. However, in Madrid, as had happened in Barcelona and Valencia, virtually every left-wing political party and trade union soon established its own squads, the
checas
, to eliminate suspected fascists. At headquarters set up in requisitioned buildings, they often had private prisons where detainees were interrogated. Executions usually took place on the outskirts of the city. In Madrid, there were nearly two hundred of these squads, if those set up by recently freed common criminals are included. The principal
checas
run by left-wing parties and unions numbered about twenty-five.
⁶
Considered to be warriors in the social war, criminals were often accepted into anarchist rearguard militias. Although far from having a monopoly of the worst excesses, the anarchists were the most
prominent in the bloodshed in Madrid. Their
checas
often took the names given respectively to CNT and PCE neighbourhood headquarters and cells – the anarchists using ‘Libertarian Atheneum’ and the Communists using the name ‘Radio’.

The ability of the forces of order to control the
checas
was severely circumscribed. Many policemen, Assault Guards and Civil Guards supported the military rebellion and had either crossed the lines or else been arrested. Many others were often suspect, and the Assault Guards and Civil Guards who remained loyal had to be deployed at the front. The consequent decimation of the various police forces facilitated the activities of the rearguard militia groups. Nevertheless, the government began almost at once to take faltering steps to put a stop to the theft, extortion and murder being committed by some
checas
, although it would be five months before anything like full control was established. The new Minister of the Interior, General Sebastián Pozas Perea, had been Inspector General of the Civil Guard until 19 July. He had worked frantically, albeit in vain, to limit the spread of the rebellion within the corps.
⁷
Now he worked equally hard and equally unsuccessfully to stop the
checas
carrying out arrests and house searches.
⁸

The targets of the self-appointed
checas
and militia groups were not only the active supporters of the military coup. Many totally innocent individuals were arrested and sometimes murdered, as one middle-class detainee wrote later, simply for owning a business, for having opposed a strike, for having expressed support for the suppression of the Asturian rising, for belonging to the clergy or ‘for being rude to the maid’s boyfriend or to the lout of a doorman’. Concierges would often tip off a
checa
on the basis of the arrival of an unknown visitor or an unusual package, or because an occupant of the building never left home. Suspicion was enough.
⁹
Antonio Machado, the fervently pro-Republican poet, was arrested in the early days of the war in a café in the Glorieta de Chamberí because a militiaman mistook him for a priest.
¹⁰

The Consul of Norway, the pro-rebel German Felix Schlayer, compiled a similar list of likely innocent victims of the
checas
, adding landowners resident in Madrid murdered by labourers from their estates and eccentric aristocrats, too old to have played any part in the uprising. Henry Helfant, the commercial attaché of the Romanian Embassy, considered that Schlayer was pro-Nazi.
¹¹
Although Schlayer collaborated with the fifth column, passing information about troop movements to the rebels besieging the capital and, after leaving Republican Spain, spending time in Salamanca, he was a valuable eyewitness. One of the names on his list
was that of the last descendant of Christopher Columbus, the Duque de Veragua, whose murder by an unknown
checa
sent shockwaves around the Latin American embassies. As in the rebel zone, denunciations were often motivated by nothing more than a desire to avoid a debt or by sexual jealousy. Crimes of theft and murder were frequently committed in the name of revolutionary justice. Often corpses were found with notes pinned to their clothing bearing the words ‘Justicia del Pueblo’.
¹²

Some responsibility for the violence must fall on a significant part of the anarcho-syndicalist leadership. At the end of July, the principal anarchist daily in Madrid,
CNT
, carried the banner headline ‘Popular Justice. The Fascist Murderers Must Fall’. The passionate article went on to dismiss the Republican authorities as if they were as much the enemy as the rebels:

Faced with a judiciary and courts that stink of rot and whose spirit and whose laws are purely bourgeois, the people must take control of justice for itself … the Republic was and is bourgeois, strictly conservative and authoritarian. Having survived the events that we have just survived, and with the popular forces in the street, with the weapons of their free will in their hands, there is no other law and no other authority than that of the people. This is justice: what the people want, what the people order, what the people impose. The Spanish people must smash its enemies, both at the front and in the rearguard. We must destroy the thousand-year-old enemy who hides in the administration, in the laws of the State, in the banks and in the management of companies. The murderers of the people have to fall! They pululate in industry, in commerce, in politics, in the courts. That is where fascism hides … it is necessary to purify with fire. Exactly. We must burn much, MUCH, in order to purify everything.
¹³

As in Barcelona, for many anarchists in the capital, destruction of churches and the assassination of the representatives of the old order, whether clergy, police or property-owners, were steps towards the creation of a new world. Overall control of CNT groups, both front-line militias and rearguard
checas
, was exercised in Madrid by the CNT–FAI Defence Committee. Its secretary and mastermind was a twenty-eight-year-old waiter from Jaca in Huesca, Eduardo Val Bescós, who had overall control of the militas and the
checas
. The volatile Amor Nuño Pérez, secretary of the Madrid Federation of the CNT, ran the
checas
on a day-to-day basis. Manuel Salgado Moreira ran the investigation units.
Cipriano Mera commanded front-line militia units which operated out of the Cine Europa, headquarters of one of the most notorious
checas
. The CNT militia units that controlled the roads out of Madrid were under the direct command of Eduardo Val.
¹⁴

Before the Civil War, the intelligent and elusive Val – ‘as silent as a shadow’, in the words of a comrade – had run the CNT–FAI ‘action groups’ in Madrid. This fact was not known by most of the rest of the anarcho-syndicalist leadership. Indeed, according to both Durruti’s close friend Ricardo Sanz and Gregorio Gallego, the leader of the regional organization of the Federación de Juventudes Libertarias (the anarchist youth movement), Val was as little known at the end of the war as he had been before 1936. Gallego wrote of the taciturn Val:

Professionally, he was an elegant waiter, smiling and amiable. When, in evening dress, he served table in the great political banquets organized at the Ritz and Palace hotels, nobody suspected that behind his gentle, slightly ironic smile lurked the man who pulled the secret strings of the terrorist groups. By nature, he was mysterious, elusive and little given to revealing anything. Many militants accused him of being a chameleon and there were those who thought he had bourgeois aspirations because of his stylish way of dressing and his refined manners. Nevertheless, as soon as the war started, he squeezed himself into a pair of overalls and the elegant cove turned himself into a scruffy wretch. Was it just another mask to permit him to pass unnoticed? I think so, because he got through the war without anyone really knowing him … Upon this man, fiercely private, secretive, more violent and daring than anyone could imagine, rested the security of the Castilian CNT.
¹⁵

Some anarchists were appalled by the
paseos
(people ‘being taken for a ride’ that culminated in their murder), but many others favoured the elimination of enemy supporters both as an opportunity to build a new world and as a necessary part of the war effort. For most elements of the Popular Front, the annihilation of the enemy within was a central wartime imperative.
Política
, the daily newspaper of Azaña’s middle-class party Izquierda Republicana, expressed outrage that rightists had been released because some Republican had intervened on their behalf. Arguing that neither friendship nor family ties should hinder the purging of the rearguard, the paper threatened to publicize the names of those involved in future cases.
¹⁶
The Communists and the anarchists were both ruthless in wanting to root out the enemy within. Eventually,
however, the Communists would come to see the anarchists as damaging the war effort and would turn on them, somewhat later than in Barcelona, and thus open a new phase of the repression.

More urgent incitements to violence came in the form of bombing raids and news of atrocities committed by the rebels. Both the bombings and the tales of the refugees were pervasively toxic in their effects, producing outbursts of mass fury that the Republican authorities were often unable to contain. In Madrid, on the night of 7 August, in reprisal for the first bombing raid, a number of rightist prisoners were assassinated. In response to the violence in general and to these murders, the moderate Socialist Indalecio Prieto made a much publicized radio broadcast. Prieto was effectively prime minister in the shadows from 20 July to 4 September while apparently serving merely as adviser to the cabinet led by the liberal Republican Professor José Giral. From a large office in the Navy Ministry, he worked untiringly to give direction to the shambles that was Giral’s government. On 8 August, he declared: