The Spanish Holocaust (52 page)

The government tried to have General López Ochoa transferred to somewhere safer but was prevented twice by anarchists surrounding the hospital. A third attempt, on 17 August, saw him being taken out in a coffin drugged with morphine to appear dead, when the ruse was discovered. He was later alleged to have been dragged from the coffin by an anarchist called Manuel Muñoz de Molino and shot in the gardens of the hospital. His head was severed and carried around the streets on a pole, with a card reading: ‘This is the butcher of Asturias’.
⁴⁰
When one of the many militiamen accused of being involved was interrogated after the war, he claimed, almost certainly having been tortured to do so, that they were acting on the orders of the Ministry of War. The Chilean
Ambassador, Aurelio Núñez Morgado, had been informed that López Ochoa was in danger but reached the military hospital in Carabanchel too late. Núñez Morgado later made the utterly baseless claim that General Pozas had authorized the handing over of López Ochoa to his eventual assassins, members of the Libertarian Atheneum of Carabanchel.
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On the same day as the murder of López Ochoa, a much greater atrocity took place. In Jaén, with the provincial prison bursting at the seams, other captured right-wingers were held in the Cathedral. There were around eight hundred prisoners bunking down in the various naves and chapels. The problems of feeding them were acute and trucks bringing them food were regularly attacked. They had every reason to fear for their lives. Already on the night of 30 July, forty-eight right-wingers had been massacred by an armed mob that assaulted the prison at Úbeda. The Civil Governor, Luis Ruiz Zunón, was anxious to avoid similar bloodshed in Jaén itself. Ruiz Zunón secured permission from the Director General of Prisons in Madrid, Pedro Villar Gómez, himself from Jaén, to transfer several hundred to the prison at Alcalá de Henares. However, Manuel Muñoz Martínez, the Director General of Security, claimed, when interrogated in 1942, that he had not been informed of the plan and therefore had been unable to arrange adequate security.

At dawn on 11 August, a first expedition of 322 detainees from the provincial prison were taken in trucks to the railway junction at Espelúy north of the capital where they were put on a train. It would appear that someone in Jaén tipped off extremists further north that the train was coming. At each station along the way, stones and insults were hurled by hostile mobs. On reaching Atocha station in the capital, eleven of the prisoners, prominent landowners and right-wing figures including two priests, were murdered. The remaining 311, a third of whom required medical attention, reached Alcalá de Henares. Early in the morning of the following day, there was a second expedition of 245 captives from the Cathedral and from the recently conquered town of Adamuz (north-east of Córdoba). Among them was the sixty-seven-year-old Bishop of Jaén, Manuel Basulto Jiménez, his sister Teresa and the Dean of the Cathedral chapter, Felix Pérez Portela.

When the train reached the station of Santa Catalina Vallecas in the south of Madrid, it was stopped by anarchist militiamen who uncoupled the locomotive. The station master and the commander of the Civil Guard escort telephoned the Director General of Security, Manuel Muñoz, and told him that the anarchists had set up three machine-guns
and threatened to shoot the Civil Guards if they did not leave. Muñoz allowed the Civil Guards to leave because, he claimed later, the government’s authority was a fiction that would crumple if the forces of order were overwhelmed in a clash with the armed people. When the guards withdrew, 193 of the prisoners were executed in groups of twenty-five. In the course of the carnage, the Bishop fell to his knees and began to pray. His sister, Teresa Basulto, shouted at one of the militiamen, ‘This is an outrage. I’m just a poor woman.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ he replied, ‘we’ll get a woman to shoot you,’ and she was shot by an anarchist named Josefa Coso. Two days later, devastated by the denouement of an initiative intended to avoid bloodshed, Luis Ruiz Zunón resigned as Civil Governor.
⁴²
A further 128 prisoners were seized from the provincial prison of Jaén between 2 and 7 April 1937 and shot in reprisal for a series of rebel bombing raids.
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The assassination of López Ochoa and of the prisoners from Jaén revealed the scale of the task facing the Republican authorities. The Director General of Prisons, Pedro Villar Gómez, a moderate Republican, was as affected as Ruiz Zunón by ‘the trains of death’. Overwhelmed by atrocities being committed in the prisons of Madrid by militiamen who freed and armed common prisoners and abducted rightists, he resigned in September. As a landowner in Quesada in the east of Jaén, he had seen his own property confiscated. Moreover, his son Bernardo Villar was an artillery captain who had joined the military rebels in Córdoba. Perceiving himself to be hated by both sides, Villar Gómez went into exile in France. His absence was just one more factor in the subsequent escalation of the outrages in the capital’s prisons.
⁴⁴

Juan García Oliver, the anarchist who was to become Minister of Justice in November 1936, justified atrocities on the grounds that ‘the military uprising destroyed all social restraints because it was carried out by those classes that usually maintained the social order. Accordingly, efforts to re-establish a legal equilibrium saw the spirit of justice revert to its most distant and pure form: the people:
vox populi, suprema lex
. And the people, while the abnormality continued, created and applied its own law and procedure, the
paseo
.’
⁴⁵
Uncontrolled acts of reprisal and revenge, responses to offences real and imagined, were not confined to high-profile atrocities like the murders of López Ochoa or of the passengers on the train from Jaén. Corpses found strewn along roadsides at dawn were the gruesome products of midnight
paseos
which could equally have been the work of militia patrols or of private enterprise hoodlums.

Both General Sebastián Pozas Perea and Manuel Blasco Garzón, who, on 19 July, became respectively Ministers of the Interior and of Justice, were simply swamped by the enormity of the task facing them. At the end of July, the Director General of Security, José Alonso Mallol, resigned in frustration at the impotence of the apparatus of the state to prevent uncontrolled criminals and militia groups taking the law into their own hands.
⁴⁶
To replace Alonso Mallol, Pozas had turned to the forty-eight-year-old Manuel Muñoz Martínez, a retired army major from Chiclana just outside Cádiz. Muñoz had represented Cádiz in the Cortes as a Left Republican deputy.
⁴⁷
Described by the Chilean diplomat Carlos Morla Lynch as ‘tall and terse, very dark, very hard and very obstinate’, he was, by most accounts, a mediocre individual.
⁴⁸
He was also distracted by fears for his own family in Cádiz.

When Muñoz first went to the Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS – Security Headquarters), he found the building completely deserted. Attempting to rebuild the apparatus of law and order, Muñoz faced the unreliability of the police, the Civil Guard and the Assault Guards. Those that could be relied upon were needed at the front.
⁴⁹
An indication of the consequent impotence was his ineffectual announcement that
porteros
(concierges) would be held responsible for any searches and arrests carried out in their buildings by unauthorized personnel.
⁵⁰

Muñoz’s basic problem in trying to rebuild his department’s central role in public order was that every party and trade union had squads that autonomously carried out house searches, arrests and executions. The most numerous and the most disorganized were the anarchist ones. The one run by the Madrid branch of the Socialist Party was more efficient and was soon given official status. It was known as the CIEP because it used the file-card system built up by the party’s Electoral Information Committee (Comisión de Información Electoral Permanente). Its principal leaders, who went on to play important roles, were Julio de Mora Martínez and two professional policemen who were also Socialists, Anselmo Burgos Gil and David Vázquez Baldominos. Julio de Mora would later become head of the Departamento Especial de Información del Estado (DEDIDE – Special State Intelligence Department). Burgos Gil would lead the bodyguards of the Soviet Ambassador. In June 1937 Vázquez Baldominos would be made chief of police in Madrid.
⁵¹

Aware of their own impotence and in a first desperate attempt to regain some vestige of control, General Pozas and Muñoz agreed that it was necessary to get the left-wing parties and unions involved in supporting the DGS. The result was the creation on 4 August of the
Comité Provincial de Investigación Pública. Muñoz’s declared objective was ‘to contain the assassinations and excesses being committed in Madrid because of the lack of authority and control over the armed masses’. The scale of the problem was revealed when, four days later, Enrique Castro Delgado, the commander of the most highly disciplined militia unit, the Communist Fifth Regiment, was obliged to announce that any of its members found to have carried out unauthorized arrests and/or house searches would be expelled.
⁵²
It was perhaps no coincidence that two battalions of the Fifth Regiment shared the premises of the most important Communist
checa
, known as ‘Radio 8’.
⁵³

By creating the Comité Provincial de Investigación Pública (CPIP), Muñoz was placing law and order in the capital in the hands of a committee composed of thirty representatives of the left-wing parties and trade unions. It was dominated by the CNT–FAI, whose representatives were Benigno Mancebo Martín and Manuel Rascón Ramírez. They would later acquire notoriety for their role in the
sacas
– the removal and subsequent assassination of prisoners. The same was true of Arturo García de la Rosa, the representative of the Communist-dominated United Socialist Youth (Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas). These poachers turned gamekeepers operated initially out of the Círculo de Bellas Artes located in the capital’s great Calle Alcalá at number 42. At the first meeting, Muñoz said that he simply could not trust the staff of the DGS and that, once it had been properly purged of rebel supporters, he would bring in members of the CPIP as ‘provisional police officers’ to fill the gaps. Nevertheless, his statement that all arrests must be made in collaboration with the police was rejected out of hand by some delegates, who made it clear that they reserved the right to shoot those considered ‘indisputably fascist and dangerous’. Muñoz was alleged to have smiled and to have said that some things did not need to be spelled out.

The Committee designated six tribunals to function round the clock with two of them working eight-hour shifts each day. These tribunals, under the overall supervision of Benigno Mancebo and consisting of men without any legal training or experience, sometimes themselves criminals, undertook the arrest, trial and sentencing of suspects. The men responsible for arresting suspects were able, with credentials provided by the DGS, to enter any premises, seize any property they considered questionable and arrest anyone they thought suspicious. Mancebo made decisions on the basis of statements from the employees or domestic servants of those detained. He was merciful with those said to have treated their staff well. Those found guilty by these tribunals
would be taken to prison. Often, militiamen from the Committee or some independent
checa
would go to the prisons with an order of liberation on DGS notepaper. As the man left the prison, usually between midnight and dawn, he would be picked up by militiamen, driven away and shot. Among those given DGS badges and identification papers were common criminals such as the notorious Felipe Emilio Sandoval Cabrerizo, a fifty-year-old anarchist who used the sobriquet ‘Dr Muñiz’.
⁵⁴

Not long after the creation of the CPIP, Muñoz was so concerned by the continuing wave of
paseos
that he turned to the CNT leadership for help. He was particularly appalled by the spectacle of large numbers of corpses being found each morning in the Pradera de San Isidro, the popular park to the south-west of the city. Muñoz knew that David Antona, the secretary of the Regional CNT, was hostile to the
paseos
. Through Antona, he was able to meet some young CNT leaders, including Gregorio Gallego, in the hope of securing their help in putting an end to the
paseos
. They told him it was impossible since that would involve them taking on their own comrades from the CPIP and the other
checas
. When Gallego discussed the meeting with Eduardo Val and Amor Nuño, who ran the anarchist
checas
, Val was critical of uncontrolled violence, but he may have been making a distinction between that and the violence that he did control. Nuño expressed approval of the
paseos
, saying ‘instant justice strengthens the revolutionary morale of the people and commits it to the life-and-death struggle in which we are involved’.
⁵⁵

On occasions, Muñoz would telephone the Círculo de Bellas Artes to order the arrest of a given individual, only for the anarchists to refuse. With ample reason not to trust the anarchists of the CPIP, Manuel Muñoz assigned to the Dirección General de Seguridad two somewhat more reliable armed units which would operate largely, although not exclusively, on his own orders. One such squad, consisting mainly of Assault Guards, was headed by Captain Juan Tomás de Estelrich. Thanks to an imaginative journalist of
Heraldo de Madrid
, the squad came to be known as ‘Los Linces de la República’ (the Lynxes of the Republic). Operating out of the ex-royal palace, it was used, on the specific orders of the DGS, for the arrest of named individuals and the confiscation of valuables. Many of its operations took place in small towns and villages outside Madrid in the provinces of Toledo and Ávila, where they shot local rightists. The unit would de dismantled in December 1936. After the war, several of its members were accused of murdering some of those arrested.
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