The Spanish Holocaust (53 page)

The other group was known as the ‘Escuadrilla del Amanecer’ (the Dawn Squad) because of its practice of arrests and house searches from 1.00 a.m. until dawn. Like the Lynxes, it consisted mainly of Assault Guards, although it was more directly responsible to Muñoz and operated out of the DGS.
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It made important arrests such as those of the great liberal politician Melquíades Álvarez and Dr José María Albiñana, who had founded the diminutive Spanish Nationalist Party in 1930. It acquired a reputation for its ruthlessness and often worked in collaboration with the CPIP and some of the anarchist
checas
, including the group led by the notorious killer Felipe Sandoval at the Cine Europa.
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After the war, members of the Escuadrilla del Amanecer were tried for theft, murder and sexual crimes. The most notorious case was that of María Dolores Chicharro y Lamamié de Clairac, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Carlist. Despite her family’s beliefs, Dolores’s only crime seems to have been her beauty. She was arrested in April 1937, gang-raped and then murdered in the Casa de Campo.
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Obviously, the overlap between police and parallel police organizations opened up considerable opportunities for corruption and abuse. The wages of those who worked in the CPIP were paid from money confiscated during house searches. Three weeks after its creation, the CPIP was obliged to issue a statement insisting that no unauthorized house searches were to be carried out, that only weapons, compromising documents and valuables of use to the war effort were to be confiscated and that everything taken was to be handed in to the CPIP.
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Accordingly, all the left-wing political parties and unions jointly announced that detentions or house searches could be carried out only by agents or militiamen carrying documentation from the DGS or the CPIP. Citizens were instructed to denounce to the authorities any attempts at either without such authorization.
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As might have been expected, this did not deter some of the groups ostensibly undertaking security functions, even those linked to the CPIP. In part to counter the disproportionate anarchist influence in the CPIP, on 5 August General Pozas ordered the reorganization of the criminal investigation section of the police, the Cuerpo de Investigación y Vigilancia. As a result, about one hundred men, the majority Socialists, were sworn in as temporary police officers. On the recommendation of the PSOE’s executive committee, Agapito García Atadell was appointed to head a unit supposedly under the supervision of a professional policeman, the commander of the Criminal Investigation Brigade, Antonio Lino. García Atadell was a thirty-four-year-old typesetter from Galicia
who claimed later to be a close friend of Indalecio Prieto. This was far from the truth and was not why he was recommended for the job. He certainly knew Prieto but merely because he had been part of his armed escort during the February election campaign. He would betray the trust placed in him. Through his nefarious activities, he was to become the most celebrated example of a man turned into a criminal by the temptations of his role.
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The García Atadell Brigade, and another set up at the same time under the command of Javier Méndez, a career policeman, effectively operated on their own initiative. The authority of their supervisor Antonio Lino was no more than nominal. García Atadell established his forty-eight men in the confiscated palace of the Condes de Rincón on Madrid’s grand Paseo de la Castellana.
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Méndez set up headquarters in the Gran Vía above the Cafetería Zahara and the press regularly recorded the arrests of spies, saboteurs, snipers, Falangists and other rebel supporters by his unit. García Atadell went to some trouble to ensure that ever more flattering accounts of the exploits of his own men were published almost daily. These legitimate duties in rearguard security usually led to the discovery of weapons and large sums of money and valuables as a result of denunciations by the
porteros
and cleaners of buildings in upper-class areas. Considerable amounts of money and valuables were handed over to the authorities by García Atadell, although part of the booty remained in his hands and those of his two closest cronies, Luis Ortuño and Pedro Penabad.
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Antonio Lino, who was secretly a rebel supporter, later alleged that the militiamen brought in by García Atadell and Méndez included ‘common thieves, gangsters and murderers’. He claimed that he and other professional policemen did not dare come out of their offices unless armed. According to Lino, Méndez was corrupt and responsible for the deaths of numerous policemen, although it is likely that Méndez was uncovering the treachery of rebel supporters within the force. Lino, fearful that his own rebel sympathies were about to be exposed, eventually took refuge in the Mexican Embassy.
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When García Atadell fell into rebel hands, he tried to put himself in a favourable light by claiming that he had often helped Lino neutralize Méndez, who used to tip off the CPIP about suspect policemen. He also boasted that he had arranged for Lino’s family to be given refuge in the Mexican Embassy. This is plausible since he ran a racket with an attaché at the Embassy whereby right-wingers arrested by his men could buy sanctuary there.
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While it was certainly the case that there were criminal elements at work in the Republican rearguard, some of the robberies and other abuses were the work of right-wing agents provocateurs. In pursuit of its legitimate duties, the Atadell Brigade uncovered an organization that provided Republican uniforms so that its members could carry out night-time shootings with impunity. García Atadell himself felt obliged to issue a statement that only men carrying an identity card with his signature were authentic members of his unit.
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Given the mix of official functions and abuse, it is extremely difficult to estimate the scale of the crimes committed by the Atadell Brigade. When he fell into rebel hands in November 1936, he tried to ingratiate himself with his interrogators by exaggerating the number of robberies and murders and claiming that they were all approved by the Republican authorities.

He admitted that the brigade carried out many executions on its own initiative after nightly judgments reached by a ‘sentencing committee’. This consisted of the so-called ‘control committee’ which administered the overall operation, augmented with a different rank-and-file militiaman each day. The prisoners were sentenced to death or imprisonment or freed. In the cases of dispute, Atadell had the casting vote. In Atadell’s version, the hundred or so persons sentenced to death were immediately driven to the outskirts of Madrid and shot. One of the committee’s members, Ángel Pedrero, who later attained prominence in the Republican security services, denied any knowledge of such executions throughout interrogation and torture and at his trial on 20 February 1940. Nevertheless, he was sentenced to death by garrotte vil for involvement in at least fifteen of the Atadell Brigade’s killings as well as for his role in the Republic’s military counter-intelligence organization from 1937 to 1939.
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The majority of the brigade’s prisoners were handed over to the DGS, along with confiscated valuables and weapons. Some of the more important, however, were kept as hostages in the brigade’s Rincón Palace. In some cases, they were held until they paid a ransom or bought the passports that enabled them to escape to the rebel zone. In others, they were murdered to cover up the theft of their property. Several others, such as the Duquesa de Lerma, were saved. Indeed, in gratitude, the Duquesa later travelled from San Sebastián to Seville to speak at Atadell’s trial. Atadell also ‘graciously extended his protection’ to people from his native village of Viveiro in Lugo. Life in the Palace gave an insight into García Atadell’s bizarre mentality. His exquisite treatment of some aristocratic prisoners perhaps suggested an ostentatious desire to show off, an
impression confirmed by the tawdry arrangements in the Palace itself. He often received visitors in a dressing gown. The reception hall was staffed by attractive typists wearing diaphanous, low-cut dresses in pastel shades and others dressed like French maids in lace aprons. The gateway into the garden was crowned by an arch of coloured lightbulbs that spelled out the name ‘Brigada García Atadell’.
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On 24 September 1936, Atadell made his most famous celebrity arrest – that of a forty-three-year-old widow, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano’s sister, Rosario. Virtually the entire Republican press carried the story that she had said, ‘Kill me but don’t make me suffer,’ to which it was alleged that Atadell replied, ‘Madame, we neither murder nor execute. We are more human than those who shoot workers en masse.’
Heraldo de Madrid
accompanied a big piece on the arrest headlined ‘The Humanization of the War’ with a photo of Atadell and Rosario. The text compared ‘the decency, the nobility, the chivalry of the chief of the people’s investigation militias’ with ‘the ignoble and inhuman conduct, the sheer abjection of the way the war is carried out by the rebels’. Rosario allegedly thanked him for ‘his kindness and consideration’.
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The press version implied that Rosario had been located as a result of brilliant detective work – ‘with the diligence that is the hallmark of this brigade, Atadell personally carried out the investigation that unearthed this person’s hiding-place’. This was contradicted by Ángel Pedrero who, in his post-war interrogation, revealed that she had contacted the brigade through a friend, to ask for protection. This is confirmed by Rosario’s own post-war account that, weary of living in clandestinity and terrified that she might be caught by anarchist ‘uncontrollables’, she gave herself up to Atadell. She hoped, rightly, that she might thereby be looked after for a potential prisoner exchange.
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According to the press, she was handed over to the Dirección General de Seguridad and, after processing, sent to a women’s prison. However, García Atadell told his interrogators in Seville that he kept her in great comfort in the Rincón Palace until 20 October when Manuel Muñoz, three of whose sons were being held by General Queipo de Llano, requested that she be transferred to his custody.
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Rosario Queipo de Llano was not the only woman to give herself up to Atadell in the hope of avoiding a worse fate at the hands of the FAI.
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The wealth of the right in general and of the Catholic Church in particular was a significant factor in the repression. The need to finance the Republican war effort led to official sanction of confiscations. Most importantly, reports of its existence fuelled much class hatred. At the end
of August, the Dawn Squad searched the home of the banker Manuel Muguiro and found bonds, cash and jewels to the value of 85 million pesetas. Felipe Sandoval’s
checa
from the Cine Europa took part in this operation. Muguiro claimed in his defence that the valuables had been given him for safe-keeping by various religious orders. A raid on the home of the treasurer of another order recovered a more modest haul of 1,800,000 pesetas.
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It was, however, not only in religious hands that vast wealth was found. Some days earlier, the Dawn Squad found over 100 million pesetas in gold coins, foreign banknotes and jewellery in the home of another banker. The proceeds were deposited in the Banco de España. The Lynxes searched the house of the lawyer César de la Mora and found clocks, watches, Manila shawls, 300 kilos of silver, 3 million pesetas in shares and gold jewellery to the value of 25,000 pesetas, as well as an enviable wine cellar. César was the uncle of Constancia de la Mora, the future Republican press chief. In mid-September, security forces searched the home of the Marqués de San Nicolás de Mora and found 100 million pesetas’ worth of cash, jewels and bonds. Similar reports of fortunes being found in the homes or bank deposit boxes of aristocrats were frequent and no doubt served to justify some of the repression. The reports were usually accompanied by a statement that the proceeds of the search had been handed over to the authorities. Occasionally, arrests were made of individuals who engaged in common theft in the guise of militiamen.
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One of the most notorious groups involved in the repression was headed by Felipe Sandoval, a criminal with a record of armed robbery who had spent long periods in prison. A bitter hatred of the bourgeoisie developed during a harsh childhood as an illegitimate child in Madrid had been intensified by his prison experiences. He was badly disfigured after a savage beating received on Christmas Eve 1919, when police, Civil Guards and soldiers swept through the Cárcel Modelo of Barcelona to avenge a strike, leaving many dead and crippled. He had been imprisoned in late 1932 for a series of armed robberies. In 1935, the Communist Enrique Castro Delgado, himself a political prisoner for his part in the left-wing rebellion of October 1934, was a fellow inmate: ‘Sandoval was a professional thief and, some said, a murderer. Taciturn, with a strange look. And an aquiline nose that had nothing human to it. And thin, pale hands dangling from really long arms. He walked hunched over, frequently coughing and spitting.’ In the opinion of Eduardo de Guzmán who came to know him well in a Francoist prison after the war, Sandoval
was a man without ideas or ideology: ‘He is not a worker rebelling against injustice who seeks ethical reasons to feed his rebellion and finds in them the strength to put up with prison and torture. He is no more than a vulgar racketeer, a common criminal.’
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Sandoval was still serving his sentence for armed robbery, and suffering from tuberculosis, when the military uprising found him in the sick bay of the Cárcel Modelo in Madrid. Considered a violent criminal, he was not released immediately, but within two weeks he was free. He presented himself to Amor Nuño, the secretary of the Madrid Federation of the CNT, who ordered him to join the so-called Checa del Cine Europa. Nuño was in operational control of the anarchist
checas
. The Cine Europa in the Calle Bravo Murillo was also the headquarters of the CNT militias. Its
checa
worked closely with the CPIP. Sandoval was soon running a squad dedicated to rooting out snipers and saboteurs. His group sped around Madrid in a black Rolls-Royce nicknamed ‘El Rayo’ (lightning). The group’s members included other recently released criminals. On the direct orders of Eduardo Val, it carried out numerous assassinations, including prisoners seized from the Cárcel de Ventas. Among the victims, on 14 and 17 September, were three prison functionaries and, on 7 November, a prison doctor, Gabriel Rebollo, murdered like others in revenge for Sandoval’s own experiences in jail.
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