The Spanish Holocaust (61 page)

On 17 August, the cameraman René Brut of Pathé newsreels arrived and was able to film piles of bodies, for which act of courage he was later imprisoned and threatened with death by the insurgent authorities.
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Some days later, Franco sent a telegram to Queipo de Llano with instructions for the strict control of photographers, ‘even those from Nationalist newspapers’, although this was to conceal the delivery of German and Italian war material as much as to hide the atrocities committed by his columns.
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It was the beginning of a massive campaign by the rebel authorities and their foreign supporters to deny that the massacre at Badajoz had taken place. Their cause was not helped when Yagüe cheerfully boasted to the journalist John Whitaker, ‘Of course, we shot them. What do you expect? Was I supposed to take four thousand Reds with me as my column advanced racing against time? Was I expected to turn them loose in my rear and let them make Badajoz Red again?’ In a town of 40,000 people, the killings may have reached nearly 10 per cent of the population.
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According to Yagüe’s biographer, in ‘the paroxysm of war’ it was impossible to distinguish pacific citizens from leftist militiamen, the implication being that it was perfectly acceptable to shoot prisoners. Another semi-official military historian of the rebel war effort, Luis María de Lojendio, later mitred Abbot of the monastery of the Valle de los Caídos, not only claimed that the defending forces were greater but also managed to explain away the deaths among them with pious sophistry:

A really criminal war is that in which chemical or technological mechanisms destroy human life pointlessly. But this was not the case in Badajoz. The material advantage, the fortress and the barricades, lay with the Marxists. The men of Lieutenant Colonel Yagüe triumphed because of that indubitably spiritual superiority which maintains in combat the will to win, the virtues of sacrifice and discipline. The streets of Badajoz were sown with corpses. Well, war is a hard and cruel spectacle.
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The savagery unleashed on Badajoz reflected both the traditions of the Spanish Moroccan Army and the outrage of the African columns at encountering solid resistance and, for the first time, suffering serious casualties. It was part of a deliberate attempt to paralyse the enemy, as well as to reward the men of the column with an orgy of rape, looting, killing and alcohol. It had a past, a colonial tradition. It had a present, as a reflection of the determination of the landowners to crush the rural proletariat once and for all. It also had a future. In late August, as the Basque towns of Irún and Fuenterrabía were being shelled from the sea and bombed from the air, the rebels dropped pamphlets threatening to deal with the population as they had dealt with the people of Badajoz. In consequence, panic-stricken refugees headed for France.
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The events of Badajoz were also meant as a message to the inhabitants of the capital as to what would happen when the columns reached Madrid.

The speed with which the African columns had progressed left many towns and villages still unconquered to the west of the line of their advance and between Badajoz and Cáceres. In these places, desperate refugees gathered. Following the pattern of what had happened in Seville and Huelva, before setting off for Madrid Yagüe organized small columns of local rightists, landowners, their sons and faithful retainers, Falangists, Requetés and a sprinking of Civil Guards, under the command of an officer. They spread out from Badajoz to the surrounding villages where
they implemented a brutal repression. Irrespective of whether local rightists had been killed or merely suffered preventive detention, men and women were shot without the slightest pretence of a trial. Among the more enthusiastically brutal leaders of such columns were the Civil Guard Captain Ernesto Navarrete Alcal and two Africanistas, Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Delgado Serrano and the Major of Regulares Mohammed ben Mizzian. Among the civilian volunteers were not only local Falangists of more or less recent vintage but also contingents from Vigo and Valladolid, who had run out of victims in their provinces of origin.

Between 19 and 29 August, these rebel columns captured dozens of towns and villages in the western part of the province of Badajoz. It was often the case that the Defence Committee of these villages had arrested local rightists and confiscated their weapons. In most cases they were insulted, in some forced to pay outstanding wages to day-labourers. Later accounts record their indignation at such humiliations which were sometimes no more than the Committee insisting that their own families, as opposed to their servants, delivered their food. Sometimes, the able-bodied prisoners were obliged to undertake physical labour ranging from road-mending to agricultural tasks. There was outrage expressed later that they had been forced to clean their prison, a church or a warehouse, and dispose of their own excrement. More irksome was the requisition of cows, sheep and pigs to be rationed to feed the workers. Olive oil, hams, chorizos and other food were also collected from the houses of the rich.
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In some villages, the rightist prisoners were beaten and, in others, murdered. The cases where this happened were greatly outnumbered by those where the local authorities prevented atrocities being committed by militiamen from other villages bent on revenge for the horrors committed by the African columns.

The subsequent revenge was wildly disproportionate. Where there had been murders of right-wingers, those killed in reprisal were rarely the perpetrators, who had usually fled. The executions were justified on the specious grounds that the left had intended to kill all the prisoners but had not done so thanks to the arrival of the column. Similarly, although there were generalized allegations of sexual abuse of right-wing women prisoners, specific accusations tend to centre on intentions which had been thwarted by members of the Defence Committees. The leftist authorities did not have a programme of extermination like that of the military rebels. Landowners who had sought confrontation with their workers by denying them jobs and often wages, supporters of the Falange and of the military coup and rabidly right-wing priests were in
the hands of the left in many towns and villages across the south of Spain. In most places, the bulk of them were not harmed.
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An appalling exception was Azuaga in the east of the province of Badajoz. The local working class, consisting of miners and agricultural day-labourers, was already deeply radicalized. From 1931 to the summer of 1936, landowners had belligerently blocked the Republic’s agrarian measures, such as the decree of municipal boundaries, which protected workers from the import of cheap outside labour. The levels of unemployment and hunger had led to a degree of social tension that raised fears that the town might see clashes like those of Castilblanco or Casas Viejas. Aware that the military uprising heralded a brutal repression, local anarchist leaders demanded that the workers be armed. In the course of 19 July, in clashes with the town’s Civil Guard unit, sixteen civilians and one Civil Guard were killed. On 21 July, Lieutenant Antonio Miranda Vega, commander of Azuaga’s substantial Civil Guard detachment, concluded that he could not win, abandoned the town and took his men to Llerena, where, as was seen earlier, he played a crucial part in the fall of the town to Castejón’s column.

The withdrawal of the Civil Guard opened the way to the tragic events that unfolded in Azuaga. Following Miranda’s departure, a Revolutionary Committee was formed and, under its control, the town remained peaceful for two weeks. Things changed with the fall of Llerena on 5 August. Many refugees arrived with horror stories of the repression unleashed there. Then, as happened when refugees from elsewhere had reached Llerena, Almendralejo and Fuente de Cantos, a wave of indignation swept the town. The committee ordered the arrest of rebel sympathizers. At dawn on 8 August, twenty-eight of them were taken to the cemetery on the outskirts and shot. They included three priests, three retired Civil Guards, three lawyers and most of the town’s landowners and businessmen. Another two were shot on 10 August. A factor in the killings was that Azuaga was constantly swelled by refugees and militiamen from other towns such as Cazalla de la Sierra and Guadalcanal (Seville), Granja de Torrehermosa (Badajoz) and Peñarroya (Córdoba). Those from outside had no compunction about venting their rage on strangers. Thus the arrival of a contingent of miners from Peñarroya on 20 August was the prelude to a further nine deaths, eight of whom, including four children aged from two to five, were from the closely related Vázquez and Delgado families.

Another atrocity took place on 31 August at the hands of a small group of militiamen returning, embittered, from a disastrous attempt to
retake Llerena. Their column had been bombed and strafed by German aircraft and nearly wiped out. A detachment of Falangists had finished off the wounded. The dead were not buried. Instead, the stomachs of the corpses were split open with bayonets, filled with petrol and ignited. The few that survived vented their anger by executing thirty-three landowners and businessmen. On 8 September, another priest was murdered. The last murders committed in Azuaga while it was still in Republican hands were the work of the militia group headed by Rafael Maltrana, the Mayor of Llerena. He controlled an area between Azuaga to Fuenteovejuna (Córdoba) where, on 22 September, his group loaded on to seven trucks fifty-seven men, including five priests and seven Franciscan monks. Six miles east of Azuaga, the first six trucks stopped and forty-three prisoners including the five lay priests were shot. The seventh truck carrying the remaining fourteen prisoners, among them the seven monks, carried on to Azuaga, where they were shot by Maltrana’s militiamen.

Two days later, after a sustained artillery bombardment, Azuaga was easily conquered by two columns of Regulares under the command of Major Alfonso Gómez Cobián, fresh from victory over a column of eight thousand refugees. In Azuaga as elsewhere, the repression was implacable. In justification, Gómez Cobián reported that 175 rightists had been hacked to death with hatchets. This was an exaggeration of the eighty-seven people who had been shot in and around Azuaga. However, the Franciscan Father Antonio Aracil provided documentation of horrendous tortures inflicted on the clergy.
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In contrast, in Fuente del Maestre to the west of the road traversed by the African columns, the Defence Committee managed to restrain the local left and there were only two deaths among the prisoners. After the fall of Los Santos de Maimona on 5 August, and with the African columns approaching, the Committee had fled and the prisoners were released. However, several hundred armed leftists arrived and took over Fuente del Maestre, rearrested the prisoners and killed a further eleven men. A column of Regulares appeared, led by Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Delgado Serrano, and a massive repression began. Over three hundred people were shot, including nearly twenty women. Most of the men were agricultural labourers. Many women considered to be leftist were raped and virtually all had their heads shaven and were forced to drink castor oil.
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In Barcarrota, where there was only one right-wing victim, those shot after the town was occupied on 25 August included all those prominent Socialists and municipal officials who had not managed
to flee. Among them were Joaquín and Juan Sosa Hormigo, brothers of the parliamentary deputy José. Joaquín was shot on 24 October 1936 and Juan on 10 January 1937 after horrific torture. When Juan’s body was exhumed years later, it was discovered that his arms and legs had been pulled from his torso.
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Inevitably, as the rebel ‘cleaning up’ operations proceeded, there were ever more refugees in flight. Some were fleeing southwards from Badajoz and Mérida towards others who had fled northwards into Badajoz from the repression in Huelva. The occupation by the Carlist columns of Luis Redondo of the mining towns of the sierra in the north of Huelva provoked a substantial exodus. Already as towns and villages along the road from Seville to Badajoz had been taken by the African columns, many had fled westwards. The result was that a large number of desperate refugees came together in an ever shrinking pocket of the western part of Badajoz. They were cut off to the east by the Seville–Mérida road and to the north by the Mérida–Badajoz road, to the south by the advancing columns, and to the west by the Portuguese frontier. By mid-September, several thousand people including children, as well as the old and infirm, had congregated between Jérez de los Caballeros and Fregenal de la Sierra. Many were in Valencia del Ventoso, where the local population did its best to feed them at rapidly organized soup kitchens.

When Fregenal fell on 18 September, faced with the prospect of being driven into rebel hands the remnants of the Defence Committees of several towns convened at Valencia del Ventoso. The organization was assumed by municipal and union leaders including José Sosa Hormigo, the Socialist deputy for Badajoz, the Mayor of Zafra, José González Barrero, and the Mayor of Fuente de Cantos, Modesto José Lorenzana Macarro, who had escaped the night before his town fell on 5 August.
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They decided to undertake a forced march towards Republican lines, dividing this desperate human mass into two groups. The first contingent consisted of about two thousand people, the second of approximately six thousand. The first had a dozen men armed with rifles and about one hundred with shotguns, the second about twice as many. These exiguous forces had to protect two lengthy columns of horses, mules and other domestic animals and carts containing whatever possessions the refugees had managed to grab from their homes before taking flight. Young children, women with babes in arms, others pregnant, and many old people made up the bulk of the columns. It is impossible to say exactly how many refugees marched. The two contingents together have
come to be known as ‘la columna de los ocho mil’ (the column of the eight thousand), although they seem to have marched separately.