The Spanish Holocaust (66 page)

Whoever signed the orders, in the midst of administrative collapse and widespread popular panic, the evacuation of eight thousand prisoners seemed impossible. Nevertheless, Carrillo’s Public Order Council would undertake the task.
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In the event, the evacuation became a massacre. It is the purpose of the rest of this chapter to elucidate, within the limits of the available evidence, what happened, who made the decision for it to happen and who carried it out.

Among those pushing for the evacuation – not necessarily the execution – of the prisoners were the Republican military authorities, General Miaja and his chief of staff, Vicente Rojo, the senior Russians present in Madrid and the Communist hierarchy. Given the crucial military assistance being provided by the Soviet personnel, and their own experience of the siege of St Petersburg in the Russian Civil War, it was natural that their advice should be sought. The most senior of the Soviet military personnel were Generals Ian Antonovich Berzin, the overall head of the Soviet military mission, and Vladimir Gorev. Berzin, along with Soviet diplomats, had gone to Valencia with the government, while Gorev,
officially the military attaché but actually Madrid station chief of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), remained. Gorev would thus play a crucial role, alongside Rojo, in the defence of Madrid. Also present and involved was Mikhail Koltsov, the
Pravda
correspondent, perhaps the most powerful Russian journalist of the day. He was close to Stalin himself, although in Madrid, when not concentrating on his journalistic tasks, he seems to have been acting on Gorev’s instructions.
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Other influential figures in the defence of Madrid were the senior Comintern personnel, the Argentinian Vittorio Codovila and the Italian Vittorio Vidali. Under the pseudonym ‘Carlos Contreras’, Vidali had played a crucial role in the founding of the Fifth Regiment which later became the core of the Republic’s Popular Army. He was the Fifth Regiment’s political commissar and his obsession with the need to eliminate rebel supporters within Madrid was reflected in numerous articles and speeches. Like their Spanish comrades, the Russian and Comintern officials were all alarmed to hear reports that the prisoners were already crowing about their imminent liberation and their incorporation into the rebel forces. Gorev, Berzin and other Russian advisers, including Vidali, insisted that it would be suicidal not to evacuate dangerous prisoners. Given the desperate situation of the siege, this was a view shared by Vicente Rojo and Miaja.
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Miaja quickly established a close relationship with one of the key players in the organization of the fate of the prisoners, José Cazorla.
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The taciturn Cazorla was equally determined to eliminate rebel supporters. For this task, as will be seen, he drew upon the advice of Russian security personnel. Every bit as concerned as Miaja about the prisoners was the forty-two-year-old and recently promoted Lieutenant Colonel Vicente Rojo. He regarded the fifth column as ‘an operational column with sufficient force and capacity to attack organized troops in the rear’. He was convinced that it was not made up only of spies, saboteurs and agitators but constituted a tightly woven network capable of influencing every aspect of the struggle, a network that had been organized long before the outbreak of war. At the beginning of November, he feared that it was capable of playing a decisive role in the fate of the capital. Accordingly, wrote Rojo, the military authorities had to take the decision to eliminate it.
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In November 1936, this was an over-pessimistic assessment of the operational capacity of the fifth column, which would not reach that level for many months yet. Nevertheless, Rojo’s view was an indication of the fear shaping Republican action and was quite reasonable, given the many times that accurate information about Republican
movements had reached the rebels and the increase of sniping as the rebel forces were moving into the capital’s western approaches.

There has been considerable speculation that Mikhail Koltsov played a key role in determining the fate of the prisoners. This is based on the entry in his diary for 7 November in which he described how, in the early hours of the morning, Pedro Checa took the decision to send militiamen to the prisons after pressure from ‘Miguel Martínez’, a supposedly Latin American Comintern agent with sufficient influence to give advice at the highest level. It has been widely assumed that ‘Miguel Martínez’ was none other than Koltsov himself because some of the activities attributed in his diary to ‘Miguel Martínez’ are known to have been carried out by Koltsov himself. Moreover, at a meeting in Moscow in April 1937, Stalin jokingly called Koltsov ‘Don Miguel’. However, it is probable that ‘Miguel Martínez’ was a composite personality invented by Koltsov in order to include material in his published diary that he could not attribute directly to his informants.

In his memoirs, Vicente Rojo refers to a foreign Communist, ‘Miguel Martínez’, who helped Contreras organize the Fifth Regiment. Rojo knew Koltsov and had no reason not to mention him by name. Accordingly, it is clear that, for Rojo, ‘Miguel Martínez’ was someone other than Koltsov, almost certainly a Spanish-speaker who worked with Vidali at the Fifth Regiment and went by the name of ‘Camarada Miguel’. The only man fitting this description was an NKVD operative named Josif Grigulevich.
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In the very small NKVD presence in Spain, of fewer than ten operatives, some were ‘legal’ – that is to say, declared to the Spanish Foreign Ministry and having diplomatic cover – and some (two or three) were ‘illegal’, that is to say, working undercover. An example of the first would be Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, the acting NKVD station chief in Madrid who went by the name Aleksandr Orlov, and of the second Josif Grigulevich. Nikolsky/Orlov was in Spain to advise on the creation of security services and to liquidate foreign Trotskyists.

Josif Romualdovich Grigulevich was a twenty-three-year-old Lithuanian who spoke fluent Spanish as a result of having lived in Argentina, where he was known as ‘Camarada Miguel’. As a member of the NKVD’s Special Tasks Administration, Grigulevich was trained in assassination and abductions. In Spain, he helped set up units known as ‘special squads’, as well as assisting Orlov in the elimination of Trotskyists. Thus, in Koltsov’s diary, ‘Miguel Martínez’ was sometimes Koltsov himself, sometimes Grigulevich, sometimes General Gorev and perhaps sometimes someone else.
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Gorev was the senior Russian officer actually
in Madrid from the evening of 6 November, after the departure of Berzin to Valencia, and Koltsov sometimes acted as his messenger during this period. Gorev later reported to Moscow that ‘comrades Koltsov and Karmen were with us, loyally carrying out to the letter all the missions that I entrusted them with in relation to the defence of the city’. This is confirmed by the writer Arturo Barea, who recalled that Koltsov put him in charge of foreign censorship in the besieged city, something that he could have done only on Gorev’s authority.
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In the case of the meeting with Checa, it is possible that ‘Miguel Martínez’ was Gorev, Grigulevich or Koltsov himself. The memoirs of the Russian cameraman Roman Karmen suggest that it may actually have been Koltsov. Late on the night of 6 November, Karmen went to the Ministry of War, only to find it already deserted. After wandering around, he finally stumbled into a room containing the Communist leader, Antonio Mije, General Gorev and the chief of the Republican General Staff, Vicente Rojo – three influential individuals all highly concerned about the problem of the prisoners. From the Ministry, he went to PCE headquarters, where he found Koltsov locked in conversation with Pedro Checa.
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This could have been the same encounter described in Koltsov’s diary as being between Checa and ‘Miguel Martínez’. In Koltsov’s version, ‘Miguel Martínez’ urged Checa to proceed to the evacuation of the prisoners. Koltsov/Miguel Martínez pointed out that it was not necessary to evacuate all of the eight thousand but that it was crucial to select the most dangerous elements and send them to the rearguard in small groups.
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Accepting this argument, Checa sent three men to ‘two big prisons’. Although the two prisons were not named by Koltsov, they were almost certainly San Antón and the Cárcel Modelo, from which there were
sacas
on 7 November. ‘Calling out names, they made the fascists come into the patio. This disconcerted and terrified them. They thought that they were about to be shot. They took them in the direction of Arganda.’
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In fact, it is highly unlikely that Koltsov would have had the authority to make such a crucial intervention. However, as Gorev’s emissary, he might well have been sent to press for action on the evacuation of prisoners. If so, that would establish the link in the decision-making chain between Gorev and the Spanish Communist Party. Since Koltsov’s ‘diary’ was not a diary as such but a book written later on the basis of his notes and
Pravda
articles, it is entirely possible that the meeting, stated there as having been early on 7 November, took place either side of midnight on 6 November. That would certainly make sense given that the prisons were in fact visited by militiamen later on the morning of the 7th.

There is no doubt that, already in the late afternoon or evening of 6 November, the two-man leadership of the PCE had provided Miaja with the public order set-up of the Junta de Defensa under the command of Santiago Carrillo. There is equally no doubt that the Public Order Council had begun to function late that same night and started the process of evacuation of prisoners. It is also clear that both Checa and Mije were in touch with the Russians. Karmen witnessed a meeting between Mije, Gorev and Vicente Rojo and another between Koltsov and Pedro Checa. There are no minutes of these meetings, but it is difficult to imagine that they were not concerned with the issue of what to do about the prisoners.

Another senior Communist, Enrique Castro Delgado, commander of the Fifth Regiment, had as his political commissar Vittorio Vidali, an NKVD agent. There can be no doubt, as will be seen, that they discussed the execution of prisoners. The journalist Herbert Matthews wrote later of the massacre of prisoners:

I believe, myself, that the orders came from the Comintern agents in Madrid because I know that the sinister Vittorio Vidali spent the night in a prison briefly interrogating prisoners brought before him and, when he decided, as he almost always did, that they were fifth columnists, he would shoot them in the back of their heads with his revolver. Ernest Hemingway told me that he heard that Vidali fired so often that the skin between thumb and index finger of his right hand was badly burned.
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What Hemingway heard and then told Matthews is hardly reliable evidence. Nevertheless, the Italian Vidali was indeed in Spain as an emissary of the Comintern under the name Carlos Contreras, but he was also an agent of the NKVD. Both Josif Grigulevich (codenamed ‘Maks’), who was briefly Vidali’s assistant at the Fifth Regiment, and Vidali himself (codenamed ‘Mario’) belonged to the NKVD Administration for Special Tasks (assassination, terror, sabotage and abductions) commanded by Yakov Isaakovich Serebryansky.
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Both Vidali and Grigulevich would later be heavily involved in the first attempt to assassinate Trotsky.

In support of Matthews’s comment on Vidali/Contreras, there is a remarkable passage in the memoirs of Castro Delgado. Castro described how, on the night of 6 November, after talking to Contreras, he said to someone identified only as Tomás, the head of a special unit: ‘The massacre starts. No quarter to be given. Mola’s Fifth Column must be
destroyed before it begins to move. Don’t worry about making a mistake! There are times when you find yourself in front of twenty people knowing that one of them is a traitor but not which one. So you have a problem of conscience and a problem concerning the Party. You understand?’ Tomás understood only too well that, to make sure of killing the traitor, some innocent people would have to die. Castro continued, ‘Bear in mind that a break-out by the Fifth Column would be a lot to cope with for you and for everyone.’ Tomás asked: ‘A completely free hand?’ Castro replied: ‘This is one of those free hands that the Party, at times like this, can deny to no one – least of all you.’ Tomás agreed and Castro then turned to Contreras, who had been present throughout, and said: ‘Let’s get a few hours’ sleep. Tomorrow is 7 November. The day of decision. That’s what it was for the Bolsheviks and what it will be for us. Are we thinking along the same lines or is there anything that you don’t agree about, Commissar?’ Contreras: ‘We’re in agreement.’
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Since Vidali was the senior partner, it is reasonable to assume that it was his instructions that Castro was giving to Tomás.

On 12 November, an article in the Fifth Regiment’s newspaper suggested that Castro Delgado’s instructions had been taken to heart:

In our city, there are still some of Mola’s accomplices. While the rebels’ evil birds drop their murderous bombs, killing defenceless women and children, the fascist elements of the fifth column throw hand grenades and fire their pistols … We know only too well what the hordes of Moors and the Legion will do if they get into Madrid. We can have no mercy for the accomplices of those savages. The fifth column must be exterminated! The committees of every apartment block must locate where the fascist, the traitor, the suspect is hiding and denounce them. In a matter of hours, let us exterminate them!
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The clear implications of the encounter between Contreras/Vidali and Castro Delgado are that elements of both the Fifth Regiment and the NKVD were involved in what happened to the prisoners in November. In the report by Gorev mentioned earlier, he wrote appreciatively of the ‘neighbours’ (a reference to the NKVD station in Madrid) ‘headed by Comrade Orlov who did much to prevent an uprising from within’. A possible break-out of the detained military officers, ‘an uprising from within’, is exactly what the prisoner evacuation was about. Gorev’s report thus suggests that Orlov was involved in the elimination of prisoners, albeit not in the initial decision-making process.
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