The Spanish Holocaust (71 page)

Serrano Poncela’s last public intervention as Director General of Security was the incident at the Finnish Legation on 4 December, which was provoked by an abuse of the right of asylum. Finland’s Ambassador, George Arvid Winckelman, was accredited to both Lisbon and Madrid and understandably preferred to stay in Portugal. In his absence, a Spanish employee of the Embassy, Francisco Cachero, had appointed himself Chargé d’Affaires. He had rented several houses and, for a price, gave refuge to large numbers of fifth columnists. At the 14 November meeting of the Junta de Defensa, it was claimed that these premises housed 2,500 fascists armed with pistols and machine-guns. On 19 November, the Junta ordered the Finnish premises to be put under surveillance.

At the beginning of December, under cover of a rebel bombing raid, home-made bombs were thrown from one of these houses into a nearby militia barracks and snipers fired on militiamen. On 3 December, the Dirección General de Seguridad informed all the foreign embassies that measures would be taken to prevent a repetition. Using the illegal status of the improvised asylum as justification, a police raid on the houses (not on the Finnish Embassy itself) was mounted the next day by José Cazorla and Serrano Poncela using the Brigada Especial commanded by David Vázquez Baldominos. The Republican security forces were met with gunfire. When they finally gained entry, they found maps with targets, an arsenal of guns and hand grenades. It was reported that numerous armed rebel supporters had been found, of whom 387 men and women were arrested.
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According to official Soviet sources, Grigulevich was involved in organizing this raid, which confirms his links with the Brigada Especial.
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Schlayer and Henry Helfant, the commercial attaché of the Romanian Embassy, appealed to Melchor Rodríguez to prevent the execution of prisoners taken in the Finnish raid. Melchor and Helfant went to see Serrano Poncela. After a tense encounter, Serrano agreed that the prisoners should be placed under Melchor’s charge.
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With Madrid’s prisons bursting at the seams, Melchor set out on 8 December to see if the prison at Alcalá de Henares had accommodation for them.

On 6 December, the prison at Guadalajara had been attacked by a mob that had killed 282 prisoners.
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That mob had included nearly one hundred militiamen under the orders of Valentín González, ‘El Campesino’. Two days later, in Alcalá de Henares, a furious crowd
including some of the same militiamen gathered to seek revenge for those killed and maimed in a bombing raid. Their target was the prisoners held there, many of them as a result of the evacuation from the Cárcel Modelo. Among the more famous prisoners were the Falangist leader, Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, the founder of the Assault Guards, Colonel Agustín Muñoz Grandes, the secretary of the CEDA, Javier Martín Artajo, and the radio personality Bobby Deglané. The recently arrived Melchor Rodríguez, showing greater courage than the prison functionaries who had fled, confronted the mob. Braving threats, insults and accusations of being a fascist, he argued that the prisoners were not responsible for the air raid and that the murder of defenceless men would bring shame on the Republic. His voice raw from making himself heard above the tumult, he said that they would have to kill him to get to the galleries. He also gave them pause by threatening to arm the prisoners. Campesino’s militiamen were led away by Major Coca, their commander, and the rest of the crowd drifted after them. Fearing that Coca planned to come back, Melchor went to his headquarters and, in a bitter confrontation with the Major, persuaded him to guarantee the safety of the prisoners. Melchor thereby saved over 1,500 lives.
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However, on his return to Madrid on the night of 8 December, Melchor was called before the CNT–FAI Defence Committee and severely criticized by its secretary, Eduardo Val. Melchor managed to calm his critics, but they were suspicious of his claim that he could stop the bombing of Madrid by negotiating with the rebels and offering to prevent any more assassinations of prisoners.
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Nevertheless, from 12 December, the situation was changing yet again. The Junta de Defensa had decreed that the militarization of all the militias and all their functions were under the control of the new Director General of Security, José Cazorla. In agreement with Cazorla, arrangements were made for young prisoners either to be forcibly conscripted into the Republican Army or, if they chose, to join work battalions building fortifications. It was later alleged that some of those ‘released’ or ‘transferred’ were taken to
checas
under the control of Cazorla. Certainly, Cazorla and Melchor Rodríguez did arrange for the release of those against whom there were no charges and of female prisoners over the age of sixty. Melchor Rodríguez also took measures to improve the food in prisons and created an information office where families could find out where prisoners were being held and their state of health. With the help of the Red Cross, he created a hospital service which ended up being used as a centre for fifth columnists. He also organized a party in the Romanian Embassy for
recently released detainees.
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Despite suspicions of his links with the fifth column, Melchor Rodríguez’s success in stopping
sacas
raises questions about Santiago Carrillo’s inability to do the same.

Subsequently, Francoist propaganda built on the atrocity of Paracuellos to depict the Republic as a murderous Communist-dominated regime guilty of red barbarism. Francoists have even claimed that the number murdered was 12,000.
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Despite the fact that Santiago Carrillo was only one of the key participants in the entire process, the Franco regime, and the Spanish right thereafter, never missed any opportunity to use Paracuellos to denigrate him during the years that he was secretary general of the Communist Party (1960–82) and especially in 1977 as part of the effort to prevent the legalization of the Communist Party. Carrillo has himself inadvertently contributed to keeping himself in the spotlight by absurdly denying any knowledge of, let alone responsibility for, the killings. However, a weight of other evidence confirmed by some of his own partial revelations makes it clear that he was fully involved.
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For instance, in more than one interview in 1977 Carrillo claimed that, by the time he took over the Council for Public Order in the Junta de Defensa, the operation of transferring prisoners from Madrid to Valencia was ‘coming to an end and all I did, with General Miaja, was order the transfer of the last prisoners’. It is certainly true that there had been
sacas
before 7 November, but the bulk of the killings took place after that date while Carrillo was Councillor for Public Order. His admission that he ordered the transfers of prisoners after 7 November clearly puts him in the frame.
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Elsewhere, he claimed that, after an evacuation had been decided on, the vehicles were ambushed and the prisoners murdered by uncontrolled elements. He has frequently insinuated that the killers were anarchists and has stated, ‘I can take no responsibility other than having been unable to prevent it.’
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This would have been hardly credible under any circumstances, but especially so after the discovery that there had been a CNT–JSU meeting on the night of 7 November.

Moreover, Carrillo’s post-1974 denials of knowledge of the Paracuellos killings were contradicted by the congratulations heaped on him at the time. Between 6 and 8 March 1937 the PCE celebrated an amplified plenary meeting of its Central Committee in Valencia. Francisco Antón said: ‘It is difficult to say that the fifth column in Madrid has been annihilated but it certainly has suffered the hardest blows there. This, it must be proclaimed loudly, is thanks to the concern of the Party and the
selfless, ceaseless effort of two new comrades, as beloved as if they were veteran militants of our Party, Comrade Carrillo when he was the Councillor for Public Order and Comrade Cazorla who holds the post now.’ When the applause died down, Carrillo rose and praised ‘the glory of those warriors of the JSU who can fight in the certain knowledge that the rearguard is safe, cleansed and free of traitors. It is no crime nor is it a manoeuvre [against the CNT] but a duty to demand such a purge.’
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Comments made at the time and later by Spanish Communists such as Pasionaria and Francisco Antón, by Comintern agents, by Gorev and by others show that prisoners were assumed to be fifth columnists and that Carrillo was to be praised for eliminating them. On 30 July 1937, in a report to the head of the Comintern Giorgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian Stoyan Minev, alias ‘Boris Stepanov’, from April 1937 the Comintern’s delegate in Spain, wrote indignantly of the ‘Jesuit and fascist’ Irujo that he had tried to arrest Carrillo because he had given ‘the order to shoot several arrested officers of the fascists’.
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In his final post-war report to Stalin, Stepanov referred to Mola’s statement about his five columns. Stepanov went on to write proudly that the Communists took note of the implications thereof and ‘in a couple of days carried out the operations necessary to cleansing Madrid of fifth columnists’. Stepanov explained in more detail his outrage against Irujo. In July 1937, shortly after becoming Minister of Justice, Manuel Irujo initiated investigations into what happened at Paracuellos, including a judicial inquiry into the role of Carrillo.
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Unfortunately, no trace of this inquiry has survived and it is a reasonable assumption that any evidence was among the papers burned by the Communist-dominated security services before the end of the war.
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What Carrillo himself said in his broadcast on Unión Radio and what Stepanov wrote in his report to Stalin were echoed years later in the Spanish Communist Party’s official history of its role in the Civil War. Published in Moscow when Carrillo was secretary general of the PCE, it declared proudly that ‘Santiago Carrillo and his deputy Cazorla took the measures necessary to maintain order in the rearguard, which was every bit as important as the fighting at the front. In two or three days, a serious blow was delivered against the snipers and fifth columnists.’
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What has gone before, like everything written about Paracuellos, is inevitably distorted because of the imbalance of material about the three phases of authorization, organization and implementation. It is possible to know that meetings took place at which evacuation and elimination were almost certainly discussed and authorization almost certainly
given. These are the meetings on 6 November of José Miaja with Pedro Checa and Antonio Mije, of Mikhail Koltsov with Checa, and of Mije with Vladimir Gorev and Vicente Rojo. However, there is little or nothing by way of records of those conversations. In contrast, there is a vast quantity of material in the Causa General on the administrative organization of the
sacas
and on what happened at the prisons when militiamen arrived to load the prisoners on to the buses. Nevertheless, there is little material on the actual murders, on the specific parts played in the killing by the anarchists, by the Fifth Regiment or by the Brigada Especial created with the help of Orlov and Grigulevich. Accordingly, there will always be an element of deduction if not speculation about the collective responsibility.

Astonishingly, despite all the other problems of defending the besieged and starving city, the Junta managed to make a priority of controlling the
checas
and centrally co-ordinating the forces of order and security in Madrid. Its efforts in terms of rebuilding the state apparatus went far beyond the ineffective measures of General Pozas and the slightly more energetic efforts to control the
checas
made by Ángel Galarza in October. Nevertheless, the greatest death toll of rebel supporters in the city would take place on the Junta’s watch between 7 November and 4 December. Thereafter, there would be little of the indiscriminate violence that marked the early months of the war as the reorganized security forces targeted more specifically those perceived to be undermining the war effort, and the numbers executed plummeted.

PART FIVE

Two Concepts of War

11

Defending the Republic from the Enemy Within

By the end of 1936, the spontaneous mass violence of the early months was no more, although in early February 1937 President Azaña could still note the disgust felt by the Minister of Finance, Juan Negrín, about the atrocities. He suggested that they made Negrín ashamed to be Spanish.
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Negrín’s commitment to ending the uncontrolled violence is corroborated by his friend Mariano Ansó, who recounted that, in Valencia on one occasion, he accosted armed militiamen who had detained a man and were clearly planning to shoot him as a fascist. At enormous risk, and by sheer force of personality, he obliged them to release the man.
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