The Spanish Holocaust (87 page)

As fear of the Moors saw the roads to Barcelona blocked with terrified refugees, Franco announced his plans for the defeated in an interview given to Manuel Aznar on 31 December 1938. He divided them into hardened criminals beyond redemption and those who had been deceived by their leaders and were capable of repentance. There would be no amnesty or reconciliation for the defeated Republicans, only punishment and repentance to open the way to their ‘redemption’. Prisons and labour camps were the necessary purgatory for those who had committed minor ‘crimes’. Others could expect no better fate than death or exile.
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A good example of what redemption by Franco really meant could be found in the experience of Catalonia after the occupation of Tarragona on 15 January 1939. The city was deserted and thousands of refugees were trudging north. An elaborate ceremony was held in the Cathedral involving a company of infantry. The officiating priest, a canon of the Cathedral of Salamanca, José Artero, got so carried away that, during his sermon, he shouted: ‘Catalan dogs! You are not worthy of the sun that shines on you!’
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In Tarragona, there were the inevitable executions that followed the occupation of the city. The fact that so many people had fled reduced the potential for mass killings but, as people came forward with denunciations, large numbers of arrests were made. Formal military trials began on 16 February 1939. Although they were brief, without any juridical guarantees, the military authorities held them in public and advertised the time and place. The new Francoist Mayor, disconcerted when the population did not react with enthusiasm to this free entertainment, made public appeals to their patriotism in order to ensure that the courts would be full. When death sentences were confirmed, the executions were also held in public. Numerous executions were carried out in the course of 1939 – on 22 April, twenty-three were shot, on 15 July, thirty-one, on 20 October, forty-three, and on 15 November, forty. In each case,
the doctor in attendance certified death by ‘internal haemorrhage’.
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The repression in the surrounding area of the Alt Camp was on a similar scale. The trials and subsequent executions took place in Valls. On 17 July forty-one people were executed, on 8 August another forty and on 19 October another forty-four.
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When news reached Barcelona, on 23 January 1939, that the Francoists were at the River Llobregat to the south of the city, a colossal exodus began. On the night of 25 January, the Republican government fled northwards to Girona. The President of the Generalitat, Lluís Companys, drove one last time through the centre of a deserted city, as leaflets calling for resistance blew through the streets along with ripped-up party and trade union membership cards.
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The next morning, the streets were full of smoke from the burning papers of ministries, parties and unions. The young Communist Teresa Pàmies witnessed, on 26 January, horrendous scenes of the fear provoked by the advancing rebels:

There is one thing I will never forget: the wounded who crawled out of the Vallcarca hospital, mutilated and bandaged, almost naked, despite the cold, they went down to the street, shrieking and pleading with us not to leave them behind to the mercies of the victors. All other details of that unforgettable day were wiped out by the sight of those defenceless soldiers … The certainty that we left them to their fate will shame us for ever. Those with no legs dragged themselves along the ground, those who had lost an arm raised the other with a clenched fist, the youngest cried in their fear, the older ones went mad with rage. They grabbed the sides of lorries loaded with furniture, with bird cages, with mattresses, with silent women, with indifferent old people, with terrified children. They screamed, they ululated, they blasphemed and cursed those who were fleeing and were abandoning them.

There were around 20,000 wounded Republican soldiers in Barcelona. Their wounds and missing limbs were proof that they had fought and would guarantee that they would be the victims of reprisals.
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Four hundred and fifty thousand terrified women, children, old men and defeated soldiers trekked towards France. In numbers and in human suffering, the exodus far exceeded even the horrors seen by Norman Bethune on the road from Málaga to Almería. Those who could squeezed into every kind of transport imaginable. Through bitterly cold sleet and snow, on roads bombed and strafed by rebel aircraft, many others walked, wrapped in blankets and clutching a few possessions, some
carrying infants. Women gave birth at the roadsides. Babies died of the cold, children were trampled to death. A witness summed up the horror of that dreadful exodus: ‘At the side of the road, a man had hung himself from a tree. One foot had a rope sandal, the other was bare. At the foot of the tree was an open suitcase in which lay a small child that had died of cold during the night.’ It is not known how many people died on the roads to France.
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Those who fled faced the bleakest future, but it was one that they chose in preference to being ‘liberated’ by Franco’s forces. From 28 January, a reluctant French government allowed the first refugees across the border. At first, they had to sleep in the streets of Figueras, the last town on the Spanish side of the border. Many died in sustained rebel bombing raids.
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The defeated Republicans, many sick or wounded, were received by the French Garde Mobile as if they were criminals. The women, children and the old were shepherded into transit camps. The soldiers were disarmed and escorted to insanitary camps on the coast, rapidly improvised by marking out sections of beach with barbed wire. Under the empty gaze of Senegalese guards, the refugees improvised shelters by burrowing into the wet sand of the camp at Saint-Cyprien a few miles to the south-east of Perpignan.

Meanwhile, the formal parade into an eerily empty Barcelona was headed by the Army Corps of Navarre, led by General Andrés Solchaga. They were accorded this honour, according to a British officer attached to Franco’s headquarters, ‘not because they have fought better, but because they hate better – that is to say, when the object of this hate is Catalonia or a Catalan’.
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A close friend of Franco, Víctor Ruiz Albeniz (‘El Tebib Arrumi’), published an article asserting that Catalonia needed ‘a biblical punishment (Sodom, Gomorrah) to purify the red city, seat of anarchism and separatism as the only remedy to extirpate these two cancers by implacable thermo-cauterization’. None of the conquering generals or Falangists referred to the crushing of Marxism or anarchism. Their entire discourse was about the conquest of Catalonia by Spain. One officer told a Portuguese journalist that the only solution to the ‘Catalan problem’ was ‘kill the Catalans. It’s just a question of time.’
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One of the first acts of the occupying forces was to ban the use of Catalan in public. For Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law and Minister of the Interior, Catalan nationalism was a sickness that had to be eradicated. He told the Nazi newspaper
Völkischer Beobachter
that the Catalan population was ‘morally and politically sick’. The man he appointed as Civil Governor of Barcelona, Wenceslao González Oliveros,
announced, in a reversal of Unamuno’s famous dictum that the rebels might win (
vencer
) but never convince (
convencer
), that Franco’s forces had come ‘to save the good Spaniards and to defeat, but not convince, the enemies of Spain’. For González Oliveros, that meant the Catalans. He stated that ‘Spain opposed the divisive autonomy statutes with greater ferocity than communism’ and that any toleration of any kind of regionalism would lead once more to ‘the putrefaction represented by Marxism and separatism that we have just surgically eradicated’.
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Within a week, the military secret police was functioning. Newspaper advertisements called for recruits, preference being given to ex-prisoners of the Republican SIM. Large queues of people with denunciations gathered outside the offices of the Occupation Services. In consequence, 22,700 people were arrested in the first eight months.
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Precisely because so many of those of political or military significance had fled, those killed by the rebels in Catalonia were perhaps fewer than might have been expected. Between those murdered by the occupying troops and those tried and executed, more than 1,700 were killed in Barcelona, 750 in Lleida, 703 in Tarragona and five hundred in Girona. Many more died from mistreatment in prison.
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In Catalonia, as in other parts of Spain occupied by the rebels, the repression took many forms and merely to stay alive was a major achievement for many Republicans. Those who had not been executed, imprisoned or exiled lived in an atmosphere of terror. Daily life for the defeated was a question of combating hunger, illness and fear of arrest or of denunciation by a neighbour or by a priest. Rural parish priests were particularly active in denouncing their parishioners. Their contribution to the exacerbation of social divisions suggested a quest for vengeance rather than a Christian commitment to forgiveness or reconciliation. The sheer misery of life for the defeated explains a notable rise in the suicide rate. Considerable cruelty was visited upon women under the rhetorical umbrella of ‘redemption’. As well as confiscation of goods and imprisonment as retribution for the behaviour of a son or husband, the widows and the wives of prisoners were raped. Many were forced to live in total poverty and often, out of desperation, to sell themselves on the streets. The increase in prostitution both benefited Francoist men who thereby slaked their lust and reassured them that ‘red’ women were a fount of dirt and corruption. Soldiers billeted on poor families often abused the unprotected women of the household. Many priests defended the honour of male parishioners and denounced their female victims as ‘reds’.
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After Catalonia fell, a huge area amounting to about 30 per cent of Spain remained in the hands of the Republic. Negrín still cherished hope of fighting on until a European war started and the democracies at last realized that the anti-fascist battle of the Republic had been theirs too. Franco was in no hurry to go into battle since the repression was a higher priority. In any case, he had reason to believe that the Republic was about to face major divisions that might save him the trouble of fighting in central Spain. His confidence was such that, on 9 February 1939, he published the Law of Political Responsibilities and dashed the hopes of non-Communist Republicans who were prepared to betray Negrín in the hope of a negotiated peace. Retroactive to October 1934, the law declared Republicans guilty of the crime of military rebellion, and was essentially a device to justify the expropriation of the defeated.
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On 4 March, Colonel Segismundo Casado, commander of the Republican Army of the Centre, formed an anti-Negrín National Defence Junta, in the hope of negotiating with Franco. He thereby sparked off what was effectively a second civil war within the Republican zone. Although he defeated pro-Communist forces, there was no prospect of a deal with Franco. Troops all along the line were surrendering or just going home. On 26 March, a gigantic and virtually unopposed advance was launched along a wide front. The next day, Franco’s forces simply occupied deserted positions and entered an eerily silent Madrid. Tens of thousands of Republicans headed for the Mediterranean coast in the vain hope of evacuation. The war was over, but there would be no reconciliation. Instead, in the areas that had just fallen under Franco’s control, Valencia, Alicante, Murcia and Albacete, Almería and eastern Andalusia, and the eastern part of New Castile, a massive wave of political arrests, trials, executions and imprisonment was about to begin.

PART SIX

Franco’s Investment in Terror

13

No Reconciliation: Trials, Executions, Prisons

As Franco had demonstrated by the nature of his war effort and made explicit in interviews private and public, he was engaged in an investment in terror. With all of Spain in his hands at the beginning of April 1939, the war against the Republic would continue by other means, not on the battle fronts but in military courts, in the prisons, in the concentration camps, in the labour battalions and even in pursuit of the exiles. The immediate tasks were the classification and punishment of those who had gathered in the eastern seaboard, the cleansing of the provinces that had just fallen and the marshalling of the hundreds of thousands of prisoners into work battalions. The long-term institutionalization of Franco’s victory required the perfection of the machinery of state terror to protect and oversee the original investment. For that reason, the martial law declared in July 1936 was not rescinded until 1948.