The Spanish Holocaust (88 page)

That Franco had no inclination to magnanimity and saw the repression as a long-term undertaking was made clear by his speech on 19 May 1939, the day on which he presided over the spectacular Victory Parade in Madrid. ‘Let us not deceive ourselves: the Jewish spirit, which permitted the alliance of big capital with Marxism and which was behind so many pacts with the anti-Spanish revolution, cannot be extirpated in a day and still beats in the hearts of many.’
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The belief that the war had been against the Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy was reiterated in his end-of-year message on 31 December 1939. Franco praised German anti-Semitic legislation, declaring that the persecution of the Jews by the fifteenth-century Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel had shown the Nazis the way:

Now you will understand the reasons which have led other countries to persecute and isolate those races marked by the stigma of their greed and self-interest. The domination of such races within society is disturbing and dangerous for the destiny of the nation. We, who were freed of this heavy burden centuries ago by the grace of God and the clear vision
of Ferdinand and Isabel, cannot remain indifferent before the modern flourishing of avaricious and selfish spirits who are so attached to their own earthly goods that they would sacrifice the lives of their children more readily than their own base interests.

In the same speech, he rejected any notion of reconciliation with the defeated:

It is necessary to put an end to the hatreds and passions of our recent war but not in the manner of liberals, with their monstrous and suicidal amnesties, which are more fraud than pardon, but rather with the redemption of sentences through work, with repentance and penance. Anyone who thinks otherwise is guilty of irresponsibility or treason. Such damage has been done to the Patria and such havoc has been wreaked on families and on morality, so many victims cry out for justice that no honourable Spaniard, no thinking being, could stand aside from the painful duty of punishment.
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The repressive judicial system applied after 1 April 1939 used both the administrative machinery and the pseudo-legal framework developed throughout the war. On 28 July 1936, the Burgos Junta’s declaration of martial law had proclaimed its determination to punish those who, ‘blinded by an incomprehensible sectarianism, commit actions or omissions that might prejudice this Movement of Redemption of the Fatherland’. Any such offence was deemed to be a crime of military rebellion and thus subject to summary court martial. The sophistry underlying this legal fiction was that the military had legitimately assumed power on 16 and 17 July (before the actual military uprising) and therefore that the defence of the Republic constituted rebellion. All political activities on behalf of parties of the left or trade unions from the beginning of October 1934 were deemed retrospectively to constitute ‘support for military rebellion’ on the grounds that they had contributed to the disorder which was said to have provoked the military take-over.
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On 15 August 1936 in Burgos, General Mola had declared, in a broadcast on Radio Castilla, ‘My words go out to our enemies, since it is only right and proper that they know what to expect lest, when the time arrives for the settling of scores, they have recourse to the legal principle that “no punishment can be imposed on an offender that was not established before the offence was committed”.’
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Franco had reiterated this
nonsensical position in an interview given on the first anniversary of the military coup: ‘The National Movement was never an uprising. The reds were and are the rebels.’
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The absurdity of these declarations was underlined by the author of the Republican Constitution and distinguished criminal lawyer, Luis Jiménez de Asúa, when he described the accusation of military rebellion as ‘reverse rebellion’, for which ‘crime’ the accused would receive ‘a vice-versa sentence’. Franco’s Minister of the Interior, Ramón Serrano Suñer, retrospectively called it ‘back-to-front justice’. Jiménez de Asúa observed that ‘a more curious reversal of the truth is inconceivable and can only be explained in psychological terms as the projection of guilt’.
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The initial basis for the repression was formalized further with a decree issued on 13 September 1936 by the Burgos Junta which outlawed all political parties, trade unions and social organizations that supported the Popular Front and opposed the ‘National Movement’. The decree ordered the confiscation of all goods, effects and documents, as well as buildings and other properties of such entities. Also liable were left-wing and liberal parties and trade unions, Freemasons, Jews, the Rotary Club, feminist, vegetarian, nudist, Esperanto and homeopathic societies, Montessori schools and sports clubs. Furthermore, the decree ordered the purging of all public servants, functionaries and schoolteachers who had served the institutions of the Republic. Special tribunals were established to judge those deemed worthy of keeping their livelihood. The human cost was colossal. For instance, when Catalonia was occupied at the end of the war, out of 15,860 public servants, 15,107 lost their jobs.
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The paranoia that lay behind the blanket denunciation of anything and everything that fell outside right-wing Catholic values was in large part thanks to the anti-Republican campaigns of the right-wing press which had fed off the writings of Juan Tusquets, Mauricio Carlavilla and Onésimo Redondo. Father Tusquets in particular had linked all these peripheral organizations to the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy.

The fiction that defence of the Republic was a crime of military rebellion was the basis of all the summary courts martial. Except in some cases of famous defendants, the accused were usually denied the possibility of defending themselves. The military would choose the judge, the prosecutor and the defence ‘lawyer’, this latter always being an officer junior to the judge and prosecutor. Given that the Army Legal Corps simply did not have sufficient personnel to cope with the demands made by the new situation, trials were usually conducted by officers with no legal training whatsoever. Groups of prisoners, unknown to one another
and accused of notably different offences, would be tried together en masse. They would have no access to the ‘case’ against them, which consisted of accusations read out without evidence. Only rarely, after the prosecutor had finished making the ‘case’, were the accused permitted to confer with the defending officer and consider their defence. If lucky, they were given an hour to prepare their case but not allowed to call witnesses or present any evidence. They were often not permitted to hear the ‘case’ against them, either because they had already been shot or because, in ‘emergency summary trials’, the charges were not even read out. In no cases were appeals permitted.
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When Juan Caba Guijarro, a CNT member from Manzanares, was tried with nineteen others, the prosecutor stated:

I do not care, nor do I even want to know, if you are innocent or not of the charges made against you. Nor will I take cognizance of any excuses, alibis or mitigating circumstances that you might present. I must base my accusations, as in previous courts martial, on the files prepared by the investigators on the basis of the denunciations. As far as the accused are concerned, I represent justice. It is not me who condemns them but their own towns, their enemies, their neighbours. I merely give voice to the accusations that others have made discreetly. My attitude is cruel and pitiless and it may appear as if my job is just to feed the firing squads so that their work of social cleansing can continue. But no, here all of us who have won the war participate and it is our wish to eliminate all opposition in order to impose our own order. Considering that there are crimes of blood in all the accusations, I have reached the conclusion that I must demand the death penalty, and I do demand the firing squad for the first eighteen in the list and, for the other two, garrotte vil. Nothing more.

The defence lawyer represented all twenty defendants at the same time, without having had time or opportunity to prepare any kind of defence. He rose and said: ‘After hearing the serious charges that have been laid against all those I am here to defend, I can only plead for mercy. Nothing more.’ The judge then proceeded to sentence the accused.
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Some of those tried by the innumerable military courts were guilty of real crimes in the
checas
, although many such had escaped into hiding or exile. Most were men and women whose crime was simply their failure actively to support the coup. The majority were condemned on the basis of an assumption of guilt, without the need for evidence. In a
typical case, that of a railwayman accused of involvement in crimes of blood, the guilty verdict was justified on the grounds that ‘although there is no evidence that he took a direct part in looting, theft, arrests or murders, his beliefs make it reasonable to suppose that he did’. Membership of a left-wing committee in a town or village where right-wingers were killed would usually guarantee a death sentence even if the accused knew nothing of the killing or had opposed it. Men and women were condemned to death for participation in crimes not on the basis of direct evidence but because the prosecutor extrapolated from their known Republican, Socialist, Communist or anarchist convictions that ‘they must have taken part’.
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As territory fell to the rebels, and especially after the end of the war, prisoners were herded into camps, frequently beaten and tortured to reveal the names of other Republicans. Inquiries were made in the prisoners’ home towns. If the local report was negative, the camp officials would usually send the prisoner back to his home town to face further investigation and prosecution. By carrying out trials in the town of origin of the detainees, it would ensure that they would be at the mercy of their neighbours who provided the necessary denunciations.
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Statements by ‘reliable’ citizens that a suspect was an undesirable or left-wing were sufficient to secure an arrest and usually a trial. Such statements were taken by the military authorities, without further investigation, as trustworthy ‘evidence’.

The military instructions for the re-establishment of civilian life in ‘liberated areas’ invited the local population of occupied territory to present denunciations of criminal acts of which they had been victims during the period of left-wing control.
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When Catalonia was occupied, ‘all good Spaniards’ were urged to come forward with information about any crimes or injustices committed ‘in the Companys period’.
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In Los Pedroches in the north-east of Córdoba, 70 per cent of trials were triggered by denunciations from civilians.
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There and elsewhere, this suggested considerable social support for the Francoists, much more than would have been found in 1936. This was hardly surprising given the scale of both the terror and the anti-Republican propaganda carried out by the victors. Whether a denunciation would fail or prosper frequently depended on the stance of the local clergy.

Denunciations often came from the bereaved relatives of those who had died in the violence that followed the defeat of the military uprising. Their grief and their desire for revenge led to them denouncing people assumed to belong to the same group as the real killers. Any leftist could
thus be incorporated into a collectivity presented as the barbaric and depraved ‘red horde’. Coincidentally, many of those denounced happened to belong to the unions and parties that had threatened the social, economic and political privileges of the denouncers. Businessmen and landowners keen to recoup the economic losses that their enterprises had suffered during the revolutionary period often denounced their competitors.
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From November 1936, increasing numbers of civilian lawyers, judges and even law students had been drafted into the military judicial corps. The main requirement was that they demonstrate right-wing sympathies. Entirely under the vigilance of the military authorities and often fearful for their own safety, even those who had qualms about what was happening had to be harsh in order to guarantee their own survival.
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At the beginning of 1938, Felipe Acedo Colunga, the senior military prosecutor, produced a report on the activities of the Auditoría de Guerra (War Court) created in November 1936 when the rebels had believed that they were about to capture Madrid. This report argued that the military courts must work pitilessly to clear the ground for the creation of a new state. Acedo Colunga insisted that there should be no equality between prosecution and defence and that the presumed intentions of defendants were every bit as reprehensible as their actual deeds.
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Acedo Colunga’s report revealed the industrial scale of the work of this one court up to the end of 1938. It had held 6,770 trials and, by trying multiple defendants together, it had been possible to prosecute 30,224 people, of whom 3,189 had been condemned to death.
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When the Republic finally fell, the military courts intensified their activity. They continued to function in regions long since occupied as well as in the recently conquered areas where they now had to deal with large numbers of captured soldiers and civilians. In Granada, where many who had fled from the rebel-held capital were captured when the eastern part of the province fell, there were 5,500 cases tried in 1939; four hundred defendants were sentenced to death and more than one thousand to life imprisonment. Between 1939 and 1959, a total of 1,001 people in Granada were executed after military trial. A decree of 8 November 1939 multiplied the number of courts martial by creating numerous provisional courts and increasing the size of the military juridical corps.
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