The Spanish Holocaust (92 page)

Companys had passed up various chances to escape from France because his son Lluís was seriously ill in a clinic in Paris. He was arrested in La Baule-les-Pins near Nantes on 13 August 1940, taken to Paris and detained in La Santé prison. However, on 26 August, La Santé received an order from the Conde de Mayalde requiring that Companys be handed over to Pedro Urraca Rendueles. He was transferred to Madrid in early September and imprisoned in the cellars of the DGS. For five weeks, he was kept in solitary confinement and tortured and beaten. Senior figures of the regime visited his cell, insulted him and threw coins or crusts of dry bread at him. On 3 October, his clothing bloodstained, a heavily manacled Companys was transferred to the Castillo de Montjuich in Barcelona.

Accused of military rebellion, he was subjected to a summary court martial on 14 October. While the military prosecutor prepared his case, Companys was given no opportunity to talk to the officer appointed to ‘defend’ him nor was he permitted to call witnesses on his own behalf. The defence advocate, an artillery captain, Ramón de Colubrí, pointed out that Companys had saved hundreds of lives of right-wingers in Catalonia, among them several army officers, including himself. At a trial lasting less than one hour, Companys was sentenced to death. The sentence was quickly approved by the Captain General of the IV Military Region, Luis Orgaz. In the early hours of the following day, the deeply Catholic Companys heard Mass and took communion. Refusing to wear a blindfold, he was taken before a firing squad of Civil Guards and, as they fired, he cried ‘Per Catalunya!’ According to his death certificate, he died at 6.30 a.m. on 15 October 1940. The cause of death was cynically given as ‘traumatic internal haemorrhage’.
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General Orgaz was displeased by having to sign the death sentence, not for moral or humanitarian considerations but because he resented having to do what he regarded as the dirty work of Falangists. Until the beginning of 1940, all death sentences had required the approval of General Franco. However, there were long delays before he could review the large numbers of pending cases. So, on 26 January that year, to speed up the process, it was decreed that Franco’s signature was no longer required. It was further decided that, in cases where those sentenced had been ministers, parliamentary deputies or civil governors or who had held other senior posts in the Republican administration, there could be no appeal for clemency.
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Four days after the death of Companys, Heinrich Himmler arrived in Spain. The invitation issued by Mayalde had been confirmed by Serrano Suñer, now newly appointed Foreign Minister. In the view of the British Ambassador, Serrano Suñer wanted to seek ‘expert advice on the liquidation of opponents and the capture of political refugees’. Himmler was interested both in police collaboration and in preparing security for the forthcoming meeting between Hitler and Franco on the French border. Arriving on the morning of 19 October 1940, he was treated to a lavishly orchestrated welcome first in San Sebastián and then in Burgos. The streets of both cities were draped with swastika flags. On 20 October, he was greeted in Madrid by Serrano Suñer and senior officials of the Falange. He set up base at the Ritz Hotel, then had a meeting with Serrano Suñer at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before both moved on to El Pardo to see Franco. Serrano Suñer was particularly interested in the whereabouts of several prominent captured Republicans, just as Himmler was concerned about exiled Germans. They reached an agreement whereby the Gestapo would establish an office in the German Embassy in Madrid and the Sicherheitsdienst would have offices in the main German consulates throughout Spain. German agents would thus operate with full diplomatic immunity. The same privilege would be applied to Spanish agents in Germany and, more importantly, in the German occupied zone of France.
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The Conde de Mayalde, who was also Mayor of Madrid, arranged an out-of-season bullfight in Himmler’s honour in a swastika-emblazoned Plaza de Ventas and also invited him to a hunting party on his estate in Toledo. Over the next few days, Himmler was taken to the Prado and the Archaeological Museum in Madrid, the historical monuments of Toledo and El Escorial and the Monastery of Montserrat in Catalonia. His visits to the archaeological museum and to Montserrat were linked to his patronage of the SS Deutsches Ahnenerbe (German Ancestral Heritage). Himmler was always on the look-out for the talisman that would win the war. On the basis of Wagner’s
Parsifal
, he was convinced that Montserrat was Montsalvat, the mountain where, according to Wolfram von Eschenbach and later Wagner, the Holy Grail was kept. In the magnificent library of Montserrat, he demanded to see the archives on the location of the Holy Grail. When he was informed that he was mistaken, he rudely claimed a Germanic pagan origin for everything to do with Montserrat and declared that Jesus Christ was not Jewish but Aryan.
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Alongside these cultural activities, there were visits to prisons and concentration camps. According to one of Serrano Suñer’s closest aides,
Ramón Garriga, Himmler was shocked by what he saw. He thought it absurd that hundreds of thousands of able-bodied Spaniards were detained in appalling conditions, many facing the death sentence, at a time when the country was in desperate need of labour for the reconstruction of roads, buildings and houses destroyed during the Civil War. Apparently, he had been impressed by the work carried out by Republican exiles in labour battalions in France. He told Franco and Serrano Suñer that they were wasting valuable resources and that it made more sense to incorporate working-class militants into the new order rather than annihilate them. In his view, the regime should have shot a small number of prominent Republicans, imprisoned some more and let the rest go free under close police vigilance. Himmler made an important distinction between ideological and racial enemies. Franco was not convinced.
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While Himmler was still in Spain, the trial began of the other prominent Republicans handed over by the Germans at the end of July. Cipriano Rivas Cherif, Francisco Cruz Salido, Carlos Montilla, Miguel Salvador, Teodomiro Menéndez and Julián Zugazagoitia were charged with military rebellion and tried on 21 October. Recognizing that they had committed no crime, the prosecutor declared that he had no intention of citing concrete facts or calling witnesses since it was clear that they had all contributed to ‘inducing revolution’. Their posts before and during the Civil War were considered to be more than sufficient proof. According to the prosecutor, anyone who held a position in a government that organized, tolerated or was impotent to prevent crimes of blood was guilty of those crimes. That Teodomiro Menéndez had retired from politics after October 1934 and, more crucially, that Ramón Serrano Suñer came and spoke on his behalf meant that he escaped the death penalty and was sentenced instead to thirty years’ imprisonment. All five of the others were sentenced to death. Several significant Francoists, including the writer Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, the Falangist Rafael Sánchez Mazas and Antonio Lizarra, a leader of the Carlist Requetés, testified that Zugazagoitia, far from tolerating crimes of blood, had saved many lives, particularly of priests and nuns. Amelia de Azarola, the widow of Julio Ruiz de Alda, spoke of Zugazagoitia’s efforts on her behalf. It was to no avail. Cruz Salido and Zugazagoitia were executed in the Madrid Cementerio del Este on 9 November 1940, along with fourteen other Republicans. On 21 December, Rivas Cherif, Montilla and Salvador learned that Franco had commuted their sentences to life imprisonment.
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There were many victims of the notion that, irrespective of their intentions and efforts, anyone who worked for the government had been impotent to prevent crimes of blood and so was guilty thereof. On 10 July 1940, the man who had been Civil Governor of Málaga from the beginning of the Civil War until mid-September 1936, José Antonio Fernández Vega, had been arrested in France by the Gestapo and brought to Spain along with Companys, Zugazagoitia, Cruz Salido, Cipriano Rivas Cherif, Teodomiro Menéndez and other deputies. He was tried in Málaga in March 1942, accused of responsibility for all the assassinations committed during his period of office. Despite an abundance of testimonies regarding the thousands of people that he had saved and the fact he had been overwhelmed by the local anarchist committees, he was sentenced to death and executed on 18 May 1942.
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The procedure for extraditions from Vichy France saw Blas Pérez González, the senior prosecutor of the Supreme Court, prepare arrest warrants that were passed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which then made the corresponding request to Vichy. In November 1940, Lequerica had delivered a list of the names of nearly three thousand Republicans wanted for trial in Spain. The official response of Vichy was lukewarm and made it clear that an individual dossier for each case was required. The majority of extradition demands were unsuccessful since the requests were absurd.

For instance, Ventura Gassol had been the Minister of Culture in the Generalitat and had saved many lives of right-wingers and religious personnel threatened by the extreme left. In consequence, he himself had received death threats from extremist groups and, in October 1936, had been forced into exile in France. Nevertheless, the extradition request accused him of being a common criminal. All those who were the object of extradition demands were arrested and imprisoned until their cases were heard. Gassol remained in prison for three months before his case came to trial. The request was rejected when the French court heard the testimony of one of those whose life he had saved, the Archbishop of Tarragona, Francesc Vidal i Barraquer, himself exiled in Italy.
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Another extradition that was turned down was that of Federica Montseny, the Minister of Health in the Largo Caballero cabinet.
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Frustrated by the legal niceties, Lequerica sometimes took matters into his own hands. One such case was the seizure in Nice on 10 December of Mariano Ansó, who had been Minister of Justice in the government of Negrín. He was arrested by the local police on the basis of instructions apparently emanating from Vichy. The team that came to
take him, supposedly to Vichy, consisted of a close friend of Lequerica, an ultra-right-wing French policeman named Victor Drouillet, a White Russian in Lequerica’s employ and the police attaché at the Spanish Embassy, Pedro Urraca Rendueles. They planned to take Ansó illegally to Spain. He managed to escape and was, with some difficulty, protected by a local police commissioner in Nice. He spent some time in prison before a judicial hearing denied the Spanish request for his extradition. The same team of Drouillet, Urraca and the White Russian thug were behind the arrest of the conservative Republican Manuel Portela Valladares. They usually confiscated the money and belongings of those they detained, on the pretext that they had been stolen in Spain. Portela was accused of stealing items that actually belonged to him and that he had managed to rescue from his house in Barcelona. They beat him to get him to hand over his property. Old and seriously ill, he considered suicide rather than face prison but was dissuaded by his friends. His case was eventually heard in Aix-en-Provence on 15 September 1941. The request for extradition was rejected on the grounds that the Spanish application had specified no date, place or victim in respect of the supposed crimes. Given that Portela had lived in France since 31 July 1936, the French court regarded the application as dubious. The Spanish authorities immediately presented a second extradition request which was rejected on 25 November 1941.
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Another ludicrous extradition request was made for the under-secretary of Justice in the Generalitat, Eduardo Ragasol i Sarrà. A distinguished lawyer in Barcelona, he had been in Madrid when the Civil War broke out and had taken part in the defence of the capital. While there, anarchists had looted his house in Barcelona. After the events of May 1937, the new Catalan Minister of Justice, Pere Bosch i Gimpera, had appointed him his under-secretary. In that position, he had worked for the re-establishment of law and order, imprisoning many extremists. At the end of the war, he went into exile and worked helping Republican refugees and also recruiting Spanish volunteers to join French forces. He was arrested on 7 July 1940 after Lequerica had accused him of holding ‘Republican treasure’, a reference to the funds taken out of Spain by the Republican government to help pay for the exiles. Over the next year, he was repeatedly arrested by the Vichy police but released each time. Finally, Blas Pérez drew up an extradition request falsely accusing Ragasol of running a parallel police force responsible for numerous murders. It was a striking example of the hypocrisy and vindictiveness that underpinned Francoist ‘justice’. Blas Pérez, as a lawyer and professor
of law in the University of Barcelona, knew Ragasol personally and himself had escaped from the Catalan capital thanks to the intervention of the Generalitat. Despite the fact that the accusation mentioned no names, dates or places nor provided any proof, a Vichy French court acceded to the Spanish request on 2 August 1941. Until energetic protests from the Mexican government persuaded the Vichy government not to hand Ragasol over to the Francoist authorities, he underwent considerable psychological humiliation and physical mistreatment in prison. Moreover, the threat of extradition and his frequent arrests created great unease within the exile community.
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In November 1940, the anarcho-syndicalist Joan Peiró Belis, who had denounced the excesses of the FAI in Catalonia and had been Minister of Industry in Largo Caballero’s government, was arrested by the Vichy police in Chabris, in the Loire. He was jailed for three weeks for illegally crossing the demarcation line and then handed over to the Gestapo and taken to Germany. On 19 February 1941, the Germans sent him to Madrid. For two and a half months, he was held in the cellars of the Dirección General de Seguridad. To make him reveal the location in France of the funds used to help Republican refugees, he was badly beaten. Police reports from Barcelona confirmed that Peiró had also saved many lives during the war. Despite both this and the fact that he had combated the extremists in his native Mataró, he was held responsible for crimes there. On 8 April, he was transferred to the provincial prison in Valencia where, for over a year, various leading Falangists offered him his liberty if he would join the regime’s official unions, the Vertical Syndicates. Having refused, he was court-martialled on 21 July 1942, accused of stealing millions of pesetas and of organizing the
checas
in Barcelona. Unusually, Peiró had a dedicated defence lawyer, Lieutenant Luis Serrano Díaz. Moreover, many people whose lives he had saved, including senior army officers, the heads of two monastic congregations and Francisco Ruiz Jarabo, Director General of Labour, submitted testimony on his behalf. The founder of the Falange in Barcelona, Luys Gutiérrez Santamarina, spoke eloquently in his defence. The judge warned Serrano Díaz that if he spoke for more than thirty minutes he risked serious punishment. He spoke for an hour and a quarter – an unprecedented defence in a Francoist court martial. It was to no avail. Peiró was found guilty and shot three days later.
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