The Spanish Holocaust (93 page)

One of Peiró’s fellow prisoners in Valencia was Dr Joan Peset i Aleixandre. An immensely distinguished bacteriologist and also a lawyer,
he had been the rector of the University of Valencia from 1932 to 1934 and a parliamentary deputy for Azaña’s Izquierda Republicana in the Popular Front. During the war, he worked as a doctor in military hospitals. When Valencia fell, he was one of the thousands of Republicans whose hopes of evacuation were thwarted and who were captured and taken first to the infamous concentration camp of Albatera and later to that of Portaceli. Although the mild-mannered and kindly Peset had worked hard to prevent killings by the anarchists, he was tried on the basis of accusations from three envious professional rivals. Although none of them could produce any evidence of wrongdoing, they all alleged, in suspiciously similar language, that his position as a celebrated Republican made him responsible for all of the killings in Valencia and Castellón.

Many people, including several nuns and a priest, testified to Peset’s efforts in preventing detentions, murders and church burnings by extremists. A court martial on 4 March 1940 found him guilty of military rebellion and condemned him to death but with a recommendation for commutation of the sentence. In protest, the Falange presented the text of an academic lecture on applied psychology in which, en passant, he had denounced the military coup and said that it was a civic duty to oppose it. The court reconvened on 25 March and reaffirmed the death sentence this time without the possibility of commutation. He was condemned not for his crimes, since he had committed none, but for what he represented in terms of the ideals of the Republic. Twenty-eight personalities, religious, military and even Falangist, petitioned for his sentence to be commuted. During the fourteen months that he had to wait for his sentence to be confirmed, he worked as a doctor in the model prison of Valencia. He was shot in the cemetery of Paterna on 24 May 1941.
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Another example of the vindictiveness of Francoist ‘justice’ even with those who had worked hard to stop the repression in the Republican zone was Melchor Rodríguez. His efforts to save right-wingers in Madrid had led some of his anarchist comrades to suspect him of being a traitor. Even his wife became convinced that, at best, he had naively let himself be used by the fifth column and, when he rejected her suspicions, she left him in early 1939. Having been named Mayor of Madrid by Casado’s Junta, he surrendered the capital to Franco’s troops. Thereafter, he was arrested on 13 April 1939 and tried by court martial in December that year. After an energetic defence by Ignacio Arenillas de Chaves, an extremely competent military lawyer, he was found not guilty. However,
the Auditor General of the Military Region of the Centre rejected the verdict and insisted on a retrial.

Melchor Rodríguez was tried again on 11 May 1940 accused of a crime that took place in Madrid at a time when he was in Valencia. A young and inexperienced defender was appointed two days before the trial. He was not permitted to meet his client or given any prosecution documents until the trial had actually started. The prosecutor, Leopoldo Huidobro Pardo, was a Carlist who had suffered frightening experiences in Madrid during the war. This more than accounted for his bitterly hostile attitude towards prominent CNT members. Furthermore, Huidobro’s hatred of the left was compounded by his distress at the death of his cousin Father Fernando Huidobro Polanco. He was, of course, unaware that Father Fernando had been shot in the back by a Legionario. However, his life had been saved when he was enabled to take refuge in the Finnish Embassy, something facilitated by Melchor Rodríguez. Nevertheless, he accused Melchor of being a bloodthirsty gunman and demanded the death penalty. However, the pantomime of a trial rigged with false testimonies was ruined by the unscheduled appearance of General Agustín Muñoz Grandes, who spoke on Melchor’s behalf and presented a list of over two thousand rightists whose lives he had saved. Among them were many aristocrats and one of the founders of the Falange, Raimundo Fernández Cuesta. Unlike Peiró, Melchor had not been a minister of the Republic and the main witness on his behalf outranked everyone else in the room. The planned death sentence was commuted to twenty years and one day and he was sent on 1 March 1941 to the prison of El Puerto de Santa María in Cádiz. Then Muñoz Grandes, as Captain General of the I Military Region, commuted his sentence to twelve years and a day, which permitted him provisional liberty.
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Melchor Rodríguez was one of the few senior elements of the Casado Junta who had remained in Madrid, naively believing that, since he had no blood on his hands, he had nothing to fear. The most senior of all was the Socialist Julián Besteiro, who had been Foreign Minister in the seven-man Junta. Besteiro had done nothing to oppose the military rising and had done more than most to put an end to Republican resistance. He was the only one of the Casado Junta’s members to stay in Madrid. The others, including the notorious organizer of the anarchist
checas
of Madrid, Eduardo Val Bescós, managed to escape with Casado to England. It was inevitable that Besteiro would face the full ferocity of the repression since he was a parliamentary deputy, had been president of both the
Socialist Party and its trade union movement, the UGT, and been President of the Constituent Cortes in 1931.

Nevertheless, Besteiro chose wilfully to ignore the revenge being wreaked on captured Republican areas. Instead, he believed assurances from his contacts in the fifth column that Franco guaranteed the life and liberty of those innocent of common crimes. Moreover, although the Casado coup had already undermined the chances of a properly organized evacuation of those in danger, Besteiro refused to allow any government resources to be used for those who needed to flee. His logic was that the national wealth was required in Spain for post-war reconstruction and that Franco would treat those who stayed behind in Spain all the better for safeguarding resources. He facilitated the peaceful surrender of the Republic to the Francoists, in co-operation with the clandestine Falange and the fifth-column organization. He complacently believed that his contribution to shortening the war would incline Franco to use him in the process of post-war reconstruction.

Despite his hope that a shared anti-communism would permit him to be the instrument of reconciliation between the two sides, Besteiro, nearly sixty-nine years old, was arrested and, on 8 July 1939, faced a court martial charged with military rebellion. It was an indication of his importance that his case was in the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Felipe Acedo Colunga, head prosecutor of the court of the Army of Occupation. Acedo Colunga recognized that Besteiro was innocent of any crime of blood, yet demanded the death sentence.
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In the event, he was sentenced to life imprisonment which was commuted to thirty years of hard labour. At the end of August 1939, he was sent to the prison of Carmona. His health destroyed by lack of adequate food and medical attention, he was forced to undertake hard physical work, scrubbing floors, cleaning latrines. This latter activity led to an untreated septicaemia which caused his death on 27 September 1940.
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Besteiro was unfortunate that the Francoists, unable to try Azaña, Prieto, Negrín, Largo Caballero and the other major figures who had made it into exile, vented their hatred on him.
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Another prominent Republican who fell foul of Francoist vindictiveness was the second wartime Prime Minister, Francisco Largo Caballero. He crossed the French frontier on 29 January 1939 and lived in Paris until two days before the German occupation. Thereafter, the Vichy authorities moved him around and kept him always under surveillance. Blas Pérez prepared the application for his extradition at the end of May 1941. It accused him of direct responsibility for assassinations, theft and
looting. Four months passed before the Vichy authorities arrested him on 9 October 1941. Now seventy-one years old, Largo Caballero was imprisoned in harsh conditions in Limoges. The petition from Madrid was heard, on the same day as another for the extradition of Federica Montseny, and both were rejected. Although Montseny was released, Largo Caballero was kept confined in Nyons. Shortly after the German occupation of Vichy France, he was arrested again on 20 February 1943 by the Italian political police and two Gestapo agents. He was interrogated in Lyons before being held in Paris. On 8 July, he was sent to Berlin and then on 31 July imprisoned in the brutal labour camp of Sachsenhausen in Oranienburg. Had he been extradited to Spain, the pressure for him to be shot would have been immense but, in the wake of the fall of Mussolini, Franco did not want to risk an international scandal likely to be greater than that provoked by the execution of Companys. Largo Caballero believed that the Madrid authorities did not request his transfer to Spain because they preferred to see him die in a German camp. In fact, he survived to be liberated by the Soviet forces, but his health was broken and he died in March 1946.
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When Blas Pérez compiled the extradition applications to Vichy he drew on a body of ‘evidence’ from one of the central instruments of the Francoist state project which had first begun to function after the conquest of the north in 1937. This was the Causa General or the ‘State proceedings to collect information about criminal acts and other aspects of life in the red zone from 18 July 1936 until the liberation’. It was formalized on 26 April 1940 when the prosecution service of the Supreme Court was instructed to start collecting information on alleged Republican misdeeds. A colossal collection of documents was assembled consisting of transcripts of interrogations of prisoners, denunciations by witnesses and captured documents. It provided ‘evidence’ for the trials of Republicans and was a central part of the regime’s process of self-legitimization. Its published version established, for internal and external consumption, the Manichaean narrative of the Civil War’s meaning which underlay the dictatorship’s rhetoric until Franco’s death.

Its rhetorical message was that heroic Christian martyrs had sacrificed their lives in the struggle against the Anti-Spain of the depraved hordes of Moscow. This provided some solace to the bereaved among the regime’s supporters, as did the belief that the guilty would get their comeuppance. A crucial element in the assembly of evidence was the encouragement of denunciations. Not to come forward was to invite suspicion. As the
Diario Montañés
of Santander declared, ‘you can
forgive what they did to you but you have no right to deprive the justice system of any enemy of the Fatherland’. Any denunciation, however implausible, could lead to arrests, interrogations, torture and often executions. The delegations from villages that came to the prison camps in search of alleged criminals were often accompanied by men or women dressed in mourning. Sometimes, they might identify those guilty of crimes but would happily seize sacrificial victims in the form of anyone from their village who had been a member of the Popular Front Committee or was a trade unionist. This reflected in practical terms the homogenization of guilt which was the underlying message of the Causa General – all of the defeated were guilty of every crime committed during the war in the Republic zone.
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There were cases of groups of individuals executed for crimes that only one of them could have committed and cases of people executed for crimes that they could not possibly have committed.
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In general, Francoist ‘justice’ attributed all deaths to a deliberate policy of the Republican government and the Generalitat. This was simply not true and a projection on to the Republicans of the rebels’ own murderous intentions.

The repression of Republicans was not limited to prison and death. They were also subject to a huge state-sponsored programme of extortion based on the Law of Political Responsibilities, announced in Burgos on 9 February 1939. Although the concept had been developed in the rebel zone since the start of the war, the timing left no doubt that a negotiated peace was out of the question. Its first article was as sweeping as it was awkwardly worded: ‘The political responsibility is declared of all those persons who, after 1 October 1934 and before 18 July 1936, contributed to the creation or aggravation of the subversion of any kind of which Spain was made a victim, and of those others, who from the second of said dates have opposed or might oppose the National Movement with concrete acts or serious passivity’.
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The concept of ‘serious passivity’ ensured that no Republican would go unpunished and justified the ‘legal’ persecution of any individual who had not actively fought in the insurgent ranks or else been a fifth columnist. It also permitted the trial and punishment of anyone who had exercised their political and trade union rights under Republican democracy from 1 October 1934 until the conquest of their area by the military rebels. The punishments involved massive fines and/or the confiscation of property ranging from businesses, factories, clinics and houses, via bank savings and shareholdings, to household furniture, crockery and cutlery. The Law was designed not just to punish the defeated but also to
pay for the war that had been inflicted upon them. This ‘juridical monstrosity’ as it has been called was applied retroactively and criminalized activities, from membership of a political party to government service, that were perfectly legal when they were carried out.
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Many of the sentences imposed under the Law were applied against people who had long since been executed or gone into exile. In such cases, their fines were passed on to their widows or other relatives if they could be found. A case was brought against the exiled lawyer Eduardo Ragasol i Sarrà. The denunciation which provoked the case came from members of the town council of Caldes de Monbui, north of Barcelona. They wanted to evict his mother from the family property to get hold of it. The Tribunal of Political Responsibilities confiscated the family patrimony in December 1939, although, three years later, his mother managed to get part of the property returned.
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