The Spanish Holocaust (98 page)

Before anything could be done, Gonzalo completely lost his mind. After lunch, at four o’clock on the sultry afternoon of Friday 28 August 1964, his younger son Agustín went into the Conde’s room to look for some papers. When his father complained of sore feet, Agustín knelt and started to massage them. Don Gonzalo began to abuse his son, pulled out a rusty Colt revolver that he had hidden and shot Agustín without warning. Badly wounded in the chest, Agustín staggered out of the room. His brother Gonzalo, alerted by the sound of gunfire, ran into the room and the Conde shot him full in the chest and in the arm. Stepping over his elder son’s corpse, he then set off in search of Agustín in order to finish him off. He found him lying dead at the door of the kitchen. His wife then came out of her room. When she saw him glaring at her while he calmly reloaded his pistol over the body of his son, she locked herself in another room. Since the farm labourers stood back, frightened by the sight of Gonzalo waving his revolver threateningly, she was obliged to escape through a window. The Civil Guard was called by the estate workers and they ordered Gonzalo to throw down his gun and come out with his hands in the air, which, his fury spent, he did.

After surrendering, he sat outside the house for more than three hours, still in his pyjamas, quietly awaiting the investigating judge from Salamanca. His wife, beside herself with grief and rage, screamed at him ‘Assassin! Murderer!’ Until calmed down by the farm workers, she shouted to the Civil Guards, ‘Kill him, he’s a savage!’ He was arrested and taken to Salamanca by the Civil Guard. They travelled in a car with reporters from the local newspaper,
La Gaceta Regional
. The journalists who interviewed him recounted that, en route, he chatted amiably to the driver. He spoke about various cars that he had had at different times, about the traffic system in France and about the poor state of the roads. He explained: ‘I’m talking to put what has happened out of my mind.’ When he was told that he was being taken to a psychiatric clinic, he said that psychiatrists are not usually in their right minds and added, ‘I called
the ones that visited me village quacks and they got angry with me.’
²⁰
Detained in the provincial psychiatric hospital in Salamanca, he apparently entertained himself by loudly insulting the nuns who staffed it.
²¹
His daughter-in-law, Concepción Lodeiro, and granddaughter, Marianela de Aguilera Lodeiro, escaped the carnage because they had gone to Lugo to make the arrangements for Marianela’s wedding. The wife and three children of Agustín were in southern Spain. Gonzalo never stood trial and died in the hospital nearly eight months later on 15 May 1965.
²²

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been many years in the making. The gratuitous cruelty that it recounts ensured that it would be an extremely painful book to write. It was also methodologically difficult because of the sheer scale of a subject covering the different kinds of repression in both zones during the war and in all of Spain afterwards. In fact, it could not have been written without the pioneering efforts of numerous Spanish historians. Their published work is referred to fully in the Notes.

Moreover, in addition to being able to read their books and articles, with many of these historians I had the pleasure and privilege of discussing detailed issues regarding the places and the topics on which they are the experts. Their readiness to share with me ideas and material was one of the most heartening and memorable features of a difficult task. Their names are listed in the Spanish edition of this book.

For a historian living in London, keeping up with the avalanche of information in some way or other related to the various aspects of the subject is a particularly difficult problem. In this regard, I owe special thanks to Javier Díaz and Sussana Anglés i Querol of Mas de las Matas, Teruel. Everyone who works on the question of repression and historical memory is in their debt for the astonishing daily updates on publications and events that they send out from La Librería de Cazarabet and through their bulletin
El Sueño Igualitario
.

I must make particular mention of a group of friends and colleagues with all of whom I have had frequent and fruitful conversations over many years. I am immensely grateful for their help and their friendship: Fernando Arcas Cubero (Málaga), Montse Armengou i Martín (Barcelona), Nicolás Belmonte (Valencia), Julián Casanova (Zaragoza), Ángela Cenarro (Zaragoza), Ian Gibson (Madrid), María Jesús González (Santander), Angela Jackson (Marçà, Tarragona), Rebecca Jinks (London), Father Josep Massot i Muntaner (Baleares), Antonio Miguez Macho (Santiago de Compostela), Father Hilari Raguer (Barcelona), Ángel Viñas (Brussels) and Boris Volodarsky (Vienna).

I must also thank my colleagues in the Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Studies in the London School of Economics: Peter Anderson, Jerry Blaney, Ana de Miguel, Susana Grau, Didac Gutiérrez Peris and Rúben Serem. In all kinds of ways, their support permitted me to make progress on the book while still meeting the heavy demands of university teaching and administration.

With two friends, the interchange of ideas and material has been almost daily. I have learned an enormous amount from them and I am deeply grateful for their friendship and for sharing with me their encyclopaedic knowledge: Francisco Espinosa Maestre (Seville) and José Luis Ledesma (Zaragoza).

Finally, I must thank Linda Palfreeman for her painstaking and insightful reading of the text. I have benefited too from the perceptive comments of Helen Graham, Lala Isla and my wife, Gabrielle, over the many years during which I have been working on the book. However, only Gabrielle knows what the emotional cost has been of daily immersion in this chronicle of inhumanity. Without her understanding and support, the task would have been so much more difficult. Accordingly, the book is dedicated to her.

Photographic Insert

Franco in Seville with the brutal leader of the ‘Column of Death’, Colonel Juan Yagüe, prior to its march on Madrid.

Yagüe’s artillery chief, the landowner from Carmona, Luis Alarcón de la Lastra.

General Emilio Mola, the implacable director of the military coup.

General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano making one of his incendiary radio broadcasts.

Gonzalo de Aguilera, the landowner and army officer who justified rebel policies of extermination to the foreign press. He later lost his mind and murdered his own sons.

Virgilio Leret, the first Republican officer to be shot by the rebels, seen here with his wife, the feminist, Carlota O’Neill, who was imprisoned and separated from their daughters, Carlota and Mariela.

Amparo Barayón, murdered because she was a feminist and married to the left-wing novelist Ramón Sender.