The Spanish Civil War (33 page)

Priests who were not killed or who did not flee abroad were simply regarded as men who had chosen a certain
métier,
and were treated in no way different from a dentist, say, or a lawyer—save that they were not allowed to practise or wear the uniform of the cassock. If they had disgraced the
métier,
and had, say, in the past, never worn a clean collar for the funeral of a poor man, but always had done so for a rich man, they would probably be killed.
²
There were some exceptions to the onslaught; for example, the bishop of Minorca remained in his palace till the war ended, and the vicar-general of Tarragona exercised his ministry in prison throughout the war.
³

Of course, in numbers, the onslaught against laymen was more violent than it was against churchmen. All who could conceivably be suspected of sympathy for the nationalist rising were in danger. As among the nationalists, the irrational circumstances of a civil war made it impossible to lay down what was or what was not treason. The worthy died, the unworthy often lived. In East Andalusia, lorries manned by the CNT drove into villages and ordered mayors to hand over their fascists. The mayors had often to say that they had all fled but the terrorists would often hear from informers which of the better off people were still there, arrest them and shoot them in a nearby ravine. In some cases, the dead were peasant farmers, denounced by those who owed them money. Support for the CEDA or membership of the old Catalan constabulary in the time of Martínez Anido, the Somaten, was enough to be shot in Sitges (Barcelona).
⁴
A gang from Madrid drove out to kill the Duke of Peñaranda outside Oropesa. To have been a
member of the Falange was almost everywhere fatal, even though many escaped through the neglect or the repentance of their captors. Some of those killed may have deserved their fate: among the summarily executed were
pistoleros
such as Ramón Sales in Barcelona, and Inocencio Faced in Alicante, widely believed to be the murderers of the anarchist leaders Seguí, Boal, Layret, and others between 1919 and 1923.
¹
In country districts, revolution itself often consisted primarily of the murder of the upper classes or the bourgeoisie. Thus the description, in Ernest Hemingway’s novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
of how the inhabitants of a small
pueblo
first beat the male members of the middle class and then flung them over a cliff, is near to the reality of what happened in the famous Andalusian town of Ronda (though the work there was the responsibility of a gang from Málaga). There, 512 were murdered in the first month of war.
²
In Guadix, a group of young terrorists, more or less anarchist in outlook, took over the town and killed recklessly for five months.
³

In the larger towns, where the potential enemy was more numerous, more sophisticated procedures were followed. The left-wing political parties set up investigation bodies which were proud to call themselves, on the Russian model, by the name of
checa.
There were several dozen of these in Madrid alone. A positive maze of different groups, each with power of life and death, each responsible to one party or department of state or even individual, characterized these first days of the civil war in the republican cities. The different
checas
would sometimes consult with each other before taking their victim ‘for a ride’ (
dar un paseo
). The language derived from Hollywood; a reflection of the quantity of cinemas built in Primo’s day. But that formality was not always followed. The cross-examination of suspects was often carried out amid insults and threats. Sometimes, the chief of the
checa
would show a card from a distance to suggest to the accused that it was his own membership card of a party hostile to the Popular Front. Sentences of death by these ‘courts’ were indicated on the appropriate documents by the letter ‘L’ for liberty, but with a full stop added. This was an instruction for the immediate execution of the
prisoner. That task would be undertaken by special brigades often composed of ex-criminals.
¹

Perhaps the most feared
checa
in Madrid was that known as ‘the dawn patrol’, from the hour at which it carried out its activities. But there was little to choose between it and ‘the brigade of criminal investigation’ led by an ex-printer, and ex-communist youth leader, Agapito García Atadell,
²
who, apparently with the blessing of the authorities, set up his ‘anti-fascist
checa
’ in the palace of the Count of Rincón in the Castellana. Both these bodies drew on the archives of the ministry of the interior to help them in their task of tracking members of right-wing parties. (The Falange had destroyed their own list of members; but the Carlists and UME had not.)
³

In the vast majority of cases, these murders were of the rank and file of the Right. Often members of the working class would be killed by their own acquaintances for hypocrisy, for having kow-towed too often to their social superiors, even simply for untruthfulness. In Altea, near Alicante, for example, a café proprietor was killed with a hatchet by an anarchist for having overcharged for stamps and for the glass of wine that buyers of stamps were forced to take while waiting.
⁴
Most of the political leaders of the Right, together with generals and others who had taken part in the rising, were imprisoned. Some of them, such as General López Ochoa, were dragged out of confinement or even hospital to be killed. Others, such as those sent to the Model Prison in Madrid, were treated well for the time being. Four Germans, all members of the Nazi party, were shot in Barcelona on 24 July after the looting of the local headquarters of the German labour front.

In the chaos, there were many settlements of personal scores. In his
imaginary dialogue written in 1937,
La velada en Benicarló,
Azaña causes a doctor to be threatened with death and imprisoned simply on the denunciation of a man on whom he had operated unsuccessfully.
¹
A convict released from the common prison broke into the apartment of a judge who had condemned him some months before, killed him in the presence of his family, and escaped with the family silver tied up in a sheet.
²
There were also many mistakes: the great cellist Casals had, for some time, his name on the death list at the Barcelona suburb of Vendrell.
³

Throughout this troubled time, the heads of such men as the President of the republic, Azaña (whose window in the National Palace faced the Casa de Campo, where so many killings occurred), did not rest easily at night. Though they could not control the killings, they were, as the government, responsible for them. Since they did not resign, they could hardly expect to escape blame. Some socialists and even Left republicans, as well as communists and anarchists, appear to have inspired many arrests and ‘investigations’, the need for which could have been only remotely concerned with winning the war. Several of the organizers of these
checas
also went on to positions of responsibility in the republic’s police once order was restored.
⁴
Yet many others, motivated by personal feelings rather than politics, went out of their way to intervene on behalf of likely victims of violence. Companys saved the cardinal archbishop of Tarragona when anarchist militiamen had arrested him in the monastery of Poblet, while the bishop of Gerona and many priests and members of the Catalan Lliga were protected by Ventura Gassol (the Catalan councillor for culture). Azaña saved some monks at his old school in the Augustinian monastery at El Escorial; La Pasionaria saved nuns in Madrid from the FAI. Galarza, though weak as a minister of the interior, rescued the president of the
Catholics’ student association, Joaquín Ruiz Jiménez.
¹
Juan Negrín, a socialist deputy and professor of physiology, helped many in Madrid. The anarchist leadership also criticized the violence, and tried to stem it within a few days. From 25 July, the CNT and FAI launched a series of protests against illegal action. On 30 July, Federica Montseny, the anarchist leader, wrote sorrowfully:

We have confirmed something we only knew in theory, namely that revolution, in which uncontrolled and uncontrollable forces operate imperiously, is blind and destructive, grandiose and cruel … How much is wrecked in the heat of the struggle and in the blind fury of the storm … Men are as we have always known them, neither better nor worse … from the hearts of rogues there springs a latent honesty, from the depths of honest men there emerges a brutish appetite—a thirst for extermination, a desire for blood.
²

Even more strongly, Juan Peiró, a long-standing member of the CNT, made an eloquent attack on those who

have killed for the sheer sake of killing, because they could kill with impunity … many who have been killed were shot because of personal vengeance … A people in rebellion have been infiltrated by amoral elements who rob and murder by profession … Many of those who carry out expropriations have had no other interest than to seize other people’s money and goods for themselves.
³

No one admittedly shielded the Catalan commissioner of public order, Frederic Escofet, dismissed because he helped some Catholic relations escape to France.
⁴
Still, a number of Popular Front committees were castigated by the government for crimes committed: and one captain of militias, Luis Bonilla, and the anarchist leaders at Valdiviedra and Molins de Llobregat were later executed for crimes. So was José Olmeda Medina, who stole corpses from the church of Carmen in Madrid. The anarchist (Castilian) paper,
Campo Libre,
remarked
in August 1937: ‘The criminal instincts of uncontrolled elements (in the village of Cabañas de Yepes, Toledo)… believed the revolution was a matter of sacking and hooliganism and, in the first days of the movement [the anarchists used the same word as the nationalists to denote the revolution of July], dealt cravenly with those who had no fault other than being unhappy.’ Considerable responsibility must lie, admittedly, with the ineffective minister of the interior, General Pozas, the horrified director-general of security, Alonso Mallol, and the incompetent minister of justice, Manuel Blasco Garzón. The agencies over which these gentlemen presided took refuge in denials that crimes had been committed, attributions that those that were killed had been murdered by fascists, and silent endorsement of some of the actions concerned by their subsequent promotion of those directly responsible.

Who were the killers? Doubtless many were criminals, released unexpectedly from gaol, some were reckless, poor boys without conscience and without ideology, most were probably adolescents, many were butchers of the type spawned by all revolutions—for example, the ex-sacristan who was active killing priests in 1936, who afterwards denounced his fellow murderers and busied himself killing republicans in 1939.
¹
But the socialist-communist youth played a part, perhaps as big a part as the anarchists. In Santander, for example, a falangist who enrolled secretly in the CNT testified later that the executions there were carried out by the socialist-communist youth, ‘provided with anarchist colours and badges to cause the blame to fall on the CNT and FAI’.
²
On the other hand, the same falangist admitted that he and a few other friends of like views were themselves responsible in Santander for a lot of the ‘red’ shooting.
³
In Andalusia, the murder gangs usually came from outside the villages where the killings occurred. These gangs would arrive in lorries, armed with sub-machine-guns, and ‘force the villages to hand over their reactionaries’.
⁴
In Jaén, the anarchists stopped the indiscriminate killing, and often the gangs concerned were
people of no real political beliefs.
¹
Equally often, however, the anarchists killed as if they were mystics, resolved to crush forever the material things of this world, all the outward signs of a corrupt and hypocritical bourgeois past. When they cried ‘Long live liberty’ and ‘Down with fascism’, while some unjust steward was dying, they voiced deep passions of fearful sincerity. Some of those captured in Barcelona were taken thirty miles down the coast to be shot overlooking the superb Bay of Sitges. Those about to die would pass their last moments on earth looking out to sea in the marvellous Mediterranean dawn. ‘See how beautiful life could have been,’ their assassins seemed to be saying, ‘if only you had not been a bourgeois, and had got up early and had seen the dawn more often—as workers do.’

A young member of the POUM, Victor Alba, many years later recalled: ‘Neither I, nor anyone whom I knew, nor the leaders, did anything to prevent the murders and burnings. Silence, caution or indifference were the general attitudes, especially among those who later on shouted loudly that, “if the CNT had not committed so many barbarities”, we would have won the war. Speaking of repression, we have to use the first person singular, not the third. Still, to be silent is one way to react. And everyone was silent. I do not think that in general this was a product of fear but of indifference, deriving from the intimate conviction that as a whole the victims deserved their fate, at least because, if they had won, they would themselves have behaved as the “uncontrolled ones” did. And in fact, when they could, they did, though controlled’.
²

Though there was much wanton killing in rebel Spain, the idea of the
limpieza,
the ‘cleaning up’ of the country from the evils which had overtaken it, was a disciplined policy of the new authorities and a part of their programme of regeneration. In republican Spain, most of the killing was the consequence of anarchy, the outcome of a national breakdown, and not the work of the state; even though some political parties in some cities abetted the enormities, and even though some of those responsible ultimately rose to positions of authority. Air raids also caused hatred and were responsible for many deaths, as reprisals.
Equally, the voice of Queipo de Llano caused much fear and resulted in the death of many of his own partisans in republican territory. On both sides most of the killing was done by people under twenty-four years old.