The Spanish Holocaust

The Spanish Holocaust

Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain

Paul Preston

Dedication

For Gabrielle

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Prologue

PART 1:
THE ORIGINS OF HATRED AND VIOLENCE

1
Social War Begins, 1931–1933

2
Theorists of Extermination

3
The Right Goes on the Offensive, 1933–1934

4
The Coming of War, 1934–1936

PART 2:
INSTITUTIONALIZED VIOLENCE IN THE REBEL ZONE

5
Queipo’s Terror: The Purging of the South

6
Mola’s Terror: The Purging of Navarre, Galicia, Castile and León

PART 3:
THE CONSEQUENCE OF THE COUP: SPONTANEOUS VIOLENCE IN THE REPUBLICAN ZONE

7
Far from the Front: Repression behind the Republican Lines

8
Revolutionary Terror in Madrid

PART 4:
MADRID BESIEGED: THE THREAT AND THE RESPONSE

9
The Column of Death’s March on Madrid

10
A Terrified City Responds: The Massacres of Paracuellos

PART 5:
TWO CONCEPTS OF WAR

11
Defending the Republic from the Enemy Within

12
Franco’s Slow War of Annihilation

PART 6:
FRANCO’S INVESTMENT IN TERROR

13
No Reconciliation: Trials, Executions, Prisons

Epilogue:
The Reverberations

Acknowledgements

Photographic Insert

Glossary

Notes

Appendix

Searchable Terms

Other Books by Paul Preston

Copyright

About the Publisher

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Franco in Seville with the brutal leader of the ‘Column of Death’, Colonel Juan Yagüe. (
© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano
)

Yagüe’s artillery chief, Luis Alarcón de la Lastra. (
EFE/jt
)

General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano. (
EFE/Jalon Angel
)

General Emilio Mola. (
EFE/Delespro/jt
)

Gonzalo de Aguilera. (
Courtesy of Marianela de la Trinidad de Aguilera y Lodeiro, Condesa de Alba de Yeltes
)

Virgilio Leret with his wife, the feminist, Carlota O’Neill. (
Courtesy of Carlota Leret-O’Neill
)

Amparo Barayón. (
Courtesy of Ramon Sender Barayón
)

A Coruña, Anniversary of the foundation of the Second Republic, 14 April 1936. (
Fondo Suárez Ferrín, Proxecto “Nomes e Voces”, Santiago de Compostela
)

José González Barrero, Mayor of Zafra. (
Courtesy of González Barrero family
)

Modesto José Lorenzana Macarro, Mayor of Fuente de Cantos. (
Courtesy of Cayetano Ibarra
)

Ricardo Zabalza, secretary general of the FNTT and Civil Governor of Valencia during the war, with his wife Obdulia Bermejo. (
Courtesy of Abel Zabalza and Emilio Majuelo
)

Mourning women after Castejón’s purge of the Triana district of Seville, 21 July 1936. (
© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano
)

Queipo de Llano (foreground) inspects the 5º Bandera of the Legion in Seville on 2 August 1936. (
© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano
)

Rafael de Medina Villalonga, in white, leads the column that has captured the town of Tocina, 4 August 1936. (
© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano
)

Trucks taking miners captured in the ambush at La Pañoleta for execution. (
© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano
)

Utrera, 26 July 1936. Townsfolk taken prisoner by the column of the Legion which captured the town. (
© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano
)

Lorca’s gravediggers. (
Courtesy of Víctor Fernández and Colección Enrique Sabater
)

Regulares examine their plunder. (
© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano
)

After a village falls, the column moves on with stolen sewing machines, household goods and animals. (
© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano
)

A firing squad prepares to execute townspeople in Llerena. (
Archivo Histórico Municipal de Llerena, Fondo Pacheco Pereira, legajo 1.
)

Calle Carnicerías (Butchery Street) in Talavera de la Reina. (
© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano
)

Mass grave near Toledo. (
© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano
)

Pascual Fresquet (centre left) with his ‘death brigade’ in Caspe. (
España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FC-CAUSA_GENERAL, 1426, EXP.45, IMAGEN128
)

The seizure of the Iglesia del Carmen in Madrid by militiamen. (
España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FC-Causa_General, 1907, 1, p.81
)

Arms and uniforms of the Falange found by militiamen in the offices of the monarchist newspaper ABC. (
España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FC-Causa_General, 1814, 1, IMAGEN6
)

Aurelio Fernández. (
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, IISG-CNT
)

Juan García Oliver. (
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, IISG-CNT
)

Ángel Pedrero García. (
España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FC-CAUSA_GENERAL, 1547, EXP.9, IMAGEN45
)

The Brigada García Atadell outside their Madrid headquarters, the Rincón Palace. (
EFE/Díaz Casariego/jgb
)

Santiago Carrillo. (
EFE/jgb
)

Melchor Rodríguez. (
EFE/Vidal/jgb
)

The wounded Pablo Yagüe receives visitors. (
EFE/Vidal/jgb
)

The cameraman Roman Karmen and the
Pravda
correspondent Mikhail Koltsov. (
Courtesy of Victor Alexandrovich Frandkin, Koltsov family
)

Andreu Nin and Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko. (
L’Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona
)

Josif Grigulevich, the Brigadas Especiales, Roman Karmen, then two of the NKVD staff, Lev Vasilevsky and then his boss, Grigory Sergeievich Syroyezhkin. Madrid October 1936. (
Cañada Blanch Collection
)

Vittorio Vidali. (
Imperial War Museum
)

Refugees flee from Queipo’s repression in Málaga towards Almería. (
Photograph by Hazen Sise, reproduced courtesy of Jesús Majada and El Centro Andaluz de la Fotografía
)

Exhaustion overcomes the refugees from Málaga on the road to Almería. (
Photograph by Hazen Sise, reproduced courtesy of Jesús Majada and El Centro Andaluz de la Fotografía
)

The Regulares enter northern Catalonia January 1939. (
España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FOTOGRAFIAS-DESCHAMPS, FOTO.7
)

Republican prisoners packed into the fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona, February 1939. (
España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FOTOGRAFIAS-DESCHAMPS, FOTO.764
)

No military threat from those making the long trek to the French border. (
Photos 12/Alamy
)

A crowd of Spanish women and children refugees cross the border into France at Le Perthus. (
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
)

Recently arrived at Argelès, women await classification. (
Roger-Viollet/Rex Features
)

The male refugees are detained at Argelès – the only facility being barbed wire. (
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
)

Prisoners carry rocks up the staircase at the Mauthausen-Gusen death camp. (
akg-images/ullstein bild
)

Franco welcomes Himmler to Madrid. (
EFE/Hermes Pato/jgb
)

Antonio Vallejo-Nájera. (
EFE/jgb
)

Himmler visits the psycho-technic checa of Alfonso Laurencic in Barcelona. (
L’Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona
)

Drawings made by Simon Manfield during the excavation at Valdedios, Asturias, summer 2003. (© Simon Manfield. Part of the Memoria Histórica series, [email protected])

PROLOGUE

Behind the lines during the Spanish Civil War, nearly 200,000 men and women were murdered extra-judicially or executed after flimsy legal process. They were killed as a result of the military coup of 17–18 July 1936 against the Second Republic. For the same reason, perhaps as many as 200,000 men died at the battle fronts. Unknown numbers of men, women and children were killed in bombing attacks and in the exoduses that followed the occupation of territory by Franco’s military forces. In all of Spain after the final victory of the rebels at the end of March 1939, approximately 20,000 Republicans were executed. Many more died of disease and malnutrition in overcrowded, unhygienic prisons and concentration camps. Others died in the slave-labour conditions of work battalions. More than half a million refugees were forced into exile and many were to die of disease in French concentration camps. Several thousand were worked to death in Nazi camps. The purpose of this book is to show as far as possible what happened to civilians and why. All of what did happen constitutes what I believe can legitimately be called the Spanish holocaust.

I thought long and hard about using the word ‘holocaust’ in the title of this book. I feel intense sorrow and outrage about the Nazis’ deliberate attempt to annihilate European Jewry. I also feel intense sorrow and outrage about the lesser, but none the less massive, suffering undergone by the Spanish people during the Civil War of 1936–9 and for several years thereafter. I could find no word that more accurately encapsulates the Spanish experience than ‘holocaust’. Moreover, in choosing it, I was influenced by the fact that those who justified the slaughter of innocent Spaniards used an anti-Semitic rhetoric and frequently claimed that they had to be exterminated because they were the instruments of a ‘Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic’ conspiracy. Nevertheless, my use of the word ‘holocaust’ is not intended to equate what happened within Spain with what happened throughout the rest of continental Europe under German occupation but rather to suggest that it be examined in a broadly
comparative context. It is hoped thereby to suggest parallels and resonances that will lead to a better understanding of what happened in Spain during the Civil War and after.