The Spanish Holocaust (33 page)

The relationship between the landowners and their military saviours was illustrated when Queipo de Llano asked Ramón de Carranza’s friend Rafael de Medina to raise money for the rebel cause. After years of anguished complaints that agriculture was in ruins as a result of Republican reforms, it might have been expected that Medina’s fund-raising efforts would meet with difficulty. On his first day, three olive exporters in Alcalá de Guadaira gave 1 million pesetas between them. Later the same day, in Dos Hermanas, one landowner asked what the money was for. When told that it was hoped to buy aircraft, he asked how much an aeroplane cost. When Medina replied, ‘About one million pesetas,’ without hesitating the
latifundista
wrote him a cheque for the full amount.
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Landowners often formed and financed their own units, such as those led by Carranza or the Mora-Figueroa brothers.

Thereafter, several of the various volunteer forces were formalized as a kind of landowners’ cavalry usually known as the Volunteer Mounted Police. These units included both landowners and those of their employees specialized in horse-breeding and training. Polo ponies were used as well as working horses. As if taking part in a sport or hunting expeditions, they carried out a continuous campaign against the left in the south. Such groups were to be found throughout most of Andalusia and Extremadura. In Lucena in Córdoba, the local landowners funded a squad of expert horsemen to ‘defend property’ and pursue leftists who had fled into the countryside. The group was notorious for its cruelty, its pillaging and its many sexual crimes and was known locally as ‘the death squad’. In September 1936, for example, they crossed the iron bridge over the River Genil and entered Cuevas de San Marcos in Málaga. Many of the inhabitants who fled into the surrounding countryside, for no reason other than fear, were rounded up and shot. After such expeditions, the death squad would return to Lucena with lorries loaded with furniture, bedding, sewing machines, books, clocks and other household items.
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The
caciques
and the army could call upon support for their repressive activities from a substantial social group. Those at the top provided money and weapons but there was no shortage of willing volunteers to do their dirty work. Those who went out searching for leftists, murdering and raping, torturing and interrogating, and those who denounced their neighbours were a heterogeneous group. Some were landowners or local businessmen, some were their sons. Others of whatever social class were hoping to save themselves from a dubious past by manifesting enthusiasm for the killing. Others enjoyed the opportunity to kill and rape without hindrance. Others again welcomed the chance to steal or buy cheaply the coveted property of their neighbours. There were also the silent accomplices who looked on, perhaps appalled, perhaps delighted. As the suffocating atmosphere of fear intensified, despite the legitimizing sermons of the clerics, the terror was based on an all-pervading moral corruption.

Sometimes, however, the intensity of the repression was not sufficient for Queipo de Llano. Córdoba had fallen within a matter of hours to the city’s military commander, the Artillery Colonel Ciriaco Cascajo Ruiz, with help from the Civil Guard.
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With the city of Córdoba isolated within a province that remained loyal to the Republic, a group of Falangists went to Seville to get arms. Their leader was asked by Queipo how many they had shot in Córdoba. When he replied, ‘None,’ Queipo was outraged and thundered: ‘Well, until you shoot a couple of hundred there’ll be no more arms for you!’ Queipo was dissatisfied because Cascajo was ordering ‘only’ five executions per day. The municipal authorities and leading Republicans who had taken refuge in the building of the Civil Governor were murdered. Among other victims were four parliamentary deputies for Andalusia and Manuel Azaña’s nephew, Gregorio Azaña Cuevas, a state lawyer, who had gone to attend a meeting about the proposed autonomy statute for Andalusia along with another of those arrested, Joaquín García Hidalgo Villanueva, a Freemason and journalist who had been Socialist deputy for the city between 1931 and 1933. García Hidalgo, a diabetic, was taken to prison. There he was tortured and force-fed sugar. He died in a diabetic coma on 28 July.

After an inspection by Queipo on 5 August, the rate of executions speeded up. Bruno Ibáñez, a brutal major of the Civil Guard, was put in charge of the terror. In the first week, he arrested 109 people from lists given him by landowners and priests. They were shot out on the roads and in the olive groves. The Socialist Mayor Manuel Sánchez Badajoz, a number of town councillors and a much loved parliamentary deputy, Dr
Vicente Martín Romera, were taken to the cemetery at dawn on 7 August and, by the light of car headlights, shot with seven others. Within a few days, with the midsummer heat at its height, the numbers of shootings and the corpses left in the streets caused a minor typhoid epidemic. It has been calculated that more than 11,500 people were killed in the province of Córdoba between 1936 and 1945.
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A young Falangist lawyer recalled: ‘The basement of Falange headquarters in which people were held was like a balloon which was blown up in the afternoon and was empty the following morning. Each day there were executions in the cemetery and along the roads leading out of the city.’ He saw Bruno Ibáñez one day at a bullfight: ‘As he came out of the ring people cringed. To get out of his way, people would have incrusted themselves in the walls if they could. Everyone was electrified with terror and fear. Don Bruno could have shot all Córdoba, he was sent there with carte blanche. It was said that his whole family had been wiped out by the reds in some town in La Mancha. Whether it was true or not, he was a prejudiced, embittered man.’ He organized book burnings and imposed a programme of religious films and Nazi documentaries in local cinemas.
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A note issued by Bruno Ibáñez on 1 October 1936 stated that ‘Those who flee are effectively confessing their guilt.’
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The repression in the wider province was equally brutal. In the small town of Lucena, 118 men and five women were shot.
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One of the most significant rebel atrocities took place in Baena, a hilltop town to the south-east of Córdoba on the road to Granada. During the spring of 1936, and indeed before, the town had seen considerable social hatred between its landless labourers and its landowners. The local bosses had systematically flouted the Republic’s labour legislation, bringing in cheap labour from outside and paying starvation wages. The commander of the town’s Civil Guard detachment, Lieutenant Pascual Sánchez Ramírez, an ex-Legionario, had built up a considerable arsenal of weapons and had been arming the local landowners and giving local Falangists official status as ‘special sworn-in guards’ (
guardias jurados
). On the night of 18 July, he seized control of the Casa del Pueblo. The next morning, he issued an edict of martial law and, with the sworn-in Falangists, occupied the town hall, the telephone exchange and other key buildings, into which they took hostages.

The rural labourers of the local CNT advanced on the town armed only with axes, sickles, sticks and a few shotguns. After a clash on the outskirts of the town, in which one Civil Guard and eleven workers died, they were driven off by a force of Civil Guards and right-wing civilians.
The next day, 20 July, the workers returned to find the centre of the town defended by well over two hundred Civil Guards, Falangists and landowners distributed among several strategically chosen buildings that dominated the town. They threatened to kill a number of hostages they were holding in the town hall, including a woman at an advanced stage of pregnancy. The workers cut off their water, electricity and food supplies. Effectively controlling the town, the anarchists declared libertarian communism, abolished money and requisitioned food and jewellery as a first step towards common ownership of property. Coupons were issued for food. The revolutionary committee detained prominent members of the middle class in a nearby old people’s residence and ordered that none be harmed. A church and a convent where the rebels had established themselves were seriously damaged in the fighting and the parish priest killed. Moreover, in acts of revenge for personal grudges, eleven right-wingers were murdered before the town was captured by the military rebels. Sánchez Ramírez rejected proposals for a truce, fearing that surrender would lead to his death and that of his men.
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On 28 July, just as the besieged Civil Guards were about to give up, a large rebel relief column left Córdoba under the orders of Colonel Eduardo Sáenz de Buruaga. It consisted of Civil Guards, Legionarios and Moorish Regulares, equipped with artillery and machine-guns. The workers, with virtually no firearms, were unable to put up much resistance and the column suffered only four wounded in taking Baena street by street. The Regulares led the assault, killing indiscriminately and looting. Survivors found in the street or in houses along the way were rounded up and taken to the town-hall square. The official Civil Guard account of the events in Baena admitted that ‘the slightest denunciation would see the accused shot’. Sáenz de Buruaga took refreshment in a café with one of his men, Félix Moreno de la Cova, the son of a rich landowner from Palma del Río. Meanwhile, Sánchez Ramírez, blind with rage, organized a massacre that echoed his experience in Morocco. First he killed the five male hostages detained in the town hall. Then he had lines of prisoners – many of whom had nothing to do with the CNT union or the events of the previous week – lie face down in the square. Completely beside himself, he insisted on shooting most of them himself. The occupying forces aided by local rightists continued to bring in more prisoners to replace those being shot.

ABC
referred to these extra-judicial killings as the application of ‘exemplary punishment’ to ‘all leading elements’ and of ‘the rigour of the law’ to anyone found with arms. The paper’s final comment was ‘it is
certain that the town of Baena will never forget the scenes of horror created by so many murders committed there and the activities of the liberating forces’. Nevertheless, despite
ABC
’s comments, Sáenz de Buruaga’s forces captured neither union leaders nor individuals with arms. Nearly all of these had withdrawn to the old people’s residence where the right-wing prisoners were being kept. The ‘so many murders’ were largely the consequence of Sáenz de Buruaga’s irresponsibility in going for a drink while Sánchez Ramírez conducted the massacre.

The many leftists who fled and packed into the residence used the hostages as shields in the hope that this would restrain Sáenz de Buruaga’s pursuing forces. It did not and many were found dead by the windows, shot with munitions possessed only by the attackers. Most of the anarchists who had taken refuge there fled, but a few stayed until the last moment, murdering many of the remaining hostages in reprisal for the executions in the square. In total, eighty-one hostages were killed. Many local people were convinced that, but for the massacre organized by Sánchez Ramírez, the hostages would have survived. Nevertheless, the discovery of their corpses led to a further massacre in an orgy of revenge so indiscriminate that several right-wingers were also victims. Masses of left-wing prisoners were shot, including an eight-year-old boy.
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On 5 August, with Sáenz de Buruaga’s column having gone to Córdoba, Baena was attacked unsuccessfully by anarchist militia. This in turn intensified the rhythm of executions within the town.
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On the night of 31 July, Queipo de Llano felt the need to justify, in his nightly broadcast, the repression in Baena, by referring to ‘real horrors, monstrous crimes that cannot be mentioned lest they bring shame on our people, and that produced after the fall of Baena, the punishment that is natural when troops are possessed by the indignation provoked by such crimes’.
¹¹⁷
Two months later, the middle classes of Baena hosted a ceremony at which Sáenz de Buruaga presented Sánchez Ramírez with the military medal in the still bloodstained square. Nearly seven hundred people were killed by, or on the orders of, Sánchez Ramírez, Sáenz de Buruaga and, over the next five months, the man named as military judge. This was the leading local landowner, Manuel Cubillo Jiménez, whose wife and three young sons were among those killed in the residence by gunfire from the forces of Sáenz de Buruaga. He was implacable in his desire for revenge. Many townspeople fled eastwards to the Republican-held province of Jaén. The women who remained were subjected to various forms of sexual abuse and humiliation, from rape to head-shaving and being forced to drink castor oil. Over six hundred
children were left orphaned, including cases of toddlers left to fend for themselves.
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The events in Baena fitted well into the overall thinking behind the military uprising. The point was made expressively by José María Pemán, who declared that ‘this magnificent conflict which is bleeding Spain is taking place on a plane that is both supernatural and wondrous. The flames of Irún, Guernica, Lequeitio, Málaga or Baena burn the stubble to leave the land fertilized for the new harvest. We are going to have, my fellow Spaniards, land clean and levelled on which to lay imperial stones.’
¹¹⁹

Initially, the rebel columns of each Andalusian province had concentrated on occupying nearby towns and villages, the choice of which depended less on military criteria than on the desire of landowners to liberate their estates from left-wing occupations. At the beginning of August, in order to impose a strategic vision of operations, a more central control was imposed on the columns. With numerous towns and villages of Córdoba still in Republican hands, General Varela was sent to undertake their conquest. Although no column would henceforth be permitted to act on its own initiative, their activities continued to reflect the prejudices and objectives of the landowners. One of the first objectives for Varela was the relief of Granada, which remained isolated and besieged by government forces. This was achieved on 18 August. A second objective was the complete occupation of Seville and Cádiz prior to an attack on Málaga. Thus the beautiful hilltop town of Ronda became an intermediate target of the highest importance.
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