The Spanish Holocaust (45 page)

Gardenyes enjoyed cult status within the movement, having earned his spurs during the period of unrestrained gangsterism between 1918 and 1923. He was one of the most prominent of the so-called ‘men of action’, specializing in fund-raising by armed robbery. He was a committed and ideological anarchist, blacklisted by Barcelona employers for his efforts. Having been exiled then imprisoned during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, he was released as a result of the amnesty to celebrate the establishment of the Second Republic in April 1931 and soon returned to robbery. Some of his comrades found his behaviour too extreme and he was expelled from the movement. After his release from prison, he joined the Patrulles de Control and soon reverted to old habits, allegedly stealing jewels from a house that was being searched.

Gardenyes’s execution was the response of the CNT–FAI leadership to demands for an end to the revolutionary terrorism. His execution was carried out by a group led by Manuel Escorza, and the body was dumped on the outskirts of Barcelona. It was rumoured that Gardenyes struggled to the last, some of his fingernails being left in the car that took him on his final journey.
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The Madrid-based anarchist Felipe Sandoval, a notorious and vicious killer in his own right, described Escorza to his own Francoist interrogators as ‘a twisted figure, physically and morally a monster, a man whose methods disgusted me’.
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The activities of Escorza did nothing to reassure the moderate elements alarmed by anarchist atrocities. The Generalitat’s efforts to save lives were more effective. Safe-conducts were issued to Catholics, businessmen, right-wingers, middle-class individuals and clergy. Passports were made available for well over 10,000 right-wingers to embark on
foreign ships in the port of Barcelona. Passports with false names were issued for people whose real identities might have put them in danger. In 1939, the French government reported that in the course of the civil war, in collaboration with the Generalitat, its Consulate in Barcelona had evacuated 6,630 people, of whom 2,142 were priests, monks and nuns, and 868 children. On 24 August 1936, Mussolini’s Consul in Barcelona, Carlo Bossi, reported that 4,388 Spaniards had been evacuated in Italian warships.
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Few of the beneficiaries showed gratitude. One of them was the wealthy financier Miquel Mateu i Pla, who, on reaching the rebel zone, formed part of Franco’s staff. After Barcelona was occupied in 1939, on the recommendation of Father Juan Tusquets, Franco appointed Mateu as Mayor. Mateu’s policies suggested that he wished to take revenge on the entire population for his discomfort at the hands of the FAI.
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A difference between the practice in Catalonia and that in the rebel zone was the way in which the corpses of the victims of extra-judicial violence were treated. In Barcelona, the relatives of the victims were able to ascertain the fate of their loved ones. The Red Cross, the municipal sanitation services or the staff of the judiciary took the corpses found in the streets to the hospital clinic where they were photographed and numbered. To avoid any such investigations, the FAI patrols established crematoriums in order to dispose of the bodies of their victims. Sometimes the bodies would be burned with gasoline, others dissolved in lime. At other times, bodies were concealed in wells or buried in remote spots.

While the Patrulles de Control ruled the streets in Barcelona, as elsewhere, to be identified as a priest, a religious, a militant Catholic or even a member of a pious society was to be in danger of death or prison – a consequence of the Church’s traditional identification with the right. During the events of October 1934, there had been isolated physical attacks on priests in Barcelona. Further south, in Vilanova i la Geltrú, the Church of the Immaculate Conception was looted and destroyed. All but two of the churches of Vilafranca del Penedès were set alight. During the spring of 1936, there were cases of stones being thrown at priests in the streets, parish residences being assaulted and religious ceremonies being violently disrupted.
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During the war, the FAI’s persecution of religious personnel in Catalonia intensified.

Churches were sacked and burned to the ground. Initially, priests in cassocks were murdered on the street. Later, priests and those who assisted in ecclesiastical functions, sacristans and parish administrators,
as well as the most notably pious lay Catholics, were arrested, principally by the FAI. They were executed after interrogation in the
checa
to which they had been taken. Many priests fled or went into hiding. A post-war report compiled by the Diocese of Barcelona ascertained that many of the abuses against both clergy and churches, although organized by local extremists, were actually carried out by elements from outside. There were many places where the local faithful opposed the assaults on their churches but sometimes, in order to save the clergy, had to accept, or even collaborate in, setting fire to the church. Equally, there were many cases where the local Popular Front Committee prevented the murder of the clergy and facilitated their escape. In Valls, a small town in Tarragona, the altars of most churches were destroyed and the buildings used as garages and agricultural warehouses. One especially valuable seventeenth-century altar was saved by local FAI members who were descendants of the sculptor who had built it. Nevertheless, twelve priests were murdered in the town.
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According to the diocesan report, there were many towns, such as Granollers or Sitges, where the local committee organized anti-clerical excesses. In the case of Vilanova i la Geltrú, since the local right had played no part in the military coup and was caught unawares, left-wing reprisals were less ferocious than in other places. Nonetheless, trucks loaded with armed men arrived from Barcelona and forced religious personnel to leave their churches, monasteries and convents. Religious buildings were looted but none burned to the ground. Nevertheless, all public liturgical practice was curtailed. The Property Registry was sacked and much documentation burned. The town was under the control of a CNT militia committee. There were other uncontrolled elements that moved around in another ghost car looting houses and making unauthorized arrests. Many murders were committed by elements who came from outside but had links with leftists within the town. Of those killed by the patrols in Vilanova i la Geltrú, only four were priests. In contrast, over half of those killed in Lleida in the five weeks following the military uprising were clergy. In the entire course of the war, 65.8 per cent of the clergy of the dioceses of Lleida met violent deaths. The left-wing association of the Church with fascism was strengthened by papal declarations to the effect that fascism was the best weapon with which to defeat proletarian revolution and defend Christian civilization.
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The notion of purification by fire, of clearing the ground of the legacy of previous Spanish history, underlay much of the violence perpetrated by idealistic anarchists. However, it was also used as a justification of the
activities of the common criminals who had been released from jail and joined the CNT –FAI’s patrols and
checas
. Individuals jailed for armed robbery and murder may have been simply criminals or even psychopathic monsters, but there were plenty of otherwise humanitarian anarchists who glorified them as heroes of the social struggle.
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Even without the recently freed prisoners, it would have been impossible to keep the groundswell of long-repressed anti-clerical feeling entirely in check once the restraints were off. Churches and convents were sacked and burned everywhere in the Republican zone except the Basque Country. Many were put to profane use as prisons, garages or warehouses. Acts of desecration – the shooting of statues of Jesus Christ and saints, the destruction of works of art, or the use of sacred vestments in satires of religious ceremonies – were usually symbolic and often theatrical. The most reliable study of religious persecution during the Civil War, by Monsignor Antonio Montero Moreno, calculated that 6,832 members of the clergy and religious orders were murdered or executed. Many others fled abroad. The popular hatred of the Church was the consequence both of its traditional association with the right and of the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s open legitimization of the military rebellion.

Despite the murder of clergy, including nearly three hundred female religious, the propaganda stories of naked nuns forced to dance in public and gang-raped by Republican militiamen were wild exaggerations. One celebrated post-war account, published under the name of Fray Justo Pérez de Urbel, the mitred Abbot of the monastery of the Valle de los Caídos, was entirely invented by his ghost writer, Carlos Luis Álvarez, a journalist who used the pseudonym ‘Cándido’.
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In 1936, Spain had just over 115,000 clergy, of whom about 45,000 were nuns, 15,000 monks and the remainder lay priests. The latest figure for the deaths of nuns in the war is 296, just over 1.3 per cent of the female clergy present in the Republican zone. This contrasts dramatically with the figures for male clergy killed, 2,365 monks and 4,184 secular priests – over 30 per cent of the monks and 18 per cent of the lay clergy in Republican territory.
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Although still shocking, the figures for confirmed sexual molestation are also extremely low, even taking into account the reluctance of victims to speak out. After exhaustive research, Montero Moreno concluded that, even if threatened, nuns were normally protected from sexual abuse, if not from death. Nuns belonging to orders devoted to social work such as the Little Sisters of the Poor were those most likely to escape any kind of persecution. The diocesan archivist of Barcelona,
Father José Sanabre Sanromá, assembled details of all the female religious murdered. Almost all were killed in the first few days. Sanabre Sanromá made no mention of sexual crimes in the Barcelona dioceses. Those incidents that did take place, such as the sexual torture and murder of five nuns in the village of Riudarenes in Girona between 22 and 25 September, were the exception. The most frequently cited reason for this is the widespread male conviction that young women could have entered convents only as a result of coercion or deception. In contrast, male religious personnel were singled out for symbolic and often barbaric tortures which often involved sexual humiliation. This reflected burning resentment of the Church’s overwhelming privileges and its power to control everyday lives, especially those of women.
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Anti-clerical violence was firmly combated by key figures in the Generalitat, despite the enormous risks involved in doing so. Jaume Miravitlles, for instance, hid groups of priests and religious in the dressing rooms of Barcelona Football Club while they awaited passage out of Catalonia. Josep Maria Espanya, the Interior Minister, Joan Casanovas as both Prime Minister until late September and as President of the Catalan Parliament, and Ventura Gassol, the Conseller de Cultura, all made heroic efforts. Azaña commented in his notes: ‘Gassols has saved many priests. And the Archbishop.’
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This was a reference to Cardinal Francesc Vidal i Barraquer, the Archbishop of Tarragona. The Bishop of Girona was given an escort out of the city and sent to Italy and the Bishops of Tortosa, La Seu d’Urgell and Vic were also saved. In his report of 24 August, the Italian Consul, Carlo Bossi, noted the facilities granted by Josep Maria Espanya to ensure the evacuation of numerous religious communities including those of the Abbey of Montserrat. He noted that obstacles were placed on the issuing of passports by the head of the local police, who was from the PSUC. Nevertheless, he could report on 11 September that a further 996 religious personnel had been evacuated in Italian vessels.
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On 20 July, the delegate of the Generalitat in Tarragona urged Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer to abandon the episcopal palace, but he rejected the advice. However, as the city’s churches began to go up in smoke, he agreed that the palace and the nearby seminary should be converted into a military hospital. A large group of heavily armed anarchists arrived from Barcelona on the afternoon of 21 July. They released all the common criminals from the city’s prison, then looted and set fire to first the monastery of Santa Clara, then the contiguous convent and orphanage run by the Barefoot Carmelites. Ordinary citizens stopped them
burning the libraries of the churches. Still the Cardinal refused to move. Finally, he agreed to leave when he was told that, if he delayed any further, he could be got out only at the cost of considerable bloodshed. On 21 July, he took refuge in the Monastery of Poblet in the interior halfway to Lleida. An anarchist patrol from Hospitalet in the south of Barcelona appeared and at gunpoint forced him to go with them. They were driving towards Hospitalet so that he could be put on trial when their car ran out of petrol. A unit of Assault Guards arrived and freed him. He was taken to Barcelona where the Generalitat arranged with Carlo Bossi for him to go into exile in Italy.
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Despite the rescue of Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer, eighty-six members of the clergy, fifty-eight secular priests and twenty-eight religious were murdered in the provincial capital of Tarragona between 23 July and 22 December, when the repression was brought under control. One-third of these were killed in the first ten days, a further third in the following three weeks of August and the remainder over the next four months. In the entire province, 136 clergy were murdered.
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Vidal i Barraquer’s Vicar General, Salvador Rial i Lloberas, was captured on 21 August by a group of CNT railwaymen and tried by a spontaneous tribunal. Its president declared that Rial was automatically sentenced to death since ‘the proletariat had agreed to exterminate all priests’. He was offered his life if he would reveal where the diocesan funds were hidden. When he refused, he was imprisoned without food or water in a minuscule storeroom on the prison ship
Río Segre
in Tarragona harbour. As he continued to refuse to reveal the location of the funds, he was about to be shot when jurisdiction was taken away from the local militiamen by the creation of people’s courts (
jurats populars
) on 24 August.
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