The Spanish Holocaust (57 page)

Paradoxically, as the
sacas
accelerated, the activities of one of the most famous
checas
began to wind down. The García Atadell Brigade had concealed many criminal acts behind their own much lauded fight against the fifth column. Since Atadell and many of his men came from the Socialist printing union, it had been easy for them to place articles about their exploits in the Republican press. This was particularly true of
Informaciones
, the newspaper now run by their fellow trade unionists. In any case, praise for the struggle against the enemy within was considered to be an important morale-booster.
¹²⁸
This could be deduced from an editorial in
El Socialista
which proudly declared García Atadell and his men to be Socialists with the vocation of policemen fighting for a common cause. Zugazagoitia, the editor, was unaware of the Brigada’s
nefarious activities when he wrote: ‘Atadell should be judged not on his past – a limpid, transparent past as a righteous Socialist – but rather on his present. His work, more than useful, is necessary. Indispensable.’ The article went on to sing a hymn of praise for the detailed preparation and precision of his pre-dawn raids. It ended with a tone redolent of Zugazagoitia’s views: ‘Bad faith, resentment and envy all press to find expression in illegal activities which, for the honour of all and the prestige of the Republic, must be frustrated.’
¹²⁹

In fact, García Atadell’s brigade had carried out many legitimate activities on a daily basis. These included searching Franco’s Madrid apartment and finding there weapons, including a machine-pistol, and correspondence with other conspirators. More notably, his group was credited with the break-up of espionage rings, the capture of a clandestine radio station, the arrests of Falangists, saboteurs and snipers and the foiling of a plan to assassinate Azaña, Largo Caballero, Prieto and Pasionaria. Newspaper articles about these triumphs cannot be taken as official endorsement of García Atadell’s criminal activities. Press references to confiscated cash and valuables usually specified that they had been handed in at the Dirección General de Seguridad.
¹³⁰
García Atadell later reiterated to his interrogators that large amounts of money and jewellery were handed in as well as claiming to have saved many lives. One of the most curious cases was the ‘rescue’ of Lourdes Bueno Méndez, the missing daughter of a conservative Republican officer who, because of alleged links with the Nazis, had been arrested by Communists from a
checa
known as ‘Radio Oeste’. García Atadell located her at the end of September and took her to the Dirección General de Seguridad, where she was held for another two and a half months. His interest in the case was probably based on the payment of a reward by her family.
¹³¹
García Atadell also claimed that he believed that, in recognition of his achievements, he would eventually have been made Director General of Security.
¹³²

However, in the second half of October, just when it might have been thought that his services would be in greatest demand, his group began to fade from public view. Questions were being asked about his activities and the whereabouts of confiscated valuables. Ironically, on 26 October, Ogilvie-Forbes had a conversation with García Atadell and explained the dreadful impact that news of the arrests, murders and robberies was having on the Republic’s international situation. Atadell, who was at the time about to flee with his own ill-gotten gains, agreed wholeheartedly and blamed the disorder exclusively on the anarchists.
¹³³
According to
Rosario Queipo de Llano, the number of detainees brought to Atadell’s headquarters had begun to diminish greatly by the end of October.
¹³⁴
He was clearly already planning his get-away. On 27 October, he met with two of his closest cronies, Luis Ortuño and Pedro Penabad, and made plans for flight. He later claimed that this was because Madrid was about to fall to the rebels and also because his life had been threatened by the Communists and the FAI in revenge for his efforts to prevent their atrocities. The three gathered together several suitcases full of money and valuables and, accompanied by García Atadell’s wife, Piedad Domínguez Díaz, an ex-nun, headed for Alicante. There they acquired false Cuban passports and took ship for Marseilles. In Marseilles they bought tickets on a boat to La Habana on 19 November.
¹³⁵

Their plans backfired thanks to the film director Luis Buñuel. In his memoirs, he recalled García Atadell as illustrating ‘the complexity of the relations that we had at times with the fascists’. Buñuel was in Paris working for the Republican Embassy as part of the anti-rebel espionage network run by the artist Luis Quintanilla. A French trade unionist, who worked in a hotel, reported to him that a Spaniard was about to take ship for South America with a suitcase full of stolen valuables. Buñuel informed the Ambassador, Luis Araquistain, who told the government in Valencia. Attempts were made to extradite him, but it was too late. Accordingly, Araquistain was authorized by the government to pass the information, via a neutral embassy, to the rebel representation in the French capital. Since the ship carrying García Atadell and his cronies had to put in at Vigo and Santa Cruz de Tenerife, it was assumed that it would be possible for the rebel authorities to arrest them there.
¹³⁶

In fact, the rebel leadership at Burgos was unable to get the agreement of the French government to the arrest of a passenger on a French ship and so it left Vigo without incident. Since both Burgos and Valencia shared the desire to see García Atadell brought to justice, however, Paris agreed. In Las Palmas, García Atadell and Penabad were arrested. After initial interrogation in the Canary Islands, they were transferred to Seville for further interrogation.
¹³⁷
From 19 December, García Atadell was held for seven months in the maximum-security wing of Seville Provincial Prison until his execution by garrotte in July 1937. As García Atadell fled Madrid and headed to his eventual downfall, the most notorious period of the activities of the
checas
was about to begin.

PART FOUR

Madrid Besieged: The Threat and the Response

9

The Column of Death’s March on Madrid

Even before the bulk of his African troops arrived in Spain, either by sea, as part of the so-called ‘victory convoy’, or in the airlift made possible by German and Italian aircraft, Franco had already, on 2 August 1936, flown to Seville. The march on Madrid was to begin that day with the first column sent northwards to Mérida in the province of Badajoz. Under the command of the tall, grey-haired and red-faced Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Asensio Cabanillas, a hardened Africanista, it consisted of two battalions of the Foreign Legion and two battalions of Moorish Regulares. In trucks provided by Queipo de Llano, it advanced fifty miles in the first two days. Asensio was followed on 3 August by Castejón’s column which advanced somewhat to the east and on 7 August by a third under Lieutenant Colonel Heli Rolando de Tella. Castejón travelled in the limousine of the Marqués de Nervión, a prominent landowner. The ultimate goal of these columns was Madrid. However, the use of three columns advancing on a wide front made it clear that an equally central objective was to destroy the left in towns and villages along the way.
¹

The unwritten orders were unambiguous: ‘to smash the cruel rabble with a great hammer blow that would paralyse them’.
²
Accordingly, as the three columns moved rapidly north from Seville in early August, they used the techniques of terror which had been the regular practice of the Africanistas against the subject population of Morocco. After they crossed the Sierra Morena, word of their tactics spread a wave of fear before them. The labourers that opposed them, inexperienced and armed only with shotguns, ancient blunderbusses, knives and hatchets, hardly merited the label of ‘militiamen’. With the advantage of total air superiority provided by Savoia-81 flown by Italian air-force pilots and Junkers Ju-52 flown by Luftwaffe pilots, and equipped with artillery, the crack shock units of the Spanish colonial army took villages and towns in the provinces of Seville and Badajoz. The number of casualties among the Republican volunteers far exceeded those among the African
columns. No prisoners were taken. Militiamen captured along the way were simply shot.

In Badajoz, there was a desperate and vain attempt by the provincial Popular Front Defence Committee to co-ordinate the hastily assembled militias. Two parliamentary deputies, the Socialist José Sosa Hormigo and the Communist Pedro Martínez Cartón, together with Ricardo Zabalza, the FNTT leader, organized militia groups which tried, with little success, to hinder the progress of the African columns. Eventually, Zabalza led a substantial group (named ‘Columna Pedro Rubio’ in memory of the PSOE deputy murdered in 1935) through the rebel lines to Madrid to join Republican forces. The columns of Sosa Hormigo and Martínez Cartón were soon swollen with men fleeing from the African columns. This did nothing for their military efficacy but intensified their readiness to kill right-wingers found in villages not yet in rebel control.
³

This undermined the endeavours of the Republican government to forestall atrocities. A stream of telegrams from Madrid on the evening of 19 July naively urged left-wing organizations to have faith in the loyalty of the Civil Guard and the army. On 20 July, the Popular Front Committees of towns within the Republican zone received orders from the Madrid government that ‘there should be no breakdown of law and order for any reason whatsoever’ and that measures should be taken ‘to prevent anyone taking advantage of the understandable nervousness of the population to commit offences against law-abiding persons or to take justice into their own hands’. Strikes were forbidden, by agreement with the Unión General de Trabajadores. On 28 July, the Civil Governors of each province passed on even stricter instructions from Madrid to local Popular Front Committees requiring them to announce that ‘the death penalty will be applied against anyone, whether belonging to a political entity or not, who attacks the life or property of others, since such crimes will be considered as acts of rebellion in the service of the enemy’. On 29 July, mayors were ordered not to touch the bank accounts of right-wingers in their towns.
⁴

No such restraint was imposed upon the rebel columns. Moving north into Badajoz, with relative ease, they took El Real de la Jara, Monesterio, Llerena, Fuente de Cantos, Zafra and Los Santos de Maimona. In addition to raping and looting, the men of the columns of Asensio, Castejón and Tella annihilated real or supposed Popular Front sympathizers that they found, leaving a trail of bloody slaughter as they went. It was no coincidence that Badajoz was the province where the spontaneous occupations of estates in the spring of 1936 had seemed to
end the injustice of the landholding system. The Africanistas’ execution of captured peasant volunteers was jokingly referred to as ‘giving them agrarian reform’.
⁵

In fact, everywhere in the rebel zone where the Republic had decreed expropriations or legalized land occupations, the columns helped the owners take back the land. Previously neglected land had usually been improved by the laborious removal of stones, stubble and bracken and the clearing of ponds and streams. Moreover, the harvest was awaiting collection. Those who had carried out the improvements received no compensation for their labour, nor for the crops, stores, seeds, animals and tools that were pillaged along with the land. In most cases, they had already fled or been killed or imprisoned by the rebel forces. The repression was especially brutal against the men and women who had benefited from land redistribution under the Republic. They would be between 70 and 80 per cent of the total executed in Badajoz.
⁶

A startling example of the relationship between the columns and the landowners concerns the
cacique
of Palma del Río, in the province of Córdoba, Félix Moreno Ardanuy. He bred fighting bulls which limited the amount of work on his estates. He refused to cultivate his land, using the slogan ‘Comed República’ (Let the Republic feed you). After the Popular Front elections, many labourers were placed on his estates, but he refused to pay them. When war broke out, Félix Moreno was in his palatial home in Seville. The anarchist committee of Palma del Río collectivized the land and rationed food supplies until fields could be tilled and the harvest came in. Moreno’s fighting bulls were killed for food and the villagers tasted red meat for the first time in their lives. The news infuriated Moreno. When a rebel column captured the town on 27 August, he drove behind in a black Cadillac accompanied by the other prominent landowners of the area. The village menfolk who had not fled were herded into a large cattle-pen. For each of his slaughtered bulls, he selected ten to be shot. As desperate men pleaded with him on the grounds that they were his godson, his cousin or linked to him in some way, he just looked ahead and said, ‘I know nobody.’ At least eighty-seven were shot on that day and twice that many over the following days.
⁷