The Spanish Holocaust (58 page)

In early October 1936, a delegation of southern landowners went to Burgos to persuade Franco’s embryonic government, the Junta Técnica del Estado, to overturn the land redistribution of the previous years. Among them was Adolfo Rodríguez Jurado, the president of the Association of Rural Estate-Owners and the president of the Federation
of Landowners of Badajoz. Arguing that left-wing labourers should not enjoy the benefits of landholding, they called for all land distributed by the Republic to be returned to its original owners and insisted that they should not have to pay for the work carried out by the settlers in preparing the land for sowing. Their identification with the rebel cause was trumpeted loudly: their appeal ended with the words ‘we landowners, farmers and cattlemen place ourselves unconditionally at the orders of the glorious army, the saviour of the Patria, and we are ready to take on any sacrifices asked of us’.
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In a real sense, the
latifundistas
’ representatives were merely seeking legal consolidation of what the African columns were doing. In Llerena, there was a substantial concentration of Civil Guards, the town’s garrison having been reinforced on 21 July by that of Zafra and the one from Azuaga to the east. The commander from Azuaga, Lieutenant Antonio Miranda Vega, convinced the Socialist Mayor of Llerena, Rafael Matrana Galán, and the Popular Front Committee that his force of Civil Guards was loyal to the Republic and ready to fight the columns moving up from the south. The road into Llerena from the south crossed a bridge over two deep gullies. On 4 August, Miranda Vega offered to take a joint force of Civil Guards and militiamen to destroy the bridge and block Castejón’s column. On reaching the bridge, the Civil Guard overpowered the workers, loaded them on to lorries and then drove south towards the advancing rebel forces. At El Ronquillo in the north of the province of Seville, they met up with Castejón’s forces. Before joining them on their march northwards, the prisoners from Llerena were shot.

The Mayor, Rafael Maltrana, having escaped at the bridge by jumping from a truck taking the prisoners to be executed, had managed to return to Llerena. Castejón’s forces easily annihilated the sporadic opposition on the road northwards. At dawn the following day, Llerena was encircled, then shelled. As the Moors, Legionarios and Civil Guards closed the circle advancing into the town, the defenders retreated to the main square. Armed only with shotguns and crude home-made bombs, they took refuge in the town hall, a school and the church. The town hall and the school were reduced by the use of hand grenades and those defenders found alive were bayoneted. The church was bombarded with artillery, then set alight. One hundred and fifty Republicans were killed, while Castejón lost two dead and twelve wounded. According to the right-wing journalist who accompanied the columns, Manuel Sánchez del Arco, the Moors were so impressed by the bravery with which the defenders of Llerena died that they commented, ‘the revolutionaries here not like
Jews’, a remark redolent of the prejudices of their officers. A small band of militiamen led by Rafael Maltrana managed to escape.
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In each of the towns and villages along the route of the African columns, the streets were left littered with the bayoneted corpses of those unfortunate enough to have been in their way. The first town reached by Castejón where a significant left-wing atrocity had been committed was Fuente de Cantos. In fact, it was one of the few where the local right suffered violence. There, nearly seventy right-wingers had been arrested on 18 July. The next day, groups of masked leftists from surrounding villages, armed with shotguns, locked fifty-six of them in the town church. Despite the desperate efforts of the Mayor, Modesto José Lorenzana Macarro, to stop them, the church was soaked with petrol and set alight. Twelve people died. Lorenzana was more successful on 4 August. As Castejón’s column approached, the town was bombed and a twenty-year-old woman was killed. When an enraged mob attempted a further assault on over ninety right-wing prisoners in the town jail, Lorenzana risked his own life. Pistol in hand, he confronted the would-be assassins saying, ‘there have already been enough deaths in this town’, at which one of the thwarted crowd quipped prophetically, ‘Well, you watch out, because those whose lives you’re saving now will be the ones who kill you.’ However, aware of the consequences of the earlier massacre, most of the town’s leftists, including Lorenzana, fled. Fuente de Cantos was virtually empty when the column arrived. When it moved on, Castejón left, on Franco’s orders, a company of Regulares under the command of the Civil Guard Captain Ernesto Navarrete Alcal, to undertake the repression in the area. Between 6 August and 30 December, for each one of the victims in the church at Fuente de Cantos, twenty-five supposed leftists were shot without trial. Among them were sixty-two women, several of them pregnant and many raped before being shot.
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Thereafter, Navarrete was accused by local members of the Falange of stealing vehicles, works of art, crops and other property. The scale of his requisitions, including several tons of grain, was such that they occupied various warehouses.
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A large column of Republican militia led by professional army officers was sent from Badajoz in an effort to halt the Africanista advance. On 5 August, near Los Santos de Maimona, they mounted a desperate defensive action but were overwhelmed by the better-trained, better-armed column of Asensio with its artillery and air support. To weigh the odds further, disloyal army officers had disabled the Republican artillery pieces. The rebel columns suffered four dead; the defenders about 250.
Before moving to Zafra, in the early hours of the morning of 7 August, Castejón sent twenty Falangists and twenty Carlist Requetés to carry on the repression in Los Santos de Maimona. Neither there nor in Zafra had any right-wingers been killed. In Los Santos de Maimona, the parish priest, Ezequiel Fernández Santana, pleaded vainly with the Falangists on behalf of the chosen victims. One hundred were shot in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the town. Many more suffered imprisonment, harassment, confiscation of their goods and fines.

Despite considerable class tension in Zafra, during the five months between the elections of February and the arrival of Castejón’s column, the Mayor, José González Barrero, had worked hard to restrain left-wing reprisals for the social abuses of 1933–5. There were some assaults on right-wingers and he was obliged to evacuate several religious communities. However, at considerable risk to his own life, he managed to ensure that no blood was shed. After the military coup, González Barrero presided over the town’s Popular Front Committee which imprisoned twenty-eight known supporters of the uprising. He prevented two attempts by radical elements to kill these prisoners. Nevertheless, in Zafra, which fell on 6 August virtually without resistance, as in Los Santos de Maimona, the repression was every bit as ferocious as in Fuente de Cantos. Forty people were shot on the first day of the military occupation of Zafra, and two hundred in total over the next months. At the end of the war, González Barrero found himself in Madrid. After Franco had announced that those without blood on their hands had nothing to fear, believing himself totally innocent, he returned home, was arrested and interned in the concentration camp of Castuera and executed at the end of April 1939.
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In all these towns, the occupying troops raped working-class women and looted the houses of leftists. Francoist officers admitted that Moroccan mercenaries were recruited with promises of pillage and that, when a town was captured, they were given free rein for two hours.
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Moorish soldiers and Legionarios selling radios, clocks, watches, jewellery and even items of furniture became a common sight in the towns of the south. The Falangist elements that undertook the repression after the columns had moved on also looted at will.
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When the columns moved northwards from Zafra, the deputy parish priest of the Church of La Candelaria, Juan Galán Bermejo, decided to join them as a chaplain. Thereafter, this tall, wavy-haired priest, with a large pistol in his belt, distinguished himself by the bloodthirsty ruthlessness with which he participated in the repression. On one occasion, discovering four men
and a wounded woman in a cave near the border of Badajoz with Córdoba, he forced them to dig their own graves before shooting them and burying them wounded but still alive. He later boasted of personally killing more than one hundred leftists.
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From Zafra, the next towns on the road to Mérida were Villafranca de los Barros and Almendralejo. Bypassing Villafranca on the night of 7 August, Asensio’s column moved on towards Almendralejo. Since there had been no assassinations of rightists in Villafranca, the inhabitants felt reasonably secure. However, angry leftists fleeing from the terror of the columns arrived with news of the slaughter, only too ready to exorcize their fears and hatred on the rightists found in the towns as yet unconquered. On the morning of 8 August, retreating militiamen tried to burn a church in Villafranca where fifty-four right-wing prisoners were being held but were foiled by the local Popular Front Committee. Nevertheless, as punishment for the unsuccessful attempt, the inhabitants of the town suffered a savage repression when, on the next day, Asensio sent back a detachment from Almendralejo to occupy Villafranca. Despite the fact that the more prominent leftists had already fled, they arrested several hundred people and shot fifty-six of them. More than three hundred were shot over the next three months. Inevitably, this had an impact on the repression in the Republican zone. In revenge for what happened in their town, individuals from Villafranca were involved in killings in Madrid and eastern Extremadura.
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Asensio’s column was experiencing considerable trouble controlling Almendralejo despite having subjected the town to artillery and air bombardment. Militiamen threatened to burn down the building holding right-wing prisoners if Asensio’s men entered the town. When they breached the outskirts, twenty-eight of the prisoners were killed. Reinforced by Castejón’s column, Asensio now advanced into the centre. Forty leftists had taken refuge in the parish church, so Asensio set fires, to which wet straw and sulphur were added, to force them out with the noxious fumes. When that failed, what was left of the church after repeated shelling was burned down. All resistance was at an end by 10 August and several hundred prisoners were taken.
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According to contemporary press reports, more than one thousand people including one hundred women were shot in what the Portuguese press called ‘this accursed town’. Local historians investigating the repression during occupation and the following three months have been able to confirm the names of over four hundred men and of sixteen women but conclude that the number of both sexes executed was certainly much higher. After
the shootings, many women were raped and others had their heads shaved and were forced to drink castor oil. Many men were given the choice ‘to Russia or the Legion’, ‘Russia’ signifying execution. They usually chose recruitment into the Legion. Local right-wingers organized mounted patrols to search the surrounding countryside for escaped leftists.
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This deliberate savagery constituted what one scholar has called ‘education through terror’. The aim was literally to bury for once and for all the aspiration of the landless peasants to collectivize the great estates. Using the excuse of the ‘red terror’, irrespective of whether there had actually been any crimes against the local conservatives, a vengeful bloodbath was unleashed by the rebel columns. In places where rightists had been protected by the Popular Front Committee, it was claimed that the columns had arrived just in time to prevent atrocities. Members of the Popular Front Committee found in a village would be shot. A similar fate awaited members of left-wing trade unions and many totally apolitical individuals unfortunate enough to be in the way. The ‘crimes’ of those executed were often unrelated to atrocities. The local right was outraged that, since the elections of February 1936, left-wing councils, in agreement with the Casas del Pueblo, had obliged the principal landowners to give jobs to unionized labour, forced them to pay wages outstanding since 1934 and prohibited religious ceremonies.
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During the spring and summer of 1936, wealthy middle-and upper-class inhabitants of the towns and villages of the rural south faced insults and impertinence from those that they regarded as their inferiors. This intolerable challenge to their social and economic status lay behind the approval of many conservatives for the brutality of the African columns.
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The
latifundio
system of sprawling estates, the dominant mode of landholding in Andalusia, Extremadura and Salamanca, made it easier for the owners to think of the
bracero
(labourer hired by the day) as sub-human and a ‘thing’ to be punished or annihilated for daring to rebel. To the owners, the entire experience of the Second Republic constituted a ‘rebellion’. After the bloodshed at Almendralejo, Franco ordered the columns of Asensio and Castejón to join together and press on to attack Mérida and Badajoz. With the local right reluctant to see him go until the left had been definitively eliminated from the town, Castejón requested units of the Civil Guard and armed Falangists and Carlists to finish the ‘cleansing’.
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Franco now gave overall field command of the three columns to Lieutenant Colonel Juan Yagüe Blanco.
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Ramón Serrano Suñer described
Yagüe as ‘Chunky, tall, with a leonine mane and the look of a hunting animal – a short-sighted one – he was an intelligent man but led, at times blinded, by his temper. A bully and a rebellious braggart, he often suffered cyclical depressions, perhaps the result of an improperly healed wound, which made his actions inconsistent and incoherent.’ Born in San Leonardo in Soria on 9 November 1891, he attended the infantry academy in Toledo at the same time as Franco. He was a typical Africanista having, for eighteen of his twenty-six years as a soldier before 1936, served in Morocco where his impulsive bravery saw him wounded three times, frequently decorated and promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel by 1928. His role in Asturias established the bespectacled Yagüe, with his mane of grey hair, as the Africanista most feared by the left.
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