The Spanish Holocaust (83 page)

The fate of the hundreds of hostages in the Asturian capital was sealed as a result of the arrival, on 17 October 1936, of the Galician column just as Oviedo, without food, water or electricity, was about to fall to the besieging miners. The tenor of the rebel advance was revealed in the joyous comment the next day in
ABC
of Seville: ‘yesterday the victorious Nationalist columns entered Oviedo after inflicting a real butchery on the red miners who were besieging it’.
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Three hundred and seventy prisoners were executed without trial, many while allegedly being transported to prisons further to the west. Two expeditions, of forty-five prisoners in late October and another of forty-six in December, never reached their destination. At the same time, there was the pantomime of military trials. After the shortest procedures, many were immediately executed, among them the Assault Guards who had remained loyal to the Republic, the Civil Governor, the director of the miners’ orphanage, the miners’ leader and PSOE deputy Graciano Antuña and the rector of the University, Leopoldo Alas Argüelles. The latter was the son of the novelist Leopoldo Alas ‘Clarín’ whose novel
La Regenta
was a devastating dissection of the provincialism and hypocrisy of Oviedo’s high society. A distinguished lawyer, the novelist’s son had been deputy Secretary of
Education and a parliamentary deputy in the Constituent Cortes. After a farcical trial, Leopoldo Alas was shot on 20 February 1937. It was believed in the city that he was executed less for his moderate politics than to satisfy the local bourgeoisie’s desire for revenge on his father.
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After the arrival of the relief column, Republican forces tried to recapture Oviedo. Although remaining dominant in the south and east of the province, their efforts were in vain. Once Santander had fallen, Asturias was in Franco’s sights and, to delay his expected onslaught, General Vicente Rojo now launched a ferocious assault aimed at capturing Zaragoza. Republican forces attacked the small town of Belchite. This time Franco did not take the bait as he had at Brunete but began a great three-pronged assault on a now encircled Asturias on 2 September 1937. Under the overall command of General Dávila and led in the field by Generals Antonio Aranda and José Solchaga, troops quickly moved through the rain-swept mountains. Anxious to finish the campaign before the winter, Franco imbued his staff with a greater urgency than was normally the case. Their efforts were greatly facilitated by the fact that the Republicans had virtually no air cover. Although Asturias was geographically a strong defensive redoubt, it was tightly blockaded by sea and remorselessly bombarded from the air. The defenders’ morale was shattered as the Germans perfected their ground-attack techniques with forays along the mountain valleys, using a combination of incendiary bombs and gasoline to create an early form of napalm.
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After the fall of Santander, the Asturians set up an independent government, sacked the Republican commander, General Gamir, and made Colonel Prada commander of military forces. In Gijón, the repression of the local right had been profound and often gratuitously vindictive, with small businesses and shops confiscated and children and adolescents imprisoned because their parents had been denounced as fascists. Prisoners were transferred to a prison ship docked in the port of El Musel to the west of Gijón. As the war effort disintegrated, the
sacas
increased. Many prisoners were shot, notably near Oviedo and, as the rebels advanced from Santander, in the east of the region, at Cangas de Onís.
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In the course of the war in Asturias, around two thousand rightist prisoners were murdered. The rebels’ revenge when Asturias was occupied saw them kill nearly six thousand Republicans.
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When the front collapsed on 21 October, people fled in cars, buses, trucks and on foot to El Musel. As many as could squeezed on to fishing boats and headed for France. Some trawlers got through but others were intercepted by the rebel fleet and forced to sail to Galicia, where the
passengers were herded into concentration camps. Groups of Falangists came to seek victims and many were taken back to Gijón or Oviedo for trial. Some were murdered on the spot. Others were forced to enlist in work battalions. Military trials were brief, with the accused given little or no chance to speak.
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Back in Gijón, Father Alejandro Martínez was deeply shocked by the ferocity of the repression, which he described as of an ‘inopportune rigour, as though a certain species of human being had to be liquidated … The troops sacked and looted Gijón as though it were a foreign city.’ The Regulares and Legionarios had the usual licence to pillage and rape and, given the lingering hatred from 1934, did so with especial vehemence. The fifth columnists who had been in hiding during the period of Republican dominance came out hungry for revenge. Colonel José Franco Mussió, a rebel sympathizer, had remained in Asturias in the hope of saving right-wing prisoners and had stayed behind in Gijón rather than flee to the Republican zone. He was tried immediately along with seven other Republican officers and shot on 14 November 1937. At least twenty schoolteachers were shot and many more were imprisoned. In the mining valleys, villagers were subjected to assassinations and beatings. Haystacks were burned at farms to force out those hiding.
Paseos
and the sexual abuse and even mutilation of women were frequent.
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Of the many atrocities committed, one of the most notorious took place at the Monastery of Valdediós near Villaviciosa. The building had been requisitioned when the Psychiatric Hospital of Oviedo was evacuated there in October 1936. On 27 October 1937, troops of the Brigadas de Navarra arrived. Without motive, they shot six men and eleven women of the staff. They were buried in a large unmarked grave, one of sixty
fosas
in Asturias.
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Institutionalized violence was most acute in the mining valleys. In Pola de Lena, more than two hundred people were assassinated, many being forced to dig their own graves. Afterwards, their assassins held a drink-fuelled celebration. When the rebels entered Sama de Langreo, wounded militiamen were loaded on to trucks, taken to the trenches used during the siege of Oviedo, shot and buried there. In the small mining town of San Martín del Rey Aurelio, in the Turón Valley, east of Langreo, at least 261 people were murdered. Near Turón itself, more than two hundred corpses were brought in trucks to a mine shaft known as the Pozo del Rincón.
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Their unions crushed, those not executed or imprisoned were then forced into slave labour in the mines in penal battalions. Some went into hiding or else became involved in a sporadic
guerrilla war often linking up with others on the run from Galicia. For years, the Civil Guard and Falangist patrols hunted them down.

One guerrillero who was caught was Pascual López from Sobrado dos Monxes in A Coruña, whose wife and six children had had no news of him since he fled at the beginning of the war. In June 1939, a man who had served in Franco’s forces returned to the village and said that he had seen Pascual in a concentration camp near Oviedo. Pascual’s wife packed some food and clothes and sent her thirteen-year-old son Pascualín to find him. It took him two weeks to walk to Oviedo and another to locate the correct camp among those in the area. Although his father told him to go home, Pascualín stayed, stealing food during the day and sneaking into the camp at night to sleep, in the open air, alongside Pascual. In early October, a group of Falangists arrived and selected the Galician prisoners to take for execution in Gijón. The Falangists were on horse-back, the prisoners walking. Against his father’s orders, Pascualín followed for twelve days, keeping out of sight. Along the way, the oldest who were too weak to keep up were murdered. When they reached El Musel, the remaining prisoners were lined up and shot on a row of rocks used as a sea defence. The youngest of the Falangists, seeing that several were still alive, asked why they had been ordered to aim at the prisoners’ legs. Their veteran leader, calling him a novice, explained: ‘Because that way they take longer to bleed to death.’ Pascual was not dead and his son managed to pull him out of the water and get him into the hills where a bullet was prised out of his leg with a knife. When he had recovered, he sent Pascualín home to Galicia while he rejoined the guerrillas and was killed shortly afterwards.
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In Oviedo, as well as the many extra-judicial murders carried out by Falangists between November 1937 and April 1938, a total of 742 people were sentenced to death. In May 1938 alone, 654 people were tried and 260 sentenced to death. When the military courts left Asturias in January 1939 in order to begin the repression in Catalonia, the senior judge praised the police in Oviedo for the speed with which death sentences had been carried out. Altogether, 1,339 people were sentenced to death and all were shot except for fifteen who were executed by garrotte vil. In order to be buried in the cemetery, the prisoner was obliged to confess before a priest and be reconciled with the Church. Only two hundred made their confessions, but a further 102 were able to be buried when their families paid a special fee. In addition to those executed after a trial, another 257 people died in prison as a result of ill-treatment or malnutrition. Approximately one-third of those killed were miners. Many
women suffered rape, beatings to reveal the whereabouts of their menfolk, head shaving and imprisonment. At least nine were executed.
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The repression was most acute in Gijón since the Republican administration, union and political leaders and the military command had been there. The prison of El Coto which had a capacity for two hundred prisoners soon had nearly 2,500. Nine hundred and three prisoners were tried and shot in the twelve months starting 9 November 1937. There were many other unrecorded cases of prisoners being taken out and shot by groups of Falangists. Beatings and torture were common. The bullring, an old glass factory and a cotton mill were used as improvised prisons. All those who had had any form of political or trade union responsibility were to be eliminated. The military prosecutor in Gijón demanded so many death sentences in such a short time that he was called ‘machine-gun’. Ninety-eight were executed in the last two months of 1937 and 849 in 1938. In addition, there were the extra-judicial murders. The director of the cemetery of El Sucu (Ceares) claimed that on many days between seventy and eighty corpses were dumped there. A recently inaugurated monument at El Sucu carries the names of 1,882 men and fifty-two women buried in the common grave between 21 October 1937 and 1951. They include the more than 1,245 from El Coto shot after court martial, the eighty-four who died there from beatings, torture or illness caused by malnutrition, overcrowding and insanitary conditions, others who died in the glass factory and those murdered whose names are known. Seventy per cent of those executed were workers.
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On 1 October 1937, after the conquest of the north, all over Spain there was a celebration of the anniversary of Franco’s elevation to the headship of state, now consecrated as ‘el Día del Caudillo’. In San Leonardo in Soria, Yagüe, dressed in the blue shirt of the Falange, made a speech that provoked wild applause when he spoke of the working class in the following terms: ‘They are not bad. The really evil ones are their leaders who deceive them with gilded promises. They are the ones that we must attack until we have entirely exterminated them.’ He then described the Falangist new order and prompted laughter and applause when he declared:

and for those of you who resist, you know what will happen, prison or the firing squad, either will do. We have decided to redeem you and we will redeem you whether you want to be redeemed or not. Do we need you for anything? No, there will never again be any elections, so why
would we need your vote? The first thing to do is to redeem the enemy. We are going to impose our civilization on them and if they don’t accept it willingly, we will impose it by force, defeating them as we defeated the Moors when they didn’t want our roads, our doctors, and our vaccinations, in a word, our civilization.
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Yagüe’s speech was a reminder, if one was needed, of what would happen if any more territory fell into rebel hands. Assuming that Franco’s next move would be an attack on Madrid, the Republican high command decided on a pre-emptive attack against Teruel, capital of the bleakest of the Aragonese provinces. The insurgent lines there were weakly held and the city was already virtually surrounded by Republican forces. In freezing weather, with the lowest temperatures of the century, savage house-to-house fighting saw the Republicans capture the rebel garrison on 8 January 1938. Enjoying massive material superiority, Franco made a fierce counter-attack. After a debilitating defence, the Republicans had to retreat on 21 February, with Teruel about to be encircled. Franco now launched a huge eastwards offensive at the beginning of March. By the middle of April, his forces had reached the Mediterranean, splitting the Republican zone in two, and occupying all of Aragon.

In fact, much of the region had long been in rebel hands and had suffered a brutal repression. The military coup was successful in most of the province of Zaragoza apart from the salient between Huesca and Teruel. Before the March rebel offensive conquered that remnant, the repression in the province had already seen intense violence.
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In the first two weeks of July 1936, around eighty Republican officials and the leaders of trade unions and political parties had been arrested and executed. Thereafter, there was a wave of terror with 730 executions in August alone. Nocturnal
paseos
by ‘vigilance patrols’ of Falangists and Carlists aided the police in this purge of ‘undesirables’. The scale of killing was not diminished by the establishment of military courts from September, and 2,578 were shot before 1936 was out. The ferocity of the repression was part of the prior plan of extermination, but was intensified by the fears provoked by the anarchist columns pressing on the east of the province. However, the readiness of civilians to participate in the killing in Zaragoza, as elsewhere, was motivated by sheer bloodlust, by the desire to hide a left-wing past and seek favour with the new regime, by envy or by long-festering resentment.
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