The Spanish Holocaust (84 page)

The proximity of the anarchist columns could be an explanation for a brutal mass execution that took place in Zaragoza at the beginning of
October. In late August, the rebel radio in Zaragoza had announced that recruiting had started for a new unit of the Foreign Legion named after General Sanjurjo. In Navarre, Civil Guard posts received orders to oblige men suspected of left-wing sympathies to appear at the recruiting offices. Summoned to the barracks, they were given the stark choice ‘the Legion or the ditch’. In La Rioja, similar calls were made in the local press but, to meet the numbers required, young men were also given a choice between being shot or joining the Sanjurjo unit. Between 2 and 10 September, several hundred young men were transported to Zaragoza for training. On 27 September, they were sworn in and on 1 October sent to the front at Almudévar south of Huesca. However, before they went into action against the anarchist columns from Catalonia, they were ordered to return to Zaragoza, where they were disarmed because the military authorities suspected that many of them planned to desert. Between 2 and 10 October, they were taken in small groups to a field behind the Military Academy in Zaragoza and shot. The bodies were conveyed to the Torrero cemetery and buried in a huge common grave. Two hundred and eighteen of those murdered were from Navarre out of a total of more than three hundred.
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Personal hatreds and resentments were much more instrumental in the events in the tiny and remote village of Uncastillo in the far north of the province of Zaragoza, midway between Pamplona and Huesca. There an act of revenge for the events of October 1934 saw 180 people killed. As in other areas of rural Aragon under rebel control, groups of Falangists and Requetés, together with the Civil Guard, entered houses, took goods and detained members of left-wing organizations and unions, as well as their friends and family. These arrests were made on the basis of captured documentation, mere rumours or denunciations from local right-wingers that were often motivated by purely personal resentments deriving from economic or sexual conflicts. The arrests of men, women and adolescents were followed by savage beatings and, often, death. For the ‘crime’ of having embroidered a Republican flag, two young women, Rosario Malón Pueyo aged twenty-four and Lourdes Malón Pueyo aged twenty, were raped and then murdered, and their corpses burned. That was done away from the village, but many executions were public with the entire village forced to watch.

In many cases, the arrests and assassinations were carried out on the recommendation of the parish priest. In the case of a young woman of nineteen who was pregnant with twins, the village doctor argued that she should be spared, and the Civil Guard accepted his reasoning. With
reluctance, the local Falange also agreed, but a priest who was present exclaimed, ‘with the animal dead, there is no more rabies’, and she was shot.
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The most prominent victim was the Mayor, Antonio Plano Aznárez. It will be recalled that he was hated by the landowners of the area for his success in improving the working conditions of the day-labourers. He was also held responsible, unjustly, for the revolutionary events of 5–6 October 1935. At first held in Zaragoza, at the beginning of October 1936, Antonio Plano was brought to Uncastillo and imprisoned with his wife Benita and his children Antonio and María in the Civil Guard barracks.

The plan was for him to be assassinated on the second anniversary of the events of October 1934. It was an act not only of revenge for the past but also a warning for the future. Plano represented in the area everything that the Republic offered in terms of social justice and education. He was not only killed but made the object of the most brutal humiliation both before and after his death. As a result of his beatings, he was brought out of the Civil Guard barracks covered in blood. The Civil Guard and Falangists obliged the remaining villagers to come to the square to watch. Plano had been forced to drink a bottle of castor oil. Bloodied and besmirched, he had to be carried on a wooden board. In front of the church, he was shot, to the delight and applause of the right-wingers present. His corpse was then kicked and abused before it was mutilated by one of the Falangists with an axe. A year after his death, he was fined the colossal sum of 25,000 pesetas and his wife a further 1,000. In order for these fines to be paid, the family home and contents were confiscated. There were many similar cases which provided an excuse for the theft of the property of those who had been assassinated. Altogether, 140 leftists were murdered in Uncastillo. Of the 110 who had been tried for the events of 1934, many had fled, but of those who remained, forty-four were executed.
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In Teruel in July 1936, the least populated of Spanish provinces, the western part fell immediately to a tiny rebel garrison. Despite the fact that there had been little social conflict in the area, detentions began immediately. The first victims were, as elsewhere, trade union and Republican political leaders and officials. A second wave of violence began in March 1938, with the entry of rebel troops into towns and villages that had been under Republican control. One of the worst incidents in this second wave took place in the small town of Calanda, where around fifty people were killed, including a pregnant woman beaten to death, and numerous others raped. At the end of the war, those who had
fled from the province of Teruel when it had been taken by the Francoists faced the choice of either going into exile or returning home. Hoping that the fact that they were guilty of no crimes meant that they would face no problems, many returned home. In Calanda, as they descended from a bus, they were set upon. Tortures, beatings, murders and sexual attacks were organized by the local chief of the Falange and the secretary of the town council. So scandalous were these events that the Civil Governor of the province reported them to the military authorities. In consequence, the perpetrators were tried and imprisoned for eight years.
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In none of these explosions of repression were all the deaths formally registered. Nevertheless, the names are known of 1,030 people who were executed in Teruel, 889 in the course of the war and 141 afterwards. To these have to be added a further 258 who were taken to Zaragoza for execution. There were many more whose names were not recorded in the civil register or buried in cemeteries. It was not in the interests of their assassins for too much to be known and subsequently the Francoist authorities made a concerted effort to hide the magnitude of the violence in Teruel.
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The scale of the repression in Teruel reflects a combination of the basic exterminatory plan of the insurgents and consciousness that the province was vulnerable to Republican attack. Among the first to be arrested from 20 July 1936 were the Mayor, the secretary of the provincial branch of the Socialist Party and the directors of the local secondary school and of the teachers’ training college. The wives and families of men who had fled to the Republican zone were detained. For instance, the wife and seventeen-year-old daughter of a Socialist town councillor were arrested and eventually shot. All the detainees were herded into the local seminary where they were kept in appalling conditions of acute overcrowding before being killed. Until 13 August, when the executions began, men and women were used as forced labour, mending roads. They were taken out at dawn in a truck known variously as the ‘dawn truck’, the ‘death truck’ or the ‘one-way truck’.
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One of their destinations was the village of Concud, about two and a half miles from the provincial capital. Here, into a pit six feet wide and 250 feet deep, known as Los Pozos de Caudé, were hurled the hundreds of bodies of men and women, including adolescent boys and girls. Few of them were political militants. Their crime was simply to be considered critical of the military coup, to be related to someone who had fled, to have had a radio or to have read liberal newspapers before the war. Throughout the years of the dictatorship fear prevented anyone from
even going near the pit, although occasionally at night bunches of flowers would be left near by. In 1959, without the permission of the relatives of those murdered, a lorryload of human remains was taken to Franco’s mausoleum at the Valle de los Caídos. Once the Socialists achieved power in 1982, people began openly to leave floral tributes. Then in 1983 a local farmer came forward and said that he had kept a notebook with the numbers of shootings that he heard each night throughout the Spanish Civil War. They totalled 1,005. Among the unregistered deaths were Republican prisoners as well as people brought from small villages. In 2005, the works for the laying of a major gas pipe unearthed remains which led to the excavation of fifteen bodies. Caudé was only one of several places in the province where bodies were dumped by the executioners.
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At least two priests were executed by the rebel military authorities in the province of Teruel. José Julve Hernández was the parish priest of Torralba de los Sisones. Father Julve was arrested on 25 July 1936, taken to the prison in Teruel and shot, because one of his relatives was a mayor of the Popular Front. The second case was that of Francisco Jaime-Cantín, a Carlist and parish priest of Calamocha. Despite such credentials, in August 1936, some Falangists and Civil Guards arrested his brother, Castro Pedro, and he was shot on 27 September. When he found out, Father Jaime-Cantín went to seek information at the Civil Guard barracks, was himself arrested, taken to Teruel and shot on 12 December. In these two cases, there was an element of personal revenge. Before the war, Castro Pedro, a landowner, had been involved in a dispute with the local branch of the FNTT over an attempt to evict tenants. He lost in the subsequent court case. When the military coup took place, the judge in the case was falsely denounced by the two brothers as a dangerous red and shot on 12 September. However, the judge had a brother who was a rebel officer. He went to Calamocha and managed to ascertain that the landowner and the priest had fabricated evidence against the judge. Thus he had them both executed.
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It is difficult to believe that priests could be executed without the tacit approval of Monsignor Anselmo Polanco, the Bishop of Teruel-Albarracín, a pious, austere and conservative cleric given to distributing alms to the poor. Before the war began, he had aligned himself with the right. Before the elections of February 1936, he wrote a circular to be read out by all parish priests in which he stated that the struggle was between ‘the defenders of religion, property and the family’ and ‘the proclaimers of impiety, Marxism and free love’, between ‘the two enemy
cities of which St Augustine speaks, the opposed forces of good and evil’.
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It was not a message likely to endear him to the wretched of the earth.

When the Civil War started, Polanco was outspoken in support of the rebels. On 31 July 1936, in his pastoral letter, he referred to ‘the rising of our glorious National Army to save Spain’. On 14 March 1937, denouncing anti-clerical violence in ferocious terms, he referred to ‘the Marxist hordes who committed every kind of uncontrolled crime and outrage with holy people and things the prime target of their fury’. He went on to denounce ‘the satanic hatred of the atheistic revolutionaries which has spread desolation and piled up debris and ruins everywhere’, in short what he called ‘Soviet
vandalismo
’.
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He rejected proposals for mediation between the two sides on the grounds that the only satisfactory end to the war was the total victory of Franco. Unsurprisingly, he had nothing to say publicly about the massive repression in his own dioceses, although there do exist testimonies to his private distress at the executions. He also made unsuccessful efforts to save some of the parishioners of the poor working-class area of Teruel known as El Arrabal. Indeed, on one occasion, when he went to intercede before the military authorities on behalf of a prisoner, a well-known Falangist said to him: ‘If you keep coming here, it will be you we shoot next.’
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Whatever Polanco’s private feelings, they did not restrain his public enthusiasm for the rebel cause. Among the more than one thousand killings by the right in Teruel during the war, two of the most notorious incidents took place in the central square, the Plaza del Torico. The first was on 27 August 1936. Falangists drove two trucks into the square. From the first, a group of musicians descended and began to play. When a large crowd gathered to listen to the band, Falangists closed the exits to the square and took thirteen prisoners from the second lorry. They included a twenty-year-old girl and the director of the local teacher training college. They were paraded around the square, insulted and ridiculed and then shot. The corpses were removed and the musicians played while the spectators danced in pools of blood – a not uncommon combination of fiesta and horror.
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It seems that the Bishop was present since he protested to the authorities about the subsequent dance.
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The second incident concerned a parade in early August 1937 by a battalion of the Legion, the Bandera Palafox, which was part of the unit named after General Sanjurjo. The Legionarios filed past the Episcopal Palace with human remains on the ends of their bayonets. These
belonged to seventy-eight Republican casualties in a battle for control of the area around Campillo and Bezas, to the west of Teruel and the south of Albarracín. The Bandera was composed of the Republicans from Zaragoza who had enlisted in the Legion to save their own lives and survived the massacre of October 1936. Bezas fell on 1 August.
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The prisoners had been stripped naked then machine-gunned in the village square before being mutilated. The parade also included a prisoner loaded with blankets secured with an ox’s halter as if he was a beast of burden. According to Indalecio Prieto, the parade was presided over by Polanco. He may not have ‘presided’ formally but he certainly witnessed the event. The Governor General of Aragon, José Ignacio Mantecón, discussed the event with Polanco after the capture of Teruel by Republican troops. The Bishop recounted ‘without emotion how he had watched from the balcony of the Episcopal Palace the parade by the Legionarios of the Tercio de Sanjurjo who carried on their bayonet points the ears, noses and other organs of Republican prisoners, describing the scenes as merely the “natural excesses of all Wars”’.
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