The Spanish Holocaust (85 page)

Claims that the Bishop had protested to the rebel military authorities both about the events in the Plaza del Torico and about the obscene spectacle mounted by the Legion were made by three priests interrogated by Republican officers. The trio had been detained in the seminary of Teruel carrying rifles whose barrels were still hot when the town fell to the Republicans on 8 January 1938. The relaxed nature of the interrogation may be deduced from their ingenuous comment that ‘The bishop didn’t protest about the rest of the shootings carried out in Teruel, about 2,000, because he thought it would be pointless and anyway, the scandal was much less because those shootings didn’t offend consciences like the ones that took place in public.’
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In addition to the three rifle-toting priests captured in the seminary, four diocesan priests served in the front line, with Polanco’s explicit approval, not as chaplains, but as combatants. The Bishop’s attitude to the repression might be deduced from the instructions sent to every parish priest in Teruel on 3 August 1937. In the event that the parish register of deaths had been destroyed or lost, he instructed that a new one be obtained and that entries henceforth be made only under the following four categories: ‘natural death; murdered by the revolutionaries; killed in battle; shot by orders of the military authorities’.
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When Polanco himself was captured after the fall of Teruel, the then Minister of Defence, Indalecio Prieto, intervened to prevent his being shot by militiamen. Prieto gave Father Alberto Onaindía an account of
the Bishop’s interrogation. The principal charge against him was that he had signed the Episcopate’s Collective Letter of 1 July 1937 in support of Franco, which was deemed to constitute incitement to, and justification of, military rebellion. Asked if he was aware of the Collective Letter, Polanco replied that, having signed it, he could hardly deny that he was. Asked if he would change anything, he said: ‘Just the date. We should have written it earlier.’ At this, the officer brought the interrogation to a close, saying, ‘You, Bishop, are an exemplary Spaniard. Your words imply character and courage. We are all Spaniards here and the sad thing is that you are on one side and we are on the other.’ With permission from Prieto, Onaindía visited Polanco in prison, finding him in good spirits, treated with respect and generally well looked after. When Onaindía told him of the rebel repression in the Basque Country, including the execution of priests, Polanco listened coldly but clearly did not want to hear.
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After all, two parish priests in his own dioceses had been shot by the rebels, presumably with his permission. After some months, thanks to the intervention of both Julián Zugazagoitia and Manuel Irujo, he was given permission to celebrate daily Mass, although he chose to do so only on Sundays and feast days.
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Although the military uprising triumphed in two of Huesca’s three major towns, the provincial capital and Jaca, the rebels initially controlled only about one-third of the province. The consequent sense of possible Republican attack ensured that the repression would be particularly harsh with just under 1,500 people killed, a figure comparable to the repression carried out by the anarchists in the part of the province under Republican control. In the capital, the military commander, General Gregorio de Benito, had a close relationship with Mola, under whom he had served in Africa. As might have been expected, he ordered the immediate execution of several Freemasons, including the Mayor, and the arrest of the remaining Republican officials. A general strike was quickly put down. Those arrested were members of the Republican middle classes, especially doctors and schoolteachers, members of the UGT (the predominant union in both Jaca and Huesca) and the wives and families of those who had fled. Seventy-four women were executed because they were the wives or mothers of men who had either fled or been shot. After De Benito had gone to take command in Zaragoza, the repression in Huesca was taken over by another Africanista, Colonel Luis Solans-Labedán, who had earned notoriety during the coup in Melilla.
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In the provincial capital, arrests, the later
sacas
from the prison and the subsequent murders were carried out by the so-called ‘Death Squad’.
The selection of victims had as much to do with personal resentments or envy as with politics. Perhaps the most celebrated victim was the artist and teacher Ramón Acín Aquilué, a member of the CNT renowned for his pacifist views. He was a friend of Federico García Lorca and of Luis Buñuel, whom he had helped make the film
Tierra sin pan
. He was shot on 6 August 1936, his death in Huesca being the local equivalent of the murder of Lorca. Acín’s wife, Concha Monrás, was shot on 23 August along with ninety-four other Republicans, including a pregnant woman. No thought was given to the young children of those executed. The best these orphans could expect was to be taken in by relatives or friends of their parents who, in doing so, ran the risk of themselves being denounced.
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The purging of the left in the smaller towns was carried out by groups of recently recruited Falangists whose victims were often selected by local landowners.

The repression was particularly brutal in Jaca under the direction of Major Dionisio Pareja Arenilla, who received orders from Zaragoza ‘to purge once and for all the undesirable elements’. The portly Bishop of Jaca, Juan Villar Sanz, was a cipher who gave free rein to a small clique of reactionary priests. Blacklists were assembled with the help of local bosses both in Jaca itself and in surrounding
pueblos
like Sabiñánigo, Ansó, Canfranc and Biescas. There were no trials. Army columns aided by Falangists detained hundreds of people and the shootings began on 27 July and ran right through the autumn and the following months. One of the most notorious crimes took place on 6 August 1936. An army captain, two Falangists and a Capuchin monk, Father Hermenegildo de Fustiñana, seized two women from Jaca prison, took them out into the countryside and shot them. One, Pilar Vizcarra, aged twenty-eight and pregnant, was the wife of a man shot exactly one week previously; the other, Desideria Giménez of the Socialist Youth, was aged sixteen. The event was presided over by the tall and bony Father de Fustiñana. Chaplain to the local Requetés, he went about the streets ostentatiously carrying a gun. His visits to the prison were dreaded by the detainees, who regarded him as a ‘bird of ill omen’. He delighted in the executions and was present at most of them. He offered confession and the last rites to those about to be shot. Then, his shoes caked with blood, he would visit the families of the few that accepted. He kept a list of all those executed, with a note if they had made their confession. More than four hundred people from Jaca and the surrounding villages were shot.
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Among those murdered in one of them, Loscorrales to the north-west of the provincial capital, was Father José Pascual Duaso, the parish priest.
He was the third priest murdered in Aragon at the hands of the rebels. During the Republic, there had been tension in the village between the priest and the local left. The most extreme of the local anti-clericals was the Mayor, Antonio Ordás Borderías, a member of the Radical-Socialist Party. The priest had vehemently opposed his efforts to prohibit bell-ringing, religious weddings and funerals. Nevertheless, Father Pascual was a much respected liberal in other ways, having brought food to soldiers hiding after the abortive Republican coup of 1931 in Jaca. He had supported local labourers in disputes over common lands with the wealthier landowners. He also enjoyed the friendship of many local Republicans, including the anarchist secretary of the town council. In February 1936, Ordás was replaced as Mayor by a Socialist.

In July 1936, with Loscorrales in the rebel zone, the new Socialist Mayor was arrested, released after Father Pascual vouched for him, then shot in October. Ordás, who had by now joined the Falange, was re-established as Mayor. However, for his membership of the Radical-Socialist Party and his anti-clerical activities, he was imprisoned in Huesca. In danger of being shot, he was saved by the intervention of a sergeant major in the forces of General Gustavo Urrutia Fernández. The man in question was married to a cousin of Ordás and apparently had considerable influence over Urrutia. Ordás then ingratiated himself with Urrutia, who was a Falangist, by offering to establish the party in the village. Ordás also seized the opportunity to rid himself of those against whom he had grudges. One was Félix Lacambra Ferrer, who had been Mayor during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. Ordás hated Lacambra because he had made his daughter Sacramento reject him as a suitor. On 15 September 1936, after a denunciation by Ordás, Lacambra was arrested and shot two days later.

Ordás hated Father Pascual even more, regarding him as a dangerous enemy because of what he knew of his left-wing past and because he suspected him, wrongly, of being the cause of his own arrest. First, in a report to the provincial Falange, Ordás denounced Father Pascual as subversive, which led to an unsuccessful request to the Bishop of Huesca that Father Pascual be transferred. Then, at a Mass to commemorate Ordás’s being named local chief of the Falange in mid-November, the priest expressed his opposition to Falangist atrocities in the area. Since the authorities did nothing, Ordás decided to accelerate matters. On 21 December, he organized a search of a haystack belonging to the recently murdered Mayor and ‘discovered’ a pistol and an incriminating document which he had actually written himself. It purported to be a plan
drawn up by the local Socialist landworkers’ federation for a purge of right-wing ‘scum’ and stated that the priest supported this. The ‘discovery’ prompted the military authorities to issue a warrant for the priest’s detention. Ordás and two accomplices were given the task of arresting him, but they simply shot him in his home on 22 December. A cursory investigation saw Ordás acquitted of guilt after claiming that Father Pascual had attacked him. The parish priest of nearby Ayerbe was arrested for trying to send a telegram to the Bishop of Huesca denouncing what had happened. In December 1939, however, the friends and families of Ordás’s victims managed to get the military authorities to open a more serious investigation into the death of Father Pascual. Ordás and his two accomplices were arrested on 11 December and held until 14 February 1942 while the investigation was carried out. The Falange supported them and, with little prospect of a trial, they were eventually released, but Ordás never dared return to Loscorrales.
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The rebel offensive which had reached the Mediterranean and which had permitted the completion of the repression in the Republican areas of Aragon also made major inroads into Catalonia. Sustained Italian bombing raids on Barcelona on 16, 17 and 18 March 1938 left nearly one thousand dead and three thousand injured. The working-class districts where the refugees huddled were especially badly hit. Many of the victims were women and children. According to the German Ambassador, the objective was not military but simply to terrorize the civilian population.
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There is some confusion as to whether the bombings took place on the orders of Franco or of Mussolini. Whoever issued the command, after protests from the British, French and American governments and the Vatican, the raids on the Catalan capital were suspended.
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However, as Franco’s massively superior forces cut through the disorganized and demoralized Republicans who were retreating into Catalonia, their advance was preceded by heavy bombardments of civilian targets by the Condor Legion.

On 26 March, fifty people were killed in the small town of Fraga. The next day, it was the turn of Lleida, which was packed with refugees from Aragon. Lleida had already suffered numerous bombardments, of which the most terrible took place on 2 November 1937. On that day, nearly three hundred had been killed. The event is commemorated in one of the war’s most famous photographs, taken by Agustí Centelles, of the mother of the journalist Josep Pernau weeping over the corpse of her husband. When the Liceu Escolar was hit, of one class of sixty-three children, only two survived. Astonishingly, there were no reprisals,
thanks to the swift intervention of the military authorities, including a radio broadcast by Major Sebastián Zamora Medina, one of whose daughters had been killed in the raid and another badly wounded. Throughout late March, the Condor Legion continued its campaign of
Blitzkrieg
attacks, aimed at provoking the flight of the civilian population and facilitating the advance of Yagüe’s columns. On Sunday 27 March, a two-hour bombardment by Heinkel 51s left four hundred people dead. Many bodies could not be recovered, given the dangerous state of the buildings. The consequent stench left the city centre uninhabitable for months.
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There were further bombing raids in the last three days of March and the first two of April. There were also artillery barrages directed by Luis Alarcón de la Lastra, who now commanded the artillery of the Moroccan Army Corps. Despite a courageous defence by the division led by Valentín González ‘El Campesino’, Lleida was occupied the following day. Franco’s forces found a ghost town. In a city normally of 40,000 inhabitants, barely two thousand were there to greet their conquerors. The Generalitat had organized a massive evacuation of refugees and the bulk of the local population. A Francoist newspaper crowed, ‘A few reds who could not flee have take refuge in some houses but they will soon be annihilated.’ Shops and houses were looted. One of the first acts of the occupying forces was to remove the records of the deaths from the bombing raids. In Lleida, Gandesa and the towns along the right bank of the Ebro, Corbera, Mora d’Ebre and many others, summary trials and executions began. In Lleida, one of those to be sentenced to death and executed was the director of one of the city’s hospitals. His crime was to have organized the evacuation of the hospital despite having been ordered by the fifth column to hand it over complete with all wounded soldiers to the rebels. The director of another hospital, who did obey such orders, was nevertheless dismissed simply because his post made him an employee of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
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