The Spanish Holocaust (96 page)

Authorization for the application of his theories was facilitated by his links with both Franco (whose wife Carmen Polo was a friend of Vallejo’s wife) and the Falange.
¹³³
He dedicated his book on the psychopathology of war, which incorporated his work on the links between Marxism and mental deficiency, ‘in respectful and admiring homage to the undefeated imperial Caudillo’. Vallejo also had a direct link to the regime organization concerned with war orphans, Auxilio Social, through his friend the psychiatrist Dr Jesús Ercilla Ortega. A close friend of Onésimo Redondo, Ercilla had been one of the founders of the JONS.
¹³⁴
He was a member of the executive committee of Auxilio Social, its medical adviser and the liaison with other groups. After the war, Ercilla was made clinical director of the Psychiatric Clinic of San José in Ciempozuelos, a hospital officially headed by Vallejo Nágera.
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Franco himself was enthusiastic about Auxilio Social’s work with Republican orphans, seeing it as a major contribution to the long-term ‘redemption’ of Spaniards from their leftist errors.
¹³⁶
A key element in the process was the law of 14 December 1941 which legalized the changing of the names of Republican orphans, of the children of prisoners unable to look after them and of babies taken away (often by force) from their mothers immediately after birth in prison.
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As the Second World progressed, conditions for all prisoners worsened. Already undernourished, they were forced to give blood transfusions for the German Army.
¹³⁸
Perhaps the most shocking example of the malice that underlay the Francoist treatment of the defeated Republicans was the fate of the Spanish exiles captured in France by the Germans. Some had been fighting in the French forces, others were still in French internment camps. Around 10,000 ended up in German camps, something made possible by the acquiescence of Franco’s government when the prisoners were offered by the Germans. Numerous letters were sent in July 1940 from the Spanish Embassy in Paris to the Foreign Ministry asking for instructions regarding the German offer to hand over the prisoners. When no reply came, the German Embassy in Paris wrote to Madrid in August asking for clarification of the Spanish government’s wishes regarding 100,000 Spanish refugees. The only reply that has been found was a list of specific individuals, which led to the extraditions
discussed earlier in the chapter. In the absence of other documentation, this alone condemned Republicans to German camps. According to SS Standartenführer August Eigruber, Gauleiter of Oberdonau in Austria, the Germans were told ‘by Franco’ that, as they had fought for ‘a Soviet Spain’, the prisoners were not considered to be Spaniards. This is consistent with Franco’s public declarations about those Republicans regarded as unredeemable criminals. Accordingly, the Spanish prisoners were treated as stateless persons and transferred from the front-line prisoner-of-war camps (Stalags) to concentration camps. Ninety per cent of the ‘Fighters for Red Spain’ (Rotspanienkämpfer) were in Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria.
¹³⁹

On 20 August 1940, a cattle train left Angoulême. A total of 927 Spanish refugees, 490 of them men, the remainder women and children, were squeezed – forty to fifty per wagon – into twenty wagons each designed for eight horses. They believed that they were being taken to Vichy. They travelled for three days and nights, with room only to stand, without food or water. On 24 August, they reached Mauthausen. The males over the age of thirteen were separated from their families and taken to the extermination camp near by. They were told by the camp commander Franz Ziereis in his ‘welcome speech’, ‘you enter by the door and you will leave by the crematorium chimney’. Three hundred and fifty-seven of the 490 would die in the camp.
¹⁴⁰
The women and children were then sent to Spain – they had been put on the train because the Germans did not want French civilians seeing the families being separated. There can be no doubt that the French authorities knew all about Mauthausen. In Spain, the returned women were interrogated and those with no one to vouch for them were imprisoned. The children were put in state orphanages even when there were Republican families willing to look after them.
¹⁴¹

It was just the beginning. Spanish Republicans ended up facing the whole gamut of horrors in many different Nazi camps, including Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen in Germany, and Auschwitz and Treblinka in Poland. In Ravensbrück, there were 101 Spanish women who had belonged to the French resistance.
¹⁴²
Mauthausen was an extermination camp where those not murdered on arrival were required to work until they died of exhaustion. From the quarry at Mauthausen, an endless chain of men carried stones weighing between 44 and 88 pounds in backpacks up 186 steep steps.
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About 60 per cent of the Spanish Republicans who died in German camps perished at Mauthausen.
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Franco’s propagandists presented the executions, the overflowing prisons and camps, the slave-labour battalions and the fate of the exiles as the scrupulous yet compassionate justice of a benevolent Caudillo. In 1964, they launched a highly choreographed, nationwide celebration of the ‘Twenty-Five Years of Peace’ since the end of the war. Every town and village in Spain was bedecked with posters rejoicing in the purging of the atheistic hordes of the left. The celebrations began on 1 April, with a Te Deum in the basilica at the Valle de los Caídos. This, together with an interview given by Franco to
ABC
, made it clear that the celebrations were not for peace but for victory.
¹⁴⁵
This was confirmed eight days later when he told the
Consejo Nacional
that the festivities were a ‘commemoration of the twenty-five years of victory’. That the Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy was still on his mind was made clear when he warned his audience of plots and sectarianism coming from Europe, of ‘secret machinations, subversive action and the power of occult forces’.
¹⁴⁶
The unspoken message of the elaborate celebrations was that the return on Franco’s investment in terror could not have been more successful.

Epilogue

The Reverberations

In mid-July 1939, Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and the Foreign Minister of Fascist Italy, made an official visit to Spain. When his guides proudly took him to see a work gang of Republican prisoners, he remarked to his own officials: ‘They are not prisoners of war, they are slaves of war.’ On his return to Rome, he described Franco to one of his cronies: ‘That queer fish of a Caudillo, sits there in his Ayete palace, in the midst of his Moorish Guard, surrounded by mountains of files of prisoners condemned to death. With his work schedule, he will see about three a day, because that fellow enjoys his siestas.’
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There is no evidence that Franco’s sleep was ever interrupted by concern for his victims. Indeed, his regime made considerable efforts to ensure that the same tranquillity was enjoyed by all of his collaborators. The consequence is that Spain today is still in the throes of a memory war. There are two sets of historical memory: the homogeneous Francoist one imposed on the country during four decades of dictatorship and the diverse Republican ones, repressed until recent years. The Francoist one was constructed in three stages before, during and after the Civil War. It was based on the need to justify the military coup against the democratically elected government and the planned slaughter that the coup was to entail. During the first stage, before 18 July 1936, the betrayal of the military oath of loyalty to the government was justified by the assertion that Spain had to be saved from the ‘Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy’ which was allegedly responsible for the greatly exaggerated breakdown of law and order. As the war progressed, the second stage saw the tightly controlled rebel media and the Catholic Church collaborate to publicize and exaggerate atrocities in the Republican zone. Thus was created a deep fear of ‘red barbarism’, an untrammelled violence allegedly masterminded by Moscow, with a view to destroying Spain and its Catholic traditions. At the same time, the atrocities committed by the rebels and their Falangist and Carlist allies were encouraged as part of the prior plan of extermination and also by way of sealing a covenant of
blood among the perpetrators. Thus those guilty of the atrocities would never contemplate any reconciliation with the defeated for fear of the vengeance of their victims.

After the war came the third and most enduring stage. By dint of totalitarian control of the education system and of all the means of public communication, press, radio and the publishing industry, the Franco regime made a powerfully sustained attempt to brainwash its population. An entirely homogeneous and impermeable version of the long-and short-term origins of the Civil War was imposed upon the Spanish people. Through endless reiteration in the press, in schools, in children’s textbooks and from church pulpits, a single historical memory was created and disseminated over three and a half decades. The rewriting of history – and denial of the experiences and recollections of both victors and victims – absolved the military rebels of guilt and sanitized the regime abroad. The process inflicted great long-term damage on Spanish society. To this day, its powerful residual effects hamper the ability of mainstream contemporary society to look upon its recent violent past in an open and honest way that could facilitate the necessary social and political closure.

During the years of the dictatorship, the defeated in Spain had no public right to historical memory, living as they did in a kind of internal exile. Only after the death of Franco and the slow reconstruction of democracy did it become possible for there to be a process of recovery of their historical memory. Of course, there were many historical memories among the defeated Republicans and their descendants, differing according to whether their politics were liberal Republican, Socialist, Communist or anarchist but always with some with elements in common deriving from the suffering and loss imposed by the Francoist repression, whether through execution, imprisonment or exile.

When the grandchildren of the victims of the Francoists finally initiated a nationwide movement for the recovery of historical memory in the year 2000, it provoked a near-hysterical rejection by those who denounced their quest as merely ‘raking up the ashes’. In the first instance, that was understandable because the coming of democracy, quite properly, had not silenced those who had either benefited from the dictatorship or merely been educated to accept its monolithic version of the nation’s historical memory. However, the ferocity of the denunciation of the quest for the recovery of memory reflected something else, something very profound. This is the principal consequence of the process of brainwashing, what in Spain is called sociological Francoism,
and it lives on in the democratic Spain of today just as sociological communism exists in the countries of the old Soviet bloc. The venom of the denunciations of the quest for the truth about the repression derives from the fact that there were also many historical memories among the victors and their descendants that have had to be repressed by the need to safeguard a false memory. The recovery of memory is distressing because it challenges the integrity of the reassuringly unified but ultimately false memories upon which the regime was reliant for its survival.

Despite the massive operation to justify the innocent blood shed because of the military rebellion, some of the Caudillo’s collaborators seem to have slept uneasily after the war. Inevitably, there is little evidence of the psychological repercussions of all that went before. It is especially difficult to know anything regarding the mental state of those who committed atrocities in the Republican zone. Those who did not escape into exile were either tried during the war itself by the Republican authorities or else afterwards by the Francoists. In the confessions extorted under torture by the Francoist police, such as that of Felipe Sandoval, there are declarations of remorse. However, taking into account the murderous repression which encompassed virtually everyone still in Spain who might have been guilty of something (as well as many who had done no wrong), it is not surprising that there is so little by way of free expressions of guilt. Nevertheless, it would be reasonable to suppose that at least some of those responsible for crimes on both sides might have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder or guilt.

In contrast to the paucity of evidence from the Republican side, perhaps because the victors were able to enjoy the fruits of their work for decades after the war, rather more of them seem to have reflected on what had happened and others seem to have suffered qualms of conscience. The most significant recognition by a Francoist that what was done, starting long before the military coup, might have been wrong came from Ramón Serrano Suñer, both in numerous interviews and in his memoirs where he described the trials in the rebel zone during the war and in all of Spain after 1939 as ‘back-to-front justice’ (
la justicia al revés
).
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