The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain

During the summer of 1934, political tension was heightened by a conflict over Catalonia which was skilfully manipulated by Gil Robles in such a way as to provoke the left. The right deeply resented the Republic’s granting of regional autonomy to Catalonia in 1932. This was reflected in the decision of the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees on 8 June to overrule a measure by the Catalan parliament to lengthen leases for smallholders. This delighted big landowners in Catalonia and elsewhere. Presenting the law unchanged to the parliament on 12 June, the President of the Generalitat (the Catalan regional government), Lluís Companys, described the Tribunal’s decision as yet another centralist attempt to reduce the region’s autonomy by ‘the lackeys of the Monarchy and of the monarchist-fascist hordes’.71

Salazar Alonso opposed those in the cabinet who favoured a compromise solution. Both the Left Republicans and many Socialists regarded Catalonia as the last remaining outpost of the ‘authentic’ Republic. The anti-Catalan statements being uttered by the CEDA left little doubt that Catalan autonomy would be under threat if the CEDA joined the government. Gil Robles spoke provocatively at an assembly organized by the Catalan landowners’ federation in Madrid on 8 September. The assembly, like others held by the CEDA’s agrarian financiers, argued for a restriction of union rights, the strengthening of the forces of authority and, more specifically, the crushing of the Generalitat’s ‘rebellion’.72

On the following day, the Juventud de Acción Popular held a fascist-style rally at Covadonga in Asturias, the site of the battle in 722 considered to be the starting point for the long campaign to reconquer Spain from the Moors. The choice of venue symbolically associated the right-wing cause with the values of traditional Spain and identified the working class with the Moorish invaders. Local Socialists declared a general strike and tried to block the roads to Covadonga, but the Civil Guard ensured that the rally went ahead as planned. The leader of the Asturian branch of Acción Popular, the retired army officer José María Fernández Ladreda, cited the reconquest of Spain as he introduced Gil Robles, who spoke belligerently of the need to crush the ‘separatist rebellion’ of the Catalans and the Basque nationalists.73 The wily Gil Robles knew only too well that such language, threatening key achievements of the Republican–Socialist coalition of 1931–3, would confirm the left in its determination to prevent the CEDA coming to power.

Salazar Alonso knew, as did Gil Robles, that the entry of the CEDA into the government was the detonator that would set off the Socialists’ revolutionary action and justify a definitive blow against them. On 11 September, at a deeply conflictive cabinet meeting, Salazar Alonso proposed a declaration of martial law precisely in order to provoke a premature outbreak of a revolutionary strike. Both the Prime Minister, Ricardo Samper, and the Minister of Agriculture, Cirilo del Río Rodríguez, protested at such irresponsible cynicism. The Minister of War, Diego Hidalgo, called for Salazar Alonso’s resignation.

Later that evening, Salazar Alonso wrote once more to his lover Amparo recounting what had happened earlier in the day. He made it clear that he thought the CEDA should join the government and that his objective was to provoke a reaction by the left precisely in order to smash it.

I explained the revolutionaries’ plan. I examined the Catalan question, pointing out objectively and honestly all the circumstances, the possibilities and the consequences of our decisions … The situation is serious. I couldn’t permit any action that was thoughtless or not properly prepared. I had to consider what was necessary to justify declaring martial law … The Government, opposed by the revolutionary left, lacks the backing of the parliamentary group [the CEDA] on whose votes it relies … Was this the Government with the authority to provoke the definitive revolutionary movement?74

In his published account of his role, Salazar Alonso wrote: ‘The problem was no less than that of starting the counter-revolutionary offensive to proceed with a work of decisive government to put an end to the evil.’ He aimed not just to smash the immediate revolutionary bid but to ensure that the left did not rise again.75

Not long afterwards, Gil Robles admitted that he was aware of and indeed shared Salazar Alonso’s provocative intentions. He knew that the Socialists were committed to reacting violently to what they believed would be an attempt to establish a Dollfuss-type regime. He too was fully aware that the chances of revolutionary success were remote. Speaking in the Acción Popular offices in December, he recalled complacently:

I was sure that our arrival in the government would immediately provoke a revolutionary movement … and when I considered that blood which was going to be shed, I asked myself this question: ‘I can give Spain three months of apparent tranquillity if I do not enter the government. If we enter, will the revolution break out? Better let that happen before it is well prepared, before it can defeat us.’ This is what Acción Popular did: precipitated the movement, confronted it and implacably smashed the revolution within the power of the government.76

The Minister of War, Diego Hidalgo, eventually came around to the point of view of Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso. At the end of September, he organized large-scale army manoeuvres in León, in an area contiguous, and of similar terrain, to Asturias, where he suspected the revolutionary bid would take place.77 When the cabinet discussed cancelling the manoeuvres, Hidalgo argued that they were necessary precisely because of the imminent revolutionary threat. Certainly, once the revolutionary strike did break out in Asturias in early October, the astonishing speed with which the Spanish Foreign Legion was transported from Africa to Asturias suggests some prior consideration of the problem. As Hidalgo later admitted in the Cortes, three days before the manoeuvres started, he had ordered the Regiment No. 3 from Oviedo not to take part and to remain in the Asturian capital because he expected a revolutionary outbreak.78 In any case, Gil Robles had secured confidential assurances from senior military figures that the army could crush any leftist uprising provoked by CEDA entry into the cabinet.79

On 26 September, Gil Robles made his move with a communiqué stating that, in view of the present cabinet’s ‘weakness’ regarding social problems, and irrespective of the consequences, a strong government with CEDA participation had to be formed. In a sinuous speech in the Cortes on 1 October, claiming to be motivated by a desire for national stability he introduced an unmistakable threat: ‘we are conscious of our strength both here and elsewhere’. After the inevitable resignation of the cabinet, President Alcalá Zamora entrusted Lerroux with the task of forming a government, acknowledging the inevitability of CEDA participation, but hoping that it would be limited to one ministry. Gil Robles insisted on three in the knowledge that this would incite Socialist outrage.80

Gil Robles’s provocation was carefully calibrated. His three choices for the cabinet announced on 4 October were José Oriol y Anguera de Sojo (Labour), Rafael Aizpún (Justice) and Manuel Giménez Fernández (Agriculture). Anguera de Sojo was an integrist Catholic (his mother was being considered by the Vatican for canonization), an expert on canon law and lawyer for the Benedictine Monastery of Montserrat. He had been the public prosecutor responsible for a hundred confiscations and numerous fines suffered by El Socialista. Moreover, as a Catalan rightist, he was a bitter enemy of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, the ruling party in the Generalitat. As a hard-line civil governor of Barcelona in 1931, his uncompromising strike-breaking policies had accelerated the CNT move to insurrectionism. The choice of Anguera could hardly have been more offensive. The Esquerra sent a deputation to see Alcalá Zamora and plead for his exclusion. Gil Robles refused point-blank the President’s suggestions.81 Aizpún, CEDA deputy for Pamplona, was close to the Carlists. Giménez Fernández, as deputy for Badajoz, was inevitably assumed to be as faithful a representative of the aggressive landlords of that province as Salazar Alonso had been and likely, as Minister of Agriculture, to intensify the awful repression that had followed the harvest strike. The suppositions about the Minister were wrong, since he was a moderate Christian Democrat, but those about the Badajoz landlords were right. Because of his relatively liberal policies, Giménez Fernández was rejected as a candidate for Badajoz in the 1936 elections and was forced to run in Segovia.82

The Socialists had every reason to fear that the new cabinet would implement Salazar Alonso’s determination to impose reactionary rule. After all, on 222 of the 315 days of Radical government until the end of July, the country had been declared to be in a state of emergency, which meant the suspension of constitutional guarantees. Sixty of the ninety-three days on which there was constitutional normality had been during the electoral period of late 1933. Press censorship, fines and seizures of newspapers, limitation of the freedom of association, declaration of the illegality of almost all strikes, protection for fascist and monarchist activities, reduction of wages and the removal of freely elected Socialist town councils were seen as the establishment of a ‘regime of white terror’. These were the policies that Gil Robles, in his speech of 1 October, had denounced as weak. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that he intended to impose more repressive ones.83

In the last few days of September, still hoping to persuade the President to resolve the crisis by calling elections, the Socialist press had resorted to desperate – and empty – threats. El Socialista implied that preparation for the revolutionary action was well advanced: ‘We have our army waiting to be mobilized, and our international plans and our plans for socialism.’84 At the end of the month, the paper’s editorial asked rhetorically: ‘Will it be necessary for us to say now, stating the obvious, that any backward step, any attempt to return to outmoded policies will inevitably face the resistance of the Socialists?’85 Clearly, Julián Zugazagoitia, the thoughtful director of El Socialista, knew full well that the Socialist movement was utterly unprepared for a revolutionary confrontation with the state. If his editorials were not senseless irresponsibility – and Zugazagoitia, a faithful supporter of Prieto, was no extremist – they have to be seen as a last-ditch threat to the President.

Largo Caballero’s revolutionary committee made no preparations for the seizure of power and the ‘revolutionary militias’ had neither national leadership nor local organization. He placed his hopes on revolutionary bluster ensuring that Alcalá Zamora would not invite the CEDA into the government. Just before midnight on 3 October, when news reached the committee that a government was being formed with CEDA participation, Largo Caballero refused to believe it and ordered that no action be taken to start the movement. Even once the truth of the news could no longer be ignored, only with the greatest reluctance did he accept that there was no choice and the threatened revolution had to be launched.86

Throughout 1934, the leaders of the PSOE and the CEDA had engaged in a war of manoeuvre. Gil Robles, with the support of Salazar Alonso, had enjoyed the stronger position and he had exploited it with skill and patience. The Socialists were forced by their relative weakness to resort to vacuous threats of revolution and were finally manoeuvred into a position in which they had to implement them. The results were catastrophic.

After defeat in strike after strike in the first nine months of 1934, Socialist intentions in the events that began on the morning of 4 October 1934 were necessarily limited. The objective was to defend the concept of the Republic developed between 1931 and 1933 against the authoritarian ambitions of the CEDA. The entry of the CEDA into the cabinet was followed by the existence for ten hours of an independent Catalan Republic; a desultory general strike in Madrid; and the establishment of a workers’ commune in Asturias. With the exception of the Asturian revolt, which held out against the armed forces during two weeks of fierce fighting and owed its ‘success’ to the mountainous terrain and the special skills of the miners, the keynote of the Spanish October was its half-heartedness. There is nothing about the events of that month, even those in Asturias, to suggest that the left had thoroughly prepared a rising. In fact, throughout the crisis, Socialist leaders were to be found restraining the revolutionary zeal of their followers.87

To allow the President time to change his mind, on 4 October the UGT leadership gave the government twenty-four hours’ notice of a peaceful general strike in Madrid. Anarchist and Trotskyist offers of participation in a revolutionary bid were brusquely rebuffed. Accordingly, the new government was able with considerable ease to arrest workers’ leaders and detain suspect members of the police and the army. Without instructions to the contrary, Socialist and anarchist trade unionists in Madrid simply stayed away from work rather than mounting any show of force in the streets. The army took over basic services – conscripts were classified according to their peacetime occupations – and bakeries, right-wing newspapers and public transport were able to function with near normality. Those Socialist leaders who managed to avoid arrest either went into hiding, as did Largo Caballero, or went into exile, as did Prieto. Their followers were left standing on street corners awaiting instructions and within a week the strike had petered out. All the talk of a seizure of power by revolutionary militias came to nothing. Hopes of collaboration by sympathizers in the army did not materialize and the few militants with arms quickly abandoned them. In the capital, some scattered sniper fire and many arrests were the sum total of the revolutionary war unleashed.88

In Catalonia, where anarchists and other left-wing groups collaborated with the Socialists in the Workers’ Alliance, events were rather more dramatic. Many of the local committees took over their villages and then waited for instructions from Barcelona, which never came.89 In the Catalan capital, ill prepared and reluctant, Companys proclaimed an independent state of Catalonia ‘within the Federal Republic of Spain’ in protest against what was seen as the betrayal of the Republic. The motives behind his heroic gesture were complex and contradictory. He was certainly alarmed by developments in Madrid. He was also being pressured by extreme Catalan nationalists to meet popular demand for action against the central government. At the same time, he wanted to forestall revolution. Accordingly, he did not mobilize the Generalitat’s own forces against General Domingo Batet, the commander of military forces in Catalonia. The working class had also been denied arms. Accordingly, Batet, after trundling artillery through the narrow streets, was able to negotiate the surrender of the Generalitat after only ten hours of independence, in the early hours of 7 October.90 The right in general, and Franco in particular, never forgave Batet for failing to make a bloody example of the Catalans.91

Asturias was a different matter. Once the news of the CEDA entry into the government reached the mining valleys in the late afternoon of 4 October, the rank-and-file workers took the lead. There, the solidarity of the miners had overcome partisan differences and the UGT, the CNT and, to a much lesser degree, the Communist Party were united in the Workers’ Alliance. It is illustrative of the fact that Socialist leaders had never really contemplated revolutionary action that, even in Asturias, the movement did not start in the stronghold of the party bureaucracy, at Oviedo, but was imposed upon it by outlying areas – Mieres, Sama de Langreo and Pola de Lena. Similarly, in the Basque country, the workers seized power only in small towns like Eibar and Mondragón. Mondragón was an exception, but in Bilbao and the rest of the region rank-and-file militants waited in vain for instructions from their leaders. Throughout the insurrection, the president of the Asturian mineworkers’ union, Amador Fernández, remained in Madrid, and on 14 October, without the knowledge of the rank and file, tried to negotiate a peaceful surrender.92

The uncertainty demonstrated by the Socialist leadership was in dramatic contrast to the determination of Gil Robles. Indeed, his behaviour, both during and immediately after the October revolt, sustained his later admission that he had deliberately provoked the left. While Socialist hesitation on 5 October suggested a quest for compromise, the new Radical–CEDA government manifested no desire for conciliation and only a determination to crush the left. Gil Robles made it clear at a meeting with his three ministers that he had no faith in either the Chief of the General Staff, General Carlos Masquelet, whom he regarded as a dangerous liberal, or General Eduardo López Ochoa, who was put in charge of restoring order in Asturias. At the cabinet meeting on 6 October, however, their proposal to send Franco to take over operations in Asturias was overruled and the views of Alcalá Zamora, Lerroux and his more liberal cabinet colleagues prevailed.93 However, in the event Franco was able to play a role that ensured that the rebellion would be repressed with considerable savagery.

Gil Robles demanded the harshest policy possible against the rebels. On 9 October, he rose in the Cortes to express his support for the government and to make the helpful suggestion that parliament be closed until the repression was over. Thus the anticipated crushing of the revolution would take place in silence. No questions could be asked in the Cortes and censorship was total for the left-wing press, although the right-wing newspapers were full of gruesome tales – never substantiated – of leftist barbarism. The new Minister of Agriculture, Manuel Giménez Fernández, one of the few sincere social Catholics within the CEDA, struck a dissident note when he told the staff of his Ministry on 12 October, ‘the disturbances which have taken place against the state have not started on the rebels’ side of the street but on ours, because the state itself has created many enemies by consistently neglecting its duties to all citizens’.94 The violence on both sides during the events of October and the brutal persecution unleashed in the wake of the left-wing defeat would deepen existing social hatreds beyond anything previously imagined.

Initially, because of Franco’s reputation as a ferocious Africanista, President Alcalá Zamora rejected the proposal to put him formally in command of troops in Asturias. Nevertheless, the Minister of War, the Radical Diego Hidalgo, insisted and gave Franco informal control of operations, naming him his ‘personal technical adviser’, marginalizing his own General Staff and slavishly signing the orders drawn up by him.95 The Minister’s decision was highly irregular but understandable. Franco had detailed knowledge of Asturias, its geography, communications and military organization. He had been stationed there, had taken part in the suppression of the general strike of 1917 and had been a regular visitor since his marriage to an Asturian woman, Carmen Polo. To the delight of the Spanish right, and as Alcalá Zamora had feared, Franco responded to the miners in Asturias as if he were dealing with the recalcitrant tribesmen of Morocco.

Franco’s approach to the events of Asturias was coloured by his conviction, fed by the regular bulletins he received from the Entente Anticommuniste of Geneva, that the workers’ uprising had been ‘carefully prepared by the agents of Moscow’ and that the Socialists, ‘with technical instructions from the Communists, thought they were going to be able to install a dictatorship’.96 That belief justified for Franco and for many on the extreme right the use of troops against Spanish civilians as if they were a foreign enemy.

With a small command unit set up in the telegraph room of the Ministry of War in Madrid, Franco controlled the movement of the troops, ships and trains to be used in the suppression of the revolution.97 Uninhibited by the humanitarian considerations which made some of the more liberal senior officers hesitate to use the full weight of the armed forces against civilians, Franco regarded the problem with the same icy ruthlessness that had underpinned his successes in the colonial wars. One of his first decisions was to order the bombing and artillery shelling of the working-class districts of the mining towns. Unmoved by the fact that the central symbol of rightist values was the reconquest of Spain from the Moors, he shipped Moroccan mercenaries to Asturias, the only part of Spain where the crescent had never flown. He saw no contradiction about using them because he regarded left-wing workers with the same racist contempt which had underlain his use of locally recruited mercenary troops, the Regulares Indígenas, against the Rif tribesmen. Visiting Oviedo after the rebellion had been defeated, he spoke to a journalist in terms that echoed the sentiments of Onésimo Redondo: ‘This war is a frontier war and its fronts are socialism, communism and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism.’98 Without apparent irony, despite Franco’s use in the north of colonial forces, the right-wing press portrayed the Asturian miners as puppets of a foreign, Jewish–Bolshevik conspiracy.99

The methods used by the colonial army, just as in Morocco, were aimed at paralysing the civilian enemy by terror. The African Army unleashed a wave of brutality that had more to do with their normal practice when entering Moroccan villages than any threat from the defeated Asturian rebels. The troops used left-wing prisoners as human shields to cover their advances. Innocent men, women and children were shot at random by the Moroccan units under the command of Franco’s crony, Lieutenant Colonel Juan Yagüe Blanco. This contributed to the demoralization of the poorly armed revolutionaries. More than fifty male and female prisoners, many of them wounded, were interrogated and immediately shot in the yard of Oviedo’s main hospital and their bodies burned in the crematorium oven. Several more were executed without trial in the Pelayo barracks. Other prisoners were tortured and women raped. In the mining village of Carbayín, twenty bodies were buried to hide evidence of torture. Houses and shops were looted of watches, jewellery and clothing, while anything not portable was smashed.100

The behaviour of the colonial units provoked serious friction between General López Ochoa, on the one hand, and Franco and Yagüe, on the other. The austere López Ochoa had been placed in operational command of the forces in Asturias. He believed, rightly, that for Franco (below him in seniority) to have been placed in overall charge of the suppression of the rebellions of 1934 was improper, since its only basis was his friendship with Diego Hidalgo. Franco, Yagüe and many on the right were concerned that López Ochoa, as a Republican and a Freemason, would try to put down the rising with as little bloodshed as possible. Their suspicions were justified. Although he condoned the use of trucks of prisoners as a cover for his advances, López Ochoa did, in the main, conduct his operations with moderation. Yagüe sent an emissary to Madrid to complain to both Franco and Gil Robles about his humanitarian treatment of the miners. All three were infuriated by López Ochoa’s pact with the miners’ leader Belarmino Tomás, holding back the Legionarios and Regulares to permit an orderly and bloodless surrender.101 Franco’s mistrust of López Ochoa was matched by his confidence in Yagüe and his approval for the summary executions following the captures of Gijón and Oviedo.102

On one occasion, Yagüe threatened López Ochoa with a pistol.103 Some months later, López Ochoa spoke with Juan-Simeón Vidarte, the deputy secretary general of the PSOE, about his problems in restraining the murderous activities of the Foreign Legion: