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

By linking Marxism as a Jewish invention and its alleged threat of a ‘re-Africanization’ of Spain, Redondo was identifying Spain’s two archetypal ‘others’, the Jew and the Moor, with the Republic. His conclusion, shared by many on the right, was that a new Reconquista was needed to prevent Spain from falling into the hands of the modern foes. His views on the legitimacy of violence were similar to those of the Catholic extreme right exemplified by the writings of Castro Albarrán.52

Anti-Semitism could be found across most of the Spanish right. In some cases, it was a vague sentiment born of traditional Catholic resentment about the fate of Jesus Christ, but in others it was a murderous justification of violence against the left. Curiously, the virulence of Onésimo Redondo constituted something of an exception within Spain’s nascent fascist movement. Ledesma Ramos regarded anti-Semitism as having relevance only in Germany.53 The Falangist leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, had little or no interest in the ‘Jewish problem’ except when it came to the Jewish–Marxist influence over the working class. Nevertheless, the Falangist daily Arriba claimed that ‘the Judaic–Masonic International is the creator of the two great evils that have afflicted humanity: capitalism and Marxism’. José Antonio Primo de Rivera shared with other rightists a belief that violence was legitimate against a Republic that he perceived as influenced by Jews and Freemasons.54 He approved of attacks by Falangists on the Jewish-owned SEPU department stores in the spring of 1935.55

The identification of the working class with foreign enemies was based on a convoluted logic whereby Bolshevism was a Jewish invention and the Jews were indistinguishable from Muslims and thus leftists were bent on subjecting Spain to domination by African elements. Thus hostility to the Spanish working class was presented as a legitimate act of Spanish patriotism. According to another of the Acción Española group, the one-time liberal turned ultra-rightist Ramiro de Maeztú, the Spanish nation had been forged in its struggles against the Jews (arrogant usurers) and the Moors (savages without civilization).56 In one of his articles, the monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo neatly encapsulated the racist dimension of the anti-leftist discourse when he referred to the Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero as ‘a Moroccan Lenin’.57 José Antonio Primo de Rivera also shared this association of the left with the Moors. In his reflections in prison in 1936, he interpreted all of Spanish history as an endless struggle between Goths and Berbers. The spirit of the former lived on in monarchical, aristocratic, religious and military values while that of the latter was to be found in the rural proletariat. He denounced the Second Republic as a ‘new Berber invasion’ signifying the demolition of European Spain.58

Gil Robles, if less explicitly than Sanjurjo or Onésimo Redondo, also conveyed the view that violence against the left was legitimate because of its racial inferiority. His frequent use of the word ‘reconquest’ linked enmity towards the left in the 1930s to the central epic of Spanish nationalism, the battle to liberate Spain from Islam between 722 and 1492. During his campaign for the elections of November 1933, on 15 October in the Monumental Cinema of Madrid, he declared: ‘We must reconquer Spain … We must give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity … For me there is only one tactic today: to form an anti-Marxist front and the wider the better. It is necessary now to defeat socialism mercilessly.’ At this point, Antonio Goicoechea, the leader of the extreme rightist Acción Española group, was made to stand and received a tumultuous ovation. Gil Robles continued his speech in language indistinguishable from that of the conspiratorial right:

We must found a new state, purge the fatherland of judaizing Freemasons … We must proceed to a new state and this imposes duties and sacrifices. What does it matter if we have to shed blood! … We need full power and that is what we demand … To realize this ideal we are not going to waste time with archaic forms. Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state. When the time comes, either parliament submits or we will eliminate it.59

Gil Robles’s speech was described by El Socialista as an ‘authentic fascist harangue’. On the left, it was perceived as the real policy of his ostensibly moderate mass party, the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas). Certainly, his every sentence had been greeted by ecstatic applause. Fernando de los Ríos, Minister of Education and Fine Arts since October 1931, a moderate Socialist and a distinguished professor of law, had suffered anti-Semitic abuse for his policy of toleration for Jewish schools and his expressions of sympathy for the Sephardic community in Morocco. He pointed out that Gil Robles’s call for a purge of Jews and Freemasons was a denial of the juridical and political postulates of the Republic.60 CEDA election posters declared that Spain must be saved from ‘Marxists, Freemasons, Separatists and Jews’. The entire forces of the left – anarchists, Socialists, Communists, liberal Republicans, regional nationalists – were denounced as anti-Spanish.61 Violence against them was therefore both legitimate and indeed an urgent patriotic necessity.

The intensified vehemence of Gil Robles was matched in the pages of El Debate by the views of Francisco de Luis, who had succeeded Ángel Herrera Oria as editor. Like Onésimo Redondo, De Luis was an energetic evangelist of the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy theory. His magnum opus on the subject was published in 1935 with an ecclesiastical imprimatur. In it, enthusiastically quoting Tusquets, the Protocols, the Carlist press and General Mola, he argued that the purpose of Freemasonry was to corrupt Christian civilization with oriental values. His premise was that ‘the Jews, progenitors of Freemasonry, having no fatherland of their own, want no man to have one’. Having freed the masses of patriotic and moral impulses, the Jews could then recruit them for the assault on Christian values. In his interpretation, Catholics faced a struggle to the death because ‘inside every Jew there is a Freemason: cunning, deceitful, secretive, hating Christ and his civilization, thirsting for extermination. Freemasons and Jews are the begetters and controllers of socialism and Bolshevism.’62

Other than in the sheer scale of their impact, there was little difference between the pronouncements of Francisco de Luis and Onésimo Redondo and those of a friend, and one-time subordinate of General Mola, the policeman Julián Mauricio Carlavilla del Barrio. Born on 13 February 1896 into a poor rural family in New Castile, in Valparaíso de Arriba in Cuenca, the young Carlavilla worked as an agricultural labourer and as a shepherd before spending three years as a conscript soldier in Morocco only because he couldn’t buy himself out. On his return to Spain, he passed the entry examinations for the police and, on 9 July 1921, was posted to Valencia. Only eleven months later, he was transferred to Zaragoza after complaints from the Civil Governor of Valencia to the Director General of Security that Carlavilla’s behaviour was bringing the police into disrepute. Thereafter, he was sent in rapid succession to Segovia and Bilbao before ending up in Madrid in October 1923. In November 1925, he was transferred to Morocco, where he made contacts with military figures that would stand him in good stead later in his career. Nevertheless, just over one year later, he was sent back to the Peninsula after accusations of irregularities including pocketing fines and selling protection for prostitutes. Nevertheless, Carlavilla eventually rose, in 1935, to the rank of comisario (inspector).63

Initially, he specialized in undercover work, infiltrating left-wing groups where he would then act as an agent provocateur. He did this on his own initiative, without informing his superior officers. His efforts included provoking, and later claiming credit for frustrating, assassination attempts against both Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera during the opening of the great exhibition in Seville in May 1929.64 When General Mola became Director General of Security in early 1930, Carlavilla informed him of his clandestine activities, which he described as ‘my role as catalyst within the highest circle of the revolutionaries’.65 On Mola’s orders, Carlavilla wrote a detailed report on the supposed activities of the Communist Party in Spain. A wild mixture of fantasy and paranoia, the report was sent by Mola at the end of 1930 to the influential anti-Communist organization in Geneva, the Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale. The contents were fed into the bulletins that the Entente sent to subscribers, including General Franco. The report formed the basis of Carlavilla’s first book, El comunismo en España.66

Carlavilla was involved in the Sanjurjo coup, his role being to prevent the police discovering the nascent conspiracy.67 Between 1932 and 1936, he wrote a series of best-sellers, using the pseudonym ‘Mauricio Karl’.68 The first, El comunismo en España, described the various Socialist, anarchist and Communist elements of the working-class movement as the enemy of Spain that would have to be defeated. The second and third, El enemigo and Asesinos de España, argued that the enemies masterminding the left-wing assassins of Spain were the Jews who controlled Freemasonry, ‘their first army’, the Socialist and Communist Internationals, and world capitalism. Spanish greatness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the fruit of the expulsion of the Jews, and further greatness would require a repetition. Since there were hardly any Jews to be expelled from Spain, it was their lackeys, the Freemasons and the left, that must be eliminated. The only hope of stopping the destruction of Christian civilization and the establishment of the empire of Israel lay in joining German Nazism and Italian Fascism in defeating the ‘sectarians of Masonic Jewry’. Carlavilla claimed that General Primo de Rivera, who died of natural causes, had been poisoned by a Jewish Freemason and that the Catalan financier, Francesc Cambó, was both Jewish and a Freemason.

One hundred thousand copies of the third of his books, Asesinos de España, were distributed free to army officers. It ended with a provocative challenge to them. Describing Jews, left-wingers and Freemasons as vultures hovering over the corpse of Spain, he wrote: ‘The Enemy howls with laughter while the nations that serve Zion play diplomatic dice for the cadaver’s land. Thus the Spain once feared by a hundred nations faces such a fate because her sons no longer know how to die or how to kill.’69 Carlavilla was expelled from the police in September 1935 as a result, according to his official record, ‘of serious offences’. He would later claim that his dismissal was persecution for his anti-Masonic revelations.70

In addition to his criminal activities, Carlavilla was an active member of the conspiratorial group Unión Militar Española. Initially, his role was centred on the writing and distribution of propaganda in favour of a military coup. However, he was also believed to have been involved in plots to kill both the distinguished law professor and PSOE parliamentary deputy Luis Jiménez Asúa and Francisco Largo Caballero. In May 1936, on the orders of the UME, he was implicated in an assassination attempt on Manuel Azaña. As a result, he was obliged to flee to Portugal. All these plans seem to have been masterminded by Mola’s crony, Inspector Santiago Martín Báguenas, who had been working since September 1932 for the monarchist–military plotters. The foiled attempts also involved the same Africanista, Captain Manuel Díaz Criado, who had instigated the shootings in the Parque de María Luisa in Seville in July 1931. In Lisbon, Carlavilla linked up with the exiled General Sanjurjo and remained on the fringes of the military plot. Shortly after the outbreak of war, he went to Burgos where he was welcomed on to the staff of General Mola. Carlavilla worked for a time there alongside Father Juan Tusquets.71

Collectively, the ideas of Tusquets, Francisco de Luis, Enrique Herrera Oria, Onésimo Redondo, Mola, Carlavilla, the Carlist press and all those who alleged the existence of a Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik plot justified the extermination of the left. The reforms of the Republic and the violent anarchist attacks on the Republic were taken equally as evidence that the left was the ungodly anti-Spain. Accordingly, the brutality of the Civil Guard in crushing strikes and demonstrations, military conspiracy and the terrorist activities of fascist groups were all deemed to be legitimate efforts to defend the true Spain.

3

The Right Goes on the Offensive, 1933–1934

In the wake of their electoral victory in November 1933, the right went on to the offensive just as the unemployment crisis reached its peak. That December there were 619,000 out of work across Spain, 12 per cent of the total workforce. Given Spain’s lack of social welfare schemes, these figures, although much lower than those in Germany and Italy, signified widespread and immense physical hardship. With the Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero no longer at the Ministry of Labour, there was no protection even for those in work. In Jaén, for instance, the new Radical Civil Governor set aside existing agreements on working conditions. In the case of the turno riguroso (the strict rotation of work among unemployed labourers), during the olive harvest, the owners were left free to give work only to the cheapest, non-union labour. The consequence was large numbers of families on the verge of starvation.1 Worsening conditions saw rank-and-file pressure on union officials for militant action particularly in agriculture, metal industries and construction, all of which were represented by substantial groups within the UGT. In the agrarian south, the number of unemployed was dramatically higher than in industrial areas. The worst-hit provinces were Jaén, Badajoz and Córdoba, where the number of unemployed was 50 per cent above the national average. Once landowners began to ignore social legislation entirely and take reprisals for the discomforts of the previous two years, unemployment rose even further. By April 1934 it would reach 703,000.2

In opposition, Largo Caballero responded to rank-and-file distress with empty revolutionary slogans. However, the fact that he had no concrete plans for an insurrection did not diminish middle-class fears provoked both by his statements and by the anarchist commitment to revolutionary violence. In fact, when, on 8 December 1933, the CNT naively called for another nationwide uprising, the Socialists ostentatiously stood aside. In the event, only a few traditionally anarchist areas responded to the call. Despite CNT supporters in Asturias and most of Andalusia standing aside, there was a sporadic wave of violent strikes, some trains were derailed and Civil Guard posts assaulted. In Galicia, the Rioja, Catalonia and Alicante, the insurrectionists were easily suppressed and several hundred prisoners were taken. Throughout Spain, 125 people were killed, sixteen from the forces of order, sixty-five anarchists and forty-four innocent bystanders.3

On 9 December at Bujalance in the highly conflictive province of Córdoba, there was an echo of Casas Viejas. Tempers were running high because the landowners were flouting agreements on wages and conditions. Anarchist peasants took over parts of the town and tried to seize the town hall. The Civil Guard replied by attacking any houses whose doors were not left open. In thirty-six hours of fighting, a Civil Guard, two anarchists, four innocent civilians, including a woman, an eight-year-old child and an elderly landowner, were killed. Two alleged ringleaders were captured in nearby Porcuna and shot by the Civil Guard ‘while trying to escape’. Two hundred prisoners were taken, many of whom were badly beaten by the Civil Guard. The Civil Governor, Mariano Jiménez Díaz, blamed the events in Bujalance on the landowners for ignoring the work agreements and amassing firearms.4

The scale of social hatred in Córdoba can be deduced from the testimony of a union leader from Baena:

The same owners who would spend 400,000 pesetas on a shawl for the statue of the Virgin or on a crucifix for the Church stinted the olive oil for the workers’ meals and would rather pay a lawyer 25,000 pesetas than an extra 25 cents to the day-labourers lest it create a precedent and let the workers get their way. In Baena, there was a señorito [master] who put cattle in the planted fields rather than pay the agreed wages to the reapers. A priest who had a farm, when the lad came down to get olive oil, had made dents in the tin jug so that it would hold less oil.

The union official from Baena went on to comment on the intransigence of the employer class when it came to getting any improvement in the awful situation of the farm labourers:

They had power, influence and money; we only had two or three thousand day-labourers behind us and we constantly had to hold them back since the desperation of being unable to feed their children turns men into wild animals. We knew that the employers, well protected by the forces of order, were not bothered if there were victims, because they just bribed the officials to change the paperwork and make black white. In fact, they were happy to see violence because it was a welcome warning to any rebels of the danger of leaving the straight and narrow.

His own experience as a young man was revealing:

The few times (two or three) that I went with a committee to discuss conditions with the employers, the only issue on the table was wages; there was no question of negotiating food or working hours, since everything was considered to be included in the clause ‘Usage and customs of the locality’, which simply meant to work until your back broke, from sun-up to sun-down, or for hours expanded by the arse-licking foremen from when you could just about see until it was too dark to see a thing. I remember in one heated discussion a caci que called me a ‘snot-nosed kid recently out of the shell’ and said that if my father knew how stupid I was, he wouldn’t throw down fodder for me. This exhausted my patience and I got up and said to him as seriously as I could: ‘It is true, Señor, that on many occasions I have had to eat, not cattle feed, but the remnants of fried bread that you throw out for your dogs, a very Christian deed in a town where the workers’ children are dying of hunger.’5

There were a number of violent incidents involving the CNT in the western region of Extremadura, an area dominated by large estates or latifundios. In the province of Cáceres, two churches were set alight in Navalmoral de la Mata.6 However, since the Socialist Landworkers’ Federation (FNTT) was not involved, the more southerly province of Badajoz was largely unaffected with the exception of Villanueva de la Serena. There, an infantry sergeant, Pío Sopena Blanco, together with eight other anarchists like himself, took over an army recruiting office, killing two Civil Guards and wounding another. They were surrounded but, instead of waiting for them to surrender, the building was bombarded with heavy machine-guns and artillery by combined units of the Civil Guard, Assault Guards and the army. Pío Sopena and two others were killed in the attack and the six others were shot in cold blood. Although local Socialists were not involved, the Mayor and the officials of the Casa del Pueblo (workers’ club) were arrested. The Casas del Pueblo in Villanueva and five other pueblos were shut down.7

These violent incidents involving the CNT diverted attention from the growing problem of malnutrition. This was not only because landowners were slashing wages and refusing work to union members but also because of price rises in basic necessities. After the new Radical government removed price control on bread, the cost had risen by between 25 and 70 per cent. Demonstrations of starving women, children and old people calling for bread became a frequent sight.8 At the end of 1933, then, the Socialist leaders faced a rising tide of mass militancy, fed by the employers’ offensive and bitterness at the perceived unfairness of electoral defeat. Dismayed by the right’s determination to destroy what they regarded as basic humanitarian legislation, ever more members of the trade union movement and the Socialist Youth (Federación de Juventudes Socialistas) had come to believe that bourgeois democracy would never allow the introduction of even a minimal social justice, let alone full-blown socialism. Fearful of losing support, Largo Caballero reacted by heightening his revolutionary tone still further. In mid-January 1934, he declared that to transform society it was necessary to arm the people and disarm the forces of capitalism – the army, the Civil Guard, the Assault Guards, the police and the courts: ‘Power cannot be taken from the hands of the bourgeoisie simply by cheering for Socialism.’9

This strident rhetoric was not backed by any serious revolutionary intentions, but, replayed via the right-wing press, it could only provoke middle-class fears. Largo Caballero’s verbal extremism pandered to rank-and-file dissatisfactions but aimed also to pressure President Alcalá Zamora into calling new elections. It was dangerously irresponsible. If the President did not respond to pressure, the Socialists would be forced either to fulfil Largo Caballero’s threats or back down and lose face with their own militants. Since there was little possibility of implementing his threats, the consequence could benefit only the right.

Largo Caballero’s ill-considered rhetoric reflected both the aggressive assault on social legislation that had followed the right-wing electoral victory and fears of fascism. He felt that he had to respond to workers’ delegations from the provinces that came to Madrid to beg the Socialist Party (PSOE) leadership to organize a counter-offensive.10 At the same time, he and others suspected that not only the Republic’s legislation but also their own persons were in danger from a possible fascist coup. On 22 November, the outgoing Minister of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos, informed the PSOE executive committee of plans being prepared for a rightist coup involving the arrest of the Socialist leadership.11 Throughout November and December, the Socialist press frequently published material indicating that Gil Robles and the CEDA had fascist ambitions. Reprinted documents included the CEDA’s plans for a citizen militia to combat revolutionary activity on the part of the working class. Others showed that, with the connivance of the police, the CEDA was assembling files on workers in every village, with full details of their ‘subversiveness’, which meant their membership of a union. The appearance of the uniformed militias of the CEDA’s youth movement (the Juventud de Acción Popular) was taken as proof that preparations were afoot to establish fascism in Spain.12

Inevitably, within the Socialist Youth and among the younger, unskilled union members there was a great surge of enthusiasm for revolution. Largo Caballero was happy to go along with their demands lest they drift towards the more determinedly revolutionary CNT. Although, at a joint meeting of the union (UGT) and party (PSOE) executives on 25 November, revolutionary proposals were defeated, the moderate Indalecio Prieto reluctantly agreed on the need for ‘defensive action’. The two executives compromised with a declaration urging workers to be ready to rise up and oppose ‘reactionary elements in the event that they went beyond the bounds of the Constitution in their public determination to annul the work of the Republic’. A joint PSOE–UGT committee was set up to prepare this ‘defensive action’.13 The lack of Socialist participation in the CNT insurrection two weeks later showed that reformist habits prevailed over the new revolutionary rhetoric. The CEDA’s support for the assault on unionized labour together with its declared determination to smash socialism and to establish a corporativist state made it, for most Spanish leftists, indistinguishable from the Italian Fascist Party or the early Nazi Party. The Socialist leadership wanted to avoid the errors made by their German and Italian comrades, but they had no real intention of actually organizing a revolution. Instead, they hoped that threats of revolution would calm rank-and-file frustration and restrain right-wing aggression.