The Spanish Holocaust (69 page)

Within Serrano Poncela’s Delegation, there were three sub-sections. The first dealt with investigation, interrogations and petitions for release. This was headed by Manuel Rascón Ramírez of the CNT. After interrogations had been carried out, this section made recommendations to the Delegation and final decisions were taken by Carrillo. This function was entirely compatible with the decisions taken at the meeting between JSU and CNT members on the evening of 7 November. The second sub-section, headed by Serrano Poncela himself, dealt with prisons, prisoners and prison transfers. According to Rascón, it used the Dawn Squad and small tribunals of militiamen set up in each prison to go through the file-cards of the prisoners. One such group in Porlier prison was run by Felipe Sandoval. The third sub-section dealt with the personnel of the police and other more or less official armed groups in the rearguard. Headed by another close JSU collaborator of Cazorla, Santiago Álvarez Santiago, it evaluated the reliability of existing policemen and also decided which members of the old
checas
could be incorporated into the police. For all these jobs, the Public Order Delegation could draw on the files and personnel of the technical section of the DGS.
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The procedures that would be applied to prisoners between 18 November and 6 December were established on 10 November at a meeting of the Public Order Delegation. Serrano Poncela laid down three categories: army officers with the rank of captain and above; Falangists; other rightists. This was roughly similar to what had been agreed at the
meeting on 7 November between members of the CNT–FAI and representatives of the JSU, one of whom had almost certainly been Serrano Poncela himself. To supervise the process, Rascón Ramírez of the CNT and Torrecilla Guijarro of the PCE were in charge of appointing those who would in turn select the prisoners to be executed. Rascón and Torrecilla named a ‘responsible’ and a deputy for each prison who in turn set up a number of three-man tribunals to select the prisoners. When these tribunals had made up their lists, they were taken to Rascón who passed them to Serrano Poncela. He then signed orders for their ‘release’, which meant their execution. According to Torrecilla, those expeditions of prisoners that arrived safely at their destination consisted of men not listed for execution by the prison tribunals. Serrano Poncela had to report every day to Carrillo in his office in the Junta de Defensa (in the Palace of Juan March in Calle Núñez de Balboa in the Barrio de Salamanca). Carrillo also often visited the office of Serrano Poncela in nearby Calle Serrano.
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That ‘release’ (execution) orders came from Serrano Poncela was confirmed by the declaration of another policeman, Álvaro Marasa Barasa. In fact, the tribunals established after the August events in the Cárcel Modelo had already drawn up lists of candidates to be shot, some of whom had been executed in the course of September and October. Now, agents would arrive at each prison late at night with a general order signed by Serrano Poncela for the ‘liberation’ of the prisoners listed on the back or on separate sheets. The director of the prison would hand them over and they would then be taken to wherever Serrano Poncela had indicated verbally to the agents. The subsequent phase of the process, the transportation and execution of the prisoners in the early hours of the following morning, was supervised by the Inspector General of the rearguard militias, Federico Manzano Govantes, or his deputy on the day. The actual tasks were carried out each day by different groups of militiamen, sometimes anarchists from the rearguard militias, sometimes Communists from the
checa
in the Calle Marqués de Riscal and sometimes from the Fifth Regiment. The prisoners were obliged to leave all their belongings, which were handed over to Santiago Álvarez Santiago. They were then tied together in pairs and loaded on to buses. Usually, Manuel Rascón or Arturo García de la Rosa went along and delivered the coup de grâce to prisoners not killed when the militiamen fired.
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On Monday 9 November, Jesús de Galíndez of the PNV had gone to the Cárcel Modelo to collect some Basque prisoners whose release had
been approved by the DGS. This was something that he had been doing regularly over the course of the previous two months. On this day, however, he noted a dramatic change. The prison was now in the hands of militiamen who were reluctant to accept the release orders that he carried. After a fierce argument, they agreed. However, as he left, his driver told him that, while he was waiting outside in the car, a truckload of militiamen had arrived to be greeted by one of the sentries saying, ‘Today you can’t have any complaints since you’ve had plenty of meat.’ This was understood by Galíndez to be a reference to the shootings that had taken place on Sunday 8 November.
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If Galíndez knew what was happening, it is impossible that Carrillo did not. This is demonstrated by the minutes of the meeting of the Junta de Defensa on the night of 11 November. The Councillor for Evacuation, Francisco Caminero Rodríguez (of the anarchist youth), asked if the Cárcel Modelo had been evacuated. Carrillo responded by saying that the necessary measures had been taken to organize the evacuations of prisoners but that the operation had had to be suspended. At this, the Communist Isidoro Diéguez Dueñas, second-in-command to Antonio Mije at the War Council, declared that the evacuation must continue given the seriousness of the problem of the prisoners. Carrillo responded that the suspension had been necessary because of protests emanating from the diplomatic corps, presumably a reference to his meeting with Schlayer. Although the minutes are extremely brief, they make it indisputably clear that Carrillo knew what was happening to the prisoners, if only as a result of the complaints by Schlayer.
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In fact, after the mass executions of 7–8 November, there were no more
sacas
until 18 November, after which they continued on a lesser scale until 6 December. Jesús de Galíndez, who was in constant touch with both the DGS and the various prisons as he tried to secure the release of Basque prisoners and members of the clergy, described the procedure that was followed. His account broadly coincides with those of Torrecilla Guijarro and Marasa Barasa. The tribunals would examine the antecedents of the prisoners to decide if they were dangerous – anyone so deemed would be executed. Those who had someone to vouch for them were released. Others remained in prison. Mistakes were made, with evident enemies of the Republic surviving and entirely innocent individuals being executed. Among the survivors were Manuel Valdés Larrañaga, a Falangist who was later Franco’s Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Agustín Muñoz Grandes, who would become Franco’s Minister of War and Vice-President, and Raimundo Fernández
Cuesta, one of the principal Falangist leaders and future minister under Franco.
⁷⁵

According to a prisoner held in Porlier, one of the tribunals there, known as the ‘tribunal de la muerte’, was headed by Felipe Sandoval. Since its members were usually drunk, its decisions were largely arbitrary. Elsewhere, the process of selection was more systematic and was facilitated by the exhaustive records held in the Technical Section of the DGS. This consisted of the files on all those arrested since the beginning of the war, with the reasons for the arrest together with details of their fate – release, imprisonment, trial, execution. The Section also held the records of right-wing groups that had been seized by various militia groups. These files had been consolidated into one large archive at the DGS. There was relatively little material on the Falange, which had managed to destroy its records, but the files of Acción Popular, the Carlists and the Unión Militar Española were virtually complete. When the Junta de Defensa was created, the Technical Section’s holdings were passed over to Serrano Poncela’s Public Order Delegation.
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The
sacas
and executions, known collectively as ‘Paracuellos’, constituted the greatest single atrocity in Republican territory during the war, its horror explained but not justified by the terrifying conditions in the besieged capital. Unlike previous
sacas
, triggered by popular outrage at bombing raids or news brought by refugees of rebel atrocities, these extra-judicial murders were carried out as a result of political-military decisions. They were organized by the Council for Public Order but they could not have been carried out without help from other elements in the rearguard militias. In the immediate aftermath, little was known about the events at Paracuellos and Torrejón on the road to Alcalá de Henares since they were not reported in the press. However, an investigation was initiated by a group of diplomats: the doyen of the diplomatic corps, the Ambassador of Chile, Aurelio Núñez Morgado; the Chargé d’Affaires of Argentina, Edgardo Pérez Quesada; the British Chargé d’Affaires, George Ogilvie-Forbes; Felix Schlayer, the German who, despite his questionable diplomatic status, was recognized by the Republic as Norwegian Chargé d’Affaires; and a representative of the Red Cross, Dr Georges Henny.

The government was bombarded with diplomatic protests, particularly from the two most openly pro-rebel diplomats, Schlayer and Núñez Morgado. Núñez Morgado’s sympathy for Franco’s cause actually saw him cross the lines to take the Romanian and Argentine representatives to Toledo to address the rebels ostensibly on behalf of the diplomatic corps.
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Schlayer’s position was extremely questionable given his German
citizenship and consular post. Ogilvie-Forbes was led to ask ‘what exactly is the position of Schlayer, who sometimes calls himself Norwegian Ambassador?’
⁷⁸
According to the wife of the Reuters correspondent, Julio Álvarez del Vayo was ‘most insulting about Schlayer of Norway and has written the Norwegian Government demanding Schlayer’s removal’.
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Despite their blatant hostility to the Republic, the protests of Schlayer and Núñez Morgado led to the Red Cross representative, Georges Henny, being able to prise from the Junta de Defensa a list of 1,600 names of prisoners who had been taken from the Cárcel Modelo, of whom 1,300 had not reached Alcalá de Henares.
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Schlayer, accompanied by Henny and Pérez Quesada, had been to Torrejón where they found recently disturbed ground from which protruded arms and legs.
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An initial report on the first murders sent by Ogilvie-Forbes was minuted by Sir Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office: ‘This is a ghastly tale of ghastly gangsters in whose hands the so-called “government” … is a bad joke. I suppose the other side will do as horribly in their turn.’
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In fact, British diplomats rarely acknowledged atrocities on the rebel side and never saw the differences between what happened in each zone. While the rebel authorities actively sanctioned atrocities throughout the war and after, it was precisely the Republican government’s opposition to them that limited them to the first five months of the war. In this context, it is worth noting the comment of the New Zealand journalist Geoffrey Cox: ‘The spotlight of publicity which has been turned on these unauthorised executions is, ironically enough, itself a reflection of the antagonism of the Spanish Government towards such deeds. For much of the information has become available only because of the freedom with which the Government has discussed the problem with foreign authorities and with visiting delegations.’
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After the mass
sacas
of 7 and 8 November, there was a brief interlude thanks to the anarchist Melchor Rodríguez and Mariano Sánchez Roca, the under-secretary at the Ministry of Justice. Those
sacas
had occurred in the absence of the Minister of Justice, García Oliver, and his Director General of Prisons, Juan Antonio Carnero, who had gone to Valencia with the rest of the government. Appalled by what was happening, the president of the Supreme Court, Mariano Gómez, and the secretary general of the Bar Association, Luis Zubillaga, sent a telegram requesting García Oliver once more to put Melchor Rodríguez in charge of the prisons in Madrid. Sánchez Roca, a labour lawyer who had represented various CNT militants including Melchor Rodríguez, managed to persuade
García Oliver to name Melchor Special Inspector of Prisons. Surprisingly, García Oliver agreed. It is not known whether this had anything to do with the diplomatic protests although, as will be seen, other members of the government had heard about, and were appalled by, the
sacas
. On 9 November, before his appointment was officially announced, Melchor took up the post. By the time his appointment was made official five days later, he would already have resigned.
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When Melchor Rodríguez unofficially assumed the post of Inspector General of Prisons, his exact powers were imprecise, not to say debatable. Nevertheless, his first initiative on the night of 9 November was decisive. Melchor’s friend, Juan Batista, the administrator of the Cárcel Modelo, had told him that a
saca
of four hundred prisoners was planned. In response, he went to the prison at midnight and ordered that all
sacas
cease and that the militiamen who had been freely moving within the prison remain outside. He forbade the release of any prisoners between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m., to prevent them being shot. He also insisted on accompanying any prisoners being transferred to other prisons. In consequence there were no
sacas
between 10 and 17 November. His next objective was to get the militiamen out and the professional prison functionaries back.
⁸⁵
He explained his intentions to Schlayer and Henny. On behalf of the diplomatic corps, Schlayer wrote to Melchor Rodríguez to confirm what had been promised: