The Spanish Holocaust (72 page)

From January 1937, repressive violence behind the Republican lines was not uncontrolled and hate-fuelled as it had been in the first weeks of the war. Henceforth, it was largely a question of the Republican state rebuilding itself and, of course, defending itself. Accordingly, it took two principal forms which occasionally overlapped. On the one hand, the security services focused their efforts on the enemy within, the saboteurs, snipers and spies of the fifth column. On the other, there were bitter rivalries over the nature of the war effort. The Communists, many of the Socialists and the Republicans perceived as subversives those on the libertarian and anti-Stalinist left who resisted the creation of a strong state capable of pursuing a centralized war effort. A substantial segment of the anarchist left was concerned with revolutionary goals and was actively hostile to the Republican state. A significant minority was simply involved in criminal activities. Clashes with the security forces were inevitable. This already fraught scenario was further complicated by the fact that, in the case of the Spanish and foreign anti-Stalinists, the Russian security advisers regarded them as Trotskyists who had to be eliminated.

Ever since the Republican government in Valencia, the Madrid Junta and the Catalan Generalitat had all made a determined effort to centralize the police and security services and disarm the various rearguard
militia groups, they had been on a collision course with the anarchists. Anarchist militiamen had violently resisted efforts to collect their weapons or to shut down their control posts on the roads in and out of the capital and on the Catalan–French border. There had been numerous incidents, including one in November 1936 when Antonio Mije, the War Councillor in the Junta, had been prevented from leaving the city on an official mission.
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There was a long-standing and fierce hostility between the PCE and the CNT. This was fuelled by the assassination by anarchists of prominent Communist union leaders such as Andrés Rodríguez González in Málaga in June and Desiderio Trillas Mainé in Barcelona on 31 July. Similarly, the foiled assassination attempts in Madrid by anarchists from the Checa del Cine Europa on both Vittorio Vidali and Enrique Líster in September had merely intensified the Communist determination to exact revenge.
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At the beginning of December 1936, when Serrano Poncela left the Dirección General de Seguridad, his executive responsibilities were taken over by José Cazorla, Carrillo’s deputy. Cazorla appointed David Vázquez Baldominos as his police chief. One of his tasks was to expand the Brigada Especial created by Carrillo and Grigulevich. Two more of these special squads were set up, led by two JSU militants, Santiago Álvarez Santiago and José Conesa Arteaga. From the beginning of 1937, all three brigades, under the operational command of Fernando Valentí Fernández, would concentrate on the detention, interrogation and, sometimes, elimination of suspicious elements. This meant not only Francoists but also members of the Madrid CNT, which Cazorla believed to be out of control and infiltrated by the fifth column.
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Cazorla was not the only one to believe that the anarchist movement was infested with fifth columnists. Largo Caballero told PSOE executive committee member Juan-Simeón Vidarte that ‘the FAI has been infiltrated by so many agents provocateurs and police informers that it is impossible to have dealings with them’.
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Neither was entirely wrong. The ease with which membership cards of the CNT could be acquired gave the fifth column access to information, an instrument for acts of provocation and relative ease of movement. With CNT accreditation, fifth columnists could also get identity cards for the Republican security services.
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A bitter example of the consequent conflict between Communists and anarchists took place in Murcia. Luis Cabo Giorla, the Communist Civil Governor of the province from mid-October 1936 until early January 1937, was fierce in his pursuit of fifth columnists, some of whom had
had CNT credentials since before the outbreak of war. After their defeat in Valencia, elements of the anarchist Iron Column had moved into Murcia and been guilty of pillage and violence against peasants who resisted them. In December, Cabo Giorla appointed Ramón Torrecilla Guijarro, who had played a key role in Paracuellos, as Delegate of the Dirección General de Seguridad in the province. After Cabo Giorla had been replaced by Antonio Pretel, Torrecilla operated ruthlessly on the blanket assumption that anyone not a member of the Communist Party was likely to be a fifth columnist. Detainees were subjected to torture, beatings and simulated executions. Eventually, in April 1937, a CNT campaign backed by the PSOE led to an official investigation, the arrest of Torrecilla and his collaborators and the resignation of Pretel. Torrecilla spent six months in prison and, after his release, joined the security staff of Cazorla, who had become Civil Governor of Albacete. There his obsessive determination to purge the rearguard led to further complaints from non-Communist elements of the Popular Front.
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Communist suspicions of the CNT were confirmed by the announcement, by a self-evidently fit Amor Nuño, at the 23 December 1936 session of the Junta Delegada de Defensa, that he was resigning for health reasons. It emerged that, some days before, a meeting of senior militants from the CNT, FAI and the Federación de Juventudes Libertarias had considered expelling him from the anarchist movement and even having him shot. According to Gregorio Gallego, Cipriano Mera, the CNT’s front-line military commander, had grabbed Nuño by the neck, shaken him and hurled him against the wall, saying that he deserved to be executed. Nuño’s offence derived from his sexual involvement with the daughter of a rebel officer. He had appointed her his secretary and taken her to important meetings where she had been able to listen to secret discussions. Nuño’s comrades suspected that she was a rebel spy and that she had him brainwashed. They spared his life but, regarding him as unreliable, made him resign from the Junta de Defensa. He took a lesser post on the secretariat of the CNT’s transport union and moved to Barcelona, where he would be arrested for his involvement in the May 1937 conflict. At the end of the war, Nuño would be captured in Alicante and beaten to death by policemen in Madrid.
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Amor Nuño was not the only Councillor of the Madrid Junta to resign on 23 December 1936. He was accompanied by Santiago Carrillo, who was replaced on Christmas Day by his former deputy José Cazorla Maure. Carrillo announced that he was leaving to devote himself totally to preparing the forthcoming congress to seal the unification of the
Socialist and Communist youth movements. That may indeed have been his motive, but his replacement was also connected with an incident two days earlier.
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At 3 p.m. in the afternoon of 23 December, the Councillor for Supply in the Junta, Pablo Yagüe Esteverá, had been stopped at an anarchist control point when he was leaving the city on official business. Since Carrillo’s decree of 9 November, control of roads in and out of the capital had been supervised by the police, the Assault Guards and the rearguard militias (MVR) under the overall co-ordination of the Public Order Council. The anarchists who stopped Yagüe thus had no authority to do so. After they had refused to recognize his credentials as a Councillor of the Junta, Yagüe continued past the roadblock and they shot and seriously wounded him. They then took refuge in the Ateneo Libertario of the Ventas district. Carrillo ordered their arrest, but the police who went to the Ateneo were told that they were under the protection of the CNT’s regional committee. Carrillo then sent in a company of Assault Guards to seize them. When this was discussed at the meeting of the Junta later that night, he called for them to be shot.
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The report in the Communist press denounced the perpetrators as
incontrolables
in the service of fascism, ‘real enemies of the people and of the revolution who, like cruel and heartless highwaymen, murder in cold blood the best defenders of the people’. The PCE called for exemplary punishment and, to avoid a repetition of the crime, for the militia groups outside Madrid to be disarmed. It was claimed that ‘certain organizations’ were heavily infiltrated by the fifth column, a clear reference to the CNT. The accusation was in fact entirely justified.
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The initial response of the anarcho-syndicalist leadership was emollient. It was stated that left-wing unity would be endangered by the accusation that those who shot Yagüe were fifth columnists. Then, on 25 December, three CNTistas were found dead with their union cards stuffed into their mouths. Those murders were avenged by Eduardo Val’s Defence Committee, which left three Communists dead with their party cards in their mouths. In reply, two more CNTistas were killed and the PCE press stepped up its campaign for a purge of the CNT. Outraged, the CNT published a list of militants killed by Communists in Málaga, Cabeza de Buey in La Serena (eastern Badajoz), Las Herencias (Ciudad Real), Miguel Estaban and La Guardia (Toledo) and Perales de Tajuña and other towns in Madrid.
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Carrillo failed in his demand for the Junta to condemn to death the militiamen responsible for the attack on Yagüe, something which was
outside its jurisdiction. He was furious when the case was put in the hands of a state tribunal at which the prosecutor refused to ask for the death penalty when it was claimed that Yagüe had not shown his credentials at the CNT control point. With the Communist press baying for the militiamen’s blood, José García Pradas, the editor of the newspaper
CNT
, published a demand that they be released and threatened that, if this did not happen, CNT forces would be withdrawn from the front to release them by force. It was the sort of incendiary comment that convinced many others that the anarchists were irresponsible, if not downright subversive.
CNT
was the mouthpiece of the Defence Committee, run by Eduardo Val, Manuel Salgado Moreira and García Pradas, all three violently anti-Communist. Miaja ordered the suspension of
CNT
, but García Pradas refused to obey. He printed, and was about to distribute, the next issue when Miaja had the paper’s offices surrounded by Assault Guards and declared that it was absurd, after the sacrifices made to defend Madrid, for a squabble between anarchists and Communists to provoke its fall. Only Miaja’s intervention prevented serious bloodshed. In the event, to the chagrin of the PCE, the tribunal decided that the men who had shot Yagüe had acted in good faith. The immediate reaction of both organizations was an agreement not to let this hostility undermine anti-fascist unity. It was short lived.
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This war of organizations was symptomatic both of the continuing weakness of the state and of the CNT’s exiguous loyalty to the Republic.

Carrillo’s successor, José Cazorla, was determined to put an end to parallel police forces. He found it intolerable that many files on right-wingers seized by militia groups in July 1936 had not been handed over to the Dirección General de Seguridad. In consequence, the Tribunales Populares had released many fifth columnists because there was no record of their political affiliations. Cazorla started the job of centralizing files and organizations when he took over the DGS in the capital from Serrano Poncela in December. He saw this as the first step towards his principal goal which was the investigation and punishment of pro-rebel sabotage and subversion. His zeal in this led to a bitter conflict with the anarchists and anti-Stalinist dissident Communists. The Communists believed that opposition to a tightly centralized war effort constituted sabotage and subversion. Moreover, they had little doubt that some of the rearguard violence was the work of agents provocateurs embedded within the CNT working to discredit the Republic internationally and to spread demoralization.

Another factor poisoning relations between the CNT and the Communists was suspicion of Melchor Rodríguez, who was arranging for more than one hundred prisoners to be released each day. Suspicions that he might have links with the fifth column were intensified when several of those whose release he arranged went over to the rebels, including Colonel Agustín Muñoz Grandes and the Falangist radio personality Bobby Deglané. In a meeting of the Madrid Junta on 8 January 1937, Cazorla complained that Melchor Rodríguez gave prisoners permission to hold pro-rebel demonstrations and have private meetings with members of the diplomatic corps. He called him ‘protector of the prisoners’ because he treated right-wing detainees as if they were exactly the same as the CNT prisoners of old. On 19 February, Cazorla accused Melchor of opposing his public order policy. He further infuriated the CNT leadership when, in his campaign against sabotage and espionage, he began to investigate the infiltration by fifth columnists of the ineffective secret services run in the Ministry of War by the CNT’s Manuel Salgado.
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As a result of these investigations, the Brigada Especial led by Santiago Álvarez Santiago arrested over thirty anarchists and Socialists in mid-February. The CNT press protested that anarchist militants deemed to be enemies of the state were being interned as part of a dirty war being carried out by Cazorla’s Public Order Council.
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After shots were fired at a Communist policeman on 23 February, Cazorla reiterated his view that the CNT sheltered fifth columnists and his agents started to rearrest prisoners released by the courts even as they left the building.
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Complaints emanated both from diplomats on behalf of rightists and from the CNT on behalf of its militants that those arrested were being sent to punishment battalions in dangerous front-line positions to work on fortifications.
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Ironically, forced-labour camps were the brainchild of the Minister of Justice, the CNT’s Juan García Oliver. Two days after he had taken over his Ministry in November 1936, he had called for the creation of camps where fascists could be used in constructive labour. On 31 December, accompanied by Mariano Gómez, the president of the Supreme Court, he explained in Valencia his idealistic vision of justice. Common criminals, whom he saw not as the enemies of society but as its victims, would find redemption in prison through libraries, sport and theatre. Political prisoners would achieve rehabilitation by building fortifications and strategic roads, bridges and railways, and would get decent wages. García Oliver believed that it made more sense for fascist lives to be saved than for them to be sentenced to death. He established
the first camp in Totana, in the province of Murcia. Above its entrance was a huge placard with the words ‘Work and Don’t Lose Hope’.
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