The Spanish Holocaust (78 page)

To consolidate the security of the Republican state, a major reorganization of counter-espionage services was made in the summer of 1937. On 12 June, the Special Services Bureau of the General Staff of the Army of the Centre, which had been commanded by the anarchist Manuel
Salgado, was dissolved. In addition to concerns that prisoners had disappeared in suspicious circumstances, there were suspicions that Salgado’s staff had been infiltrated by Falangists. In fact, his secretary was the Falangist Antonio Bouthelier España. The functions of the Special Services Bureau were fused with those of the Brigadas Especiales and other groups that worked on internal security to create the Special State Intelligence Department (Departamento Especial de Información del Estado – DEDIDE). Initially led by David Vázquez Baldominos, the new body was entrusted with the eradication of espionage and sabotage in loyalist territory, under the direct orders of the Minister of the Interior, Julián Zugazagoitia.
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The DEDIDE targeted not only the supporters of Franco but also those on the left, like the POUM, who were considered to be treacherously subversive. There was considerable suspicion of foreigners – both the POUM and the International Brigades were regarded as potential havens for spies, whether of the Axis or, in the more paranoid vision of the NKVD, of Trotsky’s Fourth International. The Republic was, in fact, extremely vulnerable to enemy espionage, whether directed by the Gestapo, the OVRA or the ever more sophisticated fifth column.
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Bilbao fell on 19 June and constant defeat intensified anxiety and paranoia.

Barely six weeks later, on 9 August, a military counter-espionage unit, the Servicio de Investigación Militar (SIM), was created by Prieto in the Ministry of Defence. As it assumed ever more responsibility for collecting political intelligence in – and therefore policing – the rearguard, in late March 1938 the SIM absorbed the DEDIDE.
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Initially, the SIM was directly responsible to Prieto, who suggested that it had been created on the advice of the Soviet ‘technicians’. However, he also claimed that, in the light of the Nin affair, he had hesitated to take the advice for fear of the police acting independently of the government, as had happened with the Communist Antonio Ortega. Keen to place all the Republican special services under his own command, to head the SIM Prieto appointed his friend Ángel Díaz Baza, who, according to Orlov, was a speculator with an interest in night clubs.
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The key role of chief of the SIM of the Army of the Centre (Madrid) was initially given to a brilliant young officer, Major Gustavo Durán, at the suggestion of Orlov, via Miaja. Prieto accepted, and later claimed that he knew that Durán was a Communist, but kept him under surveillance by naming Ángel Pedrero García as his deputy. After the dissolution of the García Atadell Brigade, Pedrero, its second-in-command, had served briefly as a police inspector at Chamberí in central Madrid before
being transferred, in December, to Salgado’s Special Services Bureau in the Ministry of War. His growing importance in military counter-intelligence saw him become SIM chief for the Army of Central Spain in October 1937.
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In the decree creating the SIM, Prieto had stipulated that all agents be approved by the Minister himself and that their credentials carry his signature. However, Gustavo Durán proceeded independently and named about four hundred SIM agents. Claiming that they were all Communists, which Durán and Orlov denied, Prieto used the excuse that Durán was needed at the front to suspend him from the SIM after barely two weeks in the job. Orlov intervened on Durán’s behalf. Pedrero claimed that Durán also received support from Eitingon and Ivan Maximov, the adviser to the General Staff of the Army of the Centre, other Soviet military advisers and Miaja.
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The overall chief of the SIM, Ángel Díaz Baza, hated the role and had soon been replaced on an interim basis by his deputy, Prudencio Sayagués. Seeking a more appropriate long-term appointment, Prieto named Major, later Colonel, Manuel Uribarri Barrutell. On Prieto’s own admission, this was a disastrous choice. While at the Toledo front, Uribarri had allegedly been guilty of large-scale looting. Now, at first he followed Prieto’s instructions but became increasingly aligned with the Communists.
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Uribarri eventually defected in April 1938, with a substantial amount of money and jewellery. Negrín seized the opportunity to purge the SIM. On the advice of Zugazagoitia and Paulino Gómez, he appointed a Socialist, Santiago Garcés Arroyo, as head of the SIM to limit the influence of the Communists.
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By February 1938, only Socialists could get jobs in the SIM.
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The Republic, like other democratic societies faced with an existential threat, adopted undemocratic norms such as censorship, internment without trial, suspension of civil liberties, strike bans in essential industries and conscription. To root out fifth-column networks and to get confessions, from May 1938 the SIM carried out illegal arrests and its operatives sometimes used refined tortures, disorientating prisoners with bright lights, constant loud noises and freezing water. Beds and benches were placed at a sharp angle, making sleep or sitting difficult. Floors were scattered with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent prisoners from pacing up and down and leaving them to stare at the walls, which were curved and covered with dizzying patterns of cubes and spirals which, with special lighting, gave the impression that the walls were moving. These cells were created in Barcelona in the so-called
Checa de Vallmajor or ‘Preventorio D’, a converted convent, and in the ‘Preventorio G’ in Carrer Saragossa, both run by the SIM. The psycho-technic designs were the work of a bizarre international adventurer called Alfonso Laurencic, who was part of the Grup d’Informació of the Generalitat’s secret intelligence service when it was absorbed by the SIM. A self-proclaimed music-hall pianist and architect, Laurencic was a Frenchman of Austrian parents and Yugoslav nationality, who had served in the Spanish Foreign Legion. He had belonged variously to the CNT, the UGT and the POUM, had made money selling false passports and eventually defrauded the SIM.
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Another element of the Republican clamp-down on the anarchist movement was the abolition of their autonomous Council of Aragon, which had been created in early October 1936 in Bujaraloz, under the presidency of Joaquín Ascaso, leader of the Zaragoza construction workers and representative of the Ortiz Column. It had had some success in limiting the excesses committed by the militias in Republican Aragon but its principal objective of co-ordinating ‘the needs of the war and the rearguard’ was never achieved because the leaders of the anarchist columns had been determined to maintain their autonomy. Republicans, Socialists and Communists regarded the Council as an anarchist dictatorship imposed by the militias. Its closure by the central government in August 1937 was achieved only at the cost of some violence. Land that had been collectivized was returned to its owners and a definitive end was made to the anarchist repression in the region.
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The clandestine war of the Russian security services against foreign Trotskyists, however, remained beyond the control of the Republican authorities. In September 1937, Orlov managed to eliminate Erwin Wolf, who had become Trotsky’s secretary in Norway. In 1936, Wolf played a key role in refuting the accusations made at the Moscow trials and was a central figure in the International Secretariat which was the predecessor to the Fourth International. He came to Spain to work with Grandizo Munis’s Bolshevik-Leninist group. In Barcelona, he was arrested for subversive activity on 27 July 1937, released on the following day but then immediately rearrested. He was officially released on 13 September but was never seen again.
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Another prominent Trotskyist who disappeared ten days later was the Austrian Kurt Landau. A one-time collaborator of Trotsky, Landau had a long history of anti-Stalinist militancy in Austria, Germany, France and Spain. Using the pseudonym ‘Wolf Bertram’, he was secretary of
Der Funke
(the Star), an international Communist opposition group. In
Spain, he worked closely with Andreu Nin and conducted liaison between the POUM and foreign journalists and writers as well as writing virulent polemics against the militarization of the militias and their incorporation into the Republican Army. He had outraged the Soviets with his pamphlet
Spain 1936, Germany 1918
, published in December 1936, which compared the crushing of the revolutionary workers of Germany by the Freikorps in 1918 to Stalinist hostility to the CNT and the POUM in Spain. In consequence, he had been smeared by Soviet propaganda as ‘the leader of a band of terrorists’ and the liaison agent between the Gestapo and the POUM.
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Kurt Landau managed to remain at liberty until 23 September 1937 when he was abducted by Soviet agents from his hiding place. Like Rein and Wolf, he was never seen again.
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It has been alleged that Stanislav Vaupshasov, a guerrilla-warfare expert, had constructed a crematorium in the basement of a building in Barcelona. He ran it with a Spanish NKVD agent, José Castelo Pacheco. Those targeted for liquidation were lured into the building, killed and their bodies eradicated in a single operation.
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Whether this is what happened to Rein, Wolf, Landau and some of the other foreigners who disappeared is not known. Manuel Irujo ensured that Nin would be the last Spanish Trotskyist to be murdered, but he was unable to stop the persecution of foreign leftists by the Soviet security services.

While these clandestine abuses were still being perpetrated by the Russians, Negrín and his ministers pressed on with their efforts to regularize the policing and justice functions of the state. In late June 1937, the Special Court for Espionage and High Treason had been created. It reflected Negrín’s view that the authority of the state should not be flouted. However, he was totally opposed to any arbitrary form of repression such as that practised in the Francoist zone.
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With Negrín’s approval, Irujo ensured that the Special Court was staffed by judges of impartiality and probity. Many rank-and-file POUM militants were in prison, infuriated at being held alongside fascists and saboteurs. Still not formally charged, they were awaiting trial by the new Special Court. Among them were several foreign anti-Stalinists. One of them, Kurt Landau’s wife, Katia, had been arrested by a Brigada Especial operating on Russian orders. Their intention was to flush her husband out of hiding.

When Kurt disappeared, Katia demanded a judicial inquiry. By then, Ortega had been dismissed and Negrín’s new Director General of Security, the Basque Socialist Paulino Gómez, tried unsuccessfully to ascertain Kurt’s whereabouts. When the authorities were unable to
clarify the fate of her husband, Katia led a hunger strike of five hundred inmates in the women’s prison in Barcelona. In addition to the investigation by Gómez, an international commission of inquiry went to Catalonia in November 1937 to study conditions in Republican prisons and to look into the disappearance of Andreu Nin, Erwin Wolf, Mark Rein and Kurt Landau. Led by John McGovern (general secretary of the British Independent Labour Party – George Orwell’s radical left group which had separated from the Labour Party) and the French pacifist Professor Felicien Challaye, it was permitted to interview Katia in the General Hospital where she was a patient as a result of her hunger strike.
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Irujo visited her in hospital and convinced her that the trials would be fair. She was sufficiently impressed to call off the strike. When Irujo sent prosecutors and judges into each prison with the appropriate paperwork, they were applauded by the prisoners who saw them as guarantors against Stalinist illegalities.
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Everything about the role of the Spanish authorities in the Landau case, particularly the success of Katia’s demand for an inquiry and of the hunger strike, contrasted with procedures in the rebel zone. Women in a rebel prison in 1938 could not have gone on hunger strike as there would have been hardly any food for them to reject and, even if they did, no one would have cared, certainly not a minister.

Shortly after taking possession of his ministry, Irujo had commissioned Mariano Gómez, the president of the Supreme Court, to draw up a draft decree to be applied to crimes perpetrated in the Republican zone since the beginning of the war, including all cases of extra-judicial deaths. It also included a revision of the release of common criminals amnestied by García Oliver.
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On 30 July 1937, Boris Stepanov reported to Dimitrov that the ‘fascist Irujo’ had tried to arrest Carrillo because of Paracuellos and ‘is organizing a system of searches of Communists, Socialists and anarchists, who brutally treated imprisoned fascists. In the name of the law, this minister of justice freed hundreds upon hundreds of arrested fascist agents or disguised fascists. Together with Zugazagoitia, Irujo does everything possible and impossible to save the Trotskyists and to sabotage trials against them. And he will do everything possible to acquit them.’
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In fact, in the light of opposition from Communists and anarchists alike, Irujo’s decree was never fully applied.

Irujo’s approach was illustrated by the case of General José Asensio Torrado, who was arrested and charged with sabotage after the precipitate fall of Málaga in February 1937. He was brought to trial in October
that year, just as the north was falling, and given a prison sentence. While in prison, Asensio was permitted to write and publish a book defending his position and to send autographed copies to members of the government. The book was openly sold in Barcelona bookshops. Largo Caballero claimed that the arrest and trial of Asensio was provoked by Communist pressure on Prieto. If so, it is testimony to Negrín’s independence not only that Asensio was able to publish his book but also that, after appeal, the case was dismissed in July 1938.
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