The Spanish Holocaust (80 page)

After the fall of Catalonia in January 1939 and an exodus of hundreds of thousands of civilians, at the last meeting of the Cortes at Figueras Negrín presented a plan to bring the war to an end in return for Franco observing certain conditions, above all no reprisals.
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The plan was put to British and French representatives, who replied that the Burgos government was not interested in humanitarian sentiments, peace-making or magnanimity and anyway declared that it punished only common crimes. The hypocrisy thereof was underlined by Negrín’s comment that ‘in a savage and pitiless civil war like ours, either everything is a common crime or nothing is’. Accordingly, Negrín offered himself as an expiatory victim, letting it be known that he would hand himself over if Franco would accept his symbolic execution in exchange for the lives of the mass of innocent Republican civilians. He did not reveal this offer to the majority of his own cabinet apart from Zugazagoitia.
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Negrín’s offer was ignored by Franco. The government remained in Spain at the Castle at Figueras until the last units of the Republican army had crossed the French frontier on 9 February. The night before, one of the few colleagues who remained with Negrín, his friend Dr Rafael Méndez, Director General of Carabineros, said to Julio Álvarez del Vayo: ‘I don’t know what we’re doing here. I fear that we will be woken up tonight by Carlist rifle-butts.’ Negrín called Méndez aside and said: ‘We are not leaving here until the last soldier has crossed the frontier.’ Determined to see these Republicans safe from the reprisals of Franco, he watched for eighteen hours until General Rojo arrived to announce
that all the Republican troops had crossed into France. Only then did Negrín move on to Toulouse to take a plane back to Alicante. Some ministers thought that he was mad, but as he himself explained: ‘If I had not done that then, today I would die of shame.’
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Back in Spain, he tried to reorganize the military forces of the centre to mount resistance either until a European war started or at least until a massive evacuation could ensure the lowest number of Republican deaths possible. On 16 February, he held a meeting of the military high command in Albacete. Having ascertained that the morale of the ordinary soldier seemed high, he was surprised when senior officers insisted that it was necessary to end the war as soon as possible. Asked why he did not sue for peace, he replied: ‘because to beg for peace is to provoke a catastrophe’.
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As his friend the American journalist Louis Fischer wrote later, ‘Negrín and del Vayo hoped, by holding out a little while longer, to extract a promise of mercy and clemency from Franco and to win time for the flight of those with a price on their heads.’
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The idea that Franco might guarantee that there would be no reprisals against the defeated was a vain one given his Law of Political Responsibilities, announced on 9 February, by which supporters of the Republic were effectively guilty of the crime of military rebellion, which in Franco’s topsy-turvy moral world meant all those who had not supported the military coup of 1936. Negrín was convinced that a fight to the finish was possible and, as a result, had been accused by Prieto of having provoked ‘the gigantic hecatomb’. Prieto claimed that a negotiated peace had been possible and blamed the policy of resistance for Francoist vengeance. This revealed either culpable ignorance of what the rebels had been doing in captured territory or else a cynical desire to make political capital for use against Negrín in the coming Republican power struggle in exile. With some bitterness, Negrín reflected on those who just wanted the war to be over, ‘without thinking about the millions of unfortunates who could not save themselves’.
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In the event, his hopes of resistance to save more Republicans would be dashed as much by the coup of Colonel Segismundo Casado in March 1939 as by Franco himself. More in sadness than in anger, he told the Standing Committee of the Cortes that ‘We could still have resisted and held on and that was our obligation. It was our obligation to remain to save those who are now going to end up murdered or in concentration camps.’ As things had turned out, thanks to Casado, he said, the Republic ended ‘in terms of catastrophe and shame’.
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12

Franco’s Slow War of Annihilation

In Galicia, Castile, León and Navarre, the areas of the north where there had been virtually no resistance to the coup, the elimination of leftists, trade unionists and supposed supporters of the Republic was immediate and thorough. In the meantime, Franco’s African forces and the columns organized by army officers and landowners were bloodily purging the southern countryside. That still left the Basque Country, Santander, Asturias, much of Aragon and all the eastern seaboard in Republican hands. The military coup had failed in most of Guipúzcoa, and the Popular Front parties had created a Defence Junta in San Sebastián. It and the smaller juntas in other towns were largely dominated by the Socialists and Communists. Basque nationalists participated in the hope of maintaining public order. Their priority was to prevent executions of rightists being carried out by the Communists.
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The military coup in the profoundly conservative province of Álava was organized by Franco’s lifelong friend Camilo Alonso Vega. Except in the north of the province, it met little resistance. A general strike was quickly suppressed and large numbers of armed Carlists and some Falangists gathered in the provincial capital, Gasteiz/Vitoria. Hundreds of CNT members were arrested, some Republicans and Basque nationalists taken as ‘hostages’ and municipal functionaries and schoolteachers removed from their jobs. On 22 July 1936, an aircraft from Vitoria bombed the village square of Otxandio in the south of Vizcaya, killing eighty-four people, of whom forty-five were children, and mutilating a further 113. In justification, the rebel command in Vitoria announced: ‘our aircraft have struck a heavy blow against a group of rebels gathered in the rearguard at Otxandiano’. The repression in Álava was overseen by the military but largely carried out by Carlists and Falangists. Carlists from the neighbouring provinces of Navarre, Logroño and Burgos undertook executions in small towns on the basis of lists provided by the local right. The Church hierarchy replaced parish priests if they were sympathetic to Basque Nationalism and some were even imprisoned.
Often, where the priest was a Carlist, leftists and Basque nationalists could expect little mercy, although there were honourable exceptions. Elsewhere, the Basque clergy did much to save lives. There were 170 executions in Álava of people from the province and another thirty or so in neighbouring areas. More than half of all the killings were extra-judicial.
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While the rest of the Basque Country remained under Republican control, anti-clerical violence was relatively limited, significantly less than in many other provinces. Sixty-nine priests died at the hands of leftists, the majority in Vizcaya, while in Guipúzcoa, four clergy were killed. This was the consequence of the lesser influence of the CNT and the committed efforts of Basque nationalists, Republicans and moderate Socialists to prevent bloodshed. Churches were not attacked and religious practices continued without interruption. Nevertheless, right-wingers were in danger. In the industrial town of Rentería, near the provincial capital San Sebastián, the local Carlist leader was arrested and shot. The total number of deaths in Rentería was three. In Tolosa, in the south of the province, right-wingers involved in the military plot were shot and thirteen Carlists were taken to San Sebastián and executed. As in most places, revolutionary committees were established which arrested wealthy holidaymakers along with members of the local bourgeoisie. Moderate Socialists and Basque nationalists tried hard to ensure their safety. The starkest exception was the provincial capital, where 183 people were executed, more than half of the total of 343 people killed in Guipúzcoa while it was under Republican control.
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The most notorious incident concerned eighty-six rebel army officers and policemen arrested on 29 July and taken to the provincial assembly. The president of the Defence Junta of San Sebastián addressed a seething mob and announced that the prisoners would be properly tried with judicial guarantees. The War Councillor of the Junta, the local Communist leader Jesús Larrañaga, demanded summary ‘justice’, and Communist militants assaulted the assembly building and seized the leader of the coup, the Military Governor Colonel León Carrasco Amilibia. They were prevented from shooting him by the Catholic Manuel de Irujo, who was denounced by Larrañaga as a fascist. A second, successful attempt to seize Carrasco saw him murdered that night alongside a railway track. Larrañaga then issued the order for the execution of the prisoners in the provincial prison at Ondarreta beach. As well as the rebel officers, those named included policemen prominent in the repression of strikes in previous years. At dawn the next day, the prison was
assaulted. Despite the efforts of Catholic Basque nationalists and Socialists, forty-one rebel army officers and twelve of their civilian supporters were shot. The assassins included militiamen from Galicia thirsting for revenge for the repression unleashed in A Coruña and Ferrol.
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Already on 23 July, Carlist troops from Navarre had entered the southern part of Guipúzcoa. Although they encountered no resistance, in Cegama and Segura they sacked the headquarters of Republican parties and the Batzoki (centres) of the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party), whose militants were detained and mistreated. Some were shot and many more subjected to arbitrary fines.
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In early August, General Mola began a campaign to cut off the Basque Country from the French border. Thus under the Carlists Colonel José Solchaga Zala and Colonel Alfonso Beorleguí y Canet, commander of the Civil Guard in Navarre, large numbers of Requetés set off from Navarre towards Irún and San Sebastián. Beorleguí was a fearless but rather childlike giant. When his column was bombed, he simply opened his umbrella.
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Irún and Fuenterrabía were being shelled from the sea and attacked daily by German and Italian bombers. They dropped rebel pamphlets threatening to repeat what had been done in Badajoz. San Sebastián was also heavily shelled from the sea and eight civilian right-wingers and five army officers were executed in reprisal.
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Irún’s poorly armed and untrained militia defenders fought bravely but were overwhelmed on 3 September. Thousands of panic-stricken refugees fled across the international bridge from Irún across the River Bidasoa to France. The last defenders, largely anarchists enraged by their lack of ammunition, shot some rightist prisoners in Fuenterrabía and set parts of Irún on fire.
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The Basque Country, Santander and Asturias were now cut off from France as well as from the rest of Republican Spain. Rebel forces occupied San Sebastián on Sunday 13 September, too late to prevent the shooting of several right-wing prisoners, including the Carlist ideologue Víctor Pradera and his son Javier. It was the second provincial capital captured from the Republic by rebel troops, and by the end of September virtually all of Guipúzcoa was in Mola’s hands.
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A substantial number of the city’s 80,000 inhabitants had fled either towards Vizcaya or else by boat to France. Despite that exodus, the number of executions in San Sebastián would be the highest carried out by the rebels in any Basque city. Mass detentions began immediately, beginning with the wounded Republicans who could not be evacuated from the military hospital. Soon two prisons, at Ondarreta and Zapatari, the offices of the Falange,
the San José hospice and the Kursaal cinema were all bursting at the seams with detainees. There is considerable doubt regarding the exact number of executions in the immediate aftermath of the rebel occupation. It is impossible to reach figures for the extra-judicial
paseos
carried out by Requetés or Falangists. Between 1936 and 1943, a total of 485 people were executed as a result of pseudo-trials mounted by the army. Forty-seven of these were women, almost all members of the CNT. Accordingly, if
paseos
are included, according to the exhaustive researches of Pedro Barruso Barés and of Mikel Aizpuru and his team, the total number for the first months is likely to be well over six hundred.
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The most notorious executions by the rebels in Guipúzcoa were those of thirteen Basque priests, which were carried out at the behest of the Carlists. In mid-September, Manuel Fal Conde, the Carlist leader, protested to General Cabanellas, the President of the Burgos Junta, about the ‘feeble nature’ of the military repression in Guipúzcoa compared with that in the south, complaining: ‘this leniency is especially notable where the clergy is concerned. The military are afraid of falling foul of the Church.’ He repeated his complaints to Cardinal Isidro Gomá, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of All Spain, and to his deeply reactionary predecessor, the exiled Cardinal Pedro Segura. He urged the use of the rules of martial law to enable the execution of Basque nationalists, including priests. Since the usual practice of extra-judicial executions was inappropriate for priests, he suggested that problems with the Church be avoided by means of a simulacrum of military trial. For Fal Conde to assume that the Church hierarchy would give written approval for the execution of priests is an accurate reflection of the Carlist mentality.
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