Authors: Preston Paul
One of the most dramatic examples of the mistreatment of correspondents by the rebels was the case of Arthur Koestler. He had worked sporadically for the Comintern propaganda wizard Willy Münzenberg between 1934 and 1936. When the military coup took place in Spain, Koestler approached Münzenberg for help in getting into Spain to join the International Brigades. When Münzenberg realized that Koestler carried a Hungarian passport and a press card for the conservative Budapest newspaper
Pester Lloyd,
he suggested that he use this ‘semi-fascist’ credential to get into the rebel zone and collect information on German and Italian intervention on behalf of Franco. Proof of Nazi and Fascist contravention of the non-intervention policy of the British and French Governments would be an important propaganda coup. In fact, the Hungarian press card had little validity, having been given to Koestler by a friendly editor, to facilitate his life as an exile in Paris. Even though Münzenberg, Otto Katz and Koestler assumed that no one in Franco’s headquarters would bother to check, they did think that it was implausible that a small Hungarian newspaper would be able to afford a correspondent in Spain and so Katz arranged for him also to be accredited by the liberal London
News Chronicle.
En route to Seville, he stopped in Lisbon, where he discovered that his passport had expired. A visit to the Hungarian Consul, who was married to a fiercely right-wing Portuguese aristocrat, led to introductions to the local circle of Franco supporters who took him to be a fellow rightist. As a result, he left Lisbon with two documents that would secure him entry into the lair of the bloodthirsty viceroy of Andalusia, General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano – a letter of introduction from Franco’s unofficial ambassador in Lisbon, the leader of the Catholic CEDA party, José María Gil Robles, and a safe conduct signed by Franco’s brother Nicolás, which described Koestler as a ‘reliable friend of the National Revolution’.
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Koestler’s trip was proving a success in terms of being able to gather information damaging to the rebels. In Lisbon, he had found ample proof of official Portuguese support for Franco. In Seville, he saw numerous German airmen whose Spanish air force overalls carried a
small swastika in the middle of their pilot’s wings. More dramatically, he managed to get an exclusive interview with Queipo de Llano, who happily repeated the same sort of virulent sexism that littered his daily radio broadcasts:
For some ten minutes he described in a steady flood of words, which now and then became extremely racy, how the Marxists slit open the stomachs of pregnant women and speared the foetuses; how they had tied two eight-year-old girls on to their father’s knees, violated them, poured petrol on them and set them on fire. This went on and on, unceasingly, one story following another – a perfect clinical demonstration in sexual psychopathology.
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However, on his second day in Seville, Koestler was recognized in a hotel lounge by a German journalist who knew that he was a Communist and denounced him to the airmen present. Shortly afterwards, a German officer demanded to see his papers. In an effort to bluff his way out of accusations that he was a spy, he demanded loudly that they telephone Luis Bolín. At that moment, into the hotel lobby swept Bolín himself, the ‘tall, weak-faced, tough-acting officer of Scandinavian descent, who had already become famous for his rudeness to the foreign press’. When Koestler, still bluffing, demanded an apology from the German officer, a furious Bolín shouted brusquely that he was not interested in their silly quarrel. Koestler was able to use this to walk out of the hotel apparently ‘in a huff. He then left for Gibraltar as soon as he could. He learned later that a warrant for his arrest had been issued about an hour after his departure and that Bolín had been heard to swear that he would shoot Koestler ‘like a mad dog if he ever got hold of him’.
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Bolín’s determination to exact punishment on Koestler can only have been intensified by the publication on 1 September of his powerful account of rebel Seville, ruled over by a deranged Queipo de Llano and thronged with Nazi officers.
Unfortunately for Koestler, five months later, Bolín did get hold of him. Indeed, Bolín would gain a kind of international fame by dint of his arrest and mistreatment of Arthur Koestler shortly after the
Nationalist capture of Málaga in February 1937. In the intervening time, Koestler had been spending his time between London, Paris and Madrid working on pro-Republican propaganda with Münzenberg and Katz. In London and Paris, he worked for the Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Breaches of the Non-Intervention Agreement in Spain. Thought up by Willi Münzenberg, the commission was run by Otto Katz as a vehicle to campaign in favour of the Republic. By demonstrating the scale of Nazi and Fascist breaches of the non-intervention pact, it was hoped to demonstrate the absurdity of a British and French foreign policy that denied the Spanish Republic its rights in international law. In October 1936, Katz also arranged for him to receive an invitation from Julio Álvarez del Vayo to go to Madrid to search the papers of right-wing politicians who had fled, for material that would demonstrate that Nazi Germany had been involved in the preparation of the military coup. By the beginning of November, he felt that he had found as much material as he could and with the Franco forces apparently about to occupy the city, he was anxious to leave before Bolín arrived.
The suitcases of documents that he then took to Paris demonstrated a web of Nazi influence in the Spanish media, but provided no specific proof of involvement in the military coup. The material that he discovered was incorporated into the book produced by Otto Katz, with the title
The Nazi Conspiracy in Spain.
In Paris, Münzenberg persuaded Koestler to write a book on the origins of the Civil War, on the role of Hitler and Mussolini and the atrocities being committed by the rebels. Established in Otto Katz’s own apartment, Koestler wrote fast. His book, complete with horrific photographs, was published in January 1937 as
L’Espagne ensanglantée
in French and as
Menschenopfer Unerhört
in German. An abridged version would eventually appear in English as the first part of
Spanish Testament.
In his autobiography, written when he had become fiercely anti-Communist, he disowned the book as too propagandistic, yet subsequent research has substantiated all of the atrocity stories recounted there.
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Having finished the book, Koestler was then commissioned by Otto Katz and the Republican news agency, Agence Espagne, to cover the war on the southern front. On 15 January 1937, armed with credentials
from the
News Chronicle,
Koestler, accompanied by Willy Forrest, had gone to Valencia, where they had spent some time with Mikhail Koltsov. Nine days later, Koestler left Valencia en route to Málaga. When the beleagured city was occupied by rebel forces, he remained in the hope of getting a scoop by being able to witness and report on the expected massacre. He had become friendly with a retired English zoologist, Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, whose villa on the outskirts of the city was next to that of Luis Bolín’s uncle, Tomás, whose family he had sheltered. Despite that act of kindness to his uncle, Luis Bolín was determined to arrest Chalmers-Mitchell because on 22 October 1936,
The Times
had published a letter from him denouncing insurgent atrocities.
Rebel troops arrived at the house on 9 February accompanied by Bolín. He recognized Koestler and arrested him. So threatening was Bolín’s manner that Koestler believed that he would be shot there and then. He was taken to a place where men were being executed by a gleeful mob of rebel soldiers. He was then held for four days in the prison at Málaga before being transferred to the central prison in Seville, where he was kept in solitary confinement for three months. He owed his life to the fact that the British authorities had intervened to save Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, and this led Bolín to believe that Koestler also enjoyed powerful protection and that his execution would provoke an international incident. Nevertheless, in prison from 13 February to 14 May, Koestler’s nights were punctuated by the sound of prisoners being taken out and shot. Although he was not officially informed of the fact, he had been sentenced to death for espionage. Confined on death row, he counted ninety-five executions before he worked out a technique of sleeping through the crucial hours. On Thursday 15 April 1937, the occupants of the cells on both sides of his were taken and shot after the warder had mistakenly tried to open his door. At one point, he was visited by a delegation of Falangists, who informed him that he would be sentenced to death but could get that sentence reduced to life imprisonment if he made a statement in favour of General Franco. After some hesitation, he had refused.
Meanwhile, Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell had managed to reach England, where he informed the
News Chronicle
of Koestler’s plight. The news of his capture was printed by the paper on 15 February. A
campaign for his release was set in motion by Koestler’s wife Dorothy. With the assistance of Otto Katz, she managed to arrange a wave of newspaper articles, pleas to the Foreign Office to intervene and letters and telegrams of protest to Franco, some from Conservative MPs and clergymen. Winston Churchill wrote to the Foreign Office on Koestler’s behalf. H. G. Wells sent a cable to Franco pleading for clemency. Katz even organized, fruitlessly as it happened, a trip by the English journalist Shiela Grant Duff to Málaga to intervene on Koestler’s behalf. The British Consul advised her to forget about helping Koestler, pointing out that to raise questions about him would do him no good at all and bring considerable harm to her. Mikhail Koltsov commented to Gustav Regler: ‘We know where he is. We’ve been shaking up the British Labour Party and the Foreign Office. The wires have been burning since yesterday. He’s being looked after. We’re the only people who can do that, you know – stir up the whole world on behalf of a single man. And the same time no one knows that we’re at the back of it. That’s something else only we can do.’ Regarding the international campaign, both Koestler and Regler later reflected on the contradiction that similar campaigns were not mounted in favour of the old Bolsheviks being immolated in the purges in Moscow.
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The Minister of Foreign Affairs in Negrín’s new government, Professor José Giral, took a particular interest in the case and made it possible for Dr Marcel Junod of the International Red Cross finally to arrange an exchange of Koestler for the beautiful wife of the rebel air ace, Captain Carlos Haya. The lady in question was not in prison but merely under surveillance in the Hotel Inglés in Valencia.
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Six weeks after their triumph at Málaga, the rebels suffered the humiliating defeat of Guadalajara and made every attempt to keep news coverage to a minimum. Aware of what happened to journalists considered to be unfriendly, many correspondents tried to evade the censorship by ensuring that their papers did not use their by-line. After the news arrived of the Italian rout at Guadalajara, the Australian Noel Monks had driven to the French border and telephoned the story, insisting that his name be omitted. Unfortunately, the article appeared under his name. He was arrested in Seville, where Franco happened to be visiting, accompanied by Bolín. In his clipped Oxford English, a
furious Bolín threatened Monks: ‘You’ve put your foot in it now, Monks. Evading censorship is equivalent to spying and spies get short shrift in this country.’ With Bolín ranting ‘Shooting is too good for you journalists’, Monks was taken before Franco himself. The paunchy rebel leader, ‘the most unmilitary figure I have ever seen’, glared at Monks with hard eyes and banged his fist on the table while repeating in Spanish that Monks was to be shot. When Bolín announced that he was to be taken before a firing squad, Monks protested: ‘You can’t shoot me. I’m British.’ The remark provoked hoots of laughter from Franco when Bolín translated for him. In the event, Monks was expelled from Nationalist Spain for the sin of mentioning the presence of Italian and German forces and thereby refusing to be ‘a party to Franco’s hoodwinking the world into believing that his revolt against the democratic Government of Spain was an all-Spanish affair, opposed to a gang of Moscow-led thugs’. The deeply Catholic Monks felt relief when he left: ‘My six months in Franco Spain deeply shocked my religious sensibilities. And they were to receive further shocks when I went to Government Spain, but for totally different reasons.’ As he commented sadly when he left Spain for the last time: ‘one thing my assignment in Madrid taught me was that Republican Spain had the greatest cause of all – freedom. I suffered no religious restrictions in Madrid, and went to Mass as I willed.’
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During the latter stages of the march on Madrid of Franco’s African columns, a press office had been set up at Talavera de la Reina shortly after its occupation on 3 September. The bureau was run by an aristocratic playboy, Pablo Merry del Val, who had been briefly the Paris correspondent of
El Debate
and was also a member of the Falange. He had been educated at Stonyhurst, the elite Jesuit school in north-west England, while his father had been Ambassador in London. Accordingly, he spoke fluent, aristocratic English. Peter Kemp, one of the few English volunteers for Franco, admired Merry del Val. He described him as still retaining
the austere manner and appearance of a Sixth Form prefect confronted by a delinquent from the Lower Fourth; he became a very good friend of mine, and I am indebted to him for a great
deal of kindness, but I always had the feeling that at any moment he might tell me to bend over and take six of the best.
Alan Dick, of the
Daily Telegraph,
met Merry del Val in Salamanca in the summer of 1937 and described him in similar but less benevolent terms:
He was sleek and black, and very English in manner and speech. In fact, I was told that he was unpopular in some quarters because he spoke broken Spanish. Not even Spain at war could crack the hard veneer of English public school and university. Outwardly he was the complete Spanish aristocrat. A stiff red Requeté beret – insignia of the Royalists of Navarre – sat like a pancake on his small oiled head. His lean face rarely abandoned its expression of tolerant hauteur. His voice was clipped and precise.