Authors: Preston Paul
It was during this visit to Spain that Fischer persuaded Negrín to visit the International Brigade hospital at Benicasim. Accompanied by Otto Katz, Fischer took him around the hospital where, among the wounded, they met the commander of the British battalion, the veteran Tom Wintringham.
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It is reasonable to suppose that Katz had come to Valencia so that the three of them could discuss Fischer’s report on the propaganda deficit. Fischer’s work on behalf of Negrín was considerable. As he put it: ‘there was never any appointment – there wasn’t any designation or elevation to some rank or anything like that’. Nevertheless, his collaboration included joining Negrín on his trips to international conferences, helping with the Republic’s press services and liaising with the International Brigades. In mid-March 1938, he was with Negrín when the Republican prime minister visited Paris incognito to try to talk Léon Blum into sending more aid to the Republic. To the deep frustration of both Negrín and Fischer, Blum provided nothing more than a litany of excuses.
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Fischer’s most passionate efforts went into trying to alert public opinion in the democracies to the absurdity of their governments’ policies of appeasement. Three weeks after the October 1937 visit to Negrín, Fischer went to Paris, where he attended a dinner with – among other prominent diplomats and politicians – the Spanish and Russian Ambassadors Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo and Jacob Suritz, and Joseph Paul-Boncour,
the former French premier. He then moved on to London carrying a card from Negrín to the Labour leader Clement Attlee. In Negrín’s name, he invited him to visit the Spanish Republic. He wrote to Otto Katz to say that he had secured the definite assurance of Attlee, the MPs Ellen Wilkinson and Philip Noel Baker and Attlee’s secretary that they would go to Spain on 2 December. As he proudly told Katz, he was extremely busy seeing influential people. The long list included the Duchess of Atholl; Sir Archibald Sinclair, later Minister of Aviation during the Second World War; Sir Stafford Cripps; David Lloyd George; the strategist Basil Liddell Hart; and the Spanish and Russian Ambassadors, Pablo de Azcárate and Ivan Maisky.
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He returned briefly to Barcelona for the first half of December before moving on to the United States. There, he gave lectures, wrote articles and talked to senators and congressmen in an effort to get the American arms embargo lifted. At the end of January 1938, Fischer cabled Otto Katz from New York, asking him to find out if it would be possible to persuade Lloyd George and the Dean of Canterbury to go to Washington for a dinner arranged for them by about one hundred members of Congress at the end of February or the beginning of March. On 24 February, he visited Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House. He received lots of sympathetic hearings but it was all to no avail.
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It was not until mid-March that he returned to Paris, where he was when he heard news that Barcelona was suffering round-the-clock pounding from Italian bombers. He hastened south and reached scenes of appalling carnage. He was arrested for taking photographs, although Constancia de la Mora secured his release.
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After the recapture of Teruel by the Francoists, the rebels had launched a massive offensive through Aragón and Castellón towards the Mediterranean. In the last week of March, they crossed the Ebro into the province of Lérida. Fischer wrote from Barcelona:
Two hundred planes can make all the difference between a fascist and a democratic Spain, between an encircled and a protected France, between a menaced and a secure position in the Western Mediterranean for the British Empire, between a threatened and a safe Czechoslovakia, between an encouraged
and a checked international fascism, between a black and a brighter Europe. But in the whole of the democratic world there are not two hundred airplanes for a cash buyer who wishes to safeguard his hearth and home and national territory against invasion. In the case of America it is a stupid law which robs the Spanish government of the wherewithal to defend itself; in the case of England it is blindness; in the case of France it is cowardice.
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The mixture of acute observation and passion was typical.
As the struggle went on, Fischer never lost heart. Nor did he hesitate to make his views known to cabinet ministers. One year after his first comment to a minister in Valencia on the subject of young, able-bodied non-combatants, he was still pressing his views on the same theme. In mid-April 1938, he referred to recent conversations in Barcelona with five ministers of the recently reshuffled Negrín government. A topic of conversation was that ‘human reserves have scarcely been tapped (too many civilians are still on the streets), and if there is time to train them there will be no shortage of soldiers’.
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A week later, he travelled through Catalonia and was struck by the privations of refugees. He was even more taken aback by the fact that, at El Vendrell, twenty-five kilometres north of Tarragona, he found the shops well stocked. The availability of clothes, toilet paper, soap, torches, radios, stationery and a host of goods long since disappeared from the shelves elsewhere : ‘All this bespeaks reserves of material and the normal organization of life – in other words, a vast capacity for further resistance.’
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It had led him back to his ongoing concern with resistance, regarding which he was entirely identified with Negrín’s policy. The lack of restraint with which Fischer expressed his opinions to ministers may, as to some extent was the case with Koltsov, be merely a symptom of his combination of intelligence and impetuousness.
Within a month of his conversations with the members of Negrín’s cabinet, he had travelled to Moscow for what would be his last trip to the Soviet Union until 1956. He arrived shortly after the trial and condemnation of Nikolai Bukharin, Alexis Rykov and a number of prominent Bolsheviks. Markoosha listed all of those they knew who
had disappeared or been shot. Ostracized by virtually all of his erstwhile friends, terrified of being seen to have links with a foreigner, he received only a last visit from Koltsov, who was thirsting for news about how the Spanish Republic was holding out. Louis announced to Markoosha that he would not be returning to the Soviet Union because he could not bring himself to write favourably about what was happening and he would not be allowed to criticize it. Markoosha felt even more strongly than he did: ‘Women, culture, literature, people’s feelings, personal dignity were offended every day, and these, as she used to tell me when I was carried away by the success of the Five Year Plans, were more important to her than increased steel and coal production or even the construction of new cities.’
Louis had combated his doubts until now, reluctant to throw away the hopes for Russia that he had nurtured for fifteen years and because Russia was helping the Spanish Republic:
At the front, on airfields, in hospitals, staff headquarters, and private apartments I met many of the Soviet Russians who had been sent to do their best for the Loyalists. In all the Spanish war, there were no harder workers, more valiant fighters, and more devoted partisans. They seemed to pour into the Spanish struggle the pent-up revolutionary passion which no longer found application in Russia.
He did not break openly with the Russians for fear of losing his family and of losing the ability to go on working with the Republican Government. Given the strength of the Spanish Communist Party, he feared that there would be obstacles placed in his way in Spain if he were to become
persona non grata
to the Soviets: ‘I therefore limited myself to talking to Loyalist Prime Minister Negrín and a few of his close collaborators about the true horror of Russia and warning them against a dictatorship in Spain.’
The last straw was the fact that among the disappeared were men that he had known in Spain, Generals Gorev and his immediate superior General Jan Berzin, alias ‘Grishin’, the trade representative Artur Stashevsky, the first Ambassador Marcel Rosenberg and the Soviet
representative in Catalonia, Vladimir Antonov Ovseyenko. Finally, he was ready for the break, but getting his family out would not be easy, since Markoosha was a Soviet citizen and their two sons, although American citizens, had been born in Russia. He wrote to the head of the NKVD, Yagoda, requesting the necessary documents, but was ignored. Six months passed and he asked Litvinov for help. He said he could do nothing and urged Fischer to write to Stalin. He did so in November 1938, but again received no reply. In desperation, on 3 January 1939, he asked Eleanor Roosevelt for an appointment. She saw him three days later. As a result of her intervention, passports for Markoosha, George and Victory Fischer to leave Russia appeared on 21 January.
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At the beginning of July 1938, Fischer was invited to England for a meeting with David Lloyd George, who sympathized with the Spanish Republic. On 12 July, he addressed a meeting at the House of Commons attended by seventy-two MPs. By the next day, Fischer was back in Paris, writing optimistically of the Spanish Republic’s ability to fight on.
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In August, he returned to Spain and visited the Ebro front. He interviewed Lieutenant Colonel Juan Modesto, the commander of the Army of the Ebro, the handsome Communist who had been challenged by Hemingway to a duel for flirting with Martha Gellhorn. En route back to Barcelona, the car in which he was travelling with Henry Buckley, Herbert Matthews and another correspondent was strafed and bombed by a rebel aircraft. On his return to Barcelona, he had lunch with Negrín. He continued to advocate the resistance policy of Negrín and del Vayo as against the inclination of Azaña and Prieto to contemplate – in vain – the prospect of a negotiated peace.
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On 28 November 1938, as the inexorable advance of Franco’s forces spelt the end for the Republic, Fischer’s optimism was replaced by a blazing indignation. He wrote a passionate account of the gruesome effects of rebel bombing raids, stressing the precision with which civilian areas in Barcelona were being targeted. It was published in Britain on 10 December and in the United States on Christmas Eve.
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During this visit to Barcelona, Fischer met up with Luis Araquistain and his wife Trudi, who would not talk to her sister Luisi, because of the intense hostility between their husbands. It is a tribute to Fischer’s amiability that he managed to remain good friends with both sides and served as
a conduit for family news between them. Not entirely seriously, Luis and Trudi used to blame Fischer for the overthrow of Largo Caballero in May 1937, as a result of which Araquistain had resigned as Spanish Ambassador in Paris. He commented:
Because of my access to key-men in Spain and Moscow, people attributed to me powers and designs which I did not have. My contacts enriched my life. I cultivated those contacts zealously and refrained from spoiling them by indiscretions or boasts. My experience with men of stature helped me grow and I look back on them with great pleasure and gratitude. I think I enjoyed the confidence of Communists, non-Communists, and anti-Communists because I resisted party clichés and narrow loyalties. There is nothing heavier than a party card and I never carried one.
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From early 1938 onwards, along with Ernest Hemingway and the correspondents John Whitaker and Edgar Mowrer, Fischer was involved in efforts to repatriate American volunteers from the International Brigades. Fischer had secured large sums from the Republican Government to pay for American volunteers to return home. However, he declared later:
By this time, there were wounded Americans and others who for various reasons wanted to go home, and Negrín, who was by this time Prime Minister and had a million things to do, was in no position to check on whether money should be paid out to this American or to that American, or to this American group or to that American group. He asked me if I would act as his intermediary with the Americans of the International Brigade.
When American Brigaders were to be repatriated, Fischer would draw on funds from the Negrín government’s financial representative in Paris.
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An indication of the authority wielded by Fischer can be found in a telegram among his papers to David McKelvey White, the secretary
of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in New York. White had issued a fund-raising pamphlet calling for donations towards the $125 needed to bring home each veteran. Fischer imperiously ordered White to desist from campaigning to raise money because it was damaging the Republic’s reputation. Indeed, several of those involved in the process were under the impression that Fischer was more interested in getting new volunteers in than wounded volunteers out, although he vehemently denied this when it was suggested by the American Ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt.
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Like Negrín, Fischer entered 1939 still believing that the Republic could hold out until the democracies came to their senses. Both believed that Franco’s threats of vengeance would keep the Republican population fighting. The Caudillo had declared, on 7 November, to the vice-president of the United Press, James Miller, that he had the names of two million Republicans scheduled for execution.
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Franco’s rejection of any possibility of an amnesty for the Republicans and his loudly announced commitment to a policy of institutionalized revenge meant, according to Fischer, that for much of the population in Loyalist Spain, ‘they have nothing to lose but the rope or a prison sentence. Better to fight.’ He contrasted this with Negrín’s announcement that the Republic would declare a complete amnesty and renounce vengeance.
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On 4 March 1939, Colonel Segismundo Casado, commander of the Republican Army of the Centre, staged a military coup against Negrín in the hope of ending the slaughter, a hope based on the erroneous belief that his contacts in Burgos would facilitate peace negotiations with Franco. When Casado thereby played into Franco’s hands and brought Republican resistance to an end, Fischer wrote a typically perceptive and prophetic article. He pointed out that, if the Republic had been dominated by the Communists, it would have been impossible for Casado to have been successful. He explained the Casado phenomenon in terms of defeatism and war-weariness: ‘The longer the war lasted, the more some Loyalists despaired of a successful conclusion; therefore they abhorred the Communists, who had faith and tenacity.’ He ended his article sadly anticipating exactly what would happen among the about-to-be exiled Republicans: