The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain

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Niccolo and Donkey Monday 16 Apr 2012

The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain

The New Republic

Timothy Snyder

March 29, 2012




The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain
By Paul Preston
(W.W. Norton, 700 pp., $35)


The young Jesuit was an idealist. A slim and bespectacled student of philosophy, Father Fernando Huidobro Polanco dreamed of the redemption of Spain from the evils of its secular, redistributive Republic. A supporter of the military coup by nationalist generals in July 1936, he discounted stories of mass murder of Spanish civilians by the rebels. But knowing that war tries the conscience, he nevertheless wanted to offer pastoral care to the rebel soldiers. When he arrived on the battlefield as a Roman Catholic chaplain that September, he was confronted by two surprising realities. First, many of the soldiers fighting under the banner of Spanish nationalism against the Republic were Muslims, mercenaries from Spanish Morocco. Second, Christian soldiers were little interested in the application of ethics to their deeds. Father Fernando quickly realized that he had been wrong about the honorable behavior of the rebels. The war that he saw, as he courageously wrote to the rebel commander General Francisco Franco, was “without prisoners or wounded,” because they were murdered by nationalist soldiers, along with civilians seen as supporters of the Republic. In April 1937, as Paul Preston records in this breathtaking history, Father Fernando was shot in the back by his own men.

This is but one of the two hundred thousand or so murders of the Spanish Civil War, many of which Preston records at this or greater level of detail. His book is macro-history by way of micro-history, assembling local stories into an overwhelming panorama of a tortured Spain. Reading this study is like running your palms along the walls of the Toledo Cathedral on a dark night, slowly acquiring painful impressions until a sense of dark structure emerges. You have the sense, though Preston never quite raises the issue directly, that something must have been amiss in the Roman Catholic Church. Somewhere beneath his account of sins by Roman Catholics against Roman Catholics, underground like the remains of a mosque beneath an Iberian cathedral, is a further history of colonized Muslims.

What Preston knows about the years of civil war, 1936–1939, is astounding, bespeaking his own formidable record as a historian of twentieth-century Spain, but also the work of Spanish historians who are restoring knowledge of a period that had been protected by a double taboo. After Franco’s victory and the destruction of the Republic in 1939, his dictatorship taught its own self-justifying history for two generations; and after his death in 1975 and the general amnesty of 1977, a consensus prevailed in newly democratic Spain that it was best to delay a historical reckoning until democracy seemed solidly rooted. But that moment finally arrived, and Preston’s work is a powerful intervention in a Spanish discussion. Its significance transcends the events it brings to light, and suggests some basic re-evaluations of recent European history (if not the one suggested by its title).

PRESTON BEGINS by showing us just what class war, that bogey of American political rhetoric, actually looks like. The lesson of interwar Europe is that there is no political magic in the untamed marketplace. From Poland’s Galicia in the east to Spain’s Galicia in the west, conditions of radical inequality conspired with weak state institutions to turn the energy of capitalism against democracy by generating support for the far Left and the far Right, especially during the Great Depression. In what were still predominantly agrarian societies, only land reform might have taught peasant majorities that they had something to gain from voting and paying taxes. Without it, peasants would support anarchists or communists who promised them relief from the state’s apparently senseless demands, while landholders consolidated their economic power in an antidemocratic reaction. In Spain, the rich sought and found ideologies to mask their interests and champions to protect them. In the 1920s, the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera reassured the owners of estates by condemning reformers as alien to the nation. In his view, anyone who supported any sort of change in the countryside was a communist, and communists were not proper Spaniards.

Under Primo de Rivera, Spanish landholders gained a secure sense of their position in the world, Spanish priests maintained their place as caretakers of the rural status quo, and Spanish officers experienced “vertiginous” promotions during the colonial wars, across the Mediterranean, against Moroccan rebels. To an extent that can only seem shocking, but is impressively documented by Preston, all three groups learned to see challenges to the inequitable and authoritarian status quo of the 1920s as a matter of racial penetration by an alien Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy. Such conspiracy theories were put forth with the greatest extravagance by Spanish fascists (one organization was founded by Rivera’s children), but they seem to have acquired the status of common sense within much of the Right.

And so the Republic itself, when it was re-established in 1931, was bound to provoke determined and articulate resistance. Its new constitution propagated a secular state, which angered the priesthood and the conservatives. The first government purged the officer corps, demoting many officers who had been promoted for their deeds in Morocco. But more infuriating still, it concerned itself with the fate of the peasantry, rather than leaving them under the authority of local notables.
In 1933, the Spanish Right returned to power, despite losing the popular vote, thanks to a quirk in the electoral law. This was just in time to roll back redistributive policies during the worst of the Great Depression. The great landholders of the Spanish south reinstated what Preston calls “semi-feudal” relations, radicalizing not only peasants but also the young generation of socialists and liberals. When miners went on strike in the Asturia region in October 1934, the right-wing government called in the army. Franco presented the striking Spanish miners as a kind of foreign enemy inspired by Moscow, and his troops punished them as they had rebellious Moroccan tribesmen. The working-class districts of cities were bombed and shelled, just as Moroccan villages had been. This was a foretaste, Preston plausibly suggests, of how Franco’s African Army would behave during the civil war. The months following the suppression of the miners’ strike saw first drought and then deluge, ruining the harvests and immiserating the Spanish countryside. “The scale of hunger in rural Spain in 1936,” writes Preston, “is almost unimaginable today.” It is unimaginable in part because we cannot imagine hunger at all, let alone the constant threat of food shortages that once made fertile soil central to local, national, and international politics. Preston works hard to help us grasp the perspective of hungry peasants prevented from tilling fields held in reserve for polo ponies or fighting bulls.

IN FEBRUARY 1936, the Left and center won a majority in parliament, and over the next months a group of generals responded by plotting a military coup against the Republic. The coup was less a tight conspiracy than a plot for a broad insurrection. The leader of the main right-wing party, CEDA, was aware of the plans to destroy the Republic, and did everything in his power to aid them by disrupting the work of parliament. Meanwhile, fascists provoked violence in the streets to create the impression that a strong hand was needed. The new government formed after the February 1936 elections was provocative to the Right by its very existence, but it was too timid for the radical Left. It declined to move against the conspirators when apprised of their identities, and socialists refused to join the government to form what would have been a stronger coalition. Peasants took the formation of a new government as a signal that they could begin to plow fallow land that did not belong to them. Workers went on strike in the hope of better wage agreements. Anarchists hoped to push the unrest forward to a full revolution. They refused all cooperation with the Republic, which they, like the Right, saw as illegitimate. Anarchists figure as the proximate political idiots of this history, indirectly aiding the Right by making the Republic seem weak and untenable.

A republic, Preston’s introductory chapters remind us, can be overturned by class war from the Right. Franco’s goal, and that of the rebellion of 1936 generally, was “to ensure that establishment interests could never again be challenged as they had been from 1931 to 1936 by the democratic reforms of the Second Republic.” But most Spaniards probably approved those policies, and the going was not smooth for the nationalist rebels. Local officers did not always join the coup; some provinces defended themselves; the big cities wanted the Republic. But Franco sought a long war, which he understood as a chance for the “redemption” of Spanish society through the blood of the Spaniards he regarded as enemies. A longer campaign created the possibility of physically eliminating the groups seen as the bastions of the Republic.

Since there were precious few Jews, Masons, or Bolsheviks in Spain, the notion of their conspiracy was an infinitely flexible one, applied simply to everyone who had supported the legal political order of the Republic. They were to be eliminated according to a “prior plan of systematic mass murder.” Preston calls this an “investment in terror”: mass killing was not only a way to win a civil war, but also to prepare for the dictatorship to follow. Franco’s idea of a “redemption” of the population through blood had a particular application to women, as Preston carefully chronicles. In the natural order of things, women were subordinate. Young peasant women were supposed to be content with prostituting themselves, quite literally, to inheritors of landed wealth. Women who were free to decide for themselves about their sexual life became, as the Right saw matters, politically perverted supporters of the Republic. Thus “redemption” for them meant rape before murder, a double assertion of power.

Franco and his allies also railed on about the “Africanization” of public life. They equated the Republic’s attempts to aid the peasantry with the barbarism they believed they were fighting in Africa, and presented Spanish peasants as racial inferiors comparable to Moroccan tribesmen. This revival of the second specter haunting Spanish nationality, the inferior Moor along with the conspiring Jew, carried with it an eerie irony. Franco’s African Army itself brought the practices of colonialism to Spanish shores. Officers and men boasted that they treated conquered Spanish towns like they treated Moroccan ones. They killed the wounded and the prisoners and the local elites for the same reasons they had in Africa, so as not to leave any possibility for resistance in the rear, and to intimidate the surrounding countryside.

During the civil war of 1936 to 1939, the Spanish Foreign Legion and the Regulares , fighting for the nationalist side, mutilated corpses, massacred prisoners, and raped working-class women. The Foreign Legion, despite the name, was composed mainly of Spaniards, with a few Cubans and other Latin Americans. The Regulares , again despite the name, were Muslim troops recruited in Morocco, and promised pillage in Spain. Preston is as restrained as he can be in the presentation of the regular gang rape of Spanish women by Muslim mercenaries under the command of Spanish nationalists. This was part and parcel of Franco’s policy.

IT IS HARD TO overstate Preston’s close familiarity with the individual atrocities he documents, one after the other. Early-morning executions in Pamplona attracted large crowds, and with them sellers of hot chocolate. Expectant mothers in the maternity ward in Toledo were taken away and shot. The progressive mayor of Uncastillo was humiliated, tortured, and executed; his corpse was dismembered by an ax. A Republican pilot who crash-landed was murdered, his body cut into pieces, the pieces placed in a box, and the box dropped by parachute over Madrid with a threatening note. Landowners who joined the rebellion also joined in its violence. Their sons would force peasants to dig their own graves before shooting them, laughingly referring to this as “land reform.” Some young señoritos hunted for peasants on their polo ponies. One landowner killed ten peasants for every fighting bull of his that the local population had taken and eaten.

The historical challenge that this book presents for the Roman Catholic Church is considerable. Although some priests sought to prevent violence or shelter those who were under threat, more seemed to have supported the rebellion, and even joined its fighting columns. Some adopted fascist salutes and took direct part in the killing. One priest shot a man who was seeking shelter in a confessional.

Preston is concerned to show that violence from the Right was on a greater scale than violence from the Left during the Spanish Civil War. Contemporary accounts of atrocities came from Madrid, the Republican capital, where reporters and ambassadors could observe and criticize the actions of the Republic but not those of the rebels—with certain exceptions, such as that airdropped corpse. Preston reminds us that prevailing opinion in the British establishment (Churchill was a good example) held at the time that right-wing killings were relatively insignificant. But with the help of massive documentation recently published by Spanish historians, Preston shows that roughly 150,000 Spaniards were murdered on territories controlled by the rebel nationalists, compared with about 50,000 in the Republican zones.

He is also concerned to demonstrate a few differences in the intentions and motivations. The Republic was a state, concerned with the rule of law. After the disruption of law caused by the coup, all of the left-wing parties—socialists, communists, Trotskyites, anarchists—created their own checas (a Soviet term), hit squads to eliminate internal enemies. But the government itself supported the people’s tribunals that replaced the murder units. As the war proceeded, ever fewer people were murdered by the Republican side. The greatest single massacre by the Republican side was of some two thousand prisoners in Madrid as Franco’s forces were approaching the city. This was a terrible atrocity, but it points up a basic difference: Franco’s forces did not usually even take prisoners. The socialist politician Indalecio Prieto gave an eloquent speech in August 1936 urging defenders of the Republic not to murder their enemies, despite the practices of the nationalist rebels: “Do not imitate them! Do not imitate them! Be better than them in your moral conduct!” Though he was not always heeded, he was right to ask in exile if anyone on the other side had issued a similar call for mercy.

The most violent political force in the Republican zone were the anarchists, who fought against Franco but also opposed the Republic. Beyond the reach of the government, and bountifully armed, they were all but impossible to control. They ran the most murderous of the checas , including one squad that decorated their murder van with skulls and their uniforms with death’s heads. They burned corpses to avoid investigation and identification; they burned churches and convents on principle. They saw civil strife as the prelude to a revolution that would overpower not just the Right but all those who upheld the state, including the socialists and the communists. They tried to collectivize agriculture, sometimes forcing peasants who had just gained land from landlords to cede it to a collective farm. They and the Spanish communists killed each other in significant numbers, over real differences in doctrine and practice. The anarchists wanted immediate and radical transformation; the communists wanted stability to build a government that would attend to the desires of Moscow. The anarchists, quite correctly, believed that Spanish communism was a front for the interests of Soviet foreign policy. The communists, quite correctly, believed that the anarchists’ carefree recruitment policies allowed many traitors access to the institutions of the Republic.

Whereas the anarchists had much local support in Spain, the communists relied on a powerful foreign backer, the Soviet Union. (The intensity of Soviet interest in Spain is one subject of Terror und Traum, Karl Schlögel’s wonderful history of Moscow in these years.) When the Spanish state did achieve a measure of stability during the civil war, it was thanks to the Soviet aid that began to arrive in autumn 1936. But support came at a price: the endorsement of the Soviet interpretation of the conflict, and the concomitant repression of those Spaniards whom the Soviets defined as enemies.

Niccolo and Donkey Sunday 7 May 2017

George Orwell’s Spanish civil war memoir is a classic, but is it bad history?

The author of ‘Homage to Catalonia’ did not grasp the wider context and provided a partial, partisan version





The Poum militia in Barcelona 1936 with Orwell in the background; he describes several days and nights spent defending its headquarters from the roof of the nearby Poliorama theatre in 1937. Photograph: Getty Images



Paul Preston

Sunday 7 May 2017 00.04 BST

Unleashed on 17 July 1936 by a military coup against the democratically elected government of the Second Republic, the Spanish civil war was a rehearsal for the second world war. The British, French and American governments stood aside and permitted General Francisco Franco, with the substantial aid of Hitler and Mussolini, to defeat the republic. To this day, the war is remembered by many as “the last great cause”, the war of the volunteers of the International Brigades , of the bombing of Guernica and of the mini-civil war within the civil war fought in Barcelona as CNT anarchists and the Poum’s quasi-Trotskyists battled forces of the Catalan government, the Generalitat, backed by the communists of the PSUC.

Eighty years ago this week, the Ramblas of Barcelona echoed with gunfire. Much of what happened on the streets during the May days is well known thanks to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia , but not why it happened. Herbert Matthews, the great New York Times correspondent, summed up the consequent problem: “The book did more to blacken the loyalist cause than any work written by enemies of the Second Republic.” This is unfortunate since, for many thousands of people, Homage to Catalonia is the only book on the Spanish civil war that they will ever read.

An eyewitness account of two fragments of the war, the book presents two priceless pieces of reportage: the first a vivid account of the experiences of a militiaman on “a quiet sector of a quiet front” in Aragón, evoking the fear, the cold and, above all, the squalor, excrement and lice of the rat-infested trenches; the second a vibrant description of several days and nights spent on the roof terrace of the Poliorama theatre in the Ramblas while defending the Poum HQ across the street. Orwell’s account of the poisonous atmosphere in Barcelona during and after the May days of 1937 is invaluable, but marred by its assumption that the Stalinist suffocation of the revolution would lead to Franco’s eventual victory.

Homage to Catalonia belongs in any list of important books on the Spanish civil war. It has informed opinion in the English-speaking world about the war – providing the inspiration, for instance, for Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom . However, limited to the time and place of Orwell’s presence in Spain, it would certainly not be there as a reliable analysis of the broader politics of the war, particularly of its international determinants. He clearly knew nothing of its origins or of the social crisis behind the Barcelona clashes. In none of his writings does he mention having any prior acquaintance with Spain or ever reading a book in Spanish about the war or anything else. Orwell himself acknowledged “my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events”.

Amendments to what he had written in Homage to Catalonia were reflected in his writings after later conversations in London with the exiled Spanish republican prime minister, Dr Juan Negrín . In answer to his questions about the wider issues of the civil war, Negrín explained why the republic had been forced to turn to the Soviet Union as the only great power prepared to sell weaponry. He also outlined the problems of trying to fight a war while dealing with “the motley conglomerate of incompatible parties, labour unions and dissident groups, and also the frequently self-appointed, largely unconstitutional, local and regional ‘governments’”. Negrín concluded that Orwell was “idealistic and weltfremd [unworldly]”.

Perhaps he was not so unworldly. He had introduced himself to Negrín only as “an editorialist of the Observer ” without mentioning his links with the Poum. Maybe he was uncomfortable with the association. He wrote to a friend in December 1938: “I’ve given a more sympathetic account of the Poum ‘line’ than I actually felt … because it has had no hearing in the capitalist press and nothing but libels in the leftwing press.” That spirit of fair play led to Orwell brushing over the Poum’s undermining of the republic. It seems irresponsible, given that he admitted that, prior to the May events, he was trying to transfer from the Poum to the International Brigades. That meant that he sympathised with the view of socialists, liberal republicans and communists that an effective war effort required state control of the economy and the mass mobilisation of a modern army.

He was in the Poum only because he had been rejected by Harry Pollitt, the secretary-general of the British Communist party. So he arrived in Barcelona with Independent Labour party credentials. Taken to the Poum’s Lenin barracks in the Gran Vía, he was welcomed because of his literary celebrity. Orwell was not popular among fellow British militiamen, who, like Pollitt, resented his “cut-glass Eton accent”. One said he disliked the “supercilious bastard” on sight: “He really didn’t like the workers.” He had been exhilarated to find “a town where the working class was in the saddle”, but the collectivist experiments of autumn 1936 had not created a war machine. The May events were about removing revolutionary obstacles to the war’s efficient conduct. He acknowledged this in his 1942 essay Looking Back on the Spanish War: “The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalise factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestos would not have made the armies more efficient. The fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn’t.”

However, in his book he expressed pro-revolutionary views based on ignorance of the damaging impact on the republic’s international image of the atrocities committed against priests, landowners and merchants in Lérida by the Poum and in eastern Aragón by anarchist columns from Barcelona. For instance, he completely misunderstood the notorious case of Antonio Martín Escudero, an anarchist smuggler who controlled the area of the French-Catalan Pyrenean frontier known as La Cerdanya. There, he and his group carried out acts of banditry, atrocities against the clergy and the extortion of people crossing into France. At the end of April, he was killed at the small town of Bellver in a clash with local people determined to end his reign of terror. Orwell accepts the anarchist version that portrayed Martín as a martyr murdered by forces of the Generalitat.

In Barcelona, social and political hostilities had been mounting for some months. The tension that Orwell encountered when he arrived in April was not the result of communist malevolence but of economic and social distress. The Catalan population had been swollen by the arrival of 300,000 refugees. The strain of housing and feeding a 40% increase in Barcelona’s population had embittered existing conflicts. Until December 1936, when the CNT had controlled the supply ministry, the anarchist solution had been to requisition food in the countrysid. As farmers hoarded stocks to sell on the black market, this provoked shortages and inflation. Then the PSUC took over the supply portfolio and implemented a more market-based approach. This infuriated the anarchists but did not solve the problem. There were bread riots in Barcelona, and armed clashes for control of food stores between anarchists and the PSUC.

That conflict was just one aspect of a much more serious one. The Poum’s call for a revolutionary workers’ front with the CNT was debilitating the war effort. Moreover, the Poum’s entirely justified public criticisms of the Moscow trials were seen as treacherously undermining the republic’s relationship with its only powerful ally. To secure Russian arms deliveries, the Poum leader, Andreu Nin, was removed in a cabinet reshuffle on 16 December. However, hostility to the anti-Stalinist left was not just about pandering to the Russians. Many Catalan anarchists were not committed to the war effort. In mid-March, several hundred anarchists who had opposed the militarisation of the militias abandoned the front and took their weapons to the Catalan capital. The revolutionaries had 60,000 rifles in Barcelona. They refused either to give them up or to go to the front themselves to fight. It was only a matter of time before outright conflict would break out. Orwell, given his lowly position in a Poum militia, saw none of this.

As clashes grew more violent in Barcelona, the Generalitat prohibited the traditional May Day rallies, which was perceived as a provocation by the CNT rank and file. In early May the crisis exploded. The immediate catalyst was the Generalitat’s seizure of the CNT-controlled central telephone exchange in Barcelona on 3 May after an anarchist operator had interrupted a telephone call by the president of the republic, Manuel Azaña. In the wake of deteriorating conditions and police heavy-handedness, elements of the CNT – supported by the Poum – confronted the forces of the Generalitat and the PSUC. The anarchists could win only by recalling their troops from Aragón. Then they would have to fight both the central republican government and the Francoists. Accordingly, with the approval of the anarchist ministers, decisive police reinforcements from the government in Valencia began to arrive on 7 May. Hundreds of CNT and Poum militants were arrested, although the needs of the war industries limited the scale of the repression. Andreu Nin was murdered by a squad of NKVD agents. Initial revolutionary achievements were steadily dismantled.

After a nightmarish experience on the run in Barcelona, Orwell wrote “Curiously enough, the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.” He never abandoned his commitment to the Spanish republic. Back in London, in July 1937, he wrote: “The International Brigade is in some sense fighting for all of us – a thin line of suffering and often ill-armed human beings standing between barbarism and at least comparative decency.” And yet Orwell’s book makes it too easy to forget that the Spanish republic was defeated by Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, and the self-interest and pusillanimity of the British, French and American governments. His ignorance of the wider picture while in Spain was forgivable. The problem is rather that his judgments facilitated the book’s subsequent use as part of a cold war narrative. Instructions left before his death for a later edition ignored his acceptance of the need for a unified war effort in Spain. It is as if the Orwell of Animal Farm , Nineteen Eighty-Four and the lister of suspect fellow-travellers for the Foreign Office thought that he should let it stand as another nail in the communist coffin, despite its distortion of the Spanish situation.

Paul Preston is a professor at the London School of Economics and the foremost historian on the period