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

Having secured their Moroccan base, the rebels’ next objective was Cádiz, the crucial port where the African Army would disembark. At 1.00 a.m. on 18 July, the military commander of Cádiz, Brigadier General José López-Pinto, assured the Civil Governor, Mariano Zapico, of his loyalty to the Republic. Three hours later, he declared for the rebels, imposed martial law and ordered the release of Brigadier General José Enrique Varela Iglesias. Arrested by the Republican authorities on 17 July rightly suspected of military conspiracy, Varela would play a central role in the rebel cause. The civilian plotters in Cádiz were led by a prominent landowner, José de Mora-Figueroa, the Marqués de Tamarón. Mora-Figueroa was head of the Falange in Cádiz; his brother Manuel, a naval officer, led its militia. In liaison with one of the key plotters in Seville, Ramón de Carranza, a retired naval captain, who was also Marqués de Soto Hermoso, the Mora-Figueroa brothers had been busy purchasing and stockpiling weapons.

Now, López Pinto and Varela were quickly joined by Mora-Figueroa’s Falangists. The Republican authorities took refuge in the town hall and the offices of the Civil Governor. They were defended by several hundred sparsely armed civilian Republicans and about fifty Assault Guards. López Pinto and Varela had about three hundred soldiers, fifty-odd Falangists and Carlist Requetés and a dozen Civil Guards. The buildings were subjected to artillery bombardment but held out until the arrival from Ceuta, late on the night of 18 July, of the destroyer Churruca and a merchant steamer carrying a unit of Regulares.12 Thereafter, the coup was certain of success in the city.

One after another the following morning, the town hall, the Civil Governor’s offices, the telephone exchange, the main post office and the headquarters of left-wing parties and trades unions surrendered virtually without resistance. All those within were detained and numerous members of the town council murdered without even a semblance of a trial. The Mayor, Manuel de la Pinta Leal, was not in Cádiz at the time of the coup and thus in no position to oppose it. Nevertheless, he was arrested in Córdoba in September, taken to Cádiz and shot. Over the days following the capture of Cádiz, the Civil Governor, the President of the provincial assembly (Diputación) and numerous officers who had refused to join the rebellion were accused of military rebellion. While detained, they wrote statements pointing out the absurdity of the accusations, since they were obeying the orders of the legal government and had merely defended themselves. Before any trials could take place, they and several others, including a Socialist parliamentary deputy and the town-hall lawyer, were simply taken from prison and murdered on or about 16 August, on the orders of General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, rebel commander of the south.13

The annihilation of less prominent leftists took place as follows. The rebels first closed off the narrow tongue of land that connected Cádiz to the rest of Spain. Groups of Falangists, Civil Guards and Regulares then searched and looted houses. Liberals and leftists, Freemasons and trade unionists, were arrested en masse. Some were shot directly in the street. Others were taken to Falange headquarters in the Casino where they were subjected to sadistic torture. They were forced to ingest a litre of castor oil and industrial alcohol mixed with sawdust and breadcrumbs. In acute abdominal pain, they were savagely beaten. A so-called ‘Tribunal of Blood’ was established and each day would select twenty-five of the detainees for execution. Over six hundred of those arrested in Cádiz were executed in the next five months and more than one thousand in the course of the war. A further three hundred would be executed between the end of the war and 1945. These figures do not include those who died in prison as a result of torture.14

The conquest of the remainder of the province was carried out with the enthusiastic collaboration of the local landowning class, many of whose younger elements had already joined the Falange or the Requeté. In Alcalá de los Gazules, to the east of Cádiz, local Falangists and Civil Guards took control of the town immediately, murdering the Mayor and town councillors, along with fifty others. In the surrounding villages, Popular Front Committees had been formed. They had detained those rightists known to support the coup and began to distribute grain and cattle among the families of landless labourers. The local landlords responded immediately by providing horses for a mounted squad to recover their property. Moving south-west, through Roche and Campano between Chiclana and Conil, the squad recaptured numerous estates that had been occupied by peasant families. Men, women and children were seized and taken back to Alcalá de los Gazules, many to be killed.15

After the fall of Cádiz, José Mora-Figueroa took his men to Jérez de la Frontera where the rising had triumphed immediately thanks to the decisive action of the military commander, another scion of a local landowning family, Major Salvador de Arizón Mejía, the Marqués de Casa Arizón, director of the army’s horse-breeding and training establishment. He and his brother, Captain Juan de Arizón Mejía, used the horses from their unit to ride out in columns to take control of the surrounding areas.16 Mora-Figueroa also organized mounted groups with friends and their employees, which he put at the disposal of the military authorities in Cádiz.17 The aim was not just to crush opposition to the rising but also to reverse the agrarian conquests of the previous years.

Most of the other principal towns of the province fell quickly. On 19 July, Salvador Arizón Mejía sent troops from Jérez to seize the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda in the north. Supporters of the Popular Front held them off until, on 21 July, a force of Regulares entered the town, killing twelve citizens including nine in one house. Executions began immediately, although a few leftists escaped in small boats. Eighty people were shot over the next five months.18 In Rota, nothing happened on 18 July. The following day, having been deceived into believing that the Civil Guard and Carabineros were loyal, the town’s anarchists, Socialists and Communists joined in declaring a general strike and establishing an anti-fascist committee. Falangists and other rightists were detained and roads into the town barricaded. When the Civil Guard declared in favour of the rebels, the anti-fascist committee surrendered without a fight. Despite the absence of left-wing violence, the Falange and the Civil Guard set about the systematic annihilation of the town’s relatively few liberals and leftists. They were tortured and forced to drink castor oil, and over sixty were shot at night, their ears cut off as trophies.19

The ambience in Jérez itself could be deduced from a broadcast on Radio Jérez on 24 July by the monarchist intellectual José María Pemán. He sang a hymn of praise to the war against what he called ‘hordes of barbarian invaders’. The implicit comparison of the working-class left with the Berber invaders of 711 was emphasized when he declared, ‘The war with its flashes of gunfire has opened our eyes. The idea of political alternation has been replaced for ever by that of extermination and expulsion, which is the only valid response against an enemy which is wreaking more destruction in Spain than any ever caused by a foreign invasion.’20

An experienced Africanista, Captain Mariano Gómez de Zamalloa, arrived in Jérez from Ceuta to take overall charge of the landowners’ mounted columns.21 The recovery of estates in the surrounding area seized by leftists fell to the column led by the Marqués de Casa Arizón. Another column was organized by José Mora-Figueroa’s brother Manuel, with the scions of other aristocratic and landowning families and of sherry magnates, like the Duque de Medina-Sidonia and Estanislao Domecq y González. The self-styled Tercio Mora-Figueroa was made up initially of three hundred young rightists, Falangists, sons of landowners and workers from the Catholic unions.

As if on a hunting party, Mora-Figueroa and his men, accompanied by Civil Guards and Requetés, set out eastwards towards Arcos de la Frontera, where his family owned land. Despite the fact that Arcos had fallen without violence, a terrible repression was unleashed which saw the deaths of eighty-six Republicans.22 The column attacked villages to the north-east of Cádiz still in Popular Front hands and recaptured estates occupied by their workers. From Arcos, Gómez de Zamalloa’s column of Regulares and Mora-Figueroa’s men moved on to Algodonales and Olvera, where the repression was fierce.23 On 13 August, Mora-Figueroa’s group reached Villamartín, which had been under the control of the Civil Guard since 19 July. There had been a few isolated incidents of left-wing violence but the repression was disproportionately severe. The landowners of Villamartín were determined to annihilate all members of trade unions and of the Socialist and Republican parties and any Republican who had held any elected office.

Despite the protests of the parish priest, men and women were tortured and shot without trial for reasons as capricious as having advocated improved working conditions or for having taken part in a carnival involving a spoof funeral of Gil Robles and songs ridiculing the right. One seventeen-year-old was shot because his father was a Socialist and a sixteen-year-old because his anarcho-syndicalist father had fled. Altogether four teenagers were murdered. A couple aged seventy-three and sixty-three were shot because their anarcho-syndicalist son had also escaped. Married couples were shot, their young children left to starve. In another case, Cristóbal Alza and his wife were arrested, their heads were shaved and they were given castor oil. Believing that they were now safe, they stayed in the town but were arrested again. Cristóbal’s brother Francisco pleaded for their lives with the Captain of the Civil Guard, who replied that he would spare only one and that Francisco must choose. He chose his brother. Between July 1936 and February 1937, a total of 102 men and nine women were executed in Villamartín.24 Three women were murdered in Bornos, two in Espera, one in Puerto Serrano, one in Arcos de la Frontera, at least ten in Ubrique and five in Olvera.25

These first killings were carried out under the umbrella of the proclamation of martial law, the Bando de Guerra, based on that issued by Queipo de Llano on 18 July. In every town and province across Western Andalusia, although the wording might vary slightly, the sweeping terms of the edict (bando) effectively decreed that anyone who opposed the rising would be shot.26 Those who carried out the killings could then claim airily that they were ‘applying the Bando de Guerra’. With no judicial basis, men were taken out and shot, their bodies left by the roadside to rot. In fact, Queipo de Llano had no authority to issue such an edict.27

Queipo de Llano wrote to López Pinto on 4 August urging him to speed up the process of eliminating the left in Cádiz. With the first African columns having left Seville for Madrid on 2 and 3 August, he wrote: ‘This will be over soon! It won’t last more than another ten days. By then it is crucial that you have finished off all the gunmen and communists in your province.’ When a new judge made inquiries about the progress of the trial of the prominent Republicans in Cádiz, he was informed that it had been shelved ‘as a result of the death of the individuals concerned by dint of the application to them of the edict of martial law of 18 July 1936’.28

Queipo de Llano’s letter reflected a key moment in the repression. The towns and villages of Cádiz, Huelva and Seville and much of Córdoba and Granada had fallen to the insurgents. The population of this territory was predominantly Republican, Socialist and anarcho-syndicalist in its sympathies. To prevent any rebellion in the rear as the columns moved north, the repression was to be intensified. Prisoners were to be killed. Two days after sending the letter, Queipo de Llano backed up its sentiments by posting the retired Lieutenant Colonel Eduardo Valera Valverde to be Civil Governor of the province of Cádiz. Valera was instructed to ‘proceed with greater energy’. In Sanlúcar de Barrameda the occupying forces began more systematic executions from 8 August. In Puerto Real, near the provincial capital, the Mayor had prevented anti-clerical disturbances and the burning of a convent on the night of 18 July. Nevertheless, he had been arrested the following day. He was a bookseller, a moderate Republican of Azaña’s Izquierda Republicana. Despite pleas on his behalf by the Mother Superior of the convent, he was killed without any trial on 21 August. Two months later, his bookshop, already ransacked by Falangists, was confiscated.29

In the meantime, in the villages between Villamartín and Ubrique, such as Benamahoma, the Mora-Figueroa column arrested the mayors and imposed new town councils. Using Olvera as their base, they advanced over the provincial border into Seville and conquered the town of Pruna on 18 August, and the villages of Villanueva de San Juan and Algámitas four days later. The local landowners and right-wingers who had been placed in protective custody by the Popular Front authorities claimed that the column had arrived just in time to save them from horrendous atrocities. It was not explained why the left had waited so long before contemplating such atrocities.30

The repression in Benamahoma was undertaken by a notorious gang known as the ‘Lions of Rota’, consisting of self-declared Falangists led by Fernando Zamacola, a man from Galicia with a record of assault and armed robbery. At a post-war investigation into Zamacola’s crimes, it was revealed that more than fifty people had been executed including several women. The town postman was shot along with his fifteen-year-old son. Members of the Lions testified that Juan Vadillo, the local commander of the Civil Guard, had ordered the shootings to cover up the appalling beatings inflicted on those arrested. As well as murders, there was also considerable theft of the property of those detained and sexual abuse of the wives of men who had fled or been shot. These women were forced to clean the Civil Guard barracks and the offices of the Falange and made to dance at parties organized by Zamacola’s men. As well as cases of head-shaving and the use of castor oil, several were raped by both Vadillo and Zamacola.31 Zamacola was awarded Spain’s highest military decoration, the Gran Cruz Laureada de San Fernando.32

Meanwhile, Mora-Figueroa’s column made daily expeditions to mop up after the troops who conquered the smaller towns to the north of the province, Ubrique, Alcalá del Valle and Setenil. Many local Republicans and trade unionists had fled to the sierra around Ubrique, fearing reprisals. However, when on 24 July a light aeroplane dropped leaflets announcing that anyone without blood on their hands had nothing to fear, many of them returned. Most of these trusting souls, including the Mayor, were shot in the course of the following weeks. A member of Izquierda Republicana, the Mayor owned a prosperous bakery and olive press. By providing cheap bread for the poor, he had earned the enmity of the local oligarchy. He was tortured and forced to hand over substantial sums of money before being shot. At least 149 people were executed in Ubrique.33

In nearby Alcalá del Valle, the local Civil Guard had handed over its guns to a rapidly created Comité de Defensa. Weapons held by local rightists were confiscated and several of the men were imprisoned but none was physically harmed. The parish church was requisitioned as the Comité’s headquarters, its altar, statues and religious images destroyed. The town was briefly occupied on 25 August by a force of twenty Civil Guards and Manuel Mora-Figueroa’s Falangists. After it had been driven off, a group of anarchist militia arrived from Ronda in the neighbouring province of Málaga and began to loot the houses of local right-wingers until they were stopped by the Comité de Defensa. On 18 September, the town was finally reoccupied by rebel units including Mora-Figueroa’s column. The repression in Alcalá del Valle was sweeping, aiming to eradicate left-wing individuals, organizations and ideas. Knowing what the columns had done in nearby towns, many inhabitants of Alcalá del Valle had already fled. These included those who had held posts in Republican parties, trade unions or institutions. The victims were thus those who had stayed confident that, being guilty of no crimes, they had nothing to fear. There was no pretence of trials. Twenty-six men and four women were picked up off the street or from their houses, tortured and then shot.34

While the various paramilitary forces purged the province of Cádiz, a similar process was taking place in Seville. There the right-wing victory was attributed by Gonzalo Queipo de Llano to his personal daring and brilliance. Within a year of the events, he claimed that he had captured the city against overwhelming odds with the help of only 130 soldiers and fifteen civilians. In a radio broadcast on 1 February 1938, he made an even wilder exaggeration, declaring that he had taken the city with fourteen or fifteen men.35 He claimed that he been opposed by a force of over 100,000 well-armed ‘communists’. In fact, the defeated workers had had between them only eighty rifles and little ammunition and were armed, if at all, with hunting shotguns, ancient pistols and knives.36

Far from being an act of spontaneous heroism, the coup had been meticulously planned by a major of the General Staff stationed in Seville, José Cuesta Monereo, and was carried out by a force of four thousand men. The commander of the Seville Military Region, General José de Fernández Villa-Abrille, and his senior staff were aware of what was being hatched. They did nothing to impede the plot, despite the pleas of the Civil Governor, José María Varela Rendueles.37 Nevertheless, Queipo had them arrested and tried for military rebellion. The majority of the Seville garrison were involved in the coup, including units of artillery, cavalry, communications, transport and the Civil Guard. This is clear even from the lists included in the hymn of praise to Queipo composed by the journalist Enrique Vila.38 After artillery bombardment, this large force seized the telephone exchange, the town hall and the Civil Governor’s headquarters, blocked the main access routes into the centre and then applied indiscriminate terror.39

The subsequent crushing of working-class resistance was undertaken by Major Antonio Castejón Espinosa. According to Castejón himself, with fifty Legionarios, fifty Carlist Requetés, fifty Falangists and another fifty Civil Guards, they immediately began the bloody suppression of the workers’ districts of Triana, La Macarena, San Julián and San Marcos. Castejón’s artillery was organized by Captain Luis Alarcón de la Lastra, the CEDA deputy and landowner from Carmona, who had immediately placed himself under the orders of Queipo.40 The Falangists came mainly from the Círculo de Labradores, the rich landowners’ club. Civilian participation in the rising was organized by prominent members of the Círculo like Ramón de Carranza, Pedro Parias González and the bullfighter Pepe el Algabeño (José García Carranza). Queipo de Llano rewarded them by making Carranza Mayor and Parias Civil Governor of Seville. Pepe el Algabeño, who had been the target of an assassination attempt by anarchists in Málaga in March 1934, headed a group of bullfighters who placed themselves at the disposal of Queipo de Llano.41 On the morning of 19 July, armed gangs led by Carranza imposed what he called ‘brutal punishment’ on working-class districts around the city.42

Despite artillery bombardment, the working-class districts resisted doggedly. Finally, Queipo’s forces, using women and children as human shields, were able to enter and begin the repression in earnest. Women and children, as well as their menfolk, were were put to the sword. After the subjugation of Triana, the new Mayor Carranza strode through the streets with a megaphone ordering that all pro-Republican and anti-fascist graffiti be cleaned from the walls. He set a ten-minute deadline, after which the residents of any house whose walls carried slogans would be shot. With fathers, husbands, brothers and sons dead or dying in the streets around them, the surviving men, women and children began frantically scrubbing at the walls while the victorious rebels gloated.43 For his final attack on La Macarena, on 22 July, Queipo used aircraft to bomb and strafe the district. He published a warning in the press demanding that weapons be thrown into the street and windows and doors be covered in white sheets to ‘avoid the damage that could be caused by air attacks and the forces of the Army’.44

On 16 August, the bodies of two Falangists were found in Triana. In reprisal, seventy men from the surrounding streets were arrested at random. They were shot in the cemetery without any form of trial two days later.45 When the actor Edmundo Barbero reached Seville in August, he would find the city (and many of its inhabitants) entirely plastered in Falangist symbols. Triana, La Macarena, San Julián and San Marcos were full of the rubble of houses destroyed by the artillery barrages. Barbero was appalled by the terror-stricken faces and the fact that all the women wore black, despite Queipo’s prohibition of public mourning, incessantly and threateningly repeated in the press and on the radio. Elsewhere, in the pueblos, Falangist patrols ensured that no houses carried emblems of mourning and that laments of grief could not be heard.46

After the initial slaughter, a more systematic repression began. On 23 July, Queipo de Llano issued another edict which stated that any strike leaders caught would be shot along with an equal number of strikers chosen at the discretion of the military authorities. Anyone who disobeyed his edicts was to be shot without trial. The following day, Queipo issued his sixth edict, which stated that ‘on discovering acts of cruelty against individuals in any town or village, the leaders of the Marxist or Communist organizations that exist there will be shot. In the event of them not being found, an equal number of their members, arbitrarily selected, will be shot without this prejudicing the sentences that will be passed against the guilty ones.’47 This edict was used to justify the execution of large numbers of men, women and children who were innocent of any ‘acts of cruelty’.

To take charge of the process, Queipo de Llano chose an Africanista, the infantry Captain Manuel Díaz Criado. He had served with the Foreign Legion in the 1920s and organized the Guardiá Cívica that murdered four workers in the Parque de María Luisa in Seville in 1931; he had also been involved in Carlavilla’s attempt to murder Azaña in May 1936. On 25 July, Queipo gave Díaz Criado the title of Military Delegate for Andalusia and Extremadura with the power of life and death over the people of the region. He chose as his right-hand man an equally brutal Civil Guard, Sergeant Major José Rebollo Montiel. Rebollo supervised the torture and interrogation of prisoners. Díaz Criado was described by Edmundo Barbero as ‘a cruel and sadistic drunk’.48 On his orders, the working-class districts of Triana and La Macarena were stripped of their male populations. Among hundreds of prisoners taken and herded into the provincial prison were children and old men. Most were quickly taken out and shot without any pretence of judicial procedure. Others were taken to rot in the fetid prison ship Cabo Carvoeiro.49

When working-class leaders could not be found, members of their families were taken as hostages. The Communist leader of the Seville dockworkers, Saturnino Barneto Atienza, went into hiding and eventually reached the Republican zone. His sister, his wife, his infant daughter and his mother-in-law were detained in inhuman conditions for the duration of the war. His seventy-two-year-old mother, Isabel Atienza, a devout Catholic, was arrested and interrogated. On 8 October, she was forced to witness a shooting in the cemetery and then, seriously disturbed, was taken to a square near her home and shot. Her body was left in the street for a day.50 On the night of 10 August, a number of murders were committed to commemorate the anniversary of General Sanjurjo’s failed military coup in 1932. Among the victims were the Andalusian intellectual Blas Infante and the Republican Mayor José González Fernández de Labandera, who had helped foil the Sanjurjada.