The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

Also on 26 January the fifth column, right-wing men and women who had remained hidden for two and a half years, appeared in the streets to settle accounts. They mixed with the advance detachments of nationalist troops entering the city, particularly Yagüe’s regulares, who were allowed several days of looting–their ‘war tax’–in shops and apartment buildings, without worrying whether the owners were reds or whites. Although the republicans had released most of their prisoners before the downfall, the nationalists and their supporters killed some 10,000 people in the first five days of ‘liberation’.²⁴ Italian officers were shaken by these massacres in cold blood, but obeyed the orders of Mussolini that any captured Italian who had fought in republican ranks should be executed immediately, ‘because dead men tell not tales’.²⁵

General Dávila, the commander-in-chief of the nationalist troops who had occupied Barcelona, published on that day an edict which ‘reintegrated the city of Barcelona and other liberated territory of the Catalan provinces within the sovereignty of the Spanish state’. All appointments and decrees made since 18 July 1936 were annulled and gave ‘the Catalan provinces the honour of being governed on an equal footing with their counterparts in the rest of Spain’.²⁶

General Eliseo A

´ lvarez Arenas, under-secretary of public order, and now chief of the occupation authority, published a decree which indicated that the nationalists saw themselves as an invading army in conquered territory. The Falangist Dionisio Ridruejo, who was in charge of propaganda, had prepared leaflets in Catalan. General A

´ lvarez Arenas, on discovering this, gave orders that they should all be destroyed. The Catalan language was forbidden by law. ‘It is a city which has sinned greatly,’ he told Ridruejo, ‘and now it must be cleansed. Altars should be erected in every street of the city and masses said continually.’²⁷ In less liturgical terms, Serrano Súñer told the special correspondent of the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter, ‘The city is totally bolshevized. The decomposition is absolute. The population, whose deeds I myself have checked up on, is morally and politically sick. Barcelona and its citizens will be treated by us in the way one would attend to someone who isill.’²⁸

On the day of the fall of Barcelona no newspaper appeared in the city. All were requisitioned, passing under the control of the ‘Press of the Movement’. On 27 January the first issue of Hoja Oficial de Barcelona came out, in which was written, ‘Yesterday Barcelona was liberated! At two in the afternoon, without firing a shot, nationalist forces under the command of General Yagüe, entered Barcelona.’ On the same day La Vanguardia and El Correo Catala

´n also reappeared. The former now called itself La Vanguardia Española and had changed its motto of ‘Daily paper in the service of democracy’ for ‘Daily paper in the service of Spain and Generalissimo Franco’. Posters were displayed on walls proclaiming ‘If you are Spanish, speak Spanish’, and ‘Speak the language of the empire!’. Books censored by the Church or the army were burned.

A few republican officers and officials had not fled to the frontier, but also stayed hidden waiting for the nationalist troops. They included Antonio Rodríguez Sastré, the chief of republican intelligence, who had been working for Franco and later became Juan March’s lawyer. Others also remained either because they felt they had nothing to fear, or because of exhaustion and apathy. There was a numb relief that the fighting was at last over and they told themselves that nothing could be worse than recent months. For most, though, the atmosphere of downfall before the arrival of the enemy contributed greatly to their panic. Some nationalist prisoners, other than those left behind in Barcelona, had been herded ahead of the retreating forces. A number were shot by their guards, who either lost their heads or acted out of the bitterness of defeat. The victims included the Bishop of Teruel and Colonel Rey d’Harcourt, who had surrendered the town.

On 28 January, at eleven in the morning, nationalist troops paraded through Barcelona. Richthofen observed, no doubt with amusement, that the Italian commanders were furious that the nationalists were not allowing them to take part in the triumphal entry. A squadron of Condor Legion Messerschmitts flew overhead as an umbrella in case republican fighters tried to make a hit-and-run raid. The next day the Luftwaffe fighter pilots switched to making low-level attacks on railways and roads, which were packed with at least as many refugees as fleeing soldiers. ‘The successes they had were excellent,’ the Condor Legion reported, ‘and the pilots are gradually getting a taste for it.’²⁹