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

In January 1940 the supervision of prison camps came under General Camilo Alonso Vega, the director-general of services in the ministry of the army. Alonso Vega, who had been head of the Civil Guard, later became minister of the interior. Those condemned by military tribunals were sent to military penal colonies for reconstruction work, or to mine coal in Asturias, León and the Basque country; some had to extract mercury, and many thousands were sent to dig canals and work on other projects close to Franco’s heart. Much of this forced labour proved far from cost-effective, as was the case in Beria’s Gulag,²⁰ but later the work was subcontracted to various companies who made better use of the unpaid labour than the military authorities. Prisoners were also hired out to landowners who were able to improve their properties with irrigation and other schemes impossible before. The rest who remained in prison, 270,719 of them according to ministry of justice figures, were spread around jails with a capacity for only 20,000.

The 150,000 republicans, who returned across the French frontier to nationalist Spain, found a society still in a state of war, even though the trenches had been abandoned. Repressive laws, such as that of 26 April 1940, insisted on exacting revenge for everything that had happened ‘in the red zone since 18 July 1936, until the liberation’. Investigations were aimed not just at crimes against the person, but also those of a ‘moral’ nature committed ‘against religion, culture, art and the national patrimony’.²¹

The ‘attribution of responsibilities’ was aimed at ‘the physical destruction of the cadres of the parties of the Popular Front, of the workers’ unions and the Masonic organizations’ and the ‘extirpation of the political forces which had sponsored and sustained the Republic’.²² We do not have a final figure for the Franquist terror, but recent researches in more than half the provinces of Spain indicates a minimum there of 35,000 official executions.²³ This suggests that the generally accepted figure of 50,000 after the war may be low. If one adds on the unofficial and random killings, and those who died during the war from execution, suicide, hunger and sickness in prison,²⁴ the total figure probably approaches 200,000.

Once again, another unanswerable question needs to be asked. If the Republic had won, how many would have been executed and might have died in their camps? As several historians have pointed out, the winner of a civil war always kills more than the losers. Everything would have depended on the republican regime which would have emerged. If it had been a communist regime, then to judge by other communist dictatorships, it would have been very high because of the paranoid nature of the system. But in Spain, much would also have depended on whether it was a Stalinist version, or whether a more Spanish variety would have evolved, as Negrín seemed to think.

The Caudillo used to read through the sentences of death when taking his coffee after a meal, often in the presence of his personal priest, José María Bulart. He would write an ‘E’ against those he decided should be executed, and a ‘C’ when commuting the sentence. For those who he considered needed to be made a conspicuous example, he wrote ‘garrote y prensa’ (garroting and press coverage). After coffee, his aide would send off the sentences to be passed to the military governor of each region of each province, who would communicate them by telegram to the head of the prison. The sentences would then be read out in the central gallery of the prison. Some officials enjoyed reading out the first name, then pausing if it was a common one, such as José or Juan, to strike fear into all those who bore it, before adding the family name. In the woman’s prison of Amorebieta one of the nuns who acted as warders would perform this duty.²⁵

Those who escaped a death sentence faced many years of terrible conditions in one of the 500 penitentiaries. The director of the Model Prison of Barcelona, Isidro Castrillón López, said to his charges, ‘You should know that a prisoner is a ten millionth part of shit.’²⁶ Prisoners were made to suffer from thirst as well as hunger. Sometimes they received no more than the equivalent of a small can of water in three days. There were epidemics of typhus and dysentery even in prisons holding mothers and small children where washing facilities hardly existed and the smell was overpowering.²⁷ The poet Miguel Hernández suffered from pneumonia in the prison of Palencia, bronchitis in the prison of Ocaña, and typhus and tuberculosis, of which he died, in Alicante prison.