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

Even by the standards of many prison systems, the corruption among warders and indeed senior officials was striking. In the penal colony of San Simón in Pontevedra provisional liberty was sold and, most appalling of all, a death sentence could be given to somebody else if a very large sum was paid. The family of a doctor from Vigo struggled desperately to raise the 400,000 pesetas which a senior official had demanded for this service.²⁸ Those captured after 1 April 1939 were known as the ‘posteriores’. They were often political militants or members of the guerrilla resistance to the regime. Many of them were subjected to terrible tortures, near-drowning in ‘la bañera’ or electric shocks, to force them to give the names of others in their organization. Both posteriores and anteriores were sometimes lined up on identity parades for widows of nationalist victims, accompanied by Falangists. Any suspected of having been involved in the death of a husband were simply ‘disappeared’.

The notion of a bolshevik infection, as an explanation of left-wing views, was given a spurious scientific basis. Major Antonio Vallejo Nágera, a professor of psychiatry at Madrid University, had founded in the summer of 1938 a centre of psychological investigation with fourteen clinics in the nationalist zone to study the ‘psiquismo del fanatismo marxista’. His conclusions were that the only way to prevent the racial dissolution of Spanishness was the removal of children from suspect parents to be schooled in nationalist values. In 1943 there were 12,043 children taken from their mothers and handed over to the Falangist Auxilio Social, to orphanages and to religious organizations. Some of these children were passed on for adoption to selected families, a pattern followed thirty years later in Argentina under the military dictatorship there.²⁹

Nationalist Spain was little more than an open prison for all those who did not sympathize with the regime. Various departments of secret police were set up. Franco’s obsession with Freemasonry even led to the creation of the Servicio de Información Especial Antimasónico in March 1940. Freemasons, in his view, were responsible for the loss of the Spanish empire, the fall of the monarchy and numerous ‘state crimes’ during the period of the Republic. On 29 March 1941 a law for the ‘Security of the State’ was introduced, which targeted illegal propaganda, criminal association including strikes and the spreading of rumours unfavourable to the regime, all of which were regarded as tantamount to ‘military rebellion’. Later, in April 1947, the law for the Repression of Banditry and Terrorism, aimed at the guerrilla resistance, represented a further turn of the screw on individual liberties.

The mania for total mastery of everything extended even to the nationalist movement itself. The state political movement combining the Falange and Carlists, the FET y de las Jons, was given a crucial role in the network of repression and social control. Serrano Súñer made sure that the ‘old shirts’, with their anti-capitalist rhetoric, should not offend the military and the rich. Franco was given total authority–‘before God and History’–to direct its ideology. Prominent Falangist ‘old shirts’ were sent abroad as ambassadors or given out-of-the-way posts in Spain. Candidates for membership of the national council of the movement were carefully chosen for their blind obedience to the Caudillo. At the end of the civil war in 1939, the party had 650,000 members. By 1945 this figure had almost doubled. As in Germany and the Soviet Union, it was essential to become a member if you wanted promotion within the bureaucracy which directed every aspect of national life.

In September 1939 the Spanish University Union was founded, to which every student in higher education had to belong. The universities themselves were turned into an extension of the state bureaucracy. Youth and even employers’ organizations were treated in a similar fashion. The Falangist trade union, the Organización Sindical, which wielded immense power, had little interest in the rights of workers. Its task was to ensure that the labour force ran on almost military lines in the service of the state. Women, meanwhile, were expected to stay at home, unless they were involved in the Feminine Section, an evolution of the Falangist charity, Winter Help, copied from the Nazi Winterhilfe. The primary role of such an organization was to train women in their household tasks and obedience to their husbands. In a counterpart to national service in the armed forces, young women had to work for Auxilio Social for six months, either looking after the children in its institutions or serving in the equivalent of soup kitchens.³⁰