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

The main characteristics of the situation in the republican zone were the almost total lack of control in the first days of the rising, the intensity and rapidity of the killings, and the attempts by left-wing and republican leaders to stop the violence. There would be one or two renewed outbreaks later in Madrid. At the end of October, 31 prisoners, including Ramiro de Maeztu, the author of Defensa de la Hispanidad, and Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, founder of the JONS, were taken out of the Prison de las Ventas and shot. There was an even more infamous event in November, when Franco’s forces were at the gates of Madrid and 2,000 prisoners were shot when evacuating them to the rear to prevent them being liberated by the nationalists.

In September Largo Caballero’s ‘government of unity’, made up of socialists, republicans and communists, took firm steps to re-establish law and order. They set up popular tribunals which, although far from perfect, were an improvement, and created municipal councils to replace the patrols whose members were ordered to the front. The cases of looting and murder rapidly diminished.

Even during the worst of the violence, leaders from all organizations and parties did what they could to save people. In Madrid, President Azaña managed to rescue the monks from his old college at the Escorial. Galarza, the minister of the interior, saved Joaquín Ruiz Jiménez. La Pasionaria intervened on behalf of many victims, including nuns. So did Juan Negrín and many others. In Catalonia Companys, Ventura Gassol, Frederic Escofet and other leading members of the Generalitat, the rector of the University Pere Bosch Gimpera, and the anarcho-syndicalist leader Joan Peiró, among others, spoke out strongly against the crimes and helped hundreds of those at risk to escape or to leave the country. And this did not happen only in the big cities. In many towns and villages civil governors, teachers, mayors and others did what they could to protect prisoners from being lynched, even when nationalist forces were close.¹⁴

In all, the victims of the red terror in the Republican zone during the civil war rose to some 38,000 people, of whom almost half were killed in Madrid (8,815) and in Catalonia (8,352) during the summer and autumn of 1936.¹⁵ On the republican side there was a strong mixture of feelings when the worst of the rearguard slaughter was over. The majority of republicans were sickened by what had happened. The anarchist intellectual Federica Montseny referred to ‘a lust for blood inconceivable in honest men before’. Although La Pasionaria intervened on several occasions to save people, other communists took a fatalistic attitude to the violence. Stalin’s ambassador is said to have commented, with a shrug, that the scum was bound to come to the top at such a time. The dubious rationale that the atrocities had been far worse on the other side was not used until the Republic’s propaganda campaign became effective in 1937. And yet the different patterns of violence were probably even more significant than the exact number of victims.

The White Terror

The pattern of killing in ‘white’ Spain was indeed different. The notion of a ‘limpieza’, or ‘cleansing’, had formed an essential part of the rebel strategy and the process began as soon as an area had been secured. General Mola, in his instructions of 30 June for the Moroccan zone, ordered the troops ‘to eliminate left-wing elements, communists, anarchists, union members, Freemasons etc.’¹ General Queipo de Llano, who described their movement as ‘the purging of the Spanish people’, did not specify political movements. He simply defined their enemies as anybody who sympathized ‘with advanced social currents or simple movements of democratic and liberal opinion’.²

The nationalists in fact felt compelled to carry out a harsh and intense repression, partly to destroy the democratic aspirations encouraged under the Republic and partly because they had to crush a hostile majority in many areas of the country. One of General Franco’s press attachés, Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera, even said to the American journalist John Whitaker that they had ‘to kill, to kill, and to kill’ all reds, ‘to exterminate a third of the masculine population and cleanse the country of the proletariat’.³ Between July 1936 and early 1937 the nationalists allowed ‘discretionary’ killing under the flag of war, but soon the repression became planned and methodically directed, encouraged by military and civil authorities and blessed by the Catholic Church.