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

In Pamplona on 15 August, while the procession of the Virgin del Sagrano was taking place, Falangists and requetés took 50 or 60 prisoners, including some priests suspected of Basque separatism. Before killing them, the requetés wanted to give them the opportunity of confession, but the Falangists refused. In the confusion some prisoners tried to escape but were shot down. ‘In order to sort out the situation, priests gave absolution en masse to the remainder. The executions were carried out and the trucks returned to Pamplona in time for the requetés to join the procession as it entered the cathedral.’¹⁰ The Association of Families of the Murdered of Navarre have identified 2,789 people executed in the province.¹¹

As might be expected, the repression was much more intensive and systematic in places where the UGT and the CNT had many members, especially in areas where the Popular Front had won in the elections of February. In Rioja, for example, over 60 per cent of the victims belonged to Popular Front parties. Over 2,000 people were executed and buried in mass graves outside Logroño.¹² There was practically no village in the Rioja which did not have inhabitants buried in the mass grave of La Barranca.¹³ In Teruel the wells of Caudé, 84 metres deep, were used for dumping the corpses of the killed. A peasant living nearby heard and recorded in a notebook 1,005 coups de graˆce.¹⁴

In Seville, where Queipo de Llano’s bluff had won over the confused soldiers, the initial killing was said to be part of a military operation. But when reinforcements from the Army of Africa arrived under Major Castejón, the mopping-up was nothing more than a fearful massacre, with survivors finished off by knife or bayonet. Immediately afterwards Colonel Díaz Criado was put in charge of public order and almost all the local officials were killed. Because the prison was not large enough, the nationalists used the Jáuregui cinema as a holding centre for more than 2,000 people, also the Variedades music hall, the Falangist headquarters and even two boats anchored near the Torre del Oro. Francisca Díaz, the eighteen-year-old sister of the secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party was interrogated for a whole night. She saw many of the workers from the olive oil factory roped together. They were going to be taken out to be shot.¹⁵ The nationalist repression in the province of Seville accounted for 8,000 lives during 1936.

Córdoba had been seized on 18 July in a few hours, with little resistance. Queipo de Llano, furious because no reprisal had been carried out, immediately sent Major Bruno Ibáñez of the Civil Guard to the city. He started with 109 people from the lists given him by landowners and clergymen. A few days later they began to shoot the prisoners out on the roads and in the olive groves. ‘The basement of Falange headquarters in which people were held was like a balloon which was blown up in the afternoon and was empty the following morning. Each day there were executions in the cemetery and along the roads leading out of the city.’¹⁶ It is calculated that a total of 10,000 were killed in Córdoba during the war, a tenth of the population. ‘Don Bruno could have shot the whole city,’ a Falangist lawyer recounted. ‘They sent him to Córdoba with carte blanche.’¹⁷

In Huelva, a town which the nationalists did not fully take until the middle of September, more than 2,000 people were killed, including the civil governor, Diego Jiménez Castellano, and the commanders of the Civil Guard and the carabineros who had stayed loyal to the Republic. It is calculated that another 2,500 inhabitants disappeared, but many of them may have escaped across the border to Portugal.¹⁸

When Major Castejón’s ‘Column of Death’ reached Zafra on the road to Badajoz, he ordered the local authorities to provide him with a list of 60 people to be shot. ‘Little by little, those on the list were locked up in a room of the town hall. Some inhabitants who came into the mayor’s office were shown the growing list. They were allowed to remove three names providing they wrote down three others.’ In the end, 48 of the names were substitutes.¹⁹

One of the great lieux de mémoire of the Spanish Civil War was Badajoz itself.²⁰ The massacre perpetrated there by the troops of Lieutenant Colonel Yagüe during its capture and the following repression turned into the first propaganda battle of the war. The nationalists exaggerated their losses in the battle and also the numbers of right wingers killed by the left beforehand. In fact, Yagüe lost no more than 44 killed and 141 wounded. But even after the war, the nationalists could not ascribe more than 243 killings to the left, while estimates on nationalist killings in the province range from over 6,000 to 12,000.²¹