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

On the road to Madrid the nationalist columns followed the same pattern. They subdued villages along the way, laying waste and daubing on the whitewashed walls graffiti such as ‘your women will give birth to fascists’. Meanwhile, General Queipo de Llano menaced republicans who listened to Radio Sevilla with stories about the sexual powers of the African troops, to whom he promised the women of Madrid as an inducement. War correspondents were held back from Toledo so that they should not witness the events which followed the relief of the Alcázar. There 200 wounded militiamen in hospital were finished off with grenades and bayonets. The conduct of the campaign was compared to the furia española of Philip II’s infantry in the sixteenth century, which terrorized Protestant Holland in its all-destructive advance.

Near Gibraltar a Falangist reported that the wife of a left-winger was raped by a whole firing squad of Moors before being shot. An American journalist, John Whitaker, was present when two young girls were handed over to Moroccan troops near Navalcarnero by their commanding officer, Major Mohamed Ben Mizzian, who told him calmly that they would not survive more than four hours.²² The Major subsequently reached the rank of lieutenant-general in Franco’s army and regulares were later made ‘honorary Christians’ by the nationalists. The horror they inspired in republican territory led to two of them being torn to pieces by a crowd when the truck in which they were being sent back as prisoners stopped to fill up with petrol.

Another of the great places of suffering was Granada, known above all for the murder of the poet Federico García Lorca, the most celebrated victim of the civil war. The fascist and military attitude to intellectuals showed itself to be one of deep distrust at the least, and usually consisted of an inarticulate reaction mixing hate, fear and contempt. This was shown in Granada where five university professors were murdered. García Lorca had returned to his house outside the city in the Huerta de San Vicente just before the rising. (With the start of the summer holidays many on both sides were saved or killed simply by their travel plans.) He was in danger because of his liberal sympathies although he belonged to no party. Even the refuge given him by the Falangist poet Luis Rosales and his family could not save him.

On Sunday, 16 August, a few hours after the murder of his brother-in-law, Manuel Fernández Montesinos, the mayor of Granada, he was seized by a former deputy of the CEDA, Ramón Ruiz Alonso, who later asserted that Lorca ‘did more damage with his pen than others with their guns’. He was accompanied by Luis García Alix, secretary of Acción Popular, and the Falangist landowner Juan Luis Trescastro, the perpetrator of the crime, who would say later: ‘We killed Federico García Lorca. I gave him two shots in the arse as a homosexual.’²³ H. G. Wells, the president of PEN, demanded details on the fate of Lorca as soon as the news reached the outside world, but the nationalist authorities denied any knowledge of his fate. Lorca’s death remained a forbidden subject in Spain until the death of Franco in 1975.

The nationalists justified the brutality of their repression as reprisals for the red terror, but as had been the case in Seville, Córdoba and in Badajoz, and as would be the case in Málaga six months later, the subsequent nationalist killings exceeded those of the left several, if not many, times over. In Málaga the nationalist executions took place after the militia, and undoubtedly almost all those responsible for killing right wingers, had escaped up the coast. This shows that there was little attempt to identify the guilty. But above all, the contrast in the numbers killed by each side could not be starker.

In August 1944 the British consul in Málaga obtained the nationalists’ own figures and forwarded them to the ambassador in Madrid, who passed them on to London. He reported that while ‘the “reds” were in control of Málaga from 18 July 1936 until February 7th 1937…they executed or murdered 1,005 persons’. But that ‘during the first week of Liberation, that is from February 8th to 14th…3,500 persons were executed by the Nationalists’. And ‘from February 15th 1937 to August 25th 1944, a further 16,952 persons have been “legally” sentenced to death and shot in Málaga’.²⁴ According to other sources, more than 700 people were shot against the walls of the San Rafael cemetery just between 1 and 23 March 1937,²⁵ but one local historian put the total figure for Málaga at 7,000 executions,²⁶ roughly a third of the number given to the British consul. Whatever the exact figure, the nationalist ‘reprisals’ were clearly not just a question of revenge, they were also motivated by the idea of establishing a reign of terror especially in areas where the right had been numerically weaker.