The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (71 page)

In fact, Negrín’s declaration on 21 September to the League of Nations did not represent a great sacrifice for the Republic because the number of foreigners serving in the ranks of the People’s Army had greatly reduced already. The ‘International Military Commission to Observe the Withdrawal of non-Spanish combatants in Government Spain’ observed, ‘It may be said that the decision of the Negrín government to withdraw and send away the international volunteers and to let this happen under the supervision of the League of Nations was a way to make a virtue out of necessity.’
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It was an astute propaganda move, because both the Republic and the nationalists had greatly exaggerated their role. In September 1938, only 7,102 foreigners were left in the International Brigades. The balance had been made up with Spaniards.

The stories of communist heresy hunting and the treatment of volunteers who wanted to leave, which had circulated in the second half of 1937, affected recruiting so seriously that the handfuls of new arrivals had done little to replace the losses suffered at Teruel and in Aragón. (The death rate among non-Spaniards in the International Brigades was just under 15 per cent up to the end of the Aragón campaign according to Soviet army statistics. A total casualty rate of 40 per cent is the figure most frequently cited.) The international military commission, which supervised their withdrawal, was later surprised to find how old many of the foreign volunteers were. The Swedish Colonel Ribbing paid particular attention to his own countrymen. ‘As for the
Swedes
, whom I checked in Sant Quirze de Besuara, I noted: “Remarkably many in and around their forties.”’
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On the Ebro front, Negrín’s plan to withdraw foreigners was not communicated to the Americans, Canadians and British of XV International Brigade, because they were about to attack Point 401 on the following day and the news might affect their morale. During the last week of September, the survivors were brought back from the front to Barcelona for their official farewell, although more than half of them were given Spanish nationality and transferred to the People’s Army. They usually consisted of those men for whom the secret police would be waiting in their home country: Germans, Italians, Hungarians and those from other dictatorships in Europe and Latin America.
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André Marty, however, rewrote the last editorial of the International Brigade newspaper,
Volunteer for Liberty
, telling the ‘anti-fascist fighters’ to return to their home countries to lead the struggle against fascism there. It was a way of saying that only selected senior cadres would be given refuge in the USSR. Marty was also terrified that proof of his summary executions might threaten him in the future, and headquarters personnel at Albacete only just escaped with their lives in his mania to suppress the truth.
¹³

On 28 October, seven weeks after their withdrawal from the front, the International Brigades assembled for a dramatic farewell parade down the Diagonal in Barcelona past President Azaña, Negrín, Companys and General Rojo, along with many other republican leaders. There were 300,000 people lining the streets and aircraft flew overhead ready to defend them against a nationalist raid. La Pasionaria said in her speech, ‘Comrades of the International Brigades! Political reasons, reasons of state, the welfare of that same cause for which you offered your blood with boundless generosity, are sending you back, some of you to your own countries and others to forced exile. You can go proudly. You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of democracy’s solidarity and universality. We shall not forget you and, when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves again, mingled with the laurels of the Spanish Republic’s victory–come back!’
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It was a moving occasion. Even the passionless expression on a huge portrait of the Soviet leader who was secretly considering an alliance with Hitler could not belittle the emotion of internationalism which made the tears of the Brigaders and the crowd flow. They were leaving behind 9,934 dead, 7,686 missing and had suffered 37,541 wounded.
¹⁵

The international commission overseeing the withdrawal of foreign volunteers was clearly shocked later to find about 400 International Brigaders in prisons in and around Barcelona, including Montjuich and the ‘Carlos Marx’ prison. Colonel Ribbing, the Swedish member of the commission reported, ‘As regards the international volunteers, they had sometimes been convicted for pure trifles, sometimes for definite and seriously undisciplined behaviour. Many stated that they were accused of espionage or sabotage; most of them protested their complete innocence.’ Even though the Negrín government had agreed to the repatriation of International Brigade prisoners as well, the commission found that there were still around 400 of them held in mid January 1939, just as the nationalists were advancing on Barcelona. This was more probably due to incompetence or bureaucratic inertia in a chaotic situation than to a deliberate attempt to leave them to the mercies of the enemy.
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The beginning of the departure of foreign communists in the second half of 1938 did not change Party policy outwardly. The Spanish communists may have been relieved that the exporters of the show-trial paranoia were returning home but this is uncertain. Spanish communist leaders later claimed that they had on several occasions argued against the orders of Moscow, not necessarily because they disliked Soviet methods, but because they considered them to be ‘premature’, as La Pasionaria put it. There is, however, little evidence of this claimed opposition in Russian files. More strikingly, there is nothing to show in the Comintern files that Dimitrov ever warned the Soviet advisers in Spain that their urge to take over the government completely was against Stalin’s policy of reassuring the bourgeois democracies.

On his return from Zurich, Negrín summoned the Cortes to a meeting in the monastery of Sant Cugat del Valle`s above Barcelona on 30 September and 1 October. The head of the government gave a speech in which he paid tribute to the soldiers who had died on the Ebro, without admitting, of course, that the plan had been disastrous. He then reviewed the governmental crisis, the relationship between the central government and the Generalitat, and re-emphasized the slogan ‘to resist is to win’. He did not mention his own secret attempts to find a negotiated solution, but proclaimed his readiness to seek an agreement with the nationalists on the basis of his Thirteen Points, even though they were clearly unacceptable to Franco.

Many of the deputies did not hide their concerns at Negrín’s designs. He had also made veiled references, which Prieto and Zugazagoitia interpreted as a threat to resign. After an adjournment in which Negrín assembled his ministers and spoke of a new governmental crisis which could be definitive, he recalled the Cortes and took up the debate again in violent terms. Faced with his hard position, opposition collapsed and the chamber gave him a vote of confidence, although this was, as Zugazagoitia later wrote: ‘without enthusiasm and out of necessity. Negrín and the parliament recognized that they were enemies.’
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The trial of the POUM leaders
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began on 11 October before the Tribunal of Espionage and High Treason, over fifteen months after the murder of Andreu Nin. Most Spanish communists realized that, although the process set in motion had to be followed through, it was unwise to be implacable. Even so, a remarkably unsubtle case was presented based on crudely forged documents linking the POUM to a nationalist spy organization in Perpignan. The communists also prepared a reserve line by adding the events of May 1937 to their charge of high treason. They claimed that the POUM had made a ‘non-aggression pact with the enemy’ so that their 29th Division could participate in the Barcelona fighting. The trials ended in something of a compromise verdict. The Republic’s reputation could not be dragged through the mud at such a moment by a show trial, so the most outrageous charges were rejected; but the POUM’s role in the events of Barcelona was used to justify imprisoning its leaders.

The onset of winter in republican Spain was bleak. Food supplies had diminished even further, industrial production was down to about one-tenth of 1936 levels as a result of raw material shortages and the lack of electricity in Barcelona. There was little fuel for heating. Cigarettes and soap had been generally unobtainable for many months. Defeatism was rife and even those who had, in desperation, convinced themselves that the struggle would eventually end in victory could not now avoid the truth. They realized that the next battle would be the last and faced the prospect with bitter resignation.

In Barcelona the population was by now on the edge of starvation. The ration, if obtainable, was down to about 100 grams of lentils per day as winter approached. People collapsed from hunger in the bomb-scarred streets and diseases such as scurvy increased. The propaganda broadcasts sounded increasingly hollow to their ears. They kept going only because there seemed to be no alternative. Workers weak from lack of food carried on in factories with virtually no electricity or raw materials for the same reason that the army kept fighting: it was less painful than thinking about the consequences of stopping.

In late November and early December Negrín’s government issued more mobilization decrees. They served little purpose because there were no spare weapons. Many of the new conscripts went home again, despite the shooting of deserters. Only a tiny proportion were caught because the administration was unable to cope with the new intake.

Even the army, where morale was usually higher than in the rearguard, looked beaten before the battle of Catalonia began, though this did not mean that they could not once again astonish the enemy with actions of brilliant and ferocious resistance. Apart from having lost some 75,000 men on the Ebro, the republican forces in Catalonia had little equipment left. The Army of the Ebro and the Army of the East, with an estimated total strength of more than a quarter of a million men, were left with only 40 tanks, fewer than 100 field guns, 106 aircraft (of which only about a half were serviceable, due to a shortage of spare parts) and only 40,000 rifles to face the nationalist onslaught.

Soviet advisers, meanwhile, appear to have been taking things easily. Perhaps they thought that with the Republic’s imminent defeat, they would not be in Spain for much longer and should therefore enjoy their ‘holiday’ while they could. ‘Things are still the same with me,’ an interpreter wrote home, ‘that is, things are very good. I’ve turned into an inveterate gambler (dominoes), we play “goat” in the evenings. We listen to the gramophone…My appetite clearly isn’t normal (it is too great)…One takes a nap after lunch, for an hour or two, that’s why I’ve put on weight…I am reading a lot here.’
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Negrín, however, was thinking about the future, but not discussing anything with his ministers. As Gerö pointed out to Dimitrov, ‘the ministers complain that they cannot see Negrín and cannot resolve questions about their departments with him.’
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In fact, Negrín appears to have been seeing only leading communists and Soviet officials. In an interview on 17 November with Marchenko, the Soviet chargé d’affaires, Negrín raised ‘the question of our neighbouring workers in Spain’, a euphemism for the NKVD. He said that ‘a connection between Comrade Kotov and his workers with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the SIM was inexpedient. He proposed that Comrade Kotov maintain an indirect connection with him, Negrín, because he is creating a special apparatus attached to him. The fact that Negrín, who is always extremely delicate with regard to our people, considered it necessary to make such a remark undoubtedly indicates the great pressure on him from the Socialist Party, the anarchists and especially the agents of the Second International concerning the “interference” of our people in police and counter-intelligence work.’
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At another meeting on 10 December, Negrín outlined his far from democratic vision, which was entirely in agreement with communist policy. He had discussed with Díaz and Uribe the idea of ‘a united national front, which seemed to him to be a sort of distinctive new party. This idea came to him after he lost faith in the possibility of uniting the socialist and communist parties…The most that might be expected is that the Socialist Party will be absorbed by the Communist Party at the end of the war.’ Negrín realized that to ‘depend on the Communist Party is unfavourable from the international standpoint. The existing republican parties have no future. The Popular Front does not have a common discipline and is torn apart by inter-party struggle. What is needed, therefore, is an organization that would unify all that is best in all of the parties and organizations and would represent a fundamental support of the government…There is no returning to the old parliamentarism; it will be impossible to allow the “free play” of parties as it existed earlier, for in this case the right might once again force its way into power. This means that either a unified political organization or a military dictatorship is necessary. He does not see any other way.’
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Negrín’s plan for a ‘National Front’ party was more or less a left-wing counterpart to what Franco had achieved with his Movimiento Nacional.

The Fall of Catalonia

A
t the beginning of December, two weeks after the last republican units slipped back across the Ebro, the nationalist Army of Manoeuvre redeployed along the two river frontiers of the Republic’s north-eastern zone. The republican general staff, foreseeing this development, prepared the defence of Catalonia and planned attacks in the west and south to divert the enemy’s attention.
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