The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (79 page)

Prison camps were set up all over the country. Including temporary and transit camps, there were 190 of them, holding between 367,000 and half a million inmates.
¹⁸
During the final offensive 45,000 had been taken in the central zone, 60,000 in the south and 35,000 in Levante.
¹⁹
When the summer of 1939 arrived, numbers had to be reduced, especially in the temporary camps. Some prisoners were given provisional liberty, 90,000 were sent off to 121 labour battalions, and 8,000 put to work in military workshops. Executions, suicides and escapes also reduced the total. Certain ‘special’ camps were maintained, such as those at Miranda de Ebro and San Pedro de Cardeña, for foreign combatants in the International Brigades. Some of those prisoners were sent off to rebuild Belchite–‘You destroyed Belchite and you will rebuild it,’ they were told.

In January 1940 the supervision of prison camps came under General Camilo Alonso Vega, the director-general of services in the ministry of the army. Alonso Vega, who had been head of the Civil Guard, later became minister of the interior. Those condemned by military tribunals were sent to military penal colonies for reconstruction work, or to mine coal in Asturias, León and the Basque country; some had to extract mercury, and many thousands were sent to dig canals and work on other projects close to Franco’s heart. Much of this forced labour proved far from cost-effective, as was the case in Beria’s Gulag,
²⁰
but later the work was subcontracted to various companies who made better use of the unpaid labour than the military authorities. Prisoners were also hired out to landowners who were able to improve their properties with irrigation and other schemes impossible before. The rest who remained in prison, 270,719 of them according to ministry of justice figures, were spread around jails with a capacity for only 20,000.

The 150,000 republicans, who returned across the French frontier to nationalist Spain, found a society still in a state of war, even though the trenches had been abandoned. Repressive laws, such as that of 26 April 1940, insisted on exacting revenge for everything that had happened ‘in the red zone since 18 July 1936, until the liberation’. Investigations were aimed not just at crimes against the person, but also those of a ‘moral’ nature committed ‘against religion, culture, art and the national patrimony’.
²¹

The ‘attribution of responsibilities’ was aimed at ‘the physical destruction of the cadres of the parties of the Popular Front, of the workers’ unions and the Masonic organizations’ and the ‘extirpation of the political forces which had sponsored and sustained the Republic’.
²²
We do not have a final figure for the Franquist terror, but recent researches in more than half the provinces of Spain indicates a minimum there of 35,000 official executions.
²³
This suggests that the generally accepted figure of 50,000 after the war may be low. If one adds on the unofficial and random killings, and those who died during the war from execution, suicide, hunger and sickness in prison,
²⁴
the total figure probably approaches 200,000.

Once again, another unanswerable question needs to be asked. If the Republic had won, how many would have been executed and might have died in their camps? As several historians have pointed out, the winner of a civil war always kills more than the losers. Everything would have depended on the republican regime which would have emerged. If it had been a communist regime, then to judge by other communist dictatorships, it would have been very high because of the paranoid nature of the system. But in Spain, much would also have depended on whether it was a Stalinist version, or whether a more Spanish variety would have evolved, as Negrín seemed to think.

The Caudillo used to read through the sentences of death when taking his coffee after a meal, often in the presence of his personal priest, José María Bulart. He would write an ‘E’ against those he decided should be executed, and a ‘C’ when commuting the sentence. For those who he considered needed to be made a conspicuous example, he wrote ‘
garrote y prensa
’ (garroting and press coverage). After coffee, his aide would send off the sentences to be passed to the military governor of each region of each province, who would communicate them by telegram to the head of the prison. The sentences would then be read out in the central gallery of the prison. Some officials enjoyed reading out the first name, then pausing if it was a common one, such as José or Juan, to strike fear into all those who bore it, before adding the family name. In the woman’s prison of Amorebieta one of the nuns who acted as warders would perform this duty.
²⁵

Those who escaped a death sentence faced many years of terrible conditions in one of the 500 penitentiaries. The director of the Model Prison of Barcelona, Isidro Castrillón López, said to his charges, ‘You should know that a prisoner is a ten millionth part of shit.’
²⁶
Prisoners were made to suffer from thirst as well as hunger. Sometimes they received no more than the equivalent of a small can of water in three days. There were epidemics of typhus and dysentery even in prisons holding mothers and small children where washing facilities hardly existed and the smell was overpowering.
²⁷
The poet Miguel Hernández suffered from pneumonia in the prison of Palencia, bronchitis in the prison of Ocaña, and typhus and tuberculosis, of which he died, in Alicante prison.

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

The defeat of the republicans also obliged them to submit themselves to the authority of the Church as well as to their temporal masters. Franco had been extremely generous in restoring all the Church’s privileges and wealth, as well as its power in education, but in return he expected the priesthood to act virtually as another arm of the state. With Church control over primary schools re-established, Franco’s minister for education purged thousands of teachers and hundreds of university lecturers and professors who were thought to have fallen under Masonic, Jewish or Marxist influences. Universities were controlled by the Falange, but with strong guidance from ecclesiastical authorities. The precepts of the nationalist movement were imposed on all subjects from history to architecture. Censorship of cultural life in all its forms was also rigorously exercised. This had started with the Law of the Press in 1938. Military and ecclesiastical censors went through libraries, destroying forbidden works.

Those republicans who had not been arrested and those freed from prison discovered that their life was still severely restricted. Many found it impossible to take up their previous employment. Priority was always given to former members of the nationalist armies. And there was also the risk of being denounced to the authorities by a jealous neighbour or a rival. The population was encouraged to accuse people as part of its patriotic duty. Concierges and caretakers became police spies, as in every dictatorship, and priests noted those who did not turn up to mass. They were regarded as part of what was called ‘the sixth column’, traitors to the cause by thought rather than by identifiable deed.

All this made the struggle for survival even harder. For example, those regarded as politically unreliable were not allowed to open a shop. Unable to scrape a living in their home town, many emigrated to the larger cities where they were unknown. The post-civil war years formed a period of great suffering and little hope of change. Franco’s regime appeared impregnable.

The Exiles and the Second World War

T
he 450,000 republicans who crossed the French frontier in February 1939 as Catalonia fell were not the first refugees from the civil war.
¹
Nor were they the last. Another 15,000, who managed to escape from Mediterranean ports in March during the final collapse of the Republic, reached the French colony of Tunisia, where they were interned in the camps of Getta and Gafsa near Tunis, and in others near Bizerta and Argelia. The conditions were described as sub-human. The French colonial authorities did not welcome this influx of ‘reds’. One of the many prisoners there was Cipriano Mera, the former bricklayer who had became commander of IV Corps and Casado’s military companion in the coup. Like many other republicans, Mera was handed over to nationalist Spain after the fall of France in 1940, but his sentence of death was commuted.
²

Those refugees who had crossed the frontier in February and March 1939 were divided between the women, children, the old and the sick on one hand, and soldiers and men of military age on the other. The former, some 170,000, went to camps at Prats de Molló, La Tour-de-Carol, Le Boulu, Bourg-Madame and Arles-sur-Tech, and later were spread over 70 French
départements
. The latter were interned in improvised camps mostly on the beaches of south-west France.

The places to which the defeated republicans were sent consisted of stretches of coast, wet, salty and without any protection from the wind. The first camp to open, in the middle of February, was at Argelès-sur-Mer. It was little more than a marshland divided into rectangles of a hectare apiece and surrounded by a perimeter of barbed wire guarded by Senegalese troops. There was a shortage of drinking water, many resorted to drinking sea water, and nothing was done to provide washing facilities or latrines. The food they received was scarce and of bad quality. The men suffered from scabies and lice. The 77,000 refugees, many without proper clothing, belongings, money or food, had to build huts for the sick and wounded. The rest dug into the sand to shelter from the wind. Only after the first few weeks were they given drinking water in cans and wood to make latrines next to the sea.