Abstract
In 1936, a left-wing democratically elected government attempted to modernize Spain but soon faced armed opposition from its own military and from the right more generally. These aspirations for change were captured in the works of art and literature of that generation and in every successive wave of creativity coming out of the Iberian Peninsula. In Manuel Rivas's Galician novel O lápis do carpinteiro (1988), the new Spain is personified in the progressive, feminist, pro-worker doctor Daniel Da Barca. The tribulations of the population of Galicia are woven into a narrative of one man’s life. Although Da Barca improbably survives being shot in the face, the reality for most Spanish progressives in the 1930s was far grimmer.
The right wing insurgency led by General Francisco Franco attempted to eliminate supporters of that movement completely and in so doing committed acts in excess of what would have been needed to capture Madrid from the government and maintain power. As Gerald Blaney puts it, ‘reactionary elements within the military and its civilian allies felt the need to eradicate the regime and its supporters'. Describing the bombing of civilians in València by Franco’s planes, Laurie Lee called it ‘an early essay in a new kind of warfare… inflicted on the bodies of his countrymen’. In The Spanish Holocaust, Paul Preston meticulously records the murder, torture and rape of people who supported the project to build a new democratic Spain. In doing so, Preston has assembled a vast ledger of evidence against Franco, his armed supporters and regime he established. In doing so he has challenged those who wanted to let these events remain in the past. This magisterial book has drawn a lot of criticism, not so much for the quality of the research, which is unassailable, but for its attempt to link the events in Spain to those happening elsewhere in the continent. Preston argues that antisemitism and a notion of racial elimination was a crucial element of right wing thinking in Spain and reminds the reader of Franco’s close associations with Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany.
The extermination of populations is a notoriously hard subject for historians to tackle, not least because it involves examining human behaviour in extremis and in horrific detail. Through analysis, it is possible to discern universal patterns of behaviour. Preston has written a vivid and compassionate account of the decimation of the city of Badajoz where the captured Republicans were tortured, humiliated and paraded in the streets before being murdered. In February 2012, US journalist Marie Colvin was killed in Syria by a bomb which probably tracked her down by using a satellite phone. She was executed within two hours of comparing the town of Homs to Srebrenica. The United Nations Tribunal at The Hague had ruled that Srebrenica was a case of genocide and the similarities to what occurred to defeated leftists in Badajoz are also very striking. Here Preston has not used the term genocide and has chosen instead to use a non-legal term, Holocaust, which was widely used before the 1940s and especially during the Smyrna fire of 1922. Genocide has proved to be a problematic term not least because when it was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, it excluded political eliminations at the behest of the Soviets.
During the civil war and in the years afterwards, Franco and his supporters attempted to eliminate a range of progressive world views and lifestyles from Spain by any means necessary including murder by garrotting, torture and long terms of imprisonment. Poetry by Federico García Lorca, executed by the right in Granada in 1936, was banned until the 1950s. The construction of hydroelectric dams in the 1950s and 1960s led to displacement of tens of thousands from their land, particularly in the Guadiana Valley near Badajoz. Republican families were further broken down by the theft of newborn babies, a practice apparently supported by individuals in the Catholic Church. Styling himself El Caudillo, the general attempted to control every aspect of Spanish life. He was supported by the religious authorities, landowners, academics, the middle classes and a small but not insignificant number of fascists who had escaped to the country from Germany, Austria or Croatia in 1945. A leading Croatian Ustaša who had imported the death camp model to his country in the shape of Jasenovac (which was dubbed the ‘Yugoslav Auschwitz’ by Vladimir Dedijer) lived fairly openly near València until he was killed by the Yugoslav Secret Services in 1969. During more than a decade in Spain, Vjekoslav Luburić met with Franco’s minister, Agustín Muñoz Grandes. Ante Pavelić, the Ustaša ‘Poglavnik’ or ‘Supreme Leader’, died in Madrid in 1959, and SS officer Otto Skorzeny sent hundreds of SS soldiers to Spain before they could travel further afield. It would be no exaggeration to describe Franco’s Spain as a fascist refuge area after 1945.
After the death of the Caudillo in 1975 and the success of a new generation of politicians protected by King Juan Carlos, many felt that the past should be left undisturbed and that fresh flowers should continue to be laid on Franco’s grave at the enormous basilica named the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos), which was originally constructed to honour the dead in the Civil War. Jeremy Treglown, reviewing the Spanish Holocaust in the Telegraph (28 February 2012) opined that it ‘may be time for the left to forget about remembering’. But this is not an issue for the left alone. Pragmatism would not generally make a convincing argument if applied to other countries: it would be offensive to argue that Jews should forget the Shoah, forget about the ashes of their ancestors or forget that they ever lived in shtetlach across the shatter zones of empire in Eastern Europe. Victims of atrocities have a fundamental need for the truth to be recorded so that their suffering does not pass unacknowledged. In one of the other contributions to this forum, Roberto Villa García argues that ‘the duty of the historian is not to revive and deepen the traumatic divisions of the Civil War'. Of course, violence remains difficult to write about because of lobbying by survivors and the constant need to respect communities of grief. Nevertheless it is the duty of the historian to record what actually happened regardless of the political or social consequences. Anything less condemns us to writing propaganda, crafted through a presentist lens. Through The Spanish Holocaust, Preston had ensured that this monumental series of crimes against the Republic and its supporters cannot be denied, minimized or forgotten.
Roberto Villa García rejects what he calls ‘crude one-sided narratives of “heroes” and “villains”’, but many contemporaries fighting in the Civil War did see the world in exactly such black and white terms – or at least thought they did. George Orwell thought his role in Catalonia quite clear: ‘When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist – after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct’. But as Orwell freely admitted, a real fascist would be another matter. I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists in the trenches outside Huesca … a man … jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran ….I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists'; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn't a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at him.
In The Spanish Holocaust, Preston interprets the violence in Republican zones as generally reactive, precipitated by the violence of the right. To do so denies the Anarchists real agency. They killed priests because they wanted to. They hated the Church with an autochthonous fanaticism that predated the 1930s, as Gerald Brenan explained in the 1943 book The Spanish Labyrinth. General Franco and his supporters killed more people because they won the war and were better organized, but we cannot state with certainty that the Republic, had it lasted, would have remained democratic and progressive. Furthermore, many right wing Spaniards remained pious, traditional, in awe of authority and hostile to gender and sexual emancipation, but fundamentally opposed to committing political violence themselves. The violent death of Andreu Nin at the hands of the Soviet NKVD in 1937 cast a shadow that might have been replicated had the left themselves retained power.