Knowing and Acknowledging Spain’s Dark Civil War Past

In September 1936, in Monreal del Campo, in Teruel province, members of Spain’s Civil Guard (a police force under military command) arrested Benjamín Górriz and his brother, a former mayor. Shortly afterwards, the local authorities loaded the two men and a number of other prisoners on to a lorry and drove them to the cemetery in the nearby village of Villafranca del Campo. Here the insurgents shot their captives and then consigned their remains to an anonymous mass grave.

Górriz’s widow dared not reveal to her son Elías anything about his father or uncle. She feared that a little knowledge might lead to him to blurt something out and prompt right-wing neighbours to discriminate or take revenge against him. As Elías grew up, however, he could not help but come into contact with the victors’ version of history which monopolized public space. In this view, activists who had supported the Republic had sown the political, social and economic chaos that had threatened to destroy Spain and had carried out a programme of state-sanctioned murder.

Having absorbed some of these ideas, Elías Górriz worried that if he started rooting around his family past he would unearth distressing stories that his father and uncle had committed an unconscionable crime. It was only in the 1990s that he brought some clarity to his hazy family history, freed himself from a lingering sense of guilt and came to understand his identity from another point of view. Prompted by conversations with a historian researching the Civil War repression in his region, he began to delve into a new wave of historiography emerging at the time. The books he read detailed how political activists in rural areas were frequently killed by supporters of the Franco regime for no other reason than their pedigree in carrying out reform and a perceived willingness to take a stance against the insurgents. This new knowledge allowed Elías Górriz to regard himself not as the son of a criminal but instead the offspring of a reformer killed by supporters of General Franco. ¹

Francoists behind the lines took the lives of at least 130,000 people like Benjamín Górriz. ² His son’s story speaks for the thousands upon thousands of relatives in Spain who through the rebel and Francoist repression lost loved ones, had their families wrenched apart and whose sense of self was poisoned by enduring stigma. This helps explain why Professor Fernando del Rey in a recent forum in the Journal of Contemporary History correctly identified political violence as the most pressing topic within the current historiography of twentieth-century Spain. ³

The intense social, political and historiographical importance of the violence means that the build up to the Civil War killings, the repression and its aftermath have all fallen under the concerted scrutiny of historians in recent years. The significance of this focus on violence also explains why the forum linked a right to reply to a review of a series of books on the Second Republic to a discussion of Paul Preston’s crucial work The Spanish Holocaust: inquisition and extermination in twentieth-century Spain; a book which deals above all with repression during and after the Civil War. ⁴

Elías’s story further tells us a great deal about the relationship between the historian and society. As we have seen, the availability of a new public history from the 1980s and 1990s allowed him to understand his family past in a new way. His experience provides us with an insight into why we need to consider carefully the argument put forward in the forum by historian Dr Robert Villa García that ‘the duty of the historian is not to revive and deepen the traumatic division of the Civil War, especially as these have been overcome by Spaniards for decades’. ⁵ We can contrast this highly questionable statement with the needs of relatives like Elías Górriz who crave historical knowledge to seal still open wounds.

It is also important to understand Dr Villa García’s opposition to raking up the past in the broader political context. The same sentiment developed across Spanish society in the years before Franco’s death in 1975. One starting point came with critics from inside the regime, such as the Catholic Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez, who had tried to move from the hard-line Francoist position of blaming the ‘Reds’ for the Civil War. In 1963, Ruiz-Giménez was instrumental in publishing the first edition of the journal Cuadernos para el Diálogo, which over the years pressed for an amnesty for political prisoners and reconciliation. ⁶ The call for compromise struck a chord with groups on the left. From 1956, for instance, the Spanish Communist Party followed a policy of national reconciliation. ⁷ By the early 1970s, important groups on both the left and right shared the idea that Spaniards should bury their differences by forgetting the past. This belief helped pave the way for negotiations between opposition groups and reformist elements who had developed from within the Franco regime. ⁸ At its best this political tactic ushered in conciliation (collaboration between former opponents without facing up to past abuses and injustices) rather than reconciliation (working together after recognizing and making amends for past errors). ⁹ The victory of conciliation over reconciliation brought together left and right and secured the fragile transition to democracy; at the same time it suppressed both knowledge and acknowledgement of past abuses.

This context furnishes us with a richer insight into the argument put forward by many in the forum that the objective history they proclaim to practice within the academy stands out as superior to what they dismiss as the ‘militant historiography’ advanced by ‘politically committed’ writers. In this regard, it is important to note that, during the transition to democracy, professional historians schooled in ‘objectivity’ made a political choice to eschew the study of the Francoist repression. The vacuum was filled by a group of scholars who often came from outside the university system but who were determined to reveal the truth about what had happed in their own towns or provinces. ¹⁰ Through the 1980s, their detailed local research led to the publication of a number of ground-breaking books. Francisco Moreno Gómez represents a distinguished example of this new breed of historian. In 1982 Moreno Gómez published his first book on the violence of the Civil War and it remains a landmark text for scholars of the Francoist violence. ¹¹

Accordingly, the political commitment of scholars like Moreno Gómez led them to study a topic others refused to touch. Crucially, however, their methodology allowed them to demonstrate the shortcomings of existing interpretations. The Francoists had first denied, or kept silent about, their repression. ¹² Instead, with firm censorship in place, much of country’s recent history was penned by army officers and policemen who concentrated on the violence of the ‘Reds’ whose souls had been poisoned by Asiatic Bolshevism. Despite the one-sided rhetoric, the regime’s newspapers were not shy of proclaiming the regime’s police officials turned chroniclers as objective historians. ¹³ From the 1960s, however, a number of foreign scholars began to draw attention to the Francoist violence. ¹⁴ In response, the regime set up its own historical unit and acknowledged some killings. Nevertheless, the regime’s leading new historical writer from this period, Ricardo de la Cierva, ignored rebel and Francoist threats to carry out mass killing and avoided discussion of executions and the mass military trials of civilians. ¹⁵ He also provided low estimates of the overall killing by arguing that just 50,000 had lost their lives behind the lines of both sides. ¹⁶

The tendency to underestimate the numbers continued after Franco’s death in 1975. We can see this in the work of Ramón Salas Larrazábal, a retired Francoist general. He stepped into the breach to defend the reputation of the newly defunct Franco regime. To do this he loudly proclaimed his own objectivity and offered a blistering critique of the scholarship of others. ¹⁷ He accused the well known British historian Hugh Thomas, for instance, of overstating the number of dead and manipulating evidence to suit his interpretation in order to portray the ‘nationalist’ (Francoist) regime in a poor light. ¹⁸ In his 1977 book Losses in the Civil War Salas argued that during the conflict 72,500 people had perished behind government lines and 35,500 in rebel territory. From 1939 until 1961 he further contended that the Francoists had executed 23,000 people. ¹⁹

For all his insistence on his objectivity, Salas’ work foundered on the rocks of his exceedingly poor methodology. He relied on figures taken from the Provincial Delegations of the National Institute of Statistics which had collated figures from death registers held in municipalities across each province. ²⁰ These records, however, represent a far-from-reliable source and in fact represent part of the history of the repression and its denial. The Francoists purged the administrative staff who kept the local death records and intimidated the relatives of those killed by their death squads. ²¹ Widows, for instance, frequently endured head shavings and purges brought on by the forced consumption of castor oil. Such intimidation could lead to remarkable cases. In 1978, for example, Rosario Padilla Camacho, a widow from Villarobledo in Albacete province, petitioned the authorities in Spain’s new democracy to register the death of her husband whom the Francoists had killed on 15 April 1939. In all the intervening years, she had remained trapped in the limbo of a marriage the authorities continued to regard as legally standing by refusing to grant her the status of widow. ²²

Accordingly, it should come as little surprise that historians frequently unearth cases in which the civil registers provide a deeply misleading impression of the numbers killed. The example of the village of Villafranca de los Barros in Badajoz province illustrates the point well. Historian Francisco Espinosa has uncovered an army document which reveals that the Francoist authorities executed 310 people in the village. The civil register, however, only records 201 of these deaths (including deaths registered in the safer atmosphere that followed on Franco’s death). ²³

One of the major contributions of the new historians of the repression has been to improve the accuracy of the historical record by applying a richer methodology. They have checked and cross-referenced the number of dead by referring to prison records, conscription documents, municipal and state censuses and cemetery records. The cemetery records for Seville, for instance, revealed that 2971 people were buried in mass graves in the capital between July and December 1936. The civil register recorded just 97 of these deaths. ²⁴ Army archives, however, have provided the richest source of information. These include military trial records replete with a wide range of investigations which frequently mention directly or indirectly killings behind the lines. In Huelva province, military records have revealed the deaths of 1278 people for whom no other documentary record exists. ²⁵ The findings produced by such research has radically overturned Salas’s figures. While Salas computed a total of 5954 killed by Francoist forces in Córdoba province, Moreno Gómez has demonstrated that 11,581 people had their lives taken behind the lines by Francoists. ²⁶

From this perspective, Moreno Gómez represents a classic example of the researchers who from the 1980s challenged the Francoist view. Dr Villa García, however, accuses him of reproducing Republican propaganda, while Professor Fernando del Rey dismisses Moreno Gómez in unflattering terms as forming part of the ‘militant historiography’. ²⁷ Such equally militant responses, however, pass over the methods and evidence of historians such as Moreno Gómez and ignore the fact their anti-Francoist views have shaped important and neglected research questions. For in practice, their empirical rigour has brought insights that enrich the historical record by overturning years of misleading interpretations and the politically inspired silence of the transition period: a task which those who made a fuss of their objectivity, such as Salas or historians in the university system after Franco’s death, had declined to undertake.

Behind the rejection of the so-called ‘militant historiography’ by participants in the forum sit a further range of charges that must be placed in a broader historiographical context to be seen in their proper light. One claim is that the ‘politically committed’ historians defend at all costs a vision of a sacred and heroic republican democracy which leads them to justify and excuse revolutionary violence and miss the ways in which Republican democracy was in practice subordinated to revolution. ²⁸ To understand this debate, we need to return to the Francoist interpretation that has shaped the historiographical legacy which ‘politically committed’ historians work against.

We can taste important elements of the Francoist interpretation in the regime’s official inquiry into the war. In 1939, the Commission of Inquiry issued a report which claimed that the Republican government and its press supported and encouraged the killing of political opponents behind the lines. The government also stood accused of setting up a number of secret police dungeons and torture chambers known as ‘Chekas’ from which many rightists were dragged off to their deaths. ²⁹ This interpretation was further sustained by a series of memoirs and propaganda accounts that portrayed the Republican government as beholden to murderous and ‘Red’ ideological beliefs that led it to order a programme of sustained terror. Titles include ‘The Red Terror in Catalonia’ and ‘Six Months under the Red Terror in Madrid’. ³⁰

The new historians of the repression argue that violence in the Republic was not directed from above. Instead it occurred because the military coup of July 1936 fragmented the policing powers of the state. The Republican authorities, however, gradually rebuilt the state and by mid-1937 the violence had largely come under control. Historians like Moreno Gómez also demonstrate a stark contrast between the violence in Republican territory and the Francoist violence. The latter was mostly state-directed, endured over time and was far larger in scale (around 50,000 killed in government territory in comparison to the at least 130,000 slain by Franco’s supporters). Similarly, for years the Francoist violence had been silenced while General Franco’s supporters decried killings behind government lines for decades. ³¹

To level the accusation that these carefully researched and substantiated conclusions ignore the revolutionary rhetoric of the left and exonerate the Republic, is to obscure both a careful distinction and a great deal of detail. The new historians of the repression carefully distinguish between the two forms of violence not to excuse left violence but to correct the Francoist interpretation. In fact, they go into a great deal of detail and offer a range of interpretations about violence in the Republic. ³² We can see this in the work Chris Ealham whose research shines out for its depth and rigour. His methods and interpretation also enhance our understanding by showing how the urban poor in Barcelona became radicalized and violent through their own lived experience, their contact with the anarcho-syndicalist organization the CNT and through a struggle against the repressive Republican state. ³³ Equally, in his detailed study of the collectivization of land and farms in the province of Aragón Julián Casanova, one of the first university historians to study the repression, has demonstrated how anarcho-syndicalist militia groups used murder as a means to acquire land. ³⁴ Similarly, Encarnación Barranquero and Lucía Prieto have pointed to the responsibility of political leaders where it existed. They also examine the example of Fuengirola, in Málaga province, where property owners and class enemies of the workers were severely repressed in 1936 under the Republic. ³⁵ Accordingly, we do not find ourselves before an effort to exonerate the Republic and ignore violent rhetoric but rather a concerted attempt to place the violence in its context of protest, the fragmentation of the state, revolution and civil war.

The role of civil war itself in sparking some of the violence brings a certain irony to our attention. A number of the contributors to the forum pointed to the shortcomings of those historians who put ideology and Republican ideological interpretations above the objective practice of history. At the heart of the view the forum contributors put forward sits the notion that the Republican government had set itself on excluding certain right-wing groups from power in order to bring about a revolution in political power. ³⁶ When applied to the Civil War period, however, this perspective misses the way war interacted with ideology to breed violence. In Barcelona, for instance, a set of left-wing groups hoped to overturn the bourgeois state. They had to do so in the onerous circumstances of a civil war which had led to the collapse of security and an acute fear of the ‘fifth column’. This fear resulted in a good deal of violence. ³⁷

The stress on Republican ideology also obscures the role of culture and gender. In her study of anti-clerical violence, for instance, Maria Thomas has shown how groups on the left used violence to re-affirm their masculinity over unmanly priests who they believed had too much influence over their womenfolk. ³⁸ For his part Julio de la Cueva has explained how the anti-clerical violence became linked to the symbolic destruction of the cultural power of the Church. ³⁹

In short, to understand better the violence we need to introduce factors beyond the ideological and political by bringing in a history of security, emotion, masculinity and culture. Moreover, it is worth bearing in mind that some of the contributors to the forum railed against a tendency to read the history of the Republic from 1931 to 1936 through the lens of the Civil War. ⁴⁰ One could also point out, however, that they run the danger of falling into a similar trap. For Professor del Rey implies that the violence of the Civil War can be explained through a reading of the early Republican period rather than dwelling on the logic of violence unleashed by the military coup. ⁴¹

As we have seen, the debate on the causes of and nature of violence during and after the Civil War has become remarkably acrimonious. As one of the most prestigious historians of Spain, Paul Preston, has become a favoured target for much harsh criticism from the right. This criticism hails particularly from academics who do not share his belief in the value of studying the Francoist repression; nor do they accept his well documented interpretation that the violence emerged from a planned operation to eliminate ideological enemies and to ensure that groups opposed to the rebels long remained hamstrung. On occasions the assault on him has become personal. ⁴²

This vehemence in good measure reflects the political conflict sparked by recent efforts to confront the Francoist repression. Part of the background to this burning dispute lies in the conservative Popular Party’s pride in its origins during the transition and its celebration of the fact that Spanish constitution was forged by a willingness to forget the past in order to build the future. More recent political developments have had the effect of redoubling the Popular Party’s insistence that the past should not be revisited.

To appreciate this point, we need to bear in mind that following Franco’s death in 1975 the Popular Party struggled to win power, but since 1996 it has regularly formed the party of government. This has bestowed a greater confidence on the Party. In the meantime, centre and left-wing groups have frequently managed to shore up coalitions by agreeing to move from forgetting past wrongs to more vigorous efforts to achieve reconciliation by confronting the past. One explanation for this is that political parties on the centre and left have responded to a new generation of ‘memory activists’. Between the start of the present century and September 2011, civil associations working, in their words, to ‘recover historical memory’ – by which they mean enriching public memory with the historical record long denied to individuals such as Elías Górriz – exhumed and gave dignified burials to 5476 victims of the rebel and Francoist repression. ⁴³ Their pressure helped lead to the 2007 Law of Historical Memory passed while the Socialist Party held power and which includes a clause for the removal of Francoist monuments that exalt violence. Demands for reconciliation, however, push the now-more-confident groups on the right to adopt a much more aggressive approach, which includes removing funding for initiatives launched under the Law of Historical Memory. ⁴⁴

The new combative spirit on the right also reflects a discomfort about the past for those who lost family members in the violence behind Republican lines or who have relatives who might have been involved in the Francoist violence. ⁴⁵ This is further reflected in a series of prosecutions launched by disgruntled relatives of named perpetrators. These cases took place during and after the transition and put in the dock, on the charge of violating the right to honour, individuals who had named Francoist perpetrators. ⁴⁶ One advantage for the Popular Party in determinedly and publicly rejecting demands for confronting the past is that it helps to secure the support of its core voters. ⁴⁷ In this environment, in which the Francoist vision of the past has often gone unchallenged, there is a sizeable public appetite for books that echo familiar refrains from the Francoist period which blame the left for the Civil War and its violence. ⁴⁸

Professor Preston’s book sits in the eye of this storm. Much of the book’s value resides in its challenge of benign historical interpretations of Francoism that are kept in place by forgetting the Civil War violence. In effect, the book helps create a new historical record. One of the limitations of Spain’s, in many ways exemplary, transition to democracy was the decision not to create a historical record of the repression. It is true that at the time the book market became flooded with publications on the Civil War during the transition and that there was an inquiry into the bombing of Guernica by the Axis powers. ⁴⁹ With the exception of former regime insiders such as Salas, however, the repression largely lay off-limits during the transition. Moreover, the state remained uninterested in transitional justice and as Spain moved towards democracy a government minister even ordered the destruction of police archives. ⁵⁰

This context offers further insights into the valuable work of the historians of the repression: they helped make the disappeared resting in anonymous mass graves visible and they brought the silenced stories of the murdered into the historical record. The vast scale of the research involved in demonstrating the scale of the repression was far beyond what any one lone scholar could achieve. This meant that the work was carried out on a province-by-province basis by many different historians. Paul Preston’s great achievement has been to bring this vast corpus of work together and to give it the prominence that only one of the most eminent of historians could accomplish. More than this, the sheer documentary weight underpinning the book makes it very difficult for future historians to view the origins of the Franco regime as in any way benign; nor does Professor Preston ignore the government side: his work deals with killings in both Francoist and Republican territory, a fact often overlooked or undervalued by his critics. The research underpinning the book, however, shows that the two sides cannot be compared as equal. Instead the use of the state, the scale of the killings, the enduring nature of the repression and the silencing of the violence all make the Francoist violence distinct. Accordingly, the book helps fill the gap left by the absence of truth and reconciliation committee in Spain which could help create a proper historical record. ⁵¹

Ultimately this is why we need to reconsider the arguments of those who shrink from Professor Preston’s work because it apportions blame or because they claim it aims to exonerate the left. ⁵² With so many families living under the shadow cast by the Francoist repression, and with benign visions of the Franco regime retaining much force, it is important to forge the historical record and reveal where responsibility lies. As we have seen, examining political responsibility does not mean exonerating the left and nor does it mean missing the logic of violence unleashed by civil war, as some critiques have argued. ⁵³ Instead Paul Preston’s book shows how research on issues of great political and social importance and underpinned by the rigorous use of evidence can open up areas of enquiry neglected or misrepresented by some who proclaim their objectivity. In the process, it helps to transform the historical record and to bring both knowledge and acknowledgement of the past.