White Terror (Spain)
In the history of Spain, the White Terror describes the political repression, including executions and rapes, which were carried out by the Nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War, as well as during the first nine years of the regime of General Francisco Franco. In the 1936–45 period, Francoist Spain had many official enemies: Loyalists to the Second Spanish Republic, Liberals, socialists of different stripes, Protestants, atheists, intellectuals, homosexuals, Freemasons, and Basque, Catalan, and Galician nationalists.
Fascists viewed the purging of leftists from Spain as the political reaction that was required in order to re-establish the monarchy in place of the Second Republic. The Francoist Repression was motivated by the right-wing notion of a limpieza social, a cleansing of society. This meant the killing of people viewed as enemies of the state began immediately upon the Nationalists' capture of a place. Ideologically, the Roman Catholic Church legitimized the killing by the Civil Guard and the Falange as the defense of Christendom.
Throughout Franco's rule, the Law of Political Responsibilities , promulgated in 1939, reformed in 1942, and in force until 1966, gave legalistic color of law to the political repression that characterized the dismantling of the Second Republic; and served to punish Loyalist Spaniards.
Historians consider the White Terror's death toll to be greater than the death toll of the corresponding Red Terror.
Background
After the flight of King Alfonso XIII, the Second Spanish Republic was established on 14 April 1931, led by President Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, whose government instituted a program of secular reforms, which included agrarian reform, the separation of church and state, the right to divorce, women's suffrage, the socio-political reformation of the Spanish Army, and political autonomy for Catalonia and the Basque Country.President Alcalá-Zamora's reforms to Spanish society were continually blocked by the right-wing parties and rejected by the far-left-wing National Confederation of Labour. The Second Spanish Republic suffered attacks from the right wing, and the left wing, whilst enduring the economic impact of the Great Depression.After the general election in February 1936 was won by the Popular Front — a coalition of leftist parties, Republican Left, Republican Union, Communist Party, Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, Republican Left of Catalonia, the Spanish right wing planned their military coup d'état against the democratic Republic to reinstall monarchy. Finally, on 17 July 1936, a part of the Spanish Army, led by a group of far-right-wing officers launched a military coup d'état against the Spanish Republic in July 1936. The generals' coup d'état failed, but the rebellious army, known as the Nationalists, controlled a large part of Spain; the Spanish Civil War had started.
Franco, one of the leaders of the coup, and his Nationalist army, won the Spanish civil war in 1939. Franco ruled Spain for the next 36 years, until his death in 1975. Besides the mass assassinations of republican political enemies, political prisoners were interned to concentration camps and homosexuals were interned to psychiatric hospitals.
Red and White Terrors
From the beginning of the war, in July 1936, the ideological nature of the Nationalist fight against the Republicans indicated the degree of dehumanisation of the lower social classes in the view of the politically-reactionary sponsors of the nationalist forces, the Roman Catholic Church of Spain, the aristocracy, the landowners, and the military, commanded by Franco. Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera y Munro, a public affairs officer for the Nationalist forces, told the American reporter John Thompson Whitaker:The Nationalists committed their atrocities in public, with assistance from the local Catholic Church clergy and from the upper social classes of the place to be politically cleansed. In August 1936, the Massacre of Badajoz featured a great crowd of rich people and a Mass before the shooting of some 4,000 Republicans. Among the children of the landlords, the joke name Reforma agraria identified the horseback hunting parties by which they killed insubordinate peasantry and so cleansed their lands of communists; moreover, the joke name alluded to the grave where the corpses of the hunted peasants were dumped: the piece of land for which the dispossessed peasants had revolted. Early in the civil war most of the victims of the White Terror and the Red Terror were killed in mass executions behind the respective front lines of the Nationalist and of the Republican forces:
Common to the political purges of the left-wing and right-wing belligerents were the sacas, the taking out of prisoners from the jails and the prisons, who then were taken for a paseo, a ride to summary execution. Most of the men and women taken out from the prisons and jails were killed by death squads, from the trade unions, and by the paramilitary militias of the political parties. Among the justifications for summary execution of right-wing enemies was reprisal for aerial bombings of civilians, other people were killed after being denounced as an enemy of the people, by false accusations motivated by personal envy and hatred. Nevertheless, the significant differences between White political terrorism and Red political terrorism was indicated by Francisco Partaloa, prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Madrid and a friend of the aristocrat General Queipo de Llano, who witnessed the assassinations, first in the Republican camp and then in the Nationalist camp of the Spanish Civil War:
Historians of the Spanish Civil War, such as Helen Graham, Paul Preston, Antony Beevor, Gabriel Jackson, Hugh Thomas, and Ian Gibson concurred that the mass killings realized behind the Nationalist front lines were organized and approved by the Nationalist rebel authorities, while the killings behind the Republican front lines resulted from the societal breakdown of the Second Spanish Republic:
In the second volume of A History of Spain and Portugal, Stanley Payne said that the political violence in the Republican zone was organized by the left-wing political parties:
That, unlike the political repression by the right wing, which "was concentrated against the most dangerous opposition elements", the Republican attacks were irrational, which featured the "murdering innocent people, and letting some of the more dangerous go free. Moreover, one of the main targets of the Red terror was the clergy, most of whom were not engaged in overt opposition" to the Spanish Republic. Nonetheless, in a letter-to-the-editor of the ABC newspaper in Seville, Miguel de Unamuno said that, unlike the assassinations in the areas held by the Republic, the methodical assassinations effected by the White Terror were ordered by the highest authorities of the Nationalist rebellion, and identified General Mola as the proponent of the political cleansing policies of the White Terror.
When news of the mass killings of Republican soldiers and sympathizers — General Mola's policy to terrorise the Republicans — reached the Republican government, the Defence Minister Indalecio Prieto plead with the Spanish republicans:
Moreover, despite his political loyalty to the reactionary rebellion of the Nationalists, the right-wing writer José María Pemán was concerned about the volume of the mass killings; in My Lunches with Important People, he reported a conversation with General Miguel Cabanellas in late 1936:
Civil War
The White Terror commenced on 17 July 1936, the day of the Nationalist coup d'état, with hundreds of assassinations effected in the area controlled by the right-wing rebels, but it had been planned before earlier. In the 30 June 1936 secret instructions for the coup d'état in Morocco, Mola ordered the rebels "to eliminate left-wing elements, communists, anarchists, union members, etc." The White Terror included the repression of political opponents in areas occupied by the Nationalist, mass executions in areas captured from the Republicans, such as the Massacre of Badajoz, and looting.In The Spanish Labyrinth, Gerald Brenan said that:
... thanks to the failure of the coup d'état and to the eruption of the Falangist and Carlist militias, with their previously prepared lists of victims, the scale on which these executions took place exceeded all precedent. Andalusia, where the supporters of Franco were a tiny minority, and where the military commander, General Queipo de Llano, was a pathological figure recalling the Conde de España of the First Carlist War, was drenched in blood. The famous massacre of Badajoz was merely the culminating act of a ritual that had already been performed in every town and village in the South-West of Spain.
Other examples include the bombing of civilian areas such as Guernica, Madrid, Málaga, Almería, Lérida, Durango, Granollers, Alcañiz, Valencia and Barcelona by the Luftwaffe ' and the Italian air force ', killings of Republican POWs, rape, forced disappearances — including whole Republican military units such as the 221st Mixed Brigade — and the establishment of Francoist prisons in the aftermath of the Republicans' defeat.
Goals and victims of the repression
The main goal of the White Terror was to terrify the civil population who opposed the coup, eliminate the supporters of the Republic and the militants of the leftist parties, and because of this, some historians have considered the White Terror a genocide. In fact, one of the leaders of the coup, General Mola said:In areas controlled by the Nationalists, government officials, Popular Front politicians, union leaders, teachers, intellectuals, suspected Freemasons, Basque, Catalan, Andalusian or Galician nationalists, military officers who had remained loyal to the government of the Republic, and people suspected of voting for the Popular Front were targeted, usually brought before local committees and imprisoned or executed. The living conditions in the improvised Nationalist prisons were very harsh. One former Republican prisoner declared:
At times we were forty prisoners in a cell built to accommodate two people. There were two benches, each capable of seating three persons, and the floor to sleep on. For our private needs, there were only three chamberpots. They had to be emptied into an old rusty cauldron which also served for washing our clothes. We were forbidden to have food brought to us from outside, and were given disgusting soup cooked with soda ash which kept us in a constant state of dysentery. We were all in a deplorable state. The air was unbreathable and the babies choked many nights for lack of oxygen...
To be imprisoned, according to the rebels, was to lose all individuality. The most elementary human rights were unknown and people were killed as easily as rabbits...
Because of this mass terror in many areas controlled by the Nationalists, thousands of Republicans left their homes and tried to hide in nearby forests or mountains. Many of these huidos later joined the Spanish maquis, the anti-Francoist guerrilla force that continued to fight against the Francoist State in the post-war era. Hundreds of thousands of others fled to the areas controlled by the Second Republic. In 1938 there were more than one million refugees in Barcelona alone. In many cases, when someone fled the Nationalists executed their relatives. One witness in Zamora stated: "All the members of the Flechas family, both men and women, were killed, a total of seven persons. A son succeeded in escaping, but in his place they killed his eight-months-pregnant fiancé Transito Alonso and her mother, Juana Ramos." Furthermore, thousands of republicans joined Falange and the Nationalist army in order to escape the repression. In fact, many supporters of the Nationalists referred to the Falange as "our reds" and to the Falange's blue shirt as the salvavidas. In Granada, one supporter of the Nationalists said:
Another major target of the Terror were women, with the overall goal of keeping them in their traditional place in Spanish society. To this end the Nationalist army promoted a campaign of targeted rape. Quiepo de Llano spoke multiple times over the radio warning that "immodest" women with Republican sympathies would be raped by his Moorish troops. Near Seville, Nationalist soldiers raped a truckload of female prisoners, threw their bodies down a well, and paraded around town with their rifles draped with their victim's underwear. These rapes were not the result of soldiers disobeying orders, but official Nationalist policies, with officers specifically choosing Moors to be the primary perpetrators. Advancing nationalist troops scrawled "Your children will give birth to fascists" on the walls of captured buildings, and many women taken prisoner were force fed castor oil, then paraded in public naked, while the powerful laxative did its work.
Death toll
Estimates of executions behind the Nationalist lines during the Spanish Civil War range from fewer than 50,000 to 200,000 were executed after a trial, and the historian Stanley Payne in his work Fascism in Spain, citing a study by Cifuentes Checa and Maluenda Pons carried out over the Nationalist-controlled city of Zaragoza and its environs, refers to 3,117 killings, of which 2,578 took place in 1936. He goes on to state that by 1938 the military courts there were directing summary executions.Many of the executions in the course of the war were carried by militants of the fascist party Falange or militants of the Carlist party militia, but with the approval of the Nationalist government.
Cooperation of the Spanish Church
The Spanish Church approved of the White Terror and cooperated with the rebels. According to Antony Beevor: "Cardinal Gomá stated that 'Jews and Masons poisoned the national soul with absurd doctrine'... A few brave priests put their lives at risk by criticizing nationalist atrocities, but the majority of the clergy in nationalist areas revelled in their new-found power and the increased size of their congregations. Anyone who did not attend Mass faithfully was likely to be suspected of 'red' tendencies. Entrepreneurs made a great money selling religious symbols... It was reminiscent of the way the Inquisition's persecutions of Jews and Moors helped make pork such an important part of the Spanish diet." One witness in Zamora said: "Many priests acted very badly. The bishop of Zamora in 1936 was more or less an assassin—I don't remember his name. He must be held responsible because prisoners appealed to him to save their lives. All he would reply was that the Reds had killed more people than the falangist were killing." Nevertheless, the Nationalists killed at least 16 Basque nationalist priests, and imprisoned or deported hundreds more. Several priests who tried to halt the killings and at least one priest who was a Mason were killed.Regarding the callous attitude of the Vatican, Manuel Montero, lecturer of the University of the Basque Country commented on 6 May 2007:
Repression in the South and the drive to Madrid
The White Terror was especially harsh in the southern part of Spain. The rebels bombed and seized the working-class districts of the main Andalusian cities in the first days of the war, and afterwards went on to execute thousands of workers and militants of the leftist parties: in the city of Cordoba 4,000; in the city of Granada 5,000; in the city of Seville 3,028; and in the city of Huelva 2,000 killed and 2,500 disappeared. The city of Málaga, occupied by the Nationalists in February 1937 following the Battle of Málaga, experienced one of the harshest repressions following Francoist victory with an estimated total of 17,000 people summarily executed. Carlos Arias Navarro, then a young lawyer who as public prosecutor signed thousands of execution warrants in the trials set up by the triumphant rightists, became known as "The Butcher of Málaga". Over 4,000 people were buried in mass graves.Even towns of rural areas were not spared the terror, such as Lora del Rio in the province of Seville, where the Nationalists killed 300 peasants as a reprisal for the assassination of a local landowner. In the province of Córdoba the Nationalists killed 995 Republicans in Puente Genil and about 700 loyalists were murdered by the orders of Nationalist Colonel Sáenz de Buruaga in Baena, although other estimates mention up to 2,000 victims following the Baena Massacre.
Paul Preston estimates the total number of victims of the Nationalists in Andalusia at 55,000.
Troops of North Africa
The colonial troops of the Spanish Army of Africa, composed mainly of the Moroccan regulares and the Spanish Legion, under the command of Colonel Juan Yagüe, made up the feared shock troops of the Francoist military. In their advance towards Madrid from Sevilla through Andalusia and Extremadura these troops routinely killed dozens or hundreds in every town or city conquered. but in the Massacre of Badajoz the number of Republicans killed reached several thousands. Furthermore, the colonial troops raped many working-class women and looted the houses of the Republicans. Queipo de Llano, one of the Nationalists leaders known for his use of radio broadcasts as a means of psychological warfare, said:Postwar
When Heinrich Himmler visited Spain in 1940, a year after Franco's victory, he claimed to have been"shocked" by the brutality of the Falangist repression. In July 1939, the foreign minister of Fascist Italy, Galeazzo Ciano, reported of "trials going on every day at a speed which I would call almost summary... There are still a great number of shootings. In Madrid alone, between 200 and 250 a day, in Barcelona 150, in Seville 80". While authors like Payne have cast doubts on the democratic leanings of the Republic, "fascism was clearly on the other".
Repressive laws
According to Beevor, Spain was an open prison for all those who opposed Franco. Until 1963, all the opponents of the Francoist State were brought before military courts. A number of repressive laws were issued, including the Law of Political Responsibilities in February 1939, the Law of Security of State in 1941, the Law for the Repression of Masonry and Communism on 2 March 1940, and the Law for the Repression of Banditry and Terrorism in April 1947, which targeted the maquis. Furthermore, in 1940, the Francoist State established the Tribunal for the eradication of Freemasonry and Communism.Political parties and trade unions were forbidden except for the government party, Traditionalist Spanish Falange and Offensive of the Unions of the National-Syndicalist, and the official trade union Spanish Trade Union Organisation. Hundreds of militants and supporters of the parties and trade unions declared illegal under Francoist Spain, such as the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, PSOE; the Communist Party of Spain, PCE; the Workers' General Union, UGT; and the National Confederation of Labor, CNT, were imprisoned or executed. The regional languages, like Basque and Catalan, were also forbidden, and the statutes of autonomy of Catalonia and the Basque country were abolished. Censorship of the press and of cultural life was rigorously exercised and forbidden books destroyed.
Executions, forced labour and medical experiments
At the end of the Spanish Civil War the executions of the "enemies of the state" continued, including the extrajudicial executions of members of the Spanish maquis and their supporters ;in the province of Córdoba 220 maquis and 160 enlaces were killed. Thousands of men and women were imprisoned after the civil war in Francoist concentration camps, approximately 367,000 to 500,000 prisoners were held in 50 camps or prisons. In 1933, before the war, the prisons of Spain contained some 12,000 prisoners, just seven years later, in 1940, just one year after the end of the civil war, 280,000 prisoners were held in more than 500 prisons throughout the country. The principal purpose of the Francoist concentration camps was to classify the prisoners of war from the defeated Spanish Republic; men and women who were classified as "unrecoverable", were put to death.After the war, the republican prisoners were sent to work in militarised penal colonies, penal detachments and disciplinary battalions of worker-soldiers. According to Beevor, 90,000 Republican prisoners were sent off to 121 labour battalions and 8,000 to military workshops. In 1939, Ciano said about the Republican prisoners of war: "They are not prisoners of war, they are slaves of war". Thousands of prisoners were forced to work building dams, highways, the Guadalquivir Canal, the Carabanchel Prison, the Valley of the Fallen and in coal mines in Asturias and Leon. The severe overcrowding of the prisons, poor sanitary conditions and the lack of food caused thousands of deaths, among them the poet Miguel Hernández and the politician Julián Besteiro. New investigations suggest that the actual number of dead prisoners was much higher, with around 15,000 deaths just in 1941.
Just as with the death toll from executions by the Nationalists during the Civil War, historians have made different estimations the victims of the White Terror after the war. Stanley Payne estimates 30,000 executions following the end of the war. Recent searches conducted with parallel excavations of mass graves in Spain estimate that the total of people executed after the war arrive at a number between 15,000 and 35,000. Julián Casanova Ruiz, nominated in 2008 among the experts in the first judicial investigation against the Francoist crimes estimate 50,000. Historian Josep Fontana says 25,000. According to Gabriel Jackson, the number of victims of the White Terror just between 1939 and 1943 was 200,000.
A Francoist psychiatrist, Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, carried out medical experiments on prisoners in the Francoist concentration camps to "establish the bio-psych roots of Marxism".
Vallejo Najera also said that it was necessary to remove the children of the Republican women from their mothers. Thousands of children were taken from their mothers and handed over to Francoist families. Many of the mothers were executed afterwards. "For mothers who had a baby with them—and there were many—the first sign that they were to be executed was when their infant was snatched from them. Everyone knew what this meant. A mother whose little one was taken had only a few hours left to live".
Stanley Payne observes that Franco's repression did not undergo "cumulative radicalisation" like that of Hitler; in fact, the opposite occurred, with major persecution being slowly reduced. 95% of death sentences under Franco's rule occurred by 1941. During the next thirty months, military prosecutors sought 939 death sentences, most of which were not approved and others commuted. On October 1, 1939, all former Republican personnel serving a sentence of less than six years were pardoned. In 1940 special military judicial commissions were created to examine sentences and were given the power to confirm or reduce them but never to extend them. Later that year, provisional liberty was granted to all political prisoners serving less than six years and in April 1941, this was also granted to those serving less than twelve years and then fourteen years in October. Provisional liberty was extended to those serving up to twenty years in December 1943.
Fate of Republican exiles
Furthermore, hundreds of thousands were forced into exile, with many intellectuals and artists who had supported the Republic such as Antonio Machado, Ramon J. Sender, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Pedro Salinas, Manuel Altolaguirre, Emilio Prados, Max Aub, Franciso Ayala, Jorge Guillén, León Felipe, Arturo Barea, Pablo Casals, Jesús Bal y Gay, Rodolfo Halffter, Julián Bautista, Salvador Bacarisse, Josep Lluís Sert, Margarita Xirgu, Maruja Mallo, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, Americo Castro, Clara Campoamor, Victoria Kent, Pablo Picasso, Maria Luisa Algarra, Alejandro Casona, Rosa Chacel, Maria Zambrano, Josep Carner, Manuel de Falla, Paulino Masip, María Teresa León, Alfonso Castelao, Jose Gaos and Luis Buñuel.entering the Mauthausen concentration camp; banner in Spanish reads "Antifascist Spaniards greet the forces of liberation". The photo was taken on 6 May 1945
When Nazi Germany occupied France, Franco's politicians encouraged the Germans to detain and to deport thousands of Republican refugees to the concentration camps. 15,000 Spanish Republicans were deported to Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, Auschwitz, Flossenburg and Mauthausen. Other Spanish Republicans were detained by the Gestapo, handed over to Spain and executed, among them Julián Zugazagoitia, Juan Peiró, Francisco Cruz Salido and Lluis Companys and another 15,000 were forced to work building the Atlantic Wall. Moreover, 4,000 Spanish Republicans were deported by the Nazis to the occupied Channel Islands and were forced to work building fortifications; only 59 survived. Thus, thousands of Spanish refugees joined the French Resistance—among them Colonel Carlos Romero Giménez—and the Free French Forces.
Purges and labour discrimination
The Francoist State carried out extensive purges among the civil service. Thousands of officials loyal to the Republic were expelled from the army. Thousands of university and school teachers lost their jobs. Priority for employment was always given to Nationalist supporters, and it was necessary to have a "good behavior" certificate from local Falangist officials and parish priests. Furthermore, the Francoist State encouraged tens of thousands of Spaniards to denounce their Republican neighbours and friends:Campaign against Republican women
Republican women were also victims of the repression in postwar Spain. Thousands of women suffered public humiliation, sexual harassment and rape. In many cases, the houses and goods of the widows of Republicans were confiscated by the government. Thus, many Republican women, living in total poverty, were forced into prostitution. According to Paul Preston: "The increase in prostitution both benefited Francoist men who thereby slaked their lust and also reassured them that 'red' women were a fount of dirt and corruption". Furthermore, thousands of women were executed among them pregnant women. One judge said: "We cannot wait seven months to execute a woman".Furthermore, under the Francoist legislation, a woman needed her husband's permission to take a job or open a bank account. Adultery by women was a crime, but adultery by the husband was a crime only if he lived with his mistress.
Marriage law
The divorce and marriage legislation of the Republic was retroactively reversed, with the divorces retroactively unmade and the children of civil marriages made illegitimate.Homosexuals
Homosexuals were first sent to concentration camps. Then the 1954 reform of the 1933 "Ley de vagos y maleantes" declared homosexuality illegal. Around 5,000 homosexuals were arrested during Francoism due to their sexual orientation.Aftermath
The last concentration camp, at Miranda de Ebro, was closed in 1947. By the early 1950s the parties and trade unions made illegal by the Francoist State had been decimated by the Francoist police, and the Spanish maquis had ceased to exist as an organized resistance. Nevertheless, new forms of opposition started like the unrest in the universities and strikes in Barcelona, Madrid and Vizcaya. The 1960s saw the start of the labour strikes led by the illegal union trade Workers' Commissions, linked to the Communist Party and the protest in the universities continued to grow. Finally, with Franco's death in 1975, the Spanish transition to democracy commenced and in 1978 the Spanish Constitution of 1978 was approved.After Franco's death, the Spanish government approved the Spanish 1977 Amnesty Law which granted a pardon for all political crimes committed by the supporters of the Francoist State and by the democratic opposition. Nevertheless, in October 2008 a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, of the National Court of Spain authorized, for the first time, an investigation into the disappearance and assassination of 114,000 victims of the Francoist State between 1936 and 1952. This investigation proceeded on the basis of the notion that this mass-murder constituted a crime against humanity which cannot be subject to any amnesty or statute of limitations. As a result, in May 2010, Mr. Garzón was accused of violating the terms of the general amnesty and his powers as a jurist have been suspended pending further investigation. In September 2010, the Argentine justice reopened a probe into crimes committed during the Spanish Civil War and during Franco's reign. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Council of Europe and United Nations have asked the Spanish government to investigate the crimes of Franco's reign.