The Spanish Holocaust Read Free Page B

fields by squads of mounted Falangists and extreme right-wing monarchists of the so-called Carlist movement. It is equally impossible to ascertain the fate of the thousands of refugees from Western Andalusia who died in the exodus after the fall of Málaga in 1937 or of those from all over Spain who had taken refuge in Barcelona only to die in the flight to the French border in 1939 or of those who committed suicide after waiting in vain for evacuation from the Mediterranean ports.
    Nevertheless, the huge amount of research that has been carried out makes it possible to state that, broadly speaking, the repression by therebels was about three times greater than that which took place in the Republican zone. The currently most reliable, yet still tentative, figure for deaths at the hands of the military rebels and their supporters is 130,199. However, it is unlikely that such deaths were fewer than 150,000 and they could well be more. Some areas have been studied only partially; others hardly at all. In several areas, which spent time in both zones, and for which the figures are known with some precision, the differences between the numbers of deaths at the hands of Republicans and at the hands of rebels are shocking. To give some examples, in Badajoz, there were 1,437 victims of the left as against 8,914 victims of the rebels; in Seville, 447 victims of the left, 12,507 victims of the rebels; in Cádiz, 97 victims of the left, 3,071 victims of the rebels; and in Huelva, 101 victims of the left, 6,019 victims of the rebels. In places where there was no Republican violence, the figures for rebel killings are almost incredible, for example Navarre, 3,280, La Rioja, 1,977. In most places where the Republican repression was the greater, like Alicante, Girona or Teruel, the differences are in the hundreds. 11 The exception is Madrid. The killings throughout the war when the capital was under Republican control seem to have been nearer three times those carried out after the rebel occupation. However, precise calculation is rendered difficult by the fact that the most frequently quoted figure for the post-war repression in Madrid, of 2,663 deaths, is based on a study of those executed and buried in only one cemetery, the Almudena or Cementerio del Este. 12
    Although exceeded by the violence exercised by the Francoists, the repression in the Republican zone before it was stopped by the Popular Front government was nonetheless horrifying. Its scale and nature necessarily varied, with the highest figures being recorded for the largely Socialist south of Toledo and the anarchist-dominated area from the south of Zaragoza, through Teruel into western Tarragona. 13 In Toledo, 3,152 rightists were killed, of whom 10 per cent were members of the clergy (nearly half of the province’s clergy). 14 In Cuenca, the total deaths were 516 (of whom thirty-six, or 7 per cent of the total killed, were priests – nearly a quarter of the province’s clergy). 15 The figure for deaths in Republican Catalonia, according to the exhaustive study by Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté and Joan Vilarroyo i Font, was 8,360. This figure corresponds closely to the conclusions reached by a commission created by the Generalitat de Catalunya (the Catalan regional government) in 1937. Part of the efforts of the Republican authorities to register deaths, it was led by a judge, Bertran de Quintana, and investigated all deaths behind the lines in order to instigate measures against those responsiblefor extra-judicial executions. 16 Such a procedure would have been inconceivable in the rebel zone.
    Recent scholarship, not only for Catalonia but also for most of Republican Spain, has dramatically dismantled the propagandistic allegations made by the rebels at the time. On 18 July 1938 in Burgos, Franco himself claimed that 54,000 people had been killed in Catalonia. In the same speech, he alleged that 70,000 had been murdered in Madrid and 20,000 in Valencia. On the same day, he