Читать книгу The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain - Paul Preston - Страница 12

Africanista officers and Civil Guards were the most violent exponents of right-wing hostility towards the Second Republic and its working-class supporters. They received encouragement and justification in the murderous hostility to the left peddled by numerous politicians, journals and newspapers. In particular, several influential individuals spewed out a rhetoric which urged the extermination of the left as a patriotic duty. They insinuated the racial inferiority of their left-wing and liberal enemies through the clichés of the theory of the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy. The presentation at the beginning of 1933 of the draft law prohibiting schools run by religious orders was a useful trigger. On 30 January, at a mass meeting in the Monumental Cinema in Madrid, the Carlist landowner José María Lamamié de Clairac, a parliamentary deputy for Salamanca, denounced the law as a satanic plot by the Freemasons to destroy the Catholic Church.¹ The Law was approved on 18 May. On 4 June, Cándido Casanueva, Lamamié’s fellow deputy for Salamanca, responded by telling the Women’s Association for Civic Education: ‘You are duty bound to pour into the hearts of your children a drop of hatred every day against the Law on Religious Orders and its authors. Woe betide you if you don’t!’² The following day, Gil Robles declared that ‘the Freemasonry that has brought the Law on Religious Orders to Spain is the work of foreigners, just like the sects and the Internationals’.³

The idea of an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Christian world was given a modern spin in Spain by the dissemination from 1932 onwards of one the most influential works of anti-Semitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Published in Russia in 1903 and based on German and French novels of the 1860s, this fantastical concoction purveyed the idea that a secret Jewish government, the Elders of Zion, was plotting the destruction of Christianity and Jewish world domination.⁴ The first Spanish translation of The Protocols had been published in Leipzig in 1930. Another translation was made available in Barcelona in 1932 by a Jesuit publishing house which then serialized it in one of its magazines. Awareness and approval of The Protocols was extended through the enormously popular work of the Catalan priest Juan Tusquets Terrats (1901–98), author of the best-seller Orígenes de la revolución española. Tusquets was born into a wealthy banking family in Barcelona on 31 March 1901. His father was a descendant of Jewish bankers, a committed Catalan nationalist and a friend of the plutocrat Francesc Cambó. His mother was a member of the fabulously wealthy Milà family, the patrons of Gaudí. His secondary education took place in a Jesuit school, then he studied at the University of Louvain and the Pontifical University in Tarragona, where he wrote his doctorate. He was ordained in 1926 and was soon regarded as one of the brightest hopes of Catalan philosophy. Renowned for his piety and his enormous culture, he became a teacher in the seminary of the Catalan capital, where he was commissioned to write a book on the theosophical movement of the controversial spiritualist Madame Helena Blavatsky. In the wake of its success, he developed an obsessive interest in secret societies.⁵

Despite, or perhaps because of, his own remote Jewish origins, by the time the Second Republic was established Tusquets’s investigations into secret societies had developed into a fierce anti-Semitism and an even fiercer hatred of Freemasonry. In a further rejection of his family background, he turned violently against Catalan Nationalism and gained great notoriety by falsely accusing the Catalan leader Francesc Macià of being a Freemason.⁶ Working with another priest, Joaquim Guiu Bonastre, he built up a network of what he called ‘my faithful and intrepid informers’. His ostentatious piety notwithstanding, Tusquets was not above spying or even burglary. One of the principal lodges in Barcelona was in the Carrer d’Avinyó next to a pharmacy. Since Tusquets’s aunt lived behind the pharmacy, he and Father Guiu were able spy on the Freemasons from her flat. On one occasion, they broke into another lodge and started a fire, using the ensuing confusion to steal a series of documents. These ‘researches’ were the basis for the regular, and vehemently anti-Masonic, articles that Tusquets contributed to the Carlist newspaper El Correo Catalán and for his immensely successful book Orígenes de la revolución española. This book was notable both for popularizing the notion that the Republic was the fruit of a Jewish–Masonic conspiracy and for publishing the names of those he considered its most sinister members. He later alleged that, in retaliation for his writings, the Freemasons twice tried to assassinate him. From his account, it seems that they did not try very hard. On the first occasion, he cheated death simply by getting into a taxi. On the second, he claimed, curiously, that he was saved by an escort provided by the anarcho-syndicalist newspaper Solidaridad Obrera. This alleged benevolence on the part of the anarchists was all the more implausible given their own passionate anti-clericalism.⁷

Tusquets used The Protocols as ‘documentary’ evidence of his essential thesis that the Jews were bent on the destruction of Christian civilization. Their instruments were Freemasons and Socialists who did their dirty work by means of revolution, economic catastrophes, unholy and pornographic propaganda and unlimited liberalism. He condemned the Second Republic as the child of Freemasonry and denounced the President, the piously Catholic Niceto Alcalá Zamora, as both a Jew and a Freemason.⁸ The message was clear – Spain and the Catholic Church could be saved only by the destruction of Jews, Freemasons and Socialists – in other words, of the entire left of the political spectrum. Orígenes de la revolución española sold massively and also provoked a noisy polemic which gave even greater currency to his ideas. His notion that the Republic was a dictatorship in the hands of ‘Judaic Freemasonry’ was further disseminated through his many articles in El Correo Catalán and a highly successful series of fifteen books (Las Sectas) attacking Freemasonry, communism and Judaism.

The second volume of Las Sectas included a complete translation of The Protocols and also repeated his slurs on Macià. The section entitled ‘their application to Spain’ asserted that the Jewish assault on Spain was visible both in the Republic’s persecution of religion and in the movement for agrarian reform via the redistribution of the great estates.⁹ Made famous by his writings, in late 1933 Tusquets was invited by the International Anti-Masonic Association to visit the recently established concentration camp at Dachau. He remarked that ‘they did it to show what we had to do in Spain’. Dachau was established as a camp for various groups that the Nazis wished to quarantine: political prisoners (Freemasons, Communists, Socialists and liberal, Catholic and monarchist opponents of the regime) and those that they defined as asocials or deviants (homosexuals, Gypsies, vagrants). Despite his favourable comments at the time, Tusquets would claim more than fifty years later that he had been shocked by what he saw. Certainly the visit did nothing to stem the flow and the intensity of his anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic publications.¹⁰

Tusquets would come to have enormous influence within the Spanish right in general and specifically over General Franco, who enthusiastically devoured his anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic diatribes. He produced a bulletin on Freemasonry that was distributed to senior military figures. Franco’s most powerful collaborator, his brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Suñer, would later praise Tusquets’s contribution to ‘the creation of the atmosphere which led to the National uprising’.¹¹ However, Tusquets did more than just develop the ideas that justified violence. He was involved in the military plot against the Republic through his links with Catalan Carlists. He and his crony Joaquim Guiu participated in conspiratorial meetings of the Unión Militar Española, which was powerful in Barcelona. In late May 1936, he would approach the private secretary to the Catalan millionaire Francesc Cambó to request financial assistance for the forthcoming coup d’état. Although Cambó, as a friend of Tusquets’s father, had written and congratulated him on the success of Orígenes de la revolución española, he did not provide finance for the coup.¹² From the early 1930s, Tusquets and Joaquim Guiu had assiduously compiled lists of Jews and Freemasons. Their search for the enemy extended to societies of nudists, vegetarians, spiritualists and enthusiasts of Esperanto. When Tusquets finally became a collaborator of Franco in Burgos during the Civil War, his files on alleged Freemasons would provide an important part of the organizational infrastructure of the repression.¹³

Endorsement of The Protocols also came from the founder of the ultra-right-wing monarchist theoretical journal Acción Española, the Marqués de Quintanar. At an event held in his honour at the Ritz, Quintanar alleged that the disaster of the fall of the monarchy came about because ‘The great worldwide Jewish–Masonic conspiracy injected the autocratic Monarchies with the virus of democracy to defeat them, after turning them into liberal Monarchies.’¹⁴ Julián Cortés Cavanillas, also of the Acción Española pressure group, cited The Protocols as proof that through Masonic intermediaries the ‘evil offspring of Israel’, the Jews, controlled the anarchist, Socialist and Communist hordes. That the new Republican–Socialist government contained Freemasons, Socialists and men thought to be Jewish was proof positive that the alliance of Marx and Rothschild had established a bridgehead in Spain.¹⁵ Reviewing with total seriousness a French edition of The Protocols as if it were empirical truth, the Marqués de Eliseda implied with a veiled reference to Margarita Nelken that Castilblanco had been masterminded by the Jews.¹⁶

Other influential writers in Acción Española were the lay theologian Marcial Solana and Father Aniceto de Castro Albarrán, the senior canon of Salamanca Cathedral. They, and Father Pablo Leon Murciego, produced theological justifications for the violent overthrow of the Republic. They argued that it was a Catholic duty to resist tyranny. Solana used St Aquinas to justify the assertion that the tyrant was any oppressive or unjust government. Since power ultimately rested with God, an anti-clerical constitution clearly rendered the Republic tyrannical.¹⁷ In 1932, Castro Albarrán, at the time rector of the Jesuit University of Comillas, had written a book on the right to rebellion. Although it was not published until 1934, an extract was presented in Acción Española which reinforced Solana’s incitements to rebellion and specifically attacked the legalism of El Debate. Castro Albarrán, through his articles and sermons, would become the principal theological apologist of the military rising. He later summed up his views in his 1938 book Guerra santa (Holy War).¹⁸ He, Solana and others argued that violence against the Republic was justified because it was a holy rebellion against tyranny, anarchy and Moscow-inspired Godlessness. In 1932, Father Antonio de Pildain Zapiain, deputy for Guipúzcoa and canon of Vitoria Cathedral, declared in the Cortes that Catholic doctrine permitted armed resistance to unjust laws. Similar arguments were central to a controversial book published in 1933 by Father José Cirera y Prat.¹⁹

The writings of Castro Albarrán and Cirera horrified more moderate clerics such as Cardinal Eustaquio Ilundain Esteban of Seville and Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer of Tarragona. Vidal was distressed by the arrogance with which Castro Albarrán presented as Catholic doctrine partisan ideas which ran counter to Vatican policy on coexistence with the Republic. He protested to Cardinal Pacelli, the Papal Secretary of State, who ordered that the nihil obstat (seal of ecclesiastical approval) be removed from the book and tried to have it withdrawn from circulation. The book was serialized in the Carlist press, and the newly appointed Primate of All Spain, Archbishop Isidro Gomá of Toledo, expressed his approval to members of Acción Española.²⁰ Gomá’s predecessor in Toledo, Cardinal Pedro Segura y Sáenz, exiled in Rome, was presented by the Carlist newspaper El Siglo Futuro as the archetype of Catholic intransigence to the Republic. He would later be found actively encouraging the Carlist leadership as their armed militia or Requetés trained for insurrection against the Republic.²¹

General Franco was a subscriber to Acción Española and a firm believer in the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik contubernio (filthy concubinage). Significantly, among the many other senior military figures sharing such views was General Emilio Mola, the future director of the military coup of 1936. The tall, bespectacled Mola had the air of a monkish scholar, but his background was that of no-nonsense veteran of the African wars. Born in Cuba in 1887, the son of a captain of the Civil Guard, a harsh disciplinarian, he rose to military prominence serving with the Regulares Indígenas (Native Regulars – locally recruited mercenaries) during the African wars. His memoirs of Morocco, wallowing in descriptions of crushed skulls and bloated intestines, suggest that he had been utterly brutalized by his African experiences.²² In February 1930 in the wake of the fall of the dictatorship, Mola was appointed Director General of Security. He quickly took to police work. Until the collapse of the monarchy fourteen months later, he devoted himself to crushing labour and student subversion as he had crushed tribal rebellion in Morocco.²³ To this end, he created a crack anti-riot squad, physically well trained and well armed, and a complex espionage system. This so-called Sección de Investigación Comunista used undercover policemen to infiltrate opposition groups and then act as agents provocateurs. The network was still substantially in place in 1936 when Mola employed it in the preparation of the military uprising.²⁴

Mola over-estimated the menace of the minuscule Spanish Communist Party, which he viewed as the tool of sinister Jewish–Masonic machinations. This reflected the credence that he gave to the fevered reports of his agents, in particular those of Santiago Martín Báguenas and of the sleazy and obsessive Julián Mauricio Carlavilla del Barrio. Mola’s views on Jews, Communists and Freemasons were also coloured by information received from the organization of the White Russian forces in exile, the Russkii Obshche-Voinskii Soiuz (ROVS, Russian All-Military Union) based in Paris. Thereafter, even when he was no longer Director General of Security, he remained in close contact with the ROVS leader Lieutenant General Evgenii Karlovitch Miller. Miller was, like the Nazi racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German. Their hatred of communism reflected the fact that the Bolshevik revolution saw them lose their families, property, livelihood and homeland. Believing that the Jews had masterminded the revolution, they were determined to prevent them doing the same in western Europe.²⁵

When the Republic was established, convinced that he would be arrested for his work in defence of the monarchy, Mola went into hiding. Then on 21 April 1931, he gave himself up to the Minister of War, Manuel Azaña. Four days earlier, General Dámaso Berenguer had been arrested for his role in the Moroccan wars, as Prime Minister and later as Minister of War during the summary trial and execution of the two pro-Republican rebels Captains Fermín Galán and Ángel García Hernández. The arrests of Mola and Berenguer fed the right-wing perception of the Republic as vindictive.²⁶ In the eyes of the Africanistas, Berenguer was being persecuted for his part in a war in which they had risked their lives, and for following military regulations in court-martialling the mutineers Galán and García Hernández. Similarly, they saw Mola as a hero of the African war who, as Director General of Security, had merely been doing his job of controlling subversion. The Africanistas were enraged that officers whom they admired were persecuted while those who had plotted against the Dictator were rewarded. The arrests gave Africanistas like Manuel Goded, Joaquín Fanjul, Mola and Franco a justification for their instinctive hostility to the Republic. They regarded the officers who received the preferment of the Republic as the lackeys of Jews and Freemasons, weaklings who pandered to the mob.

Awaiting trial for his use of excessive force against a student demonstration on 25 March, Mola was imprisoned in a ‘damp and foul-smelling cell’ in a military jail.²⁷ Azaña arranged on 5 August for this to be changed to house arrest, but, unsurprisingly, seeing his recent targets now in positions of power, Mola nurtured a rancorous hostility to the Republic and a personal hatred of Azaña. The paranoid reports sent him by Carlavilla and the dossiers supplied by the ROVS convinced him that the triumph of the democratic regime had been engineered by Jews and Freemasons. In late 1931, in the first volume of his memoirs, he wrote of the threat of Freemasonry: ‘When, in fulfilling my duties, I investigated the intervention of the Masonic lodges in the political life of Spain, I became aware of the enormous strength at their disposal, not through the lodges themselves but because of the powerful elements that manipulated them from abroad – the Jews.’ Acción Española celebrated the appearance of the book with a rapturous nine-page review by Eugenio Vegas Latapié, one of the journal’s founders and a fierce advocate of violence against the Republic.²⁸

By the time that Mola came to write the second volume of his memoirs, he was more explicit in his attacks on Freemasons and Jews. He himself implied that this was because, in addition to the reports of General Miller, he had read both the work of Father Tusquets and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Thus Mola wrote that the coming of the Republic was a reflection of the hatred for Spain of the Jews and Freemasonry:

What rational motives exist to explain why we Spaniards excite the hatred of the descendants of Israel? Fundamentally three: the envy produced in them by any race that has a fatherland of its own; our religion for which they feel unquenchable revulsion because they blame it for their dispersion throughout the world; the memory of their expulsion, which came about not, as is often claimed, because of a King’s whim but because the people demanded it. These are the three points of the Masonic triangle of the Spanish lodges.²⁹

In December 1933, Mola wrote the conclusion to his bitterly polemical book El pasado, Azaña y el porvenir (The Past, Azaña and the Future), in which he gave voice to the widespread military animosity towards the Republic in general and towards Azaña in particular. Mortified by what he perceived as the unpatriotic anti-militarism of the left, he attributed it to various causes, mainly to the fact that:

decadent nations are the favourite victims of parasitical international organizations, used in their turn by the Great Powers, taking advantage of the situation in weak nations, which is where such organizations have most success, just as unhealthy organisms are the most fertile breeding ground of the virulent spread of pathological germs. It is significant that all such organizations are manipulated if not actually directed by the Jews … The Jews don’t care about the destruction of a nation, or of ten, or of the entire world, because they, having the exceptional ability to derive benefit from the greatest catastrophes, are merely completing their programme. What has happened in Russia is a relevant example and one that is very much on Hitler’s mind. The German Chancellor – a fanatical nationalist – is convinced that his people cannot rise again as long as the Jews and the parasitical organizations that they control or influence remain embedded in the nation. That is why he persecutes them without quarter.³⁰

Morose and shy, Mola was not previously noted for his popularity. With this best-seller, he found himself an object of admiration among the most reactionary military and civilian elements.³¹

Since 1927, both Mola and Franco had been avid readers of an anti-Communist journal from Geneva, the Bulletin de l’Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale. While he was Director General of Security, Mola’s agents concocted inflated reports about the alleged threat from the Comintern, as the Third International was known. Mola passed these dubious reports to the Entente in Geneva where they were incorporated into the bulletin and sent back to Spain to Franco and other military subscribers as hard fact. The Entente had been founded by the Swiss rightist Théodore Aubert and a White Russian émigré, Georges Lodygensky. Its publications were given a vehemently anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik turn by Lodygensky and praised the achievements of fascism and military dictatorships as bulwarks against communism. Enjoying close contacts with Antikomintern, an organization run from Josef Goebbels’s Ministry of Information, the Entente skilfully targeted influential people and supplied them with reports which purported to expose plans for forthcoming Communist offensives. The material from the Entente devoured by Franco, Mola and other officers portrayed the Second Republic as a Trojan horse for Communists and Freemasons determined to unleash the Godless hordes of Moscow against Spain and all its great traditions.³² For the Spanish extreme right and for many of their allies abroad, the Second Republic was an outpost of the Elders of Zion.³³

One of the most prominent leaders of the Spanish fascist movement, Onésimo Redondo Ortega, was a fervent believer in The Protocols. Redondo had studied in Germany and was also close to the Jesuits. He was much influenced by Father Enrique Herrera Oria, brother of the editor of El Debate, Ángel Herrera Oria. Father Herrera had encouraged Onésimo in the belief that communism, Freemasonry and Judaism were conspiring to destroy religion and the fatherland and recommended that he read the virulent anti-Jewish and anti-Masonic tract by Léon Poncins, Las fuerzas secretas de la Revolución. FM – Judaismo, ‘FM’ signifying, of course, ‘Freemasonry’. Thus becoming aware of The Protocols, Onésimo translated and published an abbreviated text in his newspaper Libertad of Valladolid, a version later reissued with notes explicitly linking its generalized accusations to the specific circumstances of the Second Republic.³⁴

The ultra-right-wing press in general regarded The Protocols as a serious sociological study. Since there were few Jews in Spain, there was hardly a ‘Jewish problem’. However, Spanish ‘anti-Semitism without Jews’ was not about real Jews but was an abstract construction of a perceived international threat. Anti-Semitism was central to integrist Catholicism and harked back to Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus Christ and to medieval myths and fears about Jewish ritual killings of children. Now, it was given a burning contemporary relevance by fears of revolution. The notion that all those belonging to left-wing parties were the stooges of the Jews was supported by references to the left-wingers and Jews fleeing from Nazism who found refuge in the Second Republic. As far as the Carlist press was concerned, the few incoming Jews were the advance guard of world revolution and intended to poison Spanish society with pornography and prostitution.³⁵ Opposed to urbanism and industrialism, to liberalism and capitalism, all ideologies associated with Jews and Freemasons, the Carlists aspired to destroy the Republic by armed insurrection and to impose a kind of rural Arcadian theocracy.³⁶

Conservative intellectuals argued that through various subversive devices the Jews had enslaved the Spanish working class. One alleged consequence of this subjugation was that the Spanish workers themselves came to possess oriental qualities. The Spanish radical right began to see the working class as imbued with Jewish and Muslim treachery and barbarism. The most extreme proponent of this view was the late nineteenth-century Carlist ideologue Juan Vázquez de Mella. He argued that Jewish capital had financed the liberal revolutions and was now behind the Communist revolution in order, in union with the Muslim hordes, to destroy Christian civilization and impose Jewish tyranny on the world. Even King Alfonso XIII believed that the rebellion of tribesmen in the Rif was ‘the beginning of a general uprising of the entire Muslim world instigated by Moscow and international Jewry’.³⁷ Carlist ideologues took these ideas seriously, arguing that ‘the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, Judaism, Communism, Freemasonry and Death’, already controlled Britain, France and Australia and soon Spain would fall under their dominion.³⁸

The books of Vázquez de Mella and other Carlist ideologues were eagerly devoured by Colonel José Enrique Varela during his imprisonment after the Sanjurjada. Contrasting the success of the Primo de Rivera coup of 1923 and the failure of Sanjurjo in 1932, the dynamic and courageous Varela was convinced that a successful military rising needed substantial civilian support. He was persuaded that this could be found in the fierce Carlist militia, the Requeté. Although he resisted calls to lead an exclusively Carlist uprising on the grounds that this required someone more senior such as Franco, Varela undertook to turn the Requeté into an effective citizen army. Since he was still under police surveillance, on his trips to the Carlists’ northern heartland of Navarre he took the pseudonym ‘Don Pepe’. Day-to-day training was supervised by the National Inspector of the Requeté, the retired Lieutenant Colonel Ricardo de Rada, who also would train the Falangist militia.³⁹ Similarly, in 1934 another of the officers involved in the Sanjurjada, the Civil Guard Captain Lisardo Doval, would train the paramilitary squads of the Juventud de Acción Popular (the youth movement of Gil Robles’s Catholic party, the CEDA).

Carlists, theologians and Africanista officers were among those who through their writings and speeches fomented an atmosphere of social and racial hatred. Another was Onésimo Redondo. Although hardly a national figure, he merits attention both as one of the founders of Spanish fascism and because it was largely due to his ideas that his home town, Valladolid, experienced greater political violence than other Castilian provincial capitals. As a young lawyer, Onésimo Redondo had been involved in Acción Nacional (as Acción Popular was originally called), the Catholic political group founded on 26 April 1931 by Ángel Herrera Oria and principally supported by Castilian farmers. In early May, he set up its local branch in Valladolid and headed its propaganda campaign for the forthcoming parliamentary elections. On 13 June, Onésimo launched the first number of the fortnightly, and later weekly, anti-Republican newspaper Libertad. After the Republican–Socialist coalition won a huge majority on 28 June, Onésimo rejected democracy, broke with Acción Nacional and, in August, founded a fascist party, the Juntas Castellanas de Actuación Hispánica (the Castilian Hispanic Action Groups).⁴⁰

On 10 August, he published a fiery proclamation in Libertad expressing his commitment to the traditional rural values of Old Castile, to social justice and to violence. He wrote: ‘The historic moment, my young countrymen, obliges us to take up weapons. May we know how to use them to defend what is ours and not to serve politicians.’ For him ‘nationalism is a movement of struggle, it must include warlike, violent activities in the service of Spain against the traitors within’.⁴¹ Certainly, Onésimo Redondo and the Juntas brought a tone of brutal confrontation to a city previously notable for the tranquillity of its labour relations.⁴² Onésimo called for ‘a few hundred young warriors in each province, disciplined idealists, to smash to smithereens this dirty phantom of the red menace’. His recruits armed themselves for street fights with the predominantly Socialist working class of Valladolid. He wrote of the need to ‘cultivate the spirit of violence, of military conflict’. The meetings of the Juntas were held in virtual clandestinity. Over the next few years, his enthusiasm for violence grew progressively more strident.⁴³

The numerical weakness of the Juntas obliged Onésimo to seek links with like-minded groups. Accordingly, his gaze fell upon the first overtly fascist group in Spain, the tiny La Conquista del Estado (the Conquest of the State) led by Ramiro Ledesma Ramos.⁴⁴ Originally from Zamora, Ledesma worked in a post office in Madrid. An enthusiastic disciple of German philosophy, he had founded his group in February 1931 in a squalid room in a Madrid office block. The light had not been connected and the only furniture was a table. The ten participants signed a manifesto he had written entitled ‘The Conquest of the State’. A newspaper of the same name was launched on 14 March. Despite public indifference and police harassment, it survived for a year.⁴⁵ In the first number of Libertad, Onésimo Redondo had referred favourably to Ledesma Ramos’s newspaper: ‘We approve of the combative ardour and the eagerness of La Conquista del Estado, but we miss the anti-Semitic activity which that movement needs be effective and to go in the right direction.’⁴⁶ Although Redondo translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf, his anti-Semitism drew more on the fifteenth-century Castilian Queen Isabel la Católica than on Nazism. Anti-Semitism was a recurring theme in his writings. In late 1931, for instance, he described the co-educational schools introduced by the Second Republic as an example of ‘Jewish action against free nations: a crime against the health of the people for which the traitors responsible must pay with their heads’.⁴⁷

In October 1931, Onésimo met Ledesma Ramos in Madrid. Over the next few weeks, in several meetings in Madrid and Valladolid, they negotiated the loose fusion of their two groups as the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (the Groups of National Syndicalist Offensive or JONS). Launched on 30 November 1931, the JONS adopted the red and black colours of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT and took as its badge the emblem of the Catholic kings, the yoke and arrows. It was anti-democratic and imperialist, demanding Gibraltar, Morocco and Algeria for Spain and aspiring to ‘the extermination, the dissolution of the antinational, Marxist parties’. To this end, ‘national-syndicalist militias’ were to be created ‘in order to oppose red violence with nationalist violence’. Ledesma Ramos argued that political violence was legitimate and advocated the creation of armed militias along the lines of the Italian Fascist Squadri to prepare for insurrection or coup d’état.⁴⁸ By way of practice, the JONS squads assaulted left-wing students and, in June 1933, sacked the Madrid offices of the Association of Friends of the USSR.⁴⁹

In Valladolid, Onésimo devoted ever more time to the conversion of his forty-odd followers into warriors of what he now called ‘organized anti-communist militias’. Soon they would be involved in bloody clashes with left-wing students and workers in the University and in the streets of Valladolid. Pistols were being bought and much time was spent on training. Already by the spring of 1932, Onésimo Redondo was writing about the civil war to come – ‘The war is getting nearer; the situation of violence is inevitable. There is no point in rejecting it. It is stupid to flee from making war when they are going to make war on us. The important thing is to prepare to win, and, to win, it is necessary to seize the initiative and go on to the attack.’ On 3 May 1932, a pitched battle was fought with the left in the main square of Valladolid after which more than twenty people were hospitalized. Onésimo himself was sentenced to two months in prison for the excesses of Libertad.⁵⁰

Imprisonment did nothing to mellow Onésimo Redondo. His article in the fascist monthly JONS in May 1933 reflected the growing virulence of his thought and echoed Sanjurjo’s identification of the Spanish working class with the Arabs:

Marxism, with its Mohammedan utopias, with the truth of its dictatorial iron and with the pitiless lust of its sadistic magnates, suddenly renews the eclipse of Culture and freedoms like a modern Saracen invasion … This certain danger, of Africanization in the name of Progress, is clearly visible in Spain. We can state categorically that our Marxists are the most African of all Europe … Historically, we are a friction zone between that which is civilized and that which is African, between the Aryan and the Semitic … For this reason, the generations that built the fatherland, those that freed us from being an eternal extension of the Dark Continent, raised their swords against attacks from the south and they never sheathed them … The great Isabel ordered Spaniards always to watch Africa, to defeat Africa and never be invaded by her again. Was the Peninsula entirely de-Africanized? Is there not a danger of a new kind of African domination, here where so many roots of the Moorish spirit remained in the character of a race in the vanguard of Europe? We ask this important question dispassionately and we will answer it right away by underlining the evident danger of the new Africanization: ‘Marxism’. Throughout the world, there exists the Jewish or Semite conspiracy against Western civilization, but in Spain it can more subtly and rapidly connect the Semitic element, the African element. It can be seen flowering in all its primitive freshness in our southern provinces, where Moorish blood lives on in the subsoil of the race … The follower of Spanish Marxism, especially the Andalusian, soon takes the incendiary torch, breaks into manor houses and farms, impelled by the bandit subconscious, encouraged by the Semites of Madrid; he wants bread without earning it, he wants to laze around and be rich, to take his pleasures and to take his revenge … and the definitive victory of Marxism will be the re-Africanization of Spain, the victory of the combined Semitic elements – Jews and Moors, aristocrats and plebeians who have survived ethnically and spiritually in the Peninsula and in Europe.⁵¹

By linking Marxism as a Jewish invention and its alleged threat of a ‘re-Africanization’ of Spain, Redondo was identifying Spain’s two archetypal ‘others’, the Jew and the Moor, with the Republic. His conclusion, shared by many on the right, was that a new Reconquista was needed to prevent Spain from falling into the hands of the modern foes. His views on the legitimacy of violence were similar to those of the Catholic extreme right exemplified by the writings of Castro Albarrán.⁵²

Anti-Semitism could be found across most of the Spanish right. In some cases, it was a vague sentiment born of traditional Catholic resentment about the fate of Jesus Christ, but in others it was a murderous justification of violence against the left. Curiously, the virulence of Onésimo Redondo constituted something of an exception within Spain’s nascent fascist movement. Ledesma Ramos regarded anti-Semitism as having relevance only in Germany.⁵³ The Falangist leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, had little or no interest in the ‘Jewish problem’ except when it came to the Jewish–Marxist influence over the working class. Nevertheless, the Falangist daily Arriba claimed that ‘the Judaic–Masonic International is the creator of the two great evils that have afflicted humanity: capitalism and Marxism’. José Antonio Primo de Rivera shared with other rightists a belief that violence was legitimate against a Republic that he perceived as influenced by Jews and Freemasons.⁵⁴ He approved of attacks by Falangists on the Jewish-owned SEPU department stores in the spring of 1935.⁵⁵

The identification of the working class with foreign enemies was based on a convoluted logic whereby Bolshevism was a Jewish invention and the Jews were indistinguishable from Muslims and thus leftists were bent on subjecting Spain to domination by African elements. Thus hostility to the Spanish working class was presented as a legitimate act of Spanish patriotism. According to another of the Acción Española group, the one-time liberal turned ultra-rightist Ramiro de Maeztú, the Spanish nation had been forged in its struggles against the Jews (arrogant usurers) and the Moors (savages without civilization).⁵⁶ In one of his articles, the monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo neatly encapsulated the racist dimension of the anti-leftist discourse when he referred to the Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero as ‘a Moroccan Lenin’.⁵⁷ José Antonio Primo de Rivera also shared this association of the left with the Moors. In his reflections in prison in 1936, he interpreted all of Spanish history as an endless struggle between Goths and Berbers. The spirit of the former lived on in monarchical, aristocratic, religious and military values while that of the latter was to be found in the rural proletariat. He denounced the Second Republic as a ‘new Berber invasion’ signifying the demolition of European Spain.⁵⁸

Gil Robles, if less explicitly than Sanjurjo or Onésimo Redondo, also conveyed the view that violence against the left was legitimate because of its racial inferiority. His frequent use of the word ‘reconquest’ linked enmity towards the left in the 1930s to the central epic of Spanish nationalism, the battle to liberate Spain from Islam between 722 and 1492. During his campaign for the elections of November 1933, on 15 October in the Monumental Cinema of Madrid, he declared: ‘We must reconquer Spain … We must give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity … For me there is only one tactic today: to form an anti-Marxist front and the wider the better. It is necessary now to defeat socialism mercilessly.’ At this point, Antonio Goicoechea, the leader of the extreme rightist Acción Española group, was made to stand and received a tumultuous ovation. Gil Robles continued his speech in language indistinguishable from that of the conspiratorial right:

We must found a new state, purge the fatherland of judaizing Freemasons … We must proceed to a new state and this imposes duties and sacrifices. What does it matter if we have to shed blood! … We need full power and that is what we demand … To realize this ideal we are not going to waste time with archaic forms. Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state. When the time comes, either parliament submits or we will eliminate it.⁵⁹

Gil Robles’s speech was described by El Socialista as an ‘authentic fascist harangue’. On the left, it was perceived as the real policy of his ostensibly moderate mass party, the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas). Certainly, his every sentence had been greeted by ecstatic applause. Fernando de los Ríos, Minister of Education and Fine Arts since October 1931, a moderate Socialist and a distinguished professor of law, had suffered anti-Semitic abuse for his policy of toleration for Jewish schools and his expressions of sympathy for the Sephardic community in Morocco. He pointed out that Gil Robles’s call for a purge of Jews and Freemasons was a denial of the juridical and political postulates of the Republic.⁶⁰ CEDA election posters declared that Spain must be saved from ‘Marxists, Freemasons, Separatists and Jews’. The entire forces of the left – anarchists, Socialists, Communists, liberal Republicans, regional nationalists – were denounced as anti-Spanish.⁶¹ Violence against them was therefore both legitimate and indeed an urgent patriotic necessity.

The intensified vehemence of Gil Robles was matched in the pages of El Debate by the views of Francisco de Luis, who had succeeded Ángel Herrera Oria as editor. Like Onésimo Redondo, De Luis was an energetic evangelist of the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy theory. His magnum opus on the subject was published in 1935 with an ecclesiastical imprimatur. In it, enthusiastically quoting Tusquets, the Protocols, the Carlist press and General Mola, he argued that the purpose of Freemasonry was to corrupt Christian civilization with oriental values. His premise was that ‘the Jews, progenitors of Freemasonry, having no fatherland of their own, want no man to have one’. Having freed the masses of patriotic and moral impulses, the Jews could then recruit them for the assault on Christian values. In his interpretation, Catholics faced a struggle to the death because ‘inside every Jew there is a Freemason: cunning, deceitful, secretive, hating Christ and his civilization, thirsting for extermination. Freemasons and Jews are the begetters and controllers of socialism and Bolshevism.’⁶²

Other than in the sheer scale of their impact, there was little difference between the pronouncements of Francisco de Luis and Onésimo Redondo and those of a friend, and one-time subordinate of General Mola, the policeman Julián Mauricio Carlavilla del Barrio. Born on 13 February 1896 into a poor rural family in New Castile, in Valparaíso de Arriba in Cuenca, the young Carlavilla worked as an agricultural labourer and as a shepherd before spending three years as a conscript soldier in Morocco only because he couldn’t buy himself out. On his return to Spain, he passed the entry examinations for the police and, on 9 July 1921, was posted to Valencia. Only eleven months later, he was transferred to Zaragoza after complaints from the Civil Governor of Valencia to the Director General of Security that Carlavilla’s behaviour was bringing the police into disrepute. Thereafter, he was sent in rapid succession to Segovia and Bilbao before ending up in Madrid in October 1923. In November 1925, he was transferred to Morocco, where he made contacts with military figures that would stand him in good stead later in his career. Nevertheless, just over one year later, he was sent back to the Peninsula after accusations of irregularities including pocketing fines and selling protection for prostitutes. Nevertheless, Carlavilla eventually rose, in 1935, to the rank of comisario (inspector).⁶³

Initially, he specialized in undercover work, infiltrating left-wing groups where he would then act as an agent provocateur. He did this on his own initiative, without informing his superior officers. His efforts included provoking, and later claiming credit for frustrating, assassination attempts against both Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera during the opening of the great exhibition in Seville in May 1929.⁶⁴ When General Mola became Director General of Security in early 1930, Carlavilla informed him of his clandestine activities, which he described as ‘my role as catalyst within the highest circle of the revolutionaries’.⁶⁵ On Mola’s orders, Carlavilla wrote a detailed report on the supposed activities of the Communist Party in Spain. A wild mixture of fantasy and paranoia, the report was sent by Mola at the end of 1930 to the influential anti-Communist organization in Geneva, the Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale. The contents were fed into the bulletins that the Entente sent to subscribers, including General Franco. The report formed the basis of Carlavilla’s first book, El comunismo en España.⁶⁶

Carlavilla was involved in the Sanjurjo coup, his role being to prevent the police discovering the nascent conspiracy.⁶⁷ Between 1932 and 1936, he wrote a series of best-sellers, using the pseudonym ‘Mauricio Karl’.⁶⁸ The first, El comunismo en España, described the various Socialist, anarchist and Communist elements of the working-class movement as the enemy of Spain that would have to be defeated. The second and third, El enemigo and Asesinos de España, argued that the enemies masterminding the left-wing assassins of Spain were the Jews who controlled Freemasonry, ‘their first army’, the Socialist and Communist Internationals, and world capitalism. Spanish greatness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the fruit of the expulsion of the Jews, and further greatness would require a repetition. Since there were hardly any Jews to be expelled from Spain, it was their lackeys, the Freemasons and the left, that must be eliminated. The only hope of stopping the destruction of Christian civilization and the establishment of the empire of Israel lay in joining German Nazism and Italian Fascism in defeating the ‘sectarians of Masonic Jewry’. Carlavilla claimed that General Primo de Rivera, who died of natural causes, had been poisoned by a Jewish Freemason and that the Catalan financier, Francesc Cambó, was both Jewish and a Freemason.

One hundred thousand copies of the third of his books, Asesinos de España, were distributed free to army officers. It ended with a provocative challenge to them. Describing Jews, left-wingers and Freemasons as vultures hovering over the corpse of Spain, he wrote: ‘The Enemy howls with laughter while the nations that serve Zion play diplomatic dice for the cadaver’s land. Thus the Spain once feared by a hundred nations faces such a fate because her sons no longer know how to die or how to kill.’⁶⁹ Carlavilla was expelled from the police in September 1935 as a result, according to his official record, ‘of serious offences’. He would later claim that his dismissal was persecution for his anti-Masonic revelations.⁷⁰

In addition to his criminal activities, Carlavilla was an active member of the conspiratorial group Unión Militar Española. Initially, his role was centred on the writing and distribution of propaganda in favour of a military coup. However, he was also believed to have been involved in plots to kill both the distinguished law professor and PSOE parliamentary deputy Luis Jiménez Asúa and Francisco Largo Caballero. In May 1936, on the orders of the UME, he was implicated in an assassination attempt on Manuel Azaña. As a result, he was obliged to flee to Portugal. All these plans seem to have been masterminded by Mola’s crony, Inspector Santiago Martín Báguenas, who had been working since September 1932 for the monarchist–military plotters. The foiled attempts also involved the same Africanista, Captain Manuel Díaz Criado, who had instigated the shootings in the Parque de María Luisa in Seville in July 1931. In Lisbon, Carlavilla linked up with the exiled General Sanjurjo and remained on the fringes of the military plot. Shortly after the outbreak of war, he went to Burgos where he was welcomed on to the staff of General Mola. Carlavilla worked for a time there alongside Father Juan Tusquets.⁷¹

Collectively, the ideas of Tusquets, Francisco de Luis, Enrique Herrera Oria, Onésimo Redondo, Mola, Carlavilla, the Carlist press and all those who alleged the existence of a Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik plot justified the extermination of the left. The reforms of the Republic and the violent anarchist attacks on the Republic were taken equally as evidence that the left was the ungodly anti-Spain. Accordingly, the brutality of the Civil Guard in crushing strikes and demonstrations, military conspiracy and the terrorist activities of fascist groups were all deemed to be legitimate efforts to defend the true Spain.