White Terror (Spain)

In Spain, White Terror (also known as Represión Franquista) refers to acts of politically motivated violence committed by the Nationalist movement during the Spanish Civil War and during Francisco Franco's dictatorship. The mass executions started at the beginning of the civil war on July 1936 and continued after the war until 1945.

Most historians agree that the death toll of the White Terror was much higher than that of the Red Terror, and the White Terror occurred over a much longer period, continuing after the war. While most estimates of the Red Terror range from 38,000 to 72,344 lives (the collective work: Victimas de la guerra civil: 50,000; Hugh Thomas: 55,000; Paul Preston: 55,000 and Julian Casanova: fewer than 60,000 ) most of the estimates of the "White Terror" range from 150,000 to 400,000.

Red and White Terrors
Following the outbreak of full-scale civil war there was an explosion of atrocities in both the Nationalist and Republican zones. According to Stanley Payne:

"During the first months of the fighting most of the deaths did not come from combat on the battlefield but from political executions in the rear&mdash;the 'Red' and 'White' terrors. In some cases the murder of political opponents began more or less spontaneously, but from the very beginning there was always a certain degree of organization, and nearly all the killings after the first few days were carried out by organized groups." According to Antony Beevor, the bloodiest days of the Red Terror were at the beginning of the civil war, when the government failed to control of much of its forces in the aftermath of the generals' uprising, and large areas of the country fell under the control of local loyalists and militias.

In regards to the White Terror, Payne goes on to state, "The repression in the Nationalist zone was more centralized and much more effective. Though often carried out by right-wing civilian groups, the White terror was almost from the beginning nominally institutionalized under military courts-martial." And Paul Preston states that:

"This was not the work of uncontrolled elements as happened in the Republican zone where the military rebellion had triggered the total collapse of the entire apparatus of law and order. The Falangist and others carrying out the systematic killings could at any time restrained by the military authorities. Yet the military actively encouraged thousands of civilian vigilantes to carry out a dirty war."

Helen Graham says that:

"Those who did the killing in rebel Spain during the first months were mainly vigilantes... But the military authorities made no attempt to reign in this terror. In fact the killers were often acting with the connivance of the authorities, otherwise the death squads who came for Amparo Barayon and thousands of her compatriots would never been able to take their victims out of gaol at will."

Gabriel Jackson also says that the violence in the Nationalist zone was organized by the authorities:

"The execution in Nationalist Spain were not the work of revolutionary mobs taking advantage of the breakdown of the Republican state. They were ordered and approved by the highest military authorities... Such men as this, not Falangists and Requeté teen-agers, were reponsible for the vast killing behind the Nationalist lines."

Others, like Payne, reject the claim that the violence in the Republican zone was unorganized, vigilante acts: In general, this was not an irrepressible outpouring of hatred by the man in the street for his "oppressors," as it has sometimes been painted, but a semi-organized activity carried out by sections of nearly all the leftist groups. In the entire leftist zone the only organized political party that eschewed involvement in such activity were the Basque Nationalists.

Background
The Second Spanish Republic was established on 14 April 1931, after the abdication of King Alfonso XIII. The government, led by President Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, instituted a reformist program, including agrarian reform, separation of the church and state, right to divorce, vote for women (November 1933), reform of the Army, autonomy for Catalonia and the Basque country (October 1936). The proposed reform was blocked by the right and rejected by the far-left (CNT). The Republic suffered attacks from the right (the failed coup of Sanjurjo in 1932), and the left (the uprising of Asturias in 1934), also it suffered the impact of the Great Depression.

Nevertheless the Republic managed to survive. In February 1936 the Popular Front, a coalition of parties from the left to the center right (PSOE, IR, UR, PCE, POUM, ERC among others) won the general election and the right started to plan an uprising against the Republic. Finally, on 17 July 1936, a part of the Spanish Army, led by a group of far-right officers (the generals Sanjurjo, Goded, Emilio Mola, Franco, Miguel Cabanellas, Queipo de Llano and Varela among others) attempted a coup against the government. The coup failed but the rebel troops, known as the Nationalists, held a large part of Spain. The Spanish civil war had started.

One of the leaders of the 1936 coup against Spain's democratically elected government, Franco, with his Nationalist forces and aided by Germany and Italy, finally prevailed in 1939, ruled the country for the next 36 years. Among other means of repression, political prisoners were sent to concentration camps and homosexuals to mental asylums.

The Civil War
The "White Terror" commenced the day of the Nationalists' coup d'état, July 17, 1936, with hundreds of murders in the area controlled by the rebels,  and went on to include the repression of political opponents in areas under Nationalist occupation, mass executions in areas captured from the Republicans, such as the Massacre of Badajoz,  and looting.

Gerald Brenan, in The Spanish Labyrinth (1943), states 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. Andaulsia, 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 (Legion Condor) and the Italian air force (Aviazione Legionaria) (according to Gabriel Jackson estimates range from 5,000 to 10,000 victims of the bombings), killings of Republican POWs,  rape,     forced disappearances and the establishment of Francoist prisons in the aftermath of the Republicans' defeat.

In areas controlled by the Nationalists, government officials, Popular Front politicians were executed (in the city of Granada 23 of the 44 councillors of the city's corporation were executed), union leaders, teachers (in the first weeks of the war hundreds of teachers were killed by the Nationalists), intellectuals, suspected Freemasons (in Huesca where there were only twelve Freemasons but the Nationalists killed a hundred suspected Freemasons), Basque, Catalan, Andalusian or Galician Nationalists (among them Manuel Carrasco i Formiguera, leader of Democratic Union of Catalonia Unió Democrática de Catalunya and Blas Infante, leader of the Andalusian nationalism), military officers who had remained loyal to the government of the Republic, (among them the Army generals Domingo Batet, Enrique Salcedo Molinuevo, Miguel Campíns, Nicolás Molero, Nuñez de Prado, Manuel Romerales and Rogelio Caridad Pita), 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. The 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 an people were killed as easily as rabbits...

In his Fascism in Spain (1999), historian Stanley Payne, 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.

The main goal of the "White Terror" was to terrify the civil population who opposed the coup,  eliminate the supporters of the Second Spanish 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 Emilio Mola said:

"It is necessary to spread terror. We have to create the impression of mastery eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do. There can be no cowardice. If we hesitate one moment and fail to proceed with the greatest determination, we will not win. Anyone who helps or hides a Communist or a supporter of the Popular Front will be shot."

Because of this mass terror in many areas controlled by the Nationalists, thousands of Republicans left their houses and tried to hide in nearby forests or mountains. Many of these huidos later joined the Spanish maquis, the anti-Francoist guerrilla which continued to fight against the dictatorship in the post-war. 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 fianceé Transito Alonso and her mother, Juana Ramos."

Estimates of executions behind the Nationalist lines during the Spanish Civil War range from fewer than 50,000 to 200,000 (Hugh Thomas: 75,000, Secundino Serrano: 90,000; Josep Fontana: 150,000; and Julián Casanova: 100,000. ). Most of the victims were killed without a trial in the first months of the war and their corpses were left on the sides of roads or in clandestine and unmarked mass graves. Many of the executions in the course of the war were carried by militants of the fascist party Falange (Falange Española de las J.O.N.S.) or militants of the Carlist party (Comunión Tradicionalista) militia (Requetés), but with the approval of the Nationalist government. The Spanish Church approved the White Terror and cooperated with the rebels. One witness in Zamora said: "Many priests acted very badly. The bishop of Zamora in 1936 was more or less an assassin&mdash;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 nationalists priests (among them the arch-priest of Mondragon), and imprisoned or deported hundreds more. Also killed a few priests who tried to halt the killings and at least one priest for being a Mason.

The "White Terror" was especially harsh in the southern part of Spain (Andalusia and Extremadura). The rebels bombed and seized the working-class districts of the main Andalusian cities in the first days of the war and after executing 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; in the city of Huelva 2,000 killed and 2,500 disappeared; in the city of Malaga (occupied by the Nationalists in February 1937) 4,000. In the rural areas the White Terror was also brutal. For example, in Lora del Rio, in the province of Seville, the Nationalists killed 300 peasants as a reprisal for the assassination of a local landowner. In Puente Genil, in the province of Cordoba, the Nationalists killed 995 Republicans. Paul Preston estimates the number of victims of the Nationalists in Andalusia at 55,000.

Furthermore the colonial troops of the Spanish Army of Africa (Ejército de África), mainly the Moroccan regulares and the Spanish Legion, under the command of Colonel Juan Yagüe, in their advance towards Madrid from Sevilla trough Andalusia and Extremadura killed dozens or hundreds in every town or city conquered, and several thousands of Republicans in the city of Badajoz. Moreover the colonial troops raped many working-class women and looted the houses of the Republicans. Queipo de Llano, one of the leaders of the Nationalists said:

"Our brave Legionaries and Regulares have shown the red cowards what it means to be a man. And, incidentally the wives of reds too. These Communist and Anarchist women, after all, have made themselves fair game by their doctrine of free love. And now they have at least the acquaintance of real men, and not milksops of militiamen. Kicking their legs about and struggling won't save them."

Post-war
When Heinrich Himmler visited Spain in 1940, a year after Franco’s victory, he was shocked by the brutality of the Falangist repression. In July 1939, the foreign minister of the Fascist Italy, Ciano reported "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".

After the war the executions continued (maybe 50,000), including the extrajudicial executions of members of the Spanish maquis (anti-Francoist guerrillas) and their supporters (enlaces) (only in the province of Cordoba 220 maquis and 160 enlaces were killed). Hundreds of thousands were imprisoned after the war in concentration camps (700,000 in 50 camps) or prisons. Before the war, in 1933, there were 12,000 prisoners in Spanish prisons, but by 1940 there were 280,000 prisoners in over 500 prisons. Furthermore hundreds of thousands were forced into exile (470,000 in 1939), among them many intellectuals and artists who had supported the Republic such as Antonio Machado, Ramon J. Sender, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Pedro Salinas, Manuel Altolaguirre, Emilio Prados, Max Aub and Luis Buñuel.

When Nazi Germany occupied France, Franco's regime encouraged the Germans to detain and deport thousands of Republican refugees to the concentration camps. 15,000 Spanish Republicans were deported to Dachau, Buchenwald (including the writer Jorge Semprún), Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg (one of them the politician Francisco Largo Caballero), Auschwitz, Flossenburg and Mauthausen (5,000 out of 7,200 Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen died there). Other Spanish Republicans were detained by the Gestapo, handed over to Spain and executed, among them Julian Zugazagoitia, Juan Peiró, Francisco Cruz Salido and Lluis Companys (president of the Generalitat of Catalonia) and other 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. Because of this, thousands of Spanish refugees (10,000 fighters in 1944) joined the French Resistance and the Free French Forces.

Thousands of prisoners (15,947 in 1943) were forced to work building dams, highways, the Guadalquivir Canal (10,000 political prisoners worked on its construction between 1940 and 1962), the Carabanchel Prison, the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos) (20,000 political prisoners worked in its construction) and in coal mines in Asturias and Leon. The severe overcrowding of the prisons (according to Antony Beevor 270,000 prisoners were spread around jails with capacity for 20,000), poor sanitary conditions and the lack of food caused thousands of deaths (4,663 deaths of prisoners between 1939 and 1945, in 13 of the 50 Spanish provinces), among them the poet Miguel Hernández and the politician Julián Besteiro. Torture was systematic in the Francoist prisons and concentration camps. According to Gabriel Jackson, the number of victims of the "White Terror" (executions and hunger or illness in prisons) only between 1939 and 1943 was 200,000.

A Francoist psychiatrist, Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, carried out so-called "experiments" on prisoners in the Francoist concentration camps in order to "establish the bio-psych roots of Marxism". He said that it was necessary remove the children of the Republican women from their mothers. Thousands of children were taken from their mothers and handed over to Francoist families (in 1943 12,043). Many of their mothers were executed after that. "For mothers who had a baby with them&mdash;and there were many&mdash;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."

Republican women were also victims of the repression in post-war Spain. Thousands of women suffered public humiliation (being paraded naked through the streets, being shaved and forced to ingest castor oil so they would soil themselves in public), sexual harassment and rape. In many cases the houses and goods of the widows of Republicans were confiscated by the government. Furthermore thousands of women were executed (for example the 13 roses), among them pregnant women. One judge said: "We cannot wait seven months to execute a woman".

The divorce and marriage legislation of the Republic was retroactively reversed, with the divorces retroactively unmade and the children of civil marriages made illegitimate. Furthermore, under the Francoist legislation a woman needed her husband's permission in order to take a job or open a bank account. Adultery by women was a crime, adultery by the husband only if he lived with his mistress.

Political parties and trade unions were forbidden, excepting the government party, Traditionalist Spanish Falange and Offensive of the Unions of the National-Syndicalist (Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista or FET de las JONS), and the official trade union Spanish Trade Union Organisation, (Sindicato Vertical). Hundreds of militants and supporters of the parties and trade unions declared illegal under Franco's dictatorship, such as the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español), PSOE; the Communist Party of Spain (Partido Comunista de España), PCE; the Workers' General Union (Unión General de Trabajadores), UGT; and the National Confederation of Labor (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), CNT, were imprisoned or executed. Thousands of army officials loyal to the Republic were expelled from the army. The regional languages like Basque and Catalan were also forbidden, and the statutes of autonomy of Catalonia and the Basque country were abolished.

Estimates
Concrete figures do not exist, as many supporters and sympathizers of the Republic fled Spain after losing the Civil War. Furthermore the francoist government destroyed thousands of documents relating to the White Terror  and tried to hide the executions of the Republicans. Gabriel Jackson states that:

"Prisons records and the death registers are misleading, since it is known that certificates of release were regularly signed by or for men who were then taken out and shot, and that certificates alleging heart attacks or apoplexy were made out for corpses left on the open road. Execution techniques deliberately disfigured the corpses so as to make them unrecognizable. Officials of the time have testified that families were afraid to report missing male members, and did not come to identify the bodies of the dead."

Thousands of victims of the "White Terror" are buried in hundreds of unmarked common graves, more than 600 only in Andalusia. The largest common grave is the common grave at San Rafael cemetery on the outskirts of Malaga (with perhaps more than 4,000 bodies). The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Historica or ARMH) says that the number of disappeared is over 35,000.

Estimates range from 150,000 victims to 400,000; for example, in the collective work Victimas de la guerra civil: 150,000; the Spanish historian Josep Fontana: 175,000; Hugh Thomas: 175,000; Paul Preston: 180,000; Anthony Beevor: 200,000; and Gabriel Jackson: 400,000. There are, however, regional and partial figures. For example, in the province of Cordoba the victims of "White Terror" are 9,579 (the historian Francisco Moreno Gomez has increased the number to 11,581). , On the other hand, the victims of the "red terror" in the same province are 2,060; in the province of Sevilla the "White Terror" 8,000 (the "red terror" 480); in the province of Granada the "White Terror" 5,048 (including the poet Federico García Lorca) (the "red terror" 994); in the province of Zaragoza the "White Terror" 6,029 (the "Red Terror" 742); in the province of Valencia the "White Terror" 3,128 (the "Red Terror" 2,844); in the province of Malaga, the "White Terror" 7,000 (the "Red Terror" 2,607); in Navarra the "White Terror", 2,789 (the "Red Terror" zero); in the province of Zamora the "White Terror" 3,000 (the "Red Terror" zero); in the province of Valladolid the "White Terror" 3,430 (the "Red Terror": zero); in La Rioja, the "White Terror" 2,000 (the "red terror" zero); in Asturias, the "White Terror" 5,592; in Cadiz 3,000 (the "Red Terror" 95); and in the occidental part of the province of Badajoz, the "White Terror" 6,600 (the "Red Terror" 243). According to the historian Francisco Espinosa, the victims of the Nationalists in only five Spanish provinces (Seville, Cádiz, Huelva, a part of Badajoz and a part of Cordoba) out of fifty were 25,000. The historian Paul Preston says that the number of victims judicially executed in 36 out 50 Spanish provinces were 92,462 (many other victims were executed without a trial). They died either as a result of the Nationalist repression during the war or as a result of Franco's dictatorship repression after the war.

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 Franco's dictatorship had been decimated by the francoist police, and the Spanish maquis had ceased to exist as a 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 (Comisiones Obreras), linked to the Communist Party of Spain 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 an Amnesty Law (Ley de Amnistia de 1977) which granted pardon for all political crimes committed by the supporters of the dictatorship (including the "White Terror") 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 dictatorship 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 (unfortunately, as a result Mr. Garzón was himself 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 the Franco's dictatorship. Amnesty International, Human Right Watch the Council of Europe and United Nations have asked the Spanish government to investigate the crimes of Franco's dictatorship.