Fascism, Part 3: The Spanish Civil War

Long ignored, Franco's bloody war against his own may be fascism's most terrible example.

17-year-old Marina Ginesta stands on a rooftop in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. This photograph of Ginesta became the quintessential icon of the Spanish “New Woman,” who modeled the enlightenment of the Women’s Liberation Movement that would take another three decades to develop. Franco won, and Spain’s New Woman was crushed: she was sent to penal colonies, subjected to gang rape, imprisoned, tortured—or executed, sometimes with a child in utero. Her living children were taken from her and given to “good Catholic families” who had backed Franco. The purpose of this, as well as Franco’s heavily distributed fairy tales featuring himself as the hero, is that Franco feared the children of the people he had butchered. He wanted to wipe out even the memory of them. Until his death, Franco’s grip on history was absolute. There were laws against talking about the war. Everything published glorified him personally and fascism socially. The moment he died, memory began to resurface. Now, almost 90 years after the war began, Spain’s memory has returned. It’s a hard, hard road. Image: Public domain.

© Morgaan Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

The Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War, which ended just as World War II began, is the best possible lesson in how fascism takes root and how it expresses the attributes talked about in Part 2 of this series.

Conditions in the United States now echo many of those extant when Franco was able to gain power and kill three million of his own people. And its justification and religious enforcement are shockingly close to what we are hearing today.

“What I do has no merit whatsoever, because I simply fulfill a providential mission with the help of God,” Franco said. The Catholic Church, with its antipathy for “rationalism, freemasonry, liberalism, socialism and communism,” allied itself with Franco and fulfilled functions of this “providential mission”—and not only in the expected areas education and censorship but also in running the sprawling fascist penal archipelago.

It was a small war, as wars go, eclipsed by the sweeping conflagration of the First World War recently past, as it would be dwarfed by the Second World War soon to come. Spain, on the Iberian Peninsula at the farthest southwestern corner of Europe, was once a mighty empire. From her Atlantic ports, Columbus set sail for the New World, and Hernán Cortés departed for Mexico in search of conquest, fortune, and glory. These were heady centuries for Spain, the days when kings and popes drew lines upon maps that arrogated to themselves ownership of as-yet-undiscovered lands and the religious and political control of their oblivious indigenous peoples. From 1492 to 1898, when the country’s empire collapsed but for a few holdings in North Africa—the long-held settlements at Melilla and Ceuta—the people of Spain gazed into the glass of history and saw reflected there the very image of exaltation. After four hundred years of imperial glory, fin-de-siècle Spain was witness to the waning of her once-virile power and the fading of her once-resplendent image.

As the shockwaves rolled through the Spanish culture, rich, landed elites bristled at the loss of prestige. The Spanish military, fused to the aristocracy, had a more radical reaction.

When the end of the empire came, the military had no external role to play and scrambled to protect its funding and culturally elevated status. What Helen Graham calls a “rigid and intolerant political culture” took hold in its elite officer corps, as did a specious new narrative: that “civilian politicians had been uniquely responsible for the final loss of empire and thus had little moral claim on governing the country.” Officers saw Spain’s culture, hierarchies, and “political homogeneity” as having created her greatness in the past, and some officers believed the defense of this idea to be a “new imperial duty.”

If the landed aristocracy bristled and the military radicalized, the Spanish church, with her “Manichaean brand of Catholicism,” was right where she had been for centuries: in a position of immense political power and near-total social control. Historian Sebastiaan Faber notes that the Roman Catholic Church held a death grip on the Spanish educational system but did virtually nothing to correct the shocking level of illiteracy among Spain’s landless peasants and workers. Also, the Church, allied with the wealthy landowners, aided the estate stewards in the oppression of the poor labor force, even as “the hated civil guard … shot unemployed workers foraging for acorns and wood on estate land.” This made the poor, Graham writes, “fiercely anticlerical.”

The Run-up to the Spanish Civil War

Against the backdrop of these fused forces—the aristocracy, the military, and the church—there emerged two figures of crucial importance in the run-up to the Spanish Civil War: One was King Alfonso XIII—young, reckless, and capricious. The other was Francisco Franco—a brave, thoughtful, intelligent military figure who would become a mass murderer.

Alfonso XIII was crowned king on the May 17, 1902, his sixteenth birthday, though he had been monarch since his birth. His father, Alfonso XII died before he was born, and his mother, Maria Christina of Austria, had ruled the country as regent until he came of age. Immediately upon coronation, the reckless, power-drunk teenager began meddling in the affairs of the Cortes Generales, Spain’s parliamentary body. Alfonso’s careening capriciousness destabilized Spanish political life, and the country reeled under thirty-three different administrations in the next twenty-one years. During these rocky decades, Francisco Franco’s career would begin.

Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco Bahamonde was born in El Ferrol, on the Atlantic coast of Galicia, on December 4th, 1892, five and half years after the birth of the king. He mother was kindly and religious; his father was a contradiction in terms: he was politically leftist and iconoclastic, but paradoxically, he was a tyrannical husband and father. As Stanley Payne and Jesús Palacios write in Franco: A Personal and Political Biography, the young Franco despised his father’s “amoral and self-indulgent” lifestyle. Indeed, the elder Franco earned young Francisco’s eternal enmity by humiliating his mother and abandoning the family. Payne and Palacios write that the elder Franco may have been “the first figure of importance in his life to become the target of the unforgiving coldness and contempt that Franco, having internalized his father’s harshness and authoritarianism, would display toward those whom he scorned.” But this would come later. For the present, there was a ladder to ascend.

With most of its fleet destroyed in the Spanish-American War, the Spanish naval academy was admitting no more students. That path blocked, Francisco Franco entered military academy instead. It was 1907, and he was fifteen years old. He graduated in 1910, in the lower half of his class, as a second lieutenant.

Franco was posted to Morocco, where Spain’s last imperial possessions lay, in 1912. Morocco’s changing fortunes had included a long years of independence, administration by the Roman Empire, and conquest by the Umayyad Caliphate in the eighth century. Beginning in the eleventh century, Berber tribesmen established several dynasties, among them the Almoravid and Almohad, which controlled much of North Africa, the Western Mediterranean, and large areas that are now part of Portugal and Spain. These empires would eventually fall to Christian resistance and expansion; colonial interventions by European states, among them Britain, Portugal, France, and Spain, would eventually overlay virtually all of Moroccan territory.

The histories of European colonial powers in Morocco is complex, with ever-expanding and –contracting territorial claims, with lands taken sometimes by war and often by treaty. Spain’s possession of Ceuta dates from 1668 when the city, at the Straits of Gibraltar and of immense strategic importance, was ceded to Spain by agreement with Portugal. Spain’s possession Melilla, which lies on the Mediterranean coast in the mountainous Rif region, began with the conquest of the city in 1492 by the forces of Ferdinand and Isabella.

War was virtually incessant in Morocco from the beginning of the colonial period. The possession of large swaths of Morocco by European interests was always tenuous, with continuous violent resistance to the occupiers as well as frequent intertribal warring. Even into the modern period, Spain’s experience in its Moroccan wars would shape affairs on the mainland. Not for nothing did Sebastian Balfour title his book Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War.

The First Rif War between Spanish troops and Rif tribesmen began in 1893 and was resolved by diplomacy in 1894. The Second Rif War broke out in 1909, after several years of skirmishes between Spanish conscripted troops and the Rif tribesmen angered at Spanish expansion from Melilla to the iron mines that lay to the east. When tribesmen killed six railway workers, Spain went to war. The Riffi continued the engagement for a year before Spain finally forced them to the peace table.

The truth, however, is that the fighting never really stopped, and it worsened after the signing of the Treaty of Fès in March of 1912, the month after Francisco Franco arrived in North Africa. The Sultan of Morocco, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, had lost control of the country: his taxation system was in shambles, tribal revolts were ever-present, a Berber rival attempted to form an oppositional government in the Spanish city of Melilla, and his personal behavior was “scandalizing his own subjects, particularly the religious leaders.”

So ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz made a deal. In exchange for his continued position and the security of the hereditary line of his family, he simply gave the country away. Morocco became a protectorate of France, which, in turn gave the northern Mediterranean coastlands, including Melilla and Cueta, to Spain as her area of influence. Widespread rioting and armed revolts broke out instantaneously. France would attempt the to pacify the country, and it would take decades, in part because World War I divided and drained her energies. Spain, which remained neutral during the war, would attempt this “pacification” (read: subjugation) as well, and it would be a grueling endeavor, fraught with bloodshed, that would last fifteen years. Francisco Franco would shine.

Franco’s first promotion, to first lieutenant, had come by seniority alone, but very soon his skills—and “cold-blooded bravery”—began to show. In 1916, now a captain at age 23 (and just rejected by his first love), Franco volunteered for the regulares—a detachment of Moroccan colonial soldiers commanded by Spanish officers. Essentially, they shock troops. It was not long before Franco found out just how dangerous the posting would be. Sprayed with machine gun fire, he was gravely wounded in the abdomen and liver and may have lost a testicle—but continued to command his troops despite being wounded. So stunning was his courage—and so remarkable was the fact that he survived at all—that Moroccan troops thought he possessed baraka (divine force and the protection of God) and revered him. In early 1917, Franco, now 24, was promoted to the rank of major, the youngest Spanish army, and was posted to the mainland for three years.

As Europe emerged from World War I, which H. G. Wells had naïvely called “the war that will end war,” Spain found herself facing the immense pro-democracy pressures born of the post-war cultural transformations and the seismic sociopolitical shock that was the Russian Revolution. Continuously reeling from the erratic governance of its constantly forming-and-collapsing administrations and the incessant destabilizing interventions by the king, Spain faced immense social schisms as well, rifts generated by what Graham calls “uneven development” between sectors of the population. Chasmic divides expressed themselves as “a series of culture wars”: urban vs. rural; secular vs. religious; authoritarian vs. progressive; youth vs. age; center vs. periphery; and traditional gender roles for women vs. Spain’s “new woman.”

In 1920, Francisco Franco was posted to Morocco again, this time as the second in command of the newly formed Spanish Foreign Legion created by Lt. Colonel José Millán-Astray y Terreros. The Morocco to which he returned was even more dangerous than the Morocco he had left.

In Franco’s absence, the Spanish had arrested and imprisoned the Berber leader Abd el-Krim (Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Khaṭṭābī), the son of a revered Islamic scholar and qāḍī (Islamic judge). The elder el-Krim was also an intelligence asset of the Spanish government and received a monthly stipend for providing information and for supporting Spanish interests in the Rif. The younger el-Krim followed in his father’s footsteps, attending madrassah and eventually becoming the qāḍī al-quḍāt (chief Islamic judge) of Melilla.

In 1915, Spanish authorities called the younger el-Krim in for an interview to talk to him about his father’s views—and his own. Apparently, the elder El-Krim, whom the Spanish authorities had termed a moro amigo (a friendly Moor), had a secret. “While still a paid Spanish agent,” Shannon Fleming writes, “Abd el-Krim’s father surreptitiously supported German and Arab agents in the Rif.” It was clear violation of Spain’s neutrality as well as a betrayal of Spain’s trust.

The report written by the Spanish military damned both father and son. Spain pulled the elder el-Krim’s pension. For his son, matters were even worse: Spanish authorities accused Abd el-Krim of “pro-Central Powers sentiments, of animosity toward the French, and of supporting an autonomous central Rif free of direct Spanish administration.” They jailed him in a Melilla prison from September 1915 to August of 1916. Although the Spanish released Abd el-Krim and returned him to his position as qāḍī al-quḍāt, they continued to pressure both father and son to support their “pacification” of the Rif.  

Abd el-Krim had had enough. In 1918, he left his post in Melilla, returned to his home village, and called his brother Mohammed home from his studies in Madrid. The brothers and their uncle Abdselam formed a harka (war band) to meet the Spanish invasion they knew was coming. Spain continued to consume more territory. When General Silvestre crossed the Kert River in 1920, Abd el-Krim went into open opposition. It was into this environment of extreme tension that Franco returned to Morocco in 1920.

Silvestre chose the abandoned village of Annual, one hundred kilometers from Melilla by a tortuous, winding road, and established his forward base in the mountains there in January of 1921. The bitter recrimination for the imprisonment of Abd el-Krim and the humiliation of his father would manifest here.

In early July, the Riffi began a series of attacks along the eastern Spanish line in the Rif Mountains. They surrounded and besieged the troops stationed at Igueriben, and all attempts at her liberation failed. Repulsed by the Riffi, General Silvestre’s troops fell back to Annual. In the late afternoon of the July 21^st, Abd el-Krim attacked. It was a total rout. With just 3,000 men, the Riffi overwhelmed 14,000 Spanish troops in what became known as the Disaster at Annual. Then el-Krim’s fighters stormed across the Rif toward Melilla. By nightfall on the 23^rd of July, the Riffi stood on the crests of the Gurugú Mountains overlooking the city.

Virtually from the moment Igueriben was besieged, desperate appeals for relief troops fluttered across telegraph lines in the Rif. To the west, Francisco Franco, with the Spanish Foreign Legion at Tazarut, called off a planned attack and force-marched his troops north towards Fondak and Tetun. Combining with troops from other divisions, they then set out by train to Ceuta and from there ferried to Melilla, arriving on the 23^rd. It took three weeks for Spanish troops to quell the attacks on outposts around Melilla and save the city. It would not have been saved at all had Franco not acted with such decisiveness. Within months, the Spanish would retake most of the their lost lands, but the damage was done. Historian Sebastian Balfour holds that the it is the Battle of Annual that set in train the events that led to the Spanish Civil War. Here is why:

The official figure for Spanish deaths at Annual, and in the subsequent battles around Melilla, were reported to the Cortes Generales as being 13,192. Materiel lost by the Spanish in the summer of 1921 included 11,000 rifles, 3,000 carbines, 1,000 muskets, 60 machine guns, 2,000 horses, 1,500 mules, 100 cannons, and a large quantity of ammunition.  There was widespread, vocal outrage on the mainland at the devastating loss in blood and treasure, and the Spanish wanted an answer. Investigators went to work.

Two years later, in 1923, a report that blamed Alfonso XIII for the Disaster at Annual was one week from publication. To prevent its release, General Miguel Primo de Rivera engineered a coup d’etat that unseated the Cortes Generales. Parliamentary law in Spain was destroyed. Alfonso XIII backed the coup and installed Primo de Rivera at the head of a monarchical dictatorship.

However the Spanish felt about all this, Francisco Franco had come out of it the hero who saved Melilla. By 1926, he had become, at age 33, the youngest general in Europe. Just a year later, he was posted to the command of the new Spanish military academy, a fortuitous position for him in two respects: first, it gave him influence with the next decade’s officer corps, to whom he would be almost universally known; second, he made important social and political connections that would serve him well later. But seismic changes were coming.

Over the course of the dictatorship of the 1920s, Primo de Rivera became a deeply despised man who largely blamed for the abject condition of the country. The precarious positions of the king and his dictator forced elections in 1931. The Spanish punished Prime de Rivera and Alfonso XIII at the polls, installing the leftist Second Republic and stripping the monarch of his powers. The king fled the country.

The Second Republic would hold power for the next five years and would comprise three administrations:

• A reformist-leftist regime in power from 1931 to 1933

• A center-right, counter-reform regime, from 1933 through 1935

• The quasi-revolutionary Popular Front that came to power in early 1936

Franco’s fortunes would wax and wane during this period, but would peak during the second regime, when the more conservative government named him chief-of-staff, the highest position in the Spanish military. The third regime would be troubling for him.

In the run-up to the profoundly flawed election of 1936, which installed the last of these administrations, Spanish culture grew increasingly chaotic. Payne and Palacios write that the level of rampant law-breaking and sectarian violence was “without precedent for a modern European country not undergoing revolution.” Incidences of arson, coercion, farm seizures, forced church closures, violent strikes, censorship, summary arrests, and subversion were common. Just before the election, the conservative counter-reform government declared martial law and suspended many parliamentary functions. The ensuing violence and the government’s draconian response to it thoroughly radicalized and destabilized Spanish politics.  

When the Popular Front finally took power, stability devolved further. Franco remained loyal to the elected government and encouraged all military to remain so as well, but he also urged the government to declare a state of emergency. The government refused, stripped Franco of his status as chief-of-staff, and posted him to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, a humiliation Franco would describe as a destierro—banishment. That alone, however, was not enough to lure Franco to cast his lot with the legions of Spanish military who already wanted to overthrow the government and establish a military dictatorship. Though gunpowder lay strewn all over the floor of the magazine­, it still wanted for a lighted match to set it off.

That spark was the extrajudicial arrest, kidnapping, and assassination of opposition leader José Calvo Sotelo in the early morning hours of July 13, 1936, a brutal act of retaliation for the murder of a Republican leader by Falangists a few hours earlier. Calvo Sotelo was shot in the back of the head. His killers dumped his body at the morgue of the largest cemetery in Madrid. The government immediately stepped in to try to censor the news, but word leaked out, and the public outrage was volcanic. Franco would conjecture later that, had Sotelo not been murdered, there would never have been sufficient support among the military for a coup.

The uprising that came against the Popular Front would be staged by an army “with a long history of military intervention in Spain’s political life” and would echo the fascist takeovers by Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany. Franco was the last of the major high-ranking Spanish officers to join the rebellion, yet in a few months he would become caudillo, the Spanish equivalent of the Italian duce and the German führer. All three of the fascist nations were dedicated to halting and reversing the tidal wave of social, cultural, and political changes going on everywhere in Europe.

Indeed, in his commentary on the Criterion DVD of The Devil’s Backbone, titled “A War of Values,” historian Sebastiaan Faber speaks of the quest to make Spain a modern country, a goal that put the large sectors of the populace on a collision course with the landed gentry, the Roman Catholic Church, and the elites who “viewed indigenous protest through the lens of the Russian Revolution.”

The Coup d’État

Over the evening of July 17-18, 1936, the Africanista garrisons in North Africa broke into open rebellion against the Popular Front. The coup d’etat rapidly spread to garrisons on Spanish soil.

The generals (including Franco) who commanded this Nationalist insurgency expected to take the country from the Republicans (or Loyalists) in a day or two. They did not. Meeting with remarkably stiff resistance from peasants and the urban working classes, they failed to take both Madrid and Barcelona. The attempt settled into one of the most grueling, gruesome, and vicious civil wars in history.

The Spanish Civil War

On July 24^th, the French pledged support to the assaulted Republican government but quickly reneged. By July 28^th, Hitler and Mussolini had decided, quite independently of each other, to aid the insurgents by sending planes to Morocco to airlift the rebelling Army of Africa to the Spanish mainland.

In August of 1936, Spaniards were witness to terrifying siege from within the country and devastating betrayal from without. Franco’s “Army of Africa fans out from Seville,” Graham writes, “and begins its bloody march up through the south toward Madrid.” Outside Spain’s borders, European states, soon to become major Axis and Allied powers in World War II, lined up in support of Franco’s obviously illegal power grab, opting for a policy called “Non-Intervention,” which other nations would also adopt.

Non-intervention it was not, however, for if Spain, Italy, and Germany overtly expressed fascistic opposition to the sweeping power-to-the-people movements underway, the governments of England and France expressed the power of the elites in covert obstruction of Spain’s seated government. French banks froze Republican gold. British banks “obstructed funds that were to be used for Republican arms purchases,” but allowed Franco to trade freely through their financial systems. Britain banned arms exports to the Second Republic within a month of the coup.

Such area-wide support for a military coup against a democratically elected government was possible only in the kind of social, political, and philosophical environment that existed in Europe at the time. As historian Kevin Passmore writes, the rise in Europe of the socio-political reaction now referred to as the Radical Right, a precedent both of fascism and Nazism, occurred in a matrix of influences that was much more a synergy of sources and conditions than a family of direct causes.

Reduced to a “political religion,” Passmore states, fascism may be traced to the “radical sects of the Reformation or even the classical world.” These radical sects “prefigured the intolerant, illiberal, messianic mind-set of some fascists.”

Fascism also owes philosophical debts to both pro- and anti-Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century: fascism embraced the Enlightenment notion that “society need not be determined by tradition but could be organized according to a blueprint derived from universal principles”—even one universal idea, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who termed it the “general will.” From the diametrical position, however, fascism gravitated toward the stances of anti-Enlightenment thinkers like Gottfried von Herder in Germany and the French counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre, who argued that “‘natural’ communities—nation, profession, and family—were more important than individual human rights” [emphasis added]. Thus fascism comprised both the Enlightenment notion that society could be disengaged from tradition and organized around a universal principle—the very flower of rationalist thinking—and its reaction, the abhorrence of liberality and individual rights and, simultaneously, materialism and socialism.

There were also specific social scientists whose theories of crowd psychology lie in the dark undercrofts of the fascism and Nazism that would come. The philosopher Gustave Le Bon understood that that masses could be “manipulated by demagogues.” Le Bon’s theories attracted some philosophers from both the left and the right. Hitler and Mussolini, however, put Le Bon’s work to devastating practical use. Allied to Le Bon were George Sorel, who believed that masses are motivated by myths and violence; Gaetana Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, who argued that violence is necessary to preserve the power of the political elite; and Friedrich Nietzsche, who yearned for a “man of destiny to bring a more spiritual community” and who believed that universalism undermines respect for the strong, apparently believing such respect to be a virtue.

Le Bon’s most dangerous offering, however, lay in his twisting of  “science to argue that evolution and natural selection had permitted the elite to rise above the mass through development of the faculty of reason.” Darwin’s evolutionary theory of survival of the fittest was hijacked to craft a social theory that privileged some and threatened the very existence of others. So-called Social Darwinists tried to make the case that “the comforts of modern society, coupled with assistance to the poor, would lead to survival of the unfit and social degeneration.” They preached a deadly form of eugenicism that advocated draconian measures: the “unfit” should be sterilized and the “healthy” encouraged to reproduce.

Passmore writes that Social Darwinism was also bonded to “the even more questionable ‘science’ of race.” Composer Richard Wagner’s philosophy blended “antisemitism, Germanic Christianity purged of its ‘Jewish elements’, and paganism into an idealized Germanic myth.” Wagner’s son-in-law, Huston Stewart Chamberlain, added racism and Social Darwinism to Wagner’s already toxic mix. Hitler was a “devotee” of Chamberlain’s, and “spent his life dreaming Wagnerian dreams of victory or death.”

Even more ominously, Social Darwinism gave shelter to the notion that racism was not really racism at all. Racial privilege, the Social Darwinists argued, was simply a reflection of the natural order in life and a just result of natural superiority. “Racism was an essential ingredient of imperialism,” Passmore writes. “European powers used race science to justify domination over ‘inferior’ non-European peoples, and that permitted them to disregard the rule of law where they thought it appropriate. Extermination of some native peoples provided precedents for the Holocaust.”

In fact, the entire Radical Right philosophical edifice was erected on a foundation of long extant, psychologically and socially endemic anti-Semitism radically worsened by the publication of a lethal work of fiction. Paul Preston, writing in The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, describes the emergence of the book:

The idea of an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Christian world was given a modern spin … by the dissemination … of one of the most influential works of anti-Semitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Published in Russian 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.

The Protocols was a modernized re-visioning on a virulent older mythology. A belief in “an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity had emerged in the early Middle Ages.” In the nineteenth-century run-up to the fascist conflicts of the twentieth century, “the Spanish extreme right resurrected it to discredit the liberals whom they viewed as responsible for social changes that were damaging to their interests. In this paranoid fantasy … it was alleged that, using Freemasons as their willing intermediaries, the Jews controlled the economy, politics, the press, literature and the entertainment world through which they propagated immorality and the brutalization of the masses.”

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion poured gasoline on an already flaming bonfire of shifted blame, shadow projection, and scapegoating in the Western world. As scholar Hasia Diner relates to PBS, American automotive magnate Henry Ford published half a million copies of The Protocols, distributing them free at his car dealerships and to subscribers of the newspaper he owned. He continued to support The Protocols until 1927—six years after London Times correspondent Philip Grave had published a definitive proof that The Protocols was based on fiction, not fact. In Europe, Hitler used The Protocols as an historical textbook with no reference to its fictional origin and applauded Henry Ford, with whom the Third Reich had business connections. In 1938 Hitler awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum comments:

During the 1920s and 1930s, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion played an important part in the Nazis’ propaganda arsenal. The Nazi party published at least 23 editions of the Protocols between 1919 and 1939. Following the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, some schools used the Protocols to indoctrinate students.”

Nobel Prize-winning writer Elie Wiesel, author of Night, makes profound note of the influence of this most virulent of publications. “If ever a piece of writing could produce mass hatred,” Wiesel wrote, “it is this one.”

With these pan-European influences now in place—reactions against the Russian Revolution and the unraveling masculine control of women, the elitist attitudes in France and England, the rising Nazism in Germany and militant fascism in Italy, the anti-Semitism and racism and anti-socialism in general—the stage was set for fascism’s fiery subjugation of Europe. On this proscenium, Francisco Franco staged his coup.

Within just one week of the July 18^th coup, every major state in Europe had lined up on Franco’s side: Germany and Italy as military aides; France and England as banking allies; all the rest opting for the silence that gives consent. By the July 24^th Europe had abandoned the democratically elected government of Spain.

By early August, the killing began in earnest, and it would last for almost three years. Fascist forces wasted no time in organizing the aerial assault on Madrid of August 27^th and 28^th, making the Spanish Civil War the “first fought in Europe in which civilians became targets en masse, through bombing raids on big cities.”

With the military in revolt against the government, security nationwide collapsed. In areas still held by the Republican forces, there was virtually no police presence or operational judiciary. De facto pardons emptied the jails, and “all manner of personal scores” were settled. “Acts of outright criminality” were “pursued under the guise of revolutionary justice.” If such were acts toward individuals, there were also “symbolic acts” against “oppressive sources of power and authority in which they saw the individual victim embedded.” The “church singer and the bell-ringer were part of an old world that had to be annihilated” in an anticlerical purge that “claimed the lives of nearly seven thousand (overwhelmingly male) religious personnel.”

In a quintessential vicious cycle, Republican violence became the excuse for Fascist “cleansing.” Graham points to the “Manichaean mindset historically associated with certain forms of Catholic culture and practice” as being at the root of the violence on both sides: Republicans used violence in an attempt to achieve a “tabula rasa”—a clean slate and with it the birth of a “brave new world”—while for the Nationalists, violence was used as a tool for exterminating the ideological opposition: socialists, communists, anarchists, and the feminist Spanish New Woman.

People of all ages and conditions fell victim to this “cleansing.” What they had in common was that they were perceived as representing the changes brought by the Republic. Republican members of parliament or village mayors were primary targets for liquidation if caught. Nor did it only mean those who had benefited materially from the Republic’s redistribution reforms—though urban workers, tenant farmers, and agricultural labourers were killed by the thousands. It also meant “cleansing” people who symbolized cultural change and thus posed a threat to old ways of being and thinking: progressive teachers, intellectuals, self-educated workers, and liberated women. Nationalist violence was targeted against the socially, culturally and sexually different.

Despite the fact that both sides tended to retribution, Graham notes that there was a “fundamental asymmetry” to the violence. The Francoists, in control of all the military apparatus, could ensure security in the zones they held and penetrate deep into the last remaining safety zone for the Republican masses, the patria chica, thus destroying “home” as a safe place. The result was that “in villages across the rebel-held south, there was systematic brutality, torture, shaving and rape of women, and mass public killings of both men and women in the aftermath of conquest.”

Central to this brutality was Francisco Franco’s own self-image. Payne and Palacios report that after becoming generalissimo, Franco “considered himself increasingly to be an instrument of divine providence.” In areas of Francoist domination—to which the Republicans were never able to lay siege—“dehumanization, torture, and unlawful killing of the enemy were seen not as abuses but as a prophylactic administered by power.” In Republican-held areas, never did the “immense pressures of the war override constitutional guarantees.”

After the war, and late in his life, Franco’s “providential self-image,” remained undiminished: “What I do has no merit whatsoever, because I simply fulfill a providential mission with the help of God,” Franco said. The Catholic Church, with its antipathy for “rationalism, freemasonry, liberalism, socialism and communism,” allied itself with Franco and fulfilled functions of this “providential mission”—and not only in the expected areas education and censorship but also in running the sprawling fascist penal archipelago.

As the war wore on through 1938 and early 1939, two things became clear: first, that the Republicans inevitably would lose the war; second, that the agony attending that loss would be one of debased violence at the hands of Franco’s regime. The last of the Republican premiers, Juan Negrín y López, desperately tried to secure assurances of humane treatment of Republicans in post-war Spain by continuing resistance while secret negotiations took place with Franco’s regime. Negrín’s worst fears would be realized, for conquest brought hell.

The Aftermath

The war won, the Francoists set about purifying the “biological body” of the evils of liberal thinking, and they did it with a vengeance. It was important to the Francoists not only to break the body but also to break the mind of the defeated Republicans before they killed them. The rolls of the executed numbered in the tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands more—including women and children—were incarcerated in a network of concentration camps and forced labor gangs that operated for years after the war. Infants and children were taken from incarcerated mothers and placed with regime families, their histories erased.  

After the conflagration, it became illegal to converse about the war or to speak of Francoist atrocities. As Graham notes, “The silent knowledge of unquiet graves necessarily produced a devastating schism between public and private memory in Spain.”

Within several years of the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, the monarchy was restored, and Spain was on its way to a renascent democratic future. But that future came at great cost: the Pact of Silence was a kind of a general political amnesty and a pledge not to talk about the past. This was the price exacted by the Francoists for a peaceful transition. What had passed for truth, from the onset of the war until the 2004 abrogation of the Pact of Silence and institution of the Historical Memory Law in 2007, was the carefully crafted, self-elevating Francoist mythology about itself, penned by a regime that had already purged its archives of the much of the evidence of its atrocities. The Pact of Silence made punishable law the Francoist demand that the self-flattering lies it told about itself would remain the perceived truth in Spain for the foreseeable future; it ensured that the regime’s crimes against humanity would remain buried, along with 140,000 corpses of the vanquished that it executed, and that those who screamed in their haunted dreams would be jailed, or killed, if they spoke of what they knew.

The Historical Memory Law, as brave an attempt as it is to open the sealed vaults of memory, struggles under the many limitations placed upon it, and there is an ongoing series of court challenges demanding that archives be unsealed and that those who tortured and murdered Republicans after the war be brought to justice. Those who resist say the accused received amnesty under the Pact of Silence or that there were no laws to cover their crimes at the time they were committed. The United Nations reminds the Spanish government that there is, under international law, no amnesty for crimes against humanity and that no statute of limitations applies.

The Spanish Civil War ended on April 1^st, 1939. On the battle fronts 200,000 men had died. Another 200,000 men and women had been exterminated after flimsy, rushed trials—or no trials at all—in a radical pursuit of a purified, perfected state. After the war ended, another 20,000 were murdered outright. No one knows how many died in the bombings in the major cities. More than half a million refugees fled Spain when the Republic surrendered. Many of them died in slave-labor work battalions or in French or German concentration camps, having fallen in the arms of the Nazis. In the prisons they fell by the thousands to disease and malnutrition. It is this unspeakable humanitarian outrage that prompted historian Paul Preston to term the Spanish Civil War a holocaust, and his figures, those given here, speak for the fallen.

If there is an icon for this war, it is the photograph of a tiny, lifeless child in its tiny little coffin, a babe who died when the bombs fell. The faces of these children adorned the splintered buildings in the cities where the explosives and incendiaries rained down. Their eyes are stunned, terrified, agonized; their fragile, porcelain faces are frozen in the moment when everything, everything was taken from them. It is this haunting visage that is the central image of this war.

Martha Gellhorn was right. If the world had awakened to how hideous and deformed Franco’s quest was, the world might have shut down Hitler’s rise far earlier, perhaps early enough to prevent World War II.