The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo. Paul Preston
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If Carrillo was not there, which is unlikely, it is inconceivable that he, as both Public Order Councillor and secretary general of the JSU, was not fully apprised of the meeting.
Nuño reported that the CNT and JSU representatives, on the evening of 7 November, had decided that the prisoners should be classified into three groups. The fate of the first, consisting of ‘fascists and dangerous elements’, was to be ‘Immediate execution’ ‘with responsibility to be hidden’ – the responsibility being that of those who took the decision and of those who implemented it. The second group, of prisoners considered to be supporters of the military uprising but, because of age or profession, less dangerous, were to be evacuated to Chinchilla, near Albacete. The third, those least politically committed, were to be released ‘with all possible guarantees, as proof to the Embassies of our humanitarianism’. This last comment suggests that whoever represented the JSU at the meeting knew about and had mentioned the earlier encounter between Carrillo and Schlayer.95
The first consignment of prisoners had already left Madrid early in the morning of 7 November, presumably in accordance with the instructions for evacuation issued by Pedro Checa in response to Koltsov/Miguel Martínez. Thus some prisoners were removed and killed before the formal agreement with the CNT made later that evening. There is no record of there being any difficulty about their getting through the anarchist militias on the roads out of the capital. That is not surprising since there were CNT–FAI representatives on Serrano Poncela’s Public Order Delegation. Nevertheless, the agreement guaranteed that further convoys would face no problems at the anarchist checkpoints and that they could also rely on substantial assistance in the gory business of executing the prisoners. The strongest CNT controls were posted on the roads out to Valencia and Aragon which the convoys would take. The necessary flotillas of double-decker buses and many smaller vehicles could not get out of Madrid without the approval, cooperation or connivance of the CNT patrols. Since Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela knew this only too well, it is not plausible that they would have ordered evacuation convoys without first securing the agreement of the CNT–FAI. This undermines Carrillo’s later assertions that the convoys were hijacked by anarchists. The grain of truth in those claims resides in the certainty that the anarchists took some part in the actual killing.
The first decisions taken by Carrillo and his collaborators had been the saca on the morning of 7 November at San Antón and, in the afternoon, the larger one at the Cárcel Modelo. The prisoners were loaded on to double-decker buses. Convoys consisting of the buses escorted by cars and trucks carrying militiamen shuttled back and forth over the next two days. Their official destinations were prisons well behind the lines, in Alcalá de Henares, Chinchilla and Valencia. However, of the more than 1,000 prisoners removed, only about 300 arrived there. Eleven miles from Madrid, on the road to Alcalá de Henares, at the small village of Paracuellos del Jarama, the first batch, from San Antón, were forced off the buses. At the base of the small hill on which the village stood, they were lined up by the militiamen, verbally abused and then shot. In the evening of the same day, the second batch, from the Cárcel Modelo, suffered the same fate.96 A further consignment of prisoners arrived on the morning of 8 November. The mayor was forced to round up the able-bodied inhabitants of the village (there were only 1,600 in total) to dig huge ditches for the approximately 800 bodies which had been left to rot. When Paracuellos could cope with no more, subsequent convoys made for the nearby village of Torrejón de Ardoz, where a disused irrigation channel was used for the approximately 400 victims.97 Sacas continued, with intervals, until 3 December. Some expeditions of prisoners arrived safely in Alcalá de Henares. The total numbers killed over the four weeks following the creation of the Junta de Defensa cannot be calculated with total precision, but there is little doubt that it was somewhere between 2,200 and 2,500.98
All these sacas were initiated with documentation on Dirección General de Seguridad notepaper indicating that the prisoners were either to be released or taken to Chinchilla or Alcalá de Henares. When the order was for them to go to Alcalá de Henares, they usually arrived safely. This suggests that ‘to be released’ (libertad) and ‘Chinchilla’ were codewords for elimination.99 The specific orders for the evacuations of prisoners were not signed by Carrillo, nor by any member of the Junta de Defensa. Until 22 November, such orders were signed by Manuel Muñoz’s second-in-command in the Dirección General de Seguridad, the head of the police Vicente Girauta Linares. Girauta was under the orders of Serrano Poncela, Muñoz’s successor for Madrid. On 22 November, he followed Muñoz to Valencia. Thereafter, the orders were signed either by Serrano Poncela himself or by Girauta’s successor as head of the Madrid police, Bruno Carreras Villanueva.100 In the Causa General, there are several documents signed by Serrano Poncela. The anthology of this colossal archive, published in 1945, reproduces two. The one dated 26 November 1936 read, ‘I request that you release the individuals listed on the back of this page,’ and carried twenty-six names. The document dated 27 November read, ‘Please release the prisoners mentioned on the two attached sheets,’ which listed 106 names. All those on these two lists were assassinated.101 Explicit orders for the execution, as opposed to the ‘liberation’ or ‘transfer’ of prisoners, have not been found.
While the sacas were taking place, Carrillo had started to issue a series of decrees that would ensure Communist control of the security forces within the capital and put an end to the myriad parallel police forces that had sprung up in the first weeks of the war. On 9 November, he issued two decrees that constituted a significant step towards the centralized control of the police and security forces. The first required the surrender of all arms not in authorized hands. The second stated that the internal security of the capital would be the exclusive responsibility of forces organized by the Council for Public Order. This signified the dissolution, on paper at least, of all checas.102 Under the conditions of the siege, Carrillo was thus able to impose, by emergency decree, measures that had been beyond the government. Nevertheless, there was a considerable delay between the announcement of the decree and its successful implementation. The anarchists resisted as long as they could and the Communists never relinquished some of their own checas. Nevertheless, by his decree of 9 November, Carrillo returned the services of security and investigation to the now reformed police and suppressed all those groups run by political parties or trade unions, although many of their militants were given positions in Serrano Poncela’s Public Order Delegation.103
Explicitly included within these reformed services was ‘everything relative to the administration of the arrest and release of prisoners, as well as the movement, transfer etc of those under arrest’. They were under the control of the Public Order Delegation.104 All functions of the Dirección General de Seguridad were controlled by Serrano Poncela. However, he followed the instructions of Carrillo or his deputy José Cazorla. Carrillo’s measures constituted the institutionalization of the repression under the Public Order Delegation in the Dirección General de Seguridad.105
Within Serrano Poncela’s Delegation, there were three sub-sections. The first dealt with investigation, interrogations and petitions for release. This was headed by Manuel Rascón Ramírez of the CNT. After interrogations had been carried out, this section made recommendations to the Delegation and final decisions were taken by Carrillo. This function was entirely compatible with the decisions taken at the meeting between JSU and CNT members on the evening of 7 November. The second sub-section, headed by Serrano Poncela himself, dealt with prisons, prisoners and prison transfers. It used small tribunals of militiamen set up in each prison to go through the file-cards of the prisoners. The third sub-section dealt with the personnel of the police and other more or less official armed groups in the rearguard.106
The procedures that would be applied to prisoners