The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo. Paul Preston
Читать онлайн книгу.
of the Public Order Delegation. Serrano Poncela laid down three categories: army officers with the rank of captain and above; Falangists; other rightists. This was roughly similar to what had been agreed at the meeting on 7 November between members of the CNT–FAI and representatives of the JSU, one of whom had almost certainly been Serrano Poncela himself. When lists of prisoners were compiled, they were passed to Serrano Poncela. He then signed orders for their ‘release’, which meant their execution. It seems that those expeditions of prisoners that arrived safely at their destination consisted of men not listed for execution by the prison tribunals. Serrano Poncela had to report every day to Carrillo in his office in the Junta de Defensa (in the Palace of Juan March in Calle Núñez de Balboa in the Barrio de Salamanca). Carrillo also often visited the office of Serrano Poncela at Number 37 in nearby Calle Serrano.107
The procedure was that agents would arrive at each prison late at night with a general order signed by Serrano Poncela for the ‘liberation’ of the prisoners whose names were listed on the back or on separate sheets. The director of the prison would hand them over and they would then be taken to wherever Serrano Poncela had indicated orally to the agents. The subsequent phase of the process, the transportation and execution of the prisoners in the early hours of the following morning, was carried out each day by different groups of militiamen, sometimes anarchists, sometimes Communists and sometimes from the Fifth Regiment. The prisoners were obliged to leave all their belongings, and were then tied together in pairs and loaded on to buses.108
That Carrillo was fully aware of this is demonstrated by the minutes of the meeting of the Junta de Defensa on the night of 11 November 1936. One of the anarchist consejeros asked if the Cárcel Modelo had been evacuated. Carrillo responded by saying that the necessary measures had been taken to organize the evacuations of prisoners but that the operation had had to be suspended. At this, the Communist Isidoro Diéguez Dueñas, second-in-command to Antonio Mije at the War Council, declared that the evacuations had to continue, given the seriousness of the problem of the prisoners. Carrillo responded that the suspension had been necessary because of protests emanating from the diplomatic corps, presumably a reference to his meeting with Schlayer. Although the minutes are extremely brief, they make it indisputably clear that Carrillo knew what was happening to the prisoners if only as a result of the complaints by Schlayer.109
In fact, after the mass executions of 7–8 November, there were no more sacas until 18 November, after which they continued on a lesser scale until 6 December. The sacas and the executions have come to be known collectively as ‘Paracuellos’, the name of the village where a high proportion of the executions took place. Those executions constituted the greatest single atrocity perpetrated in Republican territory during the war. Its scale is explained but not justified as a response to the fear that rebel forces were about to take Madrid. Whereas previous sacas had been triggered by spontaneous mass outrage provoked by bombing raids or by news brought by refugees of rebel atrocities, the extra-judicial murders carried out at Paracuellos were the result of political-military decisions. The evacuations and subsequent executions were organized by the Council for Public Order but could not have been implemented without help from other, largely anarchist elements in the rearguard militias.
The brief interlude after the mass sacas of 7 and 8 November was thanks to Mariano Sánchez Roca, the under-secretary at the Ministry of Justice who arranged for the anarchist Melchor Rodríguez to be named Special Inspector of Prisons.110 The first initiative taken by Melchor Rodríguez on the night of 9 November was decisive. Hearing that a saca of 400 prisoners was planned, he went to the prison at midnight and ordered that all sacas cease and that the militiamen who had been freely moving within the prison remain outside. He forbade the release of any prisoners between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m., to prevent them being shot. He also insisted on accompanying any prisoners being transferred to other prisons. In consequence there were no sacas between 10 and 17 November, when Melchor Rodríguez was forced to resign his post by Juan García Oliver, the anarchist Minister of Justice. His offence was to have demanded that those responsible for the killings be punished.111 After his resignation, the sacas started again.112
Manuel Azaña, who had succeeded Alcalá Zamora as President of the Republic, and at least two government ministers in Valencia (Manuel Irujo and José Giral) had learned about the sacas.113 Indeed, a speech made on 12 November by Carrillo suggests that, at the time, secrecy was not a major priority. Speaking before the microphones of Unión Radio, he boasted about the measures being taken against the prisoners:
it is guaranteed that there will be no resistance to the Junta de Defensa from within. No such resistance will emerge because absolutely every possible measure has been taken to prevent any conflict or alteration of order in Madrid that could favour the enemy’s plans. The ‘Fifth Column’ is on the way to being crushed. Its last remnants in the depths of Madrid are being hunted down and cornered according to the law, but above all with the energy necessary to ensure that this ‘Fifth Column’ cannot interfere with the plans of the legitimate government and the Junta de Defensa.114
On 1 December 1936, the Junta de Defensa was renamed the Junta Delegada de Defensa de Madrid by order of Largo Caballero. Having led the government to Valencia, the Prime Minister was deeply resentful of the aureole of heroism that had accumulated around Miaja as he led the capital’s population in resisting Franco’s siege. Thus Largo Caballero wished to restrain what he considered the Junta’s excessive independence.115 Serrano Poncela had already left the Public Order Delegation at some point in early December and his responsibilities were taken over by José Cazorla.
At the end of the war, Serrano Poncela gave an implausible account of why he had left the Public Order Delegation. He told the Basque politician Jesús de Galíndez that he did not know that the words ‘transfer to Chinchilla’ or ‘release’ on the orders that he signed were code that meant the prisoners in question were to be executed. The use of such code could have been the method by which those responsible covered their guilt – as suggested by the phrase ‘with responsibility to be hidden’ in the minutes of the meeting of the evening of 7 November. Serrano Poncela told Galíndez the orders were passed to him by Santiago Carrillo and that all he did was sign them. He told Galíndez that, as soon he realized what was happening, he resigned from his post and not long afterwards left the Communist Party.116 This was not entirely true since he held the important post of JSU propaganda secretary until well into 1938. In an extraordinary letter to the Central Committee, written in March 1939, Serrano Poncela claimed that he had resigned from the Communist Party only after he had reached France the previous month, implying that previously he had feared for his life. He referred to the disgust he felt about his past in the Communist Party. He also claimed that the PCE had prevented his emigration to Mexico because he knew too much.117 Indeed, he even went so far as to assert that he had joined the PCE on 6 November 1936 only because Carrillo had browbeaten him into doing so.118
Subsequently, and presumably in reprisal for Serrano Poncela’s rejection of the Party, Carrillo denounced him. In a long interview given to Ian Gibson in September 1982, Carrillo claimed that he had had nothing to do with the activities of the Public Order Delegation and blamed everything on Serrano Poncela. He alleged that ‘my only involvement was, after about a fortnight, I got the impression that Serrano Poncela was doing bad things and so I sacked him’. Allegedly, Carrillo had discovered in late November that ‘outrages were being committed and this man was a thief’. He claimed that Serrano Poncela had in his possession jewels stolen from those arrested and that consideration had been given to having him shot.119 Serrano Poncela’s continued pre-eminence in the JSU belies this. Interestingly, neither