Franco. Paul Preston
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and Moorish troops formed up in a solemn procession through Salamanca’s enormous but elegantly proportioned Plaza Mayor to the Palacio del Ayuntamiento. The Generalísimo arrived in the square escorted by his Moorish Guard, resplendent in their blue cloaks and shining breastplates. It recalled the entry of Alfonso XIII into Melilla in 1927, an occasion on which he was accompanied by Franco, who was increasingly indulging his own taste for royal ceremony. His arrival was greeted with the chant of ‘Franco! Franco! Franco!’. He received Cantalupo in a salon magnificently adorned for the occasion with sixteenth-century Spanish tapestries and seventeenth-century porcelain. During the ceremony, Franco was accompanied by Mola, Kindelán, Cabanellas, Dávila and Queipo de Llano as well as a veritable court of other army officers and functionaries in full dress uniform. Yet, Franco himself did not match the regal show and an unimpressed Cantalupo wrote to Rome ‘He stepped out with me on the balcony that offered an incredible spectacle of the immense square but was incapable of saying anything to the people that applauded and waited to be harangued; he had become cold, glassy and feminine again’.2
Away from the pomp of Salamanca, Roatta, Faldella and other senior Italian officers were shocked by the relentless repression behind the lines.3 Cantalupo requested instructions from Rome and on 2 March Ciano told him to inform Franco of the Italian Government’s view that some moderation in the reprisals would be prudent because unrestrained brutality could only increase the duration of the war. When Cantalupo saw Franco on 3 March, the Caudillo was fully prepared for the meeting. Cantalupo appealled to him to slow down the mass executions in Málaga in order to limit the international outcry. Denying all personal responsibility and lamenting the difficulties of controlling the situation at a distance, Franco claimed that the massacres were over ‘except for those carried out by uncontrollable elements’. In fact, the slaughter hardly diminished but its judicial basis was changed. Random killings were now replaced by summary executions under the responsibility of the local military authorities. Franco claimed to have sent instructions for greater clemency to be shown to the rabble (masse incolte) and continued severity against ‘leaders and criminals’ as a result of which only one in every five of those tried was now being shot.
Nevertheless, Rome continued to receive horrifying accounts from the Italian Consul in Málaga, Bianchi.* On 7 March, Cantalupo was instructed to go to Málaga but Franco persuaded him that the situation was too dangerous for a visit. Nevertheless, the Generalísimo did undertake to have two military judges removed.4 Franco’s proclaimed difficulties about curtailing the killings in Málaga contrasted starkly with his response to a complaint by Cardinal Gomá about the shooting of Basque Nationalist priests in late October 1936. Valuing the good opinion of the Church more than that of the Italians, he replied instantaneously: ‘Your Eminence can rest assured that this stops immediately’. Shortly thereafter, Sangróniz confirmed to Gomá that ‘energetic measures had been taken’.5
At this time, Franco himself was sufficiently concerned by the unfavourable publicity provoked by the blanket repression to give a brilliantly ambiguous interview on the subject to Randolph Churchill. It was clear that in describing his policy as one of ‘humane and equitable clemency’, Franco’s meaning differed considerably from the way in which his words were understood by Churchill and his readers. Franco declared that ‘ringleaders and those guilty of murder’ would receive the death penalty, ‘just retribution’, but claimed mendaciously that all would be given fair trials, with defence counsel and ‘the fullest opportunity to state his case and call witnesses’. He omitted to mention that the defence counsel would be named by the court and would often outdo the prosecutors in demanding fierce sentences. Similarly, when Franco said that ‘when we have won, we shall have to consolidate our victory, pacify the discontented elements and unite the country’, Churchill could have no idea of the scale of the blood that would be shed or of the terror which would be deployed to realize those ends.6
For most of the Civil War, those Republican prisoners not summarily executed as they were captured or murdered behind the lines by Falangist terror squads were subjected to cursory courts martial. Often large numbers of defendants would be tried together, accused of generalised crimes and given little opportunity to defend themselves. The death sentences passed merely needed the signature (enterado) of the general commanding the province. As a result of the Italian protests, from March 1937 death sentences had to be sent to the Generalísimo’s headquarters for confirmation or pardon. The last word on death sentences lay with Franco, not as Head of State, but as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. In this area, his close confidant was Lieutenant-Colonel Lorenzo Martínez Fuset of the military juridical corps, who was auditor del Cuartel General del Generalísimo (legal adviser to headquarters). Franco insisted on seeing the death sentences personally, although he spent little time on reaching a decision. Martínez Fuset would bring folders of death sentences to Franco. Despite the regime myth of a tireless and merciful Caudillo agonizing late into the night over death sentences, the reality was much starker. In fact, in Salamanca or in Burgos, after lunch or over coffee, or even in a car speeding to the battle front, the Caudillo would flick through and then sign sheafs of them, often without reading the details but nonetheless specifying the most savage form of execution, strangulation by garrote. Occasionally, he would make a point of decreeing garrote y prensa (garrote reported in the press).7
Specifying press coverage was not just a way of intensifying the pain of the families of the condemned men but also had the wider objective of demoralizing the enemy with evidence of inexorable might and implacable terror. That was one of the lessons of war learnt by Franco in Morocco. At one lunch in the winter of 1936–37, the case of four captured Republican militiawomen was discussed. Johannes Bernhardt who was present was taken aback by the casual way Franco, in the same tone that he would use to discuss the weather, passed judgement, ‘There is nothing else to be done. Shoot them.’8 He could be gratuitously vindictive. On one occasion, having discovered that General Miaja’s son had been tried and absolved by a Nationalist tribunal in Seville, Franco intervened personally to have him rearrested and retried in Burgos. There was some doubt as to whether Captain Miaja had voluntarily come over to the Nationalists or been captured. Accordingly, the Burgos court issued a light sentence so Franco had the unfortunate young Miaja tried again in Valladolid. In Valladolid, the military tribunal found him not guilty and set him free. At this point, Franco intervened again and quite arbitrarily had him sent to a concentration camp at Miranda del Ebro where he remained until he was freed in a prisoner exchange for Miguel Primo de Rivera.9
Throughout 1937 and 1938, his brother-in-law and close political adviser, Ramón Serrano Suñer often tried to persuade him to adopt more juridically sound procedures and Franco consistently refused, saying ‘keep out of this. Soldiers don’t like civilians intervening in affairs connected with the application of their code of justice.’10 At one point, Serrano Suñer tried to arrange a reprieve for a Republican army officer. After first telling him that it was none of his business, Franco finally yielded to his brother-in-law’s pressure and undertook to do something. If Franco had wanted to help, he could have done so. As it was, four days later, he told Serrano Suñer that ‘the Army won’t put up with it, because this man was head of Azaña’s guard.’11 Serrano Suñer and Dionisio Ridruejo both alleged that the Caudillo arranged for reprieves for death sentences to arrive only after the execution had already been carried out.12
Like Hitler, Franco had plenty of collaborators willing to undertake the detailed work of repression and, also like the Führer, he was able to distance himself from the process. Nonetheless, since he was the supreme authority within the system of military justice, there is no dispute