The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. Paul Preston
seizure of power and, as his comments to Ridruejo showed, he was ready to contribute a Falangist strategy of tension to the wider conspiracy.69 Within a month of the elections, there were armed attacks in Madrid on prominent left-wing and liberal politicians. Numerous incidents were provoked in which Falangists and left-wingers fought in the streets of the capital. On 11 March, a Falangist law student, Juan José Olano, was shot dead. The following day, in reprisal, a three-man Falangist hit squad, almost certainly acting with José Antonio’s knowledge, tried to kill the Socialist law professor Luis Jiménez Asúa. Jiménez Asúa survived but his police bodyguard was killed. On the day of his funeral, the left reacted by setting fire to two churches and the offices of the Renovación Española newspaper La Nación, which belonged to one of the Falange’s backers, Manuel Delgado Barreto. The consequence was that, on 14 March, the Director General of Security, José Alonso Mallol, ordered José Antonio and other members of the senior leadership of FE de las JONS to be arrested for illegal possession of weapons.70
Azaña was shocked that Largo Caballero had expressed no concern about Jiménez Asúa – a stark indication of Socialist divisions. Nevertheless, in reprisal for José Antonio’s arrest, on 16 March, Largo Caballero’s house was fired upon by a Falangist terror squad. This prompted a cunning display of hypocrisy from Gil Robles. On 17 March, he went to see the Minister of the Interior, Amós Salvador, to protest about the disorder, citing the attack on Largo Caballero’s home as a symptom. The CEDA also tabled a debate on the subject in the Cortes, blaming the government and the left.71 Knowing that the army was not yet ready to seize power and aware that full-scale obstruction of Azaña’s government could only lead to an all-Socialist government, Gil Robles devoted his energies to building up the atmosphere of fear. The objective was that the middle classes, terrified by the spectre of disorder, would eventually turn to the army as their only saviour.
José Antonio was detained on a technicality because his involvement in the attempt on Jiménez Asúa’s life could not be proven. However, there is little doubt that he approved of it. The erstwhile leader of the Falange action squads, Juan Antonio Ansaldo, visited him in his Madrid prison, the Cárcel Modelo, to discuss plans to get the three would-be assassins out of Spain. Ansaldo got them to France, but they were arrested and extradited back to Spain. On 8 April, they were tried for the murder of the bodyguard and the attempted murder of Jiménez Asúa. Their leader, Alberto Ortega, was sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment and his two accomplices to six years each. At the highest level of the Falange – which meant the imprisoned leadership – a decision was taken to respond with a revenge attack on the judge, Manuel Pedregal, who was shot dead on 13 April as a deadly warning to judges in any future trials of Falangists.72 On 12 April, José Antonio called off a plan elaborated by the Falange action squads to murder Largo Caballero at the hospital where his wife was terminally ill. Since he visited her without his escort, it was regarded as simple for Falangists disguised as medical staff to kill him in the deserted corridor outside her room. José Antonio explained to a friend that his caution derived from the belief that the Falange would be destroyed by the consequent left-wing backlash. He was also uneasy about the public impact of the murder of a sixty-six-year-old man visiting his dying wife.73
Two days later, there took place an incident which played into the hands of the Falange and of the Unión Militar Española. In Madrid’s broad Avenida de la Castellana, there was a military parade to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the founding of the Republic. A loud explosion and the sound of machine-gun fire near the presidential platform alarmed the assembled dignitaries and their police escorts. In fact, the noises came from powerful fireworks placed by Falangists. Then, as the Civil Guard marched past, jeers and chants were heard. These included ‘Down with the Civil Guard!’ and ‘¡UHP!’ (Uníos, Hermanos Proletarios – Unite, Proletarian Brothers), recalling the brutal Asturian repression. Shots were fired and, in the mêlée, a Civil Guard lieutenant in plain clothes, Anastasio de los Reyes López, was fatally wounded by unknown assailants. Subsequently, the left-wing press claimed that he had been shot as a result of a ‘fascist provocation’. Whoever the culprit was, the right was successful in squeezing the greatest advantage from the incident.74
The government tried to have Reyes buried discreetly but the head of his unit, Lieutenant Colonel Florentino González Vallés, turned the funeral into a massive anti-Republican demonstration. Fernando Primo de Rivera, José Antonio’s brother, met representatives of the UME to discuss the role of Falangists and was told that they were expected to carry guns. Flouting government orders to the contrary, González Vallés, himself a Falangist sympathizer, ordered, in an anti-Republican gesture, that the funeral procession should follow the same route as the 14 April military parade. Despite this illegality, Gil Robles and Calvo Sotelo led the cortège. As it came down the Castellana, several shots were fired at the procession. It is not known if the culprits were leftists or right-wing agents provocateurs. When the Falangists tried to turn the procession into an attack on the Cortes, there was a clash with Assault Guards in which Andrés Sáenz de Heredia, a cousin of José Antonio, was killed. Thereafter, the commander of the Guards, Lieutenant José del Castillo Sáenz de Tejada, received death threats.75 The UME saw the events of 16 April as a boost for recruitment. Prieto commented: ‘Yesterday, it was shown that fascism has taken hold really strongly in our military organizations.’76
Disorder was certainly on the increase during the spring of 1936, but its scale was greatly inflated by the right-wing press and in the parliamentary speeches of Gil Robles and Calvo Sotelo, which placed the blame exclusively on the left. However, only two groups stood to benefit, even in theory, from the proliferation of indiscriminate lawlessness – the extreme left of the anarchist movement and the ‘catastrophist’ right who backed military conspiracy. The Popular Front tactic imposed by Moscow meant that Communists had no plans to undermine public order and seize power. In the Socialist Party, both El Socialista, the newspaper of the Prieto wing, and Claridad, the mouthpiece of Largo Caballero, warned their readers to ignore rightist provocation.77 None of the Popular Front parties had any need to provoke violence in order to take power. The creation of an atmosphere of turmoil and disorder could, on the other hand, justify the use of force to establish a dictatorship of the right. It is difficult to distinguish between provocation and reprisal in street fights between Communists or Socialists and Falangists or members of Gil Robles’s youth movement, the JAP. However, it is noteworthy that José Antonio’s close friend Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval boasted that, in the violence following Reyes’s funeral procession, ‘the mortuary welcomed, for every one of ours, ten of theirs’.78
Significantly, wealthy conservatives who had previously financed Gil Robles to defend their interests were now switching funds to the Falange and the scab union, the Sindicatos Libres. In March, ABC had opened a subscription for a hitherto unknown Federación Española de Trabajadores, behind which could be discerned Ramón Sales, the self-styled fascist agent provocateur who had become famous in the political gangsterism of 1919–23. By late April the fund had reached 350,000 pesetas, donated by aristocrats, landowners, industrialists and many anonymous ‘fascists’ and Falangists. Since the money was never used for trade union purposes and a substantial number of those arrested for acts of violence were members of the Sindicatos Libres, the left had no doubts that this was a fund to finance agents provocateurs. Professional gunmen were being hired by the right and their operations were designed to provoke the widest repercussions.79
The attacks on Jiménez de Asúa and Largo Caballero were clearly among those aimed at provoking reprisals. The most successful operation of this kind was carried out in Granada on 9–10 March. A squad of Falangist gunmen fired on a group of workers and their families, wounding many women and children. The local CNT, the UGT, the Partido Comunista de España (PCE) and the Partido Sindicalista united in calling a general strike in the course of which there was considerable violence. Two churches and the offices of both the Falange and Acción Popular were set on fire, and the ACNP newspaper, Ideal, was destroyed. Throughout the day, Falangist snipers fired from rooftops on left-wing demonstrators and also on firemen to stop them controlling the fires. In Granada and elsewhere, incidents were often caused by strangers who disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. When the military rebels took power at the beginning of the Civil War, some of the most radical anarchists and Communists