The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (70 page)

SPANISH CIVIL WAR

Death toll:
365,000
¹

Rank:
91

Type:
ideological civil war

Broad dividing line:
Nationalists (right wing) vs. Republicans (left wing)

Time frame:
1936–39

Location and major state participant:
Spain

Minor state participants:
Germany, Italy

Major non-state participants:
Falange, International Brigades

Who usually gets the most blame:
Nationalists

S
PAIN WAS GOING THROUGH ONE OF ITS OCCASIONAL DEMOCRATIC INTERLUDES
in the early 1930s when the Popular Front, a coalition of leftists ranging from moderate liberals to hard-core Communists, set aside their bickering long enough to win the elections as a solid bloc. The king quit rather than sign the leftist legislation the coalition started churning out, which suited the Popular Front just fine since it didn’t like kings anyway (hence its name in the upcoming war: Republican).

Spain had been a mess for over a hundred years, now made worse by the Great Depression. Political murder had become a common part of Spanish life, with journalists, policemen, labor leaders, and priests from all parties being gunned down, blown up, or beaten to death with frightening regularity. After the right wing lost an especially notable victim, it also lost patience with the government’s inability to keep order. In league with the Falange, the Spanish fascist party, the army garrison in Spanish Morocco mutinied, followed quickly by army units all over Spain. The commander in North Africa, Francisco Franco, was declared leader of a renegade Nationalist government that held scattered towns all over Spain.

With the army against it, the government’s only armed support came from militias raised by the trade unions; however, this tipped the Republican side from center-left to a full-fledged Communist revolution. Workers seized factories, and peasants seized land. Churches were burned and priests murdered in retaliation for the Catholic Church’s support of the military uprising.

The fascist rebels, meanwhile, rounded up and murdered anyone deemed Marxist or anti-Spain. Members of the Popular Front, union officials, Freemasons, and left-wing journalists were summarily executed. The poet Frederico García Lorca was hauled off and shot for being a homosexual. In August 1936, the Nationalists shot almost 2,000 Republican prisoners in the bullring of Badajoz following the capture of Extremadura in central Spain.

In the first chaotic days of the uprising, towns under the control of one faction or another were scattered haphazardly all over the country. Soon the Nationalists consolidated control over the center of the country and drove straight for Madrid. By this time, however, the Republican government had scrounged up enough troops to hold off the Nationalist attacks.

The fascists now shifted their efforts elsewhere and began to erase the Republican enclaves that clung to the edges of Spain. First, the south around Seville was mopped up, then the Basque region on the north coast. Fellow fascist regimes sent troops—40,000 to 50,000 Italians, at least 10,000 Germans—to help the Nationalists and to test their latest equipment and tactics. As part of this joint effort, German dive-bombers helped to punish and terrorize the enemy population with a devastating air raid against the Basque city of Guernica. One of the first urban air raids in history, this slaughter of over a thousand helpless civilians at Guernica horrified the world, but it might have been forgotten by now, overshadowed by later, larger atrocities, except that its savagery was frozen forever by Pablo Picasso in probably the most famous and powerful work of art in the twentieth century.

The Nationalists then invaded the Ebro River valley, homing in on the coastal city of Barcelona. Finally, all that was left in Republican hands was Madrid and the roads back to the coast. Soon Madrid fell, and the roads to the coast were choked with the last refugees of the Republican government, trying to escape the country.

The Big Picture

As one democracy after another collapsed during the Great Depression, the survivors had difficulty deciding whether the extreme right or extreme left was the greater danger to civilization. Liberals often denied and whitewashed the sins of the Communists, while conservatives did the same for the fascists; however, trying to overthrow the democratically elected government of Spain crossed the line, and fascism lost most of its sympathizers in the democracies. The beleaguered leftists of Spain became the world’s tragic heroes.

The Spanish Civil War was the last romantic conflict of Western Civilization where idealistic young men volunteered to fight for a great and noble cause. The International Brigades, sponsored by Communist parties worldwide, recruited 40,000 volunteers from all over the world to defend the Popular Front. Ten thousand Frenchmen fought for the cause, as did 5,000 Germans and 5,000 Poles. Twenty-seven hundred Americans volunteered for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and one-third of them died in the war.

The literary world especially rallied to the cause. French author André Malraux organized the Republican air force and negotiated the purchase of aircraft from France; Ernest Hemingway was imbedded as a journalist with the International Brigades; the writer Arthur Koestler spied on the Nationalists while posing as a journalist sympathetic to their side; the poet W. H. Auden drove an ambulance. Both the English poet Stephen Spender and the American novelist John Dos Passos tried to arrange the release of political prisoners. George Orwell fought in the Republican infantry, until he ran afoul of the Soviet military advisers provided by Stalin and had to flee.
²

SECOND WORLD WAR

Death toll:
66 million (20 million soldiers and 46 million civilians, including the Sino-Japanese War, the Bengal famine, the Holocaust, and Stalin’s wartime atrocities, but not including any of the postwar purges and conflicts)
¹

Rank:
1

Type:
world conquest

Broad dividing line:
Axis (mostly fascist) vs. Allies (mostly democratic or Communist)

Time frame:
1939–45

Locations:
Europe, East Asia, North Africa, Pacific Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean

Major state participants:
China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, United States (each of these mobilizing more than 4 million troops)

Minor state participants:
everybody else—with only about a dozen holdouts

Non-Participants:
In Europe: Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. In the Orient: Afghanistan, Nepal, Tibet, Turkey, and Yemen

Who usually gets the most blame:
the Axis, especially Hitler

Economic factors:
oil, steel, grain, the Great Depression

Why Did They Have to Have a
Second
World War?

The Germans had come so close to winning the First World War that they couldn’t believe they didn’t. By 1917, they had knocked Russia, Serbia, and Romania out of the war, driven the French army to mutiny, and pushed within a few miles of Paris. Even after being driven back by the final Allied offensive, they had retreated in good order, without panic or surrender. Because they had never really grasped that they had been fairly and completely beaten, many German soldiers blamed their defeat on “a stab in the back” by unpatriotic elements back home in Germany—Jews, war profiteers, or Communists depending on the complainer’s leanings. After all, it had been the civilian government that sued for peace, not the army. Once a new generation of young men had grown up, ready to fill out the ranks, and new technologies were developed that could overcome entrenched machine gunners, the German militarists were eager for a rematch. All they needed was an excuse and a cooperative government.
*

Among the disgruntled veterans bumming around Germany and complaining about backstabbing Jews was Adolf Hitler. Born in Austria in 1889, he passed a brief, unpleasant period of his youth in the polyglot and cosmopolitan capital at Vienna. He failed to gain admittance to art school because of his inability to draw people, which is probably a metaphor—if not an actual symptom—for a deep psychological flaw. He made a meager living painting postcards and then moved to Munich, Germany, to escape poverty, multiculturalism, and the Austrian draft; however, when the First World War broke out, he enlisted in a local German regiment. After the western front bogged down into trench warfare, he took a job as a message runner, a dangerous job that got him gassed and earned him some medals.
²

In postwar Munich, Hitler fell in with the fascist movement and helped form the National Socialist (Nazi) Party. Fascism had originated in Italy under Mussolini (who ruled in 1922–43). Unlike traditional conservatism, which defended the ruling class of nobility, church, and capitalists against the radical populism of the poor, fascism was itself radical populism in favor of conservative ideals. Like the Communists, fascists rallied the masses with promises of full employment, consumer gratification, and national unity of purpose, but were very un-Communist in their support of the homeland, God, and the natural order of things. Like other radical parties of postwar Germany such as the Communists, the Nazis fielded paramilitary squads (the Brown Shirts) to terrorize the opposition.

At first, the Nazis did poorly in Germany’s elections, but the collapse of the world economy in 1929 turned unemployed voters toward parties with radical agendas. This was happening almost everywhere, and the number of democracies in the world plummeted as quickly as the economic indicators. For a time it was uncertain whether Germany would swing hard left or hard right, but when it came down to choosing sides, the right wing offered the most (a return to the good old days) and made fewer demands (no confiscation of property). When the Nazis emerged as the leading party in the hopelessly divided German parliament in 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor. Within a matter of months, he broke, scattered, or arrested the opposition. He established the first concentration camp at Dachau, outside of Munich, to hold the growing numbers of political prisoners. Fascism soon infiltrated every aspect of society, from the big urban rallies to the Hitler Youth that replaced the multinational Boy Scouts.

Springtime for Hitler

After coming to power in Germany, Hitler set about establishing the Third Reich, German hegemony over Europe, while assuring France and Britain that this wasn’t his intention at all. He began to build the German army (the Wehrmacht) back up to pre-1914 levels, incorporating all of the latest technology. The Rome-Berlin Axis of 1936 established a partnership with Italy. In 1938, Austria was annexed, and Czechoslovakia was neutralized and partitioned. Still shaken by the senseless bloodbath of the Great War, the Western powers hesitated about starting another conflict with Germany, but they finally stiffened their spines and declared that they would allow no further encroachment on neighboring countries. This worried Hitler not in the least. A secret treaty with the Soviet Union secured a free hand in the east, and in September 1939 he launched a massive invasion of Poland, sweeping over it in a matter of weeks. The French and British declared war.

Rather than attacking France immediately, Hitler secured his northern flank by overrunning Denmark and Norway. Then he shifted his attention west and swept over the Netherlands, Belgium, and France in six weeks, while the broken remnants of the British army fled from the port of Dunkirk. Meanwhile, Stalin was taking advantage of these distractions to expand into the smaller neighbors of the Soviet Union, taking parts of Poland, Romania, and Finland and completely devouring Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Mussolini also tried to expand Italy’s holdings, this time from Albania (annexed in 1937) into Greece, and from Libya into Egypt, but he met unexpected resistance. Unable to leave an unstable situation on his southern flank, Hitler had to hurry to his ally’s assistance, rolling over an uncooperative Yugoslavia while he was at it.

The score at this point: in a little over three years, Germany had taken ten countries, Russia had annexed three and shared one of Germany’s, while Italy had annexed one. The whole of continental Europe had fallen into German hands, either directly or through allies like Hungary and submissive neutrals like Spain. The only countries still in the game against any of these aggressors were the scattered dominions of the British Commonwealth.

And the Chinese. As you’ll recall (see “Chinese Civil War”), the Japanese had begun reducing China to subjugation in 1937, and within a couple of years, they had consolidated their hold over the coast and the north. Chiang Kai-shek maintained his refugee Nationalist government deep inland, at Chongqing, supplied by the British and Americans.
*

War in Russia

Now came the showdown that Hitler had been planning all along, the crusade against the Jewish-Slavic-Bolshevik stronghold of Soviet Russia. Although this invasion is considered a mistake in hindsight, the First World War had seen France survive while Russia collapsed, so if Germany could beat France now, then Russia should be a breeze. The opening attack in May 1941 proved this, as the Soviets were caught completely off guard. The Germans bombed Soviet airplanes on the ground and easily pierced and bypassed Russia’s frontline units. Eventually, the rout had reached the point where entire Russian armies were being scooped up and destroyed. In July and August, German forces killed 486,000 Soviets and captured 310,000 in the Smolensk pocket east of Belarus. In September, they encircled and took Kiev in Ukraine after killing 616,000 Soviet soldiers and capturing 600,000.
³

As the Wehrmacht pushed into Russia, it was followed by the Einsatzgruppen, special units designated to kill Jews, Communists, and other undesirables. The fall of every big Soviet city was soon followed by a massacre. In late September 1941, the Jews of Kiev were taken to the ravine of Babi Yar, stripped, shot, and buried. The officer in charge reported a meticulous tally of 33,771 killed in three days.
⁴
Another couple of days in October were enough for Germany’s Romanian allies to kill 39,000 Jews in and around Odessa.
⁵
In November and December, 28,000 Jews were taken by the Germans into the Rumbula Forest outside Riga, stripped, lined up, and gunned down.
⁶
By April 1942, the Einsatzgruppen had reported killing a total of 518,388 victims.
⁷

Within the first few months, around 3.9 million Soviet prisoners of war were shipped back to German territory, some destined for hard labor, some for turncoat battalions, some for medical experiments, but most for starvation, frostbite, and typhus in squalid prison camps. All but 1.1 million were dead by spring.
⁸
Of the 5.7 million Soviets taken prisoner during the whole course of the war, 3.3 million died of neglect and brutality in a deliberate policy by the Nazis to eradicate the subhuman Slavs. Prisoners taken from racially kindred nations like Britain and America were treated far better, and most survived.
⁹

Because of the vastness of Soviet territory,
*
beating the Russians was taking longer than the few weeks it took to crush the French, but by December the German armies had almost enveloped Moscow. However, the months of continuous combat had exhausted the fighting efficiency of the German army, so it failed to close the circle before winter set in. The momentum shifted back to the Red Army, which had drawn on the vast reserves of Soviet manpower and industry to build itself back into a competent fighting machine. The Soviets pushed the Germans back from the suburbs of Moscow, but they made no serious dent in the fighting abilities of the German army. With spring, the Germans resumed the offensive, now in a southern drive toward the oilfields of the Caucasus Mountains.

In order to cover their advance into the Caucasus, the Germans needed to anchor their line at Stalingrad (Volgograd now). Not only would this cut off the southern Soviet armies from reinforcement, but also it would give the Germans a foothold across the Volga River, the last natural barrier before the Ural Mountains at the eastern edge of Europe. In August 1942, after sweeping through the outskirts of the city, they were stopped a few blocks short of the river by a desperate Soviet defense. The Russians turned the rubble of buildings into fortresses, and the fighting bogged down into intimate, intense firefights, street by street, block by block, and—in large factories and department stores—room by room. By day snipers patiently waited in the ruins to put a bullet into any visible German body part. By night Siberians and Tatars crept into isolated German positions with knives and bayonets to butcher an enemy unprepared for hand-to-hand fighting.
¹⁰