The Spanish Holocaust (68 page)

This is confirmed by the important testimony of Felix Schlayer. When he visited the Cárcel Modelo on 6 November, with a view to preventing possible evacuations, he saw nothing. However, the next morning, when he returned, he did see a large number of buses outside and was told that they were for the evacuation of military officers towards Valencia.
⁵⁴
This coincides with the graphic description given by Caamaño Cobanela, an inmate in the Cárcel Modelo, of the prisoners being lined up for evacuation in the early hours of the morning of 7 November. Cobanela is unequivocal that, having been taken from their cells, the prisoners were left waiting with their belongings in the patio but, after two hours, were returned to their cells.

Later in the afternoon, according to the detailed descriptions left by three prisoners, large numbers were led from their cells in the Cárcel Modelo. Two men (those sent by Pedro Checa?) with numerous yellowing file-cards from the prison registry were accompanied by militiamen. They called out names through a loud-hailer and ordered the men to take all their belongings and wait below. Those named were a mixture of army officers, priests and civilians, young and old, with no apparent pattern. They speculated anxiously whether they would be transferred to other prisons outside Madrid or be killed. They were tied together in groups and forced to leave all their bags and cases behind. Moreover, they were searched and any remaining watches, money or valuables taken from them.
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They 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, only about three hundred
arrived. 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 violently 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. 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 eight hundred 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 four hundred victims.
⁵⁶
There have been numerous assertions that ditches had already been dug.
⁵⁷
On 8 November, there were more
sacas
from the Cárcel Modelo. By then, news had already reached the prisoners of the first murders in Paracuellos del Jarama and Torrejón de Ardoz.

It is certain that, from approximately 8.00 on the morning of Saturday 7 November onwards, 175 prisoners were taken from San Antón and, later in the afternoon of the same day, more than nine hundred from the Cárcel Modelo. A further 185 to 200 were brought from the Cárcel de Porlier in the Barrio de Salamanca. Another 190 to 200 were taken from the Cárcel de Ventas. On that day, 1,450–1,545 prisoners were removed from Madrid’s four jails. Thereafter, there were
sacas
, on 7, 8, 9, 18, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30 November and 1 and 3 December. The Cárcel Modelo was the prison with the highest number of victims – 970 – but suffered
sacas
only on the first three days. By 16 November, the Francoists were so close that the Carcel Model had to be evacuated and was used as headquarters for the Durruti Column and the International Brigades despite heavy bomb damage. The prisoners were taken to the other Madrid jails, Porlier, Ventas and San Antón, and to Alcalá de Henares. Porlier saw
sacas
on 7, 8, 9, 18, 24, 25 and 26 November and 1 and 3 December. Of these, a total of 405 were murdered in Paracuellos or Torrejón.
Sacas
from San Antón on 7, 22, 28, 29 and 30 November saw a total of four hundred prisoners murdered in Paracuellos or Torrejón. Five other expeditions of prisoners from San Antón, two on 7 November and three more on 27, 28 and 29 November, arrived safely in Alcalá de Henares. From the prison at Ventas,
sacas
on 27, 29, 30 November and 1 and 3 December ended with about two hundred murders at Paracuellos or Torrejón. 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.
⁵⁸

All these
sacas
were initiated with documentation on Dirección General de Seguridad notepaper indicating that the prisoners were either to be released or to be taken to Chinchilla. When the order was for them to go to Alcalá de Henares, they usually arrived safely. This indicates that ‘liberty’ and ‘Chinchilla’ were codewords for elimination.
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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. Until he followed Muñoz to Valencia, Girauta was under the orders of Serrano Poncela, Muñoz’s successor for Madrid. Thereafter, the orders were signed either by Serrano Poncela himself, or else by Girauta’s successor as head of the Madrid police, Bruno Carreras Villanueva.
⁶⁰
In the Causa General, there are several documents signed by Serrano Poncela. Its published version reproduces two. The one dated 26 November 1936 read, ‘I request that you release the individuals listed on the back of this page,’ of whom there were twenty-six named. The document dated 27 November read, ‘Please release the prisoners mentioned on the two attached sheets,’ which had 106 names. All those on these two lists were assassinated.
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No explicit orders for the execution have been found.

Important evidence about the responsibility for what happened was provided in the post-war testimony of the Communist and close friend of José Cazorla, Ramón Torrecilla Guijarro. He stated that the entire process was directed by Segundo Serrano Poncela, supervised by members of his Public Order Delegation and implemented by agents of the Dirección General de Seguridad. These ‘agents’ were the policemen from the DGS and members of the rearguard militias of the MVR led by Federico Manzano Govantes. Torrecilla Guijarro himself admitted that three members of the Delegation, himself, Manuel Rascón Ramírez of the CNT and Manuel Ramos Martínez of the FAI, together with three policemen, Agapito Sainz, Lino Delgado and Andrés Urrésola, went to the Cárcel Modelo after 10 o’clock on the night of 7 November. Their orders from Serrano Poncela were to select prisoners and they began to go through the file-cards dividing them into military men, professionals and aristocrats, workers and those whose profession was unknown.

Between 3.00 and 4.00 a.m., they were about halfway through the task when their boss, Serrano Poncela, arrived. Given the urgency of the
situation, he ordered them to prepare those so far selected for loading on to buses. He allegedly said that this was in fulfilment of an order telephoned from Tarancón by the fleeing Minister of the Interior, Ángel Galarza, on 6 November, to which Serrano Poncela added that those preparing the expedition knew that it was for ‘definitive evacuation’ of the prisoners, which presumably meant death. Accordingly, the categorization process was abandoned. Again, the prisoners had their wrists tied together with cord, usually in twos, and were dispossessed of everything of value. Between 9 and 10 the following morning, 8 November, seven to nine double-decker buses and two large single-deck charabancs arrived. The prisoners were loaded aboard and the expedition set off, escorted by armed militiamen and accompanied by the anarchist Manuel Rascón Ramírez and the three policemen, Sainz, Delgado and Urrésola.
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In the declarations made by those later interrogated by the Francoist police, there are no references to the convoys on this or any other occasion facing any difficulties from the anarchist militias guarding the roads out of Madrid. This suggests that the deal reached on the evening of 7 November between the CNT and JSU was being implemented. It is probable that Rascón Ramírez went along to ensure easy passage through anarchist checkpoints by confirming that the expedition had CNT–FAI approval.
⁶³

What happened that morning of 8 November at the Cárcel Modelo seems to have been the standard practice employed during the subsequent
sacas
. From that day, Carrillo had started to publish 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. On 9 November, Carrillo 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
.
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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
checas
.

Shortly after taking up office, Carrillo had called a meeting with representatives of the Comité Provincial de Investigación Pública. He reminded them that, when the CPIP had been created, Manuel Muñoz
had said it was a temporary structure while the Dirección General de Seguridad was being purged, after which some of its members would be incorporated into the police. Carrillo declared that the moment had arrived.
⁶⁵
Accordingly, by his decree of 9 November, he returned the services of security and investigation to the now reformed police and suppressed all those groups run by political parties or trade unions. This meant the end of the CPIP, known as the Checa de Fomento. In fact, several of its members, including Manuel Rascón Ramírez and Manuel Ramos Martínez, were already working with the Public Order Delegation. The treasurer of the Checa de Fomento handed over 1,750,000 pesetas in cash, gold to the value of 600,000 pesetas and 460 chests full of valuable household items, including silver, porcelain, clocks and radios, that had been taken in house searches and from those arrested. Other items of jewellery had been regularly delivered to the Dirección General de Seguridad.
⁶⁶

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, which consisted of eight delegates chaired by Segundo Serrano Poncela with the Sub-Director General of Security, Vicente Girauta Linares, as his second-in-command and technical adviser. It will be recalled that one of the eight delegates, Arturo García de la Rosa, told Ian Gibson that this body began to function in the early hours of the morning of 7 November. This was confirmed by Ramón Torrecilla when interrogated in November 1939, which underlines Carrillo’s own admission that his team began to function before they had been officially named by Miaja at 11 a.m. and certainly before the first meeting of the Junta de Defensa in the evening.
⁶⁷

Two weeks after the creation of the Public Order Delegation in the DGS, under Serrano Poncela, Vicente Girauta followed Manuel Muñoz to Valencia and was replaced by Bruno Carreras, a member of the CPIP who had been accepted as a professional policeman and rose swiftly to become the inspector in charge of the city’s most important police station, the Comisaría de Buenavista. The post carried with it the position of Inspector General (Comisario General) with authority over the other eleven inspectors. This effectively made Carreras second-in-command of the Dirección General de Seguridad.
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What all of this makes indisputably clear is that all functions of the DGS were controlled by Serrano Poncela. However, it has to be noted that he, in turn, followed the instructions of Carrillo or of his deputy José Cazorla.

The Public Order Delegation took over the activities, and absorbed many of the personnel, of the CPIP. Control of roads in and out of the capital was to be in the hands of the police, the Assault Guards and Rearguard Security Militias (MVR) and co-ordinated by Serrano Poncela’s Delegation. The Delegation had a representative in each police station and in each of the principal prisons. According to Carrillo, the only opposition to his centralization measures came from the anarchists. Indeed, the closure of Felipe Sandoval’s
checa
in the Cine Europa was resisted and eventually required the intervention of the Assault Guards. Carrillo’s measures constituted the institutionalization of the repression under the Public Order Delegation in the DGS. Despite the presence of two CNT–FAI members and the fact that many ex-members of the component groups of the CPIP now became policemen, the Delegation was dominated by the Communists. They were thus able to push forward the reconstruction of the Republican state which had been a crucial necessity since the military coup had shattered the apparatus of government.
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