Excerpts from Michel Graves,The Ides of December: The Christmas Struggle and the War for Spain(Paris, 2015) (by@vilani99)*
By the end of 1941, Sanjurjo’s position was unideal but stable and improving. The 1938 ceasefire with the Republic had given him time to rebuild from the damage incurred by the short but brutal civil war. Over the next few years, the army built around the Army of Africa and assorted militia was reformed into a disciplined, well armed, and - most importantly - politically reliable and loyal fighting force. Sanjurjo and his coalition were assisted by arms shipments and advisors from Nazi Deutschland and Fascist Italy, oftentimes rerouted subsidy and industrial aid from the British and French in the wake of Red May. All this meant that by December 1941, with half of Europe locked in a titanic war of annihilation on the fields of Russia with the ComIntern, and talks of restarting the civil war floating around Madrid, Sanjurjo thought he was poised to crush the communists and weld the two Spains back into one.
Then an artery in his brain exploded.
When it became clear that Sanjurjo would never fully recover from his debilitating aneurysm, the knives came out. Each faction of the hastily constructed anti-communist coalition that was the Movimiento Nacional fell upon each other in what would become a winter of political maneuvering, street fighting, and even attempted assassinations. It would only end with Emilio Mola’s Dia de Reyes Purge, and the ascendancy of the worst of the worst of the Falange in the Spanish State.
[…]
The Movimiento Nacional was an extremely haphazard assembly of Alfonsites, Carlists, and Falangists. This was not a stable or happy alliance, and was in fact only really preserved by the de facto partition of Spain in 1938. The possibility of the civil war resuming, and the ongoing cross-border insurgency sponsored by the Free Soviet Republic, kept Sanjurjo on top of the Spanish State, and kept the anti-communist coalition together. His aneurysm and debilitation on December 15 put all that into a tailspin.
Going into the chaotic months of the Christmas Struggle, Antonio Aranda and the Alfonsites seemed to be in the best position. Aranda had made a name for himself in the first battles of the Civil War, and was a favorite of the French and British. A lifelong anglophile, Aranda was strongly in favor of neutrality when the World Revolutionary War began in 1940, and as it became clear that the United Kingdom and France were beginning to align against Nazi Deutschland in late 1941 and early 1942, he was pushing for joining them in that alignment. Aranda believed that while the Free Soviet Republic was a clear and persistent threat to Spanish Unity and Sovereignty, it was in Madrid’s best interest to keep the fragile 1938 ceasefire for as long as possible. The Spanish State would have to prioritize securing itself a place in a network of global diplomacy and trade, and while the Axis seemed to dominate Europe east of the Rhine, globally they were in a much more marginal position. If the French and British were to join the war on the side of the ComIntern, the Axis would be facing a majority of the planet’s population, resources, and industrial might. It would be best, Aranda argued, to pick the winning team in such a case. This made him many enemies in the form of the Carlists and Falange, and only his position in the Spanish Military Union (Unión Militar Española , UME), his performance in the Civil War, and his staunch opposition to the government in Barcelona kept him from being purged. His luck would not last much longer.
On the opposite end of Nationalist politics was a tendency deeply rooted in the history of Spanish reactionary politics: the Carlists. Led by Jefe Manuel Fal Conde, the Carlists were staunchly opposed to both the Alfonsite monarchy and the Spanish Republic. Instead, they favored a form of absolutist, ultra-catholic monarchy, headed by the Carlist pretender to the Spanish Throne. As tensions within the Republic began to come to a head, the Carlists prepared for a possible uprising. So, when Sanjurjo approached the Jefe for assistance in his military coup, Conde saw an opportunity for an uprising with military support. However, as the planning and secret negotiations around the coup continued, Conde and the Carlists found themselves pushed to the periphery. Nevertheless, Sanjurjo was a firm ally of Conde, and when the Civil War began in 1936, the Carlists joined the UME and Falange against the Popular Front. After the ceasefire in 1938, the Carlists were the most rabid in pushing for a resumption of the war, heedless of the Spanish State’s preparedness, or lack thereof, for resuming the war. This continued to alienate Conde and the Carlists from Sanjurjo, and the two were likely on the verge of a falling out when the Caudillo had his stroke.
Opposed to both was Mola and the Spanish Falange (Falange Española , FE). The FE were more or less a collection of fascists, primarily in the vein of Mussolini and Yasuhito. The ideological foundation of the Falange was derived from D’Annunzio and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, consisting of a racialized Spanish ultranationalism, economic proposals built around “national syndicalism,” and - especially after de Rivera’s death - virulent anti-communism. de Rivera, the founder of the Spanish Falange, had imported National Syndicalism from French and Brazilian Integralist theorists, and synthesized it with exemplary Italian economic policies. The result was essentially a rebranding of Italian corporatism suitable for the Spanish political environment. Despite his key role in the foundation of the Falange, de Rivera’s attempts to bring more overtly socialist elements into National Syndicalism to appeal to elements of the Spanish left resulted in him alienating himself from his own movement. Just after Madrid fell in 1937, Rivera was assassinated in his home. While the post-ceasefire government in Madrid laid the blame on a CNT militant, it is much more likely he was killed by members of his own party. Despite the death of their founder and leader, Falangist paramilitaries and officers proved themselves extremely capable during the Civil War, and over the years since the ceasefire, the Falange had become Sanjurjo’s favorite. Falangists secured positions within his cabinet, culminating with the elevation of Emilio Mola, the de facto leader of the Falange, to Army Chief of Staff and Minister of War in 1940.
[…]
Emilio Mola was born in Spanish Cuba on July 9, 1887, to a career army officer. After returning to Spain after the Spanish-American War, Mola enrolled in the Infantry School in Toldo in 1907, and went on to serve in Spain’s colonial wars in North Africa. He would prove to be an exceptional officer, making Captain in 1912 and Brigadier-General in 1925. While he was made Director-General of Security in 1930, his right-wing politics proved unpopular with opposition politicians, and when the Popular Front government came into power, he was dismissed to a backwater military governorship. This led to Mola becoming deeply involved with Sanjurjo’s UME and the FE. With Sanjurjo exiled in Portugal, he became the UME’s primary in-country planner and delegate, becoming known as “el Director.” Over the course of the coup attempt, the march on and siege of Madrid, and the broader civil war, Mola found himself gravitating towards the Falange. During the war, he was a chief architect of the White Terror that swept across territory captured by the Nationalists, massacring anyone even suspected of Communist or Anarchist sympathies or activity. In enacting this nightmare, Mola became close with a number of Falangist militias as they implemented his nightmarish policies across Spain. After the ceasefire and formally joining the Falange, el Director quickly ascended the ranks of the Falange, taking command in the power vacuum left by de Rivera’s untimely death. This has made Mola a popular candidate for the mastermind behind Rivera’s death, but no conclusive evidence either way has been uncovered at time of writing.
Now at the head of the FE, Mola found himself at loggerheads with factions within his party. Chief among these were the Futurists led by Ramiro Ledesma Ramos. Influenced by Marinetti, Shigoi, Yasuhito, and Togan, the futurist faction of the Falange pushed for a Spanish national revival by means of extreme and unyielding industrialization and technological progression. They envisioned Spain as a nation of trains, automobiles, and airplanes. Ramos’ narrow escape from Popular Front Militia during the start of the Civil War had hardened his politics into severe anti-communism, and he was one of the loudest voices calling for a renewed war with the Free Soviet Republic, and even for an expeditionary force to join the Axis in the Soviet Union. Ramos and his acolytes believed that burning away the “impurities” within the Spanish Nation in the furnace of World War was key to the national revivalism the whole of the Falange desired. While Mola agreed with them that the destruction of the Free Soviet Republic was vital to the Falangist project, he disagreed with the totality of transformation the Ramosites desired. Mola was, along with a strong majority of the Falange, a catholic traditionalist, his most radical political position being a preference for a Republic. The solidification of republicanism in the FE’s party line was just about the only real change Mola could exert in the Falange until Dia de Reyes.
After becoming Army Chief of Staff and Minister of War, Mola had essentially become the second-most powerful man in Spain, second only to the Caudillo himself. This ascendancy would be short-lived, however. After the Ruiz Affair - a political scandal involving the last dregs of the Falange’s “left” faction, lead by Mateo Ruiz*, entering negotiations with the PSOE in the Free Soviet Republic - Mola would be dismissed from the cabinet and as Chief of Staff in August 1941. While he maintained his military rank and salary, he was given no assignments, made persona non grata in Madrid society, and Sanjurjo notably refused to even take his calls. His rise had been meteoric, and it seemed his fall from grace would be as well.
[…]
The immediate removal of Sanjurjo from Madrid politics immediately triggered a storm of political maneuver as a thousand schemes and contingencies went into action. For the first week or so, things remained quiet as the rival camps of Movimiento Nacional politics gathered themselves for what would become a winter of chaotic political intrigue. Mola’s ouster from the cabinet had dealt a blow to the FE, and el Director ‘s focus on consolidation of power within the Falange meant that for the first few weeks, most of the action was between Aranda’s Alfonistes and Fal Conde’s Carlists. The Alfonsites were an early favorite, with a majority in the (largely rubber-stamp) Cortes and Cabinet, and the tacit backing of the British and French. Their position seemed secure when Aranda managed to secure for himself the all-important (and previously empty) post of Prime Minister. However, the Carlists were more than making trouble. Street fighting between the two factions in Madrid became endemic, and the quiet of Mola and the Falange was quickly becoming unnerving. Things quickly deteriorated for the Alfonsites, however. Sanjurjo woke from his coma on December 22nd, and while clearly no longer fit for governing, immediately began to undermine Aranda and the Alfonsites with contradictory appointments, vetoes, and declarations. Additionally, the street war in Madrid escalated with a series of assassinations of prominent Alfonsite officers and politicians. Aranda countered with his own assassinations, and soon Madrid seemed to be falling into chaos. Many, including Mola’s replacement Francisco Franco, began to quietly despair at the situation, fearing that the nationalist project would soon collapse around their ears. So when Mola and Queipo de Llano approached Franco and other military officers on New Years Eve 1941 with a solution that would simply require the army to sit back and do nothing, they accepted his offer.
Mola had spent most of the Christmas struggle consolidating the FE and preparing to seize power. The Falange Espaniola was no longer the fractious, unruly mess it had been when Mola had taken the helm of the party. Since the Ruiz Affair, Mola had brutally imposed discipline upon the dissident factions, purging, killing, and brutalizing any who would not bend the knee to Mola and his National Syndicalist faction. What resulted was a unified, disciplined party and paramilitary firmly under Mola’s control, with ample funding and political backing from the NSDAP and Italian Fascists. Mola still had contacts in the military from his stint as Chief of Staff, and used them to his advantage, securing the deal with Franco that would allow the Dia de Reyes Purge to go forwards.
January 6th, 1942 began with FE members and paramilitaries taking police stations and radio towers in the predawn dark. Simultaneously, they began to kidnap and murder the prominents of the Carlists and Alfonisites. Fal Conte was killed at 4:42 AM when twenty Falangists stormed his compound and murdered him and his family. Aranda only barely escaped by virtue of spending a late night in the government offices, and was able to flee into France over the next few days. By noon that day, the Alfonsites and Carlists had been essentially decapitated, and what was left of the rank-and-file bent the knee and joined the Falange’s coalition. El Director and the Falange Espaniola marched on the Palace of El Pardo at 1pm to make the situation clear to the Caudillo. Mola made himself very clear: he would be made Prime Minister, the FE would be made the only legal party in Spain, and he would have effectively overwhelming control over policy until “the Caudillo has made his recovery.” Sanjurjo accepted, and Mola became the de facto ruler of Spain. The Spanish Falange was ascendant.
Mola was by far the most pro-war and pro-Axis of any of the contenders in the Christmas Struggle, and this quickly bore out in his foreign policy following Dia de Reyes. Mola made repeated visits to Rome and Berlin, and took measures to move Spain onto wartime footing. Conscription was increased, and divisions were moved to the border with the Free Soviet Republic. Mola changed the timezone of Spain by decree to Central European Time to aid coordination with Berlin and Rome. Sabre-rattling and border skirmishes between the two Spains became a nearly weekly occasion. It was clear that by the time the year was over, the fragile peace that had prevailed on the Iberian peninsula for the last four years would end. Few knew how disastrous that end would be.
[…]
The Pétainists crossing the Pyrenees as May turned to June was ultimately what allowed the Nationalist Army to defeat the Spanish Red Army. The overwhelming bulk of the Free Spanish forces were oriented towards the Nationalists, and so the Petainist French were able to rapidly move across the Free Soviet Republic and link up with the Nationalists at Zaragoza, cutting Red Spain in half in the process. What remained of the Spanish Red Army was concentrated in two cauldrons on the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts; the Catalonian and Basque Pockets. As the Petainists and Falangists moved to annihilate the pockets the Royal Navy, now co-belligerent with the Free Soviet Republic, aided in the attempted evacuation of the Free Republic’s Government, Red Army units, and the civilian population to the Canaries through the Balearics and Gibraltar. However, the Marine National and Regia Marina were able to repeatedly interdict the evacuation convoys, and the Italian landings on the Balearics in April effectively cut the evacuation route from Catalonia. While enough of the leadership survived to form a Government In Exile in Tenerife, much of the Spanish Red Army in Catalonia remained in-country and were forced underground as partisans, or lay at the bottom of the western Mediterranean.
In the Basque pocket, however, evacuation was far more successful. In part this was due to the increased presence of the Royal Navy in the Atlantic compared to the Mediterranean, but it was also a matter of cold priority. The Basque Pocket contained the elements of the Loyalist French Third Army that had not yet been evacuated from Spain, so the new Franco-British Union prioritized their evacuation. Additionally, the Basque Pocket contained more of the Red Army’s units, including the 1st and 2nd Brigades of the International Volunteer Army. While the vast majority of the IVA was fighting in the Soviet Union, the IVA had been born in the Spanish Civil War, and the Brigades remained in Spain as a symbol of the ComInterns commitment to the Free Soviet Republic. They, as part of two corps of the Spanish Red Army, helped fight a brutal rearguard that allowed for a near total evacuation of the Basque Pocket to the Canaries. Notably, the 1st Brigade was the last United Nations unit to leave the country, fighting from the suburbs of Bilbao all the way to the evacuation ships at the docks, taking up to 50% casualties.
The evacuation of the Basque Pocket was not uncontested. The Marine Nationale repeatedly attempted to sink the transport convoys during the month-long evacuation using flotillas of cruisers and submarines. However, a combination of Royal Navy and WFRN escorts and regular flights of land-based aircraft from the British Isles and the Canaries allowed for a relatively low casualty rate for the transport convoys. The anti-raiding actions of the Royal Navy and WFRN during the evacuation of the Basque Pocket would become known as the Battle of the Bay of Biscay, a sub-campaign of the Battle of the Atlantic and a much needed victory for the Royal Navy and WFRN amidst the disasters of that year.
[…]
August 1942 would prove to be the apogee of the Spanish State. Spain had been reunified, the protectorate zones in Morocco had been returned to the Spanish, and Mola’s government had joined what seemed to be a unified European crusade against the ComIntern and Commonwealth. But the next few weeks would lead to a fatal victory for Sanjurjo, Mola, and the Spanish State as a whole. Gibraltar had been a thorn in the side of the Mediterranean Axis since the Western Front opened in February, and while the Battle of the Ionian Sea had pushed the Royal Navy out of the Eastern Mediterranean, as long as Gibraltar held the possibility of the United Nations breaking into the Mediterranean remained. Over late July and early August, a task force assembled in southern Spain under the command of Agustín Muñoz Grandes, with the objective of taking Gibraltar and closing the Pillars of Hercules. Its core consisted of the Spanish Second Army, augmented with the Pétainist IV Corps, the German 7th Panzer Division, and a massive contingent of German artillery. They faced comprehensive defenses on the narrow isthmus connecting Gibraltar to the mainland, manned by the thirty thousand men of the Gibraltar Defense Force, led by Geoffrey Birley. The order to attack the Rock of Gibraltar was given on the morning of August 10th, opening the Siege of Gibraltar with a four-hour artillery barrage. The Spanish contingent would spend the next fortnight attacking the defenses as Commonwealth and Axis guns fought the greatest artillery duel on the Iberian Peninsula since the Napoleonic Wars. While the defenses would be penetrated and the warren of tunnels dug into the Rock itself cleared by the end of the month, it came at a ruinous cost. The Spanish took up to 70% losses, with entire regiments and divisions existing in name only by the end of the Siege. By contrast, the Gibraltar Defense Forces had managed orderly evacuations from each layer of defenses, and by the time they were evacuated by the Royal Navy, had sustained only 10% losses to the Axis. The Siege of Gibraltar was the first of many pyrrhic victories for the Axis, ripping the guts out of the once-formidable Spanish Army and leaving them utterly unprepared for the coming campaigns.
[…]
On Sanjurjo and Mola’s left flank, Salazar was beginning to end his endless dithering. Caught between long-running British patronage and a government and sensibilities closer to the Axis powers, the Estado Novo had maintained a scrupulous neutrality since the war started in 1940, and would continue this after the Franco-British Union and it’s Commonwealth joined the war alongside the Dutch and Belgians in 1942. With the formation of the United Nations later in that year, it was becoming increasingly clear that neutrality in Europe was not viable. Portugal would enter the war, and Mola’s army was nowhere near ready for what that would bring.
Excerpts from Paul Preston,The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in 20th Century Spain(London, 2012) (By@WaltzinBrunhilda)
**Section Two:
The Scouring **
The occupation of the border regions of the Spanish Free Soviet Republic saw an immediate return to the Civil War policy set forth by Mola of unyielding terror. Mola’s guidelines during the initial securing of Castile and León returned in full form. Recently unearthed documents show that orders from Madrid written directly by Mola and with the increasingly weakened Sanjurjo’s singing along stated:
“It is necessary to spread terror. We have to create the impression of mastery, eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do. There can be no cowardice. If we vacillate one moment and fail to proceed with the greatest determination, we will not win. Anyone who helps or hides a communist will be shot.”
Whereas similar orders from Mola during the Civil War represented the insecurity of their ability to secure Spain, these orders showed that the Spanish State had begun an unabashed genocidal approach to the Free Republic. In the minds of Nationalist military commanders and Madrid itself, the Basque and Catalan nations as a whole were helping the Communists.
Terror was the chosen method to annihilate the very memory of the Free Republic, and everything it represented, most notable to the West a mutli-national approach to the Spanish question, the end of the power of landowners, industrialists, the clerics and soldiers, and worse of all the general rejection of subservience by rural and urban workers and, most irksome for the right, women. Within the Spanish state every strain of thought was unified on the matter that the Free Republic needed to be destroyed. From the small remains of the liberal wing of the CEDA, to the ultimately triumphant Falange, every member of the National Defence Junta planned on crushing the Free Republic. Even Antonio Aranda, despite his position as the leading Spanish Anglophile, supported resuming the civil war right up until his exile after Mola’s putsch. Even after fleeing to France and then Britain, his main objection - a notably common one amongst post-putsch exiles - was that Spain had joined the Stahlpakt.
[…]
The intervention of the Stahlpakt into the Spanish front served as a decisive blow to the Free Republic. With the combined strength of the Pétainist Army, the Heer and the Luftwaffe , along with a small contingent from the Regio Esercito and the Regia Aeronautica ‘s Aviazione Legionaria attacking from the north, the already overstretched Ejército Rojo was crushed. Yet the terror had only just begun.
With the successful conquest of the Free Republic, the infamous Einsatzgruppen and Squadristi were set to work teaching the already brutal Nationalist Army on how to deal with the Basque and Catalan Nations. Otto Ohlendorf, the commanding officer of the Spanish Einsatzgruppen, noted that the Spanish attacked the population of the Free Republic without mercy. In numerous occupied towns, the women lucky enough to not be raped or executed were forced to drink castor oil and left in public squares.
In majority Basque towns, a common tactic was to ask the locals to recite the Lord’s Prayer in Castilian Spanish. Those who were unable to were executed. The subsequent birth of the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna organization represented the popular Basque resistance to the brutality of the Spanish state. While remaining Catalan people had the ratline to the safe haven of neighboring Andorra, the Basques that had not escaped during the evacuation of the pocket were surrounded by the Stahlpakt due to being situated in the Bay of Biscay. As Entente military intelligence observed, a major consequence of the Basque population’s encirclement and suppression was the series of ETA terror attacks across Spain, most notably the Assumption 1942 Madrid Bombing. While insignificant compared to the damage of the First Battle of Madrid, or subsequent battles during the Second Peninsular War, the attack allowed the Falangist coalition under Mola to successfully purge the last remaining Carlists with a series of accusations that the terrorists had entered Madrid disguised as Requetés.
The ETA was not the first partisan movement to form after the Fascist occupation of the Free Republic, yet it would become one of the most well known ones. Many survivors of the Ejército Rojo would go underground much as their compatriots in the Soviet Union, forming two major partisan movements. The bulk would comprise the explicitly communist Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patriota , while some would join the more liberal Maquis. Mola’s already worsening bipolarity would see him order increasingly vicious reprisals against the national liberation movements, the liberal Marquis, and the communist FRAP alike; all of which were claimed by Falangist propaganda to be branches of the same rotting Bolshevik-Maximalist-Masonic tree. While Barcelona is the most well known example of this policy within the Entente thanks to the work of the prominent Catalan-Andoran exile Salvador Espriu, a more important example of this policy in practice can be found in the Irun Massacre.
Originally occupied by Pétainist forces, the Basque town of Irun was to be transferred to Spanish occupation forces as they arrived in the beginning of May. By the time this had occurred, the obvious progressive and leftist ‘deviants’ had already fled. However, this town in particular was tainted in the eyes of Mola, as the local church had voluntarily supported the defending Free Republican forces prior to their rout, reflecting the broader trend within Basque society, be they workers or clergy, of siding with the Free Republic over the Spanish State. Inquiries made by scholars into recently unearthed documents have found orders countersigned by both Chief of the General Staff Mola and Generals Gonzalo Queipo de Llano and Francisco Franco which commanded the complete obliteration of ‘Communist presence’ in the town. What would follow would be a calculated act of brutality against the population as a whole.
All local men were ordered into the church while any priests still remaining in the town were taken away by Blueshirts. Officially they were being interrogated on suspicion of ‘collaboration’ with the Free Republic. In actuality, The entirety of the group was executed by the roadside. Their ‘heretical’ willingness to remain loyal to the Free Republic was damning enough evidence for the increasingly erratic Mola. Following the execution of the priests, the Einsatzgruppen and Squadristi who arrived in the town were given command of the interrogation. Officially the aim was to scour out any partisans remaining. In practice it was to send a message, to both the Basque people in particular and the Republican resistance as a whole. Roughly three hours into the ‘interrogation’, a stash of rifles was found in a nearby house giving enough evidence for the local command to sign off on the order. Roughly 500 women were chained around the town publicly and forced to drink Castor Oil, with the surviving men and children forced to watch.
The exact number of men killed during the massacre is up to debate. Oldenhorf wrote “Irun has been purged of the Communist threat” in a report to Himmler. The Entente investigation following liberation found at least six mass graves and placed the number at around 700 men killed. More modern estimates place the number between 1,000 and 1,500 executed. Nevertheless, Irun represented the final descent of the Falange-dominated Spanish State into the arms of the Stahlpakt. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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