I base my charges on the information already collected by the investigating judge and his informants . . . it is not I who condemns them [the accused], but their own villages, their own enemies and their own neighbours.Footnote 1
Military prosecutor, northern SpainIntroduction
In February 1945 Bernard Malley, the secretary of the British embassy in Madrid, dispatched a letter and report to the former ambassador to Spain, Samuel Hoare (Lord Templewood) who had recently returned to London. Since arriving back in England Hoare had stirred up a hornets’ nest with a speech in the House of Lords lambasting the regime of General Francisco Franco for working hand in glove with the Gestapo and laying waste the values of civilised life through its use of special courts.Footnote 2 Given the ongoing rumpus provoked by these remarks, Malley's missives arrived at a fortuitous moment and furnished Hoare with some hard facts to wield against his opponents. Indeed, after careful research the resourceful Malley informed his former boss he had established that between 1936 and 1945 Franco's military judges had handed down sentences to more than 1 million people.Footnote 3 These ranged from the death sentence to jail terms of up to 30 years, although the main ‘crime’ the vast majority of this huge number of people had committed had been to side with the elected Popular Front government (a coalition of centre and left parties) during the Civil War of 1936–9, during which Franco had gradually occupied the whole of Spain.
Increasingly disconcerted by what he unearthed in his probing into the trials, Malley dashed off an angry note to the foreign office in October 1945 in which he pointed out that he had pored over ‘many hundreds’ of sentences, the majority of which he concluded were ‘purely political’. Indeed, he went on to condemn the trial procedures by deploring that ‘in many [cases] sentences were pronounced because service for the Republican government in any capacity was interpreted as responsibility or complicity in connection with common offences committed by third persons generally unknown to the accused’. In short, for Malley the trials represented no more than an unconscionable ‘juridical monstrosity’.Footnote 4
The protests mounted by Hoare and Malley, however, fell on deaf ears. At the time the British government and its allies had bigger fish to fry, such as sealing victory in the Second World War and staving off communist influence in Europe.Footnote 5 This meant that they chose not to make an issue of the murder (both judicially and extrajudicially) of at least 100,000 people during the Civil War and a further 50,000 in the ten years following the end of the conflict (despite a decline in the number of death sentences after 1940).Footnote 6 In so doing, they also chose to pass over the tide of prosecutions that Malley decried and which saw 24,000 people imprisoned in Toledo province alone.Footnote 7 Although across Spain the bulk of such prisoners had secured parole by the mid-1940s, they walked out of prison stigmatised by their criminal records (and individuals condemned by the courts, or their relatives, despite the Spanish parliament recently declaring the military tribunals both unjust and illegitimate, have to appeal on a case-by-case basis to have their convictions wiped cleanFootnote 8) and often broken by their time behind bars.Footnote 9 Moreover, the authorities dragged their feet in setting prisoners free and banished up to 25 per cent of those they paroled to internal exile or confined them to their local communities.Footnote 10
This combination of foreign toleration and domestic terror set Franco up to rule over his fellow countrymen until his death in November 1975. Unsurprisingly, during this time his regime muzzled all discussion of his ‘juridical monstrosity’. Even after Franco's demise and the transition to democracy that followed (1975–82), members of his regime's old guard continued to cling to powerful positions in the army and the state, leaving democrats fearful of raking up the dark origins of the Franco regime. Their hesitancy handed former Francoists a breathing space that they used to shred incriminating documents.Footnote 11
Accordingly, only towards the mid-1980s did historians begin rigorously to investigate the killings and jailings that proved the making of Franco and his regime. Given the choking silence that had long enveloped this dark past, the historians' first priority lay in establishing the exact number and the identity of those who had suffered at the hands either of Francoist death squads or the regime's military tribunals.Footnote 12
This meant that researchers who turned their attention to the trials became much more interested in the numbers sentenced than in the procedures that allowed such huge numbers of people to be dragged before the bench.Footnote 13 Indeed, many historians restricted their discussion of the trials, which generally lasted a matter of minutes and granted next to no rights to the accused, to labelling them as a farce.Footnote 14 Moreover, they have tended to examine the effects of the trials at the level of the province or military district rather than delve into their workings in the municipalities where the prosecutions actually took place.Footnote 15 More recently, some historians have added to this picture by suggesting that the military trials can best be understood as a means of institutionalising the repression by increasingly taking over from the death squads and, over time, easing the intensity of the killing.Footnote 16
This article takes a different approach and in doing so aims to contribute to the growing study of the regime's support base as a driver of the Francoist terror.Footnote 17 It therefore turns away from the study of the numbers prosecuted, jailed and killed, and instead investigates the prosecution processes that furnished the principal means by which the regime came to know and classify those it prosecuted. Such processes allowed the incipient Franco regime to pick out prisoners from the mass of the interned for prosecution, press charges and peddle its claim to legitimate rule on the basis of having ‘proved’ that its enemies stood beyond the pale of respectability.
Importantly, however, the staggering scale of this task proved far too vast for the resources of the Francoist state alone. As this article shows by examining both documentary records left from military prosecutions and correspondence between the courts and local authorities about these trials, Francoist policing officials solved this problem by turning to their grass-roots supporters at the municipal level to help them identify and convict their enemies. This devolved prosecution system operated everywhere across Francoist Spain, but is best studied where it took place: at the municipal level. For this reason the article makes a case study of the national trial system by examining the prosecution process in several municipalities around Pozoblanco in conflict-ridden southern Spain, for which unusually rich documentary sources remain. This material shows that the regime, by devolving the prosecutions to the local level, came to rely on the neighbours of those they hauled into the dock to furnish them with the snippets of information they exploited to carry out prosecutions and secure convictions. Thus the regime's support base played a pivotal role in categorising, convicting and stigmatising their mutual political enemies.
This is why the farcical trial procedures that underpinned prosecutions took on such vital significance. For they both brought the apparatus of the state to the very foundations of society and provided an avenue for those from below to access the state. Thus the courts did not simply institutionalise the repression. Instead they channelled and harnessed the agency of the regime's supporters in order to carry out much of its policing. Indeed those from below helped to criminalise and stigmatise vast numbers of their own neighbours and in the process played a role in establishing Francoism as a political and social system.
Occupation
Crucially, the trials emerged from a broad strategy designed first to overthrow the elected government of the Second Republic and then to eliminate or prostrate its supporters. This steely determination grew from the rebels’ hopes to put an end to the growing tide of secularism sponsored by the Second Republic, to safeguard certain army interests and to stave off greater autonomy for Spain's regions. Above all, however, they hoped to reverse land and rural labour reform, especially in the strife-torn south of the country.Footnote 18
Adopting such a violent approach came readily to the cabal of army officers, brutalised by years of vicious colonial warfare, who played a leading role in plotting the revolt against the Republic that would give rise to the Spanish Civil War.Footnote 19 The failure of a half-hearted revolt in 1932 ensured that they would proceed with great determination and brutality to win success, particularly after the Asturian revolt in October 1934 reinforced the lesson.Footnote 20 After February 1936 – when millions of Spaniards who had mobilised in trade unions and political organisations flocked to the polls to support the electoral coalition of centre and left parties in the Popular Front against what they labelled as ‘fascism’ – the use of violence seemed to offer the only way forward to many on the right.Footnote 21
As early as April 1936, General Emilio Mola cautioned his fellow conspirators that the ‘enemy’ was ‘strong and well organised’, so that ‘in order to subdue our enemy’ they had to be ‘violent in the extreme’.Footnote 22 To make matters even plainer he later issued orders that ‘we must create an atmosphere of terror and shoot any open or closet supporter of the Popular Front’.Footnote 23 When the military revolt began, on 17/18 July 1936, the rebels met stiff resistance from Popular Front supporters in large parts of central, south-eastern and eastern Spain, where armed workers played an important role in stifling the coup. Where the revolt was successful, the rebels realised more than ever the importance of terror in subduing their enemies. In such places as Cáceres, La Rioja, Santiago de Compostela, Soria and Segovia, death squads sprang up to kill and terrorise Republican activists. These impromptu squads were often made up of a motley collection of police officers from the paramilitary Civil Guard, Falangists and other civilian right-wingers.Footnote 24
However spontaneous these bands of killers were, we have much evidence that local military and political officials across rebel-held Spain ensured that the killers carefully targeted a common and feared enemy among their political opponents.Footnote 25 In Granada, for example, in the wake of the coup right-wing civilians rushed to join both the Falange and an array of death squads. However, the rebel governor, José Valdés Guzmán, and Franco's representative in the city, General Orgaz Yoldi, oversaw the repression.Footnote 26 Such officially sanctioned death squads swiftly notched up a gruesome tally, especially shortly after occupation. In Zaragoza province, for example, 2,610 people (74 per cent of those killed here) had their lives cut short in the first few months of the Civil War.Footnote 27
Similarly, in the south of Spain – an area gripped by intense strife over rural labour relations which had destabilised the political system before the war – the rebels seized many important provincial capitals, including Seville, Cádiz and Córdoba.Footnote 28 Here we have evidence that members of the death squads worked together secretly with landowners and murdered many of the rural activists who had long been thorns in their sides by campaigning for labour and land reform.Footnote 29 But we also know that local military and rebel officials oversaw the killing in many places.Footnote 30 Large numbers of people fell to these groups and one of the leading historians of the repression, Francisco Espinosa, estimates that in the first weeks of the war, rebels slew 25,000 people across large parts of Cádiz, Huelva, Seville, Badajoz and Córdoba provinces.Footnote 31
As the civil war developed over summer and autumn 1936, a much more considered and deeply rooted system of occupation began to take root. From August 1936 Franco's colonial troops from Morocco pushed north in a thrust towards Republican-held Madrid, cutting down rural workers whom they suspected of sympathising with the Popular Front.Footnote 32 Indeed, on this deadly progress through the south, Franco's soldiers killed at least 6,600 people from eighty-six villages.Footnote 33 This rapid pace of conquest helped Franco to emerge as the rebels’ supreme leader in late September 1936. This mattered because Franco would compromise on nothing less than outright victory; he consistently rejected peace proposals, even when brokered by the Vatican.Footnote 34 Moreover, on several occasions he also turned down the opportunity to win a swift victory by moving on the vulnerable capital, and chose instead to destroy the Republican army slowly in one part of Spain after another.Footnote 35 Crucially, this steady process of occupation mattered more to Franco than victory at the front. He made no bones about this in a statement to Mussolini's representative Randolfo Cantalupo in 1937, when he told him that his army had to proceed to ‘the necessarily slow task of redemption and pacification, without which the military occupation will be largely useless’.Footnote 36
However, the need to win widespread domestic and international support required that the Francoist side acquire at least a fig leaf to hide the violent fact of repression. This became particularly apparent with the damaging publicity that surrounded the mass killing of Republicans by Franco's troops in Badajoz in August 1936 and the disappearance of the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca in Granada the same summer.Footnote 37 Such controversies threatened to besmirch the reputation of rebels, whose cause Church figures were now beginning to bless as a ‘crusade’ against anticlerical Republicans, and who were struggling to gain belligerent rights from foreign powers which required that they at least act out the pretence of fighting according the laws of war.Footnote 38
In this context a trial system offered the chance not only to consolidate a brutal occupation but also to construct the façade of due process, an opportunity to build up rebel state institutions and a powerful means of presenting their opponents to the world not as defenders of Spain's legitimate government but as criminals.Footnote 39 In this task Francoists had been dealt an easier hand by the wave of killings that had swept over Republican-held Spain in the early months of the Civil War. Before the end of 1936, when the Republican authorities had more or less regained control of the police, the army and court systems, around 55,000 people identified with the rebel side had been killed, including over 6,800 members of the clergy.Footnote 40
Hauling those they blamed for such killings into the dock offered Francoists an easy propaganda victory. Unsurprisingly they seized the chance to produce large quantities of tracts that they argued were based on ‘a full range of judicial evidence’ taken from trial proceedings and supposedly provided ‘irrefutable proof’ of the ‘barbarity of the red hordes’.Footnote 41 Of more pressing importance, adopting a trial system offered an effective means of carrying out the ‘necessarily slow task’ of occupation. The first tentative moves in this direction began on 28 July 1936, when the rebel generals drew on the 1890 code of military justice to declare a ‘state of war’ and place all civilians under martial law.Footnote 42 However, in the haste of the summer of 1936 comparatively few trials of Popular Front supporters took place.Footnote 43
Local knowledge
A major transformation began in the autumn of 1936, as the reinvigorated rebels began to wage all-out war on the Republic and its supporters. A significant milestone came in November 1936, when it seemed as if Madrid would be captured and thousands of political opponents would fall into their hands.Footnote 44 Importantly, the fall of the capital was felt to herald the collapse of the entire Republic. With this in mind Franco decreed that military courts would operate in all areas ‘liberated’ by his forces, even though his troops would not occupy Madrid until late March 1939, at the very end of the war.Footnote 45
The ambition underpinning this order, however, put the regime in a bind. Many of its difficulties began with the revolutionary breadth of the decree of 28 July 1936, which had transformed the army's established use of its courts against civilians for public order offences by rendering all supporters of the Republic as ‘military rebels’. As court officials themselves noted, their resources did not run to prosecuting and imprisoning all their opponents.Footnote 46 This cold reality implied a need to filter and then classify those selected for prosecution. Here a further complication beset officials, for even when prosecutors had narrowed down those whom they would charge they still had to decide between three degrees of rebellion when accusing their captives. Joining the rebellion formed the most serious charge and carried the death sentence or up to thirty years in jail. Republicans put on trial for aiding and abetting the rebellion could receive terms of between three and fifteen years in prison; those in the dock for inciting the rebellion could be gaoled for periods of between six months and twelve years.Footnote 47 The decision as to which of these charges to press depended on both the extent to which the accused had come to the defence of the Republic and the degree to which they were identified with the Republican cause.Footnote 48
In addition to all this the military authorities conflated the charge of military rebellion with the accusation of having taken part in ‘common crimes’. Technically, only the seriousness of the offence was supposed to be taken into account,Footnote 49 but studies have shown how judges considered that a background in a centre or left political organisation betrayed a perverse character, leading them to conclude that activists must have taken part in crimes.Footnote 50 This gave local office-holders and their sympathisers a further opportunity to single out political activists for harsh punishment by assassinating their characters and alluding to a possible role in violence.Footnote 51
The regime thus devolved the prosecution process to the municipal level, where it could most effectively turn to its grass-roots supporters to help to measure, classify and convict its opponents. Accordingly, the central authorities came to rely on their own supporters to create the façade of due process, back up their claims to be fighting ‘criminals’ and represent their political opponent as perverse delinquents. Indeed, Franco himself liked to boast to journalists about the number of witnesses his regime could produce to back up its charges.Footnote 52
To draw in as many as possible of people prepared to incriminate their neighbours, Franco's ‘army of occupation’, as it described itself, issued instructions on how newly conquered territory should be ‘pacified’. The instructions placed the emphasis on information gathering, and stated that the first and most important task incumbent on the new occupying authorities lay in talking to local people and compiling a report on the ‘crimes’ committed during the ‘red-Marxist domination’.Footnote 53 In practice local Falangists carried out many of these initial soundings.Footnote 54 But, in addition, all local people were to be invited to come forward and denounce ‘criminals’ for prosecution.Footnote 55
Once potential candidates had been singled out, an investigating judge began to build the prosecution case. But he proceeded essentially by farming out his work to regime supporters at the municipal level. He would begin by collecting reports from local Falangists, such as the mayor and the municipal Falange investigation officer, and would then ask these local officials to gather witness testimony from ordinary citizens.Footnote 56 Importantly, given that trials lasted just a few minutes, this meant that the crucial stages in the prosecution process became the selection of the victim and the assembling of the prosecution case.
Local court hearings also reinforced the power of neighbours over those in the dock. Prosecutors preferred to try prisoners in their home towns, going out of their way to set up military courts in towns and villages across the areas they conquered. They also created roving tribunals that toured from village to village meting out punishment.Footnote 57 This devolved system of ‘justice’ allowed the regime to send those caught on the front line or in other parts of Spain back to their home towns where they could be prosecuted more easily.Footnote 58
In addition, trial procedures passed immense influence over to the regime's grass-roots supporters. Under new rules for emergency summary military tribunals drawn up in November 1936, the Francoists made it incumbent on the accused to disprove any denunciation rather than the denouncer having to prove his or her accusation.Footnote 59 Moreover, witness testimony could no longer be contested in court.Footnote 60 Although tribunals no longer used emergency procedures after July 1940, cases continued to revolve around uncorroborated witness testimony.Footnote 61
The streamlined procedures gave the military authorities the ability to mete out rapid justice on an awesome scale. When Francoist forces stormed Málaga in February 1937, for instance, the army prosecuted 20,000 people in just 100 days and sentenced 3,000 to death.Footnote 62 Similarly, in Tarragona, south of Barcelona, which was captured towards the end of the war, military officials put 15.2 per cent of the population on trial.Footnote 63 Indeed, in many places the trial system reached its height, in terms of the numbers processed, in the twilight of the conflict and in the immediate post-war years, as people returned to their homes.Footnote 64 In the judicial area of eastern Andalucía covered by the military command in Granada, for instance, the courts took on 100,000 cases between the end of the conflict in 1939 and 1945.Footnote 65
Because the devolved processes that made such huge numbers of prosecutions possible have largely been overlooked, we can gain new insights into the making of Francoism by turning to the study of prosecutions where they took place: at the municipal level. To tackle this challenge I chose to make a case study of military trials in the judicial area of Pozoblanco in the north of Córdoba province, an area of southern Spain captured at the end of the war, in late March 1939. One reason for choosing this area is that, unusually, records remain in both the military and municipal archives, so that the area offers the chance to examine the municipal prosecution process that characterised early Francoism.
The Pozoblanco region also offers an insight into the repression that marked areas such as this in southern Spain, where intense conflict over land and labour issues had long blighted life. Given that these tensions provided a crucial spark for the Civil War and that such areas often suffered severely under a brutal occupation, Pozoblanco also provides the opportunity to gain a good insight into the social bitterness that was the source of much of the Francoist repression. This is particularly true because of the embittering effect of the violence that occurred during the suppression of the revolt there in July and August 1936.
Importantly, there is no necessary connection between violence on Republican territory and the Francoist repression: in many parts of Spain the victors meted out harsh repression irrespective of whether any uncontrolled violence had taken place during the Republican period.Footnote 66 This qualification aside, the Pozoblanco judicial area does offer the potential for a valuable case study because there is evidence that in areas that suffered both forms of repression, bereaved relatives from the rebel and Francoist side collaborated in significant numbers in army trials.Footnote 67
Equally importantly, the Franco regime and its apologists drew heavily on the violence in the Republic to construct a sense of victimhood that they held justified the castigation of Republicans.Footnote 68 Accordingly, by studying how local people in the Pozoblanco area came to identify with the values of the regime and its goal of exacting retribution we can gain an insight into the making of both Francoists and Francoism. Naturally, a case study of this sort cannot represent the repression across Spain and across the entire period 1936–45, but it does give an insight into many broadly similar areas that had suffered violence during the Republican period.Footnote 69
Many of the tensions in pre-Civil War Pozoblanco arose from conflict over land distribution, with which both this region and much of southern Spain were afflicted. In Pozoblanco itself in the early 1930s there were 740 landholders (both large and small), but 2,900 people had no land whatsoever. Revealingly, just five of these 740 landholders earned 17.5 per cent of all taxable income in the area and a mere eight farms occupied 11.5 per cent of all the land in the municipality. Similarly, in the nearby village of Alcaracejos were 100 landholders and 500 landless labourers.Footnote 70 The landless suffered long months of unemployment and pitifully low wages even when they did find work. When Republican reformers attempted to improve the lot of this beleaguered group by improving wages and working hours, landholders, who feared for their livelihoods, responded belligerently. As a result, during the early years of the Second Republic socialist and communist mayors in towns such as Pozoblanco and nearby Villanueva de Córdoba locked horns with intransigent landowners as they battled to enforce changes in the face of recalcitrant opposition. Employers often reacted by turning to violence and some became involved in physical confrontations with their workforce that on occasion led to deaths.Footnote 71
On 18 July 1936, landholders and other right-wingers immediately took up arms against the Republic. They helped to seize control of the towns and villages of the region and imposed their own political leaders. They then prepared to repel the loyalist masses who had fled to the surrounding countryside and now camped outside the rebel strongholds. Miners from the nearby provinces of Jaén and Ciudad Real soon swelled their ranks and together they formed a rough and ready militia force that stormed the villages in the judicial area of Pozoblanco. The combined Republican forces regained control of Villanueva de Córdoba on 24 July. On 25 July loyalists seized Torrecampo and Pedroche fell on 26 July.Footnote 72 By 28 July a Republican army column from Madrid under General Miaja arrived on the scene and helped retake Pozoblanco on 15 August.Footnote 73 The village of Dos Torres remained the last rebel outpost in the Pozoblanco area until it too surrendered on 25 August.Footnote 74
Events in the village of Pedroche vividly illustrate the cruel bloodletting that accompanied the recapture of many of these communities. Immediately upon recapturing the village, individual militiamen beyond the control of the local Republican leadership ran amok, blasting their way into the homes of some of those who had taken up arms against the government or hacking through doors with axes to get at them. Although political leaders often tried to stop the violence, a number of these captives were dragged into the street and murdered. In total, eighty-four villagers were gunned down for their role in the rebellion.Footnote 75
Francoist occupation of the area from late March 1939 ushered in a new bout of killing. Immediately, forty-nine Republican prisoners were shot out of hand.Footnote 76 The newly victorious army tried to give a veneer of respectability to its repression by setting up a military court in Villanueva de Córdoba and another two courts in Pozoblanco immediately on occupying the region.Footnote 77 Between 1939 and 1940 the two courts in Pozoblanco sent 151 people before the firing squad.Footnote 78 For its own part, the court in Villanueva de Córdoba swung into action in November 1939, and by September 1940 officials there had dispatched 100 of their victims to an early grave, most following a military trial.Footnote 79 In September 1940 the military shipped the remaining local prisoners to the provincial capital in Córdoba, where they were tried; eighty-three people from eight small towns and villages were shot here between 1939 and 1945, while a further seventy-seven from these locations perished in the disease-ridden provincial prison.Footnote 80 Over 60,000 people were detained in Córdoba province at the end of the war, with a large but unknown number hailing form the Pozoblanco area.Footnote 81 We do know, however, that in some villages up to 14 per cent of the population faced investigation for military trial.Footnote 82
I began my study into the prosecution process by examining the surviving records of judges’ reasoning for sentences passed on Republicans from the judicial area of Pozoblanco preserved in the archives of the Tribunal of Political Responsibility (TPR). The military tribunals forwarded these sentences to the TPR as a matter of course, so that executed and imprisoned Republicans could have their assets confiscated. Records of sentences remain for 418 people. Of these, 91 received death sentences, although 43 of these were commuted to 30 years; 163 people were sentenced to 30-year terms, 77 to between 15 and 20 years in prison, and 83 people to 12 years. Tribunals sentenced a further two people to six years and freed two others.
I then examined seventy-four full trial records that have by good fortune survived and are stored in the archive of the military tribunals in Seville. These records come complete with denunciations, investigative reports, prosecution and defence statements, and both the verdict and the reasoning of tribunal members for the sentence they imposed. I also studied copies of correspondence between the trial authorities and municipal officials found in the archives of Pedroche and Torrecampo councils (the only municipal archives I found in the area where such documents had not been destroyed).
This research shows that both local office holders and ordinary sympathisers with the new authorities helped in a variety of ways to select supporters of the Republic in the Pozoblanco area for investigation. The local mayor (a Falangist appointed at occupation), supported by members of the Falange and the Civil Guard helped round up Republicans when the area first fell to Franco's forces and then reported to the investigating judge on their political background.Footnote 83 They also supplied information on Republican soldiers detained at the front and returned to the area for prosecution. These local officials also wrote reports on prisoners who had been denounced by their own neighbours. In addition, they often responded to open invitations to level any accusation of their own. In July 1939, for instance, the investigating judge based in Villanueva de Córdoba wrote to the mayor of Pedroche for the ‘most detailed information’ on any crime that had taken place in the village.Footnote 84 Once the investigating judge had gathered such reports he would forward them to a judge advocate, who decided whether to prosecute.
Once the decision was taken to launch a prosecution, the investigating judge would delve a little deeper into the case. In the Pozoblanco area investigating judges did most of their research by post, delegating the majority of their work to local officials. They would start by writing to instruct the local mayor to gather testimony from ‘upstanding citizens’ (regime sympathisers). It was normal practice for the local mayor to pass requests for testimony to the municipal judge (also a Falangist). He would then collect the testimony without attempting to get it corroborated in any way and post it on to the investigating judges. These military judges would sometimes write back to the local officials and request more information or dictate a set of questions they wanted the witnesses to answer.Footnote 85
Any number of statements against the accused could be taken, and this testimony generally formed the bedrock of the case for the prosecution. Indeed, in only one case that I examined did the authorities present any documentary evidence beyond written testimony. Generally the authorities had this process completed before the trial, but sometimes the military called the witness to the stand to level their accusations in person. Witnesses could chose to reveal as much or as little information as they wished and, indeed, some opted to refrain from firing off allegations.Footnote 86 The local authorities would also collect some testimony with the aim of permitting army judicial officers to go through the motions of preparing a ‘defence’ case. Normally, the defendant was only allowed to draw on the testimony of three people.Footnote 87 In my study, depositions for defendants generally carried little sway.Footnote 88
The evidence I studied suggests that the policy of devolving the investigation of Republicans to their own neighbours paid off handsomely for the Franco regime. This is certainly apparent in the writing of reports on the accused that led to prosecution. The operation grew to vast proportions, with the mayor of the village of Pedroche receiving at least 743 separate requests for information.Footnote 89 Struggling to cope, the local authorities generally parroted the information supplied to them by their Francoist neighbours without seeking to verify what they had been told.
Reports from the village of Alcaracejos provide a good example of how these local authorities seldom lifted a finger to substantiate allegations. In four of the eight trial cases studied in detail from the village, the local authorities openly stated that their reports were simply based on information given by named local ‘upstanding citizens’.Footnote 90 In other villages some reports simply echoed the charges made by named individuals and employed vague expressions, such as ‘according to . . .’.Footnote 91 This meant that many reports consisted of no more than repetitions of hostile feeling among Francoist sectors of society towards leading Republican political activists. The Falangist mayor of Añora, for instance, declared in the vaguest terms of one socialist leader that ‘in this village he is considered a dangerous element and is totally undesirable’.Footnote 92 For his part, the mayor of Pedroche rather revealingly declared of one left-wing activist that it was a well-known rumour in the village that he had taken part in thirty-two killings.Footnote 93
The influence enjoyed by local regime sympathisers is even more obvious in the provision of testimony. In the 69 cases that I studied which preserve a clear verdict and sentence there were 705 depositions. A total of 217 people chose to give hostile testimony and there were sometimes more than 11 witnesses per trial. Many witnesses provided more than one statement in each case and appeared as a witness in several different cases. It was civilian participation on this scale that gave an air of ‘credibility’ to the trial process, helped to sustain the illusion that the rule of law was in operation and kept the wheels of the tribunal system turning.
The sheer scale of collaboration in the Pozoblanco area shows how the overstretched Francoist authorities kept their huge programme of repression afloat despite the considerable strains under which it came. Certainly, here the authorities continued to press ahead with prosecutions and so drew ever larger numbers of grass-roots Francoists into the repression. In the sample of cases I studied, the average number of witnesses per case increased in the early 1940s. For example, in the cases for Pedroche there was an average of 5.3 testimonials per case in 1942, six in 1943 and eleven in 1944. In Alcaracejos the average number of statements had risen to fourteen by 1943. In short, in this area the courts as an institution put down greater social roots over time.
The courts drew these large numbers from many of the different social groups who had joined the rebellion in July 1936 and went on to suffer badly during the war. For these various constituencies, collaboration in the trials offered both a way of working with the state to settle personal and political scores against some of their neighbours and also a means of moving closer into the orbit of the regime. In the process they provided state officials with the small slivers of detail they used to ‘justify’ conviction.
Falangists formed one of the most important groups to lend such co-operation, and provided a crucial link between the emerging Franco regime and society. However, it is hard to draw clear-cut distinctions between local Falangists and other members of their own communities who fell in behind the Franco regime. It is true that Falangists in the Pozoblanco area worked within the state apparatus and tended to be young and male. Moreover, many of them had expressed their ideological fervour when they had thrown in their lot with the violent Falange as the political temperature rose in spring 1936. That said, they often hailed from landholding families which had frequently enjoyed close ties with conservative political organisations before the war. Moreover, they suffered and experienced the war in ways similar to many other local people who backed the regime. Indeed, both these young Falangists and their more conservative relatives saw brothers, uncles, fathers and grandfathers executed, and many from both groups suffered imprisonment and the confiscation of property.Footnote 94
The family bonds and the shared plight between Falangists and landholding families are very evident in the village of Torrecampo. The deputy mayor before the Civil War hailed from a family with a large landholding that was at the heart of local politics. His wife had headed the Catholic conservative coalition the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas) in the village.Footnote 95 His sister-in-law had two brothers who were members of the Falange. Falangists and older conservatives were also frequently united by their support for the rebellion and their suffering in the Civil War. Both the deputy mayor and his brother were killed in July 1936 for their role in the rebellion. The deputy mayor's sister-in-law also lost her two Falangist brothers in the rebellion and relatives of hers later provided hostile testimony to the military courts.Footnote 96 Both families lost land and income during the war.
This is not to say that Falangists and non-Falangists enjoyed equal influence. As we have seen, investigating judges gave local Falangist officials enormous power to root out those whom they most despised among their own neighbours. The evidence I studied suggested that they took the opportunities presented to them with alacrity. One Falangist, for example, in the post-war years served intermittently as both the mayor and municipal judge of Pedroche. In 1939 he was just 25 years old. He had taken part in the rising against the Republic but fell into the hands of militia forces in the fighting of July 1936, and suffered a mock execution.Footnote 97 He was later sentenced to a thirty-year prison term by a Republican court and did not gain his liberty until the end of the war when Francoist troops took control of the jail in Valencia.Footnote 98 Following his release, he provided copious testimony to the military authorities, particularly against those he accused of hunting him down.Footnote 99
The enthusiasm driving the testimony of such Falangist officials reveals that they did more than simply perform their bureaucratic duty to write reports, name witnesses and appear in court. Rather they pushed hard to secure the harshest convictions. One Falangist in Pozoblanco, for instance, complained that the authorities had still not executed a leading supporter of the Republic despite his three-year effort to have the sentence carried out.Footnote 100
Unsurprisingly, Falangist mayors often readily nominated as witness fellow Falangists who shared their impatience for punishment and, as a result, Falangists played a prominent role in the cases I studied. One Falangist from Alcaracejos, for instance, testified in all the cases I examined for this village. Another Falangist from Alcaracejos testified in 71 per cent of the cases I scrutinised from his home community. Similarly, a Falangist from Pedroche testified in 23 per cent of the cases I analysed from the village.
However, I found that many members of conservative families shared the same desire for retribution that consumed their Falangist neighbours. The widow of the former mayor in Torrecampo, for instance, provided testimony in 50 per cent of the cases I examined for the village. Similarly a major landowner and the widow of an important village politician in Pedroche gave hostile testimony in three of the seventeen cases I studied. Equally, the widow of another leading conservative political figure in Pedroche testified for the prosecution in three of the cases.
The Falangist mayors nominated such women as witnesses in the knowledge that both their high social standing and their status as widows made them prime examples of the ‘upstanding citizens’ the investigating judge asked to provide testimony. They also knew that they could rely on the deep bitterness many widows felt. Indeed, the actions of many of these women show that they longed to secure punishment with the same desire that possessed Falangist office holders. The house of one widow, and prominent witness, in Pedroche, for instance, bore a plaque that commemorated her husband and read that he fell ‘to the enemies of God’. It was not unknown for widows to change their testimony during trials to better secure conviction.Footnote 101
They also exercised influence over the tribunals. Working within their traditional gender roles as the custodians of their husbands’ memory they both spoke with authority and brought a degree of female participation into a largely male judicial system. Tribunal members frequently drew on the authority of witnesses, whether widows or not, when they passed sentence. In this way a tribunal handed down the death sentence on a day labourer from Pedroche accused in the vaguest terms of ‘taking part in killings’, and justified his execution on the grounds that a range of witness testimony ‘proved’ the allegations.Footnote 102 That said, the words of widows exercised a particular power. In one case the former socialist mayor of Dos Torres claimed that uncontrolled elements had spirited away a man he had arrested and done him to death. The judges, however, justified their death sentence by invoking the testimony of the victim's widow. Although not a direct eyewitness to her husband's killing, she testified in no uncertain terms that the former mayor had demonstrated his ‘criminal instincts’ by refusing her pleas not to detain her husband.Footnote 103
Many other less prominent members of local communities also provided hostile testimony. In the trials I studied for people from the village of Pedroche, for instance, a total of sixty-two non-Falangists provided extremely aggressive testimony. An analysis of the profession of these people (known in the case of forty individuals) shows that many came from what some historians have termed the ‘service class’: the lower-middle-class and upper-working-class heart of the Francoist support base.Footnote 104 Some 40 per cent were smallholders and 30 per cent were self-employed craftsmen or middle-class professionals. A further 17 per cent were female relatives of victims of the violence of July 1936 in the village.
Unlike some of the Falangists and members of old ruling families, many from this broader pro-Franco stratum provided testimony in only a limited number of cases. Sometimes they were called to give evidence because they had specific personal knowledge of the accused. Employers and colleagues of those on trial often appeared in this capacity.Footnote 105 In other cases they were related to, or colleagues of, someone alleged to have been harmed in some way by the accused.Footnote 106
However, like nearly all those who testified in the trials, very few were direct eyewitnesses to the events they described. This was not simply because the killings of summer 1936 had taken place in chaotic circumstances. More importantly, people closely allied with the rebel side had prudently remained off the streets while the militiamen ran amok.Footnote 107 In addition to this, those who carried out the killings often spirited away prisoners from militiamen carrying out orders to arrest and imprison rebels, and carted them off to secluded areas where they murdered their victims in secret.Footnote 108 Moreover, some of the killers were miners from outside the area unknown to local people.Footnote 109 As a result, those who testified, like the widow from Dos Torres, very rarely had any convincing evidence to offer. Instead they nearly always relied on no more than a series of tales ground out by local rumour mills.Footnote 110
Despite the obvious limitations of rumours, some local Francoists proved more than willing to use them. Indeed, many Francoists collaborated in the trials in the belief that they acted from the highest of motives. Bereaved relatives, for example, often called for ‘justice for God and Spain’ in their remarks to tribunal officials and argued that they made their statements ‘in the interests of justice’.Footnote 111 This belief in the positive good of the trials and the virtue of their cause allowed them to push for harsh punishment. For instance, one smallholder from Villanueva de Córdoba, whose son had died in the killings that followed the suppression of the July 1936 revolt, demanded that those against whom he testified ‘be given the punishment that in all justice they deserve’.Footnote 112
Clearly, these bereaved relatives had suffered greatly and displayed a deep emotional need to see those whom they blamed for their loss punished. Nevertheless, the reality was that they could explain the killings only in terms of guilt by association with demonised political groupings rather than through credible evidence. Thus they used their agency to turn specific individuals into what Francoists presented as depraved members of the ‘red horde’ capable of any crime, no matter how heinous. In other words, precisely because they viewed themselves as victims they colluded in the harsh stigmatisation and castigation of groups of people who had threatened their social, economic and political privilege, and thereby re-established their own place in the local hierarchy. Importantly, they presented this process not in terms of revenge but in terms of achieving justice and building a better society purged of Republican ‘criminals’. Accordingly, they also helped to produce the values of a regime that did all it could to stigmatise Republicans.
Their sense of having fallen victim to criminal Republicans pervaded much testimony. Many of those who had supported the military rebellion had had property confiscated by the Republican authorities, and significant numbers from this group went on to provide testimony.Footnote 113 In their depositions the confiscation of property, imposed as punishment for rebelling against the legally elected government, was commonly referred to, in line with Francoist propaganda, as individual acts of pillage (saqueos).Footnote 114 It is perhaps unsurprising that those who understood their property to be a God-given right should view the confiscation of their property in this way.Footnote 115
Such testimony often emerged directly out of deep personal and political conflict that had developed before the war. It was not unusual for witnesses to describe intense conflict that included coming to blows with the accused in the pre-war period.Footnote 116 During the war these hatreds grew precisely because individual Republican supporters had challenged the personal power and status of some of their neighbours. In a case from Pedroche, for instance, a smallholder testified against a man who had acted as a guard in the emergency police force set up by the village authorities in the wake of the coup and had later volunteered for the Republican army. These two acts were enough to arraign him under the charge of ‘rebellion’. However, the main part of the smallholder's testimony was taken up with describing how the man had demeaned his sense of masculinity and social status by forcing him to serve him a meal in his own home.Footnote 117 In other words, the real ‘crime’ was the attempt to challenge the relations of power in both the public and private sphere, and the trials offered a means of re-establishing these.
In giving such testimony, ordinary Francoists showed that they were not, as some scholars have argued, simply doing the bidding of local political bosses.Footnote 118 Instead they strongly identified with the new regime because of their long-standing political commitment, their suffering in the Civil War and the possibilities that the regime, and the trials in particular, offered for reshaping their own lives and their own society. Accordingly, by using their agency local Francoists played a crucial role in classifying individual Republicans as particular types of ‘rebels’ and ‘criminals’. Ironically, members of the army judicial bench gave free play to this animosity because the regime claimed to be applying procedural justice. Acting out this pretence that the trials followed fair processes required tribunal members to furnish some semblance of evidence to support their verdicts. However, in the vast majority of cases there was no evidence beyond what local Francoists alleged and claimed to have happened. This meant that the tribunals frequently cited denunciations and testimony offered by local Francoists as the decisive ‘proof’ which ‘legitimised’ their sentences and which determined the punishments they imposed.Footnote 119
Conclusion
Predominantly scholars have analysed the trials in terms of the numbers processed, as procedural farces or as part of the channelling of the repression into a state institution. This article suggests that we gain further insights into the military tribunals by complementing our understanding of the numbers pushed through the trials with an examination of the trials as part of the occupation process and as a means of categorising supporters of the Republic who fell into Francoist hands. By adopting this approach the article shows that the regime brought in significant numbers of its grass-roots supporters who proved willing to help it in the enormous task of classifying its opponents as deviant and perverse. They did so precisely because the procedures behind the trials gave those from below the chance to access a state institution to settle political and personal accounts. In the process they helped to construct themselves as virtuous victims, the regime's repression as ‘legitimate’ and the enduring memory of supporters of the Republic as deviant criminals. The prosecution process, therefore, can be considered both as a means of building political victory by eliminating opponents and as a way of making Francoism a social and cultural system. Importantly, the occupying authorities realised the importance of their local collaborators in these pivotal tasks and chose to carry out this work at the very base of society.
Revealing these very local processes that lay at the heart of making Francoism is one advantage of studying the trials at the municipal level rather than focusing on the provincial picture, as many studies of the repression have done. Although no one area can speak for the whole of Spain, current research suggests that areas such as the Pozoblanco district that suffered violence under the Republic in the early Civil War, and where the authorities conducted trials in the post-war period are particularly revealing of collaboration. This is because such areas saw both significant levels of collaboration from the bereaved and concerted efforts by the authorities to gather testimony. Thus by studying the trial process from the base of society upwards we can grasp some of the ways in which the judicial repression worked in other times and places in Spain. But as the military archives are only now opening their doors to historians, this is a question that deserves further investigation across Spain and through the period 1936–45.
