Titans of History

FRANCO

1892–1975

I am responsible only to God and history.

General Franco

General Francisco Franco, the generalissimo of Spain from 1939 to 1975, is in some ways the forgotten tyrant, his deeds overshadowed by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, yet he was truly one of history’s monsters. In the 1930s, this fascistic warlord won power with brutality and terror in a savage civil war, aided by his ally Hitler, and proceeded to terrorize the civilian population of Spain for twenty-five years. As democracy thrived in the rest of western Europe following the Second World War, his brutal military dictatorship continued to crush dissent, and to shoot and torture his supposed enemies.

Franco was born in northwest Spain in 1892, in the naval city of Ferrol. His mother was a pious and conservative upper-middle-class Catholic; his father a difficult and eccentric man who expected his son to follow him into the navy. Due to naval cutbacks, however, at just fourteen years old, Franco entered the army instead. Fiercely professional, he soon carved out his reputation as a brave and driven soldier, becoming a captain in 1916 and the youngest general in Spain in 1926, at age thirty-four.

Although staunchly loyal to the monarchy, Franco was not overtly involved in politics until 1931, when the Spanish king abdicated, leaving the government in the hands of left-wing republicans. When the conservatives won power back two years later, they identified Franco as a powerful potential ally and promoted him to major general, instructing him to suppress an uprising by Asturian miners in October 1934. Election victory for the left-wing Popular Front in 1936, however, saw Franco effectively demoted and sent to the Canary Islands, but just months later the right-wing Spanish nationalist bloc called on the army to join them in rebellion against the government, which had failed to stabilize the country. The Spanish Civil War had begun.

In a radio broadcast from the Canary Islands in July 1936, Franco declared he would join the rebels with immediate effect and, after mixed fortunes for Nationalist forces in Morocco and Madrid, he was declared generalissimo, effectively the leader of the Nationalist cause during the three years of war that followed.

Franco’s wartime campaign was notorious for his indiscriminate brutalizing of civilian populations, aided on occasions by German and Italian fascist governments. Franco organized a White Terror in which 200,000 people were murdered. The most infamous atrocity was the 1937 market-day bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the German Condor Legion. Though it was not a military target and had no air defenses, the Luftwaffe pounded the town throughout the day and swooped over outgoing roads to mow down fleeing civilians as the town was engulfed in a fireball. An estimated 1654 people were slaughtered.

As Generalissimo Francisco Franco signed his deathlists, he would place E for execute for those to die, C for those spared and, most macabre and revealing of all, GARROTE Y PRENSA (Garrote with press coverage) next to the names of certain well-known people. Nothing so sums up the miserable wickedness of the victors of the Spanish Civil War. Franco resembled the 19th-century Spanish general who on his deathbed was asked if he forgave his enemies. “I have none.” he replied, “I had them all shot.”

For a generation of left-wing intellectuals, the struggle of Republican Spain to defend itself against Franco’s Nationalists epitomized the struggle between socialist progress and fascist reaction. Idealistic intellectuals such as George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and the French novelist André Malraux flocked to Spain to fight for the Republican cause. In total, about 32,000 foreign volunteers from Europe and America fought in the campaign, while Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy pumped money and troops into Franco’s army—and dropped bombs on the civilian populations in Republican-dominated areas.

In support of the Republic, Stalin’s USSR supplied 331 tanks and 600 planes, together with a large number of pilots, in return for Spanish gold reserves. The Red Terror in Spain, according to recent historical research, accounted for the deaths of somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 people. Precise figures are unknown.

During the bloody summer of 1936, 8000 suspected Nationalists were massacred in Madrid, and another 8000 in Catalonia—both Republican-controlled areas. Wealthy farmers, industrialists and those associated with the Catholic Church received particularly brutal treatment at the hands of the various Republican factions. Nearly 7000 clerics, including nearly 300 nuns, were killed, despite being noncombatants.

Some Republicans defended these massacres on the grounds that the other side was worse. Others tried to stand back. Commenting on the atrocities committed by his own side, the anarchist intellectual Federica Montseny noted “a lust for blood inconceivable in honest men” before the war.

One of the ironies of history is that while the Stalinist terror within the Republicans is as notorious as the Red Terror that slaughtered supposed rightists, Franco and the Nationalists killed many, many more: some 200,000 were murdered by Franco in his White Terror during the war, while another half million remained in his torture chambers and camps afterward. Franco really delivered on his associate General Queipo’s promise: “For every person you kill, we will kill ten.”

Victory, when it finally came, was not enough for Franco. “The war is over,” he declared in 1939, “but the enemy is not dead.” He had drawn up lists of reds during the conflict: alleged communists to be arrested. Now in control of the state, he set about rounding up and liquidating his enemies. Hundreds of thousands of Republicans fled the country as, between 1939 and 1943, anything between 100,000 and 200,000 noncombatants or surrendering troops were summarily and systematically executed.

Repression characterized every aspect of Franco’s regime. He nominally re-established the monarchy—without appointing a king—but retained all executive powers in his own hands. Democracy was abandoned, criticism regarded as treason, imprisonment and abuse of opponents rife, Parliament a mere puppet to the executive, rival political parties and strikes banned, the Catholic Church given a free rein over social policy and education, the media muzzled, creative talent strangled by strict censorship and any dissent ruthlessly suppressed by his secret police, who practiced widespread torture and murder right up to Franco’s death in 1975. Dismissive of international criticism, Franco himself insisted on personally signing all death warrants until his death while his family married into the aristocracy and amassed colossal wealth.

A true mark of the regime was Franco’s shameful decision to grant asylum to Ante Pavelić, the fascist dictator of Croatia during the Second World War—a man thought to be responsible for over 600,000 deaths. Franco also during that time repaid Hitler and Mussolini’s support during the Civil War by sending troops—albeit limited in number—to assist the Nazis in their fight against the Soviets. But he survived by resisting Hitler’s request for him to join the war and then posing as an anti-communist after 1945.

The ghost of Franco has yet to be completely exorcized from Spanish politics, as recently as 2004 a commission having been set up to compensate his victims and oversee the exhumation of the mass graves.