IBMT Chair Jim Jump reports…

The ‘Echoes of Spain’ mosaic in London’s Portobello Road now has two plaques explaining the significance and origins of the memorial.

Located under the Westway flyover in the heart of the famous street market, the mural depicts the links between the Spanish Civil War and the Notting Hill area of West London. Several local volunteers joined the International Brigades and many Spanish Republican exiles settled in the neighbourhood.

One of the plaques is a key, indicating the various people and events that appear in the mosaic. A second plaque records that it was unveiled on 18 October 2005 by Spanish ambassador Carlos Miranda and International Brigade veteran and IBMT President Jack Jones.

The new plaques have been funded by the Westway Trust, which has worked with a group of local activists who help look after the memorial. One of them, Manuel Moreno, son of local Republican refugees, says the group has plans to add three further plaques and a QR code linking to more information. 

‘We want to give details about the International Brigades, the Basque refugee children and the Spanish Republicans who fought in the British Army in the Second World War, many of whom made this part of London their home.’

He added: ‘We also want to remember Eddie Adams, a prominent local progressive activist, who was the driving force behind the memorial.’

Manuel Moreno: plans for additional plaques.

Titled ‘They shall not pass – Echoes of Spain – 1936-1939 – Ecos de España – No pasarán’ and measuring five metres in length and more than two metres high, the mosaic pictures Portobello Road itself, on which are ‘Aid Spain’ campaigners and a red flag with the hammer and sickle, while the road disappears into a horizon of Basque mountains. 

In the centre is the Gernikako Arbola (Tree of Gernika), with bombs raining down on it and, further right, the Habana, with a refugee children crammed on the deck. 

Elsewhere are some of the volunteers in the International Brigades from North Kensington, which includes Notting Hill, historically a working-class area, but now one with extensive pockets of expensive housing. 

Also in the foreground is Mari Pepa Colomer (full name María Josep Colomer i Luque), among the first Spanish women to qualify as a pilot. She served with the Spanish Republic’s airforce during the Spanish Civil War and chose to live in England after the war.

The mosaic was created by students of Kensington and Chelsea College under the direction of artists Maureen Pepper and Barbara Gorton. Its dedication reads: ‘This mosaic commemorates the Spanish refugees who fled fascist Spain and those men and women from Kensington who fought in the International Brigade and supported the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 against Franco and his fascist allies.’

Words spoken by IBMT Chair Jim Jump at the unveiling of the memorial to the Doncaster International Brigade volunteers on 12 February…

First a big thank-you to Councillor David Shaw, former councillor Tosh McDonald and everyone at Doncaster City Council who has made this excellent memorial possible.

Eighty-eight years ago today, 12 February 1937, the British Battalion of the International Brigades went into action for the first time in the Jarama valley, south-east of Madrid. The battalion paid a heavy price: 150 men were killed, including one of the volunteers from Doncaster, Herbert Tagg of King’s Road, Doncaster. He was 43 and left a widow and three children.

Sheffield’s Daily Independent reported the death under the headline ‘Doncaster man killed in Spain fighting’, mentioning also a Leicester man, Fred Sykes, who was living in Sheffield before he travelled to Spain.

The report said: ‘Both men met their death in the decisive battle at Jarama on 27 February, when the British Battalion of the International Brigade successfully resisted the attempt of Franco’s forces to break through the Madrid-Valencia road.’

The report went on to say that in his last letter home Tagg wrote: ‘Here there is a fine army, a fine people and a fine purpose. I don’t want to come back until fascism is beaten.’

There is memorial olive tree behind an information board about the International Brigades.

Herbert Tagg was a miner, born in Oakerthorpe, Derbyshire. He had worked in collieries in the Mansfield area and been politically active for many years, including receiving three months hard labour after being arrested on a strike picket.

On that sense he was typical of many volunteers – working-class political and union activists who resisted the wage cuts of the 1920s and 30s, took part in Hunger Marches and rent strikes and fought Britain’s home-grown fascists.

They were, as folk director Ken Loach has said, ‘the cream of their generation’.

In the IBMT’s records there are 16 volunteers who went to Spain who were born or who died in Doncaster or who were living here when they set off to join the International Brigades.

There may well be more. The records are often patchy. Many gave false names or temporary addresses. They were after all defying their own government, which threatened to prosecute them for fighting in a foreign war.

Of the 2,500 volunteers from the British Isles, the fatality rate was more than one in five – 530 of them died in total.

But there must have been a lucky star over Doncaster at that time. Out of the local volunteers, only Herbert Tagg made the ultimate sacrifice.

Like him, six others were miners. We should name them all.

Hector Barber, born in Doncaster in 1906, was a wood saver canvasser in the coal mines and a member of the Yorkshire Miners’ Federation. He was wounded in the Battle of the Ebro in the summer of 1938 and spent several weeks in hospital in Vich. He is listed as a ‘Good comrade’ in the British Battalion files. He died, aged 78, in Doncaster in 1985.

Jack Foster, born in Hemsworth, lived in Grange Road, Moorends, Doncaster. He served in the John Brown Battery in Spain and is believed to have died in 1953.

Steve Gilks was born in Chesterfield and gave an address in Mansfield Crescent, Shelton. He died in Sheffield, aged 50, in 1951.

Charles Giles was an unemployed miner when he arrived in Spain, giving an address in Greendyke Lane, Doncaster. He was medically discharged in March 1937 soon after enlisting. However, he served in the West Yorkshire Regiment during the Second world War and was taken prisoner by the Japanese in Malaya in 1942. He died, aged 51, in Doncaster in February 1957.

Harold Horbury was born in Doncaster in 1904 and was a colliery surface worker. He gave an address in Barnsley when he arrived in Spain. He served in the British Battalion in the battles at Jarama, Brunete, Belchite, Aragón and Teruel and in the 15th Brigade’s kitchen from May 1938 until returning home in September of that year. He died in Barnsley in 1974, aged 70.

Tom Nottingham was born in Grimethorpe, but during the Spanish Civil War was living in Doncaster, where he died in 1960, aged 56. in Spain he was captured when the British Battalion was ambushed by Mussolini’s troops at Calaceite in March 1938. He was a prisoner of war for 10 months at the notorious San Pedro de Cardeña prison camp near Burgos before returning home in an exchange for Italian POWs.

The other nine Doncaster men were:

Frank Ayres, born in Doncaster, was a railway worker and active trade unionist. Aged 29, in 1925 he visited the Soviet Union as chair of Doncaster Trades Council. He spoke three languages and in Spain worked at Valdeganga hospital at Albacete and at Uclés hospital, in Cuenca. He also fought with 129th Artillery Division. He married a Spanish nurse, Anita de Ginar, both moving to live in Battersea, London, in 1939. He died, aged 86, in retirement in southern France.

Clockwise from left: Ralph Nicholas, Herbert Tagg, Clarence Wildsmith, Eugene Fogarty, Hector Barber, Tom Nottingham being greeted by his daughters on his return home, Thomas McNulty and Harold Horbury.

Eugene Fogarty was born in Washington DC and was a medic in Spain, working for seven months at Villanueva hospital. After the war he was a nurse at St Mary’s Hospital, London, until 1950 when he left for a similar position in Doncaster, where he died, aged 68, in 1968.

Thomas Greenfield’s service details are sketchy, but he gave an address in Catherine Street, Doncaster, when he arrived in Spain. 

William Hooton was a Doncaster-born painter. His service was brief and he was repatriated in May 1937. He emigrated to Australia in 1959, where he died seven years later, aged 67.

Thomas McNulty was born in Hanley, Staffordshire, but died in Doncaster, aged 71. He was a merchant seaman and fought with British and Lincoln Battalions at Brunete, Quinto, Belchite and Fuentes de Ebro.

Ralph Nicholas was a motor mechanic, born in Hitchen, but was living in Doncaster when he went to Spain in January 1937. He was wounded at the Battle of Brunete in 1937 and again at the Ebro in the following summer. It is not known when he died.

William Parlett was a labourer, born in Sunderland, but who died in Doncaster in January 2000 at the age of 88. He was taken prisoner at the Battle of Teruel in the winter of the 1937/38 and was a held at the San Pedro de Cardeña prison camp. In the Second World War he was decorated for his service in the merchant navy, which included the Arctic convoys to Russia.

Edward Whittaker was a fitter and mechanic, born in Pontefract in 1906, and known to be living in Doncaster in 1939 soon after he arrived back from Spain. He died in Doncaster, aged 84. In Spain he served as a company armourer.

Clarence Wildsmith was an electrician and billiard hall manager, born in Barnsley. His address was in Worcester Avenue, Wheatley. He fought with the 15th Brigade’s Anti-Tank Battery. He died in Doncaster, aged 83, in October 1988.

Today we remember these 16 men and all those who fought alongside them in Spain. We remember too all those who supported them at home as part of a mass ‘Aid for Spain’ movement. The movement showed – not for the first or last time – that millions of ordinary British people had more sense than their government at the time. 

They knew that fascism, that Hitler and Mussolini, had to be defeated in Spain or else there would be another world war.

By contrast the Conservative-led national governments of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain were keen on appeasing the fascist dictators.

Their policy of ‘non-intervention’ was designed to facilitate a Franco victory in Spain. Such was their hostility to the progressive Popular Front government of the Spanish Republic that they were prepared to sacrifice democracy in Spain – as well as in Czechoslovakia – in the hope that the fascist dictators would leave the British Empire alone and instead attack the Soviet Union. 

There are many lessons here for today. Fascism has not gone away. Nor has the predilection of many liberal democracies to side with fascist or authoritarian regimes rather than with progressive governments and forces.

While in Doncaster, talking about the Spanish Civil War, we must mention one of its favourite sons, Rodney Bickerstaffe, former Unison general secretary and trustee and patron of the IBMT. 

He would have been proud to have been here today.

Rodney’s mother-to-be, Pearl Bickerstaffe, a Doncaster lass, was a children’s nurse in Thorp Arch. Still in her teens she compiled an extraordinary scrapbook about the war in Spain. The scrapbook’s two volumes were a prized family possession. This meant that Rodney carried Spain’s tragedy in his heart and knew about the heroism and sacrifice of the International Brigades and how, as his mother told him, the world should have listened to their warnings. 

Then, when Rodney became active in the trade union movement, his hero and mentor was Jack Jones, general secretary of the mighty Transport & General Workers’ Union, who had fought in the Battle of of the Ebro with the British Battalion.

Rodney was a founding trustee of the IBMT and later one its patrons. 

The IBMT keeps alive the memory and spirit of the men and women who fought fascism and defended democracy in the Spanish Civil War. Their example of International solidarity and anti-fascism, as the inscription on our national memorial on London’s Southbank puts it, ‘inspired the world’.

The final word today should go to one of the Doncaster volunteers, Tom Nottingham. The Doncaster Gazette reported his return home on 16 February 1939. A photo shows him with fellow volunteers Ralph Nicholas and Clarence Wildsmith being greeted by supporters including Mr AE Hall, Doncaster divisional Labour Party chairman, and Mrs Tagg, widow of Herbert Tagg. 

Soon afterwards he wrote a full-page article for the Gazette headlined ‘Ten months in Franco prison’, telling of his time as a POW. He concluded by saying: ‘It has been a big ordeal and I feel very weak through having insufficient food for so long – I lost 31lbs during my imprisonment – but I would go out and fight again if the call came, in the interests of democracy against fascism.

Supporters at the unveiling on 12 February, including David Shaw (right), Tosh McDonald (fifth from right) and Jim Jump (back, centre).

Poet John Cornford and writer Ralph Fox were among 13 British and Irish International Brigaders remembered at an international symposium in Lopera, the town near Córdoba where they were killed during fighting 88 years ago.

Seven of the 13 killed were Irish, reflecting the high proportion of volunteers from Ireland in the 145-strong English-speaking No.1 Company of the mostly French Marseillaise Battalion that took part in the Battle of Lopera in December 1936. 

Until the creation of the British Battalion at the of the month, British and Irish volunteers were assigned to separate units in French and German battalions.

The symposium saw sculptor Frank Casey reunited with his relief portrait of John Cornford. He created the memorial in his studio in St Albans and it was shipped to Spain, where it was unveiled in 2019 in Lopera’s Jardín de los Poetas Ingleses (Garden of the English Poets).

This was the first time that the Scottish-born sculptor had seen his bronze tribute to Cornford – a Cambridge graduate and the great grandson of Charles Darwin – who died on 28 December 1936, the day after his 21st birthday.

Frank Casey beside his memorial bust of John Cornford.

Also commemorated in the town’s memorial garden is the novelist and biographer Ralph Fox, who was killed on the same day, aged 36. He was a renowned journalist, novelist, and historian, best remembered as a biographer of Lenin and Genghis Khan.  

The occasion was an international congress in Lopera on the International Brigades and the Battle of Lopera on 13/14 December. It brought together experts and writers on the International Brigades from several countries.

They included French historian Rémi Skoutelsky, Giles Tremlett, author of ‘The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War’ (2021) and local historian José Luis Pantoja Vallejo – the congress convener – who with brother Antonio has written a detailed study of the battle ‘La XIV Brigada Internacional en Andalucía’ (2006).

Ralph Fox is pictured (centre) on the poster for the event in Lopera.

There was also a session on the memory of the International Brigades, with representatives from memorial groups in France, Poland and Spain taking part, as well as IBMT Chair Jim Jump from Britain. Another speaker was Harry Owens of the Friends off the International Brigades in Ireland.

Speaking about how the volunteers are remembered in Britain, Jump said that interest and admiration for them remained high, with new books being written about then and new memorials being raised in their honour.

Jim Jump (standing) addressing the symposium, with pictures of John Cornford and Ralph Fox projected behind him.

‘They are held in great esteem for being the first Britons to fight fascism and for being proved right by history,’ he added.

Frank Casey said he was delighted to again see his memorial to John Cornford. ‘It’s in the right place, so near to where he died among the love trees.’

Casey is also known for creating the Blockade Runners Memorial in Glasgow in tribute too thew merchant navy crews who continued to sail ships to Spanish Republican-held ports despite attacks by German, Italian and Francoist planes and submarines.

This poem by John Cornford (above) dates from 1936, shortly before his death. It is dedicated to his girlfriend Margot Heinemann.

Heart of the heartless world,
Dear heart, the thought of you
Is the pain at my side,
The shadow that chills my view.

The wind rises in the evening,
Reminds that autumn is near.
I am afraid to lose you,
I am afraid of my fear.

On the last mile to Huesca,]
The last fence for our pride,
Think so kindly, dear, that I
Sense you at my side.

And if bad luck should lay my strength
Into the shallow grave,
Remember all the good you can;
Don’t forget my love.

Jim Jump reviews ‘Spanish Sky Spreads Its Stars: The story of the Thälmann Battalion and the first Germans in armed struggle against fascism’ by Ewald P Schulz (International Brigade Commemoration Committee, Belfast, 2024).

More than 4,000 Germans fought in the International Brigades or in the anti-fascist militias and other Spanish military units during the Spanish Civil War. Over 1,000 of them gave their lives.

Their story is recounted in this booklet by Ewald P Schulz, a Berlin-based lawyer and journalist who is active in the KFSR, the IBMT’s sister organisation in Germany. The booklet’s title is taken from the song ‘The Thälmann Column’ by composer Paul Dessau and his wife Gudrun: ‘Spain’s sky spreads its stars over our trenches / And the morning already greets from afar’.

Usually known as the Thaelmann Battalion in Spain, the battalion was named after Ernst Thälmann, leader of the KPD German Communist Party. He was arrested as soon as Hitler took power in 1933 and executed on the Führer’s personal orders in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944.

As Schulz points out, the German volunteers differed from their British, Dutch, French and Scandinavian counterparts in that they were effectively homeless. Many were already in exile from Nazism and those who travelled to Spain from Germany could also not return home.

The same was true for the battalion’s Austrians following the Anschluss of March 1938, when Germany marched into Austria.

The decision to fight fascism in Spain – on occasions pitted against the airborne Condor Legion sent by Hitler to help Franco’s rebels – had a special meaning for the German volunteers.

‘For the first time they had the opportunity to stand up to the fascists and to oppose their violence,’ he writes. 

Between 60 and 70 per cent of the German volunteers were communists, the rest mostly social democrats, anarchists or supporters of other left organisations. ‘They were all united by the conviction that Spain should not suffer the same fate as Germany.’

Three Germans are given brief biographies. Hermann Drumm, a miner from Saarland in south-west Germany, was a member of the SPD social democrats and became a company commander before being killed, aged 38, at Belchite in September 1937.

Käthe Hempel (1911-1966) was originally from Waldheim, a town west of Dresden. In the summer of 1936 she was living in Switzerland, from where she cycled to Barcelona to take part in the planned People’s Olympiad, which was being organised as an anti-fascist alternative to the Berlin Olympics. She was a communist and served as a nurse in Spain.

Alois Weisberger (1904-?) was another miner from Saarland and was one of the few members of the Catholic Centre Party to join the Thälmann Battalion. The party, indeed, had voted in favour of Hitler’s Enabling Act that gave the Nazi leader untrammelled powers. After the war in Spain, Weisberger was interned in France and in 1943 handed over to the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp.

The German volunteers fought in all the great battles of the war in Spain: the defence of Madrid, Jarama, Guadalajara, Brunete, Teruel and the Ebro. Having no homes to go to after the International Brigades were stood down in September 1938, the Germans, along with the Austrians and Czechs, took up arms again in January 1939, bravely covering the flight of refugees towards the French border as Franco’s forces advanced through Catalonia.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the booklet is the account of what happened to the surviving Thälmanns after the war. Interned by the French in a network of camps, some managed to secure visas to Britain, Mexico, the Soviet Union and the US. Others were recruited to French labour battalions. Those still in the camps following the French surrender to the Germans in 1940 were sent to concentration camps, where many perished, or escaped to join the French Resistance.

After the defeat of Nazism in 1945, contrasting receptions awaited the veterans in West and East Germany. In the Federal Republic, they fell foul of the state’s official anti-communist ideology, which included the banning of the KPD in 1956.

While former members of the Condor Legion received pensions for their service in Spain, there was no such recognition for those who had fought fascism and Nazism in Spain.

In the GDR the International Brigade veterans were officially honoured. They served in leadership roles in the East German army as well as in the country’s police and in government positions. 

Some, Schulz acknowledges, were regarded with suspicion during the Stalin era, above all any who had lived in Western countries before returning to Germany. A few lost their jobs and were unjustly persecuted, such as prominent writer Walter Janka.

In contrast with West Germany, however, the volunteers in Spain entered the cultural canon of the GDR. ‘Countless books, songs and films were published. Streets were named after Spanish fighters. Medals were awarded and every child learned about the war in Spain at school.’

Born in 1968 in West Germany, Schulz says he only found out about the Thälmanns after 2000. Most older left-wingers in the FRG first came across their story through the songs of singer-composer Ernst Busch, two albums of which were released in the 1980s.

The songs had been recorded in Barcelona in 1938 with the help of an International Brigade choir. Some of the recordings were released in New York in 1940 under the title ‘Six Songs for Democracy’, with American actor, singer and civil rights campaigner Paul Robeson writing in the sleeve notes: ‘Valiant and heroic was the part played by the International Brigade in the glorious struggle of the Spanish Republic.’ 

Schulz’s text for this booklet is based on a talk he gave in 2023 as part of Belfast’s annual Féile an Phobail (People’s Festival). The event was hosted at the Shankill Library by the IBMT-affiliated International Brigade Commemoration Committee. The booklet also includes tributes to Manus O’Riordan, the son of Cork Brigader Michael O’Riordan, and Belfast-born volunteer Paddy McAllister.

Copies of the booklet can be ordered from the IBCC for £6 plus £2.50 p&p within the UK. Contact Lynda Walker of the IBCC for more details.

Here's the speech given by IBMT Chair Jim Jump at the commemoration on 7 October 2023 at the memorial to the International Brigaders from Stockton-on-Tees…

It’s a great honour to be able say a few words here on behalf of the IBMT during this our Annual General Meeting weekend in Stockton-on-Tees.

This is a town with with a proud history of anti-fascist struggle – like the 3,000 men and women who chased Mosley’s Blackshirts out of town in the Battle of Stockton almost exactly 90 years ago on 10 September 1933.

Several of the Teessiders at Market Cross on that day would later travel to Spain to fight Franco’s fascists.

They knew that fascism was a uniquely dangerous creed, with its toxic mix of ethno-nationalism, racism and militarism – evils that are still with us today.

In some ways they were ordinary people. Looking at the Teesside volunteers, they were scaffolders, merchant seamen, labourers, carpenters, clerks, foundry workers and dockers.

In other ways they were far from ordinary. They were, in the words of Ken Loach, ‘the cream of their generation’ and they didn’t simply appear out of the blue.

Natalie Thorp (left), great niece of William Carson, and Liz Estensen, daughter of Otto Estensen, under the memorial to the International Brigades in Stockton's Wasp Nest Yard that names them and six other men from the town who went to Spain.

Pictured above, Jim Jump raises the IBMT banner under the Stockton memorial.

These Teessiders were men whose political education had been forged in those battles against home-grown fascism, against the grinding state-enforced poverty of the 1930s, in the unemployed workers’ movement, in the hunger marches, in their communist and labour party branches, in the YCL and the Labour League of Youth. 

What also makes them extraordinary is that they were willing, and in some cases did, lay their lives on the line. Nine of the 24 Teesside men made the supreme sacrifice…

…Four of them from Stockton: George Bright, Ron Dennison, Myles Harding and Bert Overton.

The others were Thomas Carter, Martin Durkin, Bob Elliott, David Halloran and John Unthank.

To mangle the words of Christy Moore’s ‘Viva La Quince Brigada’, ‘Let us all remember them today.’

Or to steal a slogan adopted by trade union campaigners for safety in the construction industry, one that chimes with the values of the International Brigades, ‘Remember the dead. Fight for the living.' 

The men and women who went to Spain warned – and they were proved right – that there would be a world war unless fascism – in the form of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini trampling over Spain’s elected Popular Front government – unless fascism was stopped on the battlefields of Madrid, Jarama, Brunete, Aragón and the Ebro.

The British government had other ideas. It preferred to play footsie with the dictators in the hope that they would turn their guns on the Soviet Union. 

Dressed up as neutrality, Britain’s policy of so-called non-intervention doomed the Spanish Republic by denying its government the right to buy arms to defend itself. 

Let us never forget that these Men of Munich, Neville Chamberlain and the other appeasers, preferred to see a Franco victory than the survival of a progressive government in Spain.

Lots of lessons there for today, not least that most in our establishment will aways serve their class interests rather than the national interest. And they will tell lies in doing so.

At the Stockton commemoration: IBMT Scotland Secretary Mike Arnott holds the Scottish Contingent banner. Also pictured (from left) are IBMT Secretary Megan Dobney and IBMT Trustee Dolores Long.

These Teesside volunteers knew better – as did all the 2,500 from Britain and Ireland who went to Spain between 1936 and 1939, whether as soldiers, sailors, pilots, medics, nurses, doctors or administrators. 

Five hundred and thirty of them gave their lives, and we remain humbled by their sacrifice and thank them for their inspirational example of international solidarity and anti-fascism.

We honour also all those lucky enough to survive the war in Spain. Many continued the fight against fascism in the Second World War – and indeed for the better world that they were defending in Spain.

And I want to leave you with the words of two of those who fought on until 1945.

The first is Johnny Longstaff. In the Second World War he joined the London Rifle Brigade. He later recalled his feelings before battle in North Africa:

I knew that some of my friends would die… I knew that others would be wounded and possibly lose a limb… I had not lost the scent of battle, the smell of blood, the stench of the bloated dead, the cries of the wounded… Once again I would be seeing fear in men’s faces … and I recalled how bravely the Republican Army and International Brigades had fought even though ill clad, ill armed and hungry and with little else but high morale and a will to win… Now, in a few days’ time, I would be fighting the same enemy.

Finally, we have the words of David Marshall, who took part in the Normandy landings and the liberation of Belsen. 

As a dole office clerk in Middlesbrough, he had witnessed at first hand the humiliating poverty and obscene inequalities of the 1930s – and knew that another world was possible. 

This is what he wrote in one of his poems:

They came from every corner of the earth
So many men from distant lands
Who took to arms in the defence
Of Spain’s Republic.
Madrid the magnet that drew us all
Along slow roads to Spain – at last a star
For desperate men, sensing the gathering storm
And we that fought to warn a watching world
Were called false prophets by appeasers

Remember the dead and fight for the living. ¡No pasarán!

Jim Jump reviews ‘Architects of Terror: Paranoia, Conspiracy and Anti-Semitism in Franco’s Spain’ by Paul Preston (HarperCollins, 2023). The review appears in the current issue of the IBMT magazine ¡No Pasarán!

Before the Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 there were no more than 6,000 Jews living in Spain and the Communist Party was tiny. Yet the plotters who launched the coup that started the war declared they were fighting, not the Spanish Republic’s elected government, but a Jewish-masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy. Their enemy was an ‘Anti-Spain’ responsible for every disaster that had beset the fatherland, from the Muslim invasion to the loss of empire.

Such an interpretation of Spanish history may have been chronologically bizarre, as Paul Preston notes in this characteristically powerful and chillingly entertaining book*. But it proved highly effective in justifying and generating enthusiasm for the uprising that brought General Franco to power and in the process killed half a million Spaniards and inflicted misery and exile on countless more.  

Antisemitism has deep roots in Spanish history, going back to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and the Catholic Church’s efforts in the Inquisition to ‘cleanse’ the country of non-believers. Then, early in the 1930s came the publication of the fabricated antisemitic text, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which supposedly showed Jewish plans for world domination. The forgery found fertile ground among the enemies of the newly installed Republic, having already been seized upon by Hitler and the Nazis to underpin their antisemitic creed. Its influence in Spain outlived the Third Reich. Twelve editions were published, alongside many other antisemitic tirades, during the Franco dictatorship that lasted until the generalísimo’s death in 1975. 

As the tide of the Second World War turned against the Axis powers, efforts were made to deny that antisemitism had been central to Francoist propaganda. Preston demolishes the myth that paints Franco as a saviour of Jews during the Holocaust. Up to 35,000 Jewish refugees did manage to pass through Spain to safety during the Second World War, many of them clandestinely. Others were turned away at the border or imprisoned, and Jewish relief organisations were banned. A few heroic Spanish diplomats – in Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia – took unilateral initiatives to save hundreds of Jewish lives. But consular protection for Sephardic Jews in Greece was refused (at least 45,000 were sent from Salonica to Auschwitz), Franco did nothing to save hundreds of Jews with Spanish nationality in Nazi concentration camps and German Jewish refugees were handed over to the Gestapo.

Several prominent Republican politicians were freemasons. The Catholic Church hated them and so did Franco, though for him it was personal. They were ‘the great invasion of evil’ and, he wrote in 1962, ‘atheistic traitors in exile, delinquents, swindlers, men who betrayed their wives’, the latter categorisation a thinly concealed swipe at his father, who was a mason and a womaniser.

His antipathy to the left was just as pathological. In 1938, with the civil war still raging, the Caudillo authorised funding for Dr Antonio Vallejo Nágera, head of the military psychiatric services, to find the ‘red gene’ that linked Marxism with mental disorders and moral degeneracy. The premise was that left-wingers were polluting the pure Spanish race with Jewish strains. Nágera’s team of investigators included two German scientific advisers and tests were carried out on captured International Brigaders and Republican women prisoners.

The foul lunacy of the Jewish-masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy theory – a classic case of ‘fake news’, according to the author – is brought to life via mini-biographies of six of its ardent adherents, each with their own chapter. They are a motley and unsavoury crew. There is the police chief and intelligence agent Mauricio Carlavilla, who kept a portrait of Hitler on his desk until retirement in 1957 and who was the author of several diatribes, including ‘Sodomitas’, which set out to link homosexuality with communism. 

The influential priest and author Juan Tusquets began compiling lists of Jews and Freemasons well before the Civil War and, at the cost of innumerable lives lost and ruined, continued his work within the Sección Judeo-Masónica of Franco’s military intelligence agency. Just as well-placed in Francoist circles was the poet José María Pemán, who extolled the brutal murder of Republican supporters in the reign of terror that followed the 1936 uprising. The war was necessary to protect the Virgin from being Russian or Jewish and ‘had been sent by God to teach Spaniards a lesson, to permit them to purify themselves, to leave behind their past sins and errors, and to reach the end pure and cleansed’.

Perhaps even more crazed was the aristocratic, polo-playing sadist Gonzalo de Aguilera who, as Franco’s press officer during the civil war, would explain to foreign correspondents in perfect English (his mother was Scottish) that, like plague-ridden rats, the Spanish masses had been infected with the virus of Bolshevism. He blamed this on sewers and modern plumbing, which had allowed too many of these ‘animals’ to survive. A vicious bully and toadying snob, he almost certainly sexually abused his daughter Magdalena over several years. The end of his life was fittingly and gruesomely tragic. By 1964 he was seriously paranoid and liable to fits of wild rage. In one of these, he shot dead his two sons at the family estate. He was locked up in an asylum in nearby Salamanca, where he died in the following year.

The final profiles are of two generals in Franco’s rebel army: Emilio Mola and Gonzalo Queipo de Llano. Both professed to be waging a crusade to save Spain from, as Queipo de Llano put it, ‘Marxist hordes’ and ‘the [Jewish] race that propagates communism, hoards gold and aspires to subjugate the world’. Mola was cold-bloodedly responsible for the murders of some 40,000 civilians in northern Spain. Queipo de Llano, Franco’s corrupt military strongman in Seville, was a bombastic psychopath who oversaw the murder and rape of thousands of Republican supporters in the working-class districts of the city. 

Mola died in a plane crash during the Civil War, while Queipo de Llano lived until 1951. Of the trio profiled by Preston who survived until Spain’s return to democracy, only Carlavilla seems to have stuck to his ideological guns, though his final years were spent in a sordid room in a Madrid lodging house. Tusquets and Pemán by contrast tried with some success to deny and downplay their pasts. Preston’s devastating new book will hopefully make sure that, in posterity at least, they won’t get away with it.

Main picture: Franco and Hitler meet in Hendaye in 1940. Photo: Heinrich Hoffmann/Cc-by-sa-3.0-de