Republican repression in Madrid (1936–1939)
Recruitment to GNR commenced soon, yet the Guard did not play major role in implementation of repressive measures; starting late 1936 it was already marked for merger into a new general public order formation.
[4] Outbreak of hostilities and especially the decision to hand weapons to civilians, mostly party and trade union members, produced rapid emergence of armed militias, usually though not always affiliated to political organizations.
[5] During first months of the war they by far eclipsed state formations in terms of shaping the public order ambience in Madrid, yet due to their makeshift organization, ephemeral nature and improvised modus operandi this vast force evades systematic structural description.
[18] Created also in August 1936 it was an army branch, supposed to co-ordinate logistics and financing of party militias, though it operated also its own Sección de Investigación; IGM was dissolved in November 1936.
[23] Two months later, in August 1937, the Ministry of War declared setting up a new organization, supposed to gather all espionage, counter-espionage and information activities: Servicio de Investigación Militar (SIM).
[25] The army intelligence units like Section Two of the General Staff, later known as Servicio de Información del Estado Mayor (SIEM), continued to operate independently,[26] yet except late 1936/early 1937, when military counter-espionage Special Services remained fairly active, they did not contribute to public order system in Madrid.
Another method was the systematic search, usually based on files held by prewar offices like police departments, or papers obtained from raiding premises of right-wing parties or institutions.
[32] Many of them, however, ended up in some sort of incarceration; it might have been in official prison compounds, in arrests on police stations or in detention centers operated by various groups, usually in former convents or other suitable large buildings.
[33] An interrogation followed; depending upon the results of questioning, the detainees might have been set free, transferred to another detention unit, e.g. from CPIP to DGS,[34] left in custody, marked to stand before a tribunal or selected for execution.
Corpses were then dumped at the nearest cemetery or left to be collected by municipal services later, but in the largest case of Paracuellos de Jarama, they were buried in shallow common graves.
[68] According to claims based on oral accounts there were two social groups which stood out as key targets of repression: the military and the religious, both approached as uniformed arms and propaganda departments of the same enemy.
However, the death toll was particularly heavy among politicians, including Melquíades Álvarez Gónzalez-Posada, José María Albiñana Sanz, Manuel Rico Avello, Ramón Álvarez-Valdés, Federico Salmón Amorín, Tomás Salort Olives, Rafael Esparza García, Francisco Javier Jiménez de la Puente, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, Rafael Salazar Alonso, Antonio Bermúdez Cañete and Andrés Nin Pérez .
High officials who lost their lives were Santiago Martín Báguenas and José Martinez de Velasco, the list of scholars includes Rufino Blanco Sánchez and Álvaro López Núñez.
Also sport personalities might have been subject to repression, as demonstrated by cases of Ricardo Zamora Martínez (who escaped death), Ramon Triana Arroyo and Hernando Fitz-James Stuart.
Detailed analysis of existing evidence of small-scale executions suggests that they climaxed in July (400),[76] August (650) and September (550), with smaller figures for October and November (around 300 each) and still lower in December (below 100).
There is no doubt that the scale of the killings was much smaller throughout 1937, 1938 and 1939, especially that since the spring of 1937 the Minister of Justice Garcia Olivier strove to set up a wide network of forced labor camps and advanced the thesis that rather than be punished by death for their crimes, the enemies of the Republic should redeem their deeds by hard work.
With 4 checas per square kilometer on average, they were covering the city with dense and rather regular network;[79] even at that time suburban borough of Puente de Vallecas hosted 17 such places.
However, as the Nationalist troops approached from the West, Aravaca or Casa del Campo found themselves dangerously close to the frontline and soon became the battlefield themselves, which prompted re-orientation of executions.
[87] During the first few weeks of the war the person responsible for public order in Republican Spain was Sebastián Pozas Perea, the Minister of Interior; scarcely involved in local Madrid issues, he nevertheless demonstrated complacency towards the revolutionary groupings.
JDM was set up in early November 1936; its branch responsible for public order, Consejeria de Orden Público, was assumed by Santiago Carillo Solares and his deputy José Cazorla Mauré.
[92] He left the capital in late March; at that time the key man behind forces of order was Vicente Girauta Liñares, since mid-1938 Comisario General de Seguridad in the province.
[102] Indeed, some scholars claim that early weeks of the war were marked by attempts to maintain "bourgeoisie policing",[103] the pattern that was abandoned and gave way to a new type of security while the CPIP came into existence.
Analysis of some 300 points broadly classified as checas seems to suggest that the anarchist CNT-FAI and the communist PCE controlled some 25% of them each, with the rest distributed among PSOE, JSU, various Republican groupings and politically ambiguous units like UHP.
[105] The CPIP itself was theoretically controlled by a 30-member board divided equally among a number of parties,[106] but its investigative squads reflected clear anarchist domination: 40% were related to CNT-FAI, 19% to PSOE and 19% to PCE.
[19] Definitely more important MVR was similarly the socialist fiefdom; its director Manzano was a PSOE man at the time[109] and 59% of militiamen registered were members of UGT; however, PCE affiliations marked 17% of them recorded and membership in the communist-dominated JSU was indicated by 14%.
Within JDM, the public order department was seized by the communists, as reflected by appointments of Carillo and Cazorla,[111] especially since PSOE-dominated CPIP and IGM were soon disbanded, and MVR followed suit some time afterwards.
[118] It appears that throughout most of 1938 the Madrid public order system remained a politically balanced structure with Communists (DEDIDE), Anarchists (military counter-intelligence, militias) and Socialists (Seguridad, SIM) keeping each other in check.
Few protagonists of the Madrid policing units were captured by the Nationalists in course of the war, but it was the case of Atadell, who in November 1936 was intercepted in Canary Islands when the French cruise liner that he had boarded in St. Nazaire was about to set off to Cuba.
Apart from frequent press notes, there were tens of documentary, paradocumentary or historical books on what was dubbed the "Red Terror" published every year, and Madrid featured prominently in most of them; it is estimated that some 450 related works were released until 1975 but mostly during the first two decades of Francoism.
Research on the Loyalist zone has been reinvigorated recently, resulting in at least three major works dedicated to Madrid;[151] Some specific issues, especially the Paracuellos killings, also earned a sizeable literature.
