The White Terror (Spanish: Terror Blanco), also called the Francoist Repression (Spanish: Represión franquista), was the political repression and mass violence against dissidents that were committed by the Nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), as well as during the first nine years of the regime of General Francisco Franco. From 1936–1945, Francoist Spain officially designated supporters of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939), liberals, socialists of different stripes, anarchists, intellectuals, homosexuals, Freemasons, and Jews as well as Basque, Catalan, Andalusian, and Galician nationalists as enemies.
The Francoist Repression was motivated by the right-wing notion of social cleansing (Spanish: limpieza social), which meant that the Nationalists immediately started executing people viewed as enemies of the state upon capturing territory. The Spanish Catholic Church alleged the killings were a response to the similar mass killings of their clergy, religious, and laity during the Republican Red Terror. They presented the killings by the Civil Guard (national police) and the Falange as a defense of Christendom.
Repression was ideologically hardwired into the Francoist regime, and according to Ramón Arnabat, it turned "the whole country into one wide prison". The regime accused the loyalist supporters of the Republic of having "adherence to the rebellion", providing "aid to the rebellion", or "military rebellion"; using the Republicans' own ideological tactics against them. Franco's Law of Political Responsibilities (Spanish: Ley de Responsabilidades Políticas), in force until 1962, gave legalistic color of law to the political repression that characterized the defeat and dismantling of the Second Spanish Republic and punished Loyalist Spaniards.
The historian Stanley G. Payne considers the White Terror's death toll to be greater than the death toll of the corresponding Red Terror.
Background
After a trio of crises in 1917, the spiral of violence in Morocco and the lead-up to the installment of the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera through a 1923 military coup d'état won the acquiescence of Alfonso XIII. Upon the political failure of the dictatorship, Alfonso XIII removed support from Primo de Rivera (who was thereby forced to resign in 1930) and favoured a return to the pre-1923 state of affairs during the so-called dictablanda. Nevertheless, he had lost most of his political capital along the way. Alfonso XIII voluntarily left Spain after the municipal elections of April 1931 – understood as a plebiscite for maintaining the monarchy or declaring a republic – which led to the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic on 14 April 1931. The Second Spanish Republic was led by President Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, whose government instituted a program of secular reforms, which included agrarian reform, the separation of church and state, the right to divorce, women's suffrage (November 1933), the socio-political reformation of the Spanish Army, and political autonomy for Catalonia and the Basque Country (October 1936). President Alcalá-Zamora's reforms to Spanish society were continually blocked by the right-wing parties and rejected by the far-left Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). The Second Spanish Republic suffered attacks from the right wing (the failed coup d'état of Sanjurjo in 1932), and the left wing (the Asturian miners' strike of 1934), whilst enduring the economic impact of the Great Depression.
After the Popular Front – a coalition of leftist parties (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), Republican Left (IR), Republican Union (UR), Communist Party (PCE), Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and others) – won the general election of February 1936, the Spanish right-wing planned to overthrow the democratic Republic in a coup d'état to reinstall the monarchy. Finally, on 17 July 1936, a part of the Spanish Army, led by a group of far-right-wing officers (the generals José Sanjurjo, Manuel Goded Llopis, Emilio Mola, Francisco Franco, Miguel Cabanellas, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, José Enrique Varela, and others) launched a military coup d'état against the Spanish Republic in July 1936. The generals' coup d'état failed, but the rebellious army, known as the Nationalists, controlled a large part of Spain; this was the start of the Spanish Civil War.
Franco, one of the coup's leaders, and his Nationalist army won the Spanish Civil War in 1939. Franco ruled Spain for the next 36 years until his death in 1975. Besides the mass assassinations of Republican political enemies, political prisoners were imprisoned in concentration camps and homosexuals were confined in psychiatric hospitals.
Repressive thinking
The Chief Prosecutor of the Francoist army, Felipe Acedo Colunga, wrote in the internal report of 1939:
The native land must be disinfected beforehand. And here is the work – weight and glory – entrusted by chance of destiny to military justice.
According to the historian Francisco Espinosa, Felipe Acedo proposed an exemplary model of repression to create the new fascist state "on the site of the race." Absolute purification was needed, "stripped of all feelings of personal piety." According to Espinosa, the legal model for repression was the German (National Socialist) procedural system, where the prosecutor could act outside legal considerations. What was important was the unwritten right that, according to Hermann Göring, people carry as a 'sacred ember in their blood'.
According to Franco, the issue of Catalonia was one of the main reasons for the war. General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano wrote in an article subtitled "Against Catalonia, the Israel of the modern world", published in Diario Palentino on November 26, 1936, that Franco's regime considered Catalan people to be "a race of Jews, because they use the same procedures that the Hebrews perform in all the nations of the globe." Queipo de Llano declared, "When the war is over, Pompeu Fabra and his works will be dragged along the Ramblas". Fabra standardized the Catalan language, and his house was raided; his large personal library was burned in the middle of the street, but Fabra was able to escape and went into exile.
Policy of extermination of the enemy
In November 1937, four months after the Collective Letter of the Spanish Bishops was signed and distributed, the Spanish bishops issued a second letter in which they justified the extermination of the enemy and testified that this was an existing policy. Otherwise, the explicit reference to a policy of extermination, not repression or elimination, leads to biopolitical interpretations, as using the war for a eugenic action over the Spanish population.
Red and White Terrors
From the beginning of the war in July 1936, the ideological nature of the Nationalist fight against the Republicans indicated the degree of dehumanisation of the lower social classes (peasants and workers) in the view of the politically reactionary sponsors of the nationalist forces, the Roman Catholic Church of Spain, the aristocracy, the landowners, and the military, commanded by Franco. Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera y Munro, a public affairs officer for the Nationalist forces, told the American reporter John Thompson Whitaker:
You know what's wrong with Spain? Modern plumbing! In healthier times – spiritually healthier, you understand – plague and pestilence could be counted on to thin the Spanish masses ... now, with modern sewage disposal, they simply multiply too fast. The masses are no better than animals, you understand, and you can't expect them not to become infected with the virus of Bolshevism. After all, rats and lice carry the plague.
The Nationalists committed their atrocities in public, sometimes with assistance from members of the local Catholic Church clergy. In August 1936, the Badajoz massacre ended with the shooting of between 500 and 4,000 Republicans; and on August 20, after a Mass and a multitudinous parade, two Republican city mayors (Juan Antonio Rodríguez Machín and Sinforiano Madroñero), Socialist deputy Nicolás de Pablo and 15 other people (7 of them Portuguese) were publicly executed. The assassination of hospitalized and wounded Republican soldiers was also a common practice.
Among the children of the landlords, the joke name Reforma agraria (agrarian reform) identified the horseback hunting parties by which they killed insubordinate peasantry and so cleansed their lands of communists. The joke name alluded to the grave where the corpses of the hunted peasants were dumped: the piece of land for which the dispossessed peasants had revolted. Early in the civil war most of the victims of the White Terror and the Red Terror were killed in mass executions behind the respective front lines of the Nationalist and the Republican forces:
During the first months of the fighting most of the deaths did not come from combat on the battlefield, but from political executions in – the "Red" and "White" terrors. In some cases, the murder of political opponents began more or less spontaneously, but, from the very beginning, there was always a certain degree of organization, and nearly all the killings, after the first few days, were carried out by organized groups.
Common to the political purges of the left-wing and right-wing belligerents were the sacas, the taking of prisoners from jails and prisons, who then were taken for a paseo, a ride to summary execution. Most of the victims were killed by death squads, from the trade unions, and by the paramilitary militias of the political parties (the Republican CNT, UGT, and PCE; the Nationalist Falange and Carlist). Among the justifications for summary execution of right-wing enemies was reprisal for aerial bombings of civilians; other people were killed after being denounced as an enemy of the people, by false accusations motivated by personal envy and hatred. Nevertheless, the significant differences between White political terrorism and Red political terrorism were indicated by Francisco Partaloa, prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Madrid (Tribunal Supremo de Madrid) and a friend of the aristocrat General Queipo de Llano, who witnessed the assassinations, first in the Republican camp and then in the Nationalist camp of the Spanish Civil War:
I had the opportunity of being a witness to the repression in both areas. In the Nationalist side it was planned, methodical, cold. As they did not trust the [local] people, the authorities imposed their will by means of terror, committing atrocities in order to achieve their aim. Atrocities also took place in the Popular Front zone; that was something which both areas had in common. But the main difference was that in the Republican zone the crimes were carried out by the [local] populace in moments of passion, not by the authorities. The latter always tried to stop them. The assistance that I received from the Spanish Republican authorities in order to flee to safety, is only one of the many examples. But this was not the case in the Nationalist zone.
Historians of the Spanish Civil War, such as Helen Graham, Paul Preston, Antony Beevor, Gabriel Jackson, Hugh Thomas, and Ian Gibson concurred that the mass killings committed behind the Nationalist frontlines were organized and approved by the Nationalist rebel authorities, while the killings behind the Republican front lines resulted from the societal breakdown of the Second Spanish Republic:
Though there was much wanton killing in rebel Spain, the idea of the limpieza, the "cleaning up" of the country from the evils which had overtaken it, was a disciplined policy of the new authorities, and a part of their programme of regeneration. In republican Spain, most of the killing was the consequence of anarchy, the outcome of a national breakdown, and not the work of the state; even though some political parties in some cities abetted the enormities, and even though some of those responsible ultimately rose to positions of authority.
In the second volume of A History of Spain and Portugal (1973), Stanley G. Payne said that the political violence in the Republican zone was organized by the left-wing political parties:
In general, this was not an irrepressible outpouring of hatred, by the man in the street for his "oppressors", as it has sometimes been painted, but a semi-organized activity carried out by sections of nearly all the leftist groups. In the entire leftist zone the only organized political party that eschewed involvement in such activity were the Basque Nationalists.
That, unlike the political repression by the right wing, which "was concentrated against the most dangerous opposition elements", the Republican attacks were irrational, which featured the "murdering [of] innocent people, and letting some of the more dangerous go free. Moreover, one of the main targets of the Red Terror was the clergy, most of whom were not engaged in overt opposition" to the Spanish Republic. Julius Ruiz argues the same: "The terror in Madrid was not extraneous to the antifascist war effort following the defeat of the military rebellion in July 1936; on the contrary, it was integral to it. Securing the rearguard required an organised response." Nonetheless, in a letter-to-the-editor of the ABC newspaper in Seville, Miguel de Unamuno said that, unlike the assassinations in the areas held by the Republic, the methodical assassinations effected by the White Terror were ordered by the highest authorities of the Nationalist rebellion, and identified General Mola as the proponent of the political cleansing policies of the White Terror.