HISTORY: ALISON RIBEIRO DE MENEZESreviews The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century SpainBy Paul Preston HarperPress, 700pp. £30
SPAIN REMAINS IN THRALL to its violent 20th-century history. The past half-decade has been marked by insistent anniversaries: 75 years since the start of the civil war and 70 since its end, 35 since the death of Franco, 30 since the ratification of the 1978 democratic constitution, and then 30 since the failed 1981 coup d’etat.
Into this crowded memorial calendar has flowed a host of academic investigations of the repression and atrocities committed by both warring factions in the course of the conflict, and by the victors during the early years of the postwar dictatorship. Yet no consensus has emerged. Indeed, the terrain is acquiring echoes of the German historians’ debate of the early 1980s, not just because of the opening up of fundamental fracture lines in the perception of the lessons to be learned from history but also in the appearance of the term holocaust itself.
The distinguished historian Paul Preston's new study, polemically titled The Spanish Holocaust, is a major, but flawed, contribution to this vibrant landscape of debate and dissension.
In Germany, the historians’ debate concerned the possibility of shifting the Holocaust from its position as foundational narrative of the nation’s postwar order, and so opening up a space from which to broach the question of German suffering during the second World War. In Spain, the current ideological divisions revolve around the extent of the atrocities committed by each side during the civil war and, crucially, the objectives that lay behind them.
Violence in the republican zone was until very recently explained by historians as an uncontrolled outburst of popular fury, driven by fear. It was largely blamed on anarchist elements that the republican government quickly attempted to bring under control. Nationalist violence, on the other hand, was viewed as a deliberate policy of persecution and – even as early as 1939, for some – of extermination that would slowly but surely eradicate all opposition to the new regime.
Preston’s book follows this historiographical line, elaborated in his many previous writings, arguing that Franco had clear exterminatory objectives, bolstered by racialist arguments that categorised his enemies as members of a secretive Jewish-masonic-communist conspiracy to destroy the Christian world and, in the process, what he regarded as the true Spain.
Preston goes to great lengths to provide a definitive set of statistics for the victims of violence on each side, and herein lies the value of his book. Scholars will be indebted to him for the careful collation of a vast amount of detail that was previously scattered across local and regional studies of the war produced by a younger generation of historians in the past two decades. But mere numbers cannot convey a sense of the moments of greatest intensity in the repression, nor do they offer much explanation for the driving forces behind it.
Preston examines such infamous atrocities as the nationalist murder of opponents and republican sympathisers in the bullring in Badajoz, or the republican murder of nationalist prisoners at Paracuellos del Jarama, just outside Madrid. But he is clearly more understanding of the dilemma faced by the republicans in Madrid, for whom the victims of Paracuellos were arguably a dangerously vociferous fifth column that could destabilise the defence of the capital. He fails to consider to what extent nationalist executions might have been driven by a military concern to prevent guerrilla actions by republican sympathisers after the still small rebel army had moved north from Badajoz.
There are also major problems with the extermination argument itself. Preston devotes a mere page and a half of his lengthy tome to explaining the use of the word Holocaust in his title yet ignores the work of contemporary historians such as Mark Levene, who have moved on from viewing genocide as a deliberate policy of extermination to seeing it as the consequence of increasingly radicalised states. In this respect, the figures that Preston lists, were he to examine them chronologically, show that nationalist violence decreased rather than increased as Franco’s new state was established. Spanish historians such as Julius Ruiz have demonstrated that the situation became less radicalised over time.
The most serious flaw of this study is the lack of any attempt to understand popular participation in the violence, particularly on the nationalist side. While it is easy to refer to extremist texts such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which bolstered Franco's theory of the republic as a Judeo-masonic conspiracy, or Gen Queipo de Llano's infamous radio broadcasts inciting violence, it is much less easy to explain why such ideas gained traction across Spain. We need, instead, to examine how this fanatical ideology intersected with the local conflicts, hatreds and petty jealousies that have begun to emerge from research into specific incidents of extrajudicial killing and denunciations of so-called subversives to the rebel authorities. And we need a greater understanding of the dynamics of fear and mass hysteria that may have motivated perpetrators in particular contexts.
Finally, Preston's book displays a complete absence of serious reflection on Spain's current memory debates, even though he clearly intends The Spanish Holocaustas a major contribution to them. One might have expected such a distinguished historian to draw on the Spanish case to expand our understanding of such terms as holocaust and genocide, and to explore their possibilities and limitations of reference, rather than simply to assert their relevance uncritically. The danger here is that, as Preston has given so many hostages to fortune, uncritical revisionists will simply dismiss his book as unsubtle and unreflecting.
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes lectures in Spanish and Portuguese at University College Dublin. She is writing a book on war and dictatorship memories in contemporary Spain
