The Red and the White ‘Terror’ in the Spanish Civil War
March 26th, 2007
Quotations taken from Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 [Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2006].
The Red Terror
Op cit. p. 87:
In all, the victims of the red terror in the Republican zone during the civil war rose to some 38,000 people, of whom almost half were killed in Madrid (8,815) and in Catalonia (8,352) during the summer of 1936. On the republican side there was strong mixture of feelings when the worst of the rearguard slaughter was over. The majority of republicans were sickened by what had happened. The anarchist intellectual Frederica Montseny referred to a ‘a lust for blood inconceivable in honest men before’. Although La Pasionara intervened on several occasions to save people, other communists took a more fatalistic attitude to the violence. … The dubious rationale that the atrocities had been far worse on the other side was not used until the Republic’s propaganda campaign became effective in 1937. And yet the different patterns of violence were probably even more significant than the exact number of victims.
The White Terror
Op. cit p.94:
In the course of the last ten years, detailed work has been carried out region by region in Spain to establish the number, the identity and the fate of the victims. Accurate statistics have now been compiled on 25 provinces and provisional figures on another four. For just over half of Spain, this comes to a total of 80,000 victims of the nationalists. If one takes into account the deaths which were never registered and allows for the provinces not yet studied, we are probably faced with a total figure for killings and executions by the nationalists during the war and afterwards of around 200,000 people. This figure is not so very far from the threat made by General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano to republicans when he promised ‘on my word of honour as a gentelman that for every person that you kill, we will kill at least ten’.
March 26th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
What’s point you’re trying to make?
March 26th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
None in particular. I need to post interesting factlets from things I read somewhere and this site is as good as anywhere
That said why I chose this particular section from that particular book is that it establishes clearly (in my mind at least) that the ‘Whites’ (the nationalists) behaved much worse than the ‘Reds’ (the republicans) in the Spanish Civil War.
March 27th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
Your comment ignores the reality of the war. From its inception and throughout the war, hundreds of thousands of “candidates” for mistreatment came into the hands of the whites while the complete lack of success by the reds meant that they accrued almost no new “candidates”.
I don’t think there is any reason to believe that the whites “behaved much worse” for any reason other than they kept capturing new potential victims , while the reds did not.
Wayne Woodrow
Mommio Castello (Lucca) Italy
March 30th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
I say the “whites” behaved much worse, not just killing but terrorizing the population. When the “reds” avenged and killed in masse too it was just to show the “whites” they were not scared. A stupid move after– and provoked by– a malevolous one.
April 6th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
My definite impression from Beevor’s summary was that the ‘White Terror’ was both quantitatively and qualitatively worse than the ‘Red Terror’.
On the quantitative side the Whites killed far more people (and while I accept the point made by Wayne Woodrow that the number killed should be normalised by population under control of the particular faction I do not believe allowing for this would make much difference — after all the Republicans controlled several of the major cities including Madrid and Barcelona for substantial periods of the Civil War).
On the qualitative side, as Beevor writes (p. 88):