Paul Preston - Architects of Terror: Paranoia, Conspiracy and Anti-Semitism in Franco’s Spain

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2023

Copyright Paul Preston 2023

Cover photograph ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, fondo Serrano

Paul Preston asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008522117

Ebook Edition February 2023 ISBN: 9780008522131

Version: 2022-12-14

For Helen Graham

Broadly speaking, this book is about how fake news contributed to the coming of a civil war. It returns to issues raised in an earlier volume, The Spanish Holocaust, expanding particularly on its fourth chapter, Theorists of Extermination. A further element of contemporary relevance is the centrality of the theme of anti-Semitism. In a country with a tiny minority of Jews, perhaps fewer than 6,000 in 1936, and a similar number of freemasons, it is astonishing that a central justification for the civil war that took the lives of around 500,000 Spaniards, should have been the alleged plans for world domination of the so-called JewishmasonicBolshevik conspiracy. The term used in Spanish by its propagators, contubernio judeo-masnico-bolchevique, has a stronger connotation than the English. It should properly be rendered as the filthy JewishmasonicBolshevik concubinage.

The war was actually fought to overturn the educational and social reforms of the democratic Second Republic and to combat its cultural challenges to the established order. In that sense, it was fought in the interests of the landowners, industrialists, bankers, clerics and army officers whose privileges were threatened, and directed against the liberals and leftists who were promulgating the reforms and cultural challenges. Yet, during the years of the Republic from 1931 to 1936, throughout the war itself and for many decades after it ended, the myth continued to be fostered in Spain that the defeated enemy in the war was the JewishmasonicBolshevik Conspiracy.

The book is not a history of either anti-Semitism or anti-freemasonry in Spain. Rather, it takes the form of biographical studies of key individuals who propagated the anti-Semitic and anti-masonic myth and of the central figures who implemented the horrors that it justified. There are six chapters dedicated to these men and two framing chapters dealing more broadly with Franco and his circle and their belief in the existence of, and need to annihilate, the so-called contubernio.

The first chapter, Fake News and Civil War, examines the relationship between Francisco Franco and the contubernio. It analyses the personal, professional and political motives that explain his fervent embrace, and subsequent implementation, of the idea. It looks at the reading, the friendships and the collaborations that consolidated his use of the myth. Key figures are his brother-in-law and political mentor Ramn Serrano Suer, the psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Ngera and the paediatrician and educationalist Professor Enrique Suer Ordez.

The second chapter, The Policeman, is about Mauricio Carlavilla, one of the most unsavoury propagandists of the contubernio. The material that he collected as an undercover agent in the late 1920s was the basis of the first of many best-sellers on the contubernio. One of his books actually sold 100,000 copies. He was personally corrupt and was a central element in an attempt to assassinate the Republican Prime Minister Manuel Azaa. His multiple publications included scurrilous tomes on sodomy and on Satanism.

The third chapter, The Priest, is about the extraordinary life of Father Joan Tusquets. As a prominent cleric, his many publications on the JewishmasonicBolshevik conspiracy were immensely influential. Among his celebrity readers were Generals Franco and Mola. Despite his ecclesiastical vocation, he engaged in criminal activity to spy on masonic lodges. He was an active propagandist for, and a participant in, the preparation of the 1936 military uprising. Before the war, he compiled huge lists of the names of freemasons. During the war, he was the effective head of the JewishMasonic Section of Francos military intelligence service. The unit collected material that swelled his lists and provided a crucial part of the infrastructure of repression. After the civil war, he made considerable efforts to deny his activities.

The protagonist of the fourth chapter is The Poet, Jos Mara Pemn, a wealthy landowner and popular poet and dramatist. A fervent monarchist, Pemn was a key propagandist of the military dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera between 1923 and 1930. Appalled by the coming of the democratic Republic in 1931, he became an important civilian advocate and sponsor of the military uprising of 1936. When it took place, he put himself forward as the official public orator on behalf of the military rebels. In hundreds of articles and public speeches, he peddled virulently anti-Semitic ideas in order to justify the bloody repression of the Republican enemy. After the defeat of Hitler, he transformed himself into the moderate face of the Franco regime. He assiduously rewrote his extremist past and was honoured by King Juan Carlos.

The fifth chapter, entitled The Messenger, focuses on an aristocratic landowner, Gonzalo Aguilera, the Conde de Alba de Yeltes. Unlike the other protagonists, he was not an advocate of the Jewishmasonic conspiracy nor was he involved in mass terror. However, he played an important role in justifying the atrocities of the military rebels. His mother was English, he was educated in England and Germany and he served as a liaison officer with the German army on the Eastern Front during the First World War. He had considerable linguistic abilities and, during the Spanish Civil War, he was employed as a liaison with the foreign press correspondents. Those in his charge were entranced by his notion that the repression was merely a necessary periodic culling of the working class. He had so internalized the brutality he experienced in the Moroccan colonies that he ended up murdering his two sons and trying unsuccessfully to do the same to his wife. With access to large tranches of his personal correspondence, it has been possible to build a fascinating psychological portrait.

The sixth chapter concerns The Killer in the North, General Emilio Mola. He served as an officer in the African wars. His memoirs of his experiences reveal that he delighted in their savagery. After the fall of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, he served as head of the national security apparatus, vainly trying to hold back the Republican tide. At that time, he was Carlavillas superior officer and shared his hatred of Jews, freemasons and leftists, all of whom were painted as Communists. He was a fervent believer in the notorious fabrication about the alleged global domination of the Jews,