Architect of Terror: Paranoia, Conspiracy and Anti-Semitism in Franco’s Spain
By Paul Preston
William Collins, £30


Sir Paul Preston, the most distinguished British historian of modern Spain, upset a lot of Jewish readers by calling his 2012 account of Spanish Civil War civilian deaths The Spanish Holocaust.

Critics said that implicitly linking the 200,000 non-combatants estimated to have died in the Spanish conflict with the world’s worst genocide demeaned the memory of the Shoah.

Preston has now made up for his faux-pas (which he always stoutly defended) with a revealing account of the shocking antisemitism that formed the intellectual (I use the word loosely) underpinning of the 1936 nationalist uprising led by General Franco that set off the civil war and eventually led to the defeat of the republican cause in 1939. It also infected Franco’s 36-year dictatorship that followed.

Jews were just one of the three “evils” that Franco’s ideologues targeted in speeches, books and articles in the troubled years leading up to the civil war: the others were freemasonry and bolshevism.

Jews were a particularly ludicrous imaginary enemy: there were only 6,000 in Spain at the time and they kept a low profile, as Jews had since the great expulsion of 1492.

Freemasonry had once been an influential political influence in countries such as Spain and Italy, but its influence had waned. Communism had swept all before it in the Soviet Union, but it was a negligible force in Spain, compared to socialism and anarchism, until the civil war broke. But the nationalists weren’t interested in such niceties.

Preston has chosen to illustrate the influence of this baleful ideology by profiling six of its leading proponents. Two are well-known, at least to students of the Spanish civil war: the nationalist generals Emilio Mola and Gonzalo Queipo de Llano. Both considered themselves superior to Franco and at various times fancied their chances of displacing him.

Mola died in 1937 in a plane crash but Queipo became a wartime legend through his near-deranged nightly radio broadcasts from Seville, in which he frequently rambled on for hours.
Antisemitism was a constant theme: the Jews, he claimed, were “fighting for Judaism against Christianity, in the belief that the moment has come for Judaism to impose their domination of the world”.

The other nationalists picked out by Preston are less well-known: a policeman, Mauricio Carlavilla; a priest, Father Juan Tusquets (who had Jewish origins); a poet, playwright and novelist José María Pemán; and a colourful figure, Gonzalo de Aguilera, who had been educated at the English Catholic public school Stonyhurst College, and whose perfect English and enthusiasm for adventure made him an ideal press officer accompanying foreign war correspondents to the front.

Carlavilla, Tusquets and Pemán may be obscure figures these days but their influence in persuading so many Spaniards to back Franco with their propaganda work was considerable. Queipo, Mola and Franco himself may have fired the bullets but this trio provided the intellectual ammunition.

They all appear to have believed that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an authentic work of history. Tusquets, indeed, edited a Spanish edition of this notorious fraud in 1932, which was a massive commercial success.

Though the few Jews of mainland Spain did not face the systematic persecution and destruction they faced elsewhere in Europe, Republican Jews in Spain’s North African colonies were not so lucky: 22 out of 100 refugees in Tangier were shot and 30 of Ceuta’s 300 Jewish citizens were executed, while 11 were killed in Melilla.

Franco’s hostility to all things Jewish continued unabated in the early 1940s. He only reversed course when he realised that it was damaging Spain’s reputation in the United States, whose support he needed by then.

With his customary meticulous research, Professor Preston shows how fake news is certainly not an invention of the 21st century, and that its consequences can be far-reaching and frequently lethal.