The republican government would come to form integrated combat columns by the remains of the loyal military units, the Civil Guard, the Assault Guard and by volunteer militiamen, but in those of the rebels the Civil Guard had less weight, which was assigned more frequently to police work in the rear.[1] ]
The IV Organic Division was based in Barcelona, which had replaced the Captaincy General of Barcelona[2] and was made up of an infantry division with two infantry brigades with two infantry regiments each, an artillery brigade with two light artillery regiments and a battalion of sappers deployed in Catalonia. The Barcelona garrison was the 7th Infantry Brigade with the regiments “Badajoz ” number 13 and “Alcantara ” number 14, Light Artillery Regiment number 7, 4th Battalion of Sappers, 2nd Cavalry Brigade belonging to the Cavalry Division with the “Santiago Regiments ” number 3 and “Montesa ” number 4, the Artillery Information Group number 3 and the Mountain Artillery Regiment number 1 belonging to the 1st Mountain Brigade.
Since 1933 the Civil Guard in Catalonia was framed in the first Zone (later it would be called the 5th Zone) based in Barcelona and which included the Tercios of Barcelona (the 3 1st and 19th), the 3rd was made up of the Commands of Barcelona (except the capital), Gerona, Lérida and Tarragona; and the 19th had its two Commanderies in Barcelona. The deployment of Civil Guard forces was equally important in Madrid and Barcelona[3].
The conspiring generals in Barcelona They were Brigadier Generals Álvarez Fernández Burriel and Justo Legorburu Domínguez-Matamoros, chiefs of the 2nd Cavalry Brigade and 4th Artillery Brigade, respectively. On July 17, 1936, General Emilio Mola Vidal, the director of the conspiracy, he was visited by his brother Ramón, who informed him of the possible failure of the uprising in Barcelona due to the militant spirit and better organization of the working class groups, which also had the support of the masses and were partially armed.[4]
The uprising failed, ending on July 20, the Administration and the Aviation had not joined, as did the Civil Guard under the command of Brigadier General Aranguren and Colonels Escobar e Brotons and the Assault Guard[5] leaving 450 dead and 2000 wounded.
The leaders and commanders of the imprisoned uprising were court-martialed, and on August 11 they were sentenced to death for military rebellion , and Generals Goded and Fernández Burriel were shot in the moats of Montjuïch on August 12 and the rest on August 26, the exact date of General Legorburu's execution being unknown.
Franco's revenge
At the end of the civil war, as a result of Franco's repression, the officers of the Civil Guard who carried out the suffocation of the uprising of July 1936 . By Decree of November 1, 1936, it was established that in the cities occupied by the Francoist army, permanent war councils would be created that would judge with an even more abbreviated summary procedure, called an emergency summary procedure. On July 5, 1938 Franco reestablished the death penalty, reincorporating it fully into the general scale of penalties of the Penal Code in force at that time, arguing that its abolition (produced during the Second Republic due to a reform of the Penal Code) was not compatible with the proper functioning of a State, in addition, the Code of Military Justice of 1890 was reestablished in the wording it had before April 14, 1931[6].
On January 26, 1939 Franco's troops entered Barcelona, the next day, Colonel Francisco Brotons Gómez[7] asked a Civil Guard brigade who had been his orders where he has to make his presentation to the occupation forces, being recognized and immediately arrested by the brigade, taken to the War Audit and handed over to the military court on duty. That same day, January 27, preliminary proceedings were instructed, in addition to the fact that the other chiefs[8] of the Civil Guard who were in Barcelona presented themselves before the authorities of the Francoist occupation forces, and on February 1 the actions are elevated to Cause 1/39.
The military judicial procedure can be consulted under File number 11271-Box 606 in the Third Territorial Military Court Archive in Barcelona, the documentation is not digitized, consisting of two rolls as main piece, in which are the judicial proceedings that will lead to the court martial for which they will end up before the firing squad on March 24 in the Bota field Francisco Brotons Gómez, Juan Aliaga Crespi, Antonio Moreno, Modesto Lara Molina and Mariano Aznar Montfort; Luis Espinosa Ortiz he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the same crimes for which the rebels of July 1936 were.
The main piece was joined by the documentation of the request for commutation of the prison sentence of June 7, 1964 of Commander Luis Espinosa Ortiz. Being a total of 329 pages that form it.
With the handover of Colonel Antonio Escobar Huerta, who had been appointed general of the republican army, a rank that was not recognized by Franco, the judicial proceedings were joined to a separate part of the same case made up of 114 folios, after a Madrid Military Court was inhibited in favor of the Barcelona Military Court and that was initiated after having voluntarily presented himself to the Francoist army in Ciudad Real on March 29, 1939. Sentenced to death for rebellion in council of war, he was executed in Montjuïch castle on February 8, 1940.
On April 10, 1939, the actions that will give rise to the separate piece of General José Aranguren Roldán begin. , after having been forcibly removed from the diplomatic mission of Panama in Valencia, and which is made up of 52 pages. He was sentenced to death for rebellion in court-martial on April 15, 1939 and will be shot in the Bota field on April 21, 1939.
The procedure is joined, in what is currently what I would call a documentary annex, two documentations with twenty and thirteen pages, in which are collected, based on the 1978 Amnesty, in one, the request for improvement of the orphan's pension of María Luisa Espinosa Hidalgo, which ends with a notification of February 27, 1979. The other is the request for testimony of the sentence of the widow of Colonel Brotons, Carmen Rodríguez Mora, for the granting of a pension.
In this case, which ended with three courts martial, the leadership of the Civil Guard was tried in 1936, "the conviction rests on the thesis that the The Civil Guard was directly responsible for the failure of the Rising in Catalonia, and consequently for the outbreak of the Civil War ”[9]. It must be pointed out that since 1841 a general has not been executed by firing squad[10], being executed again as of August 1936.
The War Audits of the General Captaincies, with their Military Courts, were the primary tool of Franco's repression; verifying the speed with which the cases are initiated, due to their going to plenary, the court martial and the execution of the sentence, becoming a fast and punitive justice. Applying to the defendants what Serrano Suñer labeled "reverse justice."
Military judicial morphology
With the analysis of the documents, the judicial morphology can be appreciated, almost identical to the current one[11], which will be the general trend in all the Francoist processes. Initiation of the procedure by means of a complaint or presentation in the Court of Duty, initiation of proceedings, currently it would be prior until the instructor concludes that the criminal acts were typified as a crime; with the statements of the defendants and witnesses, the resolutions of the investigating judge through orders and rulings; reports from the Civil Guard, the Military Police and Information Service, and the Falange; notification procedures, proof, union of documentation, guarantees, etc.; and the elevation of the proceedings to cause, with its investigation of the accused after the order of indictment and holding of the plenary session; minutes of the court-martial, sentence, its approval by the captain general and its ratification or commutation by Franco[12], constitution of the prisoner in the prison chapel; death certificates, burial certificates and registration of death in the Civil Registry. The defendant did not have a collegiate defense from the beginning of the legal proceedings, the defenders were appointed ex officio most of the time and had little time to examine the proceedings and prepare the defense.
Regarding the veracity of the sources , in this case the doubt will always plan, because the witness statements indicate personal disqualifications, political qualifications, animosity, enmity and revenge against the defendants, being totally subjective; To which will be added the inconsistency of the accusations related to the specific actions of the accused, and on the contrary, it shows their non-participation in violent actions against seditionists or suspected of being so, the ignorance they had before July 18 of the anti-republican conspiracy and the very partial information they had about the general situation during the 18th and 19th, the conservative political ideology and attitudes of all of them, the refusal to confront the rebels, although maintaining discipline and obedience to their superiors, and the clearly accusers and normally seeking expiation for the failure of the uprising in Barcelona and "an ambiguous list of manipulated actions for the benefit of exemplary punishment"[13].
Where is the court martial of the 1936 rebels in Barcelona?
However, contrary to what one might think, it is not found in the Archive of the Third Territorial Military Court in Barcelona, leaving it unclear what it was or where the procedure for the that the rebels of July 1936 were sentenced to death, will it be misplaced in another proceeding, hidden in a box in an archive, will it be the property of a private individual, will it be lost or destroyed?
Bibliography
- ALVARO DUEÑAS, Manuel, (1990), "The military in post-war political repression:the special jurisdiction of political responsibilities until the 1942 reform", Political Studies Journal (Nueva Época) , 69:141-162.
- ARNABAT MATA, Ramón, (2013), “Repression:the DNA of Spanish Francoism”, History Notebooks , 39:33-59.
- CARDONA ESCANERO, Gabriel, (1988), “The military policy of the Second Republic”, Contemporary History , 1:33-46.
- FERNÁNDEZ RODERA, José Alberto, (2018), The military career in Spain , Madrid, Marcial Pons.
- GARCÍA ALVAREZ-COQUE, Arturo, (2018), The Military Staff in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) , Doctoral Thesis, Madrid, Complutense University of Madrid.
- HUERTA BARAJAS, Justo Alberto, (2016), Government and Military Administration in the Second Spanish Republic (April 14, 1931/July 18, 1936) , Madrid, Official State Gazette.
- MARTINEZ VIQUEIRA, Eduardo. (2010), Illustrated Atlas of the Civil Guard . Madrid. Susaeta Editions S.A.
- OLIVER OLMO, Pedro, (2009), “The fate of General Goded. Punitive culture and culture of war in the Spanish revolution of 1936”, Jerónimo Zurita History Magazine , 84:39-64.
- PAYNE, Stanley G. (1968), The military and politics in contemporary Spain , Madrid, Sarpe.
- PAYNE, Stanley G. (2014), The Spanish Civil War , Madrid, Rialp Editions
- RISQUES CORBELLA, Manel, (2001), “Disciplined in 1936, executed in 1939. Summary trial of the Barcelona Civil Guard”, Ayer , 43:139-161.
- TERRADELLAS PRAT, Enric,(2015), Procediments judicial militars (Sumaríssims)1939-1980 of the Archive of the Third Territorial Military Court of Barcelona[14], Barcelona, Publications Collection of the National Archive of Catalonia No. 15. Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
Notes
[1] Payne, (2014):76.
[2] Decree of June 16, 1931 (Gaceta de Madrid number 168 of June 17, 1931).
[3] Retrieved February 5, 2022 at https://www.benemeritaaldia.org/index.php/guardia-civil/historia-de-la-guardia- civil/9147-reorganization-of-the-civil-guard-july-28-1933.html.
[4] Payne (1968):161.
[5] The Assault Guard was created in 1931 by the Republic, being the Security Corps in charge of dealing with disturbances in urban centers. The 16 Assault Group had its headquarters in Barcelona.
[6] Terradellas Prat, 2015:14.
[7] With the exception of General Aranguren and Colonel Escobar, the other Civil Guard commanders were purged between August 1936 and December 1937, accused of disaffecting the republican cause, reason why they did not have control nor they participated in the civil war. Risks 142-2001
[8] Lieutenant Colonels Juan Aliaga, Antonio Moreno and Modesto Lara, heads of the Civil Guard commands located in the province of Barcelona.
[9] Risques Corbella. (2001):111.
[10] Oliver Olmo, (2009):39.
[11] One of the differences is that there is no death penalty and another is the appointment of a court-appointed or trusted defense attorney during the entire procedure, both in the of instruction as in the plenary.
[12] Risques Corbella, (2001):109.
[13] Risques Corbella, (2001):151.
[14] Translation:Military judicial proceedings (Summary) 1939-1980 from the Archive of the Third Territorial Military Court of Barcelona.