The Last Days of the Spanish Republic. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘first part’ was the evacuation of Catalonia; the ‘second part’ would be the evacuation of the centre-south zone. As Zugazagoitia commented, although Negrín’s public declarations spoke of resistance, ‘nobody knew better than he did how meaningless the slogan was’.33 In this regard, his arrangements to transfer the financial resources of the Republic to France were a crucial part of his plans for evacuation. Rojo’s accusation that no plans had been made was unjust, although it was certainly true that the scale and speed of the final debacle had not been, indeed could hardly have been, anticipated. After the defeat at the Ebro, Negrín had already begun to prepare for the likely Francoist triumph and the need to organize the evacuation, and subsequent support, of many thousands of Republicans. He had instructed the Minister of Finance, Francisco Méndez Aspe, and the most trusted officials of his Ministry, Jerónimo Bugeda, José Prat and Rafael Méndez, to draw up lists of the assets still in the hands of the government. He instructed Méndez Aspe to recover where possible the assets that the Republic had deposited in its offices in Czechoslovakia, the USA, Mexico, France and Britain to pay for arms, munitions, food, medical supplies and raw materials. His task included arranging for goods that had been bought but still not delivered to be converted into cash. Most of the jewels, gold and silver plate, stock and bond holdings of wealthy persons who had left Spain during the war, together with many art works belonging to the Church, had been confiscated by the Caja de Reparaciones and used to buy arms and supplies for the Republic. Since the autumn of 1938, truckloads of the remaining valuables had been brought to Figueras and nearby frontier towns.34

      While still in Figueras, Negrín ordered that what remained should be packed and transported to France. He arranged with the French authorities that two sealed trucks laden with 110 boxes of these valuables be permitted to cross the frontier without examination by customs. The trucks went first to the Republican Embassy in Paris and then on to Le Havre where they would be loaded on to a vessel. This was a yacht, originally named Giralda, that had been bought by the Republican government via intermediaries from the former king Alfonso XIII and renamed Vita. In March, with the permission of the French Minister of the Interior Albert Sarrault, the Servicio de Evacuación de los Refugiados Españoles (SERE) was created in Paris, under the protection of the Mexican Embassy and the chairmanship of Pablo Azcárate. The valuables which were intended to constitute its funds were embarked for Mexico on the Vita on or about 10 March. There, in complicated circumstances, they fell into the hands of Indalecio Prieto. The subsequent fate of these funds would be a toxic issue within exile politics.35

      Enrique Castro Delgado recounted a meeting with Rojo at this time. Allegedly, Rojo told him that Negrín had ordered him to return to Spain. When Castro asked him if he would go, Rojo replied: ‘No, there are hundreds of thousands of men here needing our help.’ When a shocked Castro asked if there were not also hundreds of thousands inside Spain who needed help, Rojo replied, ‘There’s nothing to be done there … it’s the inevitable death agony that will be followed by the terrible death of an era, the death of a regime, the death of the hope of millions of people.’36 So committed was Rojo to remaining in France that, in his book, he revealed his indignation that Tagüeña, Líster and the chief of his general staff, López Iglesias, the under-secretary of the Ministry of Defence, Colonel Antonio Cordón, the chief of the Republican air force Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros and other Communist officers and commissars had returned to Spain without seeking his permission.37

      The armies defeated in Catalonia had a strong element of Communists and officers and men who had come through the militias. In contrast, the armies of the centre-south zone had a far higher proportion of career officers, a significant minority of whom were of doubtful loyalty to the Republic. Themselves often under surveillance, they had sought desk jobs behind the lines in training schools and the general staff. They had often provided money, safe-conducts and other documentation and protection for Francoist comrades who had refused to serve the Republic and were in hiding. Franco’s espionage services were especially interested in the beliefs of members of the Republican officer corps in order to ascertain whom among them they could use. As defeat followed defeat, the nostalgia of career officers for the pre-war army provided fertile soil for the recruiters of the Francoist Servicio de Información y Policia Militar (SIPM). These disgruntled professionals had long since felt a certain mistrust of, if not contempt for, the officers who had come through the militias. They harboured the vain hope that there could be a peace settlement arranged with Francoist officers with whom they had been educated in military academies and with whom they had served before 1936. Among the most typical of such officers, and one of the most powerful, was Segismundo Casado.38

      Accordingly, such officers in the centre-south zone had no desire to see the return of Líster, Modesto and other Communist commanders who were committed to continuing the fight. These commanders, after doing what they could to improve the conditions of their men, returned to Spain over the next few days. Tagüeña states that he, Líster, Francisco Romero Marín and several other officers from the Army of the Ebro returned on 19 February. There is some confusion over the date of this flight – in two books of memoirs, Líster dated it both five and six days earlier on 13 and 14 February. However, they coincide in lamenting that numerous leading figures of the Communist Party, including Antonio Mije, Francisco Antón, Santiago Álvarez and Santiago Carrillo, did not return on the grounds that the PCE did not want them exposed to danger. Líster recalled that the thirty-three-seat aircraft in which he had travelled had twenty empty seats. Hidalgo de Cisneros told Burnett Bolloten, a United Press correspondent who, by his own account, was a Communist sympathizer at the time, that the last six aircraft that flew from France to Republican Spain were ‘nearly empty’.39 That Negrín had his doubts about those who would or wouldn’t return was reported later by Francisco Romero Marín, who had returned with Hidalgo de Cisneros. When they entered Negrín’s office in the Presidencia building in the Castellana, the Prime Minister exclaimed: ‘Here come another group of lunatics.’40

      Cordón met Rojo on 18 February in Perpignan. The new Spanish Consul Rafael Méndez informed them that he had received a cable from Negrín ordering all senior officers and officials of the Ministry of Defence to return to the central zone. A visibly annoyed Rojo said: ‘Well, I will not regard myself as having received that order until the Minister of Defence gives it to me personally.’ Méndez told him to do what he liked and remarked that he thought that soldiers did not need to receive orders to rejoin the army in time of war. Rojo replied that he knew better than anyone where his duty lay and that he was fully occupied in attending to those who were arriving in France and in trying to organize the matériel brought by the army into France. When Méndez replied that there were people doing that already, Rojo walked away without a word. Three days later, Cordón had dinner at the Toulouse railway station with Rojo and Jurado. Equipped with splendid new leather luggage, the two men were on their way to Paris to seek more money at the Embassy for their work with the exiled officers. They had already spent the 4.5 million francs originally given them for this purpose. When Cordón asked if they planned to return to Spain, Rojo again stated that he had not received a direct order to do so and that, in any case, he would go only if he could do something concrete by way of negotiating peace. Cordón reminded them that orders had been issued for their return and that, if they didn’t obey, measures would be taken against them. Jurado replied threateningly that, in such a case, they might make damaging revelations – presumably a reference to the failures of the Republican authorities to prepare for the evacuation and subsequent care of the refugees. Rojo would later make the implausible claim in his book that he had been preparing to return when the Casado coup intervened and made it impossible.41

      In fact, Rojo’s absence from Negrín’s side was to contribute substantially to the success of the Casado coup. As Vicente Uribe, wrote in his memoir СКАЧАТЬ