Freemasonry in Spain
is first recorded in 1728, in an English lodge. As various papal bulls
condemned Freemasonry the Spanish Inquisition did their best to close lodges
and demonize Freemasons, therefore the success of Freemasonry from year to year
depended on the sympathy or antipathy of the ruling regime. Nevertheless,
lodges and even Grand Lodges were formed and even thrived during more liberal
periods. When Francisco Franco consolidated power in 1939, all Freemasonry was
banned. In 1979, bans on Freemasonry were declared unconstitutional.
An intriguing part of
this history as we will see is a spy
network known as APIS, which transmitted dozens of fake Masonic documents.
In fact, one can safely say that APIS was the espionage equivalent of the great
Taxil hoax of
the late nineteenth century. But Franco fell for it utterly.
Described in Pepe
Rodríguez, Masonería al descubierto,
2006 the mass murder of Freemasons began within days of the start of the
Spanish Civil War.
On 17 July 1936,
Spanish colonial troops in Morocco revolted against a democratic Republic; the
revolt soon spread over the Strait of Gibraltar to barracks on the mainland.
The country was cut in two. Where the military uprising failed, including in
Madrid and Barcelona, the Republic retained control – albeit in a chaotic
state, since no one knew which elements of the army and police would remain
loyal, and bands of revolutionary leftists controlled the streets in many
places. Where the uprising succeeded, a Nationalist Spain was carved out by
martial law. A pocket of Nationalist territory in the south-west quickly
expanded as the Army of Africa, a mix of colonial soldiers and Moroccan
mercenaries, mounted a bloody advance. In September 1936, the Army of Africa
was rewarded for its successes when its commander, General Francisco Franco,
assumed supreme military and political leadership of the rebellion. He would
soon adopt the title of Caudillo the Spanish equivalent of Duce or Führer.
In Nationalist Spain,
the army and right-wing vigilantes imposed a reign of terror. The intention was
loudly proclaimed: to ‘cleanse’ the Fatherland of its political and cultural
‘pollutants’. Anyone associated with the Republic and its institutions, with
the political Left, and even with secular modernity, was liable to be arrested,
tortured, and executed: trade unionists and politicians, workers and peasants,
liberals and intellectuals, emancipated women and homosexuals. Tens of
thousands died. Among them were many Freemasons.
Most of the Masonic
victims were killed in the early months of the Civil War when the violence was
not centrally orchestrated and left
little paperwork behind for historians to work on. The Nationalists would
eventually win the Civil War and thus control the documentary evidence upon
which accurate historical reconstruction relies. Today, more than four decades
after democracy was restored, the crimes perpetrated against civilians during
the Spanish Civil War are still alive and controversial topics of research. The
oppression of Freemasons is a neglected aspect. As a consequence, we are
nowhere near reaching a calculation of the Masonic body count. The first
attempts by historians to reckon the atrocities committed against Freemasons
had to wait until after Franco’s death in 1975. The earliest picture to be
sketched was fragmentary but shocking. In Zaragoza, thirty Brothers belonging
to Lodge Constancia were murdered. In the town of Ceuta on the African coast,
Lodge Hijos de La Viuda lost seventeen Brothers. In
Algeciras, on the Bay of Gibraltar, twenty-four members of Lodge Trafalgar
died. All but a handful of the Brothers in Lodge Vicus in Vigo were killed. In
places like Tétouan (Morocco), Las Palmas (Canary
Islands), La Coruña, Lugo and Zamora, the Freemasons were exterminated.
The list could
continue. But this early panorama of the anti-Masonic atrocities was still fogged
by hearsay and Civil War propaganda. Nobody could quite be sure how
reliable it was. Yet it established clearly enough that Spanish rightists were
uniquely vicious in their campaign against the Craft. The persecution also
raises the same awkward question raised by estimates of the number of Masonic
victims of Nazism: were these Spanish Brothers all murdered because they were
Masons? Or were they targeted for other reasons, and just happened to be
Masons?
Only in a few places have
investigations now been carried out to verify the shocking initial
sketches. In Granada, for example, we know that 35 percent of Freemasons died
violently. Yet the evidence points to their being executed primarily because
they were representatives of democratic parties or the Republican institutions
rather than because they were Masons. In early August 1936, when the
Nationalist authorities captured membership documents from the city’s three
Lodges, the ensuing inquiries found that many of the men listed had already
been put to death for other reasons. The surviving Brothers were incarcerated.
In Seville, Lodges
were raided, and membership lists published in the Catholic and right-wing
press: a cue for vigilante violence. Here too, the Masons most likely to be
killed were those
who occupied prominent positions in the institutions of the Republic. For
opponents of the rebellion, being a Mason could be an aggravating factor
serious enough to make the difference between being sent to the concentration
camp and being put before a firing squad. A few, notably the regional Grand
Master and his son, were executed for no other reason than that they were
prominent in the Brotherhood. By contrast, many Masons scrambled to distance
themselves from the Craft and demonstrate their enthusiasm for the rebellion –
thereby preserving their freedom and their life. Seville and Granada were both
places where the Nationalist violence was particularly intense, yet no Lodge
suffered the eradication of all its members.
Clearly, not all the
Masons who died were killed because of their Masonry. Yet there was a belief,
shared by all the different forces on the Nationalist side, that a
conspiratorial Masonic influence permeated the Republic so thoroughly that
almost anyone could be an instrument of the Lodges. The brutality was
capricious: many were denounced on the basis of false or exaggerated
testimonies. Some Nationalist groups, like the Falange (Spain’s Fascist
movement), compiled their own death lists from any source that came to hand.
The inevitable result was that many of the people murdered for being Freemasons
had nothing to do with the Craft.
A famous episode
from the heart of Nationalist Spain brings this messy tragedy into human focus.
In late September 1936, the rebel military élite met in Salamanca to appoint
General Francisco Franco as their supreme leader. Salamanca was a good choice
to be the Nationalist capital. A place of conservative traditions that enjoyed
the prestige of one of the world’s oldest universities, it was also close
enough to the Portuguese border to give the rebellious generals an escape route
if the Civil War went against them. As a sign of the Church’s favor, the Bishop
of Salamanca offered General Franco his palace as a headquarters. A short time
later, and no more than a couple of hundred meters away, a public ceremony was
held under the stone arches of Salamanca University’s great hall, to honor
Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America and Spain’s imperial heritage. The bishop was
there, as was Franco’s wife. The main speaker was the Caudillo’s most savage
commander, General José Millán Astray, who had lost an arm and an eye in
colonial fighting. Millán Astray’s splenetic harangue
climaxed with the battle cry of the Spanish Foreign Legion, ‘¡Viva la Muerte!’
(‘Long live death!’).
The slogan shocked
and angered the old man who was presiding over the event: Miguel de Unamuno,
one of Spain’s great writers, and the Rector of the University. Unamuno had
initially supported the Republic but was appalled by the disorder that seemed
to reign under it. Then he supported the military rebellion – until he
witnessed its unbridled violence. As General Millán Astray spoke, Unamuno
reached into his pocket, where he had put a plea for help he had received from
the wife of a friend; the friend in question was the city’s Protestant pastor
and had been arrested for being a Freemason. Unamuno took the letter out and
scribbled some notes on the back – the basis for what would become his last
speech, and the most memorable of the Civil War.
With breathtaking
bravery, Unamuno rose to his feet and called Millán Astray a cripple, who
wanted to see Spain crippled. He went on to warn the General that the
Nationalists had brute force on their side, but no reason or right. ‘You will
conquer, but you will never convince.’ The slogan would echo through the long
years of Franco’s dictatorship. Unamuno was lucky to get out of the university
alive. For his insolence, he was sacked and placed under house arrest. In
December 1936, he sent an anguished letter to a friend. Here in Salamanca, he
wrote, there had been ‘the most bestial persecution and murders with no
justification’. What claimed to be a war on Bolshevism was actually a war on
liberalism. Anyone could be caught up in it: Freemasons, Jews, members of the
League of Human Rights. ‘Lately they’ve killed the Protestant pastor here, for
being a Mason. And for being my friend. Clearly these dogs – and among them
there are some real hyenas – have no idea what the difference is between
Freemasonry and anything else.’ So the Protestant pastor did not make it.
Neither did twenty-nine of his Brothers in Lodge Helmántica,
Salamanca.
Miguel de Unamuno,
his spirit broken, passed away two and a half weeks after writing the above
words. We can only guess at what his feelings would have been having he known
that the atrocities of 1936 were only the beginning. Hatred of Freemasonry was
set to drag the Caudillo and his followers down a remorseless slide into an
obsession unique in the history of the Craft. But before we trace the arc of
that descent, we need to take a step back and ask what it was about Spain’s
right-wingers that made them repress Masonry with more brutality than did their
counterparts in either Italy or Germany. The short answer is the Catholic
Church. The forces that fell in behind Spain’s military rebellion in the summer
and autumn of 1936 inherited the full force of the Spanish Church’s legacy of
anti-Masonic rage and fear.
A perfectly Masonic
political revolution Freemasonry had had a troubled early history in Spain –
the Inquisition saw to that. Only after Napoleon Bonaparte invaded in 1808 were
Lodges allowed, but they were banned again following the restoration of the monarchy
in 1814.
Thereafter, in Spain
as elsewhere in Catholic Europe, the history of Freemasonry was part of a
protracted culture war between the Church and the forces of secular liberalism.
The Spanish Church was actually pretty successful in defending itself against the
threat of secularism. While Freemasonry may have been unbanned in 1868,
Catholicism remained the religion of state under the constitutional monarchy
(1876–1923): education was Catholic, and public expression of other religions
was banned. Despite this comparatively very privileged position, the Church in
Spain resented the gains the secularists had already made – including the
legalization of Freemasonry. Catholics were politically divided by many things,
such as the vexed issue of regional autonomy. Yet they were united in their
loathing of Freemasons. In the 1880s, Léo Taxil’s invented exposés of Satanism Satanism in the Lodges were rapidly translated into
Spanish. There was a rash of home-grown anti-Masonic publications.
The Church was not
entirely wrong to identify Masonry with secularism. In the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, Spanish Masonry prospered for the first time – although it
remained much smaller and less powerful than in other Catholic countries like
France and Italy. Membership increased to over ten thousand; there were eight
Masonic newspapers. Freemasons viewed themselves as an enlightened minority,
holding out against mass religious fanaticism. They were active in anticlerical
newspapers and in running lay schools. However, as elsewhere in Europe, Spanish
Freemasons were divided between several competing Grand Lodges and were thus
unable to exercise any influence collectively.
A turning point came
in 1898 with Spain’s traumatic military defeat at the hands of the United
States, which led to the loss of its last remaining possessions in the
Americas. Four centuries of New World empire were at an end. Catholics blamed
this national humiliation on the Masons – whether at home, or in Cuba and the
Philippines. Police raided the Madrid headquarters of the Grand Orient of Spain
and the National Grand Orient, the country’s two most important Masonic
governing bodies. Masonic membership went into decline. In the wake of 1898,
the military developed its own strain of anti-Masonry. Two generations of
officers would grow up believing that the fifth column of Masons had caused
Spain’s defeat, and was actively impeding attempts to carve out new territories
in Morocco.
The accelerating
social changes of the early twentieth century then hardened opinions on the
Church-versus-state issue, as on many others. Although the advance of Masonry
had been checked, the Church’s fear of the Craft increased regardless. For the
more the system was permeated by the Catholic hierarchy’s vision of a society
based on religion, property, order and family, the less able it was to meet the
challenges of modernity, and the more enemies the Church acquired. Liberals
mounted a secularising drive and the threat of
atheist socialism loomed. There were a number of anti-clerical riots. During
the upsurge of working-class violence in Barcelona in 1909 known as the ‘Tragic
Week’, radicals, socialists, and anarchists beheaded religious statues, desecrated
graves, and burned churches. Nor would this be the last attack against
religious personnel and property. By the end of the Great War, entire sectors
of Spanish society hated the Church: notably the urban working class, and the
brutalized peasantry of the great estates of the south. Spanish Masonry’s
destiny was in the balance: it was wedded to the fortunes of liberal ideas –
which would increasingly be treated with scorn by both Right and Left.
In 1923, amid
strikes, disorder, and the international fear of the Bolshevik revolution, a
military dictatorship under Miguel Primo de Rivera abandoned constitutional
government, much to the satisfaction of many in the Church. Masonry was
harassed, although not banned. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with its
report of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, was first translated into Spanish during
the dictatorship. The Jews were henceforth the Masons’ regular partners in
imagined plotting. But partly because there was only a very tiny and almost
invisible Jewish population – they had notoriously been expelled in 1492 –
their threat remained an abstract one. The Masons, by contrast, seemed all too
real.
Primo de Rivera’s
dictatorship fell because its attempts at conservative reform only increased
the opposition to it, even within the military; as it fell, it also brought
down the Church’s historical ally, the monarchy. When a democratic Republic was
declared in April 1931, the forces of secular modernity finally had the chance
to steer Spain into the future, and away from the Church. Many Freemasons, true
to their Brotherhood’s longstanding constitutional sympathies, took a leading
role. Of 468 members of the Constituent Assembly elected in June 1931 with the
task of drawing up the Republic’s Constitution, 149 are thought to have been
Freemasons – just under a third. This prominence was all the more remarkable
given that there were only about five thousand Craftsmen in the whole country.
Yet they viewed the Republic as their own creation, as an editorial in a
magazine for members of the Scottish Rite made clear: ‘There has been no more
perfectly Masonic political revolution than Spain’s. Everything was temperance,
justice, order, moderation, humanitarianism, tolerance, and piety.’
To Catholics, even
those who supported the Republic, such triumphalism confirmed the worst alarms
about a Masonic plot. As did the Republic’s Constitution itself. Civil marriage
and divorce were introduced, along with freedom of worship. Religious orders of
monks, nuns and priests were barred from any role in education. ‘Spain has
ceased to be Catholic,’ as the prominent Republican minister Manuel Azaña crowed in October 1931. To the dismay of Catholics, Azaña would go on to serve as the Republic’s Prime Minister
and then President. The government issued provocative directives forbidding
religious burials and processions.
Such measures only
stoked opposition to the Republic. Anti-Masonic hatred became a token of
rightist identity that was guaranteed to raise a cheer among supporters of all
the different factions among the Republic’s enemies. The volume of the
propaganda was now turned up several notches. The Catholic newspaper El Debate
had no doubt that ‘the specter of the Lodges’ was operating behind the scenes.
A leading figure among the Carlists, a group that wanted to return to an almost
theocratic version of the monarchy, told a rally in Palencia, ‘We are governed
by a small number of Freemasons, and I say that any means are permitted against
them if they continue trying to de-Christianize us.’ In 1932, a Catholic youth
movement launched with a manifesto ‘declaring war’ on Communism and Masonry.
Catholic resistance to the Republic centered on a new party, CEDA (standing for
Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights), which increasingly imitated the
rhetoric and style of Nazism. There was an anti-Masonic drumbeat in CEDA’s
propaganda: ‘The country is writhing in the anguish of a tragic agony, because
of crimes and outrages committed by lunatics who are paid for and commanded by
the Masonic Lodges and international Judaism. With the cooperation of Marxist
sectarianism, they have broken the sacred bonds of Church and state.’ For a
while, a right-wing electoral victory in 1933 checked the secularist advance.
In October 1934, CEDA’s leader became Minister of War and immediately moved to
ban Masons in the military: six generals were dismissed. New elections in
February 1936 saw anti-Masonry once again become a battle cry for the Right.
‘They shall not pass! Marxism shall not pass! Freemasonry shall not pass!’
For all this
stridency, the 1936 election result brought the Left to power once more, and
with it the forces of anti-clericalism. The polarisation
of Spanish society accelerated dramatically. Militias were formed on both
sides. There was a rash of tit-for-tat assassinations.
Plans for an army
rebellion against the Republic were soon hatched. The man at the center of
those plans, General Emilio Mola, believed that the Republic itself had come
about through ‘one race’s hatred, as transmitted through a manifesto ‘declaring
war’ on Communism and Masonry. Catholic resistance to the Republic centered on
a new party, CEDA (standing for Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights),
which increasingly imitated the rhetoric and style of Nazism. There was an
anti-Masonic drumbeat in CEDA’s propaganda: ‘The country is writhing in the
anguish of a tragic agony, because of crimes and outrages committed by lunatics
who are paid for and commanded by the Masonic Lodges and international Judaism.
With the cooperation of Marxist sectarianism, they have broken the sacred bonds
of Church and state.’ For a while, a right-wing electoral victory in 1933
checked the secularist advance. In October 1934, CEDA’s leader became Minister
of War and immediately moved to ban Masons in the military: six generals were
dismissed. New elections in February 1936 saw anti-Masonry once again become a
battle cry for the Right. ‘They shall not pass! Marxism shall not pass!
Freemasonry shall not pass!’ For all this stridency, the 1936 election result
brought the Left to power once more, and with it the forces of
anti-clericalism. The polarisation of Spanish society
accelerated dramatically. Militias were formed on both sides. There was a rash
of tit-for-tat assassinations. Plans for an army rebellion against the Republic
were soon hatched. The man at the center of those plans, General Emilio Mola,
believed that the Republic itself had come about through ‘one race’s hatred, as
transmitted through a skilfully managed organization:
I am referring specifically to the Jews and Freemasonry’. On 30 June 1936, Mola
issued a long list of instructions to his fellow conspirators in Morocco, where
the revolt would begin; they included the following: ‘Eliminate leftist
elements: communists, anarchists, trade unionists, Freemasons, etc.’
When the fighting
started two weeks later, a cruel vengeance was unleashed on both sides. Hatreds
sedimented over decades burst to the surface. There was a wave of anticlerical
killings in the Republican zone: close to seven thousand clergy died, including
thirteen bishops and two hundred and eighty-three nuns. These murders often
took a sadistic, symbolic form. In Torrijos, near Toledo, the parish priest was
stripped and flogged, and then forced to drink vinegar, wear a crown of thorns
and carry a beam on his back. In the end, his tormentors decided to shoot him
rather than nail him to a cross. There is little or no evidence that Masons
were involved in the many episodes of anticlerical violence that Spain saw
before and during the Civil War. But that made little difference.
On the Nationalist
side, bishops hailed the right-wing uprising as a ‘crusade’. The guns of
soldiers and militiamen were blessed as instruments for the defense of
Christian civilization. More than a century of Catholic anti-Masonic venom made
the Brothers a target, part of the ‘anti-Spain’ that had to be crushed.
According to one newspaper belonging to the Falange, in September 1936: ‘All of
Spain is calling for exemplary and rapid punishment for Masons, those cunning
and bloodthirsty men.’ To make matters worse, by a tragic historical
coincidence, the British influence that had radiated up from Gibraltar meant
that the Craft was concentrated in the south-western corner of Spain, around
Cádiz, Huelva, and Seville – the very area that was most savagely ‘purged’ in
the first months of the war. So it was that decades of religiously infused
anti-Masonic rhetoric culminated in the brutal persecution of Masons at the
start of the Civil War.
Mussolini had a long
track record as an anti-Mason. But his Fascist movement was not a Catholic
force and, except when it came to political tactics, religion played no part in
his anti-Masonry. Nor did anti-Semitism. Although Hitler was of course an anti-Semite,
he was no more religious than was Mussolini in his anti-Masonry. Like the Duce,
the Führer was tactically flexible. His animus against Masonry was always
subordinated to his strategic goals: winning power; crushing all sources of
actual or potential opposition; waging a race war. By contrast, the Spanish
style of Fascism, as it took shape under General Franco, was Catholic
through-and-through. Anti-Masonry, and the persecution of Freemasons, were
essential to Nationalist propaganda and action.
The APIS spy
network
As the military
acquired stable control in Nationalist territory, Craftsmen were more likely to
end up in a prison camp or labor unit than staring down the barrel of a gun.
However, brutal treatment continued to be meted out to them here and there
throughout the Spanish Civil War: it is reported that in Málaga, in October
1937, eighty prisoners were executed just for being Masons. Such ferocity was
remarkable enough. More remarkable still was the repressive drive that began
during the war and continued well beyond its end. Neither the Duce nor the
Führer, once they had broken the Brotherhood as an organization, were
particularly zealous in persecuting individual former Masons. The Caudillo, by
contrast, was remorseless to the point of obsession.
As a Catholic, and a
professional soldier who had made his career in the Moroccan campaigns, General
Francisco Franco carried predictable baggage of anti-Masonry. He may also have
had personal rancor against the Craft. Some testimonies suggest that he twice
tried and failed to join a Lodge, in 1926 and 1932, in the hope of accelerating
his military career. It is claimed that he was blackballed on the second
occasion by his brother Ramón, a celebrated aviator with Republican sympathies;
the two had a very tense relationship. Be that as it may, Franco certainly
blamed Masons in the military for blocking his advancement.
Once the Civil War
began, Franco put his anti-Masonry into practice even before he assumed supreme
leadership of the Nationalist side. In mid-September 1936, he outlawed the
Craft in the territory under his command, and declared that persistent members
were guilty of the ‘crime of rebellion’. In December 1938, he announced that
all Masonic motifs and inscriptions that ‘could be judged offensive to the
Church’ would be destroyed.
As the Francoist
forces ground out their victory, which they owed in large part to German and
Italian military support, the Caudillo began to take measures to purge all
Spain of the Masonic plague. The notorious Law of Political Responsibilities,
issued in February 1939, made it a crime to have supported the Republic and
decreed that the culprits should have their property confiscated; Masons were
included within its provisions. A new school curriculum issued in 1939 included
lessons on how, under the Republic, the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy had handed the
country over to Communism.
Franco acquired the
habit of using the sexually loaded term el contubernio to refer to the way Masons plotted with all
kinds of subversive elements: it means ‘concubinage’ – a squalid mésalliance,
like that of a concubine with her lover. This was the vocabulary of a ravenous
phobia. Before long, somebody decided that Franco’s phobia needed feeding.
The Civil War ended
in April 1939. The Second World War, in which Francoist Spain would remain
neutral, began in September. At around this time, a network of informers began
to pass high-level information on the international Masonic conspiracy against
Spain directly to Franco. The network was highly mysterious: it was referred to
as APIS in official communications, but no historian has yet discovered what
the letters stood for. What is known is that, over the next quarter of a
century, the Caudillo read intelligence briefs of astounding quality. Among the
highlights of the
APIS papers are letters to or from Roosevelt, Churchill, Montgomery,
Eisenhower and the Secretary-General of NATO. But more valuable still was the
substantial body of revelations about the Freemasons’ persistent operations in
Spain, and their attempts to infiltrate the Francoist regime.
The main flow of this
precious intelligence arrived through three intriguing women. The deep throat
was a woman who had access to Masonic strategy at the highest levels. She
referred to herself only as A. de S.; her husband, known only as R., was a
high-ranking member of the Association Maçonnique Internationale – a federation of Grand Lodges in many
different countries. A. de S.’s liaison with the APIS base in Madrid was her
children’s nanny, known as Elisa. And the woman in Madrid who edited the
reports and prepared them for the Caudillo was Marìa
Dolores de Naveràn, who led a second life as a
professor in a teacher-training college. The Caudillo frequently intimated to
his entourage that, thanks to such spies, he had inside knowledge of Masonic
schemes.
Evidently, he trusted
his sources. This was unfortunate for him because pretty much all the
significant information provided by APIS about Masonic conspiracies was fake.
There are a number of clues. The Association Maçonnique
Internationale fell apart in 1950, but APIS reports
of its mischiefs continued to arrive on the Caudillo’s desk until 1965. There
were never any original copies of the English-language documents that APIS
agents had supposedly stolen, only Spanish translations. When those
translations quoted the original for effect, the quotes often contained howlers
in English spelling and grammar. The deep throat A. de S. may well have been
completely fictional.
APIS was the
espionage equivalent of the great Taxil hoax of the
late nineteenth century. Franco fell for it utterly. Researchers currently
working on the documents do not know who was behind it. The most that can be
said is that Marìa Dolores de Naveràn,
who edited the reports, may have been involved. The most likely scenario is
that somebody, probably somebody deep in the dictatorship, was hoodwinking the
Caudillo to manipulate his anti-Masonic mania against
political rivals. Whatever the origins of the APIS deception, Freemasons,
or those suspected of being Freemasons, would pay the price.
Salamanca today is a
beautiful backwater: a medieval city carved ornately from soft Villamayor stone
that glows like butter in the early morning sunshine, to the delight of
selfie-snapping sightseers and foreign students on Erasmus scholarships. Some
of the more thorough visitors find their way to a museum that lies down a small
street behind the cathedral, on the opposite side to the university where
Miguel de Unamuno gave his final speech. The little museum’s centerpiece is a
windowless Masonic Lodge room. Or at least it purports to be a Lodge room.
Accessed through heavy double doors, and arranged around a chessboard floor, it
is a lamp-lit box crammed with Masonic stuff: squares and compasses, stone
blocks, columns, and an altar emblazoned with the double-headed eagle of the
Scottish Rite. The blood-red walls carry pictures of decapitated heads, zodiac
signs, Hebrew inscriptions and black gravestones: ‘Here lies Jubelo: ambition made him the murderer of Hiram Abiff’.
From the far wall, three seated dummies in black robes stare back at you with goggly eyes painted onto their hoods. The dummy in the centre has a skull-and-crossbones on his chest, and a
miniature skull with luminous eyes on the desk in front of him. It is all meant
to be spine-tingling. Most tourists are just baffled or amused.
The Salamanca Lodge
is the last surviving example of its kind in Europe. It was built as propaganda
by the Francoist authorities in the 1940s. Everything in it is a genuine
artefact confiscated during police raids on Lodges. Franco’s men took bits and
pieces from their hoard to create the spookiest ensemble they could. It is not
very hard to make Freemasonry seem weird.
Sources:
G.
Álvarez Chillida, El Antisemitismo en España, Madrid, 2002. ‘One race’s hatred, as transmitted through a skilfully managed organisation’,
quoted p. 320.
V.M
Arbeloa Muru, ‘La masonería y la legislación de la II República’, Revista
Española de Derecho Canónico, 37 (108), 1981. For Masons involved in drawing up the Republican
constitution, p. 369. ‘There has been no more perfectly Masonic political
revolution’, quoted from Boletín Oficial
del Supremo Consejo del Grado 33 para España y sus dependencias, p. 374. ‘The spectre
of the Lodges’, quoted p. 380.
J. Blazquez Miguel, Introduccion
a la historia de
la Masonería española,
Madrid, 1989. Particularly for the late nineteenth-century membership figures
and newspapers, pp. 92–105.
R. Carr, Spain: 1808–1975, 2nd edn,
Oxford, 1982. On Masonry and the origins of ‘culture war’ in Spain, pp. 127–8.
J. de la Cueva, ‘The assault on the city of Levites:
Spain’, in C. Clark and W. Kaiser (eds), Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic
Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge, 2004.
J.
Domínguez Arribas, L’ennemi judéo-maçonnique dans la propagande franquiste
(1936–1945), Paris, 2016. On the
origins of Franco’s anti-Masonry, pp. 93–118. See the brilliant pages on APIS,
from which my account is drawn, pp. 119–45. On Tusquets, pp. 221–73.
J. Dronda
Martínez, Con Cristo o contra Cristo. Religión e movilización antirrepublicana
en Navarra (1931–1936), Villatuerta, 2013. ‘We are governed by a small number of Freemasons’,
quoted p. 285.
J.A. Ferrer Benimeli, Masonería española contemporánea. Vol. 2. Desde 1868
has nuestros días, Madrid, 1980. The key starting
point for this topic. For the widely cited early estimates for the number of
Masonic victims of the Nationalist repression, pp. 144–50. ‘The country is
writhing in the anguish of a tragic agony’, quoted p. 122. CEDA’s leader as
Minister of War moved to ban Masons in the military, pp. 287ff. ‘Freemasonry
shall not pass!’, quoted p. 278. ‘All of Spain is calling for exemplary and
rapid punishment’, quoted p. 143. Málaga, October 1937, eighty prisoners
executed for being Masons, p. 146. On Franco’s supposed attempts to become a
Mason, pp. 169–70. Franco outlaws the Craft under his command in September
1936, ‘crime of rebellion’, ‘could be judged offensive to the Church’, pp.
140–1. ‘Lucky Hitler!’, Mauricio Karl, quoted p. 141. Card index system in
Salamanca contains 80,000 suspected Brothers, estimate p. 157.
J.A. Ferrer Benimeli, El contubernio judeo-masónico-comunista,
Madrid, 1982. Catholic youth movement manifesto ‘declaring war’ on Masonry, p.
274.
J.A. Ferrer Benimeli (ed.), Masoneria, politica y sociedad, vol. II,
Zaragoza, 1989. In particular the following important essays: J.-C. Usó i
Arnal, ‘Nuoevas aportaciones sobre la repression de la masonería Española tras
la Guerra Civil’; J. Ortiz Villalba, ‘La persecución contra la Masonería
durante la Guerra Civil y la Post-guerra’; R. Gil Bracero and M.N. López
Martínez, ‘La repression antimasónica en Granada durante la guerra civil y la
postguerra’; F. Espinosa Maestre, ‘La represión de la Masonería en la Provincia
de Huelva (1936–1941)’.
N. Folch-Serra, ‘Propaganda in Franco’s time’,
Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 89 (7–8), 2012. Judges on the Special Tribunal
nominated by the regime, p. 235. Continued use of Salamanca archive after 1964,
pp. 234–7.
R.G. Jensen, ‘Jose Millan-Astray and the Nationalist
“Crusade” in Spain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 27 (3), 1992. F. Lannon,
‘The Church’s crusade against the Republic’, in P. Preston (ed.), Revolution
and War in Spain 1931–1939, London, 1984.
F. Lannon, Privilege, Persecution, and Prophecy: The
Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1975, Oxford, 1987. For figures of the number of
clergy killed in the Civil War, p. 201.
F. Lannon, The Spanish Civil War, Oxford, 2002. D.
Manuel Palacio, ‘Early Spanish Television and the Paradoxes of a Dictator
General’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 25 (4), 2005; on
the background to Franco’s last speech.
P. Preston, ‘Juan Tusquets:
a Catalan contribution to the myth of the Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy’,
in A. Quiroga and M. Ángel del Arco (eds), Right-Wing Spain in the Civil War
Era, London, 2012. ‘Tusquets saw Freemasons
everywhere’, quoted p. 183. P. Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and
Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, London, 2012. ‘Eliminate leftist
elements’, quoted on p. 133 from Mohammad Ibn Azzuz
Hakim, La Actitud de los moros ante el alzamiento:
Marruecos 1936, Málaga, 1997. Tusquets starts a fire
to cause a distraction, pp. 35–7. On the birth of the Salamanca archive, pp.
487–90.
P. Preston, Franco: A Biography, London, 1993. On
Franco’s anti-Masonry, p. 4 and passim. J. Ruiz, ‘A Spanish Genocide?
Reflections on the Francoist Repression after the Spanish Civil War’,
Contemporary European History, 14 (2), 2005. All of Ruiz’s writing on this
topic is fundamental, and I have drawn on him heavily throughout this chapter,
such as for the workings of the anti-Masonic tribunal.
J. Ruiz, Franco’s Justice: Repression in Madrid after
the Spanish Civil War, Oxford, 2005. Those found to have taken part in the ‘red
rebellion’ were singled out for execution if they were suspected of being
Masons, p. 200. Rotary Club and League for the Rights of Man as Masonic front organisations, p. 202.
J. Ruiz, ‘Fighting the International Conspiracy: The
Francoist Persecution of Freemasonry, 1936–1945’, Politics, Religion &
Ideology, 12 (2), 2011. This essay also contains a useful short history of
Spanish Masonry. On the supposed Judeo-Masonic conspiracy in the school
curriculum, 1939, p. 181. Seventy-six per cent of those brought before the
Special Tribunal receive the minimum sentence, p. 191. ‘Fusion within the
Presidency of the United States of supreme executive power and the supreme
Masonic powers’, quoted p. 194. ‘Daughter of evil’, quoted p. 195.
H. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, London, 2003 (1961).
On Unamuno’s speech, pp. 486–9. On the stripping and flogging of the parish
priest in Torrijos, near Toledo, p. 260.
J. Treglown, Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and
Memory since 1936, London, 2013. On the archive in Salamanca, pp. 57–84.
M. De Unamuno, Epistolario inédito II (1915–1936), Madrid, 1991. ‘Lately they’ve
killed the Protestant pastor’, pp. 353–5.
The
archival documentation on the posthumous trials of Atilano Coco Martin are in
the records of the Tribunal Especial para la Represión de la Masonería y el
Comunismo in Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte – Centro Documental de
la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca. The
images of Franco’s final speech can be viewed at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCpQ0cHBRFk. The video in the Salamanca museum
explaining its context can be viewed at
http://www.culturaydeporte.gob.es/cultura/areas/archivos/mc/archivos/cdmh/exposiciones-y-actividades/audiovisuales.html.
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