CHAPTER II. Fact or fiction?

Mathieu Corman (militiaman in the Column’s International Group)

Durruti was killed by a blast of gunfire when he got out of his car. That was the only victory of the “fifth column” in Madrid. The militiamen surrounded the house from where the gunshots came and killed everyone inside.[767] Another Column fighter, who prefers to remain anonymous, expanded on Corman’s version:

J.M.

When they left the Headquarters on Miguel Angel Street, Bonilla, Manzana, and a third person whose name I don’t recall took their seats in the car. Once they got to the Moncloa Plaza—the place closest to the Hospital Clínico—Durruti told the driver to stop near one of the cottages on the avenue.

Just as he did so, someone in a cottage shot at the vehicle. A bullet pierced the car window and injured Durruti in his side. After collecting themselves, the car’s occupants went toward the building. Two or three individuals took off running. A round of gunfire hit one of them, who died instantly, but the others managed to escape. A CNT membership card issued by the Baker’s union in Madrid was found on the corpse. There was an investigation, which confirmed that its owner had died a few days earlier and that his family had noticed that the card was missing when they gave them his personal belongings. This indicated that members of the “fifth column” had infiltrated the hospitals and were stealing political identification documents.[768]

JAUME MIRAVITLLES

In his memoirs, Jaume Miravitlles says that “one year after Durruti’s death, there was an exposition in Barcelona commemorating the heroic resistance in Madrid. Among other objects, the shirt he wore on the day of his death was on display. It was spread out in a showcase and people gathered around to see the tattered edges of the bullet hole.” Miravitlles alleges that he “heard people say that it couldn’t have been caused by a bullet shot from two thousand feet away.”

“That very night,” he states, “I had specialists from the medical laboratory come to examine the shirt. All concluded the same thing: the bullet had been fired at close range.”

Days later, “at a banquet that Durruti’s compañera attended,” he questioned Emilienne Morin about the matter:

“Surely you must know the truth: how did Durruti die?” “Yes, I do know,” she answered. I insisted: “So, what happened to him?” She stared at me and said: “For as long as I live, I will accept the official account: that a Civil Guard shot him from a window.” Then, in a low voice, she added: “But I know that he was murdered by someone close to him. It was an act of vengeance.” [769]

PIERRE ROSLI

Pierre Rosli, a French Communist Party activist and Section Chief in the XI International Brigade, declares:

On November 21, the same day as Durruti’s death, his Column attacked the Hospital Clínico and the Santa Cristina Asylum. They began in the morning and, after numerous unsuccessful attempts, finally penetrated the hospital’s walls in the early afternoon. Durruti was in his command post, in front of the Modelo prison. At times the shots seemed to come from behind. Durruti dropped dead. A stray bullet? A ricochet? The anarchist leader had had many enemies among old CNT and FAI militants since August. They reproached him for his disciplinary harshness and some accused him of ambition and compromising with the Communists.

Minutes after the event, Pierre Rosli claims that men from the Durruti Column told him: “Our own people killed Durruti...” [770]

MIKHAIL KOLTSOV

November 21. A stray or perhaps intentionally fired bullet fatally wounded Durruti as he got out of his car in front of his command post. What a shame, Durruti! Despite his errors and his anarchist practices, he was doubtlessly one of the most brilliant men in Catalonia and the entire Spanish workers’ movement.[771]

DOMINIQUE DESANTI

They killed Durruti in front of the Modelo prison, the pride of the Republic.

Everything has been said about his death, but some years ago we meet an old, repentant anarchist who claimed—with details that would be difficult to invent—that one of his comrades had executed him. “With his discipline in indiscipline, Durruti would have made us lambs. We grumbled, like the Socialists and Communists. He demanded that we fight without challenging his orders, but we believed that everyone should have the right to decide whether or not to attack. He commanded like a ‘Soviet’ general.” The contrite anarchist added: “I didn’t know it back then, but while there are many ideologies, there’s only one way to fight and the goal is to win.”[772]

HUGH THOMAS

On November 21, while the battle was still raging, Durruti was killed in front of the Model Prison. His death was said to have been caused by a stray bullet from the University City. It seems more probable, however, that he was killed by one of his men, an “uncontrollable,” who resented the new Anarchist policy (termed “the discipline of indiscipline”).... Durruti’s funeral in Barcelona was an extraordinary occasion. All day long a procession of 80 to 100 people broad marched down the Diagonal, the widest street in the city. In the evening, a crowd of 200,000 pledged themselves to carry out the dead man’s principles. But the death of Durruti marked the end of the classic age of Spanish anarchism.

PIERRE BROUÉ AND EMILE TÉMIME

On 14 November the 3,500 men of the Durruti Column arrived from the Aragón front. The Madrid crowd gave them a triumphal welcome. Durruti asked for the most dangerous sector. He was given the Casa de Campo, opposite the University City. The General Staff allocated him an officer, the Russian “Santi,” as adviser....

On 15 November, the main attack actually began.... By the end of the afternoon, the Asensio Column had managed to break through and gain a footing in the University City.... On 21 November, Durruti was killed in the University City, probably by one of the men in his column who resented the risks he made them run and the discipline he imposed on them during this hell.[773]

THE REVIEWER FROM THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

To his enormous credit, Durruti finally agreed to go to Madrid and work out a deal with the Communist Party and the Government. He and his bodyguard went clattering into the underground restaurant of the Gran Vía while the shells from general Franco’s troops crashed into the street outside. The Madrileños had never seen such a display of military hardware as those warriors carried, and they were enthusiastic at the thought that these well-accoutered men were at last on their side.

“Durruti left his bodyguard. He made a deal with the communists. And fifteen minutes later he was shot in the street by agents of an anarchist organization called “The Friends of Durruti.”[774]

This is the version of Durruti’s death advanced by a writer from The Times Literary Supplement in a review of The Anarchists by James Joll and Anarchism by George Woodcock. He reproached both historians for their depiction of the event:

Neither of the authors under review has the episode quite right. They both accept the theory that Durruti got out to the Madrid front and was there shot by persons unknown. This was the theory which was, for obvious reasons, circulated by the Spanish Republican Government and the Communist Party at the time. They also had every interest in blurring the violence of the conflict between the anarchists and the communists. It was even said that perhaps Durruti had been killed by a stray bullet from the Franco trenches. None of all that was true. He was shot in the back in the presence of many observers in the streets of Madrid. And the killing could be seen as perhaps a final demonstration of the philosophy of anarchism and above all of the final conflict between the anarchists and the communists.

“The Friends of Durruti” were organized quite a while before Durruti was murdered. It was intended to express the ‘true spirit’ of anarchism as against the authoritarian tendencies of communism. It was therefore logical that ‘The Friends of Durruti’ should shoot Durruti. It was the last act in the quarrel between Bakunin and Karl Marx.

People mentioned in his article, as well as others interested in the war in Spain, replied in the following issue of The Times Literary Supplement. [775] Hugh Thomas writes:

Sir: your reviewer of James Joll’s The Anarchists (TLS, December 24) says categorically, as a definitive fact, almost as if he had been there himself, that the Spanish anarchist leader Durruti was murdered in the streets of Madrid in 1936 by the extreme organization known ironically as ‘The Friends of Durruti.’ He adds that: ‘many observers’ saw the murder and that the Spanish Republican Government and Communist Party circulated the theory that he had been shot at the front, either by the nationalists or ‘unknown persons.’ It would be very interesting to know exactly who these ‘many observers’ were and whether any of them can now be identified.... It is also perplexing why your reviewer should think that the Government and the communists had a good reason for hiding the facts of Durruti’s death, if they knew them. Surely their relations with the anarchists were already tense enough by November, 1936, for them to have used the opportunity of Durruti’s “murder” to discredit Durruti’s colleagues, particularly those reluctant to submit to the disciplines of war. And then, what evidence is there that the “Friends of Durruti” were organized at this time at all, as a group?

Albert Meltzer

There is a statement by Albert Meltzer immediately after the letter from Hugh Thomas:

Your reviewer of the Joll’s The Anarchists claims to have greater knowledge of Durruti’s death than he seems prepared to substantiate with sources. When a man is shot in the open street, in a period of warfare, one can attribute his death to his opponents or his supporters quite easily. At the time of his death, Durruti was shot, in the open street, in a quarter from which the fascists were being evicted. It is impossible that the killer could have recognized him, and shot him knowing that he was shooting Buenaventura Durruti. He wore no special uniform. The killer was shooting at random at militiamen advancing and therefore could have only been a Francoist. While Durruti was shot in the back, it was from a height, among buildings still occupied by the enemy. Later recriminations in the Republic brought forward the suggestion by the Anarchists that Durruti had been shot by a Communist, but that is improbable. It was however, true, that Durruti’s death was of great tactical advantage to the Communists, since it removed the one man in the Anarchist Movement whose prestige was great enough to have withstood the growing Communist influence.

The “Friends of Durruti” was formed months after Durruti’s death (and so named in accordance with a traditional anarchist practice to call groups ‘Friends of ’ this or that dead philosopher or militant, but never a living one). Those who adopted this name in Spain (the first group was in Paris) were the Anarchists who opposed their organization’s policy of compromise with the Government and submission to the blackmail by the Communist Party. Your reviewer (possibly a former fellow traveler?) mixed up two Communist lines of attack upon the Anarchists when he asserts that The Friends of Durruti killed Durruti, who was about to ‘do a deal’ with the Communists.

The Communists at the time of his death were in no position do a deal. It was only with the Russian influence, coming to a head after Durruti’s death, that they could have done so. In several published interviews, with the veteran Russian anarchist, Emma Goldman, Buenaventura Durruti made his position clear, shortly before his death. Asked if he were not too trusting, he replied: ‘I have no fear that if the workers are called to choose between our methods of freedom and the so-called communism you have seen in Russia, which they will choose.’ She asked what would happen if the communists proved too strong for the workers to be able to choose, and he said quite pointedly: ‘It will be an easy matter to deal with the Communists when we have disposed of Franco, or even before if the necessity arises.’ Had he lived, this might have been proved true.

JAMES JOLL

Joll also commented on the review in The Times Literary Supplement. Students of Spanish anarchism and of the Spanish civil war will be grateful to your contributor for his account of the murder of Durruti. It is perhaps a pity that your insistence on anonymity make it impossible to identify this particular source in order to assess its value and to refer to it accurately in future versions of the story.

ANONYMOUS:

The incriminated critic responded to his opponents in the same edition of the Times Literary Supplement:

Your correspondents, Mr. Thomas and Mr. Meltzer, raise four principal points. First, where was Durruti shot? Secondly, who shot him? Thirdly, why did they do so? And finally, why should the story have been officially distorted?

Mr. Thomas believes that he was shot in the Parque del Oeste; that is to say, at the front, not in Madrid. Mr. Meltzer accepts that he was shot in the street but not that he was shot by ‘The Friends of Durruti.’ I was in Madrid on the day of the murder and was at the scene of the crime within half an hour. There were several people there whom I knew at least by sight, two of them members of Durruti’s bodyguard. They certainly had no time to concoct for my benefit the story of what had happened.

Durruti was shot, as Mr. Meltzer rightly points out, from an upper window, but he amazes with his statement that ‘nationalists were being evicted’ from that section of the city at the time and therefore he was shot by a nationalist who was simply firing at Republican militiamen advancing. I would really ask Mr. Meltzer to reexamine his sources. Such an episode might have occurred many weeks earlier or many months later. No such battle with Franco supporters could possibly have occurred inside Madrid at that time. There was no need for Durruti to wear a special uniform to be identified. The killers were waiting at a window from which they could cover the exits of the building where Durruti was known to be completing his negotiations. The window was on the same side of the street; hence the shot in the back as he came out of the door.

Naturally it is possible for anyone at this date to deny that the killers were really members of ‘The Friends of Durruti.’ When Mr. Meltzer, naming no sources of his own, asks me for mine, I can only remind him of what that sort of war is like. My sources are, I should think, long since dead on many fronts. They were not the sort of men to be found now alive and happy at Chatham House or the United Nations.

Nevertheless, it is just possible—I am afraid this is the only help I can offer Mr. Joll—that one or other of the American correspondents in Madrid may have got the news past the censorship, so that it might be worthwhile looking through American newspapers files of the period. Both Mr. Meltzer and Mr. Thomas are, to my knowledge, mistaken in suggesting that ‘The Friends of Durruti’ was not in existence as an organization at the time of Durruti’s death. Their slogans were on the walls, their leaflets distributed.

Two views of them can be held. They can be seen on the one hand as “purist” anarchist idealists who felt, as any anarchist might, that under the pressure of the war the anarchist leadership was abandoning basic anarchist principles. Or they might be in fact agents of the enemy masquerading as anarchists for disruptive purposes. Here, Mr. Thomas’s reminder that the anarchists “were often used by other organizations” is valuable. Their killing of Durruti is explicable on either count.

As for the official version of the story, surely it is obvious that, since the object of the killers—whether idealistic or otherwise—was to disrupt and provoke, the object of the Government and of the communists, who had just been negotiating, must be to thwart this attempt by preventing the general public and, above all, the men on the fighting front, from learning the truth. It was an elementary riposte to the provocation.

In my view Mr. Meltzer touches the heart of the matter with his quotation from Durruti’s interview with Emma Goldman. She asked if he were not being “too trusting.” He denied it. But there were dedicated anarchists who thought that he was. And they also thought that in the brief interval between the interview and the murder he was changing his mind in the direction of a necessary cooperation with the communists, who in my personal judgment were at that date a very great deal more powerful in the republican armed forces than Mr. Meltzer suggests.

ANTONIA STERN’S VERSION

Her account differs from those previously mentioned and adds a new dimension to Durruti’s death by linking it to that of Hans Beimler, a German Communist (and onetime CP deputy), who served as a military attaché in Spain.

Beimler’s mysterious death filled his friends with worry, including Antonia Stern, who was among his closest intimates and also a collaborator. Beimler had quarreled with the German section operating out of Barcelona’s Hotel Colón, the PSUC premises. He had reproached them for bureaucratism and for focusing more on what was happening in the Catalan rearguard than the fight against fascism. Antonia Stern conducted a painstaking investigation into Beimler’s death. We extract the following paragraphs from her work:

It was a year before the tombstone at Hans Beimler’s grave received a name or any information relative to his death. And the inscriptions that were added were false. Hans Beimler died in the University City not in the Casa de Campo, some three kilometers away. Did they hope that this incorrect information would disorient the public if there was an investigation or did they simply want to avoid mentioning the University City? One can’t forget that Durruti was shot down there ten days earlier, from behind, in a cowardly way. Were they trying to stop anyone from noticing the coincidence? Perhaps there is a connection! ... But there is more... Beimler’s real friends, who spoke of him and cherished his memory, were immediately regarded with suspicion and persecuted...

Antonia Stern acknowledges that she initially believed the official version of Hans Beimler’s death. She explains what happened to her:

I wanted to collect statements from Hans Beimler’s militia comrades and publish a book in his memory. I was isolated as soon as I arrived in Barcelona and later tyrannized. Despite the fact that I had the best recommendations and permission to travel, my work, my trip to Madrid, and ultimately everything related to my effort to gather material for the book met with difficulties and prohibitions. I was finally told outright that I should give up my projected work on Hans Beimler. But, since I didn’t obey Party orders, I was arrested. They also detained all the militiamen who had shared their recollections of Beimler with me. The reason for our mistreatment, and why they wanted to prevent any talk of Beimler, escaped us. We understood when we found out how Beimler died: “They strangled the revolution with Hans. We couldn’t win because the best comrades had been liquidated by their own Party,” a militiaman confided to me. [776]

FATHER JESÚS ARNAL AND THE JOURNALIST MONTOTO

Father Jesús Arnal, better known in Aragón as “Durruti’s secretary” or “Durruti’s priest,” was fulfilling his religious duties as a parish priest in Aguinaliú (in the Huesca province) when the military uprising erupted on July 19. Fearing for his life, he hid for the first few days and then fled the area.

His got as far as Candasnos. There, a CNT militant named Timoteo, who saw no reason to execute him, tried to protect the priest and ending up taking him to the Durruti Column in Bujaraloz. He was given a job as a clerk in the Centurias Committee, along with Antonio Roda, José Esplugas, and Flores. Eventually Arnal became Company Commissioner and Secretary to Division Captain Ricardo Rionda Castro (Rico). He went to France once the war ended but soon returned to Spain, where authorities interned him in a concentration camp. When he was finally freed, he again began working as a priest, this time in Ballobar (Huesca). Such was the life of “Durruti’s priest” until one day he made the decision to write his memoirs and explain the mystery of Durruti’s death. From the moment that he publicly declared that he was doing so, journalists and filmmakers besieged him and he didn’t have a moment of peace.

Father Jesús claims that his primary reason for writing his memoirs was to justify his presence in the Durruti Column. Apparently the idea occurred to him in 1967 after he spoke with Mariano Pacheco, a technician involved in filming Golpe de mano ( Surprise Attack) in his village. According to Father Jesús, Pacheco wanted him to confirm the circumstances of Durruti’s death, which Pacheco had already learned from Julio Graves.

Jesús Arnal, perhaps inspired by the filmmaker and aware that divulging a new account of Durruti’s demise could be profitable, set out to pen his memoirs. After he publicized the fact, some journalists from the EFE Agency in Monzón came to interview him in November 1969. They ran an article on November 11 in Barcelona’s El Noticiero Universal. El Heraldo de Aragón reprinted the piece on November 30, Lérida’s La Mañana did so on December 2, 1969, and Angel Montoto published an article on the issue in La Prensa on July 7, 1970. Durruti’s death is the central matter in all of these pieces. Jesús Arnal writes:

Before reaching the bridge that separates France from Spain, Rico [i.e., Ricardo Rionda Castro] told us:

“Now you’ll know the truth about Durruti’s death. I’d always said that it was a secret, which we’d sworn not to reveal for political reasons and because it was a ridiculous death for Durruti... When we got to the University City and before entering the battle zone, Julio, the driver, parked the car along the curb. The vehicle was the convertible Hispano that we had taken from Bujaraloz. Durruti carried a naranjero submachine-gun, the type with a short barrel that you use to really blast the gendarmes.

“When he leaned forward to get out of the car, he went to rest the naranjero on the curb. The safety latch slipped when the gun hit the ground and the fateful shot rang out.”

According to Arnal, the following occurred shortly after the above statement appeared in the press:

.... a car stopped in front of my rectory house, and a gentleman, a lady, and a child got out. They came to my office and the man said to me:

“I’m from Barcelona. I’ve come to greet you and find out how you learned the truth about Durruti’s death.”

I calmly gave him my version and the sources who had given it to me.

He said: “I was in the car. You can’t use my name, only my pseudonym ‘Ragar.’”

He showed me some documents proving his identity.

“You’re right, except for some minor details. The vehicle was not a Hispano but a Buick, the machine-gun did not hit the curb but the car’s running board, and Ricardo Rionda Castro was not there but Bonilla and Manzana were. I don’t know how Rico learned the facts, but he wasn’t in the vehicle. The accident occurred in the Moncloa Plaza at the corner of Rosales Avenue at 4:00 pm on November 19, 1936. They immediately took him to the Hotel Ritz.... Federica Montseny and Mariano Vázquez swore us to secrecy.”

These comments from the mysterious “Ragar” turned Father Jesús into a detective, because the difference between his version and Rionda’s troubled him. He writes: “With many questions in mind ... the journalist Angel Montoto and I began a series of meetings with people that we assumed would be well-informed.”

They spoke with Doctors Martínez Fraile, Manuel Bastos, and José Santamaría. This resulted in the contradictory statements from Bastos and Santamaría that we’ve already noted. Arnal and Montoto accepted Santamaría’s version, because it fit more comfortably with their own theory.

Ready to continue their investigation, Montoto went to Toulouse to question Federica Montseny and Father Jesús went to Realville to speak with Rionda.

Mr. Angel Montoto visited Federica Montseny in France and told me this when he returned: “She said that we’re right, when I asserted that Durruti’s death was an accident.”

But I still wasn’t satisfied and went to France, to the town of Realville, where I’d been told that Rico lived. He received me like a father would receive a son. I told him: “Look, Rico, I come to embrace you, you and your family, but also for an issue that I really want to clarify: Durruti’s death.” “The truth is what I told you when we crossed the border and there is none other. However, you can add or clarify that I wasn’t present at the accident, but you know that Manzana and I were closer than brothers. He told me everything within ten minutes of the event. I don’t hesitate to say that Durruti was killed accidentally....

“I believe,” concludes Father Jesús, “that the last word has been said on the matter.” [777] The last word?