Julian Grimau

Julián Grimau García (Madrid, February 18, 1911-Madrid, April 20, 1963) was a Spanish communist politician, sentenced to death and executed by the Franco dictatorship, accused before the court military officer who tried him in a court martial for alleged crimes committed in the rear during the Spanish Civil War in his capacity as a member of the police services and as head of the Criminal Investigation Brigade. The opposition to the dictatorship, both inside and outside, questioned the validity of the evidence presented at the trial and denounced the torture to which he was subjected during his detention.

Later in 1991, an appeal was filed by the State Attorney General, Javier Moscoso, before the Military Chamber of the Supreme Court, to annul the sentence due to the alleged deceitful composition of the court-martial; Only the president of the chamber, the jurist José Jiménez Villarejo, voted in favor of the annulment, so it was rejected. Years later, in 2012, Izquierda Unida presented a non-legal proposal in the Congress of Deputies to rehabilitate his figure; Only the Popular Party, which governed with an absolute majority, voted against and the proposal was again rejected.

Biography

Early years

He was the son of Enrique Grimau de Mauro, police inspector and playwright. His paternal grandfather, Julián Grimau de Urssa, was a well-known doctor and mayor of the Segovian municipality of Cantalejo. In some biographical notes dedicated to the latter, you can read about Julián Grimau:

Don Julián Grimau García, son of Don Enrique Grimau Mauro, of Vallecas, and of Doña María García Ruiz, of Ávila. On February 18, 1911, on the Madrid street of Paseo del Rey, no 14, main floor, came to the world Julián Grimau García. He received in baptism the names of Julian Jesus Henry Simon in the parish of San Antonio de Padua, best known to St.Anthony of Florida, on February 27, 1911.

Spanish Civil War

He began as a member of the Republican Left, but when the civil war broke out, he joined the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). He spent the war in Barcelona, where he dedicated himself to police work. When the Republic was defeated, he went into exile in Latin America, later settling in France. He was one of the leaders of the PCE during the Franco era.

According to the accusations presented against him before the Franco military court that tried him, Grimau committed torture, home looting and murders as head of the "Czech" established since the beginning of 1938 in the Plaza de Berenguer el Grande in Barcelona. These accusations are recorded in texts from the Franco era and in the book Los papels reservados by journalist Emilio Romero.

Postwar

In 1954, during the PCE Congress held in Prague, he was elected member of its central committee. Starting in 1959 he replaced Simón Sánchez Montero, who had just been arrested, in the leadership of the Party 'in the interior', where he had to reside clandestinely for several years. He shared that address with Jorge Semprún and Francisco Romero Marín.

His activity made him one of the most wanted people by the Franco police. After his arrest, he was convicted in a summary trial and subsequently shot by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

The international press focused its attention on the Grimau case and there were massive demonstrations in several European and Latin American capitals.

The Grimau process

Grimau was arrested on November 7, 1962. The arrest occurred on a bus in which only he and two other passengers were traveling, who turned out to be agents of the Political-Social Brigade (Franco's political police).

Obviously, he had been betrayed. He was taken to the General Directorate of Security, located in Madrid's Puerta del Sol, in the building known as the Casa de Correos, which today is the headquarters of the government of the Community of Madrid. There he was subjected to torture and to cover it up, he was thrown into the interior patio of the building. His fall caused serious injuries to his skull and both wrists. Grimau explained this fact to his lawyer, stating that, at one point during the torture session to which he was subjected by his interrogators, they grabbed him and threw him out of the window, handcuffed with his hands in front, which is why he fractured himself. forehead and wrists. The police, through the Minister of Information Manuel Fraga, stated, on the contrary, that Grimau received exquisite treatment and that, at one point during his interrogation, he climbed onto a chair, opened the window and threw himself out of it. "inexplicable" and of his own free will. A version that the judge on duty accepted despite the existing indications that it had not been a suicide attempt.

Confronting all expectations, Grimau was not accused for his clandestine militancy but for his activity during the Civil War. He was the last person prosecuted and convicted in Spain as a result of the war. The reason for this is that, probably, the regime wanted to teach the opposition a lesson at a time when there was a wave of high social and political conflict.

Grimau was accused for his work as a police officer during the civil war. This activity, like all those carried out by members of the republican administration during the war, was classified as the crime of military rebellion. Specifically, Grimau was accused of torture and murder in a checa (political detention center) in Barcelona.

This accusation, which was not proven in the trial, has also been made against him by anarchist sectors, which accuse him of having been a prominent member of the Military Information Service (SIM) and of having directed the repression against those accused of the murder of SIM agent León Narwicz in 1938. However, there does not seem to be any documentary evidence of this. Furthermore, these sources place Grimau's activity in Madrid, not Barcelona. However, despite the above, Jorge Semprún (Federico Sánchez), member of the Executive Committee of the PCE, wrote in his Autobiography of Federico Sánchez the following:

Following his arrest [from Grimau], and especially after his murder, when I participated in the preparation of the book (Julián Grimau — The Man — The Crime — The Protest, Éditions Sociales, 1963) that the Party consecrated to his memory, I was knowing some aspects of his life that completely ignored while working with him in the Madrid clandestine. Thus, for example, I did not know that Julián Grimau, a few weeks after the civil war began, when he was still a member of the Federal Republican Party—just became a communist in October 1936—he had entered the Republic's Security Corps, working first at the Criminal Brigade of the Madrid police. One day, as we prepared the preparation of the book already quoted, Fernando Claudín, quite confused and with obvious discomfort and dislike, taught me a testimony about Grimau that had just been received from Latin America. There the work of Grimau in Barcelona, in the struggle against the agents of the Fifth Francoist Column, was quite detailed, but also—and that was what caused the discomfort of Claudín—in the fight against the POUM. I do not keep a copy of this document and I do not remember exactly the details of this last facet of Grimau's activity, which the Latin American witness described as if such, with hairs and signals. I know only that Grimau's involvement in the repression against the POUM was clearly established by that testimony, which was pardoned and censored in its most problematic aspects, before being published very extracted in the book to which I have already studied.

Grimau was tried by a military court and the process was full of irregularities. There were hardly any military personnel with legal training in Spain, so it was enough for the speaker or prosecutor to be a lawyer, in charge of advising the presidents of the court.. In the case of the Grimau trial, the prosecutor was a regular in political trials, Manuel Fernández Martín, who, in reality, had never studied law and held the position, like many other people at the time, thanks to the fact that he could declare that his titles "had been burned during the war" (He was unmasked a year later, after decades of practice, and sentenced to prison). The defender was the only person with legal training in the room: lieutenant lawyer Alejandro Rebollo Álvarez-Amandi (who would become a deputy years later), whom Grimau's defense would cost him his job.

The trial was held in the military courts of Madrid on Thursday, April 18, 1963, with the courtroom packed with journalists. For Rebollo, the trial was null and void (even according to the political laws of the time and even without knowing that the speaker was an impostor). The crimes of torture were not proven: the prosecution witnesses declared that they knew of the accused's crimes 'by hearsay', that is, through rumors or testimonies from third parties that could not be verified. It was only proven that, indeed, he was a police officer. The continued crime of rebellion was unlikely, given that Grimau had spent more than twenty years outside Spain after the end of the war and there was no evidence of his clandestine presence in the country during that time. The prosecutor cut off the statements of the accused and the defense lawyer himself on numerous occasions, whose plea was not taken into account. After just five hours of trial, without deliberation, the death sentence was handed down as planned.

In reality, the trial for 'military rebellion', in which the Political Responsibilities Law of 1938 was applied, made the sentence predictable. This type of summary trials in application of a law created specifically to annihilate the Republicans had not occurred since the years immediately after the war. In their heyday, they invariably ended with a death sentence, so much so that the court beadles often indulged in a macabre joke that became famous: "Let the widow of the accused come in."

On the other hand, the Council of Ministers on April 1 of that year, 1963, had approved the creation of the Public Order Court (TOP), which sought to definitively put an end to the repressive legislation approved in the context of the civil war. Grimau would have been tried by this court, which would not have handed down a death sentence but rather a prison sentence. Therefore, to ensure that Grimau would be executed, Franco ordered that the entry into force of the law be delayed until after the execution.

International pressure

Precisely because of the unusual nature of the procedure, an echo of a war that on the other hand the Franco regime seemed to want to bury (the events of the "twenty-five years of peace" were beginning to be prepared), and because the worst was expected, since the announcement of the charges against Grimau, an unprecedented international reaction of protest and pressure was unleashed in any aspect related to Spain. The international press focused its attention on the Grimau case and there were massive demonstrations in several European and Latin American capitals. In some ports, stevedores refused to unload Spanish ships, and more than 800,000 telegrams arrived in Madrid asking for the stoppage of what they considered a sham trial. The pressure did not seem to affect General Franco who, in his usual line, attributed it to a "Masonic-leftist conspiracy with the political class." Manuel Fraga, in his capacity as Minister of Information and Tourism, began an intense campaign directed at the international press attributing the biggest crimes to Grimau.

After reading the sentence, there was only the possibility that Franco commuted the sentence to another prison sentence. Numerous heads of state contacted him to make this request, including Pope John XXIII and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which was also unprecedented: it was the first time that a Soviet leader officially addressed the Franco regime. Within Spain, some personalities close to the regime also asked for clemency. The Council of Ministers, made up of seventeen people, met on April 19. It lasted ten hours, although, apparently, only Fernando Castiella, head of Foreign Affairs, and Vicente Fernández Bascarán, undersecretary of the Ministry of the Interior and acting minister that day, expressed their opposition to the execution of the sentence, alarmed by international pressure. and the consequences it could have on Spanish foreign policy. Their opposition was, however, rather timid, as Franco finally demanded a vote and the decision to execute the communist leader was made unanimously.

Execution

Julián Grimau, meanwhile, spent his chapel hours in the military barracks in the Campamento neighborhood, that is, those prior to the execution of the sentence, in the company of his lawyer, in accordance with military ordinances. Around 5 a.m. on April 20, he was taken in a van to the barracks' shooting range, where the shooting was to be carried out. In principle, the Civil Guard was ordered to form the platoon, but its commanders refused to do so, arguing that the Civil Guard was only responsible for guarding the body. The captain general of Madrid also refused to have the platoon made up of career military personnel, which was the second option. It seems that it was Franco himself who gave the order that Grimau's executioners be replacement soldiers, and so it was done. Young, scared and without shooting experience, according to witnesses, they shot Grimau twenty-seven bullets without managing to end his life. It was the lieutenant who commanded the platoon who had to finish off Grimau with two shots to the head. As he confessed years later to the deceased's family, this act haunted him throughout his life, to the point that he ended his days in a psychiatric hospital. Julián Grimau was buried in the civil cemetery of Madrid, but the exact place was not communicated to the family, so his widow, Ángela Martínez, had to resort to judicial means, obtaining the information in the conciliation act without going to trial..

Rehabilitation

With the arrival of democracy, starting in 1978, the possibility of reviewing the Grimau case and that of other victims of the dictatorship was theoretically opened. However, the approval by the Congress of Deputies of the total amnesty law on October 15, 1977, with the support of the vast majority of political groups (including the PCE), came to mean, de facto , a full stop law. In general terms, an attempt was made to forget the darkest aspects of the previous regime and to definitively bury the memory of the Republic and the war.

According to testimonies from PCE militants and Grimau's relatives, in the 1980s, the Madrid City Council, at the time headed by Enrique Tierno Galván, of the PSOE, unofficially proposed renaming Mediterranean Avenue as Julián Grimau Avenue. (There are streets and public buildings with the name Grimau in other cities outside of Spain).

Since the mid-1990s, however, the consolidation of democracy and the time that has passed since the war, in addition to the death of most of its actors (which made any reference to it less conflictive), has been leading to the beginning of demands in the parliamentary sphere for the memory and reparation of those who were retaliated against. A good part of the initiatives in this sense came and come from Izquierda Unida, a coalition that makes up the PCE. On April 15, 2002, Izquierda Unida presented a Proposal not of Law on the public and democratic rehabilitation of the figure of Julián Grimau, which received the votes in favor of all the parties with parliamentary representation except the Popular Party (PP), which at the time governed with an absolute majority. The PP had a twofold reason for opposing it and expressed it this way: on principle, it is opposed to any political initiative regarding the war and its consequences or Francoism. Secondly, he foresaw that the debate on Grimau had many possibilities of also becoming a public trial of the minister who defended his execution in all the media, Manuel Fraga, founder of the Popular Party and then president of the autonomous community of Galicia. In May 2005, Izquierda Unida presented a similar initiative in the Madrid Assembly (parliament of the autonomous community), for said assembly to urge the government to rehabilitate the figure of Julián Grimau. This initiative has had the support of the PP, which has an absolute majority in the chamber.

In 1964 the singer-songwriter Chicho Sánchez Ferlosio dedicated a song to him that appeared on his album Spanska motståndssånger ("Songs of the Spanish Resistance"), published anonymously in Stockholm, Sweden. The song begins by saying "I have known crime one morning, / my sorrow has the color of human blood. / Only clouds and lead / witnessed it. / Julián Grimau, brother, / they murdered you, they murdered you."

Shocked by Grimau's death, the Chilean artist Violeta Parra also dedicated the verses of her song 'What will the Holy Father say?' to him. published on the album Recordando a Chile (a Chilean in Paris) in 1965.

"He who officiates death like an executioner calm is taking his breakfast. The wheat will be nice for the crops, watered with your blood, Julián Grimau."

In a second version Violeta Parra incorporates Grimau in the last stanza of ¿Qué Dirá el Santo Padre?

"The more injustice, Mr. Prosecutor, my soul has more strength to sing. The wheat will be nice in the field, watered with your blood, Julián Grimau."

The French singer-songwriter Léo Ferré also dedicated the song "Franco la muerte" (1964). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhjrn--TWJU