On this date in 1940, the late Spanish Republic’s former Interior Minister was shot by Franco’s dictatorship, having received him from the hands of the Gestapo who arrested the man in exile.
A socialist journalist, Julian Zugazagoitia (English Wikipedia entry | the more detailed Spanish) was tapped for the ministry gig by Prime Minister Juan Negrin — a man to whom history appointed the distasteful destiny of trying to turn the Republic away from the abyss that gaped for it.
Negrin’s major resource in this doomed project was Russian aid* — aid conditioned on Kremlin internal control within Spain, against the other factional groups (anarchists, social democrats, and so forth) that comprised the Republic’s “popular front”. Indeed, Negrin himself came to power thanks to a bloody internal coup against anarchists and anti-Soviet communists. Zugazagoitia found this distasteful but for his year in the government he had to toe the line on it: pressed by a British delegation over the political arrests — and sometimes murders — of pro-Republic dissidents like Andres Nin, Zugazagoitia allowed that “We have received aid from Russia and have had to permit certain actions which we did not like.” (quoted (p. 86) in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia)
Though he managed to escape abroad as the Republic fell to Franco’s armies, Zugazagoitia was caught by the Gestapo in France; as they had done with his fellow politician Lluis Companys in a similar spot, the Germans deported the former Minister of the Interior to certain execution in Spain.
Zugazagoitia’s grandson, also named Julian Zugazagoitia, directs the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, USA.
* An embargo on arms shipments by most western countries all but forced Spain to buy Russian arms, on Russian terms.
On this day..
- 1801: Hyacinth Moise, Haitian Revolution general
- 1716: Maria of Curacao, slave rebel
- 1773: Eva Faschaunerin, the last tortured in Austria
- 1641: Maren Splids, Jutland witch
- 1945: Charles Ford Silliman, suicide pact?
- 2011: Luo Yaping, "land granny"
- 1942: Eddie Leonski, the Brownout Strangler
- 1848: Robert Blum, German democrat
- 1842: Stephen Brennan, desperate bushranger
- Themed Set: Bushrangers
- 1610: Blessed George Napier
- 1944: Georges Suarez, collaborationist editor
- 2008: The Bali Bombers
- 1911: Charles Justice