Gonzalo Queipo de Llano

Gonzalo Queipo de Llano

Gonzalo Queipo de Llano y Sierra (born February 5, 1875 in Tordesillas , † March 9, 1951 near Seville ) was a Spanish general on the side of the insurgents during the Spanish Civil War .

Educated in a seminary, he withdrew from his tutors and enrolled in the Spanish Army as a marksman. He later joined the Royal Cavalry Academy in Valladolid as a cadet and took part in the fighting in Cuba and in the Spanish Moroccan War as a cavalry officer, where he earned a reputation for audacity for his cavalry operations.

Queipo de Llano reached the rank of brigadier general in 1923. He was critical of the Spanish army and was in opposition to dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera , who released him from his command and locked him in prison.

He was released from prison in 1926, but also released from the army in 1928 due to continued criticism of the government. Two years later he became head of the Republican Military Association and worked with the National Revolutionary Committee, a group that promoted the overthrow of King Alfonso XIII. planned. In December 1930, under the orders of General Dámaso Berenguer Fusté , he took part as one of the leading military in a republican conspiracy that undertook the plot at Cuatro Vientos airport after the failure of the Jaca uprising . The failure of this revolt forced him to flee to Portugal .

When Alfonso XIII. went abroad in April 1931 without formal abdication, Queipo de Llano returned to Spain and took over the important post of commander of the 1st military district in Madrid . Later he was appointed head of the military advisory staff of President Niceto Alcalá Zamora (Queipo's daughter was married to a son of Alcalá Zamora).

Queipo de Llano headed the customs authorities in the Second Spanish Republic from 1934 to 1936 . He criticized the politics of the Popular Front , in particular the agrarian reform that expropriated the rural aristocracy, the ostracism of the Falange Española and the political and administrative autonomy of Catalonia . As Inspector General of the Carabineros, he kept in touch with senior military officials throughout Spain. When Zamora was replaced by Manuel Azaña in the presidential office on May 10, 1936, Queipo de Llano began, together with generals Emilio Mola , Francisco Franco and José Sanjurjo, to forge plans to overturn the Popular Front government. This led to the military revolt on July 17, 1936, which culminated in the civil war.

Queipo de Llano gained control of Seville in the first days of the conflict with only 200 men through the use of a ruse: Although the government was verifiably known that Queipo de Llano was conspiring against them, he reached the Andalusian capital unrecognized as a bulwark applied to the labor movement . There, among the officers, only the commanders of the Guardia Civil had joined him. They armed some Falangists and large landowners (señoritos) willing to fight, who lodged themselves in the barracks of the Guardia Civil. They attacked the Guardia de Asalto in improvised raiding parties after Queipo de Llano had arrested the commander of the 2nd division, General Villa Abrille, in his own office. Confronted with the resistance of the captains in the neighboring 9th Infantry Regiment , he also arrested them and promoted himself to the command of the Seville base.

Initially, however, the troops he commanded were far too few to prevent the strong working class movement in Seville, which was alarmed by a broadcast on the Seville union radio, called a general strike , erected barricades , set fire to churches and aristocratic buildings - such as the soft soap factory and Perfume from the owner of the daily ABC , Duke Luca de Tena , a prominent supporter of the coup plotters. Despite the small number of troops, he succeeded by sending the 3rd light artillery regiment to capture the center of the city with the civil administration and the telephone switchboard against the bitter resistance of the Guardia de Asalto. Radio Seville was captured without firing a shot. The Republicans had failed to organize themselves militarily in time and to occupy the Tablada airport . In order to deceive the defenders of the city about the real troop strength, Queipo de Llano had a number of Foreign Legionnaires and Regulares from Morocco fly in by plane, which drove non-stop in military trucks through the city, giving the impression of a huge military machine and quickly all bridges over the Guadalquivir occupied. The working-class district of Triana , the longest resistance to the coup, is the closest to Seville city center across from the Guadalquivir River.

In order to break the resistance in the working-class neighborhoods more quickly, he had anecdotes about terror in the form of massive executions spread to all those suspected of being militants, functionaries or sympathizers of the left political parties and trade unions , which were often outdone by reality . The arrival of Moroccan soldiers caused panic anyway because they were notorious for their barbaric fighting methods. According to a memorandum from the board of the Madrid Bar, 9,000 workers were killed in Seville alone.

During the Civil War, Queipo de Llano developed radio propaganda programs into a distinct form of psychological warfare : to intimidate the enemy and increase the perseverance of the nationalists in the republican zone, the personalities of the republican government were mocked every day in direct, shabby language. While the Republicans made fun of the nationalists claiming to restore Christian values ​​in Spain with the help of Muslim Moroccans in a civil war known as the “ crusade ”, and fueling fears of rape by Moroccan soldiers, comments were made on Radio Sevilla in allusion the masculinity of the Foreign Legionnaires and Regulares.

Queipo's statements were circulated in the ABC edition , which was printed in Seville, until they ceased to exist in February 1938 on orders from Salamanca because the Franquists wanted to give themselves a more serious image of “law and order”.

Appointed commander of the insurgents in the south, on January 17, 1937, he launched an attack on Málaga , which was defeated by the insurgents on February 8 . In the following weeks 4,000 supporters of the Popular Front were executed. Their land was distributed among the supporters of the Franquists for a symbolic price. After his appointment as commander of the insurgents in the south, Queipo de Llano behaved fairly independently throughout the civil war and subjected all the villages and towns he had captured in Andalusia to his regime of terror. In order to demonstrate its devotion, the Guardia Civil had liquidated the local representatives of the left in many places before the arrival of the Queipo de Llanos force.

Towards the end of the republic, Queipo de Llano was promoted to lieutenant general, a rank that the republic had previously abolished. His relations with Franco were generally modest because he had not always followed his orders and, in his propaganda broadcasts, had failed to comply with the language regulations of the government of the insurgents in Burgos .

Franco sent him to Italy as head of the Spanish mission after the war . He later served as the commander of the Seville Military District. Queipo de Llano died in his country estate near Seville.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gonzalo Queipo de Llano in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin
• Newspaper article about Gonzalo Queipo de Llano in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .