Juan Negrin

Juan Negrín (1938)

Juan Negrín Lopez (born February 3, 1891 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria - the year of birth varies depending on the source between 1887 and 1892; † November 12, 1956 in Paris ) was a leading Spanish republican politician ( PSOE ) during the Spanish Civil War .

biography

Studies and professional career

Negrín was born the son of a wealthy businessman and received his doctorate in 1912 at the Universities of Kiel and Leipzig . In 1923 he became a university professor of physiology at the Medical Faculty of the Complutense University of Madrid . He was a well-known researcher, built his own large research laboratory and was a forerunner of modern biochemistry . One of his students was Severo Ochoa, a Nobel Prize Winner in Physiology and Medicine . The most important hospital in the Canary Islands, located in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria , is called “Hospital Dr. Negrín ”.

minister

In 1929 he joined the socialist party PSOE and was elected to the Parliament of Cortes just two years later . In the following years he was a supporter of Indalecio Prieto , the adversary of Francisco Largo Caballero within the PSOE and leader of the right-wing socialists. In September 1936, Negrín was appointed finance minister in the cabinet of Francisco Largo Caballero, which included socialists and communists as well as liberals , republicans, Catholics and anarchists .

The supporters of the Popular Front , i.e. the cooperation of the socialists with the communists, who until then had played a subordinate role in republican Spain (the communist Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC) had fewer members than the left-Marxist POUM at the beginning of the civil war ), rejected it Francisco Largo Caballero was looking for a socialist revolution and wanted to restore the bourgeois state in Spain under the influence of Stalin's popular front strategy . The anarcho-syndicalist union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the anarchist Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) and the left-Marxist POUM, which held a real position of power in Catalonia and especially in Barcelona , stood in their way. The communists began to discredit the POUM for months as a Trotskyist party and as a supporter of Hitler and Mussolini . Negrín got involved in this by significantly expanding the number of Carabineros , customs and border guards under his control at a time when there was virtually no border traffic and sending them to the border to send the militias of the POUM and the CNT / FAI disarm.

Prime Minister during the Civil War

In May 1937, after the May events of Barcelona , President Manuel Azaña appointed Negrín prime minister in the hope of reconciling the republican forces of the UGT and CNT unions and the anarchists with those of the bourgeoisie and middle class in order to end the revolutionary movement and create one To set up a war economy. Under the pressure of his communist coalition partners, the revolutionary achievements were largely liquidated. All of this was done with the intention of dragging in the Spanish Civil War until the Second World War, which Negrín regarded as inevitable, had begun, although the Munich Agreement disappointed hopes for an early outside aid.

Negrín agreed with Azaña to ultimately approve the shipment of the Bank of Spain's gold reserves worth around US $ 500 million to Moscow in order to be able to pay for the republic's armament, which it could only buy in the Soviet Union , the urgent one Required prepayment. The Soviet Union was the only remaining alternative to buying weapons after the democratic states of Great Britain , France , the USA and others. a. adhered to the non-intervention pact, which subjected the sale of weapons to Spain to an embargo , while the Third Reich and fascist Italy , which were also signatory powers of the non-intervention pact, but with generous arms deliveries, the Condor Legion and volunteers, the rebels of General Francisco Franco massively supported.

In April 1938, Negrín took over the War Ministry. At the military level, he launched a number of offensives ( Brunete , Belchite , Teruel and Ebro ). On May 1, 1938, he published a 13-point program in which he guaranteed full respect for all civil rights and freedom of religion . Azaña attempted to remove Negrín from office in August 1938, but Negrín was now president thanks to the support of the communists in the government and the armed forces of the republic, in which the communists also played a prominent role thanks to the arms shipments from Stalin powerful.

Before the loss of Catalonia, he proposed a meeting of the Spanish parliament, the Cortes, in Figueres in order to achieve the only condition by surrendering to spare the lives of the losers. However, since he did not achieve this goal, he traveled to the central zone in February 1939 with the intention of achieving the evacuation as successfully as in Catalonia, but the Segismundo Casados uprising sabotaged this last plan: recognized after the fall of Barcelona on February 26, 1939 the British government of Arthur Neville Chamberlain the next day the insurgents of General Franco as government of Spain. President Azaña went into exile on February 7 , resigned from his office on February 24 and declared the war lost. He wanted to prevent further senseless victims.

Negrín then promoted communist functionaries such as Antonio Cordón , Juan Modesto and Enrique Lister to important army posts. Segismundo Casado, commander of the Republican Army in the central zone, became convinced that Negrín was planning a communist coup. With the support of the socialist Julián Besteiro and disappointed anarchist leaders, he established a national defense league on March 4, which was directed against Negrín and sought a mutual peace with Franco against Negrín's slogans to hold out. Two days later, José Miaja ordered the arrest of the communists in Madrid in support of the rebellion.

The grave of Juan Negrín on the Cimetière du Père Lachaise (Division 88)

Negrín, who was preparing to flee to France, ordered Luis Barceló , commander of the first army corps of the central region, to regain control of the capital. When his troops came to Madrid, a bitter battle arose in the capital. Anarchist troops led by Cipriano Mera defeated the first army corps. Barceló was arrested and executed.

Prime Minister of the government in exile

Negrín fled to France, where he formed a government in exile . When the Wehrmacht invaded France in 1940, he fled further to England . Until 1945, Negrín was president of the Second Spanish Republic in exile and organized SERE to help exiled republicans. In 1945 he traveled to Mexico to settle his discrepancies with Prieto and Martínez Barrio , resigned and returned to Paris, where he died eleven years later.

literature

• Ricardo Miralles: Prólogo de Paul Preston. Juan Negrin. Ed. Temas de Hoy. Madrid 2003.
• Heleno Saña: The Libertarian Revolution. The anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-89401-378-8 .

Web links

Commons : Juan Negrín López  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Juan Negrín in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Juan Negrín in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Biography of Juan Negrin (English)
• Republican governments during the civil war

predecessor	Office	successor
Francisco Largo Caballero	Prime Minister of Spain 1937 - 1939	Francisco Franco ( Spanish Civil War )