Valentín González

Valentín González (* 1909 in Malcocinado ( Badajoz ), † October 20, 1983 in Madrid ), known as El Campesino (Spanish "the farmer"), was a Spanish guerrilla before and after the civil war and a republican officer in the civil war.

Life

youth

Valentín González grew up in Extremadura , a very backward region of Spain at the time. During his short schooldays he came into contact with the story of El Empecinado , the Wayward , a resistance fighter who had fought against French troops under Napoleon around 1808. El Empecinado later became González's model.

González's father was an anarchist and worked as a farmer without land in road construction and later in the mine. As a young man, González was also a member of the CNT and a miner in the mines of Peñarroya ( province of Córdoba ), where he continued to become politicized and later also carried out explosive attacks against the Guardia Civil . His father was an influential labor leader in the region. He received the name El Campesino from the police after his first successful bomb attack on the police station in Peñarroya with four dead, which was supposed to be used in the fight against strikebreakers. Then he hid in the mountains from the police, as his father had advised him. Together with his comrade El Virulente , he was caught and then tortured in police custody. His comrade died in prison, he saved his life by placing all blame on him.

Life in the monarchy

When González was drafted into the Navy for the Rif War , he fled to the Spanish Foreign Legion after a boat accident in the port of Larache . For him as a guerrilla, the Foreign Legion was an excellent training facility. González played a risky double game, he succeeded in supplying the rifles around Abd el Krim with weapons. When this double game was finally exposed, he fled to the Rifkabylen. But they lost the war in 1926 due to the intervention of the French army. González was captured and faced the death penalty by shooting. During this time he became a member of the Communist Party of Spain . However, he was released through a surprising amnesty issued at the end of the war. In 1929 he roamed the villages of Andalusia , Extremadura and Castile in a truck and called the farm workers to strike. At the same time he recruited men for his people's militia and taught them how to use various weapons.

Spanish Civil War

During the Civil War , González led a militia and later the 46th Division of the Spanish Republican People's Army. At the beginning of the war he fought against the rebels in the Montana barracks and, with his militiamen, conquered some villages around Madrid and the Madrid-Cuatro Vientos airport . During the war he met André Marty , a former mutineer of the French Black Sea Fleet, Luigi Longo , who later rose to the highest ranks of the Italian Communist Party, and Josip Broz , who later became Tito, General Kléber , a former Austrian officer, André Malraux , who Literary man who built up the Spanish air wing Espanan, as well as the Soviet Colonel Rodion Jakowlewitsch Malinowski , a later Soviet Marshal, as well as Iwan Stepanowitsch Konew and Konstantin Konstantinowitsch Rokossowski know. In the defense of Madrid, he was involved in the successful fighting of the university district against the Moors . After the conquest of Villavieja del Lozoya , he was offered the rank of officer, which he initially refused. It was only when his subordinates loudly proclaimed that he should be promoted that he was said to have accepted the appointment. In the following years González took part in the battles of Guadalajara , Brunete and finally Belchite , where he was seriously injured. After his unexpected recovery, he continued to fight for the republic . As a result, at the age of only 27, he received another high military rank. Many legends were forged around his name, he was known for his clever tricks. For example, at a parade in Madrid, for example, he had his militiamen carry simple wooden rifles with them as mock-ups that had previously been painted a shiny black metal paint. During the transport of the Spanish gold to the Soviet Union, he camouflaged the 30 trucks provided with a total of around 7,600 boxes of dynamite . At night he had these exchanged for the gold boxes and was able to get safely to Cartagena with his cargo , where the gold was loaded onto a Soviet ship. Even during the various sieges and battles, his little tricks were legendary and feared. He had a deep comradeship with the anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti . González is said to have hit him on the day in autumn 1937 when Durruti received his fatal gunshot wounds. González was considered brutal in dealing with subordinates and prisoners, and his fellow campaigners ( Enrique Líster , Juan Modesto ) also had problems with him. The Italian soldiers of the fascist expeditionary corps tried again and again to catch him - without success.

Ernest Hemingway lets El Campesino perform in his novel For Whom the Hour Takes when the protagonist Robert meets El Campesino at the Madrid Hotel Gaylord . González, for his part, reported in his biography of a meeting with Hemingway.

In the Battle of Teruel González captured the city with his 46th division, which was also under the control of commissioners. The hope of a great victory for the Republicans under Defense Minister Indalecio Prieto was not fulfilled. Although the attackers overwhelmed the besieged, they later had to withdraw. Of the 900 men of his 101st Brigade in Teruel, which was at the center of the fighting, 82 remained, most of them wounded. He later paid full military praise to the unfortunate defenders of Teruel, some of whom died in the last days of the war, in spite of all political hostility. From then on, El Campesino had a broken relationship with the Republican commanders Lister and Modesto, whom he accused of having given him insufficient support and insufficient supplies. The hostility of the two was also reflected in the respective memoirs, which were written 20 and 40 years later. Only some of his soldiers escaped after the Franco troops retook Teruel . He then took part in the Battle of the Ebro , the last offensive of the republic , as a lieutenant colonel in the 46th Division . His soldiers were the first to successfully cross the river in guerrilla style. His soldiers, some of whom could not swim, floated across the river on bundles of wood. In the trench warfare that followed on the Ebro, González was wounded again by a bomb. Despite his injuries and not yet recovered, he led the 46th division, but it could no longer withstand the pressure of the materially superior Franco troops. In this situation, Lister replaced El Campesino with another division leader, who fell shortly afterwards. After the collapse of Catalonia, Juan Negrín could not hold out much longer and fled to France with Lister, Dolores Ibárruri ( La Pasionaria ) and Modesto. El Campesino (like others like Lister) returned to Republican Spain and the central zone around Madrid to continue the fight. There he was surprised by Segismundo Casado's coup . He made his way to the port of Granada Almunecar with some loyal followers. Already he seemed to be seized by Franco's troops to escape once more. From the coast he came to Oran , which ended his military activities in the republic because an initially planned guerrilla war was not started.

Exile in the Soviet Union

At the end of the civil war, El Campesino fled to Algeria in one of the last boats . He was only tolerated there temporarily, so he traveled to Paris via Marseille. From there he drove to the Soviet Union on May 18, 1939 with Russian embassy staff, 700 Spaniards, the Spanish Politburo and commanders of the People's Army on the steamer Sibir under cover names. He was one of the most famous of the 6,000 or so Republicans who emigrated to the Soviet Union at that time and was personally received by Stalin and Beria , the chief of the secret service. Now he was celebrated as Chapayev of the Spanish Revolution. His picture was on postage stamps and matchboxes. At the military academy “M. W. Frunze “ he worked with the rank of general because of the support of Stalin, as did Líster , Modesto and Tagüeña . As a result, he got to know other future marshals of the Soviet Union. He stood up for the Spanish refugees and thus came into sharp contrast to Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) and Lister. After various kinds of problems with the Soviet authorities, he was sent to prison. After being sentenced to three years in a prison camp and disenfranchised for five years, he helped build the Moscow metro . From there he tried to flee in the turmoil at the beginning of the German Wehrmacht's Russian campaign , was caught and fled again with two Spanish comrades. He ended up in Iran , where the English put him in prison. After escaping and refusing to cooperate with the British, he escaped from English custody, but was caught again and returned to the USSR . As a new punishment he now had to go to a camp in Vorkuta ( Siberia ) to mine coal. His fellow refugees died in Siberian penal camps. From there he was sent to the south of the Soviet Union to recover from a mining accident, tried again to escape from Turkmenistan and was arrested again by the NKVD . He spent the time on the tundra under the warehouse number 11.11.27. He was rescued again by a former orderly officer of the Hungarian General Lukascz (who had died on the Aragon front in 1937). The support of a German military doctor who was his opponent in the Condor Legion in 1936 and was later captured near Stalingrad was also an important aid to him. He finally managed to escape from the Soviet Union to Iran in 1948 after a severe earthquake in Ashkhabad , but he had to leave his second wife and their child behind in Moscow.

Exile in France and death

In various trials such as that of David Rousset , he acted as a prosecutor against the penal camps in Siberia. During the Cold War , however, he was rarely heard, even to the Spaniards he appeared to be a figure from an outmoded time. In Cuba he met Fidel Castro. He now lived in exile in France as a simple construction worker, but did not give up the fight against the Franco regime. In 1963 he wanted to continue fighting as a guerrillero against Franco. With eleven comrades he attacked guards of the Guardia Civil . Civil guards were either killed or wounded. He ventured to Spain twenty times. The French government then brought him to the island of Brehat in Brittany , and later to Metz , to keep him away from the Spanish border and to avoid political pressure from Spain. He later lived in Metz for many years. It was only in old age that he met his wife, son, and two daughters again, whom he believed had been executed. During these years he stood up for the socialist party and against the communists with whom he had broken. However, they viewed his activities with mixed feelings. In 1976, after Franco's death, he returned to Spain. He died in Madrid in 1983 as a result of a war injury.

Works

• La vie et la mort en URSS Blon, Paris 1950. First German translation: The great illusion. Verlag Rote Weißschriften by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1951. Second German translation: Life and Death in the USSR: (1939–1949) . Verlag Association, Hamburg 1975, ISBN 3-88032-013-6 .
• Jusqu'à la mort . Albin Michel, Paris 1978, ISBN 2-226-00693-1 . (German translation: Tomorrow is another day: Memoirs . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1979, ISBN 3-462-01347-5 )

literature

• Antony Beevor: The Spanish Civil War . 2007.
• Hidalgo de Cisneros: Change of course . 1964.
• Constancia de la Morara: double gloss . 1940.
• Soledad Fox Constancia de la Mora in War and Exile. 2007.
• Ralf Höller: Valentín González (El Campesino). Same in: I am the fight. Rebels and revolutionaries from six centuries. Page 279 ff., Structure of TB Verlag, Berlin 2001.
• Thomas Hugh: The Spanish Civil War . Harper & Brothers, New York 1961 (German translation: The Spanish Civil War ).
• The Spanish Civil War in eyewitness accounts . dtv, 1973.
• Ernest Hemingway : Whom the Hour Strikes , 1940.
• Enrique Líster: Our war . París, 1966.
• Juan Modesto: Soy del Quinto Regimiento .
• Fernando & A. Puerta, Justo en: Atlas de la Guerra Civil Española , Editorial Síntesis, Madrid, 2007.
• Antonio Jesús y Sánchez de Miguel: Batalla de Teruel . En su: Historia Ilustrada de la Guerra Civil Española . Alcobendas, Editorial LIBSA, 2006, pp. 327.
• Antonio Jesús y Sánchez de Miguel: En su: Historia Ilustrada de la Guerra Civil Española . Alcobendas, Editorial LIBSA, 2006, pp. 233.
• Dan Kurzman: The November miracle . Heyne, 1980, ISBN 3-453-01613-0 .
• War to order . In: Der Spiegel . No. 38 , 1961, pp. 80 ( online ).
• Died . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1983, pp. 288 ( online ).
• Christel Szymanski: Spain is becoming socialist . In: Die Zeit , No. 44/1977.

Web links

• Literature by and about Valentín González in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography on biografiasyvidas.com (spanish)
• Biography on memoriarepublicana.com (Spanish)
• Interview with Valentín González, 1982 (Spanish)