"Bumping Off Parties"

Adolf Hitler turned over his German Navy last week to a new commander, Rear Admiral Rolf Carls. Simultaneously Nazi warships in Spanish waters began to swagger. The cruiser Konigsberg had been "commanding" Spanish Reds by radio to set free the seized Nazi steamer Palos (TIME, Jan. 4). When the Reds remained obdurate last week, the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spec seized the Aragon, a Spanish steamer. These nautical "acts of war" (as Madrid called them) would have meant more had not Der Fuehrer already landed on Spanish soil such important numbers of German troops, almost an army of occupation.

The great Spanish Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno who died last week in his beloved Salamanca was said to have cried before he passed away, "The sight of all these Germans in Spain is enough to kill me! They act on Spanish soil as if it were their own."

Unamuno, "the most important Spaniard since Goya," died of a blood clot on the brain at 72, after making this estimate of Spain's present younger generation: "Our youth has deserted all the constructive and finer things of life for violence and destruction. This struggle in Spain has developed into a class war, full of horrors, without pity or generosity of any kind." Cold facts on Spain's horrors are increasingly hard to get past its censors but in Paris last week arrived United Press's seasoned Madrid correspondent Lester Ziffren, previously an ace coverer of Latin American civil wars. "For every soldier killed in battle in Spain's civil war, three persons--men, women and children --have been murdered behind the lines." declared Mr. Ziffren, making clear that Spaniards on both sides share equal blame as wholesale murderers.

"I saw thousands of photographs in Madrid's police headquarters showing the bodies of these victims--whose only crime was being suspected of having sympathies for the enemy--and I estimate that be- tween 10,000 and 15,000 have been shot down in the capital alone," continued U. P.'s Ziffren. "A Madrid militia commander, whom I had known for several years, offered to take me to a 'bumping off party' and show me how it was done.

He was amazed when I told him I wasn't interested; that I was sickened by the killings I had witnessed already. He explained : 'Our prisoners are gagged and when we arrive at the spot we tell them they are to be put on trial. Then we walk around behind them, as if to remove the gags, and shoot them through the back of the head. In this way the face is unrecog-nizable'--as the dumdum bullet passes through the head it mushrooms and as it emerges 'blows off the face from behind.' "

As their greeting to the New Year, the various Spanish leaders, White and Red, delivered bombastic harangues all about the People, God, Culture, Communism and whatnot. White Generalissimo Francisco Franco had left the deadlocked siege of Madrid, flown south to sunny Seville and was starting an entirely new White offensive to drive the Spanish Cabinet of Premier Francisco Largo Caballero, which fled from Madrid months ago, out of Valencia. Various airmen who flew for Largo Caballero before the bulk of his Soviet flyers arrived were trickling out of Spain last week. Said Chicago Airman Hal Du Berrier, reaching Paris: "I may fight in China next, Spain isn't to my taste. The Russians got everything into their hands in the last few weeks. Just before I left we received a new .emblem with the Soviet insignia. The stationery of the Air Ministry now has a Red Soviet star. What I cannot understand is how anybody can pretend the so-called Valencia Government is anything but a Soviet Government under Moscow's orders. ... A regular expeditionary force has been landed in Spain by the Soviets. . . . Spain already is nothing but a Soviet colony to be the base of a 'European revolution.' "

Valencia was still claiming to be the seat of Spanish Democracy this week but in its allied district of Catalonia the official Barcelona censor passed dispatches describing it as "Western Europe's First Communist State." Reports from both Spanish sides indicated that Stalin has now sent some of his best bombers and pursuit fighters to Spain, and that these Soviet craft are extremely fine machines, greatly surprising the Germans who had supposed until last week that it was enough for them to send such "old crates" as the French have been sending and as Madrid has been buying in the U. S. (see p. 13). Der Fuehrer therefore was faced with having to decide his next big move in Spain--either intervention whole hog, or scuttle--and in Berlin foreign envoys were secretly tipped by Foreign Minister Baron Constantin von Neurath who emphasized, "I am speaking for the Chancellor." His exact words were not published but their gist was a declaration that Germany will not permit the establishment in Spain of anything resembling Soviet rule, and demands of Britain and France that they state whether they are for or against the creation of a Soviet Spain.

Der Fuehrer was highly delighted when, after a Spanish White warship had fired on the British steamer Blackhill, the doctrine was boomingly announced from London this week that "whenever doubt arises as to whether a British vessel is carrying arms or munitions to Spain, it is for the British Navy, not for any foreign authority, to take appropriate action." In Berlin, high officials said that this was Adolf Hitler's naval doctrine too, and German warships in Spanish waters continued seizing and pot-shooting at Red ships, claiming they did this "in reprisal" for the Reds' continued refusal to release the cargo and Fascist passenger of the liberated Palos. In Berlin it was also said in official quarters that Der Fuehrer had sent General Wilhelm Faupel, the "German envoy to the Spanish Government of President Franco" hurrying back to Spain with official assurances of further German support for the Whites. Simultaneously about 10,000 additional Italians landed in Spain to join up with Generalissimo Franco-- this mere 10,000 being what II Duce last week meant by "going easy" (see p. 20). In London the anti-Fascist and pro-Socialist Daily Herald raged: "There is a Levantine streak in the man [Mussolini] which delights in such sharp practices!"

Most envied airman fighting with the Reds in Spain was Texan Major Frederic A. Lord. He had been given last week a ship with the very latest Hispano-Suiza "moteur canon," swankest instrument of Death. This engine has a hollow propeller shaft and through it fires an oversize machine gun or undersized field piece discharging explosive, tracer, incendiary or armor-piercing shells.

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