New names implicated in Companys' arrest
The information comes from a report prepared by Catalan lawyer Eduard Ragasol and found in the French national archives.
BarcelonaIt didn't take long for the French to investigate who had collaborated with the Nazis. In December 1944, four months after the liberation of Paris and as World War II continued on various fronts, the new democratic authorities of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, headed by General Charles de Gaulle, sought to determine responsibility for the persecution of the exiled Republican officials in 1939. One of the arrests they investigated was that of the president of the Generalitat, Lluís Companys.
The researcher and historian Jordi Pons Pujol found a previously unknown dossier in the archives of the French Ministry of the Interior, which this Wednesday, 85 years after Companys' assassination, he published in the Memory and History Association of ManresaThe dossier was signed by lawyer and member of the Catalan Republican Action (ACció Catalana Republicana), Eduard Ragasol, who went into exile in Paris in 1939. Ragasol worked to organize aid for Republican refugees. With the arrival of the Nazis, he was arrested several times and imprisoned in the Vernet camp (Arieès) for collaborating with the French Resistance. After the liberation of Paris, he collaborated with the de Gaulle government and had very good contacts. "The report was requested by Jean Verdier, a civil servant who held a high position in the Paris headquarters and who fought with the Resistance during the German occupation," explains Pons. Verdier sent the investigation to André Pelabon, director general of the French police.
Ragasol's report demonstrates once again the interest in arresting Companys and the speed with which the Francoist authorities acted. France surrendered on June 22, 1940. By the end of July, Gabriel Coronado, secretary general to the Count of Mayalde, who was the head of the Spanish police, had arrived. Coronado wasted no time and met with Colonel Rudolph, commander of the Abwerh in France, at the Hotel Majestic in Paris to discuss how they would arrest Companys.
"Imperative" orders from Francoist Spain
"During Companys's stay in the Santé prison in Paris, a series of negotiations took place between the Spanish embassy and the German authorities regarding the procedure to be followed for the detainee's handover to the embassy representatives. Any doubts that may have existed in this regard were resolved by an imperative order from Mr. Franco, addressed to the Paris embassy, and it was by virtue of this imperative order that Mr. Cristóbal del Castillo, Minister Counselor of the embassy, signed the receipt for Companys' handover," the document reads. "This is important because it corroborates the documentation already known, which demonstrated that Companys' release and handover to the Spanish police was not a German decision, but the result of a Spanish demand, and that it was not solely a police decision, but the result of a political order from the highest levels of the Francoist state," the association highlights.
In the same letter, Ragasol details that the people who were fully aware of the matter and personally involved were Gabriel Coronado; Pedro Urraca, the Spanish police officer at the Spanish embassy who lived on Rue de la Université in Paris; Felip Rodés Baldrich, a Catalan lawyer who worked at the embassy; and police officer Aparicio Monzón. Among the French gang, police officer Víctor Druillet stands out. Urraca's intervention was well known, but not that of Rodés and Drouillet.
Rodés was a lawyer who had begun as an activist in the Catalan Republican political movement, but gradually evolved towards more conservative positions. He went from being a member of the Republican Nationalist Centre to collaborating with Francisco Cambó of the Regionalist League, and then becoming Minister of Public Education under Alfonso XIII. In 1936, he was a deputy with the Catalan Front of Order. When the Civil War broke out, he went into exile in Genoa and later in Paris, where he became the right-hand man of Franco's representative in France, Quiñones de León. He worked on the creation of the Francoist press and propaganda office in Paris and reported on the activities of the Spanish Republicans. When the Nazis entered Paris, he denounced Lluís Nicolau de Olwer and Eduard Ragasol.
"Drouillet was a French fascist who had fought in the Civil War for Franco," Pons points out. He began collaborating with the Nazis in 1939 and participated in both the arrest of Companys in 1940 and that of Josep Tarradellas the following year. The Nazis trusted him completely, and in 1943 he was appointed head of the French Militia, whose objective was to fight the Resistance. When the Allies occupied France, he fled to Nazi Germany, because in France he would have been condemned. When the Nazis fell in 1945, he found refuge in Franco's Spain. He lived in Figueres until his death in 1952.
