Sex in the Civil War: "Syphilis caused more casualties than the enemy"

Julián was a former seminarian who fought with Franco's regime and had the gift of attracting women almost without realizing it. Asun was his war godmother, the name given to the unknown women who sent letters and some sweets to soldiers to cheer them up at the front. Soon, Asun and Julián became close in their correspondence. Asun described herself in a letter and revealed to Julián that she had a mole in a secret place. He asked her if it was black, "like jet, like the pain I have of not seeing it." And she replied: "Do you know that the other night when I was undressing I saw the mole and remembered you? Very affectionate greetings ." In subsequent letters, the mole was nicknamed Periquillo.

Of the Marchioness of Valparaíso, Enriqueta Mariategui, we know that she was 37 years old in July 1937, that she lived in Madrid, and that she was investigated and arrested, accused of espionage because she frequented bars where she associated with military personnel. Her husband, an artillery captain, had been shot dead in Paracuellos. The Marchioness defended herself: if she went out, it was to forget her troubles. Two medical reports, perhaps written by friends, considered Mariategui "notoriously attracted to the opposite sex" and that she had "a hysterical personality and an underlying erotic predisposition." They considered her mentally ill with "extravagant behavior, not responsible for her actions." She was released.

These are the stories that make up Love and Sex in the Civil War , the book by Fernando Ballano (published by Arzalia) that studies for the first time as an independent subject the sexual and romantic behavior of the Spanish and their guests in the period 1936-1939: the soldiers and their village girlfriends , the Moroccan, German and Italian combatants, the prostitutes, the Soviet commissars, the English, French and American brigadiers, the journalists, the nurses, the prostitutes...

"Arturo Barea wrote: when you expect death, life becomes simple and clear. Everything is disrupted; people want to enjoy themselves because they don't know if they'll be alive the next day. What's unique about Spain is that it was a civil war, not a war between nations. And on both sides, there were many foreign visitors who changed the way people behaved and left many memories," Ballano explains to EL MUNDO.

Some facts to keep in mind about the Spanish Civil War: one, it was a very slow war. Some fronts were held up for months. Soldiers were often bored and therefore had time to fall in love and seek lovers and prostitutes in the rear. Two, it was a war between compatriots, so there aren't many stories of sexual horror typical of colonial wars, nor are there photos of the humiliation of women like those from the liberation of France, nor are there stories of serial rapes left by the Red Army in Germany. "But that doesn't mean there weren't rapes. I wouldn't underestimate those cases. They're not the subject of this book, which is pleasure and love, but they existed," says Ballano. And three, Spain hadn't changed its sexual morality that much during the years of the Second Republic . Not even the Spain of the CNT. Only the arrival of foreigners accelerated the change.

"The Moroccans came half-deceived. Their commanders tried to prevent them from having contact with the Spanish, but they did, and there were many marriages. There's a curious thing: they didn't like Spanish prostitutes , so they brought their sheikhs from the Protectorate. They brought them along with kif and hashish," Ballano says. The Italians were very successful with the Spanish women, with or without payment. It was said that they went to war perfumed, and there were many jokes about the feathers on the Bersaglieri's [their elite infantry] helmets. The German aviators had no ties at all with the Spanish women. They had their brothels that amazed the natives because an officer would stand at the entrance and monitor their pilots for exactly 20 minutes. "And the brigadiers made a lot of use of prostitution. When they were in the rear, they would destroy everything. Their visit to Alcalá de Henares is famous because they caused a lot of damage. There were also brigade members who married Spanish women, mind you. The brigade members were paid 12 pesetas a day, a lot, so there were cases of profiteering.

The thread of money and love is interesting. “The soldiers of the Popular Republican Army earned 10 pesetas a day, plus food and drink . A prostitute's service cost five. The rebels earned 50 cents. Later, they were given a bonus of 1.10 pesetas per day in the trenches. The legionaries earned three pesetas a day and were the most sexually liberal of all the rebels. The difference in salaries was very noticeable in the sexual behavior of the two sides, although, in the long run, inflation in the government camp largely equalized things,” Ballano says. “Both sides had their units of accompanying prostitutes. Even among the militiawomen, women who were prostitutes infiltrated the ranks. Durruti tried to expel them, but they always returned. All he achieved was to eliminate pimping and control venereal diseases with a very strict disciplinary regime. Syphilis caused more casualties than the enemy .”

Love and Sex in the Civil War is full of nicknames and proper names that fascinate readers of 2025: La Turca and La Amparo were two famous pimps on the rebel side. La Turca, in fact, was Greek and specialized in serving the Italian military. La Amparo was Portuguese, settled in León, and worked with Germans. Marlene Grey was a French lion tamer who performed nude, or nearly so, and who caused astonishment in besieged Madrid. One day, the lions were about to eat her. They were hungry . Teresa Daniel was a Miss Spain contestant who worked as a nurse at the Hospital Clínic in Barcelona. Apparently, the wounded preferred another nurse named Rosita, who was less pretty but more expressive. Pablo Sarroca was a former military chaplain who ended up as a Republican SIM agent and who took over a chalet in the Ventas neighborhood, where he lived scandalously, in a concubine with two women named Gregoria Rubio and Julia Redondo . Thomas Cuthbert Worsley and Stephen Spender were two English writers who came to Spain to look for a lover they had shared, a communist prostitute named Tony Hyndman who enlisted in the International Brigades, who had a panic attack when entering combat in the Battle of Jarama and who was imprisoned as a deserter.

One last note: homosexuality appears in Love and Sex in the Civil War, narrated primarily through the stories of English militiamen and Gustavo Durán, a Republican officer who may have been the lover of Federico García Lorca and the painter Néstor Martín de la Torre , and who was so handsome and blond that he was nicknamed "Porcelain." He was rejected by the PCE (Spanish Communist Party) despite proving himself a brave soldier and a rigorous man. He ended up in the United States, married, and employed by the United Nations.