Onésimo Redondo

Onésimo Redondo Ortega (Quintanilla de Onésimo, Valladolid, 1905, February 16 – Labajos, Segovia, 1936, July 24) was a Spanish Falangist Fascist politician, founder of Juntas Castellanas de Actuación Hispánica (Castilian Groups of Hispanic Action), a political group that merged with Ramiro Ledesma's Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista (Unions of the National-Syndicalist Offensive) and José Antonio Primo de Rivera's Falange Española.

He was born in Quintanilla de Abajo, Valladolid (today renamed after Redondo as Quintanilla de Onésimo). He studied Law at the University of Salamanca and was Spanish teacher at the University of Mannheim (1927-1928), where he became acquainted with Nazism. (Historian Paul Preston has written that Redondo's anti-Semitism derived more from fifteenth century Castilian nationalism than from Nazi models however, though he did translate Hitler's Mein Kampf into Spanish.) He began to work in Valladolid for the Castilian union of sugar beet harvesters and joined the Catholic Action during his youth.

When the Second Republic was proclaimed (1931), he was distanced from Catholic Action because he thought it was very close to bourgeois liberalism, and he founded a little newspaper, the anti-Republican Libertad, where he wrote violently against Marxism, Jews (he published an annotated translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), and bourgeois Capitalism, and admired European fascisms. He founded Juntas Castellanas de Actuación Hispánica in August 1931 and in November it merged with Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista (JONS). They refused to participate in elections as they believed in direct action against Spain's "enemies".

"In Redondo's rhetoric, Moors , Jews, and the Left were all merged into one:'By asserting that Marxism was a Jewish invention and implied the 're-africanisation' of Spain, Redondo was identifying Spain's archetypal others, the Jew and the Moor with the Right's new enemy: the Left. The war Spain needed to fight was a new 'reconquista', and ideologues such as Redondo offered a 'murderous justification of violence against the left.'

In 1932, he collaborated with the frustrated coup d'état of General Sanjurjo and had to flee to Portugal. He returned to Valladolid in April 1933. On March 24, 1934 JONS and Falange Española merged. He was arrested on March 19, 1936 and he was moved to the prison of Ávila on June. He was liberated by the Nationalist after the beginning of the Civil War. He organized the Falange's militias in Valladolid and went to the Guadarrama mountains, where he died in combat on July 24. Francoist propaganda extolled him insistently as a war hero.

His widow, Mercedes Sanz Bachiller, founded Auxilio de Invierno (Winter Aid), after Auxilio Social (Social Aid), that was the welfare agency of Falange, further fully integrated in the Francoist State organization.

Writings

• Protocolos de los Sabios de Sión, Valladolid: Libertad, 1932
• Onésimo Redondo, caudillo de Castilla, Valladolid: Libertad, 1937, (newspaper articles and political speeches)
• El Estado Nacional, Valladolid: Libertad, 1938
• Obras Completas: edición cronológica (2 vols.), Madrid: Publicaciones Españolas, 1954-1955
• Textos políticos. Madrid: Doncel, 1975.

Bibliography

• Payne, Stanley: Falange: a history of Spanish fascism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961
• Penella, Manuel: La Falange teórica, Barcelona: Planeta, 2006
• Rodríguez Jiménez, José Luis: Historia de la Falange Española de las JONS, Madrid: Alianza, 2000

External links

• Template:Es icon Tribute web to Onésimo Redondo. Falangist and biased web, but with copious information about him.