Forty years ago today, a man who had served as an Allied spy in Saragossa, Spain during the Second World War died of wounds sustained in a bizarre terrorist attack perpetrated several days before. The tragic story of Roger Tur first came to my attention via an anecdote contained in the book Canfranc El oro y los nazis, written by journalist Ramón J. Campo and published by Mira Editores. In a chapter devoted to a network of spies that relayed information about the transport of Nazi gold from bank vaults in Bern, Switzerland to Spain and beyond during the war through a railway station situated on the French-Spanish border, Campo mentions that Roger Tur Pallier, a French resident of Saragossa who served as honorary French consul there and who daily put his life on the line as a spy for the Allies, met an untimely death in that city years later “in an unfortunate incident in which he was rolled up in a carpet by several youths who subsequently set it alight.” This macabre anecdote pricked my curiosity enough to do a little research about Roger Tur and the grisly death that awaited him decades after the war in the city I call home.
Roger Tur was a successful businessman who served as Honorary French Consul in Saragossa, where he owned a licorice factory. Working on his own initiative, he infiltrated Nazi circles that met weekly in that city during the war to share news about the front and plan military and diplomatic activities that promoted the Nazi war effort. The topics addressed in these meetings ranged from the refueling of German submarines in Spanish ports to the convoys of tungsten and iron that the Spanish government secretly shipped to German munitions plants via an international rail point located in Canfranc, a small village in the mountains of Aragon situated a mere eight kilometers from the French-Spanish border. 
Unbeknownst to the other members of this group, which met from October 1944 until early February 1946, Roger Tur prepared weekly summaries of what they discussed and plotted that he passed along under the codename “Ric” to an agent working for the Office of Strategic Services, an organization created by the American government to gather wartime intelligence. As most Spanish government files related to Spain’s collaboration with the Nazis have since vanished, the information contained in these reports has provided historians with invaluable information about Nazi activity in Spain, the secret complicity of Franco’s regime with the Third Reich, and the Spanish government’s assistance to fleeing Nazis at the war’s end. Roger Tur was subsequently inducted into the French Legion of Honor for his valor, but apparently never divulged details of his wartime activities to anyone, an understandable decision given the political situation in Spain and his desire to remain in Saragossa.
Although Spain remained in the tyrannical grip of Francisco Franco until the dictator died of natural causes in late 1975, various underground networks seeking to prepare Spanish society for an inevitable future transition to democracy began to form during the 1960s and 1970s. Underground labor movements sprang up, and a new generation of socialists operating clandestinely in Spain began to challenge the party structure that had been maintained in exile since the fall of the Second Republic. Most were non-violent, but regional separatist movements such as ETA believed that the only way to put an end to the dictatorship and realize nationalist aspirations was by force. In 1968 ETA assassinated Melitón Manzanas, the police chief of San Sebastian. This act marked the first of a long series of terrorist attacks throughout Spain that would not come to an end until a permanent ceasefire was officially declared in early 2011. During this period, Spanish university students became more politicized and rebellious. In 1972, a handful of students at the University of Zaragoza with anarchist leanings formed a clandestine group they named “el Colectivo Hoz y Martillo” (the Hammer and Sickle). Members of the Hoz y Martillo organization made several trips to Bayonne, France to make contact with ETA operatives active there. To gain ETA’s approval and convince the terrorist organization to provide them with weapons and explosives, they agreed to kidnap the French consul in Saragossa as a symbolic reprisal for pressures the French government was bringing to bear against ETA cells located in France, a mission that would prove to have fatal consequences for Roger Tur.
Roger Tur, seated third from the right.
On the morning of November 2, 1972, only a few months after the socialist party met in Toulouse and voted for a change of leadership that would pave the way for the emergence of a new generation of liberal Spanish politicians such as Felipe Gonzalez, José Antonio Mellado Romero, Alvaro Noguera Calvet, and Javier Sagarra de Moor burst into the French Consulate in Saragossa. The carpet mentioned in Campos’s book is missing from reports of the crime that I found during an Internet search, all of which stated that the attackers bound the Consul and several aides to chairs and then set off a incendiary devices – most likely handmade Molotov cocktails. At that point, the kidnapping attempt went seriously awry. Sparks from the explosive devices set the consul’s clothing alight and amid the ensuing chaos, the would-be kidnappers fled the scene. Roger Turo Pallier died five days later. For more than thirty of his sixty-eight years he had served as French consul in Saragossa. Mellado Romero, Noguero Calvet, and Sagarra de Moor were soon captured and brought to trial. All three were given lengthy prison sentences that were later commuted after the death of Franco. What they may have later thought of their 1972 escapade in the French Consulate of Saragossa in the light of declassified OSS information about Turo’s clandestine wartime activities against fascism made available to the Spanish public through a series of articles published in La Vanguardia in 2005 and 2006 and further explored in the 2007 book La guerra ignorada: los espías españoles que combatieron a los nazis, one will never know.
References consulted:
Canfranc, el oro y los nazis by Ramón J. Campo; Zaragoza: Mira Editores 2012
La guerra ignorada: los espías españoles que combatieron a los nazis by Eduardo Martín de Pozuelo and Iñaki Ellakuría, Barcelona: Random House Mondadori 2008
“En las cárcles, cincuenta presos no vascos”, el Pais April 30, 1977 http://elpais.com/diario/1977/04/30/espana/231199223_850215.html access date: 21/09/2012
“El consul francés de Zaragoza y los nazis” blog Antón Castro http://antoncastro.blogia.com/2007/051601-el-consul-frances-de-zaragoza-y-los-nazis-.php access date: 21/09/2012
“ETA timeline: Key events in the separatist movement’s deadly campaign for a Basque sovereign state” the Guardian January 10, 2010http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/10/eta-timeline-baqsque-separatist-campaign access date: 21/09/2012
“España bajo la dictadura franquista 7. conflictividad social galopante y fin del desarrollismo en los primeras años 70″ Historia y Presente (blog) http://histocliop.blogspot.com.es/2009/11/espana-bajo-la-dictadura-franquista-7.html access date: 21/09/2012
Images:
“Zaragoza: Ha fallecido el cónsul de Francia, señor Roger Tur” La Vanguardia November 8, 1972 http://hemeroteca.lavanguardia.com/preview/1972/11/08/pagina-3/33607621/pdf.html access date: 21/09/2012
“El asesinato del consul frances se fraguo en Bayona” ABC November 11, 1972 http://hemeroteca.abc.es/nav/Navigate.exe/hemeroteca/madrid/abc/1972/11/04/001.html access date: 21/09/2012
“Regaliz aragonés para el tobaco rubio americano” Mariano García el Heraldo (blog section) June 3, 2009 http://blogs.heraldo.es/tinta/?p=60
“El consul francés de Zaragoza y los nazis” blog Antón Castro http://antoncastro.blogia.com/2007/051601-el-consul-frances-de-zaragoza-y-los-nazis-.php access date: 21/09/2012
In the early summer of 1936 Belchite was a prosperous Aragonese farming community with a population of 3,516. Although initiatives pushed forward by the Republican government such as agrarian reform had angered local landowners and the Church, the mayor of the town was a socialist and member of the UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores). However, local republican authorities often pushed reforms to extremes: members of the clergy were often banned from teaching in areas that had no alternative school system and in some towns the celebration of religious holidays such as Christmas and Easter was prohibited. As one writer put it, “To one half of the population, Spain was on the threshold of a brave new world. To the other, it was teetering on the brink of the abyss.”(1) When news of the July military uprising reached Belchite, the fragile atmosphere of tolerance that had existed among the town’s opposing factions deteriorated. Local Falangist sympathizers and disaffected police officers went on a rampage, detaining the socialist mayor Mariano Castillo Carrasco, who committed suicide on July 31 after writing a lengthy letter expressing his fervent desire that his blood be the last to be shed,(2) and assassinating members of his family and various other townspeople. Similar incidents occurred in other towns throughout the zone. The new mayors imposed by these groups were expected to unfailingly toe the nationalist political line: in a maneuver reminiscent of the dark days of the Spanish Inquisition, Victorián Lafoz y Benedí, the new mayor of the nearby town La Puebla de Albortón, was accused of being a mason and later assassinated simply for refusing to condone the shooting of citizens considered by the anti-Republican faction to be “Reds.”(3)
Representatives of the CNT and the FAI (Federación Anarchista Ibérica) formed an administrative council, the Consejo de Aragón, which quickly set about reorganizing rural Aragonese society, establishing farming collectives and a barter system, negotiating commercial agreements to meet local needs with industries in other provinces of Spain and abroad, and creating a regional bus service that connected towns throughout the province; in short, attempting to create a regional agrarian utopia that undermined private commerce and was to a great extent incongruous with the central government’s efforts to put down the military uprising. This 
The battle for Belchite began on August 24. Both sides had orders not to retreat and the fighting was fierce. The town’s food and water supplies were quickly exhausted, but the Nationalist defenders held out for thirteen days in the unrelenting August heat. The soldiers of the International Brigades were forced to open small breaches in the defensive walls and storm the town building by building. The human suffering was dreadful. The town’s newly elected mayor, Ramon Trallero, died during a mortar attack on September 2, but the exhausted and dwindling defensive force did not surrender until September 7. (7) The Republican victory would be fleeting. Santander fell to the Nationalist army and the offensive against Saragossa ground to a halt. By mid-March 1938, Belchite was once again under Nationalist control and the Republic forces were in full retreat. Determined to make the town a national symbol, General Francisco Franco decreed that the Belchite would forever remain in ruins as a monument to the horrors of war and forced Republican prisoners of war to build a new town only meters away. Various families continued to live in the old town surrounded by the shells of abandoned buildings until the mid-1960s, when the last resisters finally relocated to “Nuevo Belchite.” The rain and the fierce winds of Aragon slowly reduced the heavily damaged clay brick rubble that one sees today. Following the general trend throughout rural Spain, many Belchitans gradually moved away to larger urban areas in search better employment opportunities. The population of the present Belchite stands at fewer than 1,700, a far cry from the 3,516 recorded in the original town in 1936.
The vanquished could not begin to tell their side of the story until the death of Franco in November 1975, but even then a national “pact of forgetting” greatly inhibited public discussion of the events that altered the lives of the people of Belchite forever. As most local people prefer to avoid discussion of a period so fraught with human miscalculation, vengeance, and suffering, the history of the Battle of Belchite has more or less become the property of the aging veterans of the International Brigades who fought there and foreigners interested in the Republican cause. In spite of their failure to save the Spanish Republic, the volunteers of the International Brigade never lost their sense of having done something unique and heroic. In her farewell speech to the departing foreign troops in November 1938, Dolores Ibarruri, “
The Axis powers gained expertise and confidence in Spain. However, fearful of the Republic’s left-wing political complexion, one country after another refused to provide civil and military supplies to a legitimately elected government and many surreptitiously backed the military insurgents who sought to bring it down. Historian Anthony Beevor estimated that Ford, Studebaker, and General Motors provided as many as 12,000 trucks to the Nationalist forces, noting that José Maria Doussinague, Spanish Foreign Ministry undersecretary under Franco, once remarked, “without American petroleum and American trucks and American credit, we could never have won the Civil War.”(9) Franco’s decision to crush all vestiges of the Republic, its institutions, and the social change it brought about methodically, rather than bring the civil war to a rapid conclusion, gave these countries time to reconsider their policies, but the idea of a leftist state on the map of Europe was unthinkable to them. Ironically, only a few years after the fall of the Second Spanish Republic, these same countries would accept the Soviet Union as a full ally in their own war against the Axis powers and even eventually concede it hegemony over the whole of Eastern Europe. By means of its alliance with the leaders of the military insurgence, Germany gained privileged access to the Spanish wolfram it needed for its arms production, a factor that significantly prolonged the war in Europe and cost millions of lives. One will never know how many lives sacrificed on the beaches of Normandy or lost in the Mediterranean theater might have been spared if the Allied forces could have operated from friendly Spanish ports and bases along the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines, its outlying islands, and its possessions in North Africa. For Spanish society, the price of this prevarication would be decades of economic, social, and political stultification under the curious autarchical regime of Francisco Franco Bahamonde.
Lost or previously suppressed documents concerning the Spanish Republic, the civil war that brought it to an end, and the thirty-six year totalitarian regime of Francisco Franco are continually coming to light. The work of historians and sociologists devoted to this period of Spanish history is far from complete. So is the process of healing in towns like Belchite, where a fairly new reproduction of the Falangist yoke and arrows symbol decorates the facade of a house in the new town, and an old message scrawled on a sheet of metal propped up at the entrance of one of the churches in the old town mourns that “no one now hears the voices of fathers singing 
La abuelita de Kundera y también la mía
It’s by no means a newly minted word, but I have just been made aware of its existence: obiticide. Treated by some as a joke and others as a lapse of journalistic rigor and ethics, obiticide is the word that journalist and press accuracy expert 
The very idea of writing obituaries for a living might make you laugh or give you the creeps, but for many journalists, it’s a serious profession. Obituary writers in the United States and Canada even have their own organization, 
Neither too critical nor excessively maudlin, Gussow’s article records the ups and downs of an actress who survived her own legend, from her childhood success in National Velvet to her bouts with addictions and failing health. He records Vincent Canby’s statement “More than anyone else I can think of, Elizabeth Taylor represents the complete movie phenomenon — what movies are as an art and an industry, and what they have meant to those of us who have grown up watching them in the dark,” as well as Taylor’s own rye comment to Richard Burton, “If I get fat enough, they won’t ask me to do any more films.” More than just an obituary, it’s a well-written piece of copy that is a pleasure to read over and over again. Economist magazine dedicates a full page every week to the obituary of some distinguished person. So what how do people know that less-distinguished folks are no longer around? The world knows when the rest of us have kicked the bucket if the law requires it or we have generous friends or family members willing to pay. I’m not joking: not all, but many, newspapers treat obituaries as a form of classified advertisement.
Recently I’ve read a number of good articles about bad writing. As a large part of my working day is spent making bad writing better (and, hopefully, making good writing a greater joy to read), I have to admit that I love this kind of article.
I duplicate the entire message as received this morning by email from a colleague.
For translators who need to cite the People’s Charter for Health, the 
