Anarchist César Orquín, Hero of Mauthausen

César Orquín Serra was born in Valencia, but the year of his birth is uncertain. Officially he was born in 1917, but that was when his details were entered in the Civil Register. The son of an aristocrat by the name of Leopoldo Trénor y Palavicino and a housemaid, he was not ignored by his father. The latter found him an adoptive father and supplied him with the money to ensure his education and he kept a watchful eye on everything he did. So César attended the Conservatorio and the university. Furthermore, he studied languages and could speak French, German, English, Catalan and Spanish. 

He was a lively young man endowed with some very out of the ordinary gifts. Come the Republic, he helped edit various anarchist publications. In 1934 he joined the CNT. In 1935 he cut all ties with his actual father, whom he was never to identify, not even to his own daughter when she grew up. In retaliation, his father dispatched him to Africa to do his military service under the supervision of a high-ranking uniformed relative. In 1936 Franco triggered the Civil War. César’s adoptive family, knowing what he was like, assumed that he had been executed. But no, he had escaped and crossed the straits of Gibraltar in a rickety boat and made it back to Valencia. And then he enlisted in the war. He joined the International Brigades. He was assigned to the 15th International Brigade, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, a communist unit, although he himself was an anarchist. The Lincoln was the best educated battalion of those fighting in the war, judging by the professions of those who served in it. They made him their political commissar. And then the atrocious fall-outs with the communists came along. 

When the war was lost, César left for exile via Gerona, Figueres and Le Perthus. In France he was interned in the refugee camps in Argelès, Agde and Saint-Cyprien, one after the other. He enlisted (or was enlisted) in CTE (Foreign Labour Company) 114. They assigned him to the Maginot Line near the border with Germany. On 20 June 1940 he was taken prisoner by the Germans. They placed him the stalag in Strasbourg. There, he began to brush up his German, just in case.

On 13 December 1940 he arrived in Mauthausen as deportee No 805. As he spoke German, they made him an interpreter. It was then that he came up with a plan to save as many republican lives as he could. Relying solely upon his gift of the gab and his powers of persuasion, he persuaded those in command in Mauthausen to allow him to venture outside with an outside work detail, with him in charge of its 30 members, so that he might keep an eye on them, and carry out work that had been left unfinished due to the outbreak of the war. 

From June 1941 until May 1942 he was in Vöcklabruck with 330 men under his supervision. That year in Mauthausen and its satellite camps upwards of 3,200 Spanish republicans perished. But in Vöcklabruck, not one died. In May 1942 the order came through that they were to relocate to Ternberg where the Nazis were planning to build a series of power stations along the river Enns. There, César had 408 men under his supervision; 12 of these perished, mostly in work accidents: a casualty rate of 2.9%. But in order to get a reliable idea, those figures need to be set alongside the figures from the Großraming work detail on the upper bank of the river where another power station was under construction. That subcamp held 1,013 prisoners, of whom 227 or 22.4% died. Looking at the figures (given that we are not talking about the same time period) Ternberg’s death rate was 1.2% whereas in Großraming 13.8% of the deportees perished. 

But in Ternberg unmistakable differences were emerging with the communists. Ex-International Brigaders had been holding down the most influential posts in the camp and wielded considerable sway over the deportees as a whole. They wanted César Orquín to defer to their plans. But César was not there to work. He would come and go freely. The communists began to scheme against Orquín. 

Which is how things stood when the order came through that they were to return to Mauthausen. The war was making different demands. They spent 70 days idle before the word came through that they were to venture out to Redl-Zipf to dig tunnels as protection for factories making munitions for the war. There was already a Redl-Zipf work detail in place and it was then that the label “César Kommando” began to be used to differentiate between them and the rest of the deportees. On the 300 prisoners under César’s care, not one died during the six months they spent in Redl-Zipf. 

On 27 March 1945 something occurred that the communists were to use against Orquín. Following orders from the camp commanders a list was drawn up of 96 deportees who were reassigned to the Gusen commando. The communists stated that Orquín had washed his hands of the communists and that it was his fault that they had all perished. But no one had died. And the decision was not of César’s making, as was evidenced by the fact that on the very same day deportees from the Steyr work detail were also transferred to Gusen. 

Two weeks after liberation, César found work with a firm as its head of sales. In the middle of that year he married an Austrian woman, Aloise Riedl and a year later they had a daughter, Mausi. César set up the OREA (Spanish Republican Organization in Austria). The Communist Party campaign against him escalated. He found work as a language tutor with the Berlitz Academy and at the Argentinean Embassy. At around about this time he struck up a friendship with the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal.

The death of some of his adjutants gave him cause to rethink things. The kapo Carlos Flor de Lis, an anarchist, was stabbed to death by the communist Valentín Martínez González in Piding railway station as he was leaving for Paris on 14 June 1945. José Cuenca Blanco (another anarchist), who had served in Orquín’s commando as a clerk, was so badly harassed after his release that he could hardly stand it. False evidence given by CP members led to his being thrown in jail repeatedly and he died in unusual circumstances. Then there was Fidel Balbas Salas, who also served as a kapo under César: he was denounced by former deportees and shot by the French Forces on 26 August 1947. Balbas’s execution was a watershed moment in terms of the attitude of the French towards ex-deportees when they realized that they had placed undue store by the communists’ denunciations.

Weary and disillusioned, César left for the Republic of Argentina, arriving there on a diplomatic passport (first in Buenos Aires before moving on to Mendoza). There he engaged in intensive professional artistic, cultural and entrepreneurial activity until he made a name for himself. He died on 14 February 1988, still an anarchist and without ever having set foot in Spain again. 

On 28 August 2023 César Orquín was awarded the title, post mortem, of Honourable Resident of the town of Godoy Cruz, Mendoza (Argentina). 

Guillem Llin Llopis. Rojo y Negro, May 2025. https://cgt.es/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/400-ryn-mayo_compressed-2.pdf [page 28-29, 32-33 of pdf]

Guillem Llin Llopis co-authored with Carles Senso a full-length biography of Orquín: César Orquín Serra: El anarquista que salvó a 300 españoles en Mauthausen (Independently Published, 2020)

The book lists (pp. 343-362) 424 members of the César Kommando. At No 26 there is the name of Leciñena-born Francisco Bailo Mata (b. 06/11/1917), deportee number 4216, one of the anarchists responsible for the catastrophic Rue Duguesclin armed robbery in Lyon in 1951. [See https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/3r23pp and https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/m640kc ] He served in Ternberg as part of Orquín’s outside work detail.

[Image: Mauthausen, 13 May 1945. Orquín is standing, first on the right. From https://militants-anarchistes.info/spip.php?article17236 ]

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.