José Fernández de Villa-Abrille

Fernández de Villa-Abrille was head of the II Organic Division of the army, based in Seville and in command in Andalusia, at the time of the July 1936 coup that led to the Civil War. He was aware of the conspiracy of the rebels days before. Thus, when the Commander of the General Staff, José Cuesta Monereo - following instructions from the rebel general, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano - drew up a plan with which 4,000 men were mobilized to carry out and consolidate the coup in the province of Seville, General Fernández did not join the uprising; but neither he nor many of the officers under his command showed any resistance to the coup, nor to the repressive actions that Commander Antonio Castejón Espinosa initiated in different neighborhoods of Seville.

General Fernández ignored the instructions that the civil governor of the province, José María Varela Rendueles, gave him insistently to respond to the rebels. Despite his passivity and that of several commanders under his orders, the staff of the II Organic Division was arrested and prosecuted. Fernández de Villa-Abrille - whose position as head of the II Organic Division was de facto held by Queipo - was also arrested.[1] He was discharged from the army in December 1936; and in February 1939, a court martial sentenced him to six years in prison. He finished serving his sentence in Seville, in a villa near Cruz del Campo, which was used as a military prison during the war and after the war. Shortly after his release, he died in 1946 in a Madrid pension.