Even if the Nazi–Fascist defeat was a rationally and authoritatively justified prediction, with the Italian resistenti it acquired the force of a self-fulfilling prophecy. This faith in victory was ‘the linchpin of the new, as yet poor, symbolic system that was coming about, largely through interpersonal communication and clandestine public opinion’.111
On the other hand, chancing one’s luck only on the duration of the struggle, even if in the first few months it was reckoned that it would be shorter than it turned out to be, did not mean that you were not putting your life at risk. On the contrary, to die without savouring the fruit of a now imminent victory could be still more heartbreaking. Thus, predicting his fate, Artom wrote: ‘It seems to me bitter indeed to have certain victory in sight, but to seem unable to seize it and enjoy it because death makes off with us and takes us far away.’112
Many resistenti felt the sense of a recovery that was still possible for themselves and for Italy. Foa wrote: ‘From a profound and long-term point of view the German occupation is a great boon for Italy … In fact, it has befallen Italy to have the sad privilege not, like the other European peoples, to have lived the full destructive experience of the war.’113 And the Action Party newspaper: ‘We no longer need to sneak out at night and stealthily write: “Long live the heroic Danes”: we too are like them, like the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, like the Yugoslavs and the Greeks, like the Czechs and the Poles.’114 The Garibaldino commander Ferdinando Mautino says much the same when he recalls that he and those like him made their choice in the spirit of the PCI Italian Communist Party (PCI) call-to-arms – ‘Only with a gun in our hands against the enemy do we feel that we are still men and that we are reaffirming our humanity and dignity’ – but independently of that appeal, ‘which we would know only by taking action’.115
Dante Livio Bianco recognised in himself ‘the great joy of having finally been able to pass from a theoretical position to a practical position’.116 It was the same joy, Bianco recalls, that the founder of Giustiza e Libertà, Carlo Rosselli, had manifested on arriving in Spain. In the veteran anti-Fascists, the redemption was from humiliations such as had been suffered by the socialist Filippo Turati, old and exiled, when the public prosecutor for the Seine had asked him: ‘Mais, expliquez-moi, monsieur le député, comment donc se fait-il que l’Italie ne se révolte pas?’117 In 1943 the moment seemed well and truly to have come ‘to start over again from scratch’, as Claudio Treves, another great exile, had said to the young Giorgio Amendola.118
The very fact of being the last to get there, with so heavy a burden on one’s shoulders, made the Italian resistenti particularly sensitive to the problems of a future that was not to limit itself to defeating the Germans. ‘Gagner la guerre et gagner la paix’ was the formula used by the newspaper founded in France by Silvio Trentin to sum up the problem.119 In that newspaper, there were contemptuous attacks against ‘new fair-weather patriots’ against ‘last-minute workers’, against all those who ‘follow the chariot of victory, regardless of the driver, whether Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt or Stalin’. When he subsequently took part in the Italian Resistance, Trentin certainly did not consider himself to be part of this ‘surging and roaring tide that lifts the mounted trophy of Victory’. He probably felt that the short time remaining to Italy to prove herself demanded a still greater commitment, before the star of victory cast its light also on the eleventh-hour apprentices.
3. BETRAYAL
The problem of political morality that the Italians had to face most immediately was that of betrayal. All the parties involved bandied around accusations of betrayal. In fact, ‘no one wants to appear as a traitor’ but all ‘are firmly convinced that traitors exist and that they must be punished in the most severe way possible: preferably with death’.1
In the situation in Italy following 8 September 1943, the accusations of betrayal from opposing sides bounced back and forth, interwove and contaminated one another in various ways, because all of them, or almost all, contained some fragments of truth. On the other hand, everyone seemed to be possessed by a ‘need of great treasons’ against which to salve themselves.2 The result of this was that the semantic field of the word was greatly extended. If from the point of view of Italian positive law treason was only a military offence,3 the events overwhelming Italy and Europe went well beyond the terrain of soldiers and their rules of conduct. The balance in the dialectic of freedom and bonds had dissolved – if indeed it had ever existed – as ‘unavoidable dependence’ was ‘transferred more and more to the periphery, to the externals of life’.4 Bonds, which the totalitarian regimes and the war had wished to be all-inclusive, either plummeted or became still more exclusive; and, on the other hand, in order to get a hearing, the freedom to appeal only to one’s own conscience had to take the form of absolute intransigence. The accusations of treason became both drastic and multivalent; but at the same time ‘the good use of treason’ once again came to exert its fascination.
Polybius, going over to the Romans, had written that ‘those who decide freely to come to terms with kings or dynasties and to cooperate with them’ are not traitors, nor is anyone who organises an overturning of alliances. Polybius had difficulty, however, answering the question of ‘who should really be considered a traitor’. In the struggle between resistance fighters and collaborationists things, on the contrary, became clear-cut: a group of French Jewish resistance fighters, supporters of Irgun, reopened the trial against Flavius Josephus, and condemned him to death as a collaborationist with the Romans and a traitor.5 A popular poet from Terni inveighed against ‘those who are always traitors! (the bosses, the Fascists, the powerful);6 a Fascist we have already come across, possibly recalling the song of the Piave’ – ‘ma in a notte triste si parlò di tradimento’ (‘but one sad night we spoke of betrayal’) – now wrote: ‘In this war everything is betrayal, nothing but betrayal.’7
The people about whom opinions converged most generally, albeit for different motives, in branding them as traitors were the king and Badoglio. They appeared so to the Germans, the Fascists, the majority of the resistenti, and a sizable number of the internees in Germany, wary though the latter were, for understandable reasons, of voicing this opinion openly. To the Allies they appeared at the very least as useful weathervanes, who seemed to be reviving the age-old habit the Savoys had of never concluding a war on the same side they had begun it on – unless, as was also said, they had changed front twice. In its 6 May 1944 Rome edition, Avanti! wrote: ‘The Savoys can’t possibly overturn the alliances as they did in the eighteenth century.’ As for the Germans, it was obvious that they should regard the king and Badoglio as traitors. Above all, there had been that rash sentence inserted in the proclamation Badoglio launched immediately after 25 July: ‘Italy will keep faith with the word it has given, a jealous custodian of its millenary traditions!’ If the intention behind the second part of this sentence had been to hint at a sibylline and almost comic mental reservation, now it appeared only as exacerbating the volte-face.
‘This is breaking your word’, said Rudolf von Rahn, who was in charge of German affairs in Rome, to Foreign Minister Raffaele Guariglia, who, at 7 p.m. on 8 September, came to announce the Armistice to him.8 ‘The more deceived the German troops and leadership were, the harsher the reaction was’, General Alfred Jodl later said.9 On 10 September Josef Goebbels wrote in his diary that the German people, ‘abler and more clairvoyant than its government’, had always distrusted the Italians.10 In his verdict of betrayal, Goebbels thus engulfed the whole Italian people; and he then laid it on thick: ‘The Italians, through their infidelity and treachery, have lost any right to be a modern national state. They must be punished with the utmost severity, as the laws of history impose.’11
It has been rightly observed that the German reaction stemmed from the fact that they expected absolute ‘vassalic loyalty’ on the part of their Italian ally,12 who had therefore made themselves guilty of treason (‘maresciallo fellone’ was
indeed one of the phrases used most widely to describe Badoglio). As the war had gradually taken a turn for the worse, Italian protests of ‘fidelity’ to Germany13 had been reiterated, without the Germans feeling the slightest need to offer corresponding reassurances. But the arrogance of the master left his vassal no other ‘freedom’ except to betray him by going over to the enemy. The Germans’ reluctance (at least until Kuby’s recent book)14 to consider themselves, essentially, as traitors to the Italians probably lies in this idea: a vassal can betray his master; but that the master can betray the vassal, is, for the master, a nonsensical proposition.
But, in any case, whatever the underlying convictions might have been, the distinction between the treacherous leaders and the Italian people who were themselves the victims of betrayal was too pragmatically useful not to be resorted to by the Germans. And in fact the Germans lost no time in inviting the Italians to disassociate themselves from the traitors; but they did this with a crudity that magnified the contradictions of that invitation and made the chances still scarcer of its finding mass acceptance.
‘It is evident what path you must follow’, was how one of the first German appeals, broadcast widely by radio, rounded off: ‘Leave the traitors, and come along with your German comrades.’15 It is curious how little aware the Germans seemed to be that, if there was one word at that moment that repelled the great majority of Italians, and particularly the officers and soldiers to whom the appeal was primarily addressed, it was ‘camarata’ (‘comrade’); and even if this might have been a hasty translation of a word with less extensive Fascist connotations in German, the fact remains that they ought nonetheless to have realised how it sounded to the ears of the Italians they were addressing. Probably the writers and inspirers of that proclamation were capable only of showing that they seriously believed the thesis whereby the Italians were all honest comrades, whom only betrayal had snatched away from their German allies. Besides, it was true to German tradition to interpret defeats and setbacks as acts of betrayal by many or few. Contempt for the Italians is, in any case, revealed in the passage in the appeal where it was promised that ‘like the German soldiers you too will be well fed, paid and treated’.
The Germans themselves and, obviously, the Fascists of the Social Republic were not the only ones to brand the king and Badoglio as traitors of the Germans. Anti-Fascists like Gaetano Salvemini had no doubts on this score: ‘The king has committed an act of perfidy and betrayal, even if it has been committed against a bandit like Hitler: a rascal does not become a gentleman when he betrays another rascal.’16 Even La Voce Repubblicana didn’t mince words in calling the king’s conduct towards Germany betrayal – the last link in a chain begun by Charles Albert when, in 1821, he had betrayed the Carbonari.17 Then again, more than a year later, in a letter to Piero Calamandrei, Salvemini gave his view of things in political terms that were widely shared by the Resistance:
My belief is that war against the Germans could not have been declared by a king who had signed the alliance treaty of May 1939, and by Badoglio who had been the military instrument of the Axis from 1936 to December 1940. The two men would have committed a patent act of treachery. And whoever had associated themselves with them would have dishonoured themselves with them and would have dishonoured the Italian people. Italy is already accused (wrongly) of having betrayed the allies in 1914–15. God forbid that she should go down in history with the (just) accusation of having betrayed Hitler in 1943.18
It is notable that the ghost of the changing of sides of 1915 – the ‘giro di valzer’ (‘deviation from foreign policy’) – which certainly fluttered around the ex-revolutionary interventionist Benito Mussolini in spring 1940, returned to the mind of the ex–democratic interventionist Gaetano Salvemini in 1943–44.
Incapable even of ‘betraying well’ was Silvio Trentin’s verdict on the Savoy family and the ‘re gaglioffo’ (‘good-for-nothing king’): ‘Now, always, invariably, throughout history, the Savoys have excelled not in the vile shamelessness of their oath-breaking, but rather in their shameful and perfidious cowardice.’ Trentin levelled at the monarchy an accusation that bore the clear mark of the Resistance: that of having prevented 8 September from ‘being transformed into a triumphal and redemptive day of resurrection’.19 In the same spirit, the draft of an article for an underground paper accused Badoglio of having given ‘that abandonment of Germany the character of a calculated act of treachery when it could have expressed the revolt of an entire people against an alliance that they had never wanted’.20 This sense of a golden opportunity degraded to base intrigue may help us understand attitudes such as that of a Venetian gentleman who relates how he ‘went up to a German and shook his hand, without saying a word, in a fit of disgust at what he saw going on’.21
Recognition of – or at least doubts about – the fact that the Germans had some reason to consider themselves betrayed also appears in testimonies given forty years later by people who did not join the RSI: ‘This news, naturally, was considered by our German allies to be an act of great treachery’; or, more dramatically: ‘Forty years have gone by and I’m still ashamed to have been their allies in war and then betrayed them as Judas did. But it was our leaders, who are always disgusting, who sold us out.’22
A guilty conscience towards the Germans had been displayed, in an altogether different context, by the generals heading along the road of the coup d’état and then the Armistice. In a note to Mussolini written just after his appointment as head of the General Staff of the Combined Forces, Arturo Ambrosio put forward the argument that ‘the Germans must change their operative intentions and must come to our aid, otherwise we shall not be obliged to follow them in their erroneous conduct of the war’.23
It was as if a preventive alibi were being sought, authorising one to consider the Germans traitors because they were dispatching too few troops to the rescue of an Italy threatened at close range now by the Anglo-Americans. On 17 July 1943, just after the Sicily landing (9–10 July) the Supreme Command, still more scared, unwittingly revealed the fragility of the argument: ‘And if, say, the Germans wanted to make Italy into their battlefield, I don’t rule out the possibility that Italy would fight against these allies who have systematically broken their word.’24
On the one hand, then, a greater German military presence in Italy was asked for, and on the other, it was feared that the Germans wanted to make Italy into a battlefield. This was how, in a way that may possibly have been intended to be artful but succeeded only in being tragically grotesque, the illusion-cum-fiction of the ‘parallel war’ was playing itself out. It had always, as an intelligent German observer pointed out, come up against the contradiction between ‘the desire to be as independent as possible from German control’ and ‘the need to seek German support’.25
It was not, then, by the monarchy and the high Commands of the Royal Army that the Germans needed seriously to fear being accused of betrayal, even if this was obviously attempted by those directly concerned. In his Radio Bari broadcast of 24 September 1943, the king praised those who had managed to avoid the ‘enemy’s betrayal’ and ‘the flattery of the repudiators of the patria’.26 The rulers of the South, who during the forty-five days could hardly be said to have been hard on the Fascists, could feel themselves to be the object at least of the latter’s ingratitude.
As regards betraying the Germans, part of the same underground press is at times threaded with a defensive attitude that echoes the arguments of the High Command, to which a whole class of disappointed nationalists were not insensitive. A case in point is the Roman newspaper L’Indice dei fatti e delle idee. On 15 November 1943, in the article actually entitled ‘Chi ha tradito’ (‘The betrayers’), Germany is accused, not altogether without reason, of having failed to pay enough attention to the interests of Italy since the time of the armistice with France, and of having always underrated the Mediterranean theatre of operations.27
More directly, and in the style of a court sentence, the Pied
montese paper Riscossa Italiana pronounced that ‘the accuser is discredited’ and ‘the accusation [of betrayal] is objectively bereft of any shade of legitimacy’.28 In October 1943, Il Risorgimento Liberale assured its readers that ‘propaganda about the joke of betraying the Germans will come to nothing’; but in April 1944, regarding the similar fate that had befallen Hungary, it would still feel the need to repeat that, if betrayal is ‘failure to keep one’s word’, Mussolini’s word could not place the Italian people under any obligation.29 The Partito della Democrazia del Lavoro entitled the entire October 1943 Roman issue of its paper of the same name, ‘Dov’ è il tradimento?’ (‘What betrayal?’), concluding that the real traitor was Mussolini.30 ‘Non c’ è tradimento’ (‘There is no betrayal’) was the title of an article in L’Azione: this too argued that, if betrayal there was, it was Mussolini’s betrayal of the Italian people.31 One could talk in terms of betrayal – writes Voce Operaia, organ of the Catholic communists in Rome – if the war against the Germans were being conducted, as a last-minute bid to save themselves, by those who had allied themselves with the Germans.32 This was an argument analogous to Salvemini’s, referred to above, and one which we shall see taken up again in the debate about the declaration of war against Germany.
Perhaps it is no accident that some of the quotations exemplifying this ‘defensive’ stance are found in resistance journalism that may be called ‘minor’, in the sense that it cannot be attributed to parties, or to politically prominent and well-defined groups. These publications, wrongly neglected by historiography, are one of the scanty number of sources available for reconstructing the opinion of the middle-ranking, muddled bourgeoisie which was later to carry so much weight in the days following the Liberation, not least in relation to this knotty question of the attitude held in the past and to be held in the future concerning the lost war. Of the above quotations, those of the politically well-defined parties and groups – even if, like La Democrazia del Lavoro, they carried scant weight with the Resistance – nevertheless already introduce the retaliation against Mussolini and, as in the case of Voce Operaia, extend it to the king and to the generals of the South. The Action Party newspaper, for example, was to go a long way down this path: in September 1943 it did not hesitate to maintain that ‘the Badoglio government and the Crown were betraying one and all, the Germans and the Anglo-Americans. To save Italy? No. To save themselves.’ Still along the lines of a punishable betrayal, the same newspaper affirmed: ‘All this is material for a war tribunal … And maybe the people will find a way to abbreviate procedures.’33 Ferdinando Mautino placed himself more directly on the moral plane when he noted in his diary: ‘Had it never by chance befallen the ruling classes, the marshals and the Majesties, to possess a spirit capable of committing themselves to fidelity to any of the numerous sacred principles in whose name millions of Italians have been called upon to give up all their affections, the construction of their own future, life itself.’34
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