A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  In the final words there seems to be a pre-emptive stance in relation to the disarmament that the Allies were ordering; but still clearer is the echo of a Third International–type institutional culture. Bearing a yet greater ideological mark, but still starker, is the oath adopted by the Belluno Garibaldi division: ‘I swear never to lay down these arms until the principles of progressivist liberty and democracy are established, and to combat any offensive return of Fascism and of anti-democratic and anti-popular reaction that may attempt to wrest power from the representative organs of the people.’72

  For their part, the ‘autonomous’ and ‘military’ formations had no objection, in principle, to the oath. Major Martini Mauri had his bands repeat the one customarily used in the Royal Army. As has already been said of the first Boves bands, the soldiers should, rather, have considered reviving the oath to be superfluous, given that they saw themselves as operating, in perfect continuity, within the institutions of the Kingdom of Italy. All the same, they were loath to renounce the symbolic value of the oath and of the cohesive force traditionally attributed to it; nor is it by any means sure whether, coexisting with certainty as to the legitimacy of the institutions, there was not some doubt and anxiety as to their ethical value. At times the autonomous bands proposed high-flown formulae, such as this one of the Brescia Green Flames (Fiamme Verdi):

  I swear to fight until Germans and Fascists have been driven once and for all off the soil of the patria, until Italy once again has Unity, Liberty, Dignity. I swear to make no truce with cowards, turncoats, spies, to keep the secret and never to fall short of discipline. Should I ever fail to keep my oath, I invoke upon myself the revenge of my Italian brothers and the justice of God.73

  In fact, as has already been suggested, various kinds of cultural elements influenced the practice of the oath. The honour appealed to by the military and, in their way, the aforementioned giellisti (of Giustizia e Libertà) is certainly of a different feather from what must have been going through sixteen-year-old Walter Atti’s mind when, as he was being led out of the prison of Castelfranco Emilia to be shot, he took his leave with these words: ‘They are taking me to the wall because I have sworn loyalty to Stalin.’74 Here the category of the oath (and, in implicit opposition to it, of treason) has nothing to do with institutions.

  Beyond remaining loyal to or abjuring both old oaths and institutions and new commitments, treason came to acquire meanings that no longer, or not only, regarded the power system, however conceived, but also and above all in reference to the system of human solidarity, of people’s deepest affections and convictions. On the local scale, ‘a whole dense web of ties’ had formerly united the partisans not just to one another but also to their Fascist enemies, and all of a sudden ‘each, reciprocally, had become a traitor in the other’s eyes’.75 ‘Traitor’ was, in short, becoming a label to pin on those who, like the Fascists, refused to collaborate in the reconstruction of a profound system of human solidarity, and indeed were doing their level best to nip it in the bud.

  But within the Resistance groups themselves, suspicions of betrayal could reappear, contrasting with the idealised compactness of the group itself, reiterated possibly in the very act of oath-taking – suspicions both of those who seemed to deny that compactness and of other groups. As we shall see, this process appeared most evident in the relations between the Communists and the groups to their left, and found classic expression in Pietro Secchia’s article ‘Il sinistrismo maschera della Gestapo’.76 But the Third Internationalists were not the only ones to ‘paint their adversaries as traitors’.77 The temptation to do so could nest within the same fraternal bond uniting the resistenti as such. Terror may indeed bud from fraternity, and ‘the magic power of the taboo of betrayal’ spread ‘to those who break it’.78 This helps account for the great fear of betraying, particularly under torture, felt by many resistenti. To save himself from this danger, Luciano Bolis cut his throat in prison, thereby succeeding in severing his vocal cords.79 To this day a Mauthausen deportee recalls: ‘In a certain sense I felt freer because at least I no longer had this anxiety’ – namely of betraying.80 It should be added that the Italian Resistance was less afflicted by such degenerative processes than other Resistance movements, such as the Yugoslav, the Greek and the French. In Italy, affinity between certain basic ethical and existential attitudes and unity as a main political line probably managed better to help each other out on this score.

  The resistenti frequently felt rage against ‘those who have betrayed us’. ‘Che Dio maledica chi ci ha tradito/portandoci sul Don e poi è fuggito’ (‘God curse those who betrayed us/leading us to the Don and then escaping’), ran Pietà l’è morta, one of the most intense partisan songs. This was one of the ways in which the revolt of a generation was expressed against the regime brought up under and against the ruling class that had dragged them into war. The accusation feeding this revolt cannot be seen exclusively in terms of betrayal; but betrayal does help explain the label ‘traitor’ when it is attributed not only to the Fascists, but also, as we have seen, to the king, Badoglio and the Germans themselves.

  ‘Betrayal’, ‘loyalty’, ‘honour’ and the like frequently figure in the propaganda and journalism of the Social Republic, but also in the letters of the fallen Fascists. For many of them, too, the point of departure seems to be the ‘apocalyptic devastation of 8 September’,81 the reaction to the fact that men ‘have flung their consciences in the mud and become mere wrecks’.82 But 8 September, as we have seen, remained in the minds of the Fascists as a nightmare,83 a baffling offence. The letter of a sixteen-year-old member of the Republican National Guard, written to his mother, expresses this sense of a catastrophe from which one is trying to emerge, only to become more and more ensnared; and it is worth quoting a passage from it at length, where the memory of 8 September serves to reconfirm the boy’s reasons for his choice in response to the emotion provoked by the wounded Italian enemy:

  ‘Mamma’ was the invocation of the partisan whom I myself had to carry in my arms to the dressing station. During the journey, his sole thought was his mother. Over and over again he asked me if we would have harmed his mother too, and incredulous when I said no, spoke to me to remind me of my own mother, wanted to know about you, asked whether I got mail from you, if I had a photograph of you, since he did not have one of his own and that way, he said, he would see his own mother in you. I wish that scene had been witnessed by all those people who discuss and talk so lightly about 8 September, without having the slightest notion of what disaster and ruin it brought to our patria. Because, you see, that partisan, the one I had to fire at – otherwise he would have fired first – spoke the same language as me, said ‘mamma’ as I am saying it now; he was a brother! Believe me, if at that moment I’d had that @#$%¡ in my hands and those who helped him, I’d have made mincemeat of them.84

  But who and what, for the Fascist combatants, should not have been betrayed? One might answer, with a pat formula: above all a past with which they could identify only in terms of mechanical continuity. It was a past partly lived at first hand, partly imagined, as seems to be the case with the very young joining up for the first time, often invoking loyalty to their father, ‘Italian and Fascist’,85 and to an Italy ‘which you older combatants have entrusted to us, to maintain her prestige and her honour’.86 Loyalty to the oath itself gained force above all in this context; and there is a whole category of Fascists whose oath to the Duce as an institution was unquestionably influenced by the charismatic figure of the Duce, even when, as things now stood, he came across as the object of at least momentary but always affectionate pity: ‘Poor Duce, what a change has come upon him!’ wrote a soldier who had had the honour of sitting at table with him, and who immediately continues: ‘The Man he was, robust, authoritarian, is no longer recognisable; what he has suffered in these months must have been indescribable for Him who loved Italy so much and had given everything for her. Now, however, he has gathered … new energy and w
ith his will, which is made of iron, is reconstructing our Italy anew.’87

  A paratrooper of the Folgore Division sent his mother his medallion of the Duce so that she would always wear it on her breast as a reminder of him.88 We shall be returning to the myth of Mussolini betrayed. Suffice it to record for the time being that Mussolini really did appear, paradoxically and somewhat grotesquely, as the most betrayed of all Italians. ‘Pisenti, we’ve been betrayed by the Germans and by the Italians’, was how the Duce summed it up to his minister of justice, on returning from his visit to the archbishop’s palace, when the final catastrophe was well and truly under way.89

  Among the republican Fascists there were also those intent on demonstrating the illegality of the Badoglio government, as a basis for their conduct,90 and those, by contrast, who wished to vindicate ‘the act of will of which all the soldiers of the Italian Social Republic are justly proud’. These words conclude a passage dedicated to admirals Mascherpa and Campioni, who were shot by the Fascists because they had obeyed orders to oppose the Germans: the two admirals ‘could have rebelled but there is no juridical thesis that can demonstrate that they were obliged to do so’.91

  The right to rebel against the order to betray was invoked by Major Mario Rizzatti to justify his own conduct: ‘The regulation of discipline establishes that all orders are to be obeyed save one: which is, if one’s superior commands one to betray one’s country. Often, speaking to the whole assembled battalion, I would illustrate, with imaginary examples, this duty of non-obedience, hinting that sooner or later it would have to be applied.’92

  According to the Fascists, those who above all were not to be betrayed were the Germans, ‘to whom we are tied by a pact, a war fought together. And this out of loyalty and a sense of honour, independently of any sentimentalism and practical interest.’93 We are united to the Germans, another letter reads, by ‘sworn faith, friendship cemented by blood in a hundred engagements’.94 More dryly, another Fascist wrote: ‘I started with an enemy, I must finish against the same enemy.’95

  A Fascist (later a member of the Movimento Sociale Italiano) gave this dignified testimony:

  I found ‘la guerra continua’ [‘the war must go on’] and 8 September ignoble. Therefore I considered it a question of personal coherence to stay on the losing side, knowing that almost certainly I was following the losing side. But I didn’t think it right at such a moment to turn your back on your ally, because it was well and truly an act of betrayal.96

  An interpreter in the employ of the Germans replied to the internees who complained about the treatment being meted out to them, that it was ‘good and what you deserve, given that we had betrayed them’.97

  As the Fascists saw it, the war dead were not to be betrayed.98 Here mechanical continuity with the past is particularly evident, especially if compared with the effect that insistence on the same need had on so many other fighting men who joined the Resistance. In the Fascists, this need sometimes assumed the guise of a desire for physical and close-range revenge. ‘I cannot follow those who have killed a brother whom I must avenge at all costs’,99 one letter reads; and another: ‘For what reason did I join up? Because I have a brother asking to be avenged, who was killed by our enemies, by our dear “Liberators”.’100 At times, Fascist fidelity to the war even transcends fidelity to the dead. It might be a question of a ‘perennial and metaphysical war’, or a war which is ‘like a disease’.101 In these ‘combatants of all wars’, human solidarity appears to have stiffened into virile camaraderie.

  At other times the Fascists seem to be banging their heads against the wall, dismayed and furious at what appeared to be a ‘war fought in vain … a war of few, betrayed by many [and which all the same] is my whole life’.102 Indeed, rife among the Fascist combatants too was the sensation of being victims of a profound and obscure swindle, of which the wicked 8 September was but a partial manifestation. They saw the traitor not in Fascism but in those who had betrayed Fascism, all the worse if the latter were Fascists and, as such, unpardonable: ‘Betrayed ideas cannot welcome back the traitors with open arms.’103

  These Fascists thought that the Social Republic was the last opportunity to rediscover the purity that had been sullied by the Fascism of the ventennio. A man who had asked to enlist in the republican army wrote from Germany that he wanted to fight ‘for the patria and the idea’, and that he was certain he would find ‘real men’, who were not ‘used only to cheering, flag-waving, uniforms of every ilk, as before, and to which the men of the past regime had accustomed us, but men who said little, but who were ready to take up arms to wash away the dishonour with which we have been stained by the traitors who have sold themselves to the enemy’.104 ‘We are few but healthy’, says another letter explaining the reasons for joining the republican Fascist party;105 and a naval lieutenant declared that ‘all in all the party has gained’ by ridding itself ‘of the dead wood of opportunists’.106

  Carlo Emanuele Basile, the Genoese provincial chief, boasted to the SS Command that ‘the shame of betrayal can only be washed out in the blood of a well-trained minority who show that not all Italians are servile in spirit’.107 In a private letter, a republican National Guard militiaman rejoiced at the idea of taking revenge on the traitors with fire and the sword.108 Major Mario Carità refused to allow a condemned man to be shot in the breast rather than the back: ‘No, you are a traitor, you have fought against your country in the ranks of the red militias, and must die as traitors die.’109 On the same occasion, the brother, also a Fascist officer, of Lieutenant Colonel Gobbi, for whose killing there was a reprisal, abused the victims thus: ‘Cowards, let them thank God they died in daylight; my brother was killed last night treacherously, at the street corner on his way home after doing his duty.’110 Here things seem to come full circle: traitors can only strike ‘treacherously’.

  Even those who almost boast about pitching Italy – warring Italy – against Fascism seem to be convinced of the need to take revenge on traitors: ‘I am a twenty-one-year-old son of Italy. I belong neither to Graziani nor to Badoglio but I am Italian: and I am following the path that will save the honour of Italy.’111

  But among the republican Fascists there were those who felt the need to reject the accusation that it was they who were the traitors. A republican National Guard militiaman wrote to his children that their father ‘has been neither a coward nor a traitor but one of the few who have kept an oath that they swore, without ever having had anything in compensation’.112 And even a ‘Muti’ was to implore: ‘Look at me, mamma, I’m your son, your Dante: I haven’t sold myself, I’m not a turncoat, I’m not a traitor. I’m your son.’113

  But since this book has referred constantly, though at times only implicitly, to the war waged from 10 June 1940 to 8 September 1943, we would do well, at this point, to take a direct look at that period.

  1 Vittorio Foa’s testimony. See B. Corbi, Scusateci tanto (carceri e Resistenza), Milan: La Pietra, 1977, where Foa’s dedication is the book’s epigraph.

  2 The concept was formulated by Sartre in relation to the Vietnam war and 1968: ‘The field of the possible is much vaster than the dominant classes have accustomed us to believing’. See ‘Il rischio della spontaneità, la logica dell’istituzione’, interview given to Rossana Rossanda and published with the title ‘Classe e partito’ in Il Manifesto 4 (1 September 1969), pp. 41–54, at p. 49.

  3 V. Foa, ‘Carlo Levi “uomo politico” ’ in Foa, Per una storia del movimento operaio, Turin: Einaudi, 1980, p. 50.

  4 Among recent studies that have begun to fill the gap, see F. Ferratini Tosi, G. Grassi and M. Legnani, eds, L’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale e nella Resisenza, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1988, and R. De Felice, Mussolini l’alleato, Turin: Einaudi, 1990. For the prisoners in British and American hands see F. Conti, I prigionieri di guerra italiani 1940–45, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986; and, in general, G. Rochat, ‘I prigionieri di guerra, un problema rimosso’ in Italia contemporanea 171 (June 1988), pp.
7–14. For the veterans, C. Pavone, ‘Appunti sul problema dei reduci’, in N. Gallerano ed., L’altro dopoguerra, Roma e il Sud 1943–45, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985, pp. 89–106. An up-to-date survey is G. Rochat, ‘Gli studi di storia militare sull’Italia contemporanea’, in Rivista di storia contemporanea XVIII (1989), pp. 605–27. See also Chapter 2, below.

  5 PENTAD, The Remaking of Italy, London: Penguin, 1941, immediately printed in Italian as L’Italia di domani, Harmondsworth–New York: Edizioni del Pinguino, 1942. The authors are A. F. Magri, L. Minio, I. Thomas, R.Orlando and P. P. Fano. The passage quoted is from p. 256 of the original edition.

  6 G. Chiesura, Sicilia 1943, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1954, p. 57 (under the date of 8 August). On 27 July Chiesura had recorded that the news of the coup d’état, after being greeted initially with indifference, had quickly generated euphoria ‘because it amounts to a declaration that by now the war is lost and finished’ (p. 50).