62 See G. Neppi Modona, ed., Giustizia penale e guerra di liberazione, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1984, pp. 37, 189.
63 La casa in collina (The House on the Hill) is the symbolic title that Cesare Pavese gave to his novel, published in 1949, but the first idea for which came in 1943.
64 For the whole incident see Chiesura, Sicilia 1943, pp. 96ff. It is worth remembering the film Tutti a casa [1960], in which the father (Eduardo De Filippo) urges his son (Alberto Sordi) to present himself.
65 See Reineri, Per uno studio comparato, p. 273, which publishes a page from Scotti’s diary. On the ‘partito dei contadini’, see G. De Luna, Alessandro Scotti e il partito dei contadini (1889–1974), Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985.
66 ‘La crisi morale dei giovani italiani’, speech made at the PCI youth conference, Rome, 24 May 1947, now in P. Togliatti, Opera, V, ed. L. Gruppi, Rome: Riuniti, 1984, p. 301.
67 I. Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Turin: Einaudi, 1946, p. 146.
68 This fine expression occurs in an article, ‘Pacta sunt servanda’, Azione, organ of the Christian Socialists, 20 October 1943.
69 Artom, Diari, p. 57 (28 July 1943).
70 Revelli, La guerra dei poveri, pp. 143, 168. On 26 July in Cuneo, finding himself in front of a drunken black-marketeer wrapped in the tricolore flag, Revelli had not been able to restrain himself and had shouted: ‘Pagiacci!’ (‘Buffoons!’). An ‘ometto’ (‘little man’) behind him had immediately shouted in his turn: ‘They are patriots, not buffoons. You are a Fascist, there’s a Fascist here. I’m an evacuee from Genoa, I’ve lost my house in Genoa. He’s a Fascist, he’s a Fascist’ (ibid., p. 125).
71 See Gorrieri, La Repubblica di Montefiorino, pp. 696–8.
72 To be found in ‘Chiarezza. Quaderni di discussione politica tra giovani’, July– August 1944 (typescript).
73 The episode is recorded in M. Di Giovanni’s degree thesis. In units gifted with a strong esprit de corps like the paratroopers, the choice made by the commanders in favour of the Germans or in favour of the Allies carried great, but not absolute, weight.
74 See M. Di Giovanni’s degree thesis. For other cases see G. Pisanò, Storia della guerra civile in Italia (1943–1945), 3 vols, Milan: Edizioni FPE, 1965–66, vol. I, 1965, pp. 68–70.
75 Episodes of this kind are reported, for the province of Belluno, by S. Tramontin, ‘Contadini e movimento partigiano nelle relazioni di parroci bellunesi, in Società rurale, p. 285.
76 See D. Lajolo, Il ‘voltagabbana’, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1963, Chapter X (the words quoted are on p. 198).
77 ‘Divagazioni sulla viltà’, in Il Giornale dell’Emilia, 21 December 1944, quoted in T. M. Mazzotosta, ‘Educazione e scuola nella Repubblica Sociale Italiana’, in Storia contemporanea IX (1978), p. 64.
78 Emanuele Frezza’s letter to his parents, 20 November 1943 (LRSI, p. 44).
79 Letter written by Massimo Moratti, 25 October 1943 (LRSI, p. 271).
80 This was Mario Merlini (LRSI, pp. 210–11).
81 The episode I am referring to is recounted by N. Della Santa, ‘Oggi più che mai no’, in ANEI, Resistenza senz’armi. Un capitolo di storia italiana (1943–45) dalle testimonianze di militari toscani internati nei Lager nazisti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1984, quoted in G. Rochat, ‘Memorialistica e storiografia sull’internamento’, in N. Della Santa, ed., I militari italiani internati dai tedeschi dopo l’8 settembre 1943, Florence: Giunti, 1986, p. 34. On the internees in Germany, indispensable reading is Vittorio Emanuele Giuntella’s civil and historiographical work; see in particular Il nazismo e i Lager, Rome: Studium, 1979. See also C. Schminck-Gustavus, L’attesa. Cronaca di una prigonia al tempo dei Lager, Rome: Riuniti, 1989; and A. Bendotti, G. Bertacchi, M. Pelliccioli and E. Valtulina, eds, Prigionieri in Germania, Bergamo: Il filo di Arianna, 1990.
82 See the paraphrase of a page of Elis given in M. Eve, ‘L’ opera storica di Norbert Elias’, in Rivista di storia contemporanea XII (1983), p. 400.
83 See Lucien Febvre, ‘How to Reconstruct the Emotional Life of the Past’, in A New Kind of History and Other Essays, New York: Harper & Row, 1973, esp. p. 15.
84 For the theory of groups in fusion see J.-P. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, London: Verso, 2004, above all in the section ‘The Fused Group. The group – the equivalence of freedom as necessity and of necessity as freedom’ (original edition: Critique de la raison dialectique, Paris: Gallimard, 1960).
85 Mazzantini, A cercar la bella morte, p. 42.
86 See for example A. Del Noce’s article, ‘La tragedia dell’8 settembre’, published by Il Tempo, 26 November 1988, with the significant subtitle ‘L’inizio di una revisione nell’ opera di Bartoli’ (the reference being to D. Bartoli, L’Italia si arrende. La tragedia dell’8 settembre 1943, Milan: Editoriale Nuova, 1988).
87 Captain Alberto Tombari’s letter to Mussolini, 25 October 1944 (ACS, SPD, CR, RSI, envelope 24, folder 167).
88 Memorial letter written to a friend, 18 October 1943, a copy of which was then sent to Mussolini by Rizzati.
89 See for example the essence that G. Pansa drew from the GNR reports in ‘L’ esercito di Salò nei rapporti riservati alla Guardia nazionale repubblica 1943–44’, Quaderni del Movimento di Liberazione in Italia, Milan 1969, vol. 3, p. 142. See also G. Pansa, Il gladio e l’alloro. L’esercito di Salò, Milan: Mondadori, 1991. This reality is intuited by a Communist leaflet, n.d., which, urging the soldiers of the RSI to desert with their weapons and kit, exhorts them not to allow ‘a repetition of 8 September’ (ISRT, Raccolta volantini, PCI Firenze, clandestini 1943–1944).
90 P. Vidal-Naquet, Flavius Josèphe ou du bon usage de la trahison, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977.
91 Mazzantini, A cercar la bella morte, pp. 20, 22, 200, 112. The decision to join the RSI by a disbanded Belluno soldier who had wandered for three days around the hills above Salò was motivated by the rediscovery of ‘that security and that role that he had missed after the armistice’. A. Lotto, ‘Obbedienza a rivolta: motivazioni, forme, esiti 1919–1945’, in Protagonisti IX: 32 (July–September 1988), p. 13.
92 See the file cited in Rizzatti. Another paratrooper stationed in Sardinia has recounted that ‘the idea of jumping up into one of the German trucks presented itself with the fascination of rebellion’, a fascination to which however he did not yield himself (Bianchi, Un’isola, pp. 28–9, quoted in M. Di Giovanni’s degree thesis).
93 See C. Dellavalle, Operai, industriali e partito comunista nel Biellese, 1940–1945, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978, p. 98.
94 See M. Di Giovanni’s degree thesis, as well as O. Barbieri, Ponti sull’ Arno. La Resistenza a Firenze, Preface by F. Parri, Rome: Riuniti, 1975, and G. Pisanò, Gli ultimi in grigioverde. Storia delle forze armate della Repubblica sociale italiana, Milan: FPG, 1967.
95 See S. Setta, Renato Ricci. Dallo squadrismo alla Repubblica sociale italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986.
96 Memorandum to Giovanni Dolfin, Mussolini’s secretary, 27 December 1943, cited in M. Di Giovanni’s degree thesis.
97 Pesce, Senza tregua, p. 139. The navy would number Di Nanni among its gold medal recipients (I thank Giorgio Rochat for this information).
98 See L. Casali, Il movimento di liberazione a Ravenna, Ravenna: Istituto Storico della Resistenza, vol. I, n.d., p. 91.
99 Report to the CUMER by the command of the Mario Gordini 28th GAP brigade, 29 August 1944, sent after two punishing Nazi-Fascist reprisals that month (published in Casali, Il movimento di liberazione a Ravenna II [1965], pp. 276–8).
100 Letter by a Milanese engineer, Umberto Fogagnolo, a socialist, to his wife, 31 July 1943, when he had begun the political activity that he pursued after 8 September (LRI, pp. 87–8).
101 The article was published in January 1945 in Giustizia e Libertà. Notiziario dei patrioti delle Alpi Cozie; it is reproduced in Giovana, Storia di una formazione partigiana, p. 202.
102 Mutilated, anonymous document of the northern Italian Action Party, n.d., sent to the party
’s regional and provincial committees (INSMLI, CLNAI, envelope 8, folder 12).
103 Bini (Giovanni Serbandini) spoke in these terms in Lazagna, Ponte rotto, p. 50.
104 ‘There were the bands: to go, or not to go … and I decided’; ‘When that moment [the call-up for Germany] came you had to choose which road to follow’; ‘They almost obliged us to decide to go’. Testimony by Achille Vignolini, furnace-workman, Giovanni Carretta, Fiat worker, Silvestro Silvio Tedeschi, carpenter, in Bravo and Jalla, La vita offesa, pp. 84, 83, 82. It should be borne in mind that deportations from Piedmont reached their peak in the first six months of 1944 (40 percent of the total). Ibid., pp. 55–6. A public draft notice for those born in 1925, and for shares of those born in 1923 and 1924, were issued by Graziani, the defence minister, on 4 November 1943. See E. Piscitelli, ‘I bandi tedeschi e fascisti’, Quaderni della Resistenza laziale, Rome n.d., but 1975, vol. 4, pp. 14–43. See also Pansa, L’esercito di Salò, pp. 22–5ff. In Rome notices for officers to present themselves had already been appearing since 29 September (Piscitelli, I bandi, p. 133). The proliferation of notices of this kind was to be a characteristic of the RSI.
105 Here I can recall the case of Colonel Giovanni Duca. Commander of the camp of the Military academy of Modena, on 8 September 1943, the best he managed to do was disband the units, though these were in the Modenese Apennines that were to become an epicentre of the partisan struggle. Then Colonel Duca, in another region of the North, participated in the Resistance and was captured, tortured and killed by the SS; one of his sons died in Mauthausen (see Gorrieri, La Repubblica di Montefiorino, pp. 24–6).
106 One of the very few sociological research projects devoted to the Resistance makes this process rigid by defining as full-fledged ‘innovators’ only those who opted for the Resistance in the first months (by 31 December, to be precise). All the others are placed in the categories of ‘primi adottanti’ (‘first adopters’), ‘prima maggioranza’ (‘first majority’), ‘ultima maggioranza’ (‘last majority’) and ‘marginali’, according to the scheme devised by E. M. Rogers (see Ardigò, L’insorgenza partigiana, esp. pp. 88–9). For a criticism of this scheme see G. Quazza, ‘Fra sociologia e storia: una ricerca sulla Resistenza’, in Rivista di storia contemporanea X (1981), pp. 619–25.
107 See Del Noce, La tragedia del’8 settembre. It is a fine example of how political factiousness can blunt the sharpest of minds. However, the author who inspires Del Noce on that page is Curzio Malaparte.
108 Conversation with Vittorio Foa (1985). ‘Obedience to destiny’ is from G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophische Propädeutik. ‘It becomes what you are’ is a maxim of Goethe’s. In 1976 Foa was to write: ‘In Fascism, Rossi and Bauer taught us that one needed to be capable of choosing without counting the years ahead; in the Resistance, Leo Valiani and Ferruccio Parri taught us that one needed to fight even if the destiny of the war and of Fascism were in any case marked by the military events, one needed to fight if one wanted the future not to be a continuity with the past, but a break with it.’ V. Foa, ‘Ernesto Rossi’, in Per una storia del movimento operaio, pp. 231–2.
109 This is what Claudio Magris wrote of General Vlasov in Illazione su una sciabola, Bari: Cariplo-Laterza, n.d.
110 Battaglia, Un uomo, p. 47.
111 Ardigò, L’insorgenza partigiana, p. 23.
112 Artom, Diari, p. 122 (13 December 1943).
113 Inverni (V. Foa), I partiti, pp. 11–12 (cf. p. 59).
114 L’Italia Libera, Roman edition, 11 September 1943 (note the early date), article entitled ‘L’Europa libera’.
115 Mautino, Guerra di popolo, p. 20. Enzo Collotti, in the Preface, underlines the ‘naturezza’ (‘naturalness’) of Mautino’s choice, its ‘elementary’ and ‘just’ but not ‘easy’ ‘simplicity’: a form, that is, ‘of moral indemnity towards oneself and towards others’ (p. 6).
116 See Bianco, Guerra partigiana, p. 12.
117 ‘But tell me, sir, how then is it that Italy does not rebel?’ Turati himself recounts the episode, connected with the request by the Fascist government for him to be extradited for the Savona trial, in a letter to Bianca Pittoni of 28 August 1928. See F. Turati, Lettere dall’esilio, ed. B. Pittoni, Milan: Pan, 1968, p. 182.
118 ‘We are defeated men. Don’t expect anything from us. You have to start everything again from scratch (G. Amendola’s conversation with the author).
119 This is the title of an editorial in Libérer et Fédérer, February–March 1943, from which also the quotations that follow are taken.
1 H. M. Enzenberger, ‘Sulla teoria del tradimento’, in Menabò di letteratura, 1964, vol. 7, p. 15 (original title ‘Uber die Theorie des Hochverrats’).
2 Brissot’s words used in the text are quoted by J.-P. Sartre, Search for a Method, New York: Vintage, 1968, p. 41.
3 See, for example, the entries ‘Tradimento’ in Il Digesto italiano (1916) and in Il Nuovo Digesto italiano (1940), which converge in this evaluation.
4 G. Simmel, ‘Fashion’, International Quarterly 10: 130–55 (1904), p. 148. Besides the example of fashion, Simmel also gives that of law.
5 For the references to Polybius and Flavius Josephus, see Vidal-Naquet, Flavius Josèphe.
6 See Portelli, Biografia di una città, p. 8.
7 Major Rizzati, memorial letter of 18 October 1943.
8 Rahn’s report to the German foreign minister, quoted in Pisanò, Storia della guerra civile, vol. I, p. 86.
9 Report by Jodl, chief of the General Staff of the Wehrmacht, of 7 November 1943, to the Reich-Gauleiters, and included among the Nuremburg documents, quoted in E. Collotti, L’amministrazione tedesca nell’Italia occupata, 1943–1945, Milan: Lerici, 1963, p. 80.
10 Quoted in Ragionieri, Italia giudicata, pp. 796–7.
11 Quoted in Collotti, L’amministrazione, p. 103. The Japanese view was similar: ‘Italy belongs to the Italians. From the Japanese point of view, a nation constitutes an inseparable bloc; we therefore think that the entire Italian people is responsible for the betrayal of Italy’. Report to the Mikado, n.d., in Ragionieri, Italia giudicata, p. 805.
12 J. Förster, ‘Il ruolo dell’8a armata italiana dal punto di vista tedesco’, in Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Cuneo e provincia, Gli italiani sul fronte russo, p. 258.
13 On this subject, see E. Collotti, L’alleanza italo-tedesca 1941–1943, p. 60.
14 E. Kuby, Verrat auf deutsch, Hamburg: Konkret Verlag, 1982. In an interview with Vannuccini, Karl Dietrich Bracher declared that ‘the whole thesis of the [Italian] betrayal makes no sense’ (La Repubblica, 7 September 1983).
15 The text of the appeal can be read in a leaflet dropped by German aircraft on the isle of Elba on 10 September 1943. A photographic copy of it exists in ISRT, Documenti dei CLN di Livorno e Piombino.
16 Article entitled ‘Chi tradisce?’ in the 23 October 1943 issue of L’Adunata dei refrattari, the newspaper of the Italian anarchists in America (quoted in Laura Valentini’s degree thesis on Italian political emigration and the anti-Fascist press in the United States between 1940 and 1945, discussed at the University of Pisa with Professor Elena Aga-Rossi, academic year 1980–81).
17 Article entitled ‘Il Re’, in La Voce Repubblicana, 6 October 1943. In the same number another article, ‘Quattro necessità’, spoke in any case of the Germans as the ‘ally, traitor’.
18 Salvemini and Calamandrei, 7 December 1944, published in G. Salvemini, Lettere dall’America 1944–1946, ed. A. Merola, Bari: Laterza, 1967, pp. 53–4.
19 S. Trentin, ‘Appello ai veneti, guardia avanzata della nazione italiana’, September 1943, published in Giustizia e Libertà, organ of the Veneto Action Party, 1 November 1943, also in S. Trentin, Antifascismo e rivoluzione. Scritti e discorsi 1927–1944, Venice: Marsilio, 1985, pp. 527–8.
20 IVSR, Stampa antifascista.
21 The episode is recounted by Calamandrei, La vita indivisibile, p. 110.
22 Testimonies by Giuseppe Bandini, from Cecina, told to
Tenda, and of OR, from Gorizia; the second recalls how the Germans, after capturing him and his fellow soldiers, abandoned by their officers, near Frascati, ‘left us to our destinies’ (CU).
23 On 17 February 1943, to be exact. Cited in Deakin, The Brutal Friendship, p. 166. In another note that follows soon after (3 March), Ambrosio repeated the same concepts, accusing the Germans of not understanding the importance of the Mediterranean front (p. 202).
24 ‘Appunti’ (‘Notes’) for the Foreign Ministry. See Deakin, p. 376.
25 See General Rintelen’s report of late March 1943, quoted in Deakin, pp. 358–9. The formula ‘guerra parallela’ (‘parallel war’) is contained in a memorandum by Mussolini to the king of 31 March 1940 (Deakin, p. 11).
26 See Degli Espinosa, Il Regno del Sud, p. 81.
27 Analogous arguments were to be put forward on 15 January 1944 in the article entitled ‘Un’alleanza sbagliata’.
28 ‘La storia del preteso tradimento’, 20 October 1943.
29 ‘In documento d’infamia’, 29 October 1943 (Roman edition); ‘Il caso dell’Ungheria’, April 1944 (Piedmontese edition).
30 The next issue, of November 1943, took a similar line.
31 L’ Azione, 20 November 1943. On 20 October the Christian Social newspaper had advanced a similar thesis – we are the betrayed, not the betrayers – in the already-cited article bearing the challenging title Pacta sunt servanda.
32 ‘Tutto il potere al CLN’, 28 January 1944.
33 L’Italia Libera, Roman edition, September 1943, articles entitled ‘Tradimenti’ and ‘Per la storia’.
34 Mautino, Guerra di popolo, pp. 31–2.
35 See Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason I, pp. 419–20.
36 These were the formulas: ‘I swear to be faithful to the king and his royal successors, to loyally observe the Statute and the other laws of the state, to fulfil all the duties of my state, for the sole purpose of the inseparable good of the king and the patria’; ‘In the name of God and of Italy, I swear to execute the orders of the Duce and to serve with all my strength and, if necessary, with my blood, the cause of the Fascist Revolution’ (Statute of the PNF of 1938, Art. 9). Until the Statute of 1926 betrayal had been closely connected to expulsion from the party. See M. Missori, Gerarchia e statuti del PNF, Rome: Bonacci, 1986.
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