89 The declaration of the Council of Ministers of 23 May 1944 is published among the Fonti dell’Archivio centrale dello Stato relative al Governo di Salerno (febbraio-giugno 1944), in A. Placanica, ed., 1944. Salerno capitale: istituzioni e società, Naples: Edizioni scientifiche, 1986, pp. 683–4. See the enthusiastic comment by L’Unità, Rome edition, 28 May 1944, article entitled ‘Il governo all’opera. Energica azione contro la quinta colonna fascista. Una dichiarazione programmatica di politica estera’.
90 On the exclusion of France and Greece, and their protests, see Toscano, Dal 25 luglio all’8 Settembre, pp. 55–7.
91 See Kogan, Italy and the Allies, p. 168. As regards the Dodecanese, Sforza had done no more than recognise that Greece had a ‘moral right’ to it and express his hope in ‘friendly negotiations’ between the two countries. By contrast, Lussu and Nenni’s positions were unequivocally in favour of Greece. See Sturzo, L’Italia di domani, pp. 5–6; E. Lussu, ‘La ricostruzione dello Stato’, June 1943 (Quaderni dell’Italia Libera, I), p. 15; P. Nenni, Che cosa vuole il partito socialista, speech given in Naples, 3 September 1944, p. 15.
92 See Bonomi’s introduction, datelined ‘Roma, giugno 1944’, to the reissue of Le vie nuove del socialismo, which dated from 1907, entitled ‘Travaglio di dottrine e di metodi in mezzo secolo di movimento socialista’ (partly reproduced as an appendix to L. Cortesi, Ivanoe Bonomi e la socialdemocrazia italiana, Salerno: Libreria internazionale editrice 1971, from which I quote p. 131). On 20 March 1944, La Democrazia del Lavoro, the clandestine newspaper closest to Bonomi, had written that Italy, ‘within the parameters established by the same allies after the other world war, will participate with her capacity for work in the colonising activities that will begin with the peace’. Article entitled ‘Parole agli Alleati’.
93 It is well known that this was the solution then adopted for Somalia.
94 For the Action Party, see the Progetto di piano di lavoro of the Alta Italia executive committee, edited by the regional secretariat for Emilia and Romagna (copy in ISRT); regarding this document, of which a later edition of December 1944 is attributed to Altiero Spinelli and conserved in INSMLI, Carte Damiani (envelope I, folder 7, where, however, a still later manuscript note reads ‘Valiani’), see E. Rotelli, L’avvento della regione in Italia, Milan: Giuffrè 1967, pp. 106–8; L’Italia Libera, northern edition, 8 January 1945; R. Lombardi, Il partito d’azione: cos’è e cosa vuole, December 1943 (reprinted in May 1945). For the Italian Liberal Party: the Orientamenti programmatici della federazione regionale lombarda, written by Paolo Sereni. For Christian Democracy: ‘Idee ricostruttive della Democrazia cristiana’, in Andrea Damilano, ed., Atti e documenti della Democrazia cristiana 1943–67, Rome: Cinque Lune, 1968, p. 8. Sturzo had expressed the view that the pre-Fascist colonies should not be treated in the same manner as Ethiopia, and then he too looked to a general European solution of the ‘problema africano’ (Sturzo, L’Italia di domani, pp. 6–7). Among the Socialists, Nenni too used the formula ‘libero accesso alle materie prime’ (‘free access to raw materials’). Speech in Naples, 3 September 1944. For the permanent presence of these themes among the Actionists even during the phase of the peace treaty discussion, see Tristano Codignola and Enzo Enriques Agnoletti’s letter, 14 August 1946, in ISRT, Carte Enzo Enriques Agnoloetti.
95 Compare, for example, the request formulated by the anarchist Camillo Berneri, when the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo entered the Spanish Republican government, to give Morocco its independence immediately, without allowing itself to be held back by the colonialistic fears of France and Great Britain (article entitled ‘Che fare’, in Guerre di classe, 24 October 1936, quoted in Olivari, L’azione politica di Camillo Berneri, p. 224).
96 Declaration to the New York Times, 24 January 1946 (see Kogan, Italy and the Allies, p. 167). One should, however, bear in mind that, as Kogan himself points out, Parri, as prime minister, had defended the North African possessions, appealing to Italy’s need for an open port to the Mediterranean.
97 See Ragionieri, Il partito comunista, p. 410. Ragionieri refers to the debates that followed, in the various party petitions, at the conference of the insurrectional triumvirates held in occupied Italy from 5 to 7 November 1944.
98 In an article, ‘Il problema delle colonie’, published in L’Unità, 14 September 1945, Togliatti was to put an end to a series of contradictory statements by inviting his readers ‘not to weave in the shadows intrigues against the Soviet Union’. Togliatti, Opere scelte, pp. 397–9.
99 Article entitled ‘La storia dei popoli coloniali ed oppressi, elaborati dagli scienziati sovietici’, in Italia alle Armi!, 5 April 1945.
100 ‘Informazioni da Milano: riunione del settore E. I e del sottosettore E. I’, December 1944 (IG, Archivio PCI). The document is published with the date 15 December, which is however that of the report from which part of the ‘informazioni’ is taken, in Secchia, Il PCI e la guerra di liberazione, pp. 707–9. Secchia omits the passage relating to England. The ‘informazioni’ are published, without any omissions, in Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, pp. 169–80. On the end of Italian colonialism, see A. Del Boca, Gli Italiani in Africa orientale, vol. IV, Nostalgia delle colonie, Bari: Laterza, 1984. The first chapter is wisely entitled ‘Una battaglia inutile’.
101 Integrità nazionale, Rome edition, 4 October 1943.
102 This is how the New York Italian anarchist newspaper expressed itself, with a clarity that was hard to find in Italy. ‘Questioni non territoriali’, in L’Adunata dei refrattari, 29 July 1944 (quoted in Laura Valentini’s degree thesis, where another article, dated 3 February 1945, and entitled ‘Confini scellerati’ is also mentioned).
103 Lussu, La ricostruzione dello Stato, pp. 2, 9–10.
104 Article entitled ‘Scopi di guerra e di pace’, 7 May 1944 (edizione della Lombardia).
105 Article entitled ‘Politica e Religione. Superamento’, in L’Azione dei lavoratori, 10 February 1944.
106 Rivoluzione dall’alto?, Rome edition, 20 May 1944. It is well-known that the most candid recognition of this novelty came from Stalin. See M. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. ‘This war’, said Stalin in April 1945, ‘is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own social system, as far as his army has power to do so; it cannot be otherwise.’
107 Appello di Capodanno ai giovani, Rome edition, 12 January 1944.
1 This is how, on 20 November 1943, L’Azione defined him in the already cited article ‘Non c’è tradimento’, appealing to the authority of Cesare Balbo and Pietro Colletta.
2 See Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, pp. 36, 37, 110, and Theory of the Partisan, p. 78. For a criticism of this point of view, which sees the ‘political’ as being the sole guarantee against the inhuman, see Chapter 3.1, above.
3 See L’Unificazione, ‘Edizioni del Comando delle formazioni partigiani Giustizia e Libertà, 3’, 15 March 1945, p. 4. The words ‘sacro suolo della Patria’ (‘sacred soil of the Patria’), ‘l’Italia, madre comune di tutti noi’, ‘secolare nemico’ and ‘barbarie teutonica’ were also used by Togliatti (in his Appello agli italiani of 1 April 1944 and in his speech to the Brancaccio theatre in Rome, 9 July 1944: Togliatti, Opere, vol. V, pp. 39, 59). ‘Nemico millenario’ (‘Millenary enemy’) appears in Italia nuova, the right-wing Roman clandestine newspaper, 24 January 1944.
4 Artom, Diari, p. 76.
5 This and other passages from La Germania alla conquista dell’Italia, published in 1916, are maliciously quoted in an anonymous note about Preziosi conserved in ACS, SPD, CR, RSI, envelope 24, folder 166.
6 On 14 May 1940 a Milanese informer expressed the view that the German threat to shoot ten prisoners for every paratrooper killed behind the lines ‘lent itself to a revival of Barbarossa’s acts of barbarity, the story of the hostages of Crema’. Quoted in M. Rigotti Colin, ‘Il soldato e l’eroe nella letteratura scolastica dell’I
talia liberale’, in Rivista di storia contemporanea, XIV, 1985, p. 342, which then refers the reader to Cesare Balbo’s Storia d’Italia.
7 ‘L’ éternelle barbarie’ is the title of an article that Avenir. Journal provisoirement clandestin destiné aux jeunes de France, printed in Paris, published after a German reprisal.
8 ‘Atrocità e rapine tedesche’, in Il Popolo, Rome edition, 23 October 1943.
9 This is what is said in the cyclostyled broadsheet San Giusto! Organo democratico per la lotta di liberazione, August 1944.
10 Undated Ligurian leaflet of the Action Party (Saggio bibliografico, n. 2195).
11 Sui monti, broadsheet of the Verona CLN, 1 July 1944.
12 These words belong to C. Antoni, ‘Il nazismo, fenomeno culturale’, in Nuova Europa I: 2 (17 December 1944), p. 9. Antoni wrote: ‘One is left terrified before the bewildering weakness of that ‘spirit which Germans of other times had so assiduously cultivated’.
13 Article entitled ‘La civiltà’, in L’Aratro e il Martello. Organo del Partito comunista del Friuli occidentale, 15 October 1944.
14 E. Lugaro, ‘Pazzia d’imperatore o aberrazione nazionale?’, in no. 7 (July 1915), pp. 23, 29 of the extract. Lugaro was professor of psychiatry at the University of Turin. During the Second World War Churchill often called the Germans ‘Huns’.
15 ‘Bollettino n. 33’, 8 August 1944, of the Command of the 52nd Clerici (Lombardia) brigade, named ‘Fronte Popolare’ in another document (IG, BG, 0565).
16 The expression is in ‘Bollettino n. 33’, cited in the preceding note. See Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. II, p. 171, n. 3.
17 See Gobetti, Diario partigiano, p. 147 (June 1944).
18 This is how two leaflets begin: one of the Bologna ‘Gruppi di difesa della donna’ (‘Groups for the Defence of Women’), the other of the Forlì PCI (Saggio bibliografico, nn. 3138 and 1890).
19 ‘Manifesto alla popolazione’, 10 February 1945, in Bernardo, Il momento buono, p. 216.
20 See Collotti, L’alleanza italo-tedesca, p. 33.
21 Mazzantini, A cercar la bella morte, p. 165. A soldier training in Germany admired the ‘fighting spirit’ and the ‘will to victory’ that animated the German people but not, alas, the Italian people. Last page of Nicola Tufano’s diary, 21 September 1944 (LRSI, p. 165).
22 Revelli, La guerra dei poveri, pp. 202–7. In Russia Tolloy had noted the satisfaction felt by many Italians in seeing that the Germans too stole (Tarchi, Con l’armata italiana in Russia, p. 40).
23 Chiodi, Banditi, p. 126 (23 March 1945). Leonardo Cocito had recounted to Chiodi: ‘We arrested two Germans who, trembling all over, showed us Communist documents’. In Innsbruck, during his imprisonment, Chiodi had noted: ‘I felt joy seeing so many Germans running like madmen’ (ibid., pp. 25, 81, 20 June and 23 September 1944).
24 Anonymous, ‘Romagnolo’, 1943–45, p. 342.
25 Claudio Locci’s testimony in Portelli, Biografia di una città, p. 282.
26 Mathieu in La mort dans l’âme (English title Iron in the Soul). In the French underground press the Germans are often called ‘Seigneurs’: ‘14 Français fusillés pours un Officier Nazi envoyé “ad patre” [sic]. Il appartenait il est vrai à la caste des Seigneurs’ (L’Unité de la Sarthe. Organe régional du Parti communiste français: half-title of the September 1941 number).
27 Hillgruber speaks of the ‘continuity in error’ encountered in the Germans. He himself, however, when dealing with the Norwegian resistance to the invasion in April 1940, described it not only as ‘unexpected’ but also as ‘stubbornness’. A. Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie. Politik und Kriegführung 1940–1941, Munich: Bernard & Graefe, 1965, and Der Zweite Weltkrieg 1939–1945, Stuttgart–Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1982.
28 See the German consul Moellhausen’s testimony: the partisans’ presence was ‘anomalous … an affair that regarded Wolff and the SS’ (Bocca, La Repubblica di Mussolini, pp. 104–5). Wolff was commander of the SS in Italy.
29 Article entitled ‘Cambio d’ostaggi’, in Voce nostra, organ of the 9th Garibaldi division A. Imerito (Piedmont), 18 March 1945.
30 Lazagna, Ponte rotto, p. 283.
31 Fenoglio, Golia, pp. 250–4. See what padre Gemelli wrote about the treatment of prisoners in the 1915–18 war: ‘When they take a prisoner, our soldiers look at him as a child looks at a toy he’s never seen before, and soon they become friends with a cigarette or a piece of bread’ (Gemelli, Il nostro soldato, p. 66).
32 N. Chiovini and A. Mignemi, ‘Il 44 sulle sponde del Lago Maggiore’, in Novara. Notiziario economic 2 (1987), p. 47.
33 ‘Relazione da Milano’, on a meeting of the 4th sector, 14 April 1945 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, p. 621).
34 Article entitled ‘Libere Opinioni’, 31 January 1944.
35 Article entitled ‘La Conference di Crimea’, in La Voce del Popolo, 15 March 1945.
36 Bandiera Rossa, 5 October 1943, ‘La funzione dell’URSS nel conflitto mondiale’, and 22 October 1943, ‘Anche Benedetto Croce per la Repubblica?’
37 Leading article entitled ‘Riscossa’, in La Riscossa Italiana, 20 October 1943.
38 Leading article entitled ‘Il Partito liberale italiano ai fratelli dell’Italia occupata’, July 1944 (Piedmont edition).
39 The title of the poster was ‘L’ Armata Rossa spezza ogni resistenza: la Germania è sconfitta’ (‘The Red Army breaks all resistance: Germany is defeated’). IG, Archivio PCI.
40 Letter written by Manlio Rossi-Doria to Leone’s sister, Marussa, and published by Parri with the title ‘Ricordo di Leone Ginzburg’, in L’Astrolabio, 14 March 1977, pp. 22–5.
41 See the order given on 21 September 1944 by the Command of the 28th Mario Gordini brigade (ISRR, 2, LXXIII, i., 23), and the report on the ‘attività svolta dalla compagnia effettiva al distaccamento della bassa romagna’, (‘activity engaged in by the company in withdrawing from the lower region of Romagna’), undated (ISRR, 2, CVI, d. 7).
42 On the repercussions of 25 July on the Germans and on the scant chance of analogous events occurring in Germany, see Collotti, L’amministrazione tedesca, pp. 44–7.
43 Risorgimento Liberale, Rome, 15 March 1944, article entitled ‘Perché perderanno’.
44 Ibid., 15 April 1944, ‘Il punto del suicidio’. It seems one should connect to this observation the fact that, of the thirty-one letters of Germans included in LRE, only one, written by the Communist Cato Bontjes Van Beek, contains an explicit and impassioned profession of love for Germany (p. 379). In the others there are no expressions such as ‘long live Germany’ or ‘long live free Germany’.
45 Proclamation by the Command of the 40th Garibaldi Matteotti (Lombardia) brigade, 22 July 1944 (IG, BG, 0515).
46 L’Unità, northern edition, 25 July 1944.
47 L’Unità, August 1944, leading article entitled ‘L’ Armata Rossa alle porte della Germania’.
48 Ibid. The allusion refers in particular to Marshal von Paulus, the defeated commander-in-chief at Stalingrad.
49 This is what Ario wrote, in the name of the Command of the 40th Garibaldi-Matteotii brigade, ‘ai compagni della Brigata’, 21 July 1944 (IG, BG, 0512).
50 At the foot of the typescript, conserved in IG, Archivio PCI, is this note: ‘Di L. Da tradurre in tedesco e stampare, Può andare?’ (‘By L. To translate into German and print? Is it OK?’).
51 See, for example, in Avanti!, Rome edition, 30 December 1944, the article entitled ‘Il discorso di Smuts e il federalismo europeo’.
52 ‘La situazione interna tedesca’, Lombardy edition, 9 June 1944.
53 Speech to the PCI national council, 7 April 1945 (Togliatti, Opere, vol. V, p. 132).
54 ‘Per l’indipendenza nazionale, per la società nuova, guerra alla germania nazista!’, in Voce Operaia, 22 October 1943.
55 ‘Relazione P. del mese luglio 1944. XXII’ of the Distretto di Torino, Ufficio assistenza e propaganda (ACS, SPD, CR, RSI, envelope folder 165, Tombari Alberto).
56 See for ex
ample, for France, the presentation, September–October 1940, of La Révolution française. Bulletin pour un mouvement national révolutionnnaire français: ‘It is not to our advantage to fall into a vengeful and sterile Germanophobia’; for Holland, the letter with which a Communist sentenced to death enjoins his son: ‘do not grow up blindly hating the German people’. Gau Postma to his wife Nel, 24 July 1944, in LRE, p. 694.
57 Testimonies by Giovanni Aliberti, a Turin doctor and member of GL, and Augusto Cognasso, a Turin student and Actionist, in Bravo and Jalla, La vita offesa, pp. 262, 378.
58 Testimonies by Natalina Bianca Giai (Pasqualina), from Susa, in ibid., p. 166. On the ‘hostile and contemptuous’ attitudes, save for ‘rare exceptions’, of the German population towards the Italian military internees, see Rochat, Memorialistica e storiografia sull’internamento, pp. 46, 65.
59 Gobetti, Diario partigiano, p. 348.
60 On this definition see Weber, Economia e società, vol. I, p. 221.
61 Revelli, La guerra dei poveri, pp. 387–8, under the date 16 January 1945. See General Patton, who, on the eve of the Normandy landings, explained to his collaborators that the problem of Fascism and Democracy ‘was no more important than the electoral battles periodically fought by Republicans and Democrats in the United States’ (quoted in Michel, The Shadow War, p. 8).
62 Article entitled ‘Odio’, in L’Italiano. Organo del Partito d’unione, 26 February 1944.
63 La guerra di liberazione, December 1943, p. 4.
64 ‘Promemoria dei fatti del 7 settembre 1944’, written by the doctor, the prefectorial commissar and the parish priest the day after the execution, in Chiodi, Banditi, p. 153.
65 Michel, The Shadow War, p. 247.
66 Gobetti, Diario partigiano, pp. 116 (late March 1944) and 182 (7 August 1944).
67 Appeal by the German Command (December 1944), in ISBR, 1943–1945. Occupazione e Resistenza in provincia di Belluno. I documenti, Belluno 1988, p. 115. The expression about the garbo femmineo (‘effeminate grace’) that the Germans displayed in Venice (reminiscent of Death in Venice?) is in an appeal by the ‘Comitato d’azione’, undated (typescript in IVSR, Stampa antifascista).
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