68 The report, dated 16 June (but in fact July) 1944, is signed by the commissar and the political vice-commissar (IG, BG, 011699).
69 ‘Relazione sulla formazione Busticchini fatta dal commissario politico Nello Ghilardetti’ (ISRT, Fondo Salvadori – PCI Castelfiorentino, insert 59).
70 Il Partigiano, 9 February 1944, which contains, alongside the title, ‘When it comes to liberty, one mustn’t wait, one must take: Blanqui’.
71 The German translator of Se questo è un uomo, Heinz Riedt, fought in Veneto with the GL formations. After the war ‘his political past was held against him’, even if ‘nobody ever told him in so many words’ (Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, London: Abacus, 1989), p. 140.
72 ‘Informazioni dal Piemonte’, referring to September 1943. The episode is also recounted in another report of the same month, sent by Giovanni (IG, Archivio PCI).
73 See Zangrandi, 1943, p. 20. After 25 July in Rome word spread that Hitler had committed suicide. See the telegram to the questori by Senise, the head of the police force, 28 July 1943, quoted in various authors, L’Italia dei quarantacinque giorni, p. 195.
74 Reports of this kind are contained, for example, in a ‘highly confidential and secret’ communication, signed Simon, 13 November 1944, of the inspectorate for the 1st Ligurian zone to the Command of the 2nd Garibaldi Division ‘Felice Cascione’ (INSMLI, Brigate Garibaldi, envelope 3, folder 4, subfolder 2); in a report, 20 January 1945, by a prisoner, Giglioli, who had escaped from the Germans during a roundup in the province of Piacenza (IG, BG, Emilia-Romagna, G.IV.2.6); in a report for Switzerland, signed Ciro, 17 February 1945, by the Comando Garibaldino della Valsesia, Ossola, Cusio, Verbano (IG, Archivio PCI).
75 Article entitled ‘La lotta partigiana in Piemonte’, 12 January 1944.
76 Report by Andrea to ‘dear comrades’, 14 March 1944, Parma area (IG, BG, Emilia-Romagna, G.IV.2.2).
77 Gorrieri, La Repubblica di Montefiorino, p. 352.
78 ‘Relazione su un’ispezione in Friuli dal 24 ottobre all’ 11 novembre 1944’, undated (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. II, p. 565). On 24 November of the same year an order of the day of the Slovene liberation army announced its decision to create an Austrian battalion (see Etnasi, La Resistenza in Europa, I, p. 45.
79 See Chiodi, Banditi, p. 181.
80 See Artom, Diari, p. 181.
81 Manuscript of the unpublished diary of G. Manni.
82 See paragraph 18 of the ‘Direttive’, in Atti CVL, Appendix I, document P, p. 558.
83 Northern edition, 22 July 1944. On the Czechs see P. De Lazzari, La resistenza cecoslovacca (1938–1945), Rome: Napoleone, 1977.
84 See the ‘Relazione’, undated but post-Liberation, of the 7th detachment, 1st section, of the 3rd Garibaldi brigade (IG, Archivio PCI).
85 ‘Incorporés de force’ is the name given to Alsations, Lorrainers and Luxembourgers enlisted in the German armed forces. See A. Wahl, ‘L’incorporé de force d’Alsace-Moselle, analyse de récits de guerre’, and G. Trausch, ‘Le long combat des enrolés de force luxembougeois’, in Centre de Recherche Histoire et Civilisation de l’Université de Metz, La mémoire de la seconde guerre mondiale, Metz: Centre de recherche Histoire et civilisation de l’Université de Metz, 1984, pp. 227–42, 181–99.
86 See the mention made of it in the description in the Fondo ANPI at the IRSFVG (Guida agli archivi della Resistenza, p. 542).
87 See Saggio bibliografico, n. 4539. See also, in the same text, the numerous appeals, bilingual or in German, registered in the index of the categories, under the entry Wehrmacht e SS. Compare with the titles of the newspapers in German that figure in the already cited Catalogue des périodiques clandestins: Deutsche Freiheit, Freies Deutschland, Volk und Vaterland, and others.
88 See Deakin, The Brutal Friendship, p. 720. On German deserters, labelled in the death camps with a red star, and the unsatisfactory state of the studies regarding them, see G. Schreiber, ‘La linea gotica nella strategia tedesca: obiettivi politici e compiti militari’, in Rochat, Santarelli and Sorcinelli, Linea gotica 1944, pp. 25–67. On the repression practised by the German war tribunals, ‘which passed more than fifty thousand death sentences on their own soldiers: a figure a hundred times higher than any other army in the Second World War (except the Red Army)’, see L. Klinkhammer, ‘Le strategie tedesche di occupazione e la populazione civile’, in M. Legnani and F. Vendramini, eds, Guerra, guerra di liberazione, guerra civile, Introduction by G. Quazza, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990, p. 115. These are the proceedings of the Belluno conference of 27–29 October 1988.
CHAPTER 5
The Civil War
1. A CONTROVERSIAL DEFINITION
The interpretation of the struggle between the Resistance and the Italian Social Republic as a civil war has, until very recently at least, met with hostility and reticence on the part of the anti-Fascists – so much so that the expression has come to be used almost exclusively by the defeated Fascists, who have provocatively waved it in the face of the victors.1 The anti-Fascists’ diffidence has consequently grown, fed by the fear that talk of civil war leads to the two warring sides being confused with each other and put on a par under a common condemnation or absolution.2 In fact, never so much as in civil war, which Concetto Marchesi called ‘the most ferocious and sincere of all wars’,3 are the differences between the belligerents so clear-cut and irreducible, and hatreds so profound. ‘We’re the ones they hated most of all’, an old resistente put it recently.4
To say that the Resistance is also civil war does not mean that we have to seek out protagonists who experienced it exclusively in these terms. On the contrary, it means doing our best to understand how the three aspects of the struggle – patriotic, civil, and class – analytically distinguishable, often coexisted in the same individuals or groups.
Immediately after the Liberation, as during the struggle itself (and this we shall see in the pages that follow), the taboo against the notion of a civil war had been less strong. In his report given on 6 August 1945 at the first CLN congress of the province of Milan, Emilio Sereni had spoken repeatedly of the ‘two years of civil war’ (Sereni wanted to show that another civil war would lead the country to destruction).5 In 1947 Carlo Galante Garrone had no qualms about stating that ‘a bloody civil war had been fought’.6 Leo Valiani had denounced ‘the way people’s souls turn ferocious’ as being ‘the innermost and at the same time most profound danger that any civil war (and the struggle against the Fascists was just this) brings with it’.7 Luigi Meneghello has also used the expression.8 Aligi Sassu painted the picture La guerra civile 1944.9 And in a series of lectures in the 1960s Francesco Scotti claimed that the Resistance had been ‘also a civil war against Fascism and for the creation of a completely new, socially more advanced state’;10 and Paolo Spriano also uses the expression ‘guerra civile’ intermingled with ‘guerra di liberazione’, even if he does not place it at the centre of his treatise.11
But in the volume of Palmiro Togliatti’s Opere covering the years 1944–55, the words ‘guerra civile’ never once appear, so great was the Communist leader’s desire to give his party national status. This need tallied with the widespread tendency to conceal the elementary fact that ‘the Fascists too, despite everything, were Italians’.12 ‘Italiani’ does not refer only to an ethnic fact. Both sides intended to reintegrate ‘the paradigm of the modern state as sovereign political unity’, since both felt themselves to be representatives of the whole of Italy.13 The first way of exorcising what is regressive and frightening in the breakdown of the unity of the national state lies in denying shared nationality to those who bring about that breakdown. The Fascists had always called their adversaries ‘anti-nazionale’;14 and the latter had always retorted by expelling them – at least those of the RSI – from the history of Italy, if not from humanity itself. Franco Calamandrei rightly defined as ‘esorcistica’ (‘exorcistic’) the formula ‘uomini o no’ (‘men or not-men’), which was the title Elio Vittorini gave to his bad
novel about the Resistance.15 And it is no accident that Giorgio Bocca, one of the few non-Fascist writers who have unreservedly spoken in terms of a civil war, was reviewed under the title ‘Anche Salò è storia nostra’.16 Assertions like Ermanno Gorrieri’s ‘there was no civil war’ are in fact the mechanical corollary of others, like ‘Republican Fascism found no correspondence in the popular conscience’.17 The fundamental truth of this statement does not eliminate the problem of the Fascists who, though not very numerous and largely unheeded, chose to fight alongside the Germans. The description of the Fascists as lackeys of the foreigner was not enough to cancel their being described as Italians, nor does it authorise us to evade the task of reflecting on the ties, not new but extremely close here, between external war and internal war. Nor can one overlook those Italians, far more numerous than the militant Fascists, who actually accepted the RSI government, paying it various forms of obedience, though with a greater or lesser degree of mental reservation.
In line with the fundamental continuity of the state between Fascism and the Republic, and particularly with the failure of the purges, is a bland, reassuring vision of the Resistance, where all trace of civil war has been scrubbed out. The anti-Fascist unity embodied in the system of the CLNs, which is still the legitimising source of the Italian Republic and of what has been called its ‘arco costituzionale’, is thus reinterpreted as mere anti-German unity, almost as if the Republic was founded on opposition to Germany and not to Fascism.
The truth is that inherent in civil war itself is something that feeds the tendency to bury the memory of it. In order to exorcise the civil war, the French have coined the expression ‘guerres franco-françaises’, thereby bracketing together all the fractures which, in armed or unarmed combat, have divided their people, at least since the great revolution.18 Even in Yugoslavia, at least at the official and political level, it is denied that the Resistance was a civil war.19 And yet it is hard not to recognise the struggle without quarter between Tito’s partisans, the Chetnicks of General Mihajlovic, Ante Pavelic’s Ustaše, the anti-Tito Slovenian Belagardists, and the other Fascist bands that infested the country between 1941 and 1945, as being a civil war. Indeed, Yugoslavia is the only European country in which the Resistance took the form of a successful social and political revolution. This Yugoslav paradox can be explained with reflections that may hold good for Italy, too. The members of a people who place themselves at the service of a foreign oppressor are considered guilty of so radical a betrayal as to extinguish their membership of that people. By behaving as they do, they annihilate within themselves the very fact that makes their treachery immense and unforgivable. The religious concept of the renegade might be a useful way of explaining this process, which deprives those who have placed themselves against the community of their people of ideal and moral – more so even than political – nationality. ‘Renegade’ was the name given to a partisan shot by his comrades as a spy.20 ‘Renegades scattered on the mountains’ is how a Fascist militant consul referred to the partisans.21 To destroy an internal enemy of this sort, the use of violence appears all the more legitimate the more that enemy is ranked with the external one. Against an external enemy, far more than against an internal one, a millenary tradition justifies violence which ‘may do away with limits and restrictions on the exercise of power’, and which for this very reason wishes to be rapidly forgotten.22 What is more, the renegade may repent and return to his original community, may convert and counter-convert, as in the numerous shifts from Social Republic to Resistance and vice versa. The abandoned party made the following words its maxim: ‘There is no greater traitor than the sincere convert.’23 False conversion could be tolerated, just as it is in religious wars – but not heresy.24
The link between civil war and revolution in turn should be numbered among the factors that contributed to the rejection of the notion that a civil war was fought in Italy between 1943 and 1945. But this undeniable link can be viewed in two ways. On the one hand, revolution may be seen in positive and eschatological terms, making civil war appear by comparison, in one’s evaluation of it, synonymous only with disorder and horror.25 Conversely, civil war appears as the almost inevitable outlet of revolution, in such a way as to carry in its wake the positive or negative connotations given to revolution.26 And since no one has ever claimed that the Italian Resistance was a revolution, its link with civil war has remained in memory only as a danger that was avoided. It has always been the Communists’ boast that they managed to save Italy from the ‘Greek prospect’, by preventing the Resistance movement from developing into a devastating post-liberation civil war. The Action Party invoked democratic liberty, but gave that formula a powerfully innovative meaning compared to the current use of the word ‘revolution’ and the spectres it calls up (as we have already noted, the ‘actionist’ tradition has always been the least reluctant to speak in terms of civil war).27 In effect, only a victorious revolution has the force to have no fears about inscribing the sufferings caused by civil war into its history. Even a defeated revolution can claim to have been the protagonist of a civil war when it does not intend to hide its revolutionary character. Marx’s The Civil War in France is proof of this.
The prevalence of the formula ‘war, or movement, of national liberation’ rather than ‘civil war’ thus conceals that part of reality that sees Italians fighting Italians. The Spaniards conceal things in like fashion when they define the war against the French as a war of independence, ignoring the fact that there were also the Iberian proponents of Enlightenment ideals, the afrancesados.
Concealment makes the formula ‘war of national liberation’ so tranquilising that its use has withstood the great semantic reinforcement in the post-war period, in which the formula has come to denote the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist movements of the Third World, all of which have had their bitter share of civil war.28 As we shall see, the identification of the main enemy – the German or the Fascist – is a problem running throughout the Resistance. An astute American investigator of things Italian has written: ‘Within a very short time … the average citizen of Northern Italy came to hate the Neo-Fascists even more than the Nazis.’29
This surcharge of hate is a phenomenon that needs investigating, not least for the fact that it finds a mirror-image among the Fascists, who in their turn were busy attributing the entire responsibility for the beginning and exacerbation of the civil war to the anti-Fascists, and particularly the Communists. Mutual accusations of having set the fratricidal struggle in motion were and remain numerous. Which does not mean that we should forget those who, while feeling the civil war as a tragedy that generated massacres and grief, also felt it as an event to undertake with pride, in the name of the choice they had made and the conscious acceptance of all the consequences it involved. From this point of view, the current deprecation can be reversed: it was in fact in the very tension innate in its ‘civil’ character that the negative elements typical of war as such found a way of vindicating themselves. Franco Venturi once said that civil wars are the only ones worth fighting.
2. THE REAPPEARANCE OF THE FASCISTS
There is no point in lingering over the dispute as to whether it was the Fascists or the anti-Fascists, and the Communists in particular, who fired the first shot. Giorgio Bocca’s remarks on this point are correct but not exhaustive: ‘It is obvious that the anti-Fascists should make a move before the Fascists: it is up to them to prove by fighting that there are Italians who are ready to fight, ready to pay for the return ticket to democracy. The best thing for Neo-Fascism, obviously, is inner calm, proof against consensus or popular resignation.’1
Certainly that would be the best thing, but it would leave unsatisfied some of the basic motivations that led to the rebirth of Fascism and which drove it, from within its own ranks, onto the terrain of civil war.
First of all, one had to dispel the sense of frustration rife among the Fascists from 25 July2 and exacerbated by the inglorious collapse of the regim
e. The prediction of the old turncoat police chief, Carmine Senise, proved all too true: ‘as for the party, I reassured the Duke [Acquarone] that all that was needed was a dissolution with no worry whatsoever about a possible resistance by the Fascists’.3
In his Storia della guerra civile, in answer to the inevitable question – Why did the Fascists fail to act? – Giorgio Pisanò first gives this pat answer: the best Fascists were at the front; then follows it up with another, more convincing one: they took the declarations of loyalty to the alliance with Germany seriously; and finally resorts to an argument that echoes RSI propaganda: the beginning of Fascist reorganisation was cut short by the murder of the former party secretary Ettore Muti, perpetrated for that very purpose. But Pisanò too is obliged fundamentally to recognise that the Fascist Party was involved in a general crisis afflicting the Italian people as a whole.4
This crisis had been experienced by the Fascists in various ways. Those who had not been content simply to step down could be stimulated by the collapse to radically review their past and the entire system of Fascism, along the path that led Fascists, not for reasons of opportunism, to become anti-Fascists. Those in whom this process was not at work had shifted psychologically for themselves, suffering without understanding. After 8 September, some at least could not let slip the occasion, offered by the Germans, to show (themselves above all) that they were still alive. And the simplest answer to the question ‘How could the collapse have happened?’ was to blame it all on traitors, with whom the time had now come to settle accounts.
Revenge is mentioned in the first radio appeals launched from Germany by Alessandro Pavolini and Vittorio Mussolini immediately after 8 September 1943, when the Duce was still a prisoner on the Gran Sasso, and was reckoned by many to be physically dead as well. Exemplary punishment of the ‘vile traitors’ was pre-announced by Mussolini in the speech recorded for the radio immediately after his arrival in Germany.5
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