Even if we wish to give some credence to the hypothesis that Mussolini was not enthusiastic about having been liberated by the Germans,6 once he had received this gift he had no choice but to go along with things and play his hand again. The circle of traitors to be punished went well beyond the members of the Grand Council, who were later to be dealt with at the Verona trial. It extended to all those who during the twenty years of Fascism had mutilated the Fascist victory, just as that other victory, which it had been Fascism’s historic task to reintegrate, had been mutilated.
A Fascist paper wrote about the anti-Fascist declaration of faith made on 17 August 1943 by several medical professors at the University of Modena: ‘These men are morally unworthy to teach not because they professed anti-Fascism after 25 July, but because, by accepting like sheep the discipline of a party which in their heart of hearts they deprecated, they are unworthy today to teach young people that dignity which they lacked and which is the essential basis of any severe academic discipline.7
The very youngest and the old guard could find themselves close to each other in their desire for revenge, the former bringing to it the energy of a generation conflict, the latter clinging to the myth of the ‘return to origins’, when the enemy, then too, had been other Italians unworthy of the name. When punishing the party hierarchs (gerarchi) proved to be ‘a fake Terror’,8 the area of those to be punished widened still further, until it potentially embraced the entire Italian people in whose very name, however, revenge was being invoked.
The contradictions of the two elements that had been the hallmark of much of the history of Fascism – elitist tendencies and demagogic populism – were thus revealed particularly clearly in the Social Republic. Ardengo Soffici, an intellectual who had had his day, could still delude himself that one could keep together, in the name of faith in the figure of the Duce, contempt for the people and optimism about the final outcome. He wrote: ‘It will turn out that Mussolini had not deceived himself so much as to deem a people of time-servers worthy of an empire.’9 But a twenty-two-year-old Fascist grants no respite: ‘Mussolini’s mistake is that of having overrated his people, [a people who] do not want to suffer in order to become great, powerful, rich.’10 Another complains about the ‘tardy reawakening’ of the people, and adds:
There are too many Italians who are sleeping, there are too many traitors who are exulting, there are too many pacifists who want the ruin of Italy at all costs so as to enjoy the fat booty stolen from the Fallen on all the fronts, from the workers who have always worked and suffered. But the hour of judgment and reckoning will come.11
‘Mussolini has been betrayed by everyone! It is the fault of the cowards who have betrayed [him]!’, said a Fascist on a Roman tram after an air-raid alarm.12 With a vulgarity made almost pathetic by the equivocal pass to which he had come, a squadrista and member of the Black Brigades from Fiume exulted thus: ‘Life is beautiful and is worth living only when there is spirituality, when one rises above the grey mass of the majority: it is the few who dominate the many, it is the few who make History, the many have to endure it! I prefer to be on the side of those who impose it on the others!’13
A Blackshirt from an M battalion wrote that the Duce ‘once again against the will of a people that believes itself to be Italian (and is not) has succeeded in warding off chaos, with a mere handful of men … Even against the will of the people we shall fight alongside our German ally who has shown himself to be the true friend of the Italian people.’14
Mussolini was the first to feel that he was the victim of an act of betrayal. ‘He is full of rancour against the Italians, by whom he feels he has been betrayed’, recounted Leandro Arpinati, the former gerarca who had been out of favour for some time, after a meeting with the Duce.15 In those months Mussolini recalled a memorial stone that Carlo Dossi had dedicated to former prime minister Crispi:
Francesco Crispi / great in spirit dreamed that Italy / would be great / and sought to arouse in the Italians / awareness of their worth. / But the crowd replied / that it wished to be small and cowardly/ and among the many eager pigmies / more gigantic appears the figure of Crispi.
‘This epigraph’, remarked the Duce ‘necessarily takes us back to present times.’16 Fundamental to positions of this kind is the idea that it was not Fascism that ruined Italy, which was unworthy of it. Julius Evola would write:
It wasn’t Fascism that acted negatively on the Italian people, on the Italian ‘race’, but vice versa: it was this people, this ‘race’ that acted negatively on Fascism, that is to say on the Fascist attempt, insofar as it showed itself incapable of providing a sufficient number of men who were equal to certain noble demands and certain symbols, elements healthy and capable of promoting the development of the positive potentialities that could be contained in the system.17
Even Hitler, for that matter, in the last months manifested an ingratitude towards the German people that they can scarcely be said to have deserved. His ‘ill humour’ drove him ‘to speak more and more frequently and angrily to the effect that if Germans were not ready to follow him to victory they must perish’.18 In a conversation with Albert Speer, Hitler was still more vindictive and apocalyptic: the German people had shown themselves to be too weak and the future belonged ‘exclusively to the stronger eastern people. What was left after the battle was only inferior beings; the good ones have been killed.’ In line with this, in the same days, the Führer ordered the destruction of vital German structures.19
A disturbing aspect of the path which led to republican Fascism, felt not only as a continuer of the war but as the driving force of vengeance, is given by those who, though lukewarm Fascists before 25 July, discovered the flame of militancy in themselves after 8 September. In certain respects these itineraries are more interesting than those pursued by front-ranking figures who, having wholly or half changed sides after 25 July, changed yet again after 8 September. The most illustrious case of the latter is unquestionably Giovanni Gentile; but equally exemplary is Renato Ricci.20 There were, instead, humble folk who committed themselves specifically to the Social Republic – like the elementary school teacher Franco Rubbio Nosso, who participated in the Fascist occupation of the Quirinale after the Via Rasella attack,21 or the pharmacist Oreste Millone, who had become commissar of the republican fascio and was shot by partisans, but previously ‘had never distinguished himself in special manifestations of Fascist faith, though he proudly described himself as a squadrista’.22 Franco Calamandrei notes in his diary that, ‘During the German occupation of Florence, N., kind-hearted, cordial N., to all appearances the mildest of men, was killed by the GAPs together with his father as a systematic denouncer of Jews to the SS.’23 This path was pursued also by some fairly important personalities, like Professor Goffredo Coppola, like the former nationalist Giotto Dainelli, who on 25 July did not follow his old chief Luigi Federzoni and then became podestà of Florence and Giovanni Gentile’s successor as president of the Accademia d’Italia,24 or like the director of Pirelli, Count Franco Grottanelli, who ended up in the RSI because, he said, ‘I can’t stand betrayal’.25 These are not the only cases on record.26 Beppe Fenoglio sums them up in the figure of Lieutenant X, brother of the partisan Kyra, who ‘had not been particularly enthusiastic during the whole of the war … But after 8 September the elder one changed, he was ablaze, he erupted, he was among the first and most determined and bloodthirsty Fascists.’27
Even in a distant and isolated universe like that of Italian POWs in Allied hands, there were similar reactions to those recorded above. One need only mention the testimony of General Umberto Cappuzzo, a prisoner in India at the time: ‘There were those very extreme Fascists who claimed to have always been anti-Fascist; and those who had been ‘only a soldier’ and for moral reasons suddenly felt closer to the defeated regime.’28
It should come as no surprise, then, if immediately after 8 September the Fascists reappeared here and there spontaneously, without awaiting the resurrection of Muss
olini and the establishment of the RSI government. Some, as we have seen, went directly over to serving the Germans, in Italy and the Balkans.29 Some federations of the republican Fascist party were formed before the arrival of the provincial chief (capo della provincia),30 the figure in which the RSI, in an attempt to supersede the old dualism, wished to bring together the prefect and the federal secretary (the capi delle province were summoned to Milan by Minister of the Interior Guido Buffarini Guidi only on 25 November 1943).31
It has by now been brought to light how the German leaders were in two minds as to the advisability of giving life to a neo-Fascist government, its seeming to many of them more rational, for the better conduct of military operations and a more intense exploitation of the economic resources in the Po Valley, to have a regime of direct occupation.32 It was Hitler who, judging the disastrous political effect that the reduction of the ‘senior partner’ of the Axis to a conquered land would have, above all on his minor satellites, gave the go-ahead to the creation of the Social Republic, though naturally taking the due precautions. The Führer, who in the past had had some difficulty justifying his excessive faith in Fascist Italy to high-ranking German officials, once said to Ambassador Rudolf von Rahn: ‘On no account be taken in by the Italian heart.’33
The Fascists, for their part, have always attempted to legitimise their republic as a providential shock-absorber placed between the Italian people and their enraged German comrades. Only somewhat paradoxically, Victor Emmanuel III himself was to adopt this thesis, which facilitated the reconciliation between monarchic Fascists and republican Fascists. The RSI government, the king once said in his Egyptian exile, ‘prevented the establishment of an extremely harsh, ruthless German government in Northern Italy’.34
The fact of the matter is that the RSI would not have lasted a single day without German support. All the same, this obvious reflection does not make it a useless exercise to seek the intrinsically Fascist motivations that led to the birth of the Social Republic and thrust it along the path of civil war in a more intense way than that of mere collaborationism.
We have seen how the need to show that one was still alive manifested itself above all as a desire for vengeance. We now have to add that, in the first few weeks, genuine desires for pacification were also revealed, desires which are not to be confused with the opportunistic ones of the last months of the war, let alone the clumsy attempts to divide adversaries made above all on the Socialists.35 Several incidents can be cited as occurring in Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, the two regions where the memory of the biennio rosso and the Fascist action squads were most powerful and where the civil war was to be particularly bitter. Many years later a Communist from Montelupo Fiorentino recalled: ‘The first Fascists to reappear on the scene initially proved to be submissive and to have sized up the new situation; in fact they vainly tried to make an approach to some anti-Fascists to seek their collaboration; then, as time went by, when with German support the RSI was founded, they reverted to their old methods.’36
Sergio Flamigni and Luciano Marzocchi have written of the initial tendency to conciliation and moderation displayed by the province of Forlì, and have recalled the case of a Fascist who pulled out, saying: ‘I’ve given blows, I’ve taken blows, we’re even and I don’t care anymore.’37 In Umbria, in the first few weeks the militia was ‘quiet and subdued’.38 In Alessandria and Asti the Fascists attempted talks with the CLN and the anti-Fascist representatives, and a Communist chief who had agreed to a meeting with them and with the carabinieri was dismissed from the federal committee.39
Some of this behaviour on the part of the Fascists assumes the tone of a generational appeal against the old men who had ruined Italy: the king and Badoglio headed the list, but they were not the only ones. In this regard, they would survive the failure of the bids for conciliation of the first few weeks, and rather than seeking pacification they would aim at shifting the clash between the generations, thus attempting to revive another of the Fascist myths. A leaflet distributed by the Aldo Resega Black Brigade in Milan was to set the young against the ‘old, oft-foundered wrecks of the past’, who (and here even Pavolini and Farinacci figure) ‘are diabolically attempting to submerge the purest Italic youth’. Lest there should be any misunderstanding, the following were held up to this giovinezza as models: Ettore Muti, Gino Pallotta, Niccolò Giani and Berto Ricci. This particular case, quite clearly, was a call to battle; and in fact in the leaflet there was the invocation: ‘Borsani, the youth of the trenches is with you!’40 Smacking less of battlefield memories (but we are already in October 1944) is the appeal that the Modena paper Valanga repubblicana addressed to ‘noi giovani’ (‘we young men’) who ‘tomorrow, come what may, shall have to impose our will on the country. Old men and old systems continue to dominate more or less everywhere: and it is from this old ruling garbage that we must make a clean break so as to present ourselves as free and rejuvenated for the post-war fray.’41
Other appeals to the young could slip into a patriotic and leftish populism different both from the cloying and manipulative declarations in favour of ‘socialisation’ promoted by the RSI, and Fascist ‘sinistrismo’, which was interpreted above all in terms of the cudgel and of violence. A leaflet addressed to the ‘giovani’ of the province of Forlì began like this:
Don’t let yourselves be seduced by the vain erudition and inane theories of those who out of personal interest and because all they know of life is books and libraries, forget that the real life of the people who suffer is something else … Give your faithful and firm support to the cause of the Poor against the Rich … Garibaldi is watching you from the heaven of heroes and is exhorting you to save the patria. Patria or death.42
Similar positions expressed in a more refined way, with Mazzini in place of Garibaldi, appear in a neo-Fascist rag, Patria, published, it seems, under the editorship of a philosophy teacher at the Liceo of Fano with a programme to ‘build bridges between people’s minds and not dig abysses’.43
A far cry also from the intrigues in high places appear clumsy advances such as that attempted at Castelfiorentino immediately after 8 September, when some Fascists requested the ‘approval’ of the local Communists, on condition ‘that they informed them of their every movement and of all the orders that were imparted to them by the federation’. The author of the report is careful to point out, ‘our refusal was always disdainful’, even if he has to recognise that, with the arrival in Florence of lieutenant colonel Bartali with fifty militiamen, and his having requested ‘collaboration with our men (for the good of the people: sic!)’, there was some ‘sidestepping’ (‘scantonamento’) in the neighbouring villages, though this was short-lived: ‘From then our illegal activity recommenced.’44 ‘Serenades’ to Communists and Socialists is the name Gorrieri gives to those that appeared in October 1943 in the Gazetta dell’Emilia;45 and, in the moderate underground press, there were those who did not fail to sound the alarm about this, or pretended to do so, with a tacit but clear anti-Communist polemic.46
The moves towards reconciliation of the first few weeks produced some agreement in certain places. At Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna a document of mutual commitment not to attack one another was signed in September by the Fascists and the Rimini CLN (the five Communists who participated in the initiative were duly expelled from the party); and a similar attempt occurred at Forlì.47 In Ancona immediately after 8 September Fascists and anti-Fascists signed a pact for the maintenance of order, while in Venice various anti-Fascist representatives (excluding the Actionists) replied to the appeal addressed to them by the federale (the provincial party secretary), Montesi ‘with a pure heart, transcending party egoism and passions’, and participated in a meeting of reconciliation. Other meetings and other appeals are recorded elsewhere.48 Even Concetto Marchesi, who subsequently, at the inauguration of the academic year at Padua, would address a message to the students which has become a classic of Resistance literature, but of which the ambiguities and multiple
readings have recently been highlighted, needed to be taken to task by the Communist Party before disentangling himself from polluting relations with the Fascist education minister, Carlo Alberto Biggini.49
Some of the documents recorded above mention the moment at which attempts at reconciliation cease and there prevail, inexorably by now, drives towards civil war. We shall have occasion to return to the anti-Fascist responses to ‘the tremulous attempts at reconciliation’, as the central CLN called them.50 As for the Fascists, on 15 October Fernando Mezzasoma, the minister of popular culture, decreed: ‘The newspapers are to desist from publishing appeals for the reconciliation of souls, for the concord of spirits, for the fraternity of Italians. After forty-five days of poisoning of public opinion, scandal-mongering, preaching hate and man-hunting, certain pietistic manifestations represent an indication of pusillanimity and half-heartedness.’51
Sincere though it might have been in some Fascists, the desire to hold out against foreign bayonets was thus doomed to give way to the deeper urge to wreak vengeance on the anti-Fascist Italians in the shadow of those very bayonets. With the establishment of the Social Republic, the need that its restricted and motley group of leaders must not lose face nor incur the suspicion of their German ally, who had become yet more demanding and arrogant in his new guise of occupier, led towards this outcome.
‘But what is this Fascism which has dissolved like snow in the sun?’ Hitler asked Mussolini at their first encounter after 8 September.52 It seems that Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel said that ‘the only Italian army that will not be able to betray us is an army that doesn’t exist’.53 From this point of view, the civil war was a further pledge given to Nazi Germany, which recognised its value all too well. The best way to bind the collaborationists was to ‘load them with feelings of guilt, to make them bleed, to compromise them as much as possible’.54
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