Even that small hold that the RSI managed to have on that part of the population who had been left frightened by the institutional void created after 8 September drove it, paradoxically, towards civil war. This was not a case of ‘returning to origins’. On the contrary, it was a case of establishing the maximum continuity with the twenty-year-old regime that had had as a source of essential legitimation the very re-establishment and maintenance of order. ‘I needed order’, wrote an auxiliary in the women’s service,55 speaking for many. ‘Finally we shall have a government!’ shouted a man in Venice on hearing the news of Mussolini’s rescue.56
The Fascists, who had always kept the action of creating disorder as their special preserve, were at the same time convinced that what the mass of men longed for, more than anything else, was order. They could not therefore fail to be driven to ruthlessly repress the rebels who were giving them trouble. Disorder as an instrument of order, a fundamental feature of Fascism, would come to achieve, on this road, paroxysmal results. The Social Republic would in fact be riddled with a multiplicity of police forces, armed corps, militias, bands picked up here and there in search of adventure or booty, who acted without any coordination and often in competition with each other. With bureaucratic caution, Giovanni Tebaldi, the questore of Bologna reported to the chief of police:
Despite the awareness and the rapid, effective intervention by the provincial authorities responsible, we must still note here and there arbitrary police actions, at times of considerable gravity, on the part of members of the Militia and of some provincial gerarca. Naturally, when the personal, or in any case unconfessable, motive for these actions comes to light, regular denunciations are made.57
Revealing the real state of affairs, one Fascist wrote:
The Armed Corps, by which I mean the Guardia, the Police, the Italian SS and the various battalions, ‘Nembo’, ‘San Marco’, ‘Barbarigo’, ‘Roma o Morte’, ‘Muti’ et cetera, are creating real bewilderment in the minds of the masses with their multiplicity and their enlistment methods. It’s like being in an old-style market with each of the various Jewish hawkers trying to corner the buyer by lauding his goods to the skies.58
Of the two indissoluble faces of modern totalitarianism – the rigid hierarchical order imposed on the whole of society and the chaos created by the fragmentation of juridically unregulated powers (Neumann’s Behemoth) – the RSI thus primarily displayed the latter.59 Instead of consensus, albeit forced, one had at best to content oneself with a discipline born of low spirits.60
It was the congress of Verona, inaugurated on 14 November 1943, that marked the decisive turning-point towards civil war, based on the convergence between the young and the old squadristi, who immediately thereafter perpetrated the Ferrara massacre as a reprisal for the killing of the federale (provincial party secretary) Igino Ghisellini; and the party secretary Pavolini, who used the occasion to try to lead Fascist chaos back into the hive of the single and, at least theoretically, united and intransigent party.61 From that moment on, RSI documents and political journalism are full of references, explicit or implicit, to civil or fratricidal war.62 The political or ideological character of this war made it obvious that it would be compared to the one that the German comrades were continuing to wage against the monstrous coalition of the demo-pluto-Judaic-Masonic-Bolshevik powers. As we have noted with regard to 1919–22, ‘in Fascism’s mythology of struggle and war, war and civil war make an indissoluble pact’.63 Commenting on the Ferrara massacres, Farinacci wrote in Regime fascista: ‘The watchword was: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth … It was thought that perhaps we wouldn’t have the force and courage to react. Now the facts have spoken’.64
The creation of the Black Brigades, announced by Pavolini on 26 July 1944, a year after 25 July, on the basis of a decree by Mussolini of the previous 30 June, constituted the culminating point of Fascist commitment in the civil war. The initiative stemmed not least from the failure of the republican National Guard as backbone of the internal military machinery, and of the creaking, in the summer of the partisan offensive, of the entire RSI structure. The most determined Fascists had somehow or other understood that they would have to manage the final reckoning directly. This too, for that matter, could be considered a return to origins. The 1921 statute of the National Fascist Party (PNF) had in fact established that ‘all Fascists belong to the combat squads’; and on 24 April 1923 the Grand Council had ordered that ‘all Party members be officially registered in the militia’.65 Pavolini’s announcement was: ‘All members of the republican Fascist party aged between eighteen and sixty constitute the auxiliary corps of the Black Shirts.’
The instructions that followed, which were again Pavolini’s, reiterated and specified the meaning of this total militarisation of the party, which was also a further attempt to reabsorb the neo-action-squad ‘federal police’, who, springing up in the weeks immediately following 8 September, were ‘in many cases survivors of the government’s attempted dissolution of them’.66 Thus the party secretary wrote: ‘As of this moment all Fascists are to consider themselves in a state of emergency for the struggle against the activity of the rebels and for the defence of their own families’; consequently, the house of every Fascist is to be transformed into ‘a small fortress where it is not possible to be surprised in one’s sleep.’67 Shortly before, on 27 June, writing to Mussolini, Pavolini had stressed, against Graziani’s ‘apolitical’ velleities, the need to place oneself on a ‘terrain which is that of armed politicians against armed politicians’.68 Now, in his radio broadcast of 25 July, Pavolini publicly developed this concept, remarking: ‘It is not enough to profess oneself to be for Italy when there is also an Italy of Badoglio and Palmiro Togliatti.’ The divisions returning from Germany ‘bear on their bayonets a political idea. Nor could it be otherwise at such a time as this, during this war which Mussolini defines as a religious war.’
In the same speech, flaunting unscrupulousness and gall, which served to cover up a sense of frustration and almost of envy (sentiments not new to the Fascists, above all in their attitude to the Communists), Pavolini said that the Italians
do not fear combat … They don’t, however, like being shut up in barracks, organised, regimentalised … The partisan movement is successful because the combatant in the partisan ranks has the impression of being a free man. He is proud of what he is doing because he acts independently and develops the action according to his personality. It is therefore necessary to create an anti-partisan movement on the same bases and with the same characteristics.69
No doubt the party secretary had in mind the experience that had already been tried out by the ‘franchi tiratori’ (snipers) or Gruppi d’Azione Giovanile (GAG) who had been organised in Florence in opposition to the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica (GAP), and with a view to a sniping campaign that was to be conducted after the arrival of the Allies.70 In a letter to Mussolini of 18 June Pavolini had written that, in the disintegration of the civil and military authorities that was taking place in Tuscany, only the Fascists were holding out.71 A practical translation of the concepts expressed by Pavolini can be found in a plan devised by Mussolini himself the following 16 August: ‘The partisans captured during and after the fighting are immediately shot. The disbanded who are captured with weapons are shot in conformity with the well-known ministerial ordinance’; the unarmed were to be sent to Germany; those who present themselves, ‘to work or to military service’.72
In fact, the party secretary’s directives were obeyed only to a limited extent. The Black Brigades only rarely entered the city gates; nor did they manage adequately to take the place of the garrisons of the fast-dissolving republican National Guard.73 In Trieste, in July 1944, out of 8,500 party members only 500 formed part of the Black Brigades.74
The sporadic Fascist sniping in Florence and Turin, where provincial party secretary, federale Giuseppe Solaro seems to have been planning it for some time,75 should be considered the last, albeit faint-hearted
Fascist contribution to the civil war. Their chances of doing any harm were overrated by the Resistance organisms. The Communist Party ‘Direttive per l’insurrezione n.9’ of 15 September 1944 warned against a ‘particularly dangerous occult resistance’ and against the fifth column.76 On 1 April 1945 the ‘Direttive operative per il piano E.27’ of the Biella zone command mentioned foreseeable Fascist guerrilla warfare for the period following liberation.77
Only a very minor and abortive contribution to the civil war was given by the extremely rare Fascist attempts to conduct actions south of the Gothic line.78 These are not to be confused with the sporadic and vague manifestations of nostalgia or sympathy for Fascism that occurred in liberated Italy, and that were far more the fruit of local situations than of Pavolini’s directives. Still pursuing the mirage of mirroring the anti-Fascists, Pavolini had in fact decreed that the Fascists left in situ or deliberately sent behind the lines should stir up a ‘clandestine Fascism, similar in its manifestations to the activity of the clandestine parties of our adversaries or at any rate of our opponents generally in the provinces controlled by us’.79
The result of these directives can be seen not so much in the facts as in the propaganda of the RSI.80 What should be stressed, rather, is that as a rule both the Royal Army and the Fascist government, evidently in agreement with their respective allies, avoided deploying their regular units against one another on the front.81 This confirms the fact that the civil war was not fought between the Kingdom of the South and the Italian Social Republic. It was a war fought between Fascists and anti-Fascists, on the only territory where they were present politically and militarily, in a contest that was nonetheless acquiring a significance that involved the entire Italian people – just as squadrismo, a central and northern phenomenon, had left its mark on the fate of the whole nation.
Graziani’s regular troops also participated in the civil war, particularly the four divisions organised in Germany. In a poster Tito Agosti, commander of the Littorio division, gave warning of reprisals in the event of partisan attacks on Italian or German soldiers; in another poster Agosti gave news of a reprisal that had been carried out (four partisans shot). Again, by means of a poster a military command announced the execution of three partisans in reprisal.82 ‘The roundups are being conducted by the traitors who have re-entered the country from Germany’, Chiodi wrote in his diary.83 In Garfagnana, when the Monterosa and Italia divisions arrived, things took a turn for the worse compared with the period in which the front had been held by the Germans: requisitions, thefts, reprisals to stem desertions.84 In one of his writings many years later, Ferruccio Parri, engaged as ever in transfusing anti-Fascist tension into the national significance of the war of liberation, saw the arrival of Graziani’s divisions from Germany as marking the moment when the struggle took on the ‘character of a real civil war’, and added vehemently: ‘We could even go so far as to say that if the Germans had had more means at their disposal, or had not been forced into a tight corner by the way the war was going, more numerous and well-organised Graziani divisions could have created difficult problems.’85
The desertions that decimated these divisions only accentuated their Fascist character. Those who remained – and, up to the very last weeks, they were more numerous than the resistenti had bargained for – were in some cases the most cowardly, but in many other cases the most highly motivated and diehard. In Monterosa, according to a Garibaldino report, the Fascists were about 40 percent of the troops, and all the officers.86 In short, in the controversy between ‘national’ army and ‘political’ army, force of circumstance proved Pavolini right.
It was not easy for the RSI Fascists to recognise the very existence of the partisan movement. After many years a Fascist described the first partisan prisoners with whom he came into contact as being very different from ‘a kind of opposite version of ourselves’.87 The Fascists in fact found it hard to understand how one could not be heroic, according to the image they had of heroism, yet nevertheless not banal. Apart from their propagandist aim, the use of expressions like ‘bandits’ or, worse still, ‘hired assassins in the pay of the enemy’ manifest their strong unease at an unexpected phenomenon, which they sought to exorcise by attributing its birth and development to external agents. This idea was reinforced by the tendency to refuse, at first, to make a careful distinction between partisans and escaped prisoners, above all if they were Slavs.88 Communists and Jews – both linked, in the haunted Fascist imagination, to dark and powerful international organisations – lent themselves well to being indicated as those most directly responsible for a banditry directed by others.89 The expression ‘comunisti badogliani’, used above all in the first months to describe the partisans (this was the name given to the Via Rasella assailants in Rome), while aiming on the one hand at compromising and disqualifying both by juxtaposing them, on the other hand presented itself as the internal version of the monstrous capitalistic–Bolshevik coalition against which Fascism and Nazism were fighting.
At the heart of the Fascist attitude lay deep-rooted incredulity in the very capacity of the anti-Fascists to fight. The memory of the all-too-easy Action Squad victories of 1920–22, when Fascist violence was organised while Socialist violence was not,90 the long-enjoyed security of institutional protection, and contempt for the adversary (it is typical for the Fascists to call their enemies ‘bastards’, i.e. racially impure) left the Fascists unprepared to face a real civil war fought by both sides. It was one thing for them to vent their desire for revenge by reviving the punitive expeditions, and quite another to face other organised, armed Italians. Perhaps the altogether particular hatred that the Fascists later reserved for the figure of Parri derived precisely from their incapacity to understand how such a fragile-looking man, discreet and no worshipper of violence, had managed in the end to be stronger than themselves. Allowing for the obvious differences, we might all the same suggest an analogy with Churchill’s remark about Hitler’s incapacity to understand what unshakable strength of will lay hidden, despite everything, in that frail gentleman with the umbrella, Arthur Neville Chamberlain.91
Thus, the reality of the partisan Vendée, as Mussolini called it,92 was gradually brought home to high- and low-ranking Fascists alike, to extremists like Giorgio Almirante and moderates like Giorgio Pini. In June 1944 Graziani, in a memorandum to Mussolini, was compelled to acknowledge: ‘Only the flat lands of the Po Valley were under effective Republican control. All the rest was virtually in the hands of the rebels.’93
Once they were forced to take stock of the real state of affairs, eliminating the rebels could not but be an essential objective. Above all, it would have been intolerable if even this task was dealt with by the Germans alone. ‘You see? To do in the subversives there’s no need of the Germans, we’re enough!’ said a Fascist to a comrade before the bodies of partisans displayed in Piazzale Loreto in August 1944.94
The Fascists had always been afflicted by fear of not being taken seriously by their allies. Even in Spain the Francoists had sung:
Guadalajara no es Abisinia
Los españoles, aunque rojos, son valientes
Menos camiones y mas c …95
[Guadalajara is no Abyssinia
The Spaniards, even the Reds, are valiant
They have fewer trucks and more b[alls]
Now the Fascists had at all costs to show that, even if they were unable to fight seriously against an external enemy, they could at least, by the very fact of being Fascists, crush the internal one. Taking seriously the distinction between the armed forces of the state and the party militias, Giovanni Tarabini, Modena regent of the republican fascio, theorised this unrealistic distinction of tasks: ‘While the state will see to the war against the enemies at the front, the Fascists will see to fighting against the anti-Italian elements at home.’96
‘I was captured only because I’m a Fascist. For no other reason’, wrote forty-year-old Andrea Perusini, secretary of the Ronchi fascio, shot by the par
tisans of the Natisone Garibaldi division, in his last letter; and he was appreciated by them for his dignified behaviour in the face of death.97 Umberto Scaramelli, the black brigatista from Fiumi, a veteran of the March on Rome, showed clear awareness of how hard the struggle was, and of how it had burnt bridges for both sides: ‘If by some wretched chance our adversaries should win the day, they certainly won’t have any pity on us; we must therefore be manly in character, continue fighting for the Idea, and if necessary die for it; at least that way our adversaries will have to respect us and recognise us as men worthy of the name!’98
Another Fascist accepts the consequences of defeat in the civil war, though still following the logic of revenge, which appears in him to be intrinsic to the cult of life. He declares: ‘I’ve been sentenced to death by the partisans, by whom I’ve been taken prisoner. They’ve won and are therefore right to take their revenge on those fighting them … I was wrong. I bet on the losing horse and now I’m paying for it. Let me say however that not for one moment do I repent my error’, which was due to his choosing the path ‘of honour and of life’.99 A nineteen-year-old paracadutista appears more arrogant, calling ‘the patriots’ (his quotes) ‘illusi’ (‘dupes’ or ‘dreamers’), but also ‘wretched renegades’ and ‘cowards’ and, assuring his parents that ‘the paracadutista’s cudgel is hard, you know!’, identifies himself with the squadristi of the mythicised old guard.100
Characteristic of the civil war are direct, personalised relations between combatants on opposing sides, from whom there pours forth not only rage and ferocity, but also a vast range of reactions and attitudes – from defiant bravado to the hurling of abuse, from pity to bewilderment, to a curious readiness to ‘talk to each other’. Nuto Revelli tells of a telephone conversation that he had consisting of insults, while in the mountains, with a Cuneo gerarca (Fascist party official).101 An exchange of songs during combat well highlights some of these factors peculiar to civil war:
A Civil War Page 49
