At a certain moment the devilish shooting fell silent, and the low, calm voice of the vice-commander of the Bufalo battalion for the first time enjoined the enemy to surrender, to which the Fascists replied with volleys of machine-gun fire and with the usual cawing of the dying crows: Battaglioni del Duce, battaglioni … The fighting continued like this, with greater or lesser intensity, for many hours. The enemy no longer sang, instead it was our valorous garibaldini who, heedless of the danger that had come very close to many of them, were singing: Cosa importa se ci chiaman banditi … Ma il popolo conosce i suoi figli … [‘What does it matter if they call us bandits?… But the people knows its sons’]102
A man from the province of Bologna wrote to his wife in another key:
I also don’t think that the ‘patrioti’ will harm you, knowing my conduct as an Italian who for six years has been fighting in grey-green. If they should ask about me, tell them that I’ll go to the front and that when the war’s over, if we are the victors, will come back calm and content to my small village; if they are the victors, I won’t go into hiding, but will give myself up to their courts, sure of receiving a serene verdict, in an Italy sanctified by so many sacrifices.103
A very young paratrooper addressed his parents as follows: ‘I myself would like to go and see the partisans to have a drink with them and tell them that we must join forces to drive out first of all the real invaders, who are the English, Americans and company, then the Germans if they should refuse to go.’104
A case of genuine bewilderment, to be solved only by the intervention of the officers, is recounted by Franco Calamandrei, after a shoot-out in Rome in front of the barracks in Viale Giulio Cesare:
A Fascist comes along the sidewalk firing a machine-gun. Then he turns around, enters [the tavern where Calamandrei has taken refuge], he’s young, distraught, in a black leather jacket: and says to the women who are looking at him in terror and contempt – ‘If you knew how I too am feeling! I’ve had it! That we have to do this kind of thing between Italians!’ – and bursts into tears, throws down his weapon, sinks to the ground and sits there in a half faint. Moved, the women gather around him, shake him, and cry as well.105
It would be wrong to think that the RSI survived exclusively, inasmuch as it survived, on its commitment to the civil war. The militant Fascists were a slim minority, far more isolated than the Resistance minority, which was much larger. The Fascists conducted their civil war on the wide strata of the population who found in the Republic their own peculiar modus vivendi. For Fascism, which, under the cloak of gaudy forced politicisation, had covered a far more penetrating and widespread depoliticisation of the Italians, it was now impossible to re-politicise, to their own advantage, great masses of the population in a situation of dire emergency – a situation which had increased the profound and widespread weariness produced by the war. Probably Mussolini – with what conviction, who can say? – tried to play once again the old double card of violence and normalisation, of the stick and the carrot, to use one of his last felicitous journalistic quips.106 In reality, the RSI leant not only on the violence of the old and new squadristi, and certainly more so than on the demagogy culminating in ‘socialisation’, but also on the ‘stuffy and oppressive atmosphere’ breathed in the territory under its control. Roberto Battaglia had already drawn attention to this atmosphere in likening it, with an idea that was to be taken up again only recently, with that of the Kingdom of the South.107
The process of normalisation practised by the RSI should not be seen as a true re-establishment of order founded on a sufficient degree of certainty and law, but as an acquiescence obtained, within certain limits, to the commands of an authority that had suddenly stepped in with the purpose somehow or other of filling the void that had been created after 8 September.
Those who had experienced those days as a source of liberating exultation were upset and almost incredulous before what seemed a rapid and unjustifiable return to normality. Shortly after 8 September, Ada Gobetti noted in her diary: ‘Outside, in the streets, on the tram, external life appeared squalidly normal. Incredulous bewilderment, enraged rebellion, was now giving way, in most people, to the indomitable resigned weariness of the Italian people.’108 To cope with this problem, L’Unità drastically stated that ‘between the occupiers and the occupied there is no possibility whatsoever of normalisation’.109 But even the Jews were partly deceived by this spurious normalisation, thereby inscribing in the painful part of their memory the passivity with which they awaited the catastrophe.110 And, to contaminate things further, even in those who actually accepted some form of normalisation, antipathy for the armed units that supported it remained and grew, fanned by the conviction that those units were formed by volunteers.111
Military disobedience, which was directed at the highest of the positions at stake, was not accompanied by equally extensive civil disobedience, though there were the appeals by the committees, the partisan commands and the parties, even to the point of inviting the population to boycott German goods and to abstain from public spectacles, and even of threats.
On the eve of the liberation of the city, the Florence CLN, which was the first to put itself forward explicitly as an organ of government, sent the vice-podestà a warning against the reporting, ordered by the Germans, of motorised vehicles and other materials: ‘We therefore kindly ask you and your collaborators to refrain from such a practice … We also think it opportune to inform you that, should you decide differently from our desires, you will be shot without further warning.’112 The partisan commands were no less resolute. Commissar Cino [Vincenzo Moscatelli] and commander Ciro [Eraldo Gastone] warned a firm that had declared its intention to denounce unauthorised absentees from work to the Germans that they were laying themselves open ‘to very bitter and overdue attention by the force of partisan law. This is a warning: only words. If you do not correct your attitude you will very soon learn what our style is: facts.’113 The Communist press is full of warnings to those who collaborated in whatever form: policemen, hall porters, functionaries, actors.114 Luciano Bolis has recorded that ‘luckily, the greatest understanding reigned between conspirators and doctors (when it wasn’t spontaneous, threatening letters made sure that it was equally active and effective!)’.115
But it was above all the activity of the CLNAI (the CLN for Northern Italy), which in the last few months of the war, after the written authority received on 31 January 1944 by the central committee and the following 26 December by the Rome government, should justify its recognition as the ‘third government’ or, if one prefers, the shadow government,116 that was ‘bent on making the actions of the Social Republic appear in an illegal light’.117 Particularly notable, in terms of civil disobedience, was the exhortation not to pay taxes, which had already appeared in the 8 November 1943 issue of Avanti!. On 14 September 1944 the CLNAI decreed the suspension of the existing fiscal legislation,118 and the Ligurian CLN warned the citizens against paying taxes and the collectors’ offices against forced payment orders, on pain of answering for them after the Liberation.119 On 3 February 1945 the military command of the Piave zone issued a similar warning, and the Belluno partisans saw to it, as far as was in their power, that it was respected.120
On 15 March 1944 the CLNAI warned against subscribing to the ‘prestito città di Milano’ (‘city of Milan loan’) launched by Piero Parini, podestà and subsequently head of the province, who was fond of flirting with self-rule in Milan and Risorgimento Liberale urged the people of Milan not to subscribe to a loan that ‘does not possess the qualifications and authorisations provided for by Italian laws’. But in a fortnight a billion lire were raised and the loan, after being annulled by the municipal council by decree of the CLN, was to all effects recognised as valid in 1946 by the city administration that won the election.121 This Fascist success was all the more significant for the fact that it appeared to go against the trend of ‘tesaurizzazione’ (‘accumulation’ or ‘hoarding’), which back in June 1943
had caused the ‘scant success’ of the issue of multi-year treasury bonds, compelling the government ‘to rely increasingly on the pressure of bank-bills’.122
Only analytic research will be able to give an adequate indication of the outcome of the injunctions to fiscal disobedience. But Massimo Legnani’s findings do seem to give us some idea:
About 14 percent of the payments made by the RSI were covered by tax revenue, a percentage about 6 points lower than the margin assured by the fiscal revenue of 1940–43. Considering the general conditions in which the administrative machinery was operating, the difference between the two percentages appears undoubtedly significant, but not so much as to become a vertical fall.123
Sometimes it was the practical needs of small town councils that made it difficult to put fiscal boycotting into practice. This is revealed by the 31 October 1944 request by the ‘CLN, Ufficio collegiale di Valsusa’ to the CVL Command of the Alta Valle to put up a poster urging payment, given that, in the absence of tax collections, they were proving unable to provide essential services.124
In fact, appeals not to pay taxes, and other similar appeals, do not always appear to carry complete conviction. The president of the CLNAI himself, the independent Alfredo Pizzoni, implicitly acknowledged this when he reminded the parties that ‘as a rule what is decided at the CLNAI level serves for a well circumscribed interval of time’.125
The government of the South, for its part, was to take measures for ‘legislative order in the liberated territories’ without taking account of what the CLNAI was decreeing.126 When a delegation of the prime minister’s legislative office subsequently arrived in Milan after the Liberation, it was to write in its report: ‘We feel no desire at all that the measures of the CLNAI or the various liberation committees be recognised as having legislative value.’ The delegation thus toed the line of ‘throwing in the sponge’ over the clearly widespread practice of ignoring the CLNAI’s injunctions of non-collaboration and civil disobedience.127
The double-crossing and opportunism, the absences and presences, the doing and not doing characterising the activity of the public administration which went over to the service of the RSI, often corresponded to the more or less widespread expectations of an exhausted population that needed to use certain essential services, and for which the dividing lines between acquiescence to de facto established authorities, fence-sitting and passive resistance were not well defined, thus making for a toing-and-froing from one territory to another. The ‘resigned fatalism’ that Mussolini himself could not help drawing to Hitler’s attention on 3 October 1943 – though he considered it as coexisting with the opposite pole of a ‘volontà di ripresa’ (‘determination to recover’) – the oscillation of the large majority between scepticism and pessimism, which the Duce would again mention to Hitler at the Klessheim meeting of 22 April 1944,128 the ‘grey zone of the indifferent and the resigned’ undulating between ‘il popolo sano’ and the ‘rebels’,129 are like their counterpart, in Fascist guise, of the attesismo insistently denounced by both the Communists and the Actionists. The latter were all too aware how the moderate anti-Fascist parties had their eyes on the weary and uncertain mass whose numerical weight would count when it came to elections.
A strongly partisan and GL province like Cuneo would later give most of its votes to the monarchy and Democrazia Cristiana. The provincial head, who complained about not managing to get himself taken seriously ‘because the population felt that the established authorities had less force than the rebels’, traced this picture with pessimistic perspicacity:
Here at present they are not very Fascist and do not seem to have been very much so in the past, but they were very great lovers of public order and legality; they are extremely attached to their possessions and almost all are small proprietors, workers, individualists, monarchists, or at least were so at one time – people who would like to have everything and give nothing.130
There was a great deal of Fascist propaganda against ‘sceptics, fence-sitters, Anglophiles’, as a poster of 20 April called them.131 Another poster quoted these words of Eleonora Duse: ‘He who despairs betrays’.132 A propaganda postcard read: ‘Sfiducia [here meaning “disheartenment”]. Away with that S’, which was represented in the form of a serpent.133 A leaflet of 5 October considered ‘the Italians’ attitude of equivalent detachment from the English and the Germans a way of not doing their duty towards the patria’.134 Republican Fascism missed the fact that, though it makes sense to play a waiting game vis-à-vis a winning cause whose fruits one is waiting to gather, contributing as little as possible to it, it makes no sense to do so when it comes to a losing cause. In the latter case, fence-sitting can mean no more than waiting, without taking any risks, for by now inevitable, definitive defeat.
Between the small amount of possible ordinary administration swathed in vague Fascist phraseology and act upon act of increasingly barbaric violence, no middle way lay open to the RSI. A twenty-one-year-old auxiliary, sentenced to death by the partisans of the Valle d’Aosta, expressed this contrast in the bitterest terms, blaming his fate on the uselessness of a war fought for those who preferred not to lift a finger: ‘It’s terrible to think that tomorrow I’ll no longer exist; I’m still unable to convince myself. I don’t ask to be avenged, there’s no point; but I’d like my death to serve as an example to all those who call themselves Fascists and who sacrifice nothing for our Cause except words.’135
3. THE ANTI-FASCISTS’ ATTITUDE TO THE CIVIL WAR
Anti-Fascist and Resistance circles sometimes refused, but more often than not agreed to recognise, implicitly or explicitly, what was taking place as a civil war, though with various inflections. These range from reticence to deprecation, from the rejection of all responsibility for the Fascists to the firm acceptance of the phrase as describing an incontrovertible fact.
The monarchist ‘Centro della Democrazia italiana’ adopted an extreme position. As late as April 1944 it accused the CLN of not having grasped the fact that, after the great event of 25 July, ‘liberation’, after 8 September as well, could only have ‘the value and meaning of liberation from the foreigner’, as well as the restoration of ‘the reign of law’ violated first in 1919–22 and then in 1922– 43. The monarchist newspaper L’Italiano did not hesitate to use the formula ‘war of national liberation’ and, while going so far as to speak of ‘war of religion’, did so in the extremely literal sense of identifying the right side with the Catholic Church. The ‘Centro’ declared that it had been born to give voice to the increasingly large number of people who disapproved of the CLN and of whom, certainly, and above all in Rome, there were more than a few.1 This was not an isolated position, as regards either the present, the past (the biennio rosso being bracketed with Fascism), or a near future, above all in Rome and the South. It amounted to the partisans being saddled with responsibility for the civil war even by those who were not Fascists. Another minor Roman underground paper had already done as much, albeit in the guise of an impartial condemnation of both parties. The parties, it says, ‘under the influence of extremist positions’, have ‘unleashed the civil war’, and it is difficult to distinguish right from wrong in it.2 Victor Emmanuel III had come cleaner when, in his speech on Radio Bari of 24 September 1943, he had denounced those who ‘either by betraying the oath they had given, or by forgetting the repeated assurances of loyalty given to me personally, foment civil war by inciting the Italians to fight against their brothers’.3
A few months later, what was happening in the North would be recognised in no uncertain terms as being a civil war by the general commanding the carabinieri, while explicitly denying a similar contraposition between the Kingdom of the South and the Social Republic.4
In its famous order of the day of 16 October 1943 (asking that it be given ‘all the constitutional powers of the state’), the central CLN laid the entire blame for the civil war on the Fascists, maintaining all the while some uncertainty as to the effective outcome of the initiative
that the latter had taken. In fact it spoke of ‘Mussolini’s last-minute attempt to raise, beneath the mask of a self-styled republican state, the horrors of civil war’.5 The Modena CLN, to cite a peripheral example of some months later, resolutely declared:
It is not [the patriots], it is not we who are responsible for the civil war. It is the Fascists who have wanted to unleash it in the crazy, criminal and desperate attempt to avoid the end that they deserve. And they are so vile as often to send to fight against the patriots young men who are our kindred spirits, blood of our blood. They are so impotent that they have to seek help from the Germans.6
Equally clear-cut was the position taken by Risorgimento Liberale: ‘Mussolini is to blame for the blood being spilled today in the streets and jails of Italy, even the blood of his extreme and wretched supporters. It is he who has stimulated his followers, compelled his enemies, urged his allies to be violent. It is he who has unleashed the civil war.’7
Notable, in these two texts inspired by the ‘moderate’ parties, is its being taken for granted that the Fascists are worse than the Germans.
Views of the civil war appear to oscillate in the Christian Democrat press. On 23 October 1943 Il Popolo recognised its existence and laid all the blame on the Fascists; on 23 January 1944 it went back on this. On 12 December it had declared that the Italian front was the internal one.8 The Christian Democrat view of things would be influenced by fear that the ‘civil war’ would swing in favour of the left and degenerate into revolution. Indicative of this is a document sent to Alcide De Gasperi by the Christian Democrats of Turin on 15 January 1945.9 After giving a picture of the Garibaldi (and also Matteotti) partisan movement which anticipates many of the themes of 18 April, it said that unfortunately Democrazia Cristiana and the Liberal Party had not managed to impose the idea of ‘keeping the rebels’ movement on purely patriotic and military ground under a single command, which should also have been military in character’; Actionists and Communists had clashed because above all the latter aimed to make the partisan formations into ‘an instrument of oppression for tomorrow, more so than a means of anti-German and anti-Fascist struggle for today’. Without too much thought to coherence, the authors of the document strongly underlined that 90 percent of the population were extremely hostile to the Germans, but even more so to the Fascists. Moreover, at roughly the same time, in one of its propaganda booklets the Ministry of Occupied Italy, run by the Communist Mauro Scoccimarro, published the famous words of the song Fischia il Vento (The Wind Whistles) with one variant, ‘a conquistare la bella primavera’ (rather than rossa), and another which had the partisan waving the Italian flag.10
A Civil War Page 50
