A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  The objective of the Risorgimento dispute was the appropriation of the essence of that movement, whereby those who joined with the opposite side were rejected with the word ‘anti-Italian’. There was nothing new about this phenomenon either. It has always been denied that the Risorgimento was a civil war, even in episodes like the Expedition of the Thousand, which saw only Italians fighting against Italians. This process is analogous to that described in regard to the ‘war of national liberation’, which led to the annihilation of the very nationality of compatriots fighting on opposite sides. The success of the appeals to the Risorgimento made between 1943 and 1945 probably lies also in their capacity to place the internal enemy on the same plane as the external one, in line with the reassuring vision of the founding process of the unitary state.

  At times the recapitulatory thrust of the ‘day of reckoning’ that occurred between 1943 and 1945 transcended the very opposition between Fascism and anti-Fascism and its links with the Risorgimento. Fractures emerged, together with resentments, ancient desires for vengeance, more far-reaching and deeply rooted conflicting conceptions of the Italian man and the Italian nation. In a pamphlet written in December 1943, Riccardo Lombardi claimed that ‘1922 is simply a repetition, befitting the changed times, of 1898’, just as Luigi Salvatorelli in 1919 had linked the crisis of the end of the century, the radiant May of 1915, and the Fascist reaction.79 But comparisons and questionings could go well beyond this. There were imprecations against ‘our historic curse, opportunism’.80 There was the wish to liberate oneself from the diagnosis of Fascism as a ‘revelation’ or as the ‘autobiography of the nation’.81

  4. THE MAIN ENEMY: THE FASCISTS OR THE GERMANS?

  Once the figure of the Fascist enemy had been redefined, alongside that of the German enemy, the unifying category ‘nazifascista’ was not always enough to keep the two parties together, even though the category was viscerally understood by the majority of resistenti, and not invalidated by the fact that the Fascist was the servant of the German – not an occasional servant, but a servant morally and politically in accord with his master.

  Let us take another look at a page from Beppe Fenoglio, whose initial title, we should remember, for The Twenty-Three Days of the City of Alba had been Tales of the Civil War.1 Note this dialogue between two partisans:

  Sandor says: ‘I’ve got it in for the Germans, of course I have, for lots of reasons. But that doesn’t compare with how I’ve got it in for the Fascists. As I see it they’re the cause of everything’.

  Ivan says: ‘True … but what kind of people are we Italians? We’re in a war in which you can hurt everyone, you must hurt everyone, and we only do it among each other. What is this? Cowardice, idiotic goodness, justice maybe? I don’t know. I only know that if we catch a German, rather than kill him we end up keeping him like one of our own. If the Fascists over there nab an Englishman or an American they’ll certainly rough him up a bit, but they don’t kill him. But if instead we nab each other, you’ve had it, and if we try to explain that we’re brothers they laugh in our faces’.2

  In this dialogue the claim, ideally so clear-cut and so often repeated, that the German is being fought only insofar as he is a Nazi and the Italian only insofar as he is a Fascist,3 is unable to contain and control all the emotions and doubts that the civil war arouses in relation to the war against the foreigner. What is more, in Beppe Fenoglio’s words there emerges one of the most perturbing aspects of the civil war.

  The civil war was generally described by both sides as ‘fratricide’, so as to fan its horror and to lay a more infamous condemnation at the feet of the enemy, who was held up as the only culprit. There were families whose different members had chosen to fight on opposite sides.4 But the fratricide metaphor sprang most forcefully from fraternity as a category extended to the entire nation. Giancarlo Puecher, shot by the Fascists, forgave them because ‘they know not what they do and do not know that brothers killing each other will never produce concord’.5 ‘I’m not going to fight against my brother’ – this was the reason a prisoner in Germany gave for refusing to join the ranks of the RSI.6 A southerner cut off in the North did not join the Fascists because he did not want to fight against his brothers; he did, however, join the partisans because, evidently, the Fascists appeared to him to have fallen from the rank of brothers.7 A soldier conscripted by the RSI did not intend ‘to defend an idea that doesn’t concern me … kill a brother for no reason … stain my hands and my soul with our [own] blood’.8 Fascist leaflets distributed in the South denounced the call-up to fight the brothers of the North.9

  In the page from Fenoglio quoted above, fratricide appears as a fact that aggravates the struggle and which, in place of mutual pity, generates mutual scorn. Umberto Saba raised this theme of fratricide almost to the status of an interpretive canon for the whole of Italian history:

  The Italians are not parricides; they are fratricides. Romulus and Remus, Ferruccio and Maramaldo, Mussolini and the socialists, Badoglio and Graziani … ‘We shall fight,’ the latter had printed in one of his posters, ‘brothers against brothers’ (a great favourite, not determined by circumstances, it was a cry from the heart and a cry from one who – having got things straight in his mind – finally gave vent to his feelings). The Italians are the only people (I believe) who have at the basis of their history (or their legend) an act of fratricide.10

  Saba forgot Cain and Abel, Eteocles and Polynices, Wagner’s Fasolt and Fafner, and whoever else was to make Hannah Arendt write that the whole of human history ‘is born from fratricide, any political organisation … has its origin in murder’.11 But Saba intended to provide a profound motivation for Italians’ incapacity, even at the height of the fratricidal struggle, to perform a true revolution, which is inevitably parricidal.

  In fact, if we skim the most direct and spontaneous Resistance documents, hatred of the Fascists seems to prevail over that against the Germans. This may naturally depend on the way Fascist repression was viewed: for example, in December 1944 (when Graziani’s divisions had already arrived) the Piedmontese command of the GL formations considered it far more severe than German repression.12 In the same period the group command of the Valsesia, Ossola, Cusio and Verbana Garibaldi divisions reported that ‘the Germans opposed the conducting of roundups which the Fascists would like to conduct’ – naturally, they were careful to add, without there being the least compromise between the patriots’ formations and those of the German Commands.13 At the same time, it might depend on the ordinary behaviour of the Germans and the Fascists: in that same period, Ada Gobetti saw the former as ‘unbelievably stolid and indifferent (at times one would even say blind, deaf and dumb)’ and the latter as ‘far more curious and wide-awake’.14 But there also emerges an intrinsic and profound loathing of those who, though Italian, had led Italy to ruin. A young man on his way to enlist in the Stella Rossa was asked by the commissar: ‘What do you have in mind?’ ‘To kill Fascists.’ ‘Enough,’ said commissar Ferdi, ‘to go on with, more than enough.’15 In Cernobbio, during the days of the Liberation, the population raised no protest against Germans being sent to Switzerland, but wanted to lynch the Fascists of the Republican National Guard (GNR) on the spot.16 Many preferred to go with the Germans rather than the Fascists.17 At a distance of a few years, an Actionist would state that ‘the German was fought almost solely because he was the last incarnation of Fascism, his ally and accomplice’.18

  While the Actionist did not unduly object to the tendency to see the Fascist as the main enemy, the Communist leaders often felt the need to curb it, concerned as they were that it might lead to the national character of the struggle being blurred. The Communists, moreover, were more closely identified with the thinking of the coalition between the great powers, which had been adopted as an essential element of the new party strategy. They warned that the struggle against the Germans ought always to be considered the main one.

  ‘There always remains’, says a Garibaldi document of win
ter 1944, ‘the conviction in the GAPs that those most responsible are the Fascists and that the Germans will be dealt with later. But we are doing our utmost to combat this way of thinking and reckon to have concrete results soon.’19 From the Marche, the following June, it was reported that ‘the actions have been directed principally against the Fascists but there have also been those against the Germans, though to an insufficient extent’.20 And in Lombardy again:

  It is not right to maintain that our struggle should be conducted only against the Fascists. By doing so, we would play the German enemy’s game … Therefore, the struggle against the Germans should be the principal struggle that we must conduct in order to liberate the soil of our country for good. Act then indiscriminately against Germans and against Fascists as common enemies.21

  This was the Solomonic and not altogether coherent conclusion.

  With a view to the insurrection, a Ravenna Communist document says, a new ‘line’ must be adopted, responsive to a revolutionary need. The ‘most feared enemy’, the one most hated by the people, was no longer the Fascist but the German, and so the latter was the ‘enemy who needs to be struck at’ with a ‘continuous, ruthless fight to the death … in order bring the masses ever closer to our action’.22

  Behind the greater inclination to fight the Fascists ‘impregnated with ferocity and defeat’,23 there might well have been, in some cases, the greater fear inspired by the German warlords; but there was also the hatred aroused by the Fascists themselves, whose subaltern position to the Germans seemed to generate, almost by way of compensation, a touch more violence.

  ‘I was able to ascertain’, reads another Garibaldi document, ‘that while the Germans reserve the fighting for themselves, they leave the dirty work, such as that of hangman and jailer, to the repubblichini.’24 While the Germans, recounts a prisoner who managed to give them the slip, succeed in ‘exploiting down to the finest detail the errors committed by the partisans towards the local populations … they leave the Fascists in charge of the reprisals and acts of violence against civilians and partisans’.25 In a Ligurian band it was ruled out, incorrectly of course, that ‘the Germans got involved in such operations’, namely the reprisals.26

  When in Florence, in December 1943, there was the reprisal against the killing of Colonel Gino Gobbi, the Germans refused to hand over five officers they were holding.27 In this particular case it might have been a question of formalistic respect being paid to different competences; but the impression aroused was nevertheless always an increase in the odiousness of the Fascists, even when the Germans handed over to them for execution prisoners whom they had previously tortured.28

  In a discussion between Veneto Garibaldini the opinion clearly emerged that what was done to shorten the war – the destruction of vehicles, for example – would undoubtedly count with the Allies and the decisions they would take about the future of Italy ‘more perhaps than the number of Fascists eliminated, although morally, for the whole partisan movement, the elimination of the Fascist lackeys is the most powerful tonic sustaining us’.29

  Ferdinando Mautino (Carlino, head of the Natisone Garibaldi division General Staff, mentioned earlier) argued this irrepressible priority given to hating the Fascists with a reflection that seemed to reverse the trend: that it wasn’t so much the Germans who were sustaining the Fascists but vice versa. ‘The work of local traitors, without which no foreign force would have been able to manage, was indispensable.’ If, Mautino explained, the Germans were able to organise themselves rapidly, it was because they had ‘found at their feet cowardly and irresponsible officials and public functionaries, greedy and corrupt industrialists and speculators, and the ignoble thugs of the Fascist hierarchy’.30

  Recognition is given to the Germans in contrast to the Fascists even by a member of the insurrectional triumvirate for Emilia-Romagna. This Communist leader took the Modena GAP brigade command to task for having sent letters, for an exchange of prisoners, not only to the German command but to the prefect and to the Black Brigade command. He points out that

  The German Command is waging the war more or less within the international rules. We can denounce its acts of brutality, but essentially we can deal with it as belligerent to belligerent, but not the Fascists! They are traitors in the service of the foreigner and it is precisely by writing to the Germans that we must brand with fire this shameful fact of sold flesh.31

  Whenever possible, the Germans were the first to speculate on the distinction they saw being made between themselves and the Fascists. A German officer said of the partisans: ‘They attack us because they want to take our weapons in order to fight the Fascists.’32 The Germans had general orders from above to avoid if possible entering ‘into direct contact with the Italian population, but to use the Italian authorities as executive organs’.33 And they even flattered themselves with the belief that the Italians would appreciate ‘their objectivity, to which they were hitherto unaccustomed’.34 The Germans thereby turned to their advantage, with how much intentional perfidy it is hard to say, the role of mediation with the population that the protagonists of the Social Republic (and its retrospective apologists) have attributed to it. On the field several German attempts were made to divert the force and anger of the partisans against the Fascists.

  In the Marche, before the failed attempt to get the Macerata brigade to hand over their arms pacifically, the SS offered (again unsuccessfully) ‘to leave them in peace, provided they undertook not to fight the German occupying troops, so [gave them] … free rein to do in the … Fascist … allies’.35 In the Pavese Oltrepò, too, the Germans showed themselves willing at certain moments to come to an agreement, ‘promising the patriots that they would leave them ample freedom in their struggle against the Fascists’.36 In the zone of Imperia a German commander ‘made pacification proposals, namely that they were not to attack the Germans and they for their part would take no measures against Italians who dissented from the Fascist regime. In the presence of the Italian SS he added: that the Italian dissidents could do what they wanted against the Fascists, that they washed their hands of them etc.’37

  It was by now spring 1945, and the document I have just quoted also recalls symmetrical attempts to reach an accord on the part of the republican National Guard, the San Marco division, and the provincial head of Savona. The truth is that, out of the corner of their eye, the Fascists had always kept close watch over the Germans for fear of being ditched. ‘Throughout the zone complicity between the partisans and Germans is in the normal run of things’, a bitter and frightened Fascist had written with regard to the Valtellina.38 The Germans, however, knew all too well that they had the whip-hand. The Val Pellice commander did not mince his words with the GL partisans who, earning the contempt of the Garibaldino Barbato, had sought to speculate on the disagreements between Fascists and Germans: ‘Coming to terms with us you avoid the Fascists, but coming to terms with the Fascists you don’t avoid us.’39

  It has always been a good tactic to divide one’s adversaries, in peace as in war. The resistenti also tried it out, but came up against two very powerful obstacles. The first lay in the almost fatally fanciful character that the action assumed, as soon as it went beyond the mere recognition of the Germans’ low regard for the frustrated Fascists. ‘Open disavowal of Fascism by the Germans’ was the optimistic moral that L’Italia Libera believed it could draw from the way the Milan strike of December 1943 had gone.40 The ‘shrewd line’ to pursue, suggested by a document submitted to the Tuscan CLN, of avoiding compelling ‘Germans and Fascists to bolster, for reasons of defence, their ill-matched solidarity’, was easier to preach than to practice.41

  The other and more substantial obstacle lay in the fact that the only viable form that these divisive attempts could take was to stipulate separate agreements with one enemy or the other. Here, a dual reality has to be registered. The political directorates and the central partisan commands always issued the firmest prohibitions about resorting to this kind of thin
g. Witness the military command for Northern Italy’s ‘Direttive per la lotta armata’ of February 1944 and the CLNAI’s ‘Appello agli italiani’ of 3 December 1944.42 There may at times have been some sign of a certain gratification in seeing the arrogant adversaries compelled to come to terms. Thus Avanti! informed its readers with satisfaction that, in many places in Piedmont, ‘the small Nazi garrisons are negotiating with the partisans, who have the control of that zone in their hands’.43 And L’Unità wrote: ‘Kesselring would like to come to terms’, terms that naturally are not considered.44 The gratification was completely justified, seeing that Mussolini found himself compelled to complain to Ambassador Rudolf von Rahn that ‘in many places the German military local authorities have come to modus vivendi terms with the partisans; forming true and proper agreements … which has increased the power and prestige of the partisans’.45 This power and prestige seemed still greater for the very fact that the advances were rejected. L’Unità writes proudly: ‘After having sought to obtain from our commands a sort of “neutrality” at least towards the German troops, the German Command was compelled to give battle.’46