A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  Naturally, this more or less unavoidable necessity lent itself to political vendetta – for example the denunciation, mentioned earlier, of ‘sinistrimo as a mask of the Gestapo’, and to acts of discrimination against those who saw ‘irregularity’ as being still an innate component of their decision to join the Resistance and the increasingly rife ferments of social revolt. A typical case is Giuseppe Marozin, an intriguing popular ringleader from the Vicenza area. While no one questioned his courage and enterprise, orders were given that, if he was caught in the act, ‘one should intervene with the maximum determination and with all the means at one’s disposal’.13

  The danger was also felt on the left that nuclei of future white guards were nesting in the irregular formations. Above all, and particularly in the last months, the Communists were on the lookout on this score; and the efforts made to defend the factories by means of the SAPs and other CLN-recognised formations aimed also at preventing a last-minute collapse, to their own disadvantage, of that unification of forces in the name of which so many of the class ‘differences’ most deeply felt by the militants had been sacrificed. On the other hand, the very presence of armed workers in the factories could tempt the owners to organise their own squads. When in Turin the DC became spokesman for such a request, the PCI’s reaction was extremely severe. ‘Any other organisms [that are not SAPs] directed and financed by the forces of reaction will be fought with every means’: ‘In fact, the Turin Communists had earlier warned: the industrialists, especially the management of the Fiat plant, would do well to remember that the workers will not tolerate management’s private squads entering the factories, since they are considered real corps of white guards and are treated as such.’14

  Similar warnings were given in Milan and elsewhere.15 An extremely precocious denunciation of this kind had come from L’Italia Libera, the Action Party newspaper: ‘Watch out for squads that the capitalists themselves are promoting for their class interests, under the guise of the appeal to ‘national solidarity’ and ‘sacrifices to bear in common’ and under the promises of ‘concessions on the social terrain’.16

  Leaving aside for the time being developments that would lead us back into the theme of the class war, the organisation of violence as an instrument against its own degeneration had to reckon with the revolutionary tradition which did not always draw a clear dividing-line between rebels and bandits.17 The severity towards robbers disguised as partisans sprang also from the need to be rid of this atavistic ambiguity, which threatened to reappear in the very bosom of the established partisan bands. The 1848 Garibaldini despised the regular army, but demanded discipline and severely punished pillagers.18 In 1924–25 the young Communist Altiero Spinelli answered the complaint that the party was not minting false money or organising large-scale robberies by saying that, if one went about things in that way, one would transform oneself ‘without even realising it, from revolutionaries into common criminals, participants, albeit irregularly, in the common exploitation practised by the bourgeoisie’.19

  The Communist federation of Venice was to act along these lines when it enjoined the partisans operating in the zone between Mestre, San Donà and Portogruaro to stop getting well-to-do people to hand over money at gunpoint.20 But it is certainly true that sometimes exceptional circumstances prompted criticisms against the positions expressed by Spinelli and by Giuseppe Dozza. A report from Bologna reads:

  We are still encountering in the men who currently make up our GAPs a fundamental weakness which is the residue of a false sentimentalism, namely uncertainty about, nay aversion to, acts of expropriation. They are of the view that a Communist cannot act as a robber would act, and on this point all they see is the form while forgetting the substance.21

  But a document from the Bergamo area denounces the excess of retrieval operations, stimulated by granting prizes and percentages: ‘Either we work for the cause, in which case it’s a patriotic and political action, or else we work for a prize or percentage, in which case it’s banditry, even if it’s hidden beneath a political veil.’22 Requisitions, a GL Command decreed, were to be carried out ‘in cases of urgent and absolute necessity’, and in any case only at the expense of the most prosperous.23

  The Communist and Actionist leadership were always well aware of the risk that the fragility of political education would degrade the partisans, turning them into ‘adventurers with neither scruples nor restraint, undisciplined to the point of insubordination, strong, daring in action but out for their own ends and for no other purpose’.24 This was a risk that was becoming particularly serious following the dispersal provoked by the roundups.25

  There was thus not only the problem of an abstract normativeness, but of the discipline in which this was to be embodied as an instrument to distinguish the ‘flower’ from the ‘dregs’. This distinction, which figures in Fenoglio’s work as a hendiadys, could however become blurred since not everyone accepted GL’s severe and diffident proposal, ‘neither heroes nor bandits’, and since at exceptional moments even the dregs could turn into flowers and possibly revert later into dregs.26 It was no easy transformation, as witness the case of the murderer who, having joined the partisans, purportedly to redeem himself, when tried for desertion and rabble-rousing, saw his past recoil against him.27

  Acts of banditry committed by the partisans therefore met with the greatest severity, and the documentary sources attest to the sternest application of them, even if they are more reticent about recording actions that remained unpunished. Above all, there was the need to distinguish oneself, on this plane as well, from those Fascist formations which were the first to behave like bands of robbers. This was the reputation deservedly gained in Rome by the Bardi and Pollastrini band, who had their den in the headquarters of the ‘federazione dei fasci dell’Urbe’, in Palazzo Braschi, and who were eventually arrested by the Italian police.28 Likewise, Chiodi brands as robbers a unit of the Italian SS ‘who are stealing jewels, automobiles, money, giving part of the booty to their German masters’.29

  For the partisans who behaved like robbers or highwaymen the punishment was almost always death. On the eastern border the chief of a Garibaldi band who imposed a tribute on the population, thus ‘abusing the name of the partisans’, was captured and shot ‘after an interrogation’.30 In the free zone of Montefiorino those guilty of carrying violent conduct too far were shot.31 A Terni partisan who had burgled the stores of the Slavs was sentenced to death.32 A partisan who stole 10,000 lire from an arrested Fascist was shot, while the Fascist was released under caution.33 At a higher level, the Piedmont CLN issued an appeal against the acts of brigandage and the robberies that that were polluting the partisan movement,34 while the tribunal of the Val Germanasca brigade of the 5th GL Alpine division expelled from all the patriotic formations a squad commander who ‘tolerated his men’s performing unspeakable actions against private and public bodies, thereby mystifying the just and sacrosanct work of his comrades in the brigade and of the other patriotic formations’.35 In Val Seriana, the tribunal of the Gabriele Camozzi GL brigade sentenced to death six men ‘guilty of robbery, refusal to obey and mutiny’.36 In the Nino Bixio brigade operating in Liguria, in the space of only a few days, two partisans were shot for rape and robbery, one for theft, another for robbery, and one because he was ‘a robber, thief and spy’.37

  Disciplining violence could therefore mean going the whole way in exercising it against those on one’s own side who were making abusive use of it. The very circumstances of the partisans left precious little alternative to extreme punishment. A page in Emanuele Artom’s diary, which begins by recalling the singular request by the carabinieri in the service of the RSI to remove some partisan robbers from the bands so that they could arrest them, recalls also that the commander and his men ‘are afraid that if they hand them over to the carabinieri they will give away information about the camp and the bases. They would prefer to eliminate them’; and immediately after this they repent not having killed a general
and two of his men who had been allowed to go free. Artom, who had argued that one had to be generous, makes a comment that is acute even if not altogether generally applicable: ‘I’ve noticed that those who are most inclined to favour the death sentences are always the ones who don’t have to issue them, but who just prattle.’38 These words clearly reveal the personal doubts of Artom, whose father had recalled ‘the Talmudic saying that a court that pronounces the death sentence even once in a century is to be considered very severe’, and who on another occasion proposed the death penalty for three partisans who had stolen, but undertook to commute it ‘into a few hours of lookout duty and being deprived of cigarettes and money prizes for the whole of the war’.39

  In some cases, moral scruples (Guido Quazza’s diary records arguments and perplexities)40 could be accompanied by fears for the future. A circular of the Piedmontese regional military command, which stigmatised executions without trial and recalled one’s duty not to confound oneself with the Fascists, reprovingly drew attention to an episode in which no one had wanted to take part in a tribunal for fear of being called to account later for ‘illegal judgment’.41

  Experience often provided tragic confirmatory evidence of the need to take a hard line. Chiodi recounts that a partisan who was sentenced to death for thieving, but managed to avoid execution, went over to the Black Brigades and then took revenge by killing a former comrade whom he took by surprise while the latter was on his way home for Christmas.42 In the trials instituted against partisans after the Liberation, it is telling that robberies would either be struck out, being defined as requisitions for war needs, or considered particularly infamous.43

  Robberies and thefts were not the only occasion for the exercise of punitive violence within the formations. Deserters, instigators, those guilty of grave acts of insubordination could in their turn undergo the death penalty. There have been many case studies in this field, too. The partisan Tigre, who had shot at an envoy of the Tuscan CLN, piercing one of his arms, was immediately executed.44 A squad leader who during an action wanted to withdraw a machine-gun pit was shot on the spot by his men.45 One Command decreed: ‘No kind of disbandment will be tolerated. I explicitly authorise the killing on the spot of anyone who flees.’ And another, still more drastically: ‘shirkers are to be shot’.46 Major Mauri, an example of whose militaristic severity I have already given, ordered the shooting of anyone who absented himself with weapons for more than twenty-four hours, of anyone who went over to another unit without being authorised, of anyone who gave information to the enemy (to be shot ‘without fail’), of anyone who abandoned his position during an action (he would be shot by his commander in person), of anyone who in an action refused to carry out an order (‘to be shot immediately’), of anyone who spread discontent and disorder among the patriots (‘shot at once’), of anyone who committed acts of sabotage (‘shot without fail’), of anyone who did not hand over to his commander objects that had come into his possession (‘shot’), of those who stole from their companions-in-arms, of anyone who falsified Command documents for their own advantage.47

  Dante Livio Bianco writes of the death sentence inflicted ‘with a perfectly serene conscience’ on three partisans who were preparing to desert at the prospect of an imminent roundup.48 The Triestina brigade set up a tribunal to judge deserters, and on 6 May 1944 reported two executions.49 Another Command decided to be tough, ‘not excluding execution’, with some young men who presented themselves to the enemy, possibly with the intention of subsequently returning to the partisans ‘so as to be in on the final reckoning as combatants’.50

  These episodes are mentioned not in order to analyse the disciplinary and punitive system practised in the formations, which would merit separate treatment, but to add other facts in the attempt to reconstruct the atmosphere of violence in which the partisan war was necessarily immersed. The more responsible men did not fail to question themselves on the legitimacy of violent action when it was directed against those who, for their own part, had been infected by that atmosphere and had allowed themselves to be dominated by it.

  A page written by the ever blunt and severe Ferdinando Mautino, which begins by recalling that ‘discipline was not imposed, but requested’, continues thus: ‘And we have seen the men of entire formations demanding even the death penalty for comrades who had been found gravely wanting; and those very same men confirming the need for that law which was about to strike them so terribly’.51 Lazagna tells of a partisan robber who accepted his execution as being just, and of protests, which appeared in the mural newspapers, against the sentence, deemed too mild, inflicted on a partisan who had stolen a sack of wheat; but an Allied mission too demanded the immediate execution of partisans who had made off with two parachutes.52 That a partisan should pay more dearly than a civilian was powerfully stated in a December 1944 leaflet of the Vittorio Veneto brigade.53

  At the heart of this wish to punish even to the point of inflicting the death penalty was unquestionably the need the Resistance movement felt for complete self-legitimisation. For this very reason the need was felt to embody the determination to punish in procedural forms which in some way guaranteed that those irreversible means tallied with the ends. On 16 July 1944 the CVL General Command issued directives for the ‘constitution and functioning of war tribunals at the partisan units’.54 The offences which were to lie within the competence of these tribunals were ‘military ones or in any case those concerning military operations (banditry, espionage, outrages against the populations or against their political organisations)’. The sentences were declared unappealable and to be carried out immediately; and it was specified that ‘in cases of flagrante delicto, desertion of one’s post before the enemy or betrayal, the culprits could be shot without the formality of a trial’, though the General Command could reserve the right to ‘express its opinion in the matter’. Besides being an attempt to produce uniformity and discipline, these norms endorsed the practices already being followed in the various formations.55 The norms did not establish the punishments nor specify the offences all that precisely – for example, desertion was not explicitly named. Writing towards the end of 1944, a Command gave this extremely realistic account of things:

  Our tribunals are in no way whatsoever obliged to decree the penalties according to the exact interpretation of the code in force. It is logical that in the absence of the technical elements (the presence of attorneys and judges in the formations is an exception) the judgments that are passed are founded exclusively on equity and common sense. The function of the solemn character given to our trials even when they do not carry the death sentence is above all educational.56

  And a book of memoirs reads that, before managing to create tribunals, ‘in the early days sentences were passed in a somewhat primitive way by all the formations’.57

  The military penal code was in fact appealed to fairly often in the sentences of the partisan tribunals, a case in point being a Command of the Piacenza area, which did however take care to describe the Royal Army as ‘ex’.58 In legal jargon, these references can be said to have been more often than not material, not formal: that is to say, they paid lip-service to the content of some norms, but did not regard the norms themselves as being in force as such. And indeed, when traditional legality came back into its own after the Liberation, the res judicata value of the sentences passed by the partisan military tribunals was not always recognised.59

  On the other hand, appealing to the norms of the code could have the paradoxical effect of highlighting the makeshift character of the procedure that was followed.60 And those who, like Major Mauri, in his proclamation mentioned earlier, explicitly referred to the fundamental norms ‘of the war military penal code of the Italian Royal Army’, as far as procedure was concerned took no steps at all towards setting up tribunals, but bestowed the power to punish directly on the division, brigade and detachment commanders.61

  In partisan justice, therefore, the stress fell necessarily on substance ra
ther than form. In Weberian terms, partisan justice can be broadly classed under the ideal type of the justice of the Muslim kadi.62 In Mosso the real partisans arrested four false partisans who were extorting money from the population, led them into the square and asked the crowd what they wanted to do with them; and the crowd replied that they should be taken into the mountains and made to suffer starvation.63 The almost total absence of legal experts in the bands accentuated this state of affairs and would subsequently be polemically remarked on by the partisans brought before the tribunals for not having greatly respected courtroom regulations: ‘Signor giudice, that’s true, only you were not there and so I had to do it.’64 Which is not to say that there was a mere ‘simulacrum of jurisdiction’ resorted to only to ‘set one’s conscience at rest’.65 The ritual of the trial channelled the desire for vengeance, stirred a sense of guilt in the accused, encouraged all the other members of the group to question themselves about what was just and what was unjust, and reaffirmed that even in the most exceptional situation there existed a general norm – in this case on the confines between morality, politics and legality – to which everyone had to submit. Roberto Battaglia has put this very well: ‘Precisely because we were fighting for a need for justice and that need was the true reality that had rallied us from far and wide around the same banner, in our law we instinctively aspired to a norm that was superior and not practical in character.’66