Sometimes there was an intrinsic need not to let the most infamous crimes go unpunished. Chiodi recounts: ‘They shot a sergeant who was generally thought by his companions to have made some partisan prisoners eat excrement.’109 And Revelli:
Today one of our patrols met three German customs officers on the Lombard hills. They were the very same Germans of Isola, those who murdered Franceschi and the others last July. No pity. One of the Germans had a photograph of his children and was crying and trembling. The same old story: they understand everything, they become men again when they’re lost.110
This theme of the German prisoners revealing themselves to be weak in the face of death appears widely in the partisan press and represents almost a counterpoint to the fear generated by the ruthless determination that the latter habitually displayed when it was they who did the killing. The face ‘of that German who begged for pity in Piazza Cadorna showing me the picture of his children’ remained impressed in a Gappist’s memory.111
Another Gappist recounts: ‘During the interrogation, as often happened in those circumstances, the two [German] prisoners declared that they were prepared to enter our ranks, simply to save their skins’:112 the two were executed. The newspaper of a brigade of autonomi, many of whom were Catholics, wrote:
The German commander K … he actually has a human heart and, like so many others, is bewailing the fate of his wife and daughters whom he hasn’t heard from for some time. Do you remember that German K again … the thirteen Italians he had shot at Borgo Ticino as a reprisal? Does he reckon that they didn’t have wives, mothers, sisters, children who were bewailing their fate?113
A sergeant of the GNR was first acquitted for lack of proof from the accusation of having directed a roundup, then shot for high treason.114
By decreeing that the putting to death of captured men ‘who truly proved to be prisoners of war’ and of spies was to disregard any promise made to obtain their surrender, the military Command of the Ossola zone115 contravened one of the norms mentioned above, but obeyed another which condemned war criminals to death, the execution being entrusted without more ado to the partisans. What actually happened was that the Fascists’ resistance to the bitter end was stimulated once they became convinced that, come what may, they were doomed to be eliminated.116 Some partisan Commands were so drastic as to leave no way out, as when they prescribed: ‘Members of the republican armed forces who are captured are to be shot in the same place where they are captured as a warning and example. The same applies to members of the German armed forces.’117 Similar conduct is represented in a more hesitant form with these words: ‘From experience, the partisans were reluctant to take prisoners. A prisoner in partisan hands is always an encumbrance, besides being a danger.’118
As things turned out, if the instructions of the high-level unitary organs, the CLNAI and CVL, were not followed to the letter, nor were those, which were often notably different from each other, of the lower Commands and the single political organisms. One Command felt the need to repeat that if the ‘outlaws’ of the Muti, the Black Brigades, the Decima Mas, and so on, had to be executed, ‘the prisoner must be treated with dignity’, as prescribed by the norms, which were not always applied.119 One Communist political commissar spoke ironically about the fact that
the most pious bourgeois souls in the division were upset by the shooting of Fascist and Black Brigade elements, putting forward the excuse that it is pointless our adding other deaths to the millions of war dead, and saying that it is not against the Fascists or elements in the Black Brigades that one should be acting, but more realistically than the king, against the great capitalists whom we don’t have in our hands.120
Pelle-di-biscia (Snake-skin), one of Calvino’s characters, ‘was saving men one moment, and killing them the next: he was changeable and ambiguous’.121 ‘The prisoners are going to pieces. We’re releasing them, even if they’ll rush back into the arms of the Germans!’ This, Revelli recounts, was the line taken spontaneously during a roundup.122
There was no single attitude even about exchanges of prisoners. One protagonist, still offended by the fact that the formations were sometimes asked to capture prisoners in order to exchange them for arrested leaders, tells how a partisan
did not consider it worth the trouble risking so much to exchange a prisoner for a leader whom nobody knew … The fact that only high-ranking leaders were spared by the enemy and that only they were granted the possibility of being exchanged, conflicted with the high sense of justice of the partisan, whose general and absolute principle was equality and the same right of all combatants to live.123
‘Davide’ (Osvaldo Poppi), the political commissar of the Modena division, once criticised the exchange, which he deemed inopportune, between a militia captain and the mother of a partisan.124 Things are expressed more extensively, but in a similar spirit, in this letter written on the eve of the Liberation:
We’ve never been able to do the slightest good outside the jails of Novara and Vercelli … Negotiations of this sort were brought to a conclusion by Christian Democrats, Liberals and Socialists, but, evidently, our comrades in the towns don’t … hit it off too well with the Nazi-Fascist Commands. On the other hand, since in Novara and Vercelli too they’re screwing us over the exchanges because they’re systematically packing the most valuable elements we request off to Bolzano, we’ve decided to waste no time and eliminate all the Nazi-Fascists who fall into our hands, except for those who give themselves up spontaneously. Just think, at the moment we still have, despite the notable bloodlettings that are being inflicted daily, some sixty prisoners, who eat and drink and keep a battalion of us busy. Sorry about the comrades who are inside, but, on the other hand, it isn’t right either to save the worst at the expense of the best who are never liberated.125
The risks of magnanimity were pointed out with particular insistence. The released prisoners, it was said, not only should not be used for exchanges or to threaten reprisals, but they offered the enemy precious information, nor to be sure did they sweeten his behaviour.126
‘The partisans have taken all the weapons off the Germans and Fascists, but have made the mistake of setting them free: they have simply assembled them on the road and got the townsfolk to keep an eye on them’, the upshot being that when the German reinforcements arrived, many of these townsfolk were captured in their turn.127 ‘When this happens they all declare themselves friends, but then, on being released, direct the roundups’.128
‘If we look carefully at the question, we recognise that we’ve erred out of good-heartedness’, says a report on the temporary occupation of the village of Bubbio in the Astigiano area, where the population would have liked the deaths of the secretary of the fascio, the podestà and the marshal of the carabinieri; but the partisans did not allow this, ‘believing that a moral punishment was sufficient’. On the other hand, the officers and NCOs of the captured SS ‘were gotten up in civilian dress and shot in a wood’, while two German soldiers of the Red Cross ‘are living with us like two friends; besides, a point in their favour is that one of them is of Austrian nationality’.129
‘Moral punishment’ recurs in another text, but this time, from both the ethical and practical point of view, in reverse form. Two former prisoners who had been roughed up led the Germans in the roundup; and the young Artom remarks:
So now I understand the gravity of having killed some prisoners. Even at the time I had protested, but now I realise that it would have been better to remind him that the Germans kill partisans they capture, then point my revolver at him, reprieve him and keep him for an hour, explaining Hitler’s certain defeat and the reason for our resistance. If he went back to the Fascists, never mind: one more or one less when there are so many makes no great difference, but there was some likelihood of his mending his ways, of his remaining our friend and doing us a good turn or two, or at least of his fighting against us more half-heartedly. The difference between the two systems would have been made c
lear, at least before the people and history.130
This page well sums up one of the horns of the difficult dilemma. The other horn is formulated with equal clarity, independently of its practical effects, in the following passage written by another hand many months later:
It is also necessary not to let oneself be carried away by personal sympathies or by acts of exaggerated clemency; things which, though tolerated up to now, thanks to the experience acquired by the movement, can in no way be justified either in the case of the recruits or still less of the veterans … The enemy shows us no clemency, so why should we show him any? Must we pardon those who are in cahoots with the enemy or who connive in his crimes?131
Connected with this problem, but not always coinciding with it, was that of the ill-treatment and torture of prisoners. In the frequent severe reprimands of partisans who stained themselves with these crimes the chief argument was that one must not behave like the Nazi-Fascists. ‘If he is guilty, shoot him! It is not possible to sink to the level of the Nazis’, is how commissar ‘Vanni’ (Giovanni Padoan) reacted to one of the rare cases of torture.132
A GL newspaper replies to a hypothetical partisan who asks why the prisoners are being treated with so much clemency that this is happening in order not to put oneself on the inhuman plane of the enemies.133 Revelli tells of a spy of the Muti brigade, ‘a poor colourless, irresponsible wretch, who has been reduced to the level of the rabble by a school of bullying and cowardice. It will be hard to shoot him! A long interrogation, without harming a hair of his head, to make him understand that we are not like the “blacks”.’ Revelli also tells of a thirteen-year-old, the mascot of the same Muti brigade: ‘He’s pathetic and infuriating. No one must touch him. What he deserves is a good hiding, but I ask them not to hurt a hair of his head. The most I’ve let them do is to shout “Balilla!” and “Camicia sporca!” [“dirty black shirt!”] behind him’. And then, of a woman spy: ‘Don’t hit her, don’t touch her. We’re not Fascists: no tortures, no vulgarity. We’ll shoot her.’134
The Command of the Mario Gordini 28th GAP brigade operating in the Ravenna area recommended that German prisoners be treated ‘according to the laws of war’;135 and a political commissar, who had learned through an Allied mission (a channel of information which made the news all the more galling) about tortures inflicted on a German prisoner, threatened the culprit with the death penalty, with the reminder that such acts ‘we leave exclusively to the barbarity so often demonstrated towards our fellows by the persecutors of our people, holding it up as an example for popular indignation’.136 More pragmatically, another Command explains: ‘One should have no pity for the vile enemy, but one must make sure that the culprits, justly dealt with, do not inspire pity in public opinion.’137
The shortage of equipment and clothing could lead to the stripping of prisoners and the dead, a practice followed by the Fascists as well. On this score Commissar Vanni wrote: ‘None of us has ever claimed that it was right to do such a thing, but to cite the Geneva convention about this is absurd.’138 Commissar Giglioli was extremely harsh in his criticism of Garibaldini after a roundup in the Parma area:
They have acted very badly against the prisoners, who during this period of imprisonment have accumulated a terrible hatred of the partisans, which will now have undoubtedly the gravest repercussions, for these prisoners are now in town and in town a sizable number of partisans have taken refuge. This accumulated hatred is not determined by political differences but by bad treatment, and this bad treatment was only determined by outrages committed against them, by the almost daily beatings and by the material privations that certain partisans imposed only because those men were prisoners. In fact, many of these prisoners did not occupy positions of responsibility and should not have been treated as such and instead unfortunately the most dangerous ones, either as a result of interventions or something else, were not ill-treated like all the others – which has created a very deep abyss between us and them. By this I don’t want to defend these reptiles, but I’m keen to demonstrate that it was neither politic nor human to act in that way, and if there were responsibilities it would have been better to examine them and to take due action at the right time, not least to avoid the formations having to support hundreds of men who were an impediment, and this was demonstrated in the recent roundups that the formations have had to transport these people from one zone to another, subjecting them to harsh sacrifices and hunger, which is justifiable given the gravity of the situation, but if it was right to impose for elements responsible for misdeeds it could not be conceivable for simple prisoners many of whom had been in our hands for months without having committed serious offences.
Thus one would do well to bear in mind for the future that prisoners have to be treated as ‘prisoners and if they are responsible they should be punished at once according to their responsibility, without hesitation and distinction; this will make it possible to instil the seriousness of our movement in the adversary, and will give him the chance to think more deeply before performing his actions against us’.139
I have transcribed this long extract because in it are baldly displayed many of the points that I have been trying to highlight above. And in it there appears a tragic anticipation of the problem that not even the legal post-war purging would be able to solve: namely that of striking in high places and being clement lower down towards those who had not stained themselves with specific crimes. The rank someone held constituted the presumption of guilt, while those who did not take account of this criterion were reproached for their stolid benevolence.140 The length of the period of detention, though indicated in Giglioli’s report, raises another thorny question: how to treat the Fascists who were not captured in combat but arrested in the free zones. This is a problem well known to the rich body of literature on the partisan republics. It could appear particularly acute in the not very extensive territories that were liberated for periods of greater or less duration, and influence relations with the population. There were thus cases of posters put up to explain the reasons for an execution that had just taken place;141 and for similar ends a French newspaper resorted to quotations from Montesquieu and Voltaire to recall that the executors of the sentence were as responsible as the judges who pronounced them.142 There are also records of militiamen being set free because ‘the local old folk had testified to their good conduct; this after a little sermon aimed, as usual, to point out the difference in behaviour between the patriots and the Fascists’.143
The recurrent invitations to desert, or indeed to desert en masse,144 raised the question of what to do with the deserters: enlist them or send them away.145 Both solutions involved risks, intrinsic moreover to the possibility of ‘conversion’ which has already been said to be a distinguishing feature of civil war. The important thing was to verify the sincerity of the conversion, which could not, in principle, be denied even to prisoners. In fact, there were cases of their enrolling as well,146 at times with the superficiality revealed by two militiamen of the Montefiorino zone who went around with a red star sewn onto their black shirts;147 more often with the distrust aroused by the suspicion that at the moment of danger they could not be completely relied on,148 and from the risk that spies might insinuate themselves into their ranks. Never however, Cino and Ciro wrote, would enlisted prisoners ‘hold any rank in the formations’.149 On the other hand, the difference between being captured, especially in the case of mass surrenders, and changing sides, was not always clear-cut, as the suspicious Fascist Commands themselves pointed out.150 ‘Appearing too humane’ with the Alpini, says a document, ‘had dire consequences during the last roundup’; consequently, before enrolling them it is necessary to ‘subject them to a severe test’ treating the ‘waverers’ as prisoners to assign to the auxiliary services.151 This description is probably more realistic than the one which has the Alpini deserters ‘embracing the Garibaldini as brothers’ and large numbers of them asking to be enlisted.152 The 4th Garibaldi Piedmont division
set up an ‘ethico-military training centre’ for deserters, and a group of them complained of the too lengthy period of quarantine which prevented them from ‘being free with their fists’.153 Elsewhere deserters were transformed into workers, under the command of partisans.154 Sometimes there was the fear that desertions by single individuals might provoke roundups, and that mass desertions might bring ‘too close to our formations troops who were certainly better trained and more heavily armed’. In other words, there was the fear, as a dangerous by-product, of a shift in power relations (but it should be mentioned that in this case Mongolian troops were involved).155
The theme of spies has already been encountered several times in this book. All the formations had to be, and were, on the lookout for the presence of spies. Spies could be found everywhere: among prisoners, among deserters, among civilians, among the partisans themselves. The ambiguity of the figure of the spy was transformed into a halo of uncertainty as to their very existence. On the one hand this uncertainty was fed by frequent conspiratorial irresponsibility, and on the other hand it produced widespread and exaggerated suspiciousness and repressive harshness. In the Communist leaders the tragic experiences provoked by spies and the desire for vengeance against this particularly infamous incarnation of the figure of the traitor combined with excessive Third International training in revolutionary vigilance. If highly insidious spies had managed to hide themselves in the leadership of the Comintern and of the monolithic Communist Party, why on earth could the same thing not happen in the improvised Italian partisan bands? A PCI federation wrote that the suppression of spies was part of the ‘concept of our Party’, even if, for fear of reprisals, it was not part of that of National Liberation Front.156 The CLN of Sassuolo, presumably under Communist hegemony, put up a poster which, giving the first names and surnames of spies ‘responsible for having caused our people poverty, hunger, desperation and destruction’ urged: ‘Hand them over to our military tribunals. Eliminate them yourselves.’157
A Civil War Page 91
