A Friuli document asserted that the elimination of spies was more important than acts of sabotage;158 and an Emilian one announced still more drastically:
When a spy is reported we must act with inflexibility, without sentimental weakness which could jeopardise the life of the unit. Even when in doubt we must eliminate the spy for the supreme reason of our safety. Those of us who are captured are shot and therefore we can do no differently with the active Fascist elements and those who aid them. Another vital consideration is that the execution of two or three traitors will bring terror among those who may be tempted to act as spies.159
Before the change in attitude of the population of a valley, from being favourable to being hostile to the partisans, a Garibaldi command became convinced that ‘our only form of defence might be the elimination of spies and collaborators, in a word of the persons who are terrorising the population; this elimination will have to be ruthless’.160 But in relations with the population the treatment given to spies or those presumed to be so could have the opposite results. Some Veneto parish priests’ diaries testify to this,161 while the report of an Emilian commissar describes an oscillation of opinions: ‘As for the elimination of spies, some strata of the population had shown a certain disapproval more for sentimental reasons than anything else; after the roundup and the criminal conduct of spies against the villages and populations who had sympathised with the partisans’ movement, these people have changed their minds.’162
The writer of this report would probably have put down to ‘sentimental reasons’ the behaviour of those three women from the Garfagnana who, finding a piece of paper with the names of three Fascist spies to be executed, went to tip off the threatened men.163
The following testimony from Umbria appeals explicitly to criteria of summary popular justice: ‘Especially the spies, we’ve eliminated all of them. All of them. All the spies who we knew had spied, we looked for them even at the cost of spending entire nights walking.’164
A young intellectual subtly questioned himself about the action he was performing to identify a spy marked out for elimination. He feels ‘like a fisherman tightening the net around an unwitting fish’, and goes about gathering evidence ‘without anger and without compassion, without any desire to lose him or to save him, only trying to get at the truth’. All the same, this is enough to burden him with his share of ‘responsibility for a human life and for the grief of the relatives who will remain’.165
The dilemma between absolutely necessary and excessive violence appears particularly dramatically in the treatment to be given to spies or those alleged to be so. We shall encounter this problem again shortly, when we discuss the activity of the GAPs, whose task it often was to eliminate spies. But first we need to turn our attention to another crucial aspect of the problematic question of violence: reprisals – though not without having first recalled, after so many examples of decisions to kill, the abolition of the death penalty decreed by the government of a partisan republic.166
4. REPRISALS AND COUNTER-REPRISALS
For twenty-five centuries responsibility has been individual and has to be established by impartial judges. For twenty-five centuries punishment has no longer been conceived of as an act of vengeance, except in criminal associations. Well, that lot managed to do worse than the law of retaliation.
This is how a poster addressed to ‘men and women of Padua’ puts things in response to the reprisal killing of Flavio Buonasera and others.1
Ferruccio Parri wrote that ‘clamorous events’ like the Via Rasella attack in Rome, which was followed by the Ardeatine Caves reprisal, ‘are born of a political vision, but embrace an unsolved and possibly insoluble problem of responsibility’.2 It is the link between action, collective responsibility and individual responsibility which emerges in the reprisal and makes it, apart from the horror it arouses, a fact bristling with implications that are clear from its long and complex presence in history.
The distinction between the responsibility of the individual and the responsibility of the group of which he is a part was limpidly made by the Roman jurist Eneo Domizio Ulpian: ‘Si quid universitati debetur, nec quod debet universitas singuli debent’ (‘If something is due from the community, it does not follow that the individuals owe what the community owes’). A medieval jurist, Godofredo da Trani, had applied this maxim, which was born in the sphere of civil law, to the very theme of reprisals: ‘Represaliis in singulos cives alicuius civitatis non dari ob sponsionem et debitum ipsius civitatis’3 (‘Reprisals against single citizens of a certain city must not be meted out because of the wager and debt of that same city’).
In the medieval Comuni, the powerful identification between civis and civitas led, moreover, to the legitimisation of the right of reprisal as a relationship between individuals, disciplined by the community. A citizen who had been wronged by a foreigner was, in other words, recognised as having the right to exercise reprisal on a fellow citizen of the perpetrator of the wrong, though it was not legitimate to go so far as to resort to violence against persons. The Comune simply guaranteed the exercise of this right. It was the modern state that attributed to itself alone the right to carry out reprisals, gradually circumscribing, however, the possibilities and ways of exercising it.4 Persons subjected to reprisal, wrote a late-nineteenth-century jurist, were to be ‘treated gently’.5
War by its very nature has always constituted the most drastic denial of these civil principles. In war the bond linking civis to civitas is considered so obvious and absolute as to legitimise the citizen’s right, for the debitum of civitas, to kill and be killed. Rousseau sought to get around this problem by claiming, in the very sphere of his classical ideal of the soldier-citizen, that war is not a relation ‘between man and man, but between State and State … Furthermore each State can have for enemies only other States, and not men; for between things disparate in nature there can be no real relation.’6
In fact the regulation and, within certain limits, the humanisation of war had led to the cives, who were also soldiers, being distinguished from everyone else, the result being that the extreme consequences of membership of the civitas was applied only to the former. But precisely for this reason the practice of reprisals – whether exercised against captured enemy combatants or, still more so, against civilians – was a harrowing, regressive fact. What, in fact, was questioned once again, on the most pressing of terrains, was that distinction between public and private, between the collective and the individual, which had relegated the doctrine of reprisals, seen as a ‘sort of imperfect war’,7 into the sphere of international law, where the only subjects, active or passive, are states. It is no accident that reprisals against colonial peoples, whose members were not accorded the dignity of civitas, let alone that of citizenship, were found less shocking than the German reprisal against a French village, where some francs-tireurs had hidden in 1870.8
The historical memory of the connection between reprisal and the Germanic feud probably acted in the Nazis as an incentive to practise it and, in those who endured it, as proof of ineradicable Teutonic barbarity. It seems that the Germans exercised the first reprisal of the Second World War near Warsaw, on 26 December 1939, with the shooting of 107 Polish citizens.9 In Italy the first episode seems to have been that of Rionero in Vulture, where the Germans killed sixteen civilians in reprisal against the killing of an Italian paratrooper who had gone over to their side.10
The Germans gave the word ‘reprisal’ an extremely wide meaning. They called the V1s and V2s launched against London in the last year of the war Vergeltungswaffen (reprisal weapons). Reprisal in fact was no longer an ‘imperfect war’, but the consummation of total war, which was seen as a gigantic reprisal against the forces of evil that wished to annihilate the Third Reich. Ernst Nolte would still be thinking along these lines when he interpreted the horrors of Nazism as an ‘excessive response’ to Bolshevism. The distinction between the collective and the individual was utterly extraneous to this vision
of things: the great European civil war, consequently, was not lived as something different from the war between states, even if it was interwoven with it, but as a frightening reshuffling and polluting of relations and distinctions between the state and society.
It has to be added, however, that in a perverse form reprisals evoke one of the noblest principles of collective action, that of solidarity. Max Weber places the few lines he devotes to reprisals under the heading: ‘The imputation of social action: representation and mutual responsibility’.11 The distinction between representation, where the action of the representatives is imputed to those represented, who remain distinct from them, and solidarity, where ‘certain kinds of action of each participant may be imputed to all others’ inevitably takes reprisals into the sphere of solidarity, which is all the more present the more ‘closed’ the relations are (Weber actually cites war as an example), and the more the social relationship rests on ‘various types of affectual, emotional or traditional bases’.12 It is no accident that those, like Otto Brunner, who theorise the medieval constitutional model as ‘authentically stable because founded on a rigorously organic– solidaristic perspective’ assign a place of honour to the feud as ‘a mechanism of defence and of protection of rights’.13 Reprisal, by contrast, appears to our consciences as setting in dramatic collision the moral autonomy of the individual and his sense of belonging, in the sense of solidarity with the other members of the community of which he is a part. Individual conscience finds itself having to reckon with a network of relations which are indeed interpersonal but which somehow transcend it, so that it sees coming down on its head, contorted and brutal, the consequences of relations and principles in which it had put its trust and from which it had sought support. Perhaps the extensive use of the words ‘martyrs’ and ‘martyrdom’, even for those who were only ‘victims’ of the reprisals,14 can be ascribed to the more or less consciously felt desire to bring under the category of testimony also those acts of violence and suffering endured (if we can speak in such terms) ‘objectively’. So frightening is this objectivity that one writer who has sought to get to the heart of it has ended up, in the case of the Marzabotto massacre, going beyond the ‘rational’ concept of reprisal to speak of a ‘caste’ crime. At the root of this crime are metaphysical motivations of a kind that, strictly speaking, we ought to refer to in terms not of war crimes but of crimes ‘occasioned by war’.15
If on the one hand reprisals drive terrorised individuals to seek individual safety, on the other hand they ultimately exalt that very sense of solidarity and co-responsibility that, by striking at its foundations, they had wished to undermine. Hence their essential failure. ‘Humble and defenceless folk who tremble like a leaf, but react splendidly’ were not accounted for in the plan for reprisals.16
The passage from Weber cited above concludes by recalling that a reprisal may be seen as ‘vengeance’ or as an ‘instrument of guarantee’. Germans and Fascists used it in both senses: the ruthlessness of the vengeance was intended to increase the effectiveness of the guarantee. In both cases the unequal value attributed to human life constituted an essential element. In Poland and Yugoslavia the ratio between the German soldiers killed and people shot in reprisals, belonging to the inferior race of Slavs, and what is more Communists, was of the order of 1-to-100.17 In Italy, as for that matter in Western Europe as a whole, the ratio was lower (for the Via Rasella attack it was 1-to-10). But it could greatly increase in the case of indiscriminate massacres of entire villages, as at Marzabotto, and in France at Oradour-sur-Glane. ‘The life of a German is worth that of fifty Italians’, said a Nazi officer. The reply he got from a parish priest of the Belluno area is valid, whatever the proportion adopted: ‘That is not true, an Italian is a man like yourselves, perhaps more human than you.’18
The RSI Fascists did everything possible to belie this greater humanity accredited to the Italians, when, starting with the Ferrara massacre, mentioned earlier, they embarked on the road of reprisals, vying with the Germans – in the wake, it must be said, of what the Royal Army had done in the Balkans and of what had been provided for by the war laws of 1938, referred to elsewhere. Reprisals against the relatives of deserters were decreed by the provisions of both the German and the Italian authorities.19
The stances taken by the resistenti to the Nazi-Fascist reprisals range from partisan counter-reprisals, through the positions of those who, while aware of the possibility of reprisals, did not intend to let themselves be discouraged from the struggle by this possibility, to a powerful urge, at the other extreme, to wait on events in the name of the need to spare human lives. Naturally, the focal point of disagreement did not lie in reprobation of the inhuman Nazi-Fascist vengeance, but in whether one agreed or denied that the ‘instrument of guarantee’ really worked in the enemy’s favour. The point was that to bow before the reprisals might be considered an implicit recognition of the enemy’s right to practise them. The enemy was indeed covered, in this barbarous practice too, by that patina of legality which the exercise of a state power, even the most ruthless, is always able to invoke – a legality, by contrast, not enjoyed by the bands of ‘outlaws’.
In one of its documents of February 1944, the military Command for Northern Italy outlined how one was to behave in this sphere, claiming that ‘causes for reprisals’ should be ‘avoided or limited whenever possible’. But it added that ‘concern about reprisals must not constitute an insuperable impediment to action and still less so be a mask for incapacity and unwillingness to act’. The document reiterated the condemnation of ‘useless cruelties’ and the need never to sink to the level of the enemy. It consequently sought to discipline counter-reprisals too, stipulating that ‘if [the enemy’s] cowardly ferocity demands reprisals only the chiefs have the right to order them’.20
From the very first weeks, the enjoinder not to fear reprisals is current in the Communist and Actionist documents and press. Their meaning can be summed up by borrowing these words from France d’abord: ‘The Nazi terror is operative only for those who accept it.’21 In the GL version: ‘The force of the enemy exists because we fear it, not because it is real.’22
These drastic affirmations of principle were argued in various ways. Above all it was said that the reprisals bespoke not so much the force as the weakness of the enemy, against whom ultimately they could only rebound. ‘Terror is nothing more than the cry of the savage who in his heart of hearts is weak and frightened’, says the document just cited. The Gappist Giovanni Pesce wrote of the massacre perpetrated by the Fascists in Piazzale Loreto on 10 August 1944: ‘The enemy realises that the weapon of terror is backfiring on him. We must insist.’23 And on the occasion of attacks organised by him:
Reprisals? – he replies to a Gappist who has broached the question with him – Yes, and more and more ferocious. That’s why we must constantly keep our hands at [the enemy’s] throat … Not let ourselves be intimidated by the reprisals. It’s the only way to keep our forces effective and to let the enemy know how useless his ferocity is.24
A Garibaldi Command repeated ‘the necessity to attack the enemy and inflict losses on him without worrying about reprisals on the population, reprisals which ultimately always rebound on the enemy himself’.25 In fact, if the Fascists were not attacked, a protagonist was to write, ‘they scrupulously performed their canine duty … on the presumption that they had no final reckoning to fear’.26
‘With action the weapon of terrorism is snapped’; ‘Against the vile Nazis the audacious use of force is always the best weapon’: these are notes struck over and over again by L’Unità,27 widening out into still others: ‘The sooner we chase the brown pest out of Italy, the fewer victims he will be able to slaughter, and the less ruin he will bring upon us.’28
And in fact the Fascists and Germans did not always carry out reprisals, whether from the impossibility of doing so or from calculation. The above quotations, and the many others like them, should therefore be seen not as mere voluntaristic
exhortations. Reality, at least partly, bore them out. ‘The decrees are not obeyed and the German authorities don’t insist’, wrote a parish priest from the Belluno area.29 Curious confirmation is given by a German anti-aircraft Flakkorps unit that had gone over to the partisans of the Costrignano brigade without reprisals being visited on its families. It addressed its ‘dear Italian comrades’, urging them not to fear reprisals, given that the Germans were incapable of carrying them out.30
‘The groups of partisans, the GAPs, disintegrate if they don’t act’.31 ‘Down in the valley there was a military delegation which gradually died of exhaustion from having to wait so long for the day of struggle.’32
This theme, which here we find formulated at the beginning of the struggle as an incitement and at the end as a statement of fact, was another of the arguments used to overcome fear of reprisals. Ermanno Gorrieri, always so careful to steer as clear as he could of the crueller aspects of the struggle, drew from the experience of a band from Sassuolo, which had successfully conducted an attack on the GNR barracks of Pavullo, the moral that it was indeed successful actions that made formations grow.33 The examples of Yugoslavia, of the USSR, and of France were often invoked on this score.34
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