A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  The opinion was also expressed that the Nazi-Fascist reprisals fed popular hatred against those who practised them and thus, in this way too, fed the struggle. We shall shortly see that this was not always the case, but that sometimes it well and truly was. Above all among the partisans themselves: ‘we turned nastier after that episode’, recalls a partisan from the Terni area.35

  In Valle Maira the German destruction of San Damiano and Cartignano (August 1944) provoked a bitter reaction in the population and fed the influx of recruits joining the bands.36 ‘The more the danger increases the more anti-German spirit increases’, observed a Veneto parish priest as well.37 Contempt was particularly strong when the Germans and Fascists failed to keep their word, following negotiations, that they would not carry out reprisals.38 Fascist censorship drew attention, in the letters it examined, to the mixture of contempt for German reprisals and of fear of the actions of the partisans that provoked them.39 The same view is expressed in the report by the GL political commissar Giorgio Agosti, which I have cited several times.40 One could by no means be certain what direction popular reaction would take; on the contrary, there was a real fear that it would turn against the partisans, from awareness that the more hazardous actions might, as has been duly written, arouse ‘both enthusiasm and reprobation’.41 For example, a commissar expressed satisfaction at the fact that the Germans had not carried out reprisals – and to avoid them they had refrained from organising resistance in some villages – because they ‘would have brought down on us the hatred and rancour of the population’.42 German threats, says another Garibaldi document, ‘have had repercussions on the morale of the population, which is not always up to understanding the situation’.43 And still worse:

  Following such ruthless reprisal measures one can well imagine the consequences and repercussions on fighting spirit and the spirit of sympathy in the majority of peasant and mountain folk. From indirect news it appears that the mountain folk are chasing the partisans off, threatening (for the time being just threats) to denounce them to the Germans. The peasants have got it into their heads that these massacres happen because we are killing Germans and that it would be better not to kill them. Here in town as well that’s the way people are seeing things.44

  At times the population reproached the partisans for having put them in jeopardy and for not having then been able to defend them.45 It is well-known that this was a central issue in the debate about the creation of the free zones. On the other hand, the lack of reprisals could sometimes induce the populations to look benevolently on the troops engaged in the roundups.46

  But beyond predictions about repercussions that enemy reprisals might provoke in the local populations, repercussions which had however to be taken into the maximum account, the duty not to let oneself be intimidated was powerfully felt. All the human costs – the tragic destiny of the ‘unknown heroes’47 – were to be put on the enemy’s account. This was the point which, in principle, it was urgent to insist on, even within the bosom of the Resistance itself, which did not always accept it: those responsible for the reprisals were the Nazi-Fascists who carried them out, not the partisans who performed the actions that provoked them.

  Eraldo Bassotto, leader of an autonomous band, declared to Benvenuto Santus, a Communist from the Biella area, that he would consider him personally responsible for the reprisals that the Garibaldini’s initiatives might provoke not only against the civilian population but also against the men of his formation.48 The vice-commander and political commissar of the ‘Italia Libera’ brigade operating in the Grappa zone wrote in his memoirs: ‘I didn’t want ill-advised killings to be performed in the zone under my control, which could harm the population (with reprisals) and ourselves (with roundups).’ To prevent this, he even went so far as to stop the Garibaldi patrols from passing through his territory.49 After a German reaction that had atrociously befallen the population, it is a squad leader himself who declares: ‘I do not want to be responsible for so many murders.’50

  The Via Rasella attack in Rome, with the ensuing massacre in the Ardeatine Caves on 24 March 1944, is perhaps the episode that fed this kind of reflection most powerfully. The diary of one of the protagonists of the action, Franco Calamandrei, records immediately after the explosion that ‘some, above all the women’, commented unfavourably (‘just when they were leaving …’); then, when the reprisal had taken place, notes that ‘public opinion is not too favourable towards the action. They don’t see its international political importance, which may be worth the sacrifice.’ Finally, Calamandrei speaks of the discussions about it in the Rome PCI: intensify or hold fire? While initially the tendency seemed to be in favour of intensification, the line in favour of holding fire then prevailed, ‘but only provided that during the pause leaflets are circulated to the population and the Germans, threatening a resumption of terrorism if evacuation has not taken place by a certain date’.51 The firmness of principles and the attention given to the real state of affairs met in the conviction that an historian of the European Resistance has expressed in the following words: ‘Guerilla warfare is less devastating than Verdun, the bombing of Coventry or Hiroshima’.52

  In the course of the struggle in Italy we find a noble expression of the firmness of principles in the words that Leonardo Cocito, kept in jail as a hostage, addressed to one of his cellmates: ‘Whatever you do, don’t abandon the struggle. Act without anxiety. If I am to come out of this, I’ll come out, if I have to die let my fate be accomplished. But the important thing is that you never give in!’53 A similar, though more abstract, dignity we find in the reply that Moscatelli sent to the German Command of Varallo Sesia, which had announced ‘the execution of twenty-five hostages taken from among the civilian population, no distinction being made for sex and age, for every shot fired by the “rebels” ’. Moscatelli replied that such conduct related to ‘the justice of civil peoples, to which the names of those responsible, which are well-known to us, will be transmitted’.54 Giovanni Pesce, after his reply, mentioned earlier, to the Gappist who was questioning him about the probability of enemy reprisals, added: ‘We have all asked ourselves Azzini’s questions, a thousand times, before the fallen, before the murdered, before the sacrificed innocents. They are a proof of honesty, of loyalty towards the hundreds and hundreds of comrades who are already dead, and towards those who are fighting with a weapon in their hands in every corner of Italy.’55

  A Piedmontese woman partisan testified to the attention and concern for civilians: ‘Certain actions had to be limited simply to prevent reprisals being carried out against the population. There was an enormous respect for the population.’56 A GAP commander from the Ravenna area wrote that it would not have been difficult to kill Germans, but ‘are we capable of facing [the enemy’s] reprisal? No! So what should we do?’ This attitude, he is quick to add, ‘is neither fear nor cowardice, but prudence’.57 But it is precisely ‘the physical fear of getting killed’ that is indicated in other documents as being a consequence of not having been sufficiently educated ‘at the magnificent school of Bolshevism’.58

  In order to avoid German reprisals, at a meeting chaired on 4 October 1943 by the commander Sante Danesin, a Garibaldi detachment of the Cecina zone decided to suspend all actions for forty-five days.59 The Command of the 3rd Aliotta Pavese Oltrepò division decided on one occasion to ‘defer offensive activities in order not to provoke roundups which, rumour has it, appear to be imminent’.60 The commander of the Piedmont GL warned that ‘action must not be confused with exhibitionism’ and that one must not, by occupying ‘positions that cannot be held’, expose civilian populations ‘to the harshest reprisals’.61

  The acceptance of the human costs of the struggle generally went hand in hand with the commitment to reduce them to the minimum. It was on how this minimum was to be gauged, which was highly difficult to define, that differences were most marked. In fact it was not always easy to distinguish human concern about the shedding of blood62 from political concerns
about the intensification of the struggle. The distinction was particularly hard when Catholics who were also Christian Democrats were involved. In the diaries of parish priests from the Belluno area there is the recurrent motif of the need to avoid reprisals by limiting actions.63 The vicar forane of central Garfagnana spoke of ‘crude and useless reprisals’.64 The parish priest of Cassolnovo in Lomellina spoke out against partisans who provoked reprisals.65 The bishop of Casale Monferrato, mentioned earlier, also wrote that ‘as a rule the partisans, having struck, fled. The population, who were absolutely innocent, remained and paid.’66

  Here ethico-religious concerns are already shifting in the direction of a political stance. The shift is complete in this appeal by the Tuscan committee of the DC: ‘Verbal effrontery, which would be a sorry repetition of the demagogic arrogance of dying Fascism, and rash and undisciplined actions would only provide a pretext for acts of enemy barbarity against the city and against the population and would be contrary to the useful and necessary war requirements themselves.’67

  The Christian Democrat president of the provincial CLN of Apuania complained that ‘the carrying out of sporadic and inorganic attacks against individual Germans’ had provoked ‘a furious and ferocious reaction immensely superior to the actual damage done to the efficiency of the enemy’.68 One of don Moretti’s directives at the time the Osoppo brigade was created was to take account of the ‘proportionality between the damage done to the enemy and the possible damage suffered by the populations in reprisals’.69

  The Tuscan CLN of 24 June 1944 passed a motion affirming ‘the duty to abstain from private vendettas and reprisals, save the right to react with violence to possible acts of Fascist violence’, and on 30 June the Tuscan committee of the Christian Democrat party, in a manifesto addressed to its followers, paraphrased the text of this, dropping the adjective ‘private’. At a subsequent meeting of the committee on 26 June the DC had, with the backing of the Liberals and Socialists, asked for the cancellation of this word from the motion; but the proposal had not gone through owing to the opposition of the Actionists and Communists.70 In another Christian Democrat document, the aim of the struggle is indicated as being ‘to make our contribution count at the peace table, namely by doing what the Allies expect of us, but always bearing in mind that for ‘us, as Italians … it is no less important to seek not to bring too much harm upon Italy through the Nazi reprisals’.71 These words sound almost like an upended version, but stripped this time of cynicism, of the few thousand dead that, in June 1940, Mussolini wanted to make count at the peace table; and to send the Italians along the old road of reaping the maximum benefit from the sacrifices of others, while minimising one’s own costs.

  This, indeed, is the heart of the polemic about attesismo. In this polemic, in fact, the two principles of the value of life and the values that transcend life clash once again. This clash could neither be avoided nor remedied. Here there reappears the theme of expiation, which is to restore the Italians to the community of suffering peoples. Ferdinando Mautino calls it ‘monstrous wrongheadedness’ not to make a move for fear of reprisals, ‘as if we really imagined we could demonstrate that we were enemies of the Germans without facing their wrath, without undergoing the atrocities that all their enemies had undergone’.72 Fratelli d’Italia, the newspaper of the Veneto CLN described as ‘cowardly and tremulous souls’ those who ‘find it convenient to argue in favour of the need for a prudent and dishonourable inertia’.73 A railway-workers’ newspaper repeated: ‘Either we act or we don’t delude ourselves that others will act for us.’74

  In the latter maxim, stated at that time and in that place, the word ‘we’ could acquire a dual meaning: ‘we Italians’ and ‘we the working class’. It was this second meaning – rarely stated explicitly, in fact more often than not denied75 – that stoked the suspicions and fears with which the fence-sitting attitudes of the conservative wing of the anti-Fascists were nourished. But both meanings contained a powerful wish for autonomous redemption, the desire to demonstrate that ‘we are not a nation of cowards and loafers, nor do we have the souls of lackeys’.76 And this not only had to serve to belie a view widely held by the Allies, but aimed also at countering Fascist claims about the cowardice of the Italian people and getting matters straight over the charges that the Fascists, rightly from their point of view, levelled at the folk who ‘are sitting pretty getting by somehow in town’, at those who are ‘behind the blinds waiting on events’.77

  Included in the condemnation of waiting on events (attesismo) were those who, though capable of offering active participation, preferred to take refuge in Switzerland. In her diary Ada Gobetti expressed disappointment in those who chose this path;78 and Moscatelli was indignant at ‘the foolish lamentations of irresponsible individuals who had crossed the border into Switzerland’ after the fall of the Ossola Republic, contrasting them with everything that ‘we have done, with our wretchedness, with our bare feet, with the few weapons at our disposal, with our dead, with our great determination to demonstrate that Italians know how to fight and die for liberty’.79

  The dual outcome of the reprisals – of terrorising and thereby discouraging action, and of provoking reaction – must be linked to the fact that they also involved the ‘territoriali’, the ‘true extremists of moderation’, ‘the naturally prudent’, those who forwent the joy of fighting for justice and liberty, contenting themselves instead with enjoying the benefits that had been won by others.80 An essential channel of this involvement was the taking of hostages, one of the many barbarous practices reintroduced by Nazi-Fascist warfare.

  Already in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, to prevent attacks on troop trains in occupied territory, the Prussians had forced distinguished French citizens to ride in them.81 An international agreement entered into in Tokyo in 1934 had attempted to give a status also to hostages: when, ‘in exceptional circumstances’, a state deemed it indispensable to take hostages, ‘they must not, under any circumstances, be subject to interrogation or corporal punishment’.82 But as early as 12 September 1940 the German Command in France decreed: ‘The hostages are locals whose lives guarantee the proper attitude of the population. Their fate is in the hands of their fellow villagers’.83

  On 21 August 1941 General Schaumburg decreed that all French people arrested by the German or French authorities were to be considered hostages.84 On 16 September of the same year, Field Marshal Keitel expounded the principle that Communists were whatever the case to be considered responsible for the attacks: ‘It is only by this method, which has been used successfully in the history of the extension of the power of great nations, that one can re-establish order’.85

  In the war that the Nazi-Fascists waged in Italy against the resistenti, all prisoners were considered hostages subject to reprisals, unless one preferred to use them for exchanges or to try to save one’s skin on the final day. But not just this: not only the relatives of the resistenti, but all the civilian populations became potentially hostages in the hands of the occupiers. There was thus an expansion of the category of hostage that lent itself to aberrant inversions when it came to attributing responsibility. Thus in an article L’Osservatore Romano condemned both the capturing of hostages that involved civilians and the increasing number of attacks on estranei (outsiders, foreigners), and in its comment on the Ardeatine Caves called the partisans ‘irresponsible’ because they had provoked the killing by ‘those responsible’ of ‘three hundred and twenty people sacrificed for the culprits who had fled arrest’.86

  The journey from the First to the Second World War along the sorry highway of reprisals, counter-reprisals and hostages was long. In 1916 Maurice Barrès had called the Zeppelin raids on Paris ‘horribles futilités’, and had denied the usefulness of the reprisal bombing of Essen that had been requested.87 In 1942 a French underground paper wrote that the unexpected generosity of the Germans who had not shot the 3,000 French prisoners, or thereabouts, captured at Bir Hacheim (outlaws, according to th
e Armistice), assured itself that if they had done so, ‘The English will immediately shoot an equal number of Krauts’.88 Another underground paper warned the rulers of Vichy who were having the relatives of those who were siding with the Algiers government arrested: ‘But we still need charitably to remind these gentlemen that they also have a family, and it is still the case that we will be victorious’.89

  In the Italian Resistance, numerous and authoritative stances were taken in favour of counter-reprisals, naturally against militant Fascists and German soldiers, not certainly against the local populations, however fence-sitting, absentee or opportunist they might have been. We have already recalled the February 1944 ‘Directives for the Armed Struggle’ of the military Command for Northern Italy. In the instructions of 14 July of the same year, ‘as part of their military activity’, the CVL General Command explicitly provided for the capture, by the formations, of hostages ‘to be sought among the German military and civilian authorities, and treasonous Fascist officers and functionaries’. The hostages – and Ferruccio Parri himself urged Tancredi Galimberti to take them (‘We can’t avoid it’) – were to be treated as prisoners of war. Authorisation was given to proceed against them in reprisal for the shooting of civilians, prisoners and the wounded, and for the torturing and maltreatment of arrested patriots. It was also explained that, ‘In no case may the measures consist of actions that are repugnant to the loyalty of those fighting valorously for the liberation of the patria.’90 The Communist from the North, Francesco, was clearly referring to this directive when, on 13 December 1944, he communicated to party headquarters in Rome that the Command of the CVL had permitted the ‘widespread use of partisan reprisals in response to Fascist and German atrocities’.91