A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  From October 1943 L’Italia Libera, organ of the Action Party, had, on the other hand, declared: ‘The Italian people must not fear reprisals. One reprisal leads to another, and the weapon of intimidation rebounds on those who use it.’92 ‘We shall respond to terror with terror’ was Giovanni Pesce’s reaction to the execution of Ateo Garemi in Turin.93 Another Gappist has written, moreover, that the Fascist reprisals immediately gave birth to the partisans’ desire for counter-reprisals, and that these – as we have already noted – were not always followed by a recrudescence of Nazi-Fascist actions, while in the local populations satisfaction at the performance of acts of justice prevailed over fear of their possible consequences.94 For ‘every young patriot killed ten Fascists die!’ reads a leaflet announcing the slaughter of five young men on 22 March 1944.95

  On 10 August, in view of the ‘savage crimes’ that the Nazi-Fascists were committing in Milan – torturing, shooting and abandoning the corpses in the squares – the Lombardy delegation of the Garibaldi brigade General Command issued this order to the formations under its jurisdiction:

  1. Shoot the Nazi-Fascist prisoners at present in your possession (with the exception of those hostages for whom special exchange negotiations have already begun);

  2. Such executions are to be communicated and popularised, indicating that they are carried out in reprisal for the Milan massacres;

  3. If such massacres are repeated in Milan or in other cities, mass executions of Nazi-Fascist prisoners will have to be carried out immediately.96

  On 27 September 1944 the CLN for Piedmont announced in one of its manifestos: ‘We shall respond to persecutions with persecutions, to reprisals with reprisals. For every patriot killed five Nazi-Fascists will die; for every village set fire to fifty traitors will be shot.’97

  At a meeting in late October 1944 the zone Command of the province of Belluno established, with the approval of the CLN representative, that one was to ‘respond to terror with terror, completing the guerrilla actions with a rich dose of reprisals, aimed at making it clear that the movement was neither dead nor emasculated’.98 The Vicenza CLN manifesto, referred to earlier, which rejected the accusation that some prisoners had requested the bombing of the city by radio, added that if the Fascists, under cover of that lie, were to kill the patriots in their hands, the GAPs would immediately execute ‘those directly and indirectly responsible who are well-known to us’.99 Towards the end of 1944 the Garibaldi delegation for Lombardy, faced with the fact that in Milan the Fascists, ‘to avoid our reprisals’, were rounding up and murdering ‘our comrades’ during the night and ‘abandoning them along the roadside’, decreed: ‘No pity and no more crowding them into concentration camps.’100

  These threats were not always followed up; but as the struggle grew more bitter, a voice like Elio Vittorini’s resounded like a voice in the wilderness. Commemorating Eugenio Curiel, killed by Fascists in Milan on 24 February 1945, he wrote: ‘He knew that taking vengeance and carrying out reprisals may be necessary for those who have nothing before them; it may be necessary for the Fascists, but not for us who have much before us. We need something different: to fight for this much.’101

  In some very rare cases the intensification of the struggle could lead even the partisans to threaten to carry out reprisals on the families of Fascists.102 At other times it was the partisan Commands themselves that avoided the reoccupation of villages that had for some time been under the Nazi-Fascists, in order to avoid ‘reprisals by foolhardy individuals against those who had compromised themselves with the enemy’.103 In cases like this, it was really more a question of vendetta than reprisal.

  On 8 February 1945 the CLNAI sent its delegation in Switzerland, urging them to pass it on to the Rome government, a sorrowful appeal to ask for ‘a ruthless action of exemplary reprisal’ as the ‘sole defence perceivable against inevitable future explosions of the impotent rage of the crumbling regime’. In this document the major political organ of the Resistance put the government on its guard against the ‘deleterious influence’ that ‘the total lack observed so far of any gesture of active solidarity with the victims’ had on the combattenti della libertà.104

  In the absence of the Rome government, the partisans had to deal with the spiral of reprisal and counter-reprisal as well. A case in point is a document relating to the Cuneo area, which reads:

  In the war that the patriots of the partisan formations are waging enemy reprisals against the population are almost inevitable. It is up to us to intervene in the most suitable way in defence of the interests of the inhabitants threatened by the Nazi-Fascist reprisals. If the Nazi-Fascists burn down the houses of the peasants we shall have to burn down the houses of the Fascist chiefs, of the Fascists; if they kill the peaceful inhabitants of villages in reprisal we shall have to take to counter-reprisals against Fascists, Germans, and their families as well. Nazi-Fascist terror needs to be countered by patriotic terror.105

  Exactly a year earlier, two German officers had been shot after being captured in the 27 December 1943 attack on Mondovì airport, conducted by almost all the Cuneo area formations under the command of two bovesani officers, i.e. regular officers.106 In the autonomous division De Vitis, a Fascist lieutenant, was shot in reprisal for the killing of a partisan.107 A long series of reprisals and counter-reprisals has been reconstructed for the Biella area.108 A list of counter-reprisals that were carried out is contained in a letter of the Garibaldi Command delegation for Lombardy. These include thirty shootings (two against one) in response to the Piazzale Loreto massacre of 10 August 1944. If the Nazi-Fascists insisted, the document stressed, the proportion, in the counter-reprisals, would be raised to three against one.109 A few days later, on 15 October, a poster, ‘Al popolo di Milano! A tutti lombardi!’, issued by the same delegation, gave news of this reprisal and added that the slaughter of civilians in the Pavia area had been answered with the shooting of eight prisoners, and the slaughter of fifteen patriots captured in the province of Varese with the shooting of forty-five Nazi-Fascists: ‘The Garibaldini are waging war as soldiers of liberty, but they know how to be inexorable, and executioners!’110 Against the shooting of two patriots in Varzi the Command of the 3rd Lombardia Aliotta division ordered that each of the brigades under it proceed to the killing of the same number of militiamen who were their prisoners.111 In response to the shooting of five partisans captured and tortured by the Germans in a square of the village of Ivestria, the Baltera brigade shot twenty SS men kept as hostages.112 On 8 October 1944 L’Unità reported the shooting of thirty-five prisoners in response to the murder of seven patriots.113

  Particularly harsh was the reprisal for the killing of Duccio Galimberti, commander of the Piedmontese GL formations. On 12 December 1944 the regional military Command issued the following order ‘to all the dependent formations’: ‘Shoot 50 bandits of the Black Brigades to avenge the death of commander Tancredi Galimberti.’114

  When, between 28 and 29 April 1945, the Germans who were seeking to push their way through eastward massacred partisans and civilians in the zone of Santhià, in reprisal the partisans executed an equal number of Fascist prisoners in Vercelli.115 In answer to another massacre of civilians carried out in extremis by German and Italian SS men, on 2 May 1945 at Avasinis, Garibaldini and Osoppo partisans shot all the members of the unit who did not manage to escape capture.116

  This list, in which the victims are all enemy combatants and not civilian populations, is by no means complete. It should nevertheless be set alongside that of the reprisals and acts of violence which were avoided out of fear of partisan counter-reprisals. This list is far more difficult to compile, because what remains in terms of documentation is scant and unreliable, and the Fascist sources, which do not fail to denounce the attesismo of the population, are wary about levelling a similar and far graver accusation at their own armed forces (the same applies a fortiori for the Germans). Only one piece of evidence remains of Nazi-Fascist reprisals that were expected and
did not come about. On one occasion the threat of a reprisal averted the shooting of some hostages.117 A survivor from the death camps remembers a welcome ad hoc announcement of this by Radio London.118

  5. URBAN GUERRILLA WARFARE AND THE GAPS

  A Fascist mailman was repeatedly warned that he could do the rounds of the town, but must do so without wearing the Fascist uniform. Having continued to wear it, he was killed by partisans, ‘because it weren’t just the repubblichini. The partisans did them there reprisals here too, understand?’1

  The dividing-line between counter-reprisal, reprisal and autonomous initiatives was not in fact easily definable, even within a position that appeared, all things considered, as a response to the violence of others. ‘To the arrogance of Nazism that presumes to reduce people to servitude with violence and terror we must respond with violence and terror’, declared the Communist Party’s September 1943 appeal to the Italian people, cited earlier.2

  The words terrore and terrorismo are used indiscriminately in the Resistance sources, uninhibitedly and without the echoes triggered today by the events that have occurred in Italy and internationally in the last two decades. The Resistance occurred in a situation that had seen the demise of the Romantic and anarchic tradition of the terrorist attack as an individual and exemplary act (propaganda of the deed) and which had simultaneously witnessed the outbreak of mass terror, to the point of genocide. In this context, Resistance terrorismo should not be confused with terrore, and appears as the extreme point of armed reaction to Nazi-Fascism, with motivations and implications as distant from those of the nineteenth-century assailants as from those of the terrorists of the 1970s and 80s. It is symptomatic that those who, like the Trotskyists – and, in Italy, also the bordighisti – regarded themselves as orthodox interpreters of the anti-anarchic Marxist tradition, took clear stances against any action that smacked of individualistic terrorism. The French Trotskyists, who were a good deal more authoritative than their Italian counterparts, published an article eloquently entitled ‘Terrorism or mass organization?’. The answer was obviously all in favour of mass organised violence, not least because, if used against soldiers, ‘the terrorist act widened the gap between French workers and German soldiers’, and, if used against officers, the latter were easily replaceable, as for that matter were Laval and Déat. The bordighisti expressed similar concepts in an article that appeared in their newspaper, entitled ‘Individual and class violence’.3 Francesco Scotti, one of the first organisers of partisans and Gappists in Italy, has testified that some comrades ‘maintained that it was not right to unleash individual terror which was contrary to Marxist-Leninist principles’, and added: ‘These and other objections had already had to be overcome in France in order to establish the Franc-Tireurs Partisans.’4

  During the ventennio Italian anti-Fascism had also had to reckon with the problem of terrorism. The Communists had accused the activism of GL of reproducing the spectacular but sterile, or even harmful and counterrevolutionary, nineteenth-century and petit-bourgeois terrorism.5 Riccardo Bauer and Ernesto Rossi had recognised a revolutionary character in their actions, but had firmly excluded the terroristic one, given the respect, which they imposed on themselves, ‘for the elementary principles of humanity and morality’.6 Many years later, Ferruccio Parri recalled that in GL circles he was against terrorism because he thought that Fascism would collapse on its own – but that now he was no longer convinced that a violent action might not have speeded things up.7 These swings of opinion merit attention. Pietro Secchia pointed out again that, if individual action was not sufficient, neither was mass action alone. He too had at one time urged action ‘against things and persons’.8

  In the practice of urban terrorism – of which the GAPs were the principal instrument – some of the thorniest political and ethical problems of the Resistance struggle come to light. The fact that the GAPs were very largely Communist in initiative and composition9 makes the problem no easier; it only enriches it with a class and ideological component. Obviously, no mention was made of this component in the documents of the CVL General Command. But the Command preferred to speak of ‘special action groups’ ‘to indicate in general terms formations like the GAPs, namely formations of special action groups of just a few men whose task it is to carry out terrorist actions against enemies and traitors, actions of sabotage against the enemy’s communication channels and depots, etc.’10

  A carefully argued account of the reasons why, in the last months of 1943, terrorism became ‘feasible, even on a wide scale’, was made by Leo Valiani, who vindicated the rightness of this choice not only for the Communists, but for ‘all democratic parties’, spoke admiringly of ‘one of our [the Action Party’s] terrorists’, Pasqualino from Bergamo, and underlined that the attack on the federale (provincial party secretary) of Milan, Aldo Resega, and the exchange of shots at his funeral, ‘galvanised the atmosphere of the Lombard metropolis’. According to Valiani, ‘militant anti-Fascism decided to run this risk’ – that is, the risk of reprisals and the effects of these on the population, and also

  the more hidden and at the same time profound risk that every civil war (and this was very much the case in the struggle against the Fascists) brings with it the danger of people’s souls becoming ferocious, which after the victory could rebound, as a habit of ‘taking the law into one’s own hands’, even against the democratic government itself that had come to power.11

  A terrorism reminiscent of Vittorini’s ‘abstract furies’12 appears in the article that Avanti! published as a comment on the Salerno ‘turning-point’, recalling that, from its order of the day of 9 February, the Socialist Party had pointed ‘the way which was historically illuminated by the French precedents of the September and Maratian terror, when in order to eliminate the external enemy it was necessary first to eliminate the internal one, and of the Paris Commune’.13

  In the passage referred to above, Leo Valiani took care to emphasise that ‘terrorism, in the city, was not directed against all the enemy soldiers indiscriminately, but only against those who were assigned to duties of policing, repression, reprisal’. By and large this tallies with the truth, even if the distinction was not always easy to make. However, urban terrorism did not take truculent appeals like the following literally: ‘The repubblichini Fascists are no longer men, they are ferocious animals from which one has to defend oneself. They must surrender unconditionally or be killed for legitimate defence. If you can do nothing else throw them down the stairs or out of the windows.’14

  What was involved rather were actions aimed ad personam; and this policy on the one hand excluded indiscriminate killings, and on the other made the Gappist into a combatant of a highly peculiar kind.

  Dante Livio Bianco spoke of ‘the elimination of particularly dangerous and loathsome enemies (as in the case of Cumar, a boxer who had been the official torturer of the Fascist federation of Cuneo)’.15 In Florence a GAP entered the home of the ‘Fascist Nocentini Nello, spy, provocateur and right-hand man of Mario Carità’, killed the bodyguard Pecchioli, ‘a Fascist and ex-wrestler’, and Nocentini’s son, both ‘Fascist SS men’, but missed the main target.16 L’Unità often published news with headlines such as ‘Fascist Traitors Executed’, ‘Popular Justice Knows how to Shoot Traitors’, and the like. In the French underground press announcements of this kind were highly frequent and detailed, and regarded the execution of spies, traitors, Gestapo agents, and particularly detested militiamen.17

  There were recurrent exhortations not to commit errors in identifying the persons to be punished. In a hotbed like Trieste, the PCI federal committee enjoined:

  When you strike, strike in such a way as to demonstrate our objectivity, seriousness and sense of political justice; only thus will we have the solidarity and approval of the population of the area in which we are operating, only thus will we show that we are … implacable, against the enemies of the people and of liberty, but at the same time upright and honest and above all revolutio
nary combatants, as Communists have always shown themselves to be and still do.

  This document immediately listed first those to whom one should not abandon ‘the tactic of the foibe’:

  Fascists responsible for actions against the population, ex-leaders and holders of positions of responsibility in the Fascist regime who have shown themselves to be particularly reactionary; leaders and holders of positions of responsibility of the present republican Fascism, of the government of Mussolini, who has sold himself, members of the republican militia and of the republican National Guard; open, determined and active collaborators of the Germans, spies et cetera, et cetera.18

  A meticulous list like this distances itself from the merely symbolic violence that strikes a human being, depersonalising him, only insofar as it sees incarnated in him something that transcends him. It is inspired rather by a violence that wishes to set an example only insofar as it strikes individuals deserving punishment, however broad – ‘et cetera, et cetera’ – the area of enemies punishable with this summary and radical procedure may be. The commander of the Cascione division is keen to offer this assurance: ‘Up to now although we have taken action against a fair number of adversaries, we do not appear to have executed innocent people, and I do not deny that, given the situation, this too might just, by way of exception, occur, however much we try to do what is possible to avoid errors of that kind.’19

  There appears to be not a shadow of doubt that ‘patriotic terror’ had deleterious effects on enemy morale. When in February 1944 the Germans organised an auxiliary police force in Bologna, the GAPs were initially ordered not to disturb them, in view of the fact that ‘immature youngsters’ had enrolled ‘for the sole purpose of dodging the compulsory draft and not fighting the German war’. But when those policemen began to take part in anti-partisan repression, in five days the GAPs executed seventeen policemen, the result being that, out of 500, 150 seem to have deserted, while others actually went up into the mountains to join the partisans.20 A great deal of fear was inspired, and at times it seemed that what was invoked by the Garibaldi brigade newspaper had come to pass: ‘The third front must create for the Nazi-Fascists an atmosphere of hatred and terror; these criminals must no longer feel safe and sound anywhere; wherever they are they must feel hated and despised, wherever they are they must see enemies, wherever they are an armed hand striking them.’21