A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  When, in his speech to the Italians pronounced from the Campidoglio on 24 June 1943, Gentile had sought to champion a form of national unity in the form of Fascism, a newspaper of new generation anti-Fascists had commented in language which, though archaic, hit the nail on the head: ‘He scorns us only because he is sufficiently able at leading innocents, namely the young and the masses further down the path of vice rather than that of virtue.’58

  Now, in the course of the civil war, the frontier between ‘vice’ and ‘virtue’ was garrisoned, on both sides, with arms; and ‘national unity’ could only be proposed either wholly from one side or wholly from the other side of that frontier. Indeed, in order to achieve it on his side, Gentile demanded the elimination of those who sought it from the opposing side. If some credit is due to Gentile in those circumstances, it lies in his having taken sides without hesitation – though, as Dionisotti has pointed out clearly, with the ambiguity of the philosopher of history convinced that, whatever the situation may be, he has to be there at the centre of events. There is some truth, then, and, in the final part, ingenuous optimism, in this article in L’Italia Libera: ‘This bloody death has somehow redeemed Giovanni Gentile, not certainly in comparison with the Italian intellectuals who have died fighting against Nazism, but in comparison with the Federzonis and Bottais who have abased themselves with some obliging protector, in the hope of avoiding the inevitable judgment that awaits them.’59

  6. INSURRECTIONAL VIOLENCE

  The violence practised during the Insurrection and the phase immediately following it had a character of its own, when the direct ‘settling of accounts’ reached its acme, but at the same time headed towards its rapid conclusion, giving way to the process of punishment and purging that was to be conducted by the new institutional order. Coexisting in the climate of general euphoria of the last days of April 1945 were faith in and doubts about the near future, the fears of the Allies, the Rome government and the moderate parties that they might lose their hold on the situation, and on the other hand the urge to achieve, while time remained, as much as possible in the way of irreversible actions. On the one hand, in short, a determination to strike while the iron was hot, and on the other hand a ready commitment to cool the iron down. This is the background against which the explosion of violence that occurred in those crucial days has to be seen, when the exasperation accumulated in twenty months of civil war came out of hiding and was given vent in a way which, though legitimised by the victory, the victory itself might before long push down the slippery slope of mere and unseemly vendetta.

  ‘Only justice which is rapid and exemplary will prevent an excessive number of massacres on the one hand and unmerited impunity on the other’ – this is how the Piedmontese regional military Command had wisely sought in advance to steer the phase of transition in which excessive indulgence could only have added fuel to partisan radicalism.1 The secretariat of the Action Party for Northern Italy had moved along the same lines early on, in urging the avoidance both of ‘a bureaucratic and central purging process’ like that promoted in Rome and a ‘spontaneous movement of mob vendettas’, which would simply have meant playing into the Allies’ hands. There was in all this the awareness of how difficult it was to ‘find a just middle way between inconclusive Jacobin extremism and inertly waiting for a Constitution which in itself will be unable to solve anything if the way is not suitably paved by positive actions’.2

  The news coming from the South was a spur to act swiftly if, as the PCI representative in the Piedmont regional military command had said at the beginning of the year, one wished to avoid repeating ‘Rome’s error as a result of which too many Fascists are still roaming the streets of the city undisturbed, and, what is worse, holding public offices and fomenting disorder of every kind’.3

  Immediate problems of this order include the arguments and conflicts that occurred in the CLNs and in the CVL Commands about the role that the partisans ought to play in keeping the peace immediately after the overthrow of the Nazi-Fascist authorities. In the background there was the equally and perhaps still more important question of the inclusion of the partisans in the regular forces of the army and the police.

  ‘Total and exclusive employment of military formations for purposes of warfare’ was written in the agreement stipulated between the CLNAI and Under-Secretary Medici Tornaquinci on a mission to the North.4 The distinction between military activity, police action and judicial proceedings was as clear on paper as it was difficult in practice in the days of the insurrection. Much as one wished to reduce the partisans to a pure military status, everyone knew full well that this was not how things stood: indeed, Edgardo Sogno, chief of the Franchi organisation, urged that the regular Italian Liberation Corps (CIL) troops should be the first to enter Milan, while the Communists were pressing the Garibaldini to liberate the city.5

  On 20 April the CLNAI issued a ‘regulation for the functioning of the commissions of justice’ in order to ‘offer the population a serious guarantee that justice will be done with serenity and promptness’. On 25 April, proclaiming the state of exception, it ordered the zone commands of the CVL to set up military war tribunals, and, the same day, issued a decree concerning its own jurisdictional powers.6 This disciplining of the easily foreseeable violence during the phase of transition was fairly loosely woven, since much depended on those who, when it came down to it, would act in concrete terms. This regulation, which repeated that ‘every due regard should be shown’ towards enemies who did not put up resistance, stressed that ‘arms must be used against those who on the contrary put up resistance or are about to do so’.

  In the proclamation of the state of exception it was explained, again by the CLNAI, that members of the Fascist armed corps were to be interned in concentration camps, while ‘infringers are considered rebels punishable with death and will be shot on the spot’. At the same time death was reserved for saboteurs, looters, robbers, thieves: if caught in the act, these too were to be shot on the spot. Things, in short, were heading towards one of those moments in which, in order to feel that the nightmare of death was well and truly over, people, in exceptional cases, still had to die.

  Some time before, in the Fortress Command of Turin, ‘Brandani’ (Mario Mammuccari), the Communist representative, had opposed a proposal by the Action Party, which duly withdrew it, to set up a police service with many ‘technical’ members, for the period immediately following the Liberation. The reasons Brandani gave for opposing this proposal deserve quoting for the general question that they raise:

  The police are a force and a political phenomenon, especially in the present phase of Italian life … As for the excesses of the crowd, it is worth pointing out that the masses are the basic element of the insurrection. It would not do were active participation in this insurrection to be interpreted as excesses by the crowd. Naturally thefts and sackings have to be prevented, but this will be avoided with suitable appeals and with a garrison service at the stores and depots. The policing service during the insurrection must be performed by the citizen squads and the patriotic formations; from each of these the new police corps will spring. These squads and formations will be assigned the task of cleansing out the elements of the fifth column.7

  At a later meeting of the Fortress Command, the Communist representative once again proposed the creation ‘as from now’ of a service of city police chosen from the GAPs and SAPs. According to the minutes of that meeting, the proposal was accepted.8 At a 2 May assembly of the Piedmontese regional CLN, acting by now in the capacity of regional government council, Colonel Stevens, head of the Allied mission, accepted the principle of a police force entrusted to the partisans, ‘apart from the carabinieri technicians’, precisely in order to prevent ‘all the partisans indiscriminately from regarding themselves as forces of order’. This high-ranking British officer was stressing an essential point. Essential too was the other point made at that meeting: the impossibility for the time being of stopping ‘the present rhyth
m of the sentences being passed by the military tribunals’ (as the prefect, the Socialist Pierluigi Passoni, said). On the same occasion, Colonel John Stevens made two provocative remarks that accurately pinpointed the state of affairs not only in Turin but elsewhere too: ‘I should like to know in very simple words why we need the state of emergency here in Turin; whether we are afraid of the Germans or of the partisans … It is curious that those of us present here, all civilians, apart from myself, should be defending military authority.’9

  In fact, even this last point was not altogether indisputable. It was true that rapid and exceptional justice called for the work of the military tribunals; but those who wished to guarantee the pre-eminence of that political moment had at the same time to reaffirm the superiority of the CLNs to the regional Commands of the CVL (Corpo voluntari della libertà). And the PCI did just this, refusing to delegate to the Commands the maintenance of law and order, which was the exclusive task of the CLN.10

  A realistic view of things during those days was also shown, in another way, by those officers of the Allied missions who ‘confidentially urged the most rapid elimination of war criminals since, they said, once the Allied troops arrived a stop would be put to everything’.11

  In many Italian sources it is, naturally, clearer that there should be the incitement to lose no time in taking the law into one’s own hands. In response to General Mario Roatta’s flight the Communist federation of Treviso made an appeal to the partisans to ensure that they secured ‘all the peace-keeping and purging services in the country … There is still too little attention and a kind-hearted and gullible spirit on the part of many partisans and certain anti-Fascists.’12 More explicitly, Roberto Battaglia, former commander of the Lunense GL division and future historian of the Resistance, sent Renato Iacopini, the CLN-appointed questore of La Spezia, the following advice from Rome: ‘We must do the purging now, since after the Liberation we’ll no longer be able to do it, because in war you shoot, but once the war’s over you don’t shoot anymore.’13 In La Spezia too, the secretary of the PCI federation had, with a view to the insurrection, sent out an internal circular saying: ‘Arrest all Fascists, remember that they will try to flee, and shoot those who try to flee.’14

  Returning to Cuneo from France, Nuto Revelli saw the ‘two-timers of the Littorio, yesterday’s lions, now sheep’, who, as prisoners, ‘eat and drink’ and ‘are in seventh heaven’, and flew off the handle: ‘God forbid, I’m not saying we should disembowel all Fascists. But let’s shoot because it’s about time we did so.’15 Pietro Chiodi’s diary clearly sums up the behaviour that was rife at that time: ‘Numerous prisoners are pouring in. On orders of the CMRP [Piedmont Regional Military Command] some categories are being tried and shot, while the majority are jailed for dispatch to Turin’s Carcere Nuove.’16 A confirmation of this attitude can be found, again in Piedmont, in the regional CLN Council minutes mentioned earlier:17

  Presidente, liberale [Franco Antonicelli]. Reports executions that have occurred at Pinerolo with highly summary verdicts. CMRP [Francesco (Fausto) Scotti, Communist, or Livio Bianco, Actionist]. Explains that five men were shot because circular 250 of the military command has been applied according to which the forces of the black brigades and the Decima Mas are war criminals and are to be eliminated, unless possible coercion be demonstrated. The complaints are therefore unfounded.

  At the other end of the Alpine arc, in the Piave valley, the situation is described as follows: ‘The ten thousand prisoners or thereabouts captured were consigned to the Allies a few days later. Only the Fascist prisoners were not consigned, though they were requested. The undersigned has assumed responsibility for the refusal.’18

  When the shooting stopped, anger and violence could take other paths. Chiodi accompanied to Turin’s Carcere Nuove the sister of a partisan who had been hanged in his cell, where both had been imprisoned, and found it occupied by six SS officers. Finding himself before the ‘beast’s face’ of one of them, who had not stood to his feet, Chiodi, who remembers having given his word that he would not shoot, struck him ‘savagely on the face with my pistol’, while the hanged man’s sister ‘kicked in the face, knocking over’ two who had gone down on their knees ‘begging for pity’.19 If the defeated proved to be cowards – Giuseppe Solaro, provincial head of Turin, ‘before dying had said: Don’t hurt me. I’ve always been a socialist’20 – contempt could lead to ferocious treatment or, alternatively, transcend it. Before the anguish that he felt at the memory of his many dead comrades, Revelli said to himself: ‘As long as I shoot, as long as I’m busy fighting, I manage to forget’; but when he came across a group of Fascists of the Littorio, who had become sprightly partisans at the eleventh hour, he gave up: ‘It’s hard to hit it off. Let them go to the devil!’21

  At times there was repugnance, rooted in popular ethics, at reporting people to the authorities, whatever those authorities might be. A survivor from the German camps found a Fascist who had become a municipal guard, and, together with his comrades, gave him a thrashing: ‘But we didn’t go and turn him in. That had been enough to get it off our chests.’22 Another partisan said to a spy who had him arrested and deported to Germany, and was now imprisoned in the Carcere Nuove: ‘I won’t denounce anyone, just make sure I never see you again as long as I live!’23

  The feeling that reporting was akin to the very crime – denouncement to the enemy – that one was intent on punishing, could, on the other hand, be a further spur to summary justice: ‘Then they took the one who had denounced him and shot him on the same spot.’24

  Those, by contrast, who did the denouncing but to no effect could be driven to take things into their own hands. After the Liberation the partisan Rosanna Rolando handed over to a PCI inspector a report against the spy who had denounced her, ‘but he lost it’. So she gave another one to two comrades, who said: ‘Don’t you worry, we won’t lose the report.’ The spy was arrested, ‘given a people’s trial’ and shot.25 ‘One thing is sure’, said another woman partisan, ‘when the liberation came they took too little time to execute criminals.’26 To make use of the time available, a commander insisted on regaining his ‘freedom of action’ in order to pass ‘from theory to practice in making sure that the Fascists camouflaged as patriots get the justice that everyone is talking about’.27

  Persistent and pent-up tension triggered tragic fates, like that of the partisan Mitraglia (Machine-gun):

  He loses his legs in combat. In Rome, immediately after the Liberation, he feels he has a leading role to play. At the meeting in front of the Coliseum about Roatta’s escape, he harangues the crowd, incites them to storm the Quirinale. He goes back to his village, in the Valdarno. His life sinks gradually into indolence, demoralisation, loss of confidence. Until he beats to death an amnestied Fascist. He escapes. His wanderings. Milan. Attempt to cross the eastern border. An Allied patrol kills him.28

  Disgust with the violence in which one had been immersed created, alongside the refusal to pardon, the inclination to pardon. A survivor from deportation to Germany has recently said: ‘I have forgiven no one and still now forgive no one.’29 But another concentration camp survivor has recalled:

  I, like others – I’ve spoken to others too – we were fairly tranquil, how can I put it? – a bit dim possibly, a bit shaken. But I believe that at least in me there was … I don’t want to use big words, but for me there was a sense of great pardon, in the sense … we’ve squabbled but now it’s over, good! And let bygones be bygones. I felt no need at all for vengeance.30

  So pardon as virtue, pardon as guilt and political error, pardon as repugnance for ‘beating them hollow’ and as a desire to forget, interweave with the violence in those days of April and May 1945.31 Formally, the matter was settled in Milan by the ordinance of the prefect, the Actionist Riccardo Lombardi, who ordered ‘the immediate suspension of arbitrary executions following summary proceedings by formations of volunteers and self-styled volunteers’.32

  For many years
the neo-Fascist press spoke of 300,000 people killed that April. The government waited until 1952 before giving the Chamber of Deputies, through the minister of the interior, Mario Scelba, the figure of 1,732 killed, supplied, it seems, by the General Headquarters of the carabinieri. Neither figure is very credible – one because it is excessive, the other because it falls short, despite its flaunted precision. It is almost impossible to work out rigorous data on this score: the very viscosity of the civil war makes such data difficult to trace. In their absence, here is Giorgio Bocca’s estimate: 3,000 killed in Milan and between 12,000 and 15,000 in the whole of Northern Italy.33

  The episode that symbolically sums up the violence during those days was the shooting of Mussolini and the hanging by the feet in Piazzale Loreto of his body, together with those of Clara Petacci and eighteen Fascist gerarchi.