A Civil War (68 page)

It was not easy for the RSI Fascists to recognise the very existence of the partisan movement. After many years a Fascist described the first partisan prisoners with whom he came into contact as being very different from ‘a kind of opposite version of ourselves'.
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The Fascists in fact found it hard to understand how one could not be heroic, according to the image they had of heroism, yet nevertheless not banal. Apart from their propagandist aim, the use of expressions like ‘bandits' or, worse still, ‘hired assassins in the pay of the enemy' manifest their strong unease at an unexpected phenomenon, which they sought to exorcise by attributing its birth and development to external agents. This idea was reinforced by the tendency to refuse, at first, to make a careful distinction between partisans and escaped prisoners, above all if they were Slavs.
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Communists and Jews – both linked, in the haunted Fascist imagination, to dark and powerful international organisations – lent themselves well to being indicated as those most directly responsible for a banditry directed by others.
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The expression ‘comunisti badogliani', used above all in the first months to describe the partisans (this was the name given to the Via Rasella assailants in Rome), while aiming on the one hand at compromising and disqualifying both by juxtaposing them, on the other hand presented itself as the internal version of the monstrous capitalistic–Bolshevik coalition against which Fascism and Nazism were fighting.

At the heart of the Fascist attitude lay deep-rooted incredulity in the very capacity of the anti-Fascists to fight. The memory of the all-too-easy Action Squad victories of 1920–22, when Fascist violence was organised while Socialist violence was not,
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the long-enjoyed security of institutional protection, and contempt for the adversary (it is typical for the Fascists to call their enemies ‘bastards', i.e. racially impure) left the Fascists unprepared to face a real civil war fought by both sides. It was one thing for them to vent their desire for revenge by reviving the punitive expeditions, and quite another to face other organised, armed Italians. Perhaps the altogether particular hatred that the Fascists
later reserved for the figure of Parri derived precisely from their incapacity to understand how such a fragile-looking man, discreet and no worshipper of violence, had managed in the end to be stronger than themselves. Allowing for the obvious differences, we might all the same suggest an analogy with Churchill's remark about Hitler's incapacity to understand what unshakable strength of will lay hidden, despite everything, in that frail gentleman with the umbrella, Arthur Neville Chamberlain.
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Thus, the reality of the partisan Vendée, as Mussolini called it,
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was gradually brought home to high- and low-ranking Fascists alike, to extremists like Giorgio Almirante and moderates like Giorgio Pini. In June 1944 Graziani, in a memorandum to Mussolini, was compelled to acknowledge: ‘Only the flat lands of the Po Valley were under effective Republican control. All the rest was virtually in the hands of the rebels.'
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Once they were forced to take stock of the real state of affairs, eliminating the rebels could not but be an essential objective. Above all, it would have been intolerable if even this task was dealt with by the Germans alone. ‘You see? To do in the subversives there's no need of the Germans, we're enough!' said a Fascist to a comrade before the bodies of partisans displayed in Piazzale Loreto in August 1944.
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The Fascists had always been afflicted by fear of not being taken seriously by their allies. Even in Spain the Francoists had sung:

Now the Fascists had at all costs to show that, even if they were unable to fight seriously against an external enemy, they could at least, by the very fact of
being Fascists, crush the internal one. Taking seriously the distinction between the armed forces of the state and the party militias, Giovanni Tarabini, Modena regent of the republican
fascio
, theorised this unrealistic distinction of tasks: ‘While the state will see to the war against the enemies at the front, the Fascists will see to fighting against the anti-Italian elements at home.'
⁹⁶

‘I was captured only because I'm a Fascist. For no other reason', wrote forty-year-old Andrea Perusini, secretary of the Ronchi
fascio
, shot by the partisans of the Natisone Garibaldi division, in his last letter; and he was appreciated by them for his dignified behaviour in the face of death.
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Umberto Scaramelli, the black
brigatista
from Fiumi, a veteran of the March on Rome, showed clear awareness of how hard the struggle was, and of how it had burnt bridges for both sides: ‘If by some wretched chance our adversaries should win the day, they certainly won't have any pity on us; we must therefore be manly in character, continue fighting for the Idea, and if necessary die for it; at least that way our adversaries will have to respect us and recognise us as men worthy of the name!'
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Another Fascist accepts the consequences of defeat in the civil war, though still following the logic of revenge, which appears in him to be intrinsic to the cult of life. He declares: ‘I've been sentenced to death by the partisans, by whom I've been taken prisoner. They've won and are therefore right to take their revenge on those fighting them … I was wrong. I bet on the losing horse and now I'm paying for it. Let me say however that not for one moment do I repent my error', which was due to his choosing the path ‘of honour and of life'.
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A nineteen-year-old
paracadutista
appears more arrogant, calling ‘the patriots' (his quotes) ‘illusi' (‘dupes' or ‘dreamers'), but also ‘wretched renegades' and ‘cowards' and, assuring his parents that ‘the
paracadutista
's cudgel is hard, you know!', identifies himself with the
squadristi
of the mythicised old guard.
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Characteristic of the civil war are direct, personalised relations between combatants on opposing sides, from whom there pours forth not only rage and ferocity, but also a vast range of reactions and attitudes – from defiant bravado to the hurling of abuse, from pity to bewilderment, to a curious readiness to ‘talk to each other'. Nuto Revelli tells of a telephone conversation that he had consisting of insults, while in the mountains, with a Cuneo
gerarca
(Fascist party
official).
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An exchange of songs during combat well highlights some of these factors peculiar to civil war:

A man from the province of Bologna wrote to his wife in another key:

A very young paratrooper addressed his parents as follows: ‘I myself would like to go and see the partisans to have a drink with them and tell them that we must join forces to drive out first of all the real invaders, who are the English, Americans and company, then the Germans if they should refuse to go.'
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A case of genuine bewilderment, to be solved only by the intervention of the officers, is recounted by Franco Calamandrei, after a shoot-out in Rome in front of the barracks in Viale Giulio Cesare:

It would be wrong to think that the RSI survived exclusively, inasmuch as it survived, on its commitment to the civil war. The militant Fascists were a slim minority, far more isolated than the Resistance minority, which was much larger. The Fascists conducted their civil war on the wide strata of the population who found in the Republic their own peculiar modus vivendi. For Fascism, which, under the cloak of gaudy forced politicisation, had covered a far more penetrating and widespread depoliticisation of the Italians, it was now impossible to re-politicise, to their own advantage, great masses of the population in a situation of dire emergency – a situation which had increased the profound and widespread weariness produced by the war. Probably Mussolini – with what conviction, who can say? – tried to play once again the old double card of violence and normalisation, of the stick and the carrot, to use one of his last felicitous journalistic quips.
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In reality, the RSI leant not only on the violence of the old and new
squadristi
, and certainly more so than on the demagogy culminating in ‘socialisation', but also on the ‘stuffy and oppressive atmosphere' breathed in the territory under its control. Roberto Battaglia had already drawn attention to this atmosphere in likening it, with an idea that was to be taken up again only recently, with that of the Kingdom of the South.
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The process of normalisation practised by the RSI should not be seen as a true re-establishment of order founded on a sufficient degree of certainty and law, but as an acquiescence obtained, within certain limits, to the commands of an authority that had suddenly stepped in with the purpose somehow or other of filling the void that had been created after 8 September.

Those who had experienced those days as a source of liberating exultation were upset and almost incredulous before what seemed a rapid and unjustifiable return to normality. Shortly after 8 September, Ada Gobetti noted in her diary: ‘Outside, in the streets, on the tram, external life appeared squalidly normal. Incredulous bewilderment, enraged rebellion, was now giving way, in most people, to the indomitable resigned weariness of the Italian people.'
¹⁰⁸
To cope
with this problem,
L'Unità
drastically stated that ‘between the occupiers and the occupied there is no possibility whatsoever of normalisation'.
¹⁰⁹
But even the Jews were partly deceived by this spurious normalisation, thereby inscribing in the painful part of their memory the passivity with which they awaited the catastrophe.
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And, to contaminate things further, even in those who actually accepted some form of normalisation, antipathy for the armed units that supported it remained and grew, fanned by the conviction that those units were formed by volunteers.
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Military disobedience, which was directed at the highest of the positions at stake, was not accompanied by equally extensive civil disobedience, though there were the appeals by the committees, the partisan commands and the parties, even to the point of inviting the population to boycott German goods and to abstain from public spectacles, and even of threats.

On the eve of the liberation of the city, the Florence CLN, which was the first to put itself forward explicitly as an organ of government, sent the vice-
podestà
a warning against the reporting, ordered by the Germans, of motorised vehicles and other materials: ‘We therefore kindly ask you and your collaborators to refrain from such a practice … We also think it opportune to inform you that, should you decide differently from our desires, you will be shot without further warning.'
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The partisan commands were no less resolute. Commissar
Cino [Vincenzo Moscatelli] and commander Ciro [Eraldo Gastone] warned a firm that had declared its intention to denounce unauthorised absentees from work to the Germans that they were laying themselves open ‘to very bitter and overdue attention by the force of partisan law. This is a warning: only words. If you do not correct your attitude you will very soon learn what our style is: facts.'
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The Communist press is full of warnings to those who collaborated in whatever form: policemen, hall porters, functionaries, actors.
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Luciano Bolis has recorded that ‘luckily, the greatest understanding reigned between conspirators and doctors (when it wasn't spontaneous, threatening letters made sure that it was equally active and effective!)'.
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But it was above all the activity of the CLNAI (the CLN for Northern Italy), which in the last few months of the war, after the written authority received on 31 January 1944 by the central committee and the following 26 December by the Rome government, should justify its recognition as the ‘third government' or, if one prefers, the shadow government,
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that was ‘bent on making the actions of the Social Republic appear in an illegal light'.
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Particularly notable, in terms of civil disobedience, was the exhortation not to pay taxes, which had already appeared in the 8 November 1943 issue of
Avanti!
. On 14 September 1944 the CLNAI decreed the suspension of the existing fiscal legislation,
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and
the Ligurian CLN warned the citizens against paying taxes and the collectors' offices against forced payment orders, on pain of answering for them after the Liberation.
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On 3 February 1945 the military command of the Piave zone issued a similar warning, and the Belluno partisans saw to it, as far as was in their power, that it was respected.
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