A Civil War (128 page)

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:

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

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:

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 3
^rd
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 blood
⁶²
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