A Civil War (129 page)

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 denied
⁷⁵
– 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 the 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

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:

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.