A Civil War (13 page)

Recognition of – or at least doubts about – the fact that the Germans had some reason to consider themselves betrayed also appears in testimonies given forty years later by people who did not join the RSI: ‘This news, naturally, was considered by our German allies to be an act of great treachery'; or, more dramatically: ‘Forty years have gone by and I'm still ashamed to have been their allies in war and then betrayed them as Judas did. But it was our leaders, who are always disgusting, who sold us out.'
²²

A guilty conscience towards the Germans had been displayed, in an altogether different context, by the generals heading along the road of the coup d'état and then the Armistice. In a note to Mussolini written just after his appointment as head of the General Staff of the Combined Forces, Arturo Ambrosio put forward the argument that ‘the Germans must change their operative intentions and must come to our aid, otherwise we shall not be obliged to follow them in their erroneous conduct of the war'.
²³

It was as if a preventive alibi were being sought, authorising one to consider the Germans traitors because they were dispatching too few troops to the rescue of an Italy threatened at close range now by the Anglo-Americans. On 17 July 1943, just after the Sicily landing (9–10 July) the Supreme Command, still more scared, unwittingly revealed the fragility of the argument: ‘And if, say, the Germans wanted to make Italy into their battlefield, I don't rule out the possibility that Italy would fight against these allies who have systematically broken their word.'
²⁴

On the one hand, then, a greater German military presence in Italy was asked for, and on the other, it was feared that the Germans wanted to make Italy into a battlefield. This was how, in a way that may possibly have been intended to be artful but succeeded only in being tragically grotesque, the illusion-cum-fiction of the ‘parallel war' was playing itself out. It had always, as an intelligent German observer pointed out, come up against the contradiction between ‘the desire to be as independent as possible from German control' and ‘the need to seek German support'.
²⁵

It was not, then, by the monarchy and the high Commands of the Royal Army that the Germans needed seriously to fear being accused of betrayal, even if this was obviously attempted by those directly concerned. In his Radio Bari broadcast of 24 September 1943, the king praised those who had managed to avoid the ‘enemy's betrayal' and ‘the flattery of the repudiators of the
patria
'.
²⁶
The rulers of the South, who during the forty-five days could hardly be said to have been hard on the Fascists, could feel themselves to be the object at least of the latter's ingratitude.

As regards betraying the Germans, part of the same underground press is at times threaded with a defensive attitude that echoes the arguments of the High Command, to which a whole class of disappointed nationalists were not insensitive. A case in point is the Roman newspaper
L'Indice dei fatti e delle idee
. On 15 November 1943, in the article actually entitled ‘Chi ha tradito' (‘The betrayers'), Germany is accused, not altogether without reason, of having failed to pay enough attention to the interests of Italy since the time of the armistice with France, and of having always underrated the Mediterranean theatre of operations.
²⁷

More directly, and in the style of a court sentence, the Piedmontese paper
Riscossa Italiana
pronounced that ‘the accuser is discredited' and ‘the accusation [of betrayal] is objectively bereft of any shade of legitimacy'.
²⁸
In October 1943,
Il Risorgimento Liberale
assured its readers that ‘propaganda about the joke of betraying the Germans will come to nothing'; but in April 1944, regarding the similar fate that had befallen Hungary, it would still feel the need to repeat that, if betrayal is ‘failure to keep one's word', Mussolini's word could not place the Italian people under any obligation.
²⁹
The Partito della Democrazia del Lavoro entitled the entire October 1943 Roman issue of its paper of the same name, ‘Dov' è il tradimento?' (‘What betrayal?'), concluding that the real traitor was Mussolini.
³⁰
‘Non c' è tradimento' (‘There is no betrayal') was the title of an article in
L'Azione
: this too argued that, if betrayal there was, it was Mussolini's betrayal of the Italian people.
³¹
One could talk in terms of betrayal – writes
Voce Operaia
, organ of the Catholic communists in Rome – if the war against the Germans were being conducted, as a last-minute bid to save themselves, by those who had allied themselves with the Germans.
³²
This was an argument analogous to Salvemini's, referred to above, and one which we shall see taken up again in the debate about the declaration of war against Germany.

Perhaps it is no accident that some of the quotations exemplifying this ‘defensive' stance are found in resistance journalism that may be called ‘minor', in the sense that it cannot be attributed to parties, or to politically prominent and well-defined groups. These publications, wrongly neglected by historiography, are one of the scanty number of sources available for reconstructing the opinion of the middle-ranking, muddled bourgeoisie which was later to carry so much weight in the days following the Liberation, not least in relation to this knotty question of the attitude held in the past and to be held in the future concerning the lost war. Of the above quotations, those of the politically well-defined parties and groups – even if, like La Democrazia del Lavoro, they carried scant weight with the Resistance – nevertheless already introduce the retaliation against Mussolini and, as in the case of
Voce Operaia
, extend it to the king and to the generals of the South. The Action Party newspaper, for example, was to go a long way down this path: in September 1943 it did not hesitate to maintain that ‘the Badoglio government and the Crown were betraying one and all, the Germans and the Anglo-Americans. To save Italy? No. To save themselves.' Still
along the lines of a punishable betrayal, the same newspaper affirmed: ‘All this is material for a war tribunal … And maybe the people will find a way to abbreviate procedures.'
³³
Ferdinando Mautino placed himself more directly on the moral plane when he noted in his diary: ‘Had it never by chance befallen the ruling classes, the marshals and the Majesties, to possess a spirit capable of committing themselves to fidelity to any of the numerous sacred principles in whose name millions of Italians have been called upon to give up all their affections, the construction of their own future, life itself.'
³⁴

As we know, the attitude to the king and Badoglio was to be conditioned in the Resistance press by the way the political situation as a whole was unfolding, and by the change in the parties' positions after the Salerno ‘turning-point'. What needs to be stressed here is that including Badoglio and above all the king in the accusation of betrayal meant, on the one hand, shifting the terms of judgment and accusation onto a political and moral plane that transcended the very events following 8 September; and, on the other hand, it made the problem of whether or not to keep the oath a particularly pressing one. If, from a lay point of view, the oath was a ‘guarantee against the future' and against the very freedom of the person taking it, it was also an ‘inert determination of the future.'
³⁵
The eternal value, essential to the form of the oath, may therefore come into conflict with the need for new and unforeseen acts of liberty. There thus emerges the clause, never openly voiced, that the oath was valid only if the fundamental conditions that determined it did not change. Thus, at the very moment when it should be deploying its whole cogent force, the oath might instead become null.

Every, or nearly every, Italian had taken two oaths: one to the king, the other to the Duce.
³⁶
More or less all those who had been enlisted in the regime's youth organisations had sung: ‘Duce! Duce! Chi no saprà morir? Il giuramento chi mai rinnegherà?' (‘Duce! Duce! Who will not be prepared to die? Who will ever break the oath?'). Compelled now to choose between one oath or the other, the Resistance simply cut the Gordian knot by choosing neither one nor the other, and thereby freed the solemn matter of being true to oneself from any
pre-established institutional encumbrance and personal bond. But even those who felt bound to one oath rather than the other, and branded those of the opposite persuasion as traitors, were, in order to justify their choice, induced to resort to principles that went beyond loyalty to the oath as such. Thus a still predominantly formal criterion might be invoked, such as legitimacy and legality, or else deeper motivations involving the contents synthesised, or simply implicit, in the formula and the very act of taking the oath.

Things became more complicated with the problem of the legitimacy of the Social Republic, particularly when the latter demanded a further oath, thereby reviving the conflict and creating new opportunities to betray (as
L'Italia Libera
wrote: ‘Whoever takes the oath is a traitor').
³⁷
It was obvious that the anti-Fascist parties and the CLNs, starting with those of northern Italy,
³⁸
would urge people not to take the oath, thus bestowing legitimacy on the government of the South, and offering visible and easily comprehensible support to undecided consciences.

But the conflict between oaths was not simply a question of two opposing legalities confronting each other. To paraphrase Gramsci's famous remark that, in the West, with the trembling of the state the structures of civil society can be glimpsed with the naked eye,
³⁹
we might say that the conflict that was born around the question of betrayal–oath–loyalty caused cultural structures deeply inscribed in the conscience of the Italians to surface.

The determination not to break one's oath to the king undoubtedly fed the steadfast and dignified behaviour of a large number of the internees in the German concentration camps, where even Badoglio's name figures as a point of reference. ‘Hurrah Badoglio!' was how friendly Russian prisoners sometimes greeted their Italian companions.
⁴⁰
Testimonies of this kind abound.
⁴¹
Among the most eloquent worth citing is that of the 245 second lieutenants of the Pinerolo cavalry school, who, not yet having sworn the oath to the king, pronounced it, in the camp of Przemysl before the oldest officer.
⁴²
An officer shot in Greece by the Germans wrote: ‘I have always been loyal to any oaths I have taken and for the oath of loyalty to the King of Italy I give my life.'
⁴³

It is also a certified fact that the oath to the king carried more weight in the consciences of the officers, especially the older ones, than in those of the soldiers
⁴⁴
– an indication of the hiatus existing in the country between governing classes and the populace and, in the army, between officers and troops. The Germans tried to make the most of this hiatus, boasting the greater egalitarianism existing in their army.
⁴⁵
But beyond keeping one's word and appealing to an implicit judgment of constitutional legality, other explanations as to why the oath to the king appeared more binding than that to the Duce ought to be explored.

At work certainly was a stronger, more long-standing and deep-rooted sense of the
patria
–state, in the person of the king, than of the government–regime, in the person of the Duce. For example, it has been noted how, in the memoirs of the ex-military internees, there is a good deal more cursing of the high Commands than of the king and Badoglio himself.
⁴⁶
The fact that the Fascist national party had lost, along with its entire retinue of organisations, much of its political sting, and that, to the majority of Italians, it seemed by now to be no more than one of the many bureaucratic apparatuses of the state, played against the possibility of the resurrected Republican Fascist Party's competing on an equal footing with the traditional state, however tattered the latter might be. On the contrary, this Fascist pretension was to seem on the one hand devoid of any serious foundation, and on the other hand compromising in a new sense, which went well beyond the ritual request for the bread ration card (‘tessera del pane').

One ex-internee offers this testimony:

The Christian Democrat paper
Il Popolo
, also keen to rebut accusations of betrayal of the Germans,
⁴⁸
tried to take an explicit look at the thorny question of the two oaths.
⁴⁹
It is no accident that this was a Catholic paper: the oath to the Duce had in fact constituted one of the polemical objectives of Pius XI's encyclical
Non abbiamo bisogno
of 29 June 1931. The Pope had suggested that the already signed-up Fascists there should make this mental reservation: ‘apart from the laws of God and of the Church' or ‘apart from the duties of the good Christian', and reserved the right to ask that in future the formula be modified, ‘should one not wish to do better, far better, and omit the oath, which is such a religious act, and is certainly not in the place most fitting to it on a party membership card'. To these mental reservations Pius XI had suggested adding this other one: ‘with the firm intention to declare such a reservation even overtly, should the need arise'.
⁵⁰