A Civil War (133 page)

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:

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.
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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 rhythm 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.'
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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.
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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'.
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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.'
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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.'
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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.'
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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.'
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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.'
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A confirmation of this attitude can be found, again in Piedmont, in the regional CLN Council minutes mentioned earlier:
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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.'
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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'.
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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'
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– 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!'
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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.'
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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!'
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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.'
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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.
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‘One thing is sure', said another woman partisan, ‘when the liberation came they took too little time to execute criminals.'
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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'.
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Persistent and pent-up tension triggered tragic fates, like that of the partisan Mitraglia (Machine-gun):

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.'
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But another concentration camp survivor has recalled:

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.
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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'.
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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.
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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
.

The legality of the executions that occurred at Dongo stems from the complex institutional system that sustained the last phase of the Resistance, and then the insurrection. Without going too far back, on 12 April 1945 the CLNAI, ordering his capture, had denounced Mussolini and the members of the Fascist directorate as ‘traitors to the country and war criminals';
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and we have seen what consequences a declaration of this sort automatically involved. After the execution, the CLNAI fully endorsed it, deprecating only ‘the explosion of popular hate which has on this single occasion gone so far as to produce excesses' – which was imputable, however, ‘to the climate desired and created by Mussolini'.
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Italy, unlike France and England, had no regicides in its history as watersheds between opposing epochs. It had never fractured the monistic vision of power with the ‘final decapitation of the king as symbol'.
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Italy, the late comer even in this field had, in the very middle of the twentieth century, the execution of the Duce. Occurring in broad daylight, but without mob participation, along the road between Dongo and Giulino di Mezzegra, that execution of the charismatic leader fleeing ‘disguised as a German'
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was, immediately afterwards, made public in Piazzale Loreto. And in the most macabre manner, reviving the tradition of the dead body of the tyrant to be displayed to the people, and paying back Fascism, which had practised it in the self-same place, with the spectacle
of the exhibition of the corpses. The symbolic value of this repayment, however, went very deep: the Duce's body, invulnerable to so many assassination attempts, was now hanging upended and lifeless.
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And upended too was the Fascist symbology of the lictor's axe as an instrument of executions: the victim now was the Duce of Fascism himself, defeated and guilty. A sort of
lex talionis
was being put into practice, on the assumption that, in this case too, the ‘forms of the execution referred to the nature of the crime'.
³⁹
The killing of Clara Petacci, which had not been bargained for, was due to the fidelity, worthy of respect, that she showed to the person of Mussolini. But the exhibition of her corpse came to appear as a moralistic and public punishment for the tyrant's lasciviousness and a debunking of the myth, which had been cultivated so strenuously, of his virility.
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