A Civil War (67 page)

Sincere though it might have been in some Fascists, the desire to hold out against foreign bayonets was thus doomed to give way to the deeper urge to wreak vengeance on the anti-Fascist Italians in the shadow of those very bayonets. With the establishment of the Social Republic, the need that its restricted and motley group of leaders must not lose face nor incur the suspicion of their German ally, who had become yet more demanding and arrogant in his new guise of occupier, led towards this outcome.

‘But what is this Fascism which has dissolved like snow in the sun?' Hitler asked Mussolini at their first encounter after 8 September.
⁵²
It seems that Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel said that ‘the only Italian army that will not be able to betray us is an army that doesn't exist'.
⁵³
From this point of view, the civil war was a further pledge given to Nazi Germany, which recognised its value all too well. The best way to bind the collaborationists was to ‘load them with feelings of guilt, to make them bleed, to compromise them as much as possible'.
⁵⁴

Even that small hold that the RSI managed to have on that part of the population who had been left frightened by the institutional void created after 8 September drove it, paradoxically, towards civil war. This was not a case of ‘returning to origins'. On the contrary, it was a case of establishing the maximum continuity with the twenty-year-old regime that had had as a source of essential legitimation the very re-establishment and maintenance of order. ‘I needed order', wrote an auxiliary in the women's service,
⁵⁵
speaking for many. ‘Finally we shall have a government!' shouted a man in Venice on hearing the news of Mussolini's rescue.
⁵⁶

The Fascists, who had always kept the action of creating disorder as their special preserve, were at the same time convinced that what the mass of men longed for, more than anything else, was order. They could not therefore fail to be driven to ruthlessly repress the rebels who were giving them trouble. Disorder as an instrument of order, a fundamental feature of Fascism, would come to achieve, on this road, paroxysmal results. The Social Republic would in fact be riddled with a multiplicity of police forces, armed corps, militias, bands picked up here and there in search of adventure or booty, who acted without any coordination and often in competition with each other. With bureaucratic caution, Giovanni Tebaldi, the
questore
of Bologna reported to the chief of police:

Revealing the real state of affairs, one Fascist wrote:

Of the two indissoluble faces of modern totalitarianism – the rigid hierarchical order imposed on the whole of society and the chaos created by the
fragmentation of juridically unregulated powers (Neumann's Behemoth) – the RSI thus primarily displayed the latter.
⁵⁹
Instead of consensus, albeit forced, one had at best to content oneself with a discipline born of low spirits.
⁶⁰

It was the congress of Verona, inaugurated on 14 November 1943, that marked the decisive turning-point towards civil war, based on the convergence between the young and the old
squadristi
, who immediately thereafter perpetrated the Ferrara massacre as a reprisal for the killing of the
federale
(provincial party secretary) Igino Ghisellini; and the party secretary Pavolini, who used the occasion to try to lead Fascist chaos back into the hive of the single and, at least theoretically, united and intransigent party.
⁶¹
From that moment on, RSI documents and political journalism are full of references, explicit or implicit, to civil or fratricidal war.
⁶²
The political or ideological character of this war made it obvious that it would be compared to the one that the German comrades were continuing to wage against the monstrous coalition of the demo-pluto-Judaic-Masonic-Bolshevik powers. As we have noted with regard to 1919–22, ‘in Fascism's mythology of struggle and war, war and civil war make an indissoluble pact'.
⁶³
Commenting on the Ferrara massacres, Farinacci wrote in
Regime fascista
: ‘The watchword was: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth … It was thought that perhaps we wouldn't have the force and courage to react. Now the facts have spoken'.
⁶⁴

The creation of the Black Brigades, announced by Pavolini on 26 July 1944, a year after 25 July, on the basis of a decree by Mussolini of the previous 30 June, constituted the culminating point of Fascist commitment in the civil war. The
initiative stemmed not least from the failure of the republican National Guard as backbone of the internal military machinery, and of the creaking, in the summer of the partisan offensive, of the entire RSI structure. The most determined Fascists had somehow or other understood that they would have to manage the final reckoning directly. This too, for that matter, could be considered a return to origins. The 1921 statute of the National Fascist Party (PNF) had in fact established that ‘all Fascists belong to the combat squads'; and on 24 April 1923 the Grand Council had ordered that ‘all Party members be officially registered in the militia'.
⁶⁵
Pavolini's announcement was: ‘All members of the republican Fascist party aged between eighteen and sixty constitute the auxiliary corps of the Black Shirts.'

The instructions that followed, which were again Pavolini's, reiterated and specified the meaning of this total militarisation of the party, which was also a further attempt to reabsorb the neo-action-squad ‘federal police', who, springing up in the weeks immediately following 8 September, were ‘in many cases survivors of the government's attempted dissolution of them'.
⁶⁶
Thus the party secretary wrote: ‘As of this moment all Fascists are to consider themselves in a state of emergency for the struggle against the activity of the rebels and for the defence of their own families'; consequently, the house of every Fascist is to be transformed into ‘a small fortress where it is not possible to be surprised in one's sleep.'
⁶⁷
Shortly before, on 27 June, writing to Mussolini, Pavolini had stressed, against Graziani's ‘apolitical' velleities, the need to place oneself on a ‘terrain which is that of armed politicians against armed politicians'.
⁶⁸
Now, in his radio broadcast of 25 July, Pavolini publicly developed this concept, remarking: ‘It is not enough to profess oneself to be for Italy when there is also an Italy of Badoglio and Palmiro Togliatti.' The divisions returning from Germany ‘bear on their bayonets a political idea. Nor could it be otherwise at such a time as this, during this war which Mussolini defines as a religious war.'

In the same speech, flaunting unscrupulousness and gall, which served to cover up a sense of frustration and almost of envy (sentiments not new to the Fascists, above all in their attitude to the Communists), Pavolini said that the Italians

No doubt the party secretary had in mind the experience that had already been tried out by the ‘franchi tiratori' (snipers) or Gruppi d'Azione Giovanile (GAG) who had been organised in Florence in opposition to the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica (GAP), and with a view to a sniping campaign that was to be conducted after the arrival of the Allies.
⁷⁰
In a letter to Mussolini of 18 June Pavolini had written that, in the disintegration of the civil and military authorities that was taking place in Tuscany, only the Fascists were holding out.
⁷¹
A practical translation of the concepts expressed by Pavolini can be found in a plan devised by Mussolini himself the following 16 August: ‘The partisans captured during and after the fighting are immediately shot. The disbanded who are captured with weapons are shot in conformity with the well-known ministerial ordinance'; the unarmed were to be sent to Germany; those who present themselves, ‘to work or to military service'.
⁷²

In fact, the party secretary's directives were obeyed only to a limited extent. The Black Brigades only rarely entered the city gates; nor did they manage adequately to take the place of the garrisons of the fast-dissolving republican National Guard.
⁷³
In Trieste, in July 1944, out of 8,500 party members only 500 formed part of the Black Brigades.
⁷⁴

The sporadic Fascist sniping in Florence and Turin, where provincial party secretary,
federale
Giuseppe Solaro seems to have been planning it for some time,
⁷⁵
should be considered the last, albeit faint-hearted Fascist contribution
to the civil war. Their chances of doing any harm were overrated by the Resistance organisms. The Communist Party ‘Direttive per l'insurrezione n.9' of 15 September 1944 warned against a ‘particularly dangerous occult resistance' and against the fifth column.
⁷⁶
On 1 April 1945 the ‘Direttive operative per il piano E.27' of the Biella zone command mentioned foreseeable Fascist guerrilla warfare for the period following liberation.
⁷⁷

Only a very minor and abortive contribution to the civil war was given by the extremely rare Fascist attempts to conduct actions south of the Gothic line.
⁷⁸
These are not to be confused with the sporadic and vague manifestations of nostalgia or sympathy for Fascism that occurred in liberated Italy, and that were far more the fruit of local situations than of Pavolini's directives. Still pursuing the mirage of mirroring the anti-Fascists, Pavolini had in fact decreed that the Fascists left in situ or deliberately sent behind the lines should stir up a ‘clandestine Fascism, similar in its manifestations to the activity of the clandestine parties of our adversaries or at any rate of our opponents generally in the provinces controlled by us'.
⁷⁹

The result of these directives can be seen not so much in the facts as in the propaganda of the RSI.
⁸⁰
What should be stressed, rather, is that as a rule both the Royal Army and the Fascist government, evidently in agreement with their respective allies, avoided deploying their regular units against one another on the front.
⁸¹
This confirms the fact that the civil war was not fought between the Kingdom of the South and the Italian Social Republic. It was a war fought between Fascists and anti-Fascists, on the only territory where
they were present politically and militarily, in a contest that was nonetheless acquiring a significance that involved the entire Italian people – just as
squadrismo
, a central and northern phenomenon, had left its mark on the fate of the whole nation.

Graziani's regular troops also participated in the civil war, particularly the four divisions organised in Germany. In a poster Tito Agosti, commander of the Littorio division, gave warning of reprisals in the event of partisan attacks on Italian or German soldiers; in another poster Agosti gave news of a reprisal that had been carried out (four partisans shot). Again, by means of a poster a military command announced the execution of three partisans in reprisal.
⁸²
‘The roundups are being conducted by the traitors who have re-entered the country from Germany', Chiodi wrote in his diary.
⁸³
In Garfagnana, when the Monterosa and Italia divisions arrived, things took a turn for the worse compared with the period in which the front had been held by the Germans: requisitions, thefts, reprisals to stem desertions.
⁸⁴
In one of his writings many years later, Ferruccio Parri, engaged as ever in transfusing anti-Fascist tension into the national significance of the war of liberation, saw the arrival of Graziani's divisions from Germany as marking the moment when the struggle took on the ‘character of a real civil war', and added vehemently: ‘We could even go so far as to say that if the Germans had had more means at their disposal, or had not been forced into a tight corner by the way the war was going, more numerous and well-organised Graziani divisions could have created difficult problems.'
⁸⁵

The desertions that decimated these divisions only accentuated their Fascist character. Those who remained – and, up to the very last weeks, they were more numerous than the
resistenti
had bargained for – were in some cases the most cowardly, but in many other cases the most highly motivated and diehard. In Monterosa, according to a Garibaldino report, the Fascists were about 40 percent of the troops, and all the officers.
⁸⁶
In short, in the
controversy between ‘national' army and ‘political' army, force of circumstance proved Pavolini right.