A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  Beppe Fenoglio has a sure intuition of these contradictory sentiments when he describes the impression aroused in the people of a village by the sight of a German captured by partisans: ‘They kept silent, beginning to explain to themselves the mystery of 8 September, when a dozen of these men had subdued a barracks with entire regiments of ours in them.’ This prisoner is admired, particularly by the women, for his patently racial attributes: tall, blond, extremely strong, golden-skinned. And one partisan says to another: ‘God, Ivan, doesn’t it seem quite something to you that one of Hitler’s men, from the army that brought France and Poland and half the world to its knees, is there washing plates for us poor down-at-heel Italian partisans?’ In the end the prisoner will be killed by a little partisan, just so that the latter can free himself of his angry sense of inferiority – while a similar sense of liberation had been produced in other partisans by seeing how the Germans’ arrogance was mixed with opportunism towards those who at that moment had the upper hand.31 Thus there are partisans who gleefully recall how many German prisoners were glad to be packed off to Switzerland in their underpants.32

  But the more the Germans shrunk to human size, even to the lowest scale, the more they aroused the problem of their capacity for redemption. Here it is hard to distinguish the conditioning effect of the victors’ perspectives as to what lay in store for Germany. To what degree did one’s pragmatic or purely ideological stances affect the attitudes aimed at instilling one’s values even into the enemy?

  The conviction was widespread among the resistenti that Germany should be punished more severely than Italy because its crimes were greater and its insistence in pursuing them more stubborn. A Communist worker says this, for example: ‘It is natural that the greatest weight of the defeat of the Fascists will press most heavily on the Fascist peoples. Germany will suffer the greatest weight. It is natural that Germany will be dismembered even if this goes against the Marxist principle of nationalisation.’33

  Interlaced with this kind of attitude was the widespread conviction that one of the aims of the struggle was to sweeten, by comparison, the treatment reserved for Italy. This expectation of greater severity for Germany was at times expressed in crudely self-gratifying formulae. For example, the Democratic Labour newspaper Azione democratica recognised that, among the German troops, there were ‘many decent Germans who are in the very same condition that so many decent Italians were in before 25 July. But today all of them – with their acquiescence and their herd-spirit (which is much stronger than in the Italians) – are behaving and have to be considered as Nazis. And treated as such.’34

  But there was a strong desire that Germany too would manage to throw off the yoke before the final catastrophe, above all because this would bring the war to a swift conclusion, then because many felt that the distinction between people and regime, invoked for the Italians, could not be denied a priori to the Germans, and lastly out of a genuine repugnance to admitting that there was such a thing as an irremediably infected and damned people. This repugnance could even take the form of the aberrant paradox that appears in La Voce del Popolo, the newspaper of the Italian Labour Party. As a corollary of the way the Yalta Conference had been criticised for its incapacity to ensure a real recovery for Germany, the paper wrote that if the German people really could not be re-taught the meaning of liberty, it would constitute a danger by its very existence and ‘the United Nations would be duty-bound to exterminate it, in the same way that the Germans have tried to do with the Jews – naturally without their senseless acts of cruelty, but also without any senseless pietism’.35 Another smaller, extreme left-wing formation, the ‘Movimento comunista d’Italia’, expressed the more humane wish that the German people would know how to liberate themselves from Nazism, and warned: ‘Let it be clear that we are fighting against Nazism and not against the Germans and that we are not prepared to play the game of a new anti-German nationalism.’36

  A typical kind of argument is to be found in La Riscossa Italiana, the Piedmontese CLN broadsheet:

  The Italian people do not intend to pour on the German people that stream of hate and that river of insults which Fascism, in the anger generated by its moral and material inferiority, habitually directed against the peoples of the united nations:

  Anglo-Saxons and Russians. We know the exceptional contribution which at other times Germany too has been capable of giving to the cause of civilisation, but its people must today cure themselves [a metaphor widely used about the Germans] of the turbid and fearsome ideologies which, in the name of militarism, pan-Germanism, and racism, have perverted it, making it the blind instrument of f erocious oppression.37

  The Germany of Goethe, Schiller and Kant was also appealed to by Il Risorgimento Liberale,38 which was not alone in invoking the great spirits of German civilisation, and the glorious episodes of German history. Thus a Communist poster printed in the province of Bergamo at the end of 1943 urged the German people to ‘rediscover itself and those forces that saved it under Frederick the Great, that made it rise up against Napoleon, that have always fought against the Hohenzollerns, the Kruppses, the Trendelenburgs, the Bosches and partners, those forces that have always wanted a Germany that is truly united, free, independent, loved and respected by all the peoples of the earth’.

  The same poster recalled that in 1918 Germany had been rescued from total ruin by a revolution which had unfortunately been betrayed – whence Nazism.39 Among the last words of Leone Ginzburg, a prisoner of the Germans, are those ‘about the need after the war to become missionaries of civilisation in Germany’.40

  The difficulty in making a clear-cut distinction between Nazis and Germans, resisting the idea that the former were but the expression of the deep essence of the latter, is revealed by the fact that some posters and appeals are directed against the ‘Nazi Germans’, and others simply against the Germans. The different treatment often given to prisoners who were soldiers of the Wehrmacht on the one hand and the SS and other explicitly Nazi corps on the other was a concrete way in which the distinction between people and regime sought to gain ground. In a zone where instructions were that all German prisoners were to be treated indiscriminately according to the laws of war, a squad handed seven prisoners over to the Allies. But two, when questioned, confirmed that they were Nazis and war volunteers. On hearing this declaration the partisans immediately executed the two enemies, thereby retrieving two automatic pistols.41

  Opinions differed about the possibility that the German generals might attempt a coup like the successful one conducted on 25 July by their Italian colleagues, but mostly tended to be sceptical.42 For example, not long before the attempt on Hitler’s life of 20 July 1944, the Liberal paper Risorgimento Liberale wrote:

  The generals feel that their destiny is united with that of the Nazis, despite all the repugnance that the best of them may feel, despite all their feelings of repentance. Together, Hitlerian chiefs and generals will be called before the judgment of the world: one might just as well, therefore, think the chiefs of the German general staffs, carry on fighting to the end.43

  This prediction was essentially correct and was founded on the belief that in the psychology of the German people there existed ‘the suicide point’, which was in fact close at hand.44

  These opinions appeared to be called into question again by the episode of 20 July 1944. The Communist reactions include both a typical and a specific case in point. In their public stances the Communists, just like the other parties, could only approve the coup, albeit failed. Evidence of this is clear, above all initially. A Garibaldi proclamation gives this assurance: ‘The German people too are stirring against Hitler and the Nazi scoundrels. The German generals … wanted to show the world and above all their people that the Nazi war is definitively lost. With the attempt, the soldiers and the German people are in open rebellion.’45

  A headline on the front page of L’Unità reads: ‘After the blows dealt by the Red Army and the Allied Armies, pressed by all
the peoples fighting for their liberty, the internal German front is collapsing.’46 On 7 August the tone is naturally more muted: ‘The colonel’s bomb was not the desperate gesture of a small clique, but the expression of revolt that is rife in the German army.’47 The Communist paper establishes a link, clearly dear to its heart, between a possible internal change in Germany and the invitation to surrender formulated by ‘as many as seventeen of the thirty generals taken prisoner this summer on the eastern front’.48 An explanation of events expressed in doctrinaire terms, rare in the public declarations of the Resistance, is given instead by a Garibaldi political commissar: ‘As the Italian capitalistic bourgeoisie, with the occupation of Sicily, and thus the appearance of certain defeat, resolved to liquidate Fascism, since the Fascist government or committee of capitalist bourgeois interests no longer responded to their interests, so in Germany Hitler and Nazism no longer respond to national and capitalistic bourgeois interests.’

  We, the commissar concluded, using our method and our philosophy, ‘which is that of historical and dialectical materialism’, must prove capable of interpreting ‘all events and consequently of drawing our directives and marching orders towards our boundless social goals’.49

  That the two peoples’ fates, common in the tragedy that had led them to hate one another, should be common too in their recovery, is the animating spirit of a Communist-inspired article or manifesto, written in the Bergamo zone at the end of 1943: ‘Only through the common struggle against Nazism and Fascism can the Italian and German peoples save their nations and once again become brothers.’50 The extreme expression of this wish is that the two peoples would find fraternity in socialism, for which Germany was regarded as being fully ripe.51

  L’Italia Libera wrote: ‘The heavy bombings have then made tens of millions of people homeless, creating a proletarianisation still more frightening than that produced in its time by inflation.’52 More realistically, Togliatti was to express concern about the absence of the German working class ‘in the front for the struggle for liberation’.53 A reminder of the sufferings and ‘innocent blood’ of ‘our Catholic brothers of the other invaded lands’ and ‘the German Catholics themselves, oppressed by Hitlerian persecution’ and by ‘pagan and racist’ Nazism, is contained in an issue of the Catholic-Communist paper Voce Operaia.54

  The way in which the soldiers of the Social Republic – a unit stationed in Turin – reacted to the assassination attempt on Hitler is described cautiously, but transparently enough, in a Fascist report:

  The soldiers are astonished at what has happened in Germany. They claim that now the Germans won’t be able to proclaim themselves paladins of national integrity since what happened in Italy on 25 July was about to happen in their nation as well … They also add that the fact of having actually wanted to make an attempt on the very life of the Head of State demonstrates that in Germany hostility to the Führer, though not represented by wide strata of the population, is characterised by a more intense hatred. (In Italy on 25 July this had not happened to Mussolini.) As regards the ‘failure’ of the attempt, the soldiers fear a certain indifference, which cannot be due to ill-concealed disappointment. Their way of seeing and judging things has vaster horizons: all the present heads of the warring nations, they say, should be outlawed and eliminated from the political scene (and not only the political one …) insofar as they are all responsible, to a greater or lesser extent, for this terrible and inhuman conflict, which, degenerating into vendettas and reprisals, is increasing still further death and grief in the families.55

  The stances taken towards the German people, also present in other European Resistance movements,56 had to reckon with the reality of the repression exercised by the Germans as occupiers, and with the hatred aroused by their uniforms and the way they wore them, for the symbols of their power, for the sound of their incomprehensible language, for their whole way of being and behaving in Italy and among other men.

  The Resistance therefore found itself facing – as had already happened in the war, but now more starkly – the problem of how vehemently one should hate the enemy. For some there was no problem, just an uncontrollable impulse; and it is understandable why testimonies in this regard are mainly offered by death-camp survivors: ‘There was such hate in me, I think it was hate that made me survive’; ‘And all this time there was a great hatred, an enormous, terrible hatred of the Germans’.57 Those who were prepared to grant that not all Germans were the same called the worst of them ‘German Germans’.58 When on 18 April 1945 Ada Gobetti met up with a German armed to the teeth and scared out of his wits, she noted: ‘Despite my inveterate sympathy for the defeated, I just couldn’t feel pity for him.’59

  Revelli has illustrated the difference he sensed between hating the enemy, which he explained somehow in terms of a ‘natural’ relationship, and fighting him with cold professionalism. The difference, that is, between the ‘individually motivated warrior’, as the resistente prided himself on being, and the bureaucratic soldier of ‘rational’ modern armies.60 When, on the other side of the Alpine front, he met up with the first American units, Revelli noted:

  I get the impression that the Americans can’t get around to hating the Germans. In the German they see the soldier, not the beast. You’d think they were ignorant of the concentration camps, the reprisals, the destruction that they’re encountering as they advance. Theirs is a regular war, waged with a superiority of equipment, armaments, which are formidable. Their country is far away, out of harm’s way, and not being carpet-bombed. At times it almost seems as if they don’t know what they’re fighting for. Perhaps they’re unable to grasp the reasons for the terror and misery surrounding them.61

  The Americans thus found it hard to understand how such a high degree of rationality and ferocity coexisted in the German army. And, by recalling the carpet-bombing, of which the German cities were victims, Revelli is suggesting, unwittingly perhaps, a link between the two ‘rational’ armies, precisely on the plane of ruthlessness. There was in turn an awareness of the risks involved in hatred. From Radio Bari, ‘Astolfo’ had urged that children be taught to hate the Germans; and one of the minor Roman papers replied to him: ‘Yes, we are fighting the Germans and holding them up as enemies even to children; but why instil hatred into those young hearts?’62 Though not without its share of apocalyptic tones and reminiscence of Churchillian ‘tears and blood’, an Action Party pamphlet warned: ‘The war of liberation is not inextinguishable hatred of the German people, but of the diabolical power which today it incarnates.’63

  It is precisely the elements of the civil and ideological war, which gave birth to the ruthlessness of the struggle, that acted as a counterweight to the all-absorbing aversion to the German, as such. When at Carigno, on 7 September 1944, Pietro Mancuso, ‘born in Palermo on 14 July 1920, chemist, resident in Milan’, was made by the Germans to mount the scaffold, he shouted: ‘Long live Italy and long live a free Germany!’ The officer asked him: ‘Long live a free Germany?’ – ‘Yes, long live a free Germany …’ was the reply.64 Before being shot by the Germans, the French partisan Boris Vildé wrote: ‘My death must not provide sustenance for hatred of Germany.’ One of ‘very few’ such cases, Henri Michel noted.65 In the letters written by Italian resistenti awaiting execution, explicit expressions of this kind are equally rare and should be distinguished from enjoinders to forgiveness with a more universal meaning. Equally rare, however, are incitements to hate the German people. When, during the struggle, Ada Gobetti, who, as we have seen, could not bring herself to feel sympathy for the vanquished Germans, had entered a trattoria where some German soldiers were having a moment’s break, she had described them as

  good-looking blond, cheerful lads. Stripped of their uniforms, of the hated symbols, in what way were they any different from our lads? I thought that if one of them had been in the place of young Davide [a dead partisan, whose corpse she had seen shortly before] I would have felt the same feeling of rebellion and the same pain.


  She then recalled an old woman from Meana, with a son on the African front, who prayed ‘for him and for all of them. For all of them. For the others too’. Again, Ada Gobetti seemed to discern with anxiety, and relief, human sentiments – albeit fleeing – in the German automatons. Thus, she recorded these words uttered by a German who was participating in the burning of a village: ‘Cursed war! I have children too. And I’ve been fighting in this war for four years. But I hate this kind of thing. It’s those from HQ who order them. They’re bad, bad.’ But a little later, ‘on his face the cold, impassive, lifeless mask had descended again’.66

  Indeed, only rarely did the Germans open up, and when they did only rarely was this taken as being other than the ‘effeminate gracefulness of the occupiers’. So it is worth recalling the curious romantic tone with which the provincial police of Belluno addressed the partisans to persuade them to ‘stop their restless roaming and re-enter the orbit of ordinary life’.67

  Between pietà l’è morta (pity the dead), which is to be taken not only as a tragic statement of fact but as an imperative for intransigence, and recognising in the German enemy a human object of pity, there is thus a vast range of feelings and behaviour. Often the choices resulting from them are hard, for fear of the consequences they might have on other men. A report of the 3rd Garibaldi brigade fighting in the area between Piombino and Pisa states that the shooting of three German prisoners was demanded by some partisans, ‘particularly the foreigners’ (in the band there were Russians, Ukrainians, Mongols, and two Americans; and the fact that it was the ‘foreigners’ who were the most severe is stressed with evident satisfaction); but,