A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  having ascertained that the two Germans are Austrian and the other can prove his anti-Nazi sentiments, we have decided not to grant the request. We are explaining things in order to clarify the thinking behind our decision: the partisans are judges not murderers. They do not use the vile methods of the enemy. The decision is approved by a large majority.68

  But another Tuscan report tells of a partisan patrol that captured two Germans ‘who on being disarmed were released because of their insistence on joining the partisans, thereby demonstrating that they were anti-Nazi in sympathy; instead, as soon as they’d been freed they told the German command about the incident’.69 It was, then, a real problem to ensure that one ran no risks from having too excessive a humanitarian spirit.

  The invitation to go over to the just side while there was still time became particularly dramatic in this context. Witness the emphasis with which a minor Roman newspaper of that part of the left which did not identify itself with the CLN, addressed an essay as ‘A Word to a German Soldier’). He was threatened with terrible reprisals, which could only be avoided by going over outright to the side of the workers and the revolution. At the same time, it is boasted that no attempt is being made to instil hatred for the German as such, but the German soldier is warned that, if he does not get a move on, something worse than defeat will befall him – namely, ‘being excluded for ever from the category of civil beings. And I will no longer be able to save you.’70

  Desertion was therefore the main highway offered to the Germans as proof of their desire for salvation, the only one that could concretely act as a counterweight to the hatred they incurred. These enjoinders to desert not only express the obvious desire to weaken the enemy (and here hope far outdistanced reality), but appear to be motivated by confidence that the deserter, like the prisoner, could be won over to one’s own side. This confidence is unknown in ‘normal’ warfare, where prisoners are, indeed, protected by international conventions against forced enlistment into the ranks of those who have captured them. By contrast, the civil war nature of the struggle, extended to the Germans as well insofar as they were Nazis, made for a different kind of attitude aimed at breaching one of the cardinal points of German military ethics, whereby it would have seemed inconceivable that German honour, in those circumstances, could be saved only by desertion and going over to the enemy.71

  This complex attitude to the Germans appears in many documents. Emblematic is the case, be it real or invented, mentioned in a Communist report: ‘In a large Turin factory, while the workers were raising funds in favour of the partisans, they were surprised by German soldiers. Four German soldiers gave ten lire each to the fundraisers.’72

  Expectations that a crack would appear in the German army were greater in the weeks immediately following 8 September, when the hope was cherished that the mess Italy was in might have repercussions on the German monolith.73 Such hopes grew slimmer in the difficult central months of the struggle, though appeals to desertion never ceased, nor appeals to make the most of whatever desertions occurred. They were to flourish again when it was clear that things were heading for the final breakup and the Germans themselves on various occasions appeared less determined.74 Thus, the September 1943 issue of Informazioni da Piemonte, mentioned earlier, states:

  In Turin and the region the German soldiers are hostile to the SS and are tired of and demoralised by the war. Many of them have looked for civilian clothes in order to desert. Especially in the factories, the German soldiers are trying to chum up with the workers … While taking care about what might be provocative in this, we must set about exploiting this state of affairs.

  The Rome edition of Avanti! assured its readers that German deserters were going over to the partisans,75 while the fact that two prisoners were a bricklayer and a farmhand who decided to fight with the partisans was stressed, by way of guarantee, in a Garibaldi document.76 Gorrieri recalls that in the Republic of Montefiorino there were German deserters in a battalion formed by men of various nationalities.77 On 28 May 1944 the Rome edition of L’Unità announced that in the Magliano zone (where the German army was in retreat) ‘120 German soldiers are going over to the partisans’. Generally, announcements of this sort that appear in the underground press are inflated; more sober and accurate are the facts given by the documents of the formations. The creation, or attempted creation, of units formed exclusively by German deserters should be regarded as borderline cases. A Communist document from Friuli notes:

  A German battalion is being formed with Austrians and Germans who have been in our Garibaldi formations for some time and have proved to be reliable elements. Once it has formed and got its bearings, the battalion will be sent into Austrian territory to act and to start a partisan movement. A small propaganda section will stay behind in the division’s zone to work on German soldiers.78

  Recurrent mention is made of the Austrians as being the most ready to desert, and in any case, save some contrary indications,79 the most human among the enemy. This came to be writ large in people’s memories. Many years later, Silvio Rivoir, who was imprisoned in the ‘Carceri Nuove’ of Turin along with Emanuele Artom, recounted how his comrade and a German sentry ‘spoke about the important things in life, of the moral and human motives that must inspire us; Artom quoted classical authors to give force to his argument and the other understood and was seen to be deeply upset’.80 Though requested to do so, a GL commander of the Grappa zone took his time over enlisting the five Austrians present among six prisoners in his hands. Recaptured during a roundup, and denounced by the sixth, a ‘Prussian’, the five were hanged, and the commander was seized by remorse for having distrusted them.81 On 23 November 1943, the Rome edition of Risorgimento Liberale had believed that it could announce that ‘the Austrian units stationed in the vicinity of Rome have been disarmed. For some time now German soldiers of different ranks, and Austrians in particular, have been buying civilian clothing at any price so as to be able to flee at the opportune moment.’

  The February 1944, ‘Directives for the armed struggle’ of the military Command for Northern Italy recommended directing propaganda for the German troops, which ‘has already been successfully tried out here and there’, above all at the Austrians, Czechs, Poles, and so on.82 ‘The German army is disintegrating’ ran the title of an article in Italia Libera reporting the desertion above all of Bohemians, for instance of two hundred of them above Arona.83 Some hundred Volksdeutschen (ethnic German) deserters are mentioned in a Garibaldi report from the Bibbona area in Tuscany.84 These last examples already bring us onto different ground: the urging of those who had, it was generously assumed, been press-ganged into the oppressor’s army to have done with it.85 As for the Germans as such, it is worth recalling the existence in Carnia of a battalion called ‘Fries Deutschland’86 and of the newspaper Germania Libera,87 as well as a ‘German Committee for National Liberation’ whose existence in Milan was reported at the eleventh hour by the Information Service.88

  1 Mazzantini, A cercar la bella morte, pp. 23–4.

  2 This memorandum was written in Val Pellice, 17 September 1943, for internal use by the Action Party. My thanks to Foa for having given me a copy.

  3 U. L Malfa, Per la rinascita dell’Italia, edited by the Action Party, 1943, p. 4.

  4 ‘Orientamenti gennaio 1944’, in Bollettino n. 7, pp. 8–9.

  5 Enzo Enriques Agnoletti in the preface to LRI, p. 13.

  6 This paraphrases an expression by G. L. Mosse, Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality, New York: Howard Fertig, 1980. Mosse writes of ‘humanistic nationalism’, p. 18.

  7 This observation was made by Franco Venturi at a seminar on the birth of the nation held in 1986 at the ‘Scuola normale superiore di Pisa’. Venturi gave the examples of Italy, Poland and Greece, and recalled that the nexus between unhappiness and patriotism had first appeared in Pasquale Paoli’s Corsica: ‘We are an unhappy people …’. For a fuller development of this theme, see F. Venturi, Settecen
to riformatore, vol. V, L’Italia dei lumi (1764–1790), vol. I, Turin: Einaudi, 1987, Chapter I, ‘Patria e libertà: la rivoluzione di Corsica’.

  8 This is what Giuseppe Pavone says in his diary about the 23 September 1943 meeting at Paestum with General Donovan, head of the OSS (Pavone, I gruppi combattenti Italia, p. 85). See the letter that the general sent on 12 October to Benedetto Croce, inspirer of the Groups: the general was insistent about ‘not accepting a dependence that had even the slightest semblance of inferiority or of less moral, military and political consideration’ (ibid., p. 93).

  9 Anonymous ‘Romagnolo’, 1943–45, p. 47 (conversation with General Neame).

  10 These words occur in the E. Sequi’s Preface, datelined Belgrade, 10 July 1964, to A. Bressan and L. Giuricin, Fratelli nel sangue. Contributi per una storia della partecipazione degli italiani alla guerra popolare di liberazione della Jugoslavia, Rijeka: Edit, 1964, p. 5.

  11 The Communist Cafiero Canali’s testimony, in Portelli, Biografia di una città, p. 239.

  12 See Bravo and Jalla, La vita offesa, p. 185 (the authors’ comment) and p. 187 (testimonies by Natalino Pia, artisan, survivor from the Russian campaign, and of Giuseppa Doleati Soardi, Turinese factory worker, partisan dispatch rider).

  13 Chiodi, Banditi, p. 14.

  14 Artom, Diari, pp. 76, 124–5.

  15 N. Ginsburg to G. Falaschi, ed., La letteratura partigiana, pp. 8–9.

  16 See Passerini’s observations, Torino operaia, p. 82.

  17 La popolazione deve essere con noi, document written by Eros, general commissar of the joint Garibaldi and Fiamme Verdi Command for Reggio Emilia, 26 January 1945 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, pp. 89–91).

  18 Undated report by the 23rd Pio Borri Garibaldi brigade (ISRT, Carte Francesco Berti, envelope I, folder 7).

  19 Undated short report by the Bianconcini formation (ISRT, Carte Carlo Campolmi, envelope I, folder c, subfolder Monte Foggiola).

  20 See for example a combatant’s letter quoted in the ‘syntheses of the reports’ of the military offices, war censorship, of September 1944, conserved in ACS and quoted in Aga-Rossi, La situazione politica ed economica, p. 129.

  21 See Chiodi, Banditi, pp. 53, 42 (August 23 and 18, 1944). In the national-Fascist song, instead of ‘Italia’, ‘Dalmazia’ or ‘Frontiera’ were sung; in the partisan song, ‘Valsesia’.

  22 Tersilla Fenoglio Oppedisano’s testimony, in Bruzzone and Farina, La Resistenza taciuta, pp. 146–7.

  23 Testimony given by Roberto Marocchi and Mariano Fenudi, whom I thank for having communicated it to me. The butcher writes: ‘So, on 8 September 1943, when the roads were crowded with frightened people, I was at work preparing meat for the “Italiani”, as the Marshal had said! On 8 September 1943, I was working, as a Communist, as a Partisan.’

  24 Letter by Maurizio Giglio, who was shot in the Ardeatine Caves (March 1944). Wounded in Greece, he had decided to leave the commission for the armistice with France, in Turin, which had seemed to him ‘a kind of shirker’s hideout’. Having made contact with the OSS, he had enlisted in the RSI auxiliary police in order to supply information. He was discovered by the Koch band. Today he is celebrated as a real hero of the police of the Italian Republic, which confirms the fact that the confusion of languages regarding the concept of the patria has not yet ceased, and has indeed been revived by the ‘continuità dello Stato’. See A. Baldinotti, ‘Il diverso silenzio di Maurizio Giglio’, in Polizia moderna XXXVII: 8–9 (August–September 1985), pp. 38–42.

  25 Gobetti, Diario partigiano, p. 39.

  26 Article entitled ‘Guerra regia e guerra di popolo’, in L’Italia Libera, Rome edition, 17 October 1943.

  27 See, among others, the leading articles ‘Combattere’ and ‘Nostra guerra’, 11 and 25 October 1943.

  28 Article entitled ‘Proletari in guardia!’, in Bandiera Rossa, 15 October 1943.

  29 The manifesto was published in L’Unità, Rome edition, 18 October, and in Voce Operaia, 22 October 1943. It can now be read in Il comunismo italiano nella seconda guerra mondiale, pp. 217–19.

  30 Article entitled ‘Guerra giusta e necessaria’, in L’Unità, Rome edition, 18 October 1943. See also ibid., 1 December 1943, the article entitled ‘Necessità di un governo’, which repeats that, under Badoglio’s leadership, the war against Germany cannot be fought.

  31 See Italia nuova. Giornale del Centro della democrazia italiana, Rome, 1 March 1944, leading article entitled ‘Dopo il discorso di Churchill’. The reference is to his 22 February speech to the House of Commons, in which the premier had repeated his support of the king and Badoglio: ‘When you have to hold a hot coffee-pot, it is better not to break the handle off until you are sure you will get another equally convenient and serviceable, or, at any rate, until there is a dish-cloth handy!’ (quoted in Degli Spinosa, Il Regno del Sud, p. 284).

  32 See the Manifesto, signed by the National Liberation Front and written by Croce, put up in Naples on 10 October 1943, calling for volunteers for the Gruppi Combattenti Italia (Appendix V to Croce, Quando l’Italia era tagliata in due, p. 155).

  33 See Il Combattente, actually a somewhat atypical organ of the ‘Garibaldi assault detachments of Tuscany’, 3–4, undated, but between January and March, 1944.

  34 For the proclamation, signed by Major General Peko Dupcevic, see Bressan and Giuricin, Fratelli nel sangue, p. 400.

  35 These expressions are contained in the commentary that La Voce del Popolo, 15 October 1943, dedicated to the declaration of war on Germany, which, the newspaper wrote, had caused ‘a sort of dismay’.

  36 Ibid., 15 October 1943, article in the series Fuori dall’equivoco, later collected in a booklet.

  37 Ibid., 1 November 1943, article entitled ‘Il nostro “fare” ’, and 20 February 1944, ‘Fuori dall’equivoco’.

  38 ‘Conoscerci’, in La Voce dei giovani, Milan: Sesto Giovanni, chiefly edited by Delfino Insolera.

  39 ‘Fuori dall’equivoco’, in La Voce del Popolo, 20 February 1944. The allusion is to the congress of the CLNs held in Bari, 28 and 29 January 1944.

  40 ‘Fuori dall’equivoco. Variazoni’, ibid., 20 April 1944.

  41 Candidus was John Joseph Marus, born in London of Friulian parents, tried in Italy by the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State (see Piccialuti Caprioli, Radio Londra 1940–45, pp. xv, 16).

  42 Article entitled ‘Dignità’, in L’Italia Repubblicana, organ of the Partito Repubblicano del Lavoro, Rome, 1 November 1943.

  43 Article entitled ‘Scopi di guerra e di pace’, 7 May 1944 (Lombardy edition).

  44 La Voce Repubblicana, 4 June 1944.

  45 The subtitle of the newspaper is ‘Organo degli studenti italiani’ and in its first number, datelined Rome, 26 March 1944, it announced that it had been founded by the Unione Studenti Italiani, as a transformation of the agitation committee that had come into being the previous December. The constitutive document is signed by PdA, PCI, PSIUP, PRI, Communist and Christian-Socialist Catholics. The extracts quoted are in two articles of the first number: ‘Volontà di democrazia’ and ‘Impegno’.

  46 Articles entitled ‘Tra i fuochi’ and ‘Gli assenti’, in La Rinascita. Organo dell’Unione italiana per il rinnovamento sociale, bitterly and confusedly critical towards the old ruling class as a whole (1, undated: number 2 is dated 10 December 1943).

  47 Article entitled ‘Italia e Antitalia: gli eroe di Monte Canino’, in Il Popolo, Rome edition, 23 January 1944.

  48 Letter published under the title ‘Neutralisti, no’, in La Democrazia del Lavoro.

  49 Il Partigiano, Rome, 23 January 1944, which prints a speech made on 2 January by the political commissar of a ‘Comando superiore partigiano’, of which it claims to be the organ; a speech said independently of both the Royal Army and by the CLN. See on this Comando superiore, E. Piscitelli, Storia della Resistenza romana, Bari: Laterza, 1965, p. 141.

  50 See the first number cyclostyled in Rome, 15–23 January 1944, of L’Alleanza italiana
. Settimanale del Centro politico italiano. Dio-Autorità, which invokes, alongside the king, the heart of Jesus and the name of the Virgin Mary.

  51 Leading article entitled ‘L’assente’, which appeared in La Stampa, 20 February 1945, signed by the editor, Concetto Pettinato. Regarding the episode and the entire position of Pettinato, who was in the habit of making such statements, which eventually cost him his job (but never did a dismissal so benefit the person dismissed), see Pansa, L’esercito di Salò, pp. 687–8. The northern Italian edition of L’Unità, commented, ‘not for nothing is La Stampa owned by Fiat, one of those monopolistic trusts which have financed Fascism and which have been profiteers of Fascism, and are the main culprits for the Fascist policy that has led our country to catastrophe’ (lead article entitled ‘I piani criminali del nazifascismo devono essere e saranno sventati col ferro e col fuoco dell’insurrezione nazionale’).

  52 See Informazioni da Milano, 22 April 1945, which is unsparing in its criticisms of the gullibility of the workers (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, p. 673). L’Unità, cited in the previous note, had written, ‘The bandits of the “Mas”, with their chief, the rogue Prince Julio Borghese, will meet the same fate as their “comrades”.’

  53 Fondo RSI, no. 340. See also nos 538, 603, 612, 703.

  54 A note penned on the copy of this issue, dated ‘agosto 1944’, in the possession of the Istituto Gramsci in Rome, reads: ‘Here is a number of L’Unità falsified by Chief Pantono of Alessandria on the orders of the Fascist federation. We have already taken care to reply with a leaflet’.

  55 Text proposed by the ‘Comando militare settore Magenta’ to the Comando piazza of Milan, 1 March 1945 (IG, BG, 0435).